Angels

Angels: A History
By David Albert Jones
OUP £10.99, 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

Tired of being alone in a cold, impersonal cosmos? Imagine instead that the universe is filled with benevolent spirits, and that one of them is looking out just for you. Powerful and wise, your spirit guardian is there to pick you up when you fall and give you a gentle shove out of the way if a piano is about to drop on your head.

This is the reassuring world inhabited by those who believe in angels. They are legion: recent polls put belief in angels in the UK at around the 40 per cent mark; in the US it is more like 70 per cent. In both cases women are much more likely to believe than men, which perhaps explains why in popular culture angels are the new vampires – the risqué romantic interest that is tantalisingly unattainable.

This explosion of angelic interest makes David Albert Jones’s short introduction timely. He attempts to bring a certain seriousness to talk of winged visitors, which, as he notes, are not always regarded as intellectually respectable. Seeing angels is perceived rather on a par with seeing aliens: something that happens to backwoods Americans who live detached from civilisation, not to say reality. But, at least scripturally speaking, angels are very respectable indeed.

It was an angel, Gabriel, that brought Mary the good news that she was to bear the Messiah. Some six hundred years later, according to Islamic tradition, that same Gabriel then gave the word of God to Muhammad. But the Biblical angels are a motley crew: some resemble humans and even eat and drink – or pretend to, depending on your theology – while others are mighty warriors. At no point, however, are they cutesy, podgy flying babies.

Indeed, the cherubim of the Bible, far from being chubby little boys with endearing grins, are terrible monsters: giants with four heads and many wings, they are given the task of guarding paradise to prevent mankind from sneaking back in. The cuddlier version, explains Jones, is an invention of the Renaissance, when Italian artists drew liberally on the Greco-Roman tradition of cheeky cupids.

This is a good book. It is not beautifully written: the prose is like a schoolmaster lecturing a wayward class. But it is clear and fulfils its brief. Jones not only knows his Bible, but his Koran and Talmud. Though a believer, he does not shy from non-divine explanations of winged callers, such as that “visions of angels are a symptom of a mental health condition”.

Jones notes that, although there is some support in scripture for the idea of guardian angels, it is rather scant. He also reminds us that these heralds have a darker side: our image, for example, of death – the Grim Reaper – is modelled on the angels of the book of Revelation who go “with sharp sickles” to reap their harvest of wicked souls. Whereas the Devil, until his fall the handsomest of God’s minions in heaven, shows us what happens when angels go bad.

Stephen Cave is writing a book on immortality