Our Angelic Defenders
I’ve sometimes said that I’m the youngest person you will meet who has strong memories of something that the tidal wave of social, educational, and ecclesiological change in the 1960s was going to leave in sticks and rubble. In part, that’s because I taught myself to read when I was three, so I could, for example, puzzle out the Latin on the left page of the handsome missal that my mother always took to daily Mass. I was too small to see the priest, so I thought his voice was coming from high up on the wall by the ceiling, not that I paid any mind to him. The book was more interesting.
Yet now I see that many things were already lost before I arrived. I suppose my fellow Christians in other communions can name some: congregations that sang in four-part harmony, without a choirmaster; weekly evening lectures on the Christian life—who can name them all?
The book I am holding can give us a few: Paroissien Romain [Roman Parishioner], printed in Belgium in 1956. It contains prayers, readings, and chants for the Mass and the Divine Office for every Sunday through the year and all feast days. Its inside cover is marked “Paroisse Notre Dame de l’Assomption, Arichat, 1958.” That’s the main church on the island in Nova Scotia where we live in the summer.
I took my copy from a stash in a closet, long forgotten.
The preface contains twenty small-print pages describing how to pronounce Latin and how to execute Gregorian chant. It’s clear that the publishers wanted people to understand and to communicate the verses they were singing, by making sure that words and phrases preserved their integrity across a tapestry of notes. But precise technical discussions of rhythmic stress and rhythmic synthesis are not as important as what would be sung, almost all of which has been discarded.
Prayers for Michaelmas
Here I turn to one of the great feasts of old, now neglected: what the English called Michaelmas, September 29. It’s a feast in honor not only of Saint Michael the Archangel, but of all of those mysterious intellectual beings whom God has assigned to man’s protection. I think it would be altogether good for Christians to keep in mind that angels—spiritual beings whose precise nature has not been revealed to us—do exist, both those that are ministers of God and those that fell with Satan. The blessed angels are our superiors, but they and we are still fellow servants of the Most High. It is impossible to consider the glory of the angels apart from their obedience and their humility, and that is what we learn from the old chants and readings presented in Paroissien Romain.
The chant of the Introit, simple and direct in melody, binds men and angels together in praise of God:
Benedicite Dominum omnes Angeli ejus: potentes virtute, qui facitis verbum ejus, ad audiendam vocem sermonum ejus. Alleluia, alleluia. Benedic anima mea Domino, et omnia quae intra me sunt, nomini sancto ejus.
Bless the Lord, all ye his Angels, mighty in power, who perform his word when ye hear the voice of his speech. Alleluia, Alleluia. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.
The subsequent prayer, the collect for the day, develops this relationship: “O God, who by a wondrous order hast disposed the service of men and angels, graciously vouchsafe that our life, which is continually assisted by those who minister before thee in heaven, may be defended by them also upon earth.” Even if man is the only intellectual creature in the physical universe, we are not alone. The cloud of witnesses about us includes these, our elder brothers.
What Scripture should we read on such a day? The epistle came from the first chapter of the Apocalypse of John (Rev. 1:1–5). What we are about to hear, says the apostle, came from an angel, a messenger of God; and he prays that grace will be showered upon the seven churches “from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits which are before his throne; and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the first-begotten of the dead, and prince of the kings of the earth, who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood.” The language is lofty, mysterious, hieratic. Keep that in mind.
Then came the Gradual, a Christian form of the psalms of ascent. On this day, the choir or congregation repeated the words of the Introit, but now the chant is extraordinary, especially for the word nomen, “name,”whose final syllable takes up 43 notes. Of course, we are now disposed to find such lingering excessive. But we are not good judges. What form of art have we not helped to murder by modernism, with its hatred of detail and subtlety and color, its impatience with anything human that cannot be quantified or delivered as a commodity, and its deracination of place and time? The question to ask is not why they, the Benedictine monks who arranged the chants, could linger so lovingly on a single word, but why we cannot.
Angels & Children
Then came the gospel (Matt. 18:1–10):
At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said,
“Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. . . . And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
“Woe to the world because of offenses! For it needs must be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh! Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
“Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”
Let me try to put these things together. When we see a little child, we do not immediately think of the danger of hell fire; we do not think of the last days and the judgment of God; we do not think of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. But Jesus warns us that the angels devoted to the protection of these little ones look steadily upon the face of the Father in heaven, and that if we offend any one of them—consider, reader, that our whole world is specifically constituted to offend them, to murder their innocence and corrupt body and soul—we would do better to hang a great millstone round our neck and cast ourselves to the bottom of the sea.
Thus are Michael and all the hosts of heaven united in purity and wonder with the child whom Jesus sets forth as our exemplar. The angels themselves are not too high and mighty to obey, and in their obedience they are exalted in glory and power. Perhaps angels and sinners make an awkward choir. But angels and children—not the wispy, effeminate angels you find on a greeting card, and not the children we are so efficient at turning out, weazened, pallid, knowledgeable about evil, and ignorant of innumerable naturally good and healthy things—get along better than we can imagine.
To honor the highest of all created beings is to become a child again. Whatever else we may say about modernism in worship, one thing seems clear to me: people who were children at heart were not responsible for it. Millstones? Towers of steel and glass? A child gathering shiny pebbles on a beach is closer to the truth than is comfortable for us, the aged, to admit. Therefore I wish I were young again: or I pray to be made young for the first time, as young as Michael and his shining cohorts.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on Imagination from the online archives
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
11.5—September/October 1998
Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp
An Essay on Myth & 'Real Life' by Stratford Caldecott
19.10—December 2006
Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills
more from the online archives
25.4—July/August 2012
The Corrosive & Far-Reaching Fallout of the Sexual Revolution by Anthony Esolen
32.5—September/October 2019
on the Inhuman Transformation of Transgenderism by Anthony Esolen
33.3—May/June 2020
On Flight & Fight in the Present Tribulation by Douglas Farrow
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