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Angel painting never recovered from the blow dealt by the Reformation. After Luther's proposal that men could approach God directly by faith through grace, with no intermediaries, the angels were theologically unemployed. The gap they were meant to close had been written out of existence; they were reduced to mere attendant lords, thunderbolt carriers to swell a scene or two. Nineteenth century rationalism seemed to finish them off for good. The remark of a Victorian doctor, that he had never met the soul in a dissection, found its artistic parallel in Gustave Courbet.
And yet . . . and yet . . . The thought that angels are dead is a nagging one. It is unsatisfactory, and the root of the dissatisfaction goes back to an early angelologist, the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, who warned in the 6th century that "in dwelling upon the nobler images it is probable that we might fall into the error of supposing that the Celestial Intelligences are some kind of golden beings, or shining men flashing like lightning."
Precisely. The physical shape of angels is only a metaphor, but the spiritual experience to which the now dead form refers may be very much alive. That is the process of revelation, of stepping between levels of awareness. "The angel," Carl Jung wrote, "personifies the coming into consciousness of something new arising from the deep unconscious." As the rigid boxes of 19th century positivism disappear from our culture and new epiphanies of consciousness unfold themselves, it is possible that we may return to that receptiveness in which earlier civilizations saw their angels. Except that, inevitably, we will call ours something else.