Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil (5 page)

Another remarkable bit of evidence for the early Christians’ acceptance of the Book of Enoch was for many years buried under the King James Bible’s mistranslation of Luke 9:35, describing the transfiguration of Christ: “And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him.” Apparently the translator here wished to make this verse agree with a similar verse in Matthew and Mark. But Luke’s verse in the original Greek reads: “This is my Son, the
Elect One
.
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Hear him.”

The “Elect One” is a most significant term in the Book of Enoch. If the book was indeed known to the apostles, with its abundant descriptions of the Elect One who should “sit upon a throne of glory” and the Elect One who should “dwell in the midst of them,” (En. 54:3–4) then great scriptural authenticity is accorded to the Book of Enoch when the “voice out of the cloud” tells the apostles, “This is my Son, the Elect One”—the one promised in the Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch was also much loved by the Essenes, the new-age community that had a large monastery at Qumran on the Dead Sea at the time of Jesus Christ. “The motif of the fallen angels,” Dr. Potter notes, “was a favorite legend among the Essenes.”
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Fragments of ten Enoch manuscripts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The famous scrolls actually comprise only one part of the total findings at Qumran. Much of the rest was Enochian literature, copies of the Book of Enoch, and other apocryphal works in the Enochian tradition, like the Book of Jubilees. With so many copies around, the Essenes could well have used Enoch as a community prayer book or teacher’s manual and study text.

The Essenes were waiting for the coming Messiah to deliver them from the persecution they suffered, which they attributed to the “sons of Belial”—undoubtedly the fallen angels. They awaited the coming of the Elect One; for as the Book of Enoch had prophesied, “You shall behold my Elect One, sitting upon the throne of my glory. And he shall judge Azazeel [Azazyel], all his associates, and all his hosts.” (54:5)

In this same tradition, Jesus himself said, “Now is the judgment of this world-system [of the Watchers]: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.” (John 12:31)
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Certainly his listeners, well-versed as they were in the teachings of the Book of Enoch, would have caught Jesus’ clear inference: that he came to implement the judgment of the fallen angels prophesied in the Book of Enoch.

In essence, Jesus revealed himself as the Messiah, the Elect One of the Book of Enoch, who came not only to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament but also to fulfill one very special prophecy in the Book of Enoch—namely, the judgment of the Watchers and their offspring.

The Book of Enoch was also used by writers of the noncanonical (i.e., apocryphal or “hidden”) texts. The author of the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas quotes the Book of Enoch three times, twice calling it “the Scripture,” a term specifically denoting the inspired Word of God.
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Other apocryphal works reflect knowledge of the Enoch story of the Watchers, notably the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Book of Jubilees. (See “
Enoch in the Forgotten Books
” in this volume.)

Everybody loved and respected the Book of Enoch.
At least for a time.
The turning point of opinions came in the fourth century, during the era of the Church Fathers. These highly respected interpreters of Christ’s theology were the prominent leaders and teachers of the Christian Church who thrived from the first to the eighth centuries
A.D.

At first the Fathers devoted much attention to the subject of the fall of the angel whom they knew as the biblical Satan. They also addressed the subject of the personalities of other fallen angels, the modus operandi of wicked spirits, and the nature of evil itself.

Convinced that these ancient wicked ones were still quite active in the world, the early Fathers often quoted the Book of Enoch to make their case for good against evil. Indeed, Dr. Charles points out that “with the earlier Fathers and Apologists it [the Book of Enoch] had all the weight of a canonical book.”
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In the second century
A.D.
, for example, Justin Martyr ascribed all evil to demons whom he alleged to be the offspring of the angels who fell through lust for the daughters of men—precisely the Enochian story.

The fallen angels seem to have occupied far more of Justin’s thought than the good angels, and the consciousness of the demonic element in the universe was central to Justin’s cosmology. Justin, in his
Second Apology,
agrees with Enoch that the angels fell through lust.
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Moreover, explains Justin,

they subsequently subjected the human race to themselves, partly by magic writings, partly by the fear they instilled into them and the punishments they inflicted upon them, and partly by instructing them in the use of sacrifices, incense, and libations, which they really needed after becoming slaves of their lustful passions; and among men they engendered murders, wars, adulteries, all sorts of dissipation, and every species of sin.
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Here Justin makes a strong statement reinforcing the argument that these angels actually dwelt among men as physical beings.

Athenagoras, writing in his work called
Legatio
in about
A.D.
170, regards Enoch as a true prophet. He describes the angels which “violated both their own nature and their office”:

These include the prince over matter and material things and others who are of those stationed at the first firmament (do realize that we say nothing unsupported by evidence but that we are exponents of what the prophets uttered); the latter are the angels who fell to lusting after maidens and let themselves be conquered by the flesh, the former failed his responsibility and operated wickedly in the administration of what had been entrusted to him.

Now from those who went after maidens were born the so-called giants. Do not be surprised that a partial account of the giants has been set forth also by poets. Worldly wisdom and prophetic wisdom differ from one another as truth differs from probability—the one is heavenly, the other earthly and in harmony with the prince of matter [who says]: We know how to tell many falsehoods which have the form of truth.

These angels, then, who fell from heaven busy themselves about the air and the earth and are no longer able to rise to the realms above the heavens. The souls of the giants are the demons who wander about the world. Both angels and demons produce movements [i.e., agitations, vibrations]
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—demons, movements which are akin to the natures they received, and angels, movements which are akin to the lusts with which they were possessed.
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The teaching that “the souls of the giants are the demons who wander about the world” is directly from Enoch. Athenagoras also discusses the fact that the angels “let themselves be conquered by flesh.” Herein he may be implying that these angels were (or at least at one time had been) physical beings. The physicality of the fallen angels is nowhere more graphic than in Enoch’s description of the wicked deeds of their giant offspring who devoured man and beast in their voracious appetites and even drank their blood. (En. 7:12–14)

Most of the other early Church Fathers, as well as the early Jews, apparently held this same belief in the physicality of the fallen angels. Two Christian apologists, Lactantius and Tatian, speculated in detail on that idea of the incarnation of the fallen angels in matter.

Lactantius (260–330) believed that the fall resulted in a degradation of the angelic nature itself—that the once-heavenly angels had in fact become quite earthly. The earlier apologist Tatian (110–172) went into greater detail regarding this degradation. He described how the angels became engrossed in material things, and he believed that their very nature became coarse, gross, and material.
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A contemporary Catholic scholar, Emil Schneweis, summarizing Tatian’s view, says the Father believed that “the fallen angels sank deeper and deeper into matter, becoming the slaves of concupiscence and lust.”
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Tatian actually says their bodies were “of fire and air”—not material flesh as are the bodies of men but in the broad sense “from matter.”

Might Tatian have conjectured that the demons were physical, yet of a different sort of substance than other forms of life known to the five senses? Or might his thesis have gone so far as to speculate that the demons dwelt only in the astral realms “beneath”?

We may never know precisely how Tatian defined his terms. But even though Tatian and Lactantius both qualified their statements regarding the physicality of angels, saying that the substance composing their bodies was a fiery, airy material, later theologians totally dismissed the entire idea of material-clad angels.

Seventeenth-century editors of Tatian’s work warned the reader to beware of the passage where Tatian “seems rashly to imagine the demons to be material creatures.” Tatian says that the demons,

having received their structure
from matter
and obtained the spirit which inheres in it, became intemperate and greedy; some few, indeed, turning to what was purer but others choosing what was inferior
in matter
and conforming their manner of life to it.
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Just in case Tatian’s reader thinks Tatian is saying these demons were physical beings (drawing the obvious conclusion from the above text), the respected collection of Church writings
The Ante-Nicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene Fathers
to this day reprints the warning in a footnote to prevent such an ‘error’.
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“In the course of time,” says the 1967
New Catholic Encyclopedia,
“theology has purified the obscurity and error contained in traditional views about angels. In this way, theology ... [now] specifies that the nature of angels is completely spiritual and no longer merely a very fine material, firelike and vaporous.”
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Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in the third century, makes several direct references to the Enoch story, including Enoch’s announcement of the condemnation of the fallen Watchers. Irenaeus accuses a magically inclined Gnostic of his day of obtaining

wonders of power that is utterly severed from God and apostate, which Satan, thy true father, enables thee still to accomplish by means of Azazel, that fallen and yet mighty angel.
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Azazel (or Azazyel) in the Book of Enoch is the fallen Watcher to whom the Lord “ascribes the whole crime” of the corruption of earth by his wicked inventions, including the instruments of war. Irenaeus, for one, believed Azazyel was still around.

Tertullian, who lived between
A.D.
160 and 230, is most enthusiastic about the Book of Enoch. He calls the Book of Enoch “Scripture.” He says:

As for the details of how some of the angels, of their own accord, were perverted and then constituted the source of the even more corrupt race of devils, a race damned by God together with the originators of the race and him whom we have mentioned as their leader, the account is found in Sacred Scripture.
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Tertullian wrote an entire work discussing the apparel of women in which he adjures women to dress modestly, without adornment, or what he calls “the tricks of beautifying themselves.” He uses the Book of Enoch as the sturdiest evidence in his case against such “trappings”:

For those, too, who invented these things are condemned to the penalty of death, namely, those angels who rushed from heaven upon the daughters of men.... For when these fallen angels had revealed certain well-hidden material substances, and numerous other arts that were only faintly revealed, to an age much more ignorant than ours ... they granted to women as their special and, as it were, personal property these means of feminine vanity: the radiance of precious stones with which necklaces are decorated in different colors, the bracelets of gold which they wrap around their arms, the colored preparations which are used to dye wool, and that black powder which they use to enhance the beauty of their eyes.

If you want to know what kind of things these are, you can easily learn from the character of those who taught these arts. Have sinners ever been able to show and provide anything conducive to holiness, unlawful lovers anything contributing to chastity, rebel angels anything promoting the fear of God? If, indeed, we must call what they have passed on ‘teachings’, then evil teachers must of necessity have taught evil lessons; if these are the wages of sin, then there can be nothing beautiful about the reward for something evil. But why should they have taught and granted such things?

Are we to think that women without the material of adornment or without the tricks of beautifying themselves would not have been able to please men when these same women, unadorned and uncouth and, as I might say, crude and rude, were able to impress angels? Or would the latter have appeared beggarly lovers who insolently demanded favors for nothing, unless they had brought some gift to the women they had attracted into marriage? But this is hardly conceivable. The women who possessed angels as husbands could not desire anything further, for surely they had already made a fine match.

The angels, on the other hand, who certainly thought sometimes of the place whence they had fallen and longed for heaven after the heated impulses of lust had quickly passed, rewarded in this way the very gift of woman’s natural beauty as the cause of evil, that is, that woman should not profit from her happiness, but, rather, drawn away from the ways of innocence and sincerity, should be united with them in sin against God. They must have been certain that all ostentation, ambition, and love achieved by carnal pleasure would be displeasing God. You see, these are the angels whom we are destined to judge, (I Cor. 6:3) these are the angels whom we renounce in baptism, these are the very things on account of which they deserved to be judged by men.
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