I HAVE visited a couple of church in East Anglia where a glass case holds some tiny bits of lead, and a note solemnly informs you that these were found embedded within the carved wood angels within the roof, which “Cromwell’s soldiers” — the same old suspects — had tried to shoot down. They saw them as idolatrous. (I can’t help toying with the concept of a detailed season for angels, as for grouse or other game.)
It is, after all, nonsense: no person of their senses would attempt to obliterate great lumps of oak with what you place in a shotgun cartridge. The real reason for the shooting was birds, especially sparrows, who had taken Psalm 84 verse 3 an excessive amount of to heart. Bird droppings on altars or statues of saints should not welcome. Before small-calibre guns, people cleared the birds with sparrowhawks: in accordance with an old rhyme, that bird was traditionally flown by the “holy water clerk”.
YOU can’t shoot angels down, anyway, in any sense. In East Anglia, you’ll be able to get moderately blasé about those elaborate angel roofs (seen one, seen ’em all. . .). After all, between the late 1300s and the cataclysm of Reformation, several hundred were built where carved and colored angels sprouted from almost any coign of vantage. Mainly within the conservative — once very wealthy — wool counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, about 140 have survived every thing that builders, bigotry, and beetle could throw at them. Angels stand to attention on hammerbeams, hover on roof bosses and tie beams, and hold shields that (like every thing else) were once brightly, even garishly, painted, with arms, symbols, emblems of the Passion.
At one or two places, where later centuries added galleries as liturgical practice modified, you’ll be able to almost reach out and touch their gently smiling faces; no two are alike, and plenty of are (as one might say) nearly life-size; they usually can develop into a loved a part of the ensemble of the church. Men were paid good money, definitely, for the expert work, hard readily available and arm, of constructing them, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t love — as any creator would — what they were releasing into beauty and form from the raw block that they were carving.
Some angels play, as they’ve done through silent centuries, their soundless lutes, flutes, vielles, harps, shawms, psalteries, hurdy-gurdies. Although, while we’re clothed on this muddy vesture of decay, we cannot hear the concords of heaven, these poor but glorious images remind us of it.
IMAGINE: when these carvings were fresh from chisel and paint, you’d have entered a constructing where the sunshine of the sun was filtered through the stories of the stained glass, and the painted partitions themselves might speak. The flames of the beeswax candles perpetually burning before the altars, before the rood, before the sacrament, would move gently as you passed by, and light-weight would shimmer off the gold leaf and the high colors that decorated the carvings.
The whole place would appear alive, working in your senses and emotions; and — even when the roof was not a double hammerbeam, with angels above angels, like St Wendreda’s, March, or St Mary’s, Woolpit — the choir of heaven would appear to maintain silent watch over their charges, who, with the carelessness of each day familiarity, may not even look up. It is very easy to disregard angels after they are thus far above us. But it’s well that these ministers of grace, as Hamlet calls them, don’t ignore us.
I’m letting imagination run away with me — and a number of the Reformers were deeply suspicious of the emotional effect of church art. However naturalistic (so to talk), nevertheless symbolic, nevertheless beloved these spectacular examples of wood carving and architecture may be, they’re wood; and the work of man’s hands is what they continue to be. “Eyes have they, and see not. . .”
But, just because the marks on page or screen in front of you now remain just that, through them we see something else which they notate. So with the humanities generally, so with images — pictures, specifically. Just don’t mistake a logo or an indication for what it stands for. We can don’t know whether angels do or wouldn’t have wings, and it doesn’t matter; what does matter is that we’re open to their ministry.
LAST Michaelmas, I wrote in these pages concerning the hierarchies of heaven, the orders of angels. I emphasised not only the chance, however the probability, of their existence, as servants of their Lord in the enjoyment of the love that moves the sun and other stars. But, for the past 4 centuries, we within the West have trodden an empiricist and materialist path, which has delivered for the lucky ones a more comfortable world. Everywhere we glance, nevertheless, we see the unpayable environmental and mental bills coming in thick and fast.
Our forebears couldn’t have conceived of so reductive an outlook: their world was energetic on so many levels, stuffed with spiritual friends and foes. They would have been quite unable to make our glib separation of “natural” and “supernatural”; for the continuum between tangible and intangible was unquestioned.
Indeed, the bedrock of Christians’ faith is the actual, not metaphorical, resurrection of the Lord: that event makes nonsense of any complacent materialism. “Miracles don’t occur”? Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Matter With Things is simply probably the most recent — comprehensive — demolition of current left-brain materialism.
SO, WHERE does that leave us? Those wood angels — so long as we see them for what they’re, symbols of an unutterable reality, it does no harm to be keen on them; to allow them to express to our senses the spiritual beings who surround us — and, yes, who often, unnoticed, intervene for and minister to us. We humans cannot but think in images and metaphor. As C. S. Lewis once remarked along with his usual pungency, “Nobody ever went to hell for considering that God had a white beard.”
Those carvings allow us to acknowledge a spiritual mode of being, before which, if it revealed itself in unadorned majesty, we’d tremble in holy terror. Enjoy those angel roofs: hear the silent harmony that they signify, and pray that we may, in due time, join our own voices to that concord that can resolve our discord.
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