Inklings Forever Volume 8 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Joint Meeting of The Eighth Frances White Ewbank Article 27 Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends and The C.S. Lewis & The Inklings Society Conference 5-31-2012 C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy Susan Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society Woody Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever Recommended Citation Wendling, Susan and Wendling, Woody (2012) "C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy," Inklings Forever: Vol. 8 , Article 27. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol8/iss1/27 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume VIII A Collection of Essays Presented at the Joint Meeting of The Eighth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM ON C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS and THE C.S. LEWIS AND THE INKLINGS SOCIETY CONFERENCE Taylor University 2012 Upland, Indiana C. S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy Susan and Woody Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society Wendling, Susan and Woody Wendling. “C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy.” Inklings Forever 8 (2012) www.taylor.edu/cslewis 1 C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy Susan and Woody Wendling New York C.S. Lewis Society Introduction "the dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic . not temporal but Readers and scholars of C.S. Lewis eternal" (p. 153). universally acknowledge his "syncretistic Daring us to take up this challenge imagination"--which fuses classical pagan of being "one of the few" who are ideas with Christian allegory--and call "prepared to go further into the matter," him a "Neoplatonist Christian" (cf. C.S. Lewis presents to us readers the ancient Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and and universal belief in spiritual Beauty; Adam Barkman, C.S. Lewis & cosmology, or as this paper identifies it, Philosophy As A Way of Life). This paper the Angelic Hierarchy. By examining this will specifically identify the concept of the belief Scripturally and philosophically, we Angelic Hierarchy (or "spiritual can then highlight its centrality in Lewis's cosmology") as being both ancient and thinking and writing and speculate that universally accepted. The Canadian critic he believed it to be part of a spiritually- Adam Barkman warns that "Lewis's based worldview true for moderns as well fiction is not always an accurate depiction as for the ancients. of his metaphysical [spiritual] beliefs," (p. 237). Yet there are clues in the Ransom The Angelic Hierarchy trilogy that C.S. Lewis collapses the in the Scriptures distinction between "ancient" and "modern" and "fiction" and "fact" Let us emphasize at the outset precisely because he takes "ancient that "the Bible provides the basis for all philosophy" seriously and wants us Christian reflection on angels. Angels are moderns to do likewise. present throughout Scripture, and must At the end of Out of the Silent be confronted by all of its readers" (Keck, Planet Lewis the author establishes that p. 8). Far from being a "mythological the fictional narrator is named "Lewis" (p. hangover from pre-modern times" 155); that he is close friends with the (Dunbar, p. 5), Scripture tells us right in novel's protagonist Ransom; that he has the beginning of Genesis about God's been working on certain facts concerning creation of the cosmos and every creature planetary knowledge and medieval in and on the celestial and terrestrial Platonism; that these facts are relevant to orbs. From the patristic era through the modern times because "the medieval medieval period, the roles of the spirits in Platonists were living in the same the Genesis creation story were celestial year as ourselves" (p. 153); and frequently explored (Keck, p. 16). Yet finally, that they--Ransom and Lewis-- ultimately by the Council of Nicea in 325 must disguise these facts as fiction A.D., the orthodox Fathers declared that because humanity is in danger and that God created the angels despite the 2 C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy · Susan and Woody Wendling apparent silence of Genesis in this specific This mention of "evil" by John area. Lewis takes this historically Calvin reminds us that those who choose orthodox position that the Angelic to follow God's Son are constantly Hierarchy exists as part of God's creation, engaged in cosmic spiritual warfare. yet sees the cosmos as filled with angelic Ephesians 6 warns that "we are not beings, arranged hierarchically. contending against flesh and blood, but In the Bible the angels are against the principalities, against the represented throughout as spiritual powers, against the world rulers of this beings intermediate between God and present darkness, against the spiritual Man in their function as "messengers of hosts of wickedness in the heavenly God." The Latin and Greek words for places" (RSV). Paul here clearly states "angel" or "aggelos" means "one sent." that the fallen angels hold sway over the They, like humans, are created beings (Ps. world! 148:2-5; Col. 1:16-17). They are spirits; It is assumed in the ancient the writer of Hebrews says "Are they not Biblical worldview that this "angelic fall" all ministering spirits, sent to minister to occurred prior to the Fall of Man and that them who shall receive the inheritance of legions of fallen angels who had allied salvation?" (Heb. 1:14). In Revelation 8:2- themselves with Lucifer also fell. 5 they render perpetual assistance to God Revelation 12:9 describes this War in and are depicted as standing "before Heaven, with Satan, which "deceiveth the God's throne." In Jacob's vision they are whole world," being cast out into the shown ascending and descending the earth "and his Angels were cast out with ladder which stretches from earth to him." Luke 8:31 tells us that a portion of heaven--a visual image of this concept of the fallen angels are currently restrained hierarchy. Angels interact with Hagar in in a spiritual prison called "the Abyss." the wilderness. The angel Gabriel Later we will connect this ancient idea of announced the birth of John the Baptist the angelic fall to Lewis's knowledge of, and the Incarnation of the Lord Christ. and love for, Milton's epic poem, Paradise Further, they are represented as the Lost, and his linking of the fallen angel constituted guardians of the nations at Lucifer to the story of Earth's fallen some particular crisis, such as in Daniel "Oyarsa" in his cosmic inter-planetary 10:12-21, where the Archangel Michael novels. was coming to assist Daniel but was detained in the heavens by the Prince of The Angelic Hierarchy Persia. Throughout the Bible we find it and Platonic Philosophy repeatedly implied that each soul has its tutelary angel. St. Paul refers to Realizing how extensive the principalities, powers, virtues, and Biblical teaching is on the spiritual reality dominions in Ephesians 1:21, and, writing of the angels, their place in God's creation, to the Colossians (1:16), he says: "In Him and their relationship to humanity, let's were all things created in heaven and on examine the belief in spiritual cosmology earth, visible and invisible, whether or hierarchy seen in philosophers such as thrones or dominations, or principalities Plato and Plotinus. According to Justin or powers." According to John Calvin's Pollard and Howard Reid: "In the Enneads Institutes of the Christian Religion (Vol. I, we can look into the mind of the last great Chapter XIV, Section 6, p. 145), the angels pagan philosopher of antiquity. Plotinus’s "regard our safety, undertake our universe is, broadly speaking, of a similar defense, direct our ways, and exercise a structure to Plato’s, graded in the Great constant solicitude that no evil befall us." Chain of Being from the divine to the mundane, from the eternal to the mortal, 3 C.S. Lewis and the Angelic Hierarchy · Susan and Woody Wendling from God the One to nature, matter, and The Angelic Hierarchy the observed world." (Pollard and Reid, p. in Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost 248) These authors pinpoint that the Twelve years prior to the legacy of these ideas continued not just in publication of the OHEL volume, in 1942, the last days of the pagan ancient world Lewis published his famous study on John but throughout later history: Milton, A Preface to Paradise Lost. In it he In the later classical world the discusses the concept of hierarchy itself, theological traditions of Christianity something he believed to be "of great (most particularly in the work of Saint importance" (Hooper, p. 561). Further, as Augustine), Islam, and Judaism all looked a seventeenth century English poet, to Platonic philosophy, as described by Milton's tale of the rebellion and fall of Plotinus, as a method for formulating and the angels provides further grist for articulating their own theologies. After Lewis's ancient Neoplatonic spiritual the obscurity of the medieval period, the cosmology. In Chapter XV, "The Mistake Enneads reemerged in 1492 as one of the about Milton's Angels," Lewis defends the driving forces behind the writings of the materiality of Milton's angels by saying Italian Renaissance philosophers and in that "the whole passage . becomes the works of humanists like Erasmus and intelligible . when we realize that Milton Thomas More. [emphasis added] (Pollard put it there chiefly because he thought it and Reid, p.