Word: angelically
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...Macy's angel, that one. The awe that angels inspired in those who saw them, the terrible sense of epiphany, the momentary contact with God's blazing ambassador-all this has been lost in a welter of tinsel and feathers. The tongues of angels now speak with the voice of Muzak. It was not always so. Angels have an older ancestry than Christianity itself, and the most copious sources for named angels are not the New or even the Old Testament but Talmudic and Mohammedan writings. Still, for nearly 2,000 years the belief in angels was vital...
Zero Population Growth. The angel of popular culture today is to his forebears what the last American buffalo, ailing in some future zoo, will be to the mighty herds that roamed the West: a token, a remnant of a spiritual breed that will never return. In the 13th century, Doctor of the Church Albertus Magnus held that there were nine choirs of angels, "each choir at 6,666 legions, and each legion at 6,666 angels." That made 399,920,004, all fluttering and hymning in orbit around the throne of God. Of these, one-third were flung down with...
...That is what an angel is, an idea of God." So said the great mystic, Meister Eckhart. But ideas have no visual form, and the struggle to make angels concrete absorbed the energies of Europe's artists for nearly 1,000 years. The angel became one of the master images of religious experience...
...concept of an angel," wrote one recent student of the creatures, Theodora Ward, in Men and Angels, "is peculiar to the monotheistic religions, in which the immensity of the power concentrated in one universal god must somehow be channeled to reach the needs of man, as a great river may be diverted into a system of ducts to irrigate fields." But how to embody this concept? The first angels in Christian art look like ordinary men, whether painted on catacomb walls or preserved in mosaic on the 5th century walls of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. What the artist stresses...
...sign by which angels are known today-wings- did not appear for some time. Pre-Christian mythology abounded with winged, supernatural beings, and the Christian angel annexed the symbolic properties of wings-mobility, ascension, elevation and refinement of consciousness, power to move freely between Heaven and Earth. All the same, there were difficulties of symbolization, which is why the distinctions that early theologians drew between various levels of angels did not endure in art. The thrones, in their ceaseless orbit around God, were sometimes depicted as winged wheels, whose hubs were studded with eyes-to indicate their power...