Eliot Weinberger - Angels & saints

By Eliot Weinberger

AUTHOR

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1979; 1987; 2016)

Works on Paper (1986) Outside Stories (1992)

Written Reaction (1996) Karmic Traces (2000) 9/12 (2003)

What I Heard About Iraq (2005) The Stars (2005)

What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (2005) Muhammad (2006)

An Elemental Thing (2007) Oranges & Peanuts for Sale (2009)

Wildlife (2011) Two American Scenes (with Lydia Davis, 2013)

The Wall, the City, and the World (2014) The Ghosts of Birds (2016)

EDITOR/TRANSLATOR

Octavio Paz: Eagle or Sun? (1970; 1976) A Draft of Shadows (1980) Selected Poems (1984) Collected Poems 19571987 (1987) A Tree Within (1988) Sunstone (1991) In Light of India (1997) A Tale of Two Gardens (1997) An Erotic Beyond: Sade (1998) Figures & Figurations (2002) The Poems of Octavio Paz (2012)

Homero Aridjis: Exaltation of Light (1981)

Jorge Luis Borges: Seven Nights (1984) Selected Non-Fictions (1999)

Vicente Huidobro: Altazor (1988; 2003) Equatorial (2019)

Cecilia Vicua: Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Water (1992)

Xavier Villaurrutia: Nostalgia for Death (1992)

Bei Dao: Unlock (with Iona Man Cheong, 2000) The Rose of Time:Selected Poems (2010)

EDITOR

Montemora (19751982)

Una antologa de la poesa norteamericana desde 1950 (1992)

American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders (1993)

Sulfur 33: Into the Past (1993)

The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003)

World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions (2006)

Elsewhere (2014)

Calligrams: Writings from and on China (2015)

for NS, AD & H, and S

Copyright 2020 Eliot Weinberger

Guide to the illustrations copyright 2020 Mary Wellesley

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

A Note on the Text: The extracts are adapted from the following translations: John Climacus (Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell), Aelred of Rievaulx (Eric Colledge), Mechthild of Magdeburg (Frank Tobin), Hadewijch (Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B.), and Angela of Foligno (Paul Lachance, O.F.M.).

Image Credits: Pages 1, 2, and 88: Bibliothque Nationale de France; pages 10, 33, 59, 68, 99, 109, 117, 124, 139, and 148: The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; page 17: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mnchen, Clm 8201, fol. 94; pages 24, 40, 49, and 79: Burgerbibliothek, Bern; page 152: Bibliothques dAmiens Mtropole

Manufactured in China

First published as a Christine Burgin / New Directions clothbound book in 2020

Design by Leslie Miller

Color production and cover design by Jason Burch

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weinberger, Eliot, author.

Title: Angels & saints / Eliot Weinberger ; with a guide to the illustrations by Mary Wellesley

Other titles: Angels and saints

Description: New York : Christine Burgin/New Directions Publishing, 2020

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045191 | ISBN 9780811229869 (cloth) | ISBN 9780811229876 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Angels. | Christian saints.

Classification: LCC BT966.3 .W38 2020 | DDC 235dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045191

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Christine Burgin Books are published by

Christine Burgin, 245 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Preceding images and all images to follow:

from Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780856 CE) In honorem sanctae crucis.

I.
Angels

Angels

When armed men come to arrest Jesus, one of his followers draws a sword and cuts off the ear of a high priests servant. Jesus tells him to put down his sword. Do you think I cannot now pray to my Father who would presently give more than twelve legions of angels? A Roman legion at the time had five thousand men, but Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century revealed that a heavenly legion has 6,666 angels. Twelve such legions would have been a modest portion of what the Bible calls heavens army. Revelation states there are ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands and thousands of angels. Hebrews merely says they are innumerable. Bernardino of Siena in the 15th century said there are more angels than stars in the sky, grains of sand on the beaches, or all corporeal things. 14th century Kabbalists, turning words into numbers, calculated that there are exactly 301,655,722, although the Zohar says that 600 million were created on the second day of Creation and others afterward. Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century, expanding Origen, said that there are indeed 6,666 angels per legion, and also 6,666 legions per order, and nine orders, but that the total number (which would otherwise be 399,920,004) remains incalculable. One of the largest estimates is in the apocryphal book 3 Enoch, where each of the seven archangels leads 496,000 myriads and each myriad has 10,000 angels: 34,720,000,000 angels in all. William Cross in the 18th century simply said tis beyond the Power of Arithmetic to compute them. Others have wondered how angels, being incorporeal, could be counted.

Surprisingly little was originally known about the angels. They are mentioned less than two hundred times in the Bible, usually only in passing. (And, in the Old Testament, when a supernatural being appears, it often may or may not be Yahweh himself.) They appear or they act, but the matter of their existence is not elucidated. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century said it was easier to know what angels do than what they are. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century explained that, in Genesis, Moses says nothing about the angels he met because he was addressing an uncultured people, as yet incapable of understanding an incorporeal nature.

In the few times when they are described, the Biblical angels usually look like young mennot, as in the later iconography, as young women or androgynes or boys or babies. Only certain ones have wings. When two angels come to Sodom looking for a just man, the Sodomites find them attractive and try to seduce them. An angel with a drawn sword was invisible to Balaam, but visible to his donkey. The angel who tells Samsons previously barren mother that she will conceive a child has a very terrible countenance. An angel with a face like lightning and a robe white as snow rolls away the stone from Jesus tomb to show that he has gone. (Or, in another Gospel, the people themselves roll away the stone and find inside a young man dressed in white. Or, in yet another Gospel, they find two young men.)