News
There was war in heaven
Where does that come from? We have been looking at the accounts of creation in the first and second chapters of the Book of Genesis which complement one another about the place of our humanity in the created order. We have seen that ‘adam’, meaning our humanity collectively speaking, is embedded in the whole order of creation, connected to every other aspect of the natural world, and yet, distinct and different by virtue of being made “in the image of God,” and as “the dust of the ground” into which God breathes his Spirit. The challenge lies in how we think what these things mean.
As we have noted, being made in the image of God counters a modern misreading of dominion. To be made in the image of God means to act in the image of God, to act in the way of divine dominion. What is that? It means to act with care and concern for everything in the created order as derived from God, “to till the ground,” as Genesis 2 puts it. Our “dominion” provides no warrant for our manipulation, abuse, and technocratic domination of the world. Instead we are called to care and respect for the world and for one another. But what if we deny or reject that idea? Therein lies the long, long story of sin and evil. It has to do with the denial of God and of our being made in God’s image.
The reading from Revelation about war in heaven belongs to the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels celebrated on September 29th. It has a particular significance for our school. The Fall term is properly known as Michaelmas Term as derived from the great Medieval universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. Angels in this sense belong to intellectual life. We are with the angels in our thinking and loving the good. The angels are pure intellectual, and non-material spiritual beings, the thoughts of God in creation, the invisible reasons for the visible things of creation. They belong to the spiritual landscape of the Scriptures of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions and to the intellectual world of Hellenic philosophy in its interaction with those traditions.
The angels teach us, Thomas Aquinas, known as the angelic doctor, says “by moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding”. But what are we to make of this reading? The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine is the last book of the Christian Scriptures. The imagery here looks back to the Genesis story of creation and the Fall. The story of the Fall, as we will see, is about how we separate ourselves from God, the world, and one another through the sin of disobedience and discover division, death and suffering. That is really about a denial of our being as made in the image of God. Genesis 2 offers the possibility of a way of beginning to make some sense of the negative side of our humanity. Not only is our humanity said to be made in God’s image, but it is only our humanity which is given a commandment by God in the paradise of creation. We are told not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for in the day that you do you will die.” Wow. To be given a commandment implies rationality. There is more to us than just our instinctual drives and desires.
But if we deny God and ourselves as made in his image then we discover division and separation, suffering and death, precisely in terms of that which opposes the truth of God as the principle upon which our being and knowing depend. St. Michael and his angels fight against that which exists in self-contradiction through the denial of God. Such is the meaning of “the great dragon,” “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan,” the deceiver. This is simply what stands in opposition to God but as the story makes clear, and as belonging to the logic of creation itself, this is folly and unwisdom. If the created order and ourselves within it is said to be “good” and the whole of it “very good,” then the commandment, too, is part of the good order of creation. Sin and evil depend entirely on that which they reject; such are the actions of creatures who deny their creatureliness, those who deny God. They have contradicted the conditions of their own being. They are good in their very being but evil in their denial.
Another name for “that old serpent called the devil and Satan” is Lucifer. This helps us to understand the nature of sin and evil. The name Lucifer means light-bearer, one who is created to be the bearer of the light of God, the light of knowing and understanding. But in denying God, Lucifer turns his back on God’s light and becomes the Prince of Darkness. He exists in contradiction with himself and God. Such is the negativity of sin and evil both cosmically and individually.
Michaelmas reminds us that the nature and the power of the goodness of God is by definition greater than all evil. There was war in heaven, not there is. In the Christian understanding, the cosmic battle between good and evil is won by the blood of the lamb, a reference to Christ. In a lovely passage, Jesus says that Nathanael will see great things, “the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (Jn. 1.51)
We are lifted up on angels’ wings to think the high things of God. Such is the purpose of our intellectual institutions. In thinking nature we are thinking the thoughts of God after him, as the astronomer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler puts it (late 16th, early 17th century). Creation is revelation, the revelation of God as the intellectual principle of all being and knowing, and the making known of our humanity as made in its image. To deny that is to exist in contradiction; to think and do what in some sense we know we should not do. Thus these biblical stories help us to think about our humanity both in its truth and in its disarray, They recall us to the truth and dignity of our humanity even in its negativity.
In this way of thinking the fault does not lie in the stars or with God but with us in our relation to creation and the Creator. Thomas King, the first indigenous Canadian to give the Massey Lectures (2003), in comparing a charming indigenous creation myth, the Woman who fell from heaven, with the account in Genesis, raises an interesting question. What if the story was about a flawed deity? That is the default position really of a kind of atheism in trying to account for the idea of God. In such a view, God is made in our image. We are flawed, so God is flawed. This is the exact opposite of the spiritual imaginaries of the philosophical and theological traditions that are shaped by the Genesis story. In the Feast of St. Michael we learn about the dignity of our humanity in thinking with the angels and about the denial of that dignity in our sin and folly.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
King’s-Edgehill School is located in Mi'kma'ki, the unceded ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq People.
