Angels and Saints

Abstract

Medieval theologians may not have agonized over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—though the question does arise in the anonymous mystical dialogue Schwester Katrei—but on other matters angels provoked them to endless speculation. How many are there? Perhaps 34,720,000,000, but that was not the only calculation. Without bodies, how do they speak or sing? Do they have names, or even personal identities? How and why and when did some of them rebel? How do they flit back and forth between praising God in heaven and tending to people on earth? The Bible says much about angels, but they remain abstract and good to speculate about. They are ranked in a hierarchy of orders, but the theologians have different ways of organizing them. James Collins used to say that angels, rational beings like us, show what we would be without our bodies. Even disembodied, however, we would be less mysterious to ourselves than angels are. Saints, being less abstract than angels, lend themselves far more to storytelling—which is precisely what Weinberger does when he shifts from angels to saints. Having guided the reader through issue after speculative issue in the field of angelology, he tells story after story from the treasure trove of hagiography. Are there no issues to be explored? Might the reader be interested in the tug-of-war between action and contemplation, or the role of conversion and penitence, or the gender dynamics of sainthood, or for that matter the tendency of saints to wrestle with demons, bidden or unbidden? Saints are paradoxically both imitable and utterly beyond imitation: they feed the hungry, but they also (some of them) levitate, or starve themselves to death, or produce fire from their fingertips. Unlike angels, they are firmly grounded in history, which means they change over time: modern saints differ from ancient ones, at least in context. Weinberger gives ample material for reflection about saints—at one point, a catalog of ten Hyacinths and a Hyacintha. In approaching the angels, he gives questions with multiple answers; in dealing with saints, he gives answers and leaves it for us to ask the right questions.