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Now it came to pass, in the interlocking, abstract system of cosmology that medieval philosophers derived from Plato, that the universe was also divided into nine spheres. They nestled concentrically in one another like Chinese ivory balls. The innermost was the central and unmoving earth; outward from the earth were the spheres of the moon, of the five known planets, of the sun and the zodiac, and finally the primum mobile. The primum mobile contained no matter. Its energies kept the stars in their courses and the planets spinning. Seraphs, the most powerful angels, kept the primum mobile moving; cherubs moved the zodiac, thrones the sphere of Saturn, and so on down to the moon, which fell under the care of common angels. The motive force of all this gyration was God's love for his own creations—Dante's "Love, that moves the sun and the other stars."
Closing Diapason. The symbol of this beatific order was music. Musical harmony was an image of the perfect and immutable order that God had imposed on his creation, structure developing out of structure like an immense fugue; the "music of the spheres" was considered to be less a figure of speech than a cosmological fact, and angels made it. As Dryden put it, in Song for St. Cecelia's Day:
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.
The music-making angel became one of the favorite personages of medieval and Renaissance art, but his repertory was not restricted, as it is today, to harp solos. The choir of angels in Luca Signorelli's fresco of the Calling of the Chosen, circa 1500, pluck their lutes and viols and ecstatically flourish tambourines, and the arc of their overlapping wings becomes a metaphor of the circling cosmos.
If angelic creatures ministered to the universe in general, they attended to the earth in particular, and everything men did or were was affected by them. "Every blade of grass," says the Talmud, "has its angel that bends over it and whispers 'Grow, grow!' " An archetypical angel, that: like Mrs. Portnoy to young Alex: "Eat, son, eat."
Accidental Ingestion. Angels could cause or cure plague, summon up earthquakes and floods and paralyze whole nations with famine. They destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, assisted in the slaying of the first-born of the Egyptians and annihilated the army of Sennacherib; others fed Elijah, shut the mouths of the lions in Daniel's den, wrestled with Jacob, cured Tobit's blindness and announced the birth of Samson to Manoah. In a society whose world view was largely passive and deterministic, where every creature could symbolize some aspect of God, angels assumed vast importance.
Medieval Europe was such a culture. Angels (and demons) were everywhere. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that an English farmer living in 1300 would have believed more firmly that there were angels in Kent than that there were other farmers in France or Italy. You could meet an angel in a field, or accidentally ingest one if it perched on the tip of your fork. Every living man had his guardian angel, directed by God to the comparatively lowly task of helping to protect him from physical and spiritual harm.