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This chapter examines the import and meaning of the terms sempiternitas, perpetuitas, and aeviternitas or aevum. The terms sempiternitas and perpetuitas were often used interchangeably since they were basically used to refer to limitless particulars and their durations. Medieval figures recognized two types of limitlessness: durations which had no end and durations which had neither a beginning nor an end. As the terms perpetuitas and sempiternitas could be used of both kinds of durations, it is not unusual to find them used of God, angels, souls, and heavenly bodies. The terms aeviternitas and aevum were often used in a similar way, and were sometimes used synonymously with perpetuitas and sempiternitas. Nevertheless, there were serious disagreements amongst 13th century thinkers about the nature of the aevum, in particular whether it was extended or not.

This chapter discusses the impact of natural philosophy on views of angels, and the ways in which angels constituted thought experiments in natural philosophy. Milton's angels are objects of natural-philosophical knowledge. There was no divorce between mechanical and occult or spiritual philosophy; rather, it was the opponents of the Society, such as Hobbes, who doubted that spiritual beings were reliable evidence. Increasingly the ‘proof’ of the spirit world lay in descriptions and explanations of apparitions, such as those compiled by Robert Boyle, Glanvill, and More. The spirits concerned were predominantly demons because the age of miracles and angels was over. Still, there is no real division between the philosopher, theologian, and poet, because the story is ‘a complex narrative organism’ and the part and whole must be understood together.

This chapter explores the theological views of angelic communication and virtual embodiment. For Milton, the doctrine of the nine angelic orders was popish, and such hierarchy as did exist in Creation was flexible and permeable. Angelic music in Paradise Lost does not resemble the music of the spheres in two ways: first, it is profoundly verbal; these are words that are being sung. Secondly, it is far more creaturely than any account of the celestial harmonies. Milton's angels are substantial, physical beings; they are spirits, but nonetheless material. They have no bodies, and therefore they have no tongues and no ears. The exception is that their matter has a ‘proper’ shape, the angel's ‘own’ shape, and they assume form according to their purposes and will. To speak with the tongue of angels is to speak eloquently without feigning.

Alan Segal starts by observing that incarnation is not an easy category to fit into native Jewish categories for talking about God. Casting around for adequate precedents, he first examines Plato's conceptions of matter and spirit (along with mortality and immortality). Philo was to use Platonic thought and vocabulary significantly, although he did not breach the line between spiritual and material objects. Philo looked askance at incarnation. Segal then recalls various angelic theophanies and mediation scenes, in which precedents for the Christian conception of incarnation seem better grounded in Jewish literature.

The poems presented here by Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and George Wither are all state-of-the-nation poems that invoke the presence of national angels. Milton and Wither raise questions about the relationship between the islands and the kingdom. Cowley's Cromwell, driven by an evil angel, retorts to Marvell's ‘Angelic Cromwell’. Marvell may have known Wither's poem, and also Wither's later poem on Cromwell's riding accident, which construes a complex and qualified mode of praise. All of these writings are rooted in an account of the nature and offices of angels that was common in early modern Britain. And all engage in a dialogue that is founded upon a sense of the imaginative possibilities of angels.

The very fact that human beings share a space, in which their bodies, as physical masses, cannot occupy the same place, raises the need for political existence. This is because bodily existence is directly tied to the emergence of relations of power. Bodily existence makes human beings not only subjects of power, but also objects of power. This fact necessitates a civilization, i.e., a second birth of human beings. These connections are best seen when we compare the human situation to that of angels. It is because human beings, unlike angels, have an (empirical) body, that they require a political order. Such a political order is thus to be contrasted both with a-historical paradisiacal conditions, as well as with the para-empirical notion of a “natural man,” as Ibn Khaldûn has shown through his distinction between a “hypothetically” and an “empirically” proceeding political science.

This chapter examines the diversity of expectations concerning the hope for immortality present in the expulsion narrative. Despite contrasting expectations for astral-immortality, soul-immortality, or bodily resurrection, the hope for immortality is often articulated using the symbolic capital of the expulsion narrative. This chapter discusses expectations that adhere closely to the expulsion narrative, including the removal of the sword of the cherubim, the “opening” of gates, and the reacquisition of beatific life in Eden. However, this chapter also considers motifs for resurrection and immortality, such as the revivification of dust, “the Way” to life, and angelic participation, which employ the symbolic capital of the expulsion narrative mediated by the influence of images of mortality in Job, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.

Milton has been both deplored as a misogynist and acclaimed as the pre-eminent poet of companionate marriage. This chapter traces the emergence and development of both of these views, as well as critical responses to prelapsarian lovemaking. Many critics have discussed Milton’s eroticism separately from his sexual politics, but it is a curious fact that the poem’s most bitter or offensive passages are juxtaposed with its most tender professions of love. This chapter asks why this should be so, and argues that critics on both sides of the ‘misogyny’ question have obscured the real issue by either emphasizing or denying Milton’s supposed ‘grudge’ against women. Mary Wollstonecraft offered a more searching criticism when she argued that it is Milton’s love, not hatred, that poses the real threat. The chapter also asks what Milton meant by ‘cheerful conversation’ (in Paradise and the divorce pamphlets), and examines the history of critical responses to angelic lovemaking.

Beethoven's only opera Fidelio is a gritty tale of rescue rooted in actual events from the post-Revolutionary era. The three versions of Fidelio shed light on the composer's political convictions and his inclination to find inspiration in French Revolutionary models. Beethoven's models for the final 1814 version of the opera also included Schiller's play on Jeanne d'Arc and his own music to Goethe's drama Egmont, whereas his irritation with Mozart's opera Così fan tutte lurks behind his exalted depiction of his disguised heroine Leonore. Some instrumental works, notably the "Appassionata" Sonata, op. 57, harbor affinities to Fidelio and French sources, in this case, a thematic kinship to the Marseillaise. The music of the dungeon scenes in Fidelio is suggestive, allowing the climactic conclusion of Florestan's aria and the ensuing melodrama to be experienced as simultaneous complementary perspectives. Angelic symbolism enriches the prisoner's delirious vision, before Leonore gains access to the forbidden chamber and holds Pizarro at bay, knocking the tyrant off his pedestal. Leonore's musical dominance over her adversary is asserted as she reveals herself as a woman, singing "Weib!" ("wife!") to an unaccompanied note at the top of her vocal range. Fidelio celebrates the ideals of the French Revolution.

This chapter considers the influence of Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises on Southwell. It first discusses Southwell's religious training, which made him aware of the presence of the angelic, and allowed him to express it accordingly in his poetry. The chapter shows that it is the encouragement to express and study personal feeling that makes Exercises useful to an examination of the creation in English poetry of a new psychological realism and emotional integrity. It then considers the core experience of Exercises and stresses that Ignatius presented an understanding of the psychological processes involved in self-analysis.

This chapter treats Aristotle’s role in the angelology of Aquinas, both in his Summa theologiae and in other works. For Aquinas, our knowledge of angels comes largely from divine revelation. Even so, human reason can know something of “separate substances.” Philosophy is therefore shown to be a privileged interlocutor for Christian angelology. Examination of Aquinas’s reception of the teaching that Aristotle devotes explicitly to “separated substances” confirms this attitude, at the same time appreciative and critical. Aquinas has recourse to specifically Aristotelian themes in direct relation with the question of separated substances in order to deepen his teaching about angels. Through this concrete example of the interaction between theology and philosophy, it clearly appears that, for Aquinas, theology uses the multiple resources of philosophy without ever being subordinated to philosophy.

This chapter describes occult philosophy's state of decline, which translated to fewer works on alchemy, less respect for astrology, and the virtual disappearance of ritual magic among the educated. From 1710 onwards, years passed without any new book or alchemical work coming onto the market at all. Astrology, on the other hand, suffered a somewhat different fate. As with alchemy, it suffered a loss of prestige, but its popularity remained. Public thirst for predictions remained constant, and so did the number of almanacs published in England at the time. A select few bothered to examine whether astrology worked through natural magic or angelic influence, and as a result, serious studies of astrology became rare and hard to come by. John Partridge dominated the field, with his empirical approach that was anti-Copernican, firmly opposed to magic, and fixated on the “Hileg” or predictor of death.

Christian orators explained the emergence of new, renunciatory communities to their urban congregations by the use of a trope: they explained that ascetics were Christians but were different because they were living "the angelic life." This chapter explores the development of that trope among urban preachers, then examines evidence from ascetic communities themselves to understand the effects of the discourse on the day-to-day lives of monks. Ascetic literature, including the works of Shenoute of Atripe, head of the White Monastery, demonstrates that ascetics received the trope with ambivalence, at times using it to construct the cultural foundations of their communities, while at others rejecting it as a dangerous and hubristic way of viewing the ascetic project.

Why has Peace Be Still become one of the most influential gospel albums of all time? What does it express, sonically and lyrically, about the circumstances in which the artists lived? Have interpretations of its message by a predominantly African American listening public changed during the six tumultuous decades since its release? The introduction presents these and other questions the book will address. The introduction also summarizes the book’s main argument: that the album, and particularly its title track, does not necessarily contain elements of explicit protest as much as it codes messages of resistance and resilience that have nurtured and sustained African Americans over centuries of discrimination.

The opening chapter situates Peace Be Still in its geographic and cultural context of Essex County, New Jersey, a destination for African Americans departing the South during the Great Migration. It offers brief biographies on two of the book’s principal characters: Lawrence Roberts, who organized the Angelic Choir, and Dolores Pigford Roberts, his wife and an Angelic Choir member. Readers learn what it was like to grow up African American in a religious household in the Newark metropolitan area. It offers a history of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, where Lawrence became pastor and for which he formed the Angelic Choir, which recorded Peace Be Still in 1963.

Chapter 3 opens with Reverend Lawrence Roberts being named pastor of the First Baptist Church of Nutley. Church membership having dwindled to almost nothing, Lawrence and Bootsy set about turning the ship around. They recharged the church’s music ministry by inviting Lawrence’s Voices of Faith community choir to sing periodically for Sunday services. The Voices of Faith soon became First Baptist’s main choir. A brief explanation of the significance of a gospel choir in African American Baptist churches is presented for readers unfamiliar with the practice. When in 1961 the Voices of Faith cut their first album for Savoy Records, the ensemble was rechristened the Angelic Choir.

This chapter describes the production of the first two volumes of the This Sunday--in Person albums by James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir at First Baptist Church. It explores the sonic and lyrical content of each album and the record trade’s response to each upon their release. Some of the musical architecture established on these albums would inform arrangements used for Peace Be Still. A description of the final live recording produced in the original First Baptist Church, by the Roberta Martin Singers, precedes the razing of the church building and plans to erect a modern sanctuary on the site. Most of the funding for the new building would depend on sales of Angelic Choir recordings.