Today is the Feast of the Guardian Angels -- a celebration of which I confess I was unaware until this morning. Most Anglicans don't think about angels much: their metaphysical specificity is a little embarrassing. However, only a churl would deny their existence, and the thought of there being one heavenly being assigned to each human is a comforting one. They must work awfully hard at keeping us from the worst consequences of our actions and omissions; one feels a certain sympathy for them, and one wonders what they do after their human dies. Do they get another one, or do they go back to eternal praise? Curious: the merest touch of irony creeps into any Anglican discussion of them, all by itself. It's as if there is something vaguely childish about belief in them, and we have put away childish things. On the other hand, childlike is not childish, and childlike is what we are urged to become, by an Authority higher even than St Paul. So perhaps, like a very small child crossing the road, we should just put our hand up without looking, in the absolute trust that there will be a protective hand to grasp it.
It is pleasing also that Sir Thomas Browne, definitely a man of the seventeenth century with whom one would like to have dinner, liked guardian angels:
Therefore for Spirits I am so farre from denying their existence, that I could easily believe, that not only whole Countries, but particular persons have their Tutelary, and Guardian Angels: It is not a new opinion of the Church of Rome, but an old one of Pythagoras and Plato; there is no heresy in it, and if not manifestly defined in Scripiture, yet is it an opinion of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions of a man's life, and would serve as an Hypothesis to salve many doubts, whereof common philosophy affordeth no solution. (Religio Medici)
Image: Raphael, "The Deliverance of St Peter" in the Vatican. Peter's was the most famous guardian angel in the New Testament.
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