What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (29 page)

Cherubim:
In the Old Testament, these sphinx-like creatures stood beside God’s throne, guarded the gates of Eden, and steered God’s chariot. That was then. For some reason, they’re now imagined as fat little babies with wings and no diapers, which means you don’t want them perching over your car.

Thrones or Ophanim:
Taking their orders from the Seraphim and the Cherubim, they serve as God’s chariot, appearing as wheels with eyes around them. They carry out God’s commands and keep the cosmos in order. They’re described as having four wings and four faces, and they rarely interact with man—which is probably just as well because they’d give the children nightmares.

The Second Choir

Dominions:
These are your classic angel types. They don white, floor-length gowns with golden belts, and carry a staff of gold in one hand and God’s seal in the other. Clearly they know how to accessorize. As heaven’s middle-managers, their job is to coordinate the activities of the First and Third Choirs.

Virtues:
Also called “the shining ones,” they’re sky spirits that regulate the planets and the weather. (And here you thought it was the laws of physics.) They assist people struggling with their faith, they reward worshippers with grace and valor, and they perform the occasional miracle. Handy guys to have around.

Powers:
Guarding the frontier between heaven and earth, they are the border patrol of the afterlife. They guide the soul to heaven after death, and stop demons from slipping in without a green card.

The Third Choir

Principalities:
These hands-on entities protect human rulers, cities, and nations from
evil
angels. They dress like soldiers yet they wear girdles of gold—which makes them sound like shock troops for Victoria’s Secret.

Archangels:
These are the most famous angels because they deliver messages directly to man and they’re the only ones with names. Theoretically there are seven of them, but we generally only hear about Gabriel and Michael. They lead the armies of heaven against the “sons of darkness,” meaning those who seceded from heaven to follow Lucifer.

Angels:
All other angels fall into this category. They have the thankless job of being closest to man: heaven’s interns. They watch over us, offer help now and then, and work as a message service whenever something big is about to come down—like Jesus, or the end of the world, or both. Guardian Angels come from this rank, though that term appears nowhere in the Bible.

Ironically, stereotypical angels get their look from pagan mythology. The halo was the glowing aura of spiritual purity associated with sun gods. Originally their worshippers fashioned a crown of feathers to represent the solar disk. Later, Roman emperors and medieval kings, equating themselves with divine beings, adopted a crown of gold because gold was an incorruptible metal and because feathers started to look pretty stupid.

Christian sculptors rendered marble saints with halos on their heads shaped like flat disks, which—no kidding—had the added benefit of protecting the faces from bird droppings. In paintings, the halo was shown as a golden disk, and it later morphed into the circle of neon we now imagine hovering overhead like a personal UFO.

How to become a Saint

While we’re on the subject of divine beings, the Catholic Church has a long tradition of turning its heroes into superheroes by elevating them to sainthood. It’s a nice way to whitewash the reputation of special servants of the faith, and some of them really needed whitewashing. The bishop who ordered the death of Hypatia was made a saint.

Technically, when the pope bestows sainthood, it’s simply a recognition of something God has already done. For the first thousand years of Christianity, it was an informal process. More of a popularity contest. Then, in the 10
^th
century, Pope John XV established the official rules of canonization, which have been modified over the centuries. Until recently, there was an office of “devil’s advocate” charged with making the case against the candidate for sainthood—to make sure they really deserved it. But Pope John Paul II got rid of the position, which I think is kind of disappointing.

The process of canonization can take years or even centuries. It begins at least five years after the candidate’s death when a bishop investigates a candidates’ life and work to see if they’re virtuous enough for consideration. A report is sent to the Vatican, where a committee of cardinals and theologians review the material. If they approve, the pope declares the candidate to be “venerable.” A Catholic role model.

Next, the candidate must be deemed responsible for a posthumous miracle of some kind, except if they died as a martyr, in which case no evidence is required. If they pass this hurdle they are granted “beatification.”

Then, if a
second
miracle is proven to be associated with them, maybe through praying in their name, the candidate is canonized—they become a saint. But the Vatican has to verify these miracles. (I’m curious how this is even possible. Do they have a
Mythbusters
lab somewhere?)

A saint is ultimately recommended to the entire Church for veneration, and occasionally they’re assigned to become the patron saint of something-or-other, like a church or a city. There are patron saints of cab drivers, accountants, comedians, earthquakes, television, thieves, and even abdominal pains. Recently, one was named for the Internet. Maybe he was prone to viruses.

A Brief History of Hell

Meanwhile, at the other end of the moral universe is the realm of the demons—hell. In the Middle Ages, hell was a big deal, and ideas about it evolved rapidly in the public imagination. What started as the gray underworld of Egypt and Greece, where everyone went after death, turned into a pit of torture exclusively for sinners, which was still almost everyone. There is no hell in Jewish belief, though some of the Israelites who bitched to Moses in the Sinai were gobbled up by the earth and landed in Sheol, also called Hades. It didn’t sound like fun.

The Gospel of Matthew mentions “an unquenchable fire” that awaits sinners in the last days. This was embellished into God’s penitentiary—the Evil Empire where the damned would suffer forever. Christian writers were happy to list specifically who the damned were, as if there was a membership roster, and it usually included you.

Paul included adulterers, slanderers, homosexuals, fornicators, swindlers, idolaters, thieves, drunkards, the greedy, the envious and even the quarrelsome—which takes care of everyone I’ve friended on Facebook. Augustine added sexual perverts to the guest list. I’m not sure if this included his concubine.

Because so much attention was paid to him, the devil took on a variety of names: Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Demon, the Dragon, Leviathan, Mephistopheles, the Serpent, Prince of Darkness, Tempter, Deceiver of Mankind, the Bogeyman, and even Dickens (as in,
“You scared the Dickens out of me!”
No relation to Charles.). Satan assumed the appearance of Pan, the randy satyr of Greek mythology from whom we get the term “horny little devil.” His pitchfork came from Neptune’s trident and his voice came from
The Exorcist.

Back around 20 B.C., the Roman poet Virgil was one of the first to describe hell vividly. It was a realm of violent earthquakes, noxious fumes, and vicious hounds, which I’ll bet were those wheezing, snotty-eyed little toy poodles we’d all love to drown. Virgil was the first to locate hell geographically—under Italy. He said the entrance was in a cave outside of Naples. (Consult your
Lonely Planet.
)

In the sixth century, Gregory the Great collected stories of hell that included stinking rivers, cackling demons, and legions of the damned boiling in pits. A notorious work from 12
^th
century Ireland, The Vision of Tundal, featured murderers sizzling on a grill, traitors impaled on hooks, and unchaste priests being eaten by a giant bird which then defecated them onto a frozen lake full of serpents. Fuck.

Around 1300, Dante Alighieri added a major chapter to the lore in
The Divine Comedy
. He moved hell to the center of the earth with a sign at the entrance reading, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” He gave us the Nine Circles of Hell, with offenders assigned to a hierarchy of specific tortures: the lustful flailed in winds of desire, gluttons sank into garbage heaps, and the slothful rotted in swamps. Plus there were the Furies, the Medusa, Harpies, boiling rivers and, at the bottom of it all, an icy lake of blood. There, Dante found those who had betrayed their lords—Judas, Brutus, and Satan himself. Et tu Beelzebub?

As the Black Death tore across Europe in the 1340s, hell visions began to include the Grim Reaper and living skeletons. Different religious orders added more details, and these evolving images of damnation eventually wound up in plays and operas. John Milton eventually elevated Satan to the glorious prince of hell in
Paradise Lost
. For Milton, hell was a kind of parallel reality rather than a geographic place, and Satan reigned from a palace called Pandemonium (meaning “all demons”).

Inquiring Minds

Fear of demons expanded to fear of everything—even old women who practiced pre-Christian folk medicine. Sometimes this involved an incantation. Pious locals would freak out about this and grab their torches and pitchforks. By the late 12
^th
century, these spontaneous panics became a big issue.

In response to popular demand, the Church established the Inquisition to handle these cases, and to target heretics like the Christian Cathars in southern France. It was less about saving souls and more about spooking people into proper behavior. Speaking freely could be a death penalty offense. In 1252, the use of torture was authorized by Pope Innocent IV. And while the big witch hunts of popular lore were still two centuries in the future, there was plenty of fear to go around.

Out of this same bleak era came the Crusades—Christian holy wars. In 1096, Pope Urban II launched an international assault upon the Holy Land to wrest Jerusalem back from the Muslims and to free Christians from Islamic rule. You were promised instant salvation if you died in the cause. Waves of Europeans, including children, spent the next 200 years invading Palestine in a failed campaign to liberate the place in the name of Jesus.

The Crusades saw the rise of one of history’s great hypocrites—the Christian Soldier. Warriors for Christ, complete with the swords that Jesus said we would die by if we lived by them. These warriors passed judgment on their enemies and killed with impunity. Not a lot of “turn the other cheek” or “pray for those who persecute you” among the ranks. Yet somehow they thought they were doing God’s work.

Another victim of this Age of Faith was, of course, the Jews. You know, the folks who gave us Jesus? There were many episodes of persecution. Richard the Lionheart wasn’t one of their biggest fans, and he banned them from his coronation in 1189. This was followed by anti-Jewish riots in London, York and elsewhere. Victims were beaten, stoned, and their houses burned until the king ordered it to stop.

Throughout this period, Jews were accused of ritually sacrificing children and, when the plague broke out, of poisoning the wells. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from most of central Europe in the following decades, Christian charity and tolerance apparently in short supply.

How to End a Dark Age

Well, all this world-class stupidity couldn’t last forever. But the end of the Middle Ages got its start in the
middle
of the Middle Ages. In 1085, in Southern Spain, Christian troops drove into Muslim-controlled cities like Toledo, and got busy turning mosques into churches. The Arabs had the last laugh, though, because they had been building mosques for 500 years, and what the Crusaders discovered inside those temples would eventually undo the Catholic rule of Europe.

Stored within the libraries of Islamic wisdom were Arabic translations of far older documents—the works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Archimedes, Pythagoras, and a toga party full of intellectual superstars—materials essentially forgotten by the Christian world. In fact, the only reason we know about many of these guys today is because of what was preserved in those Muslim archives. By the 12
^th
century, these documents were being translated from Arabic into Latin and were making their way into scholarly circles across Europe.

What the Crusaders had discovered was overwhelming—reams of Greek works on philosophy, science, history, government, mathematics, anatomy, ethics, geometry, poetry, theatre, literature, and mythology. And that was just the short list. This stuff was so advanced, European translators had to make up new words for concepts long forgotten in the West. It was a treasure trove of discovery, creativity, and wisdom unequalled in history. But for Christian scholars it was a problem.

You see, most of these documents were written centuries
before
the birth of Jesus—an astounding mass of knowledge acquired by people who worshipped pagan gods, chugged their wine, and held sporting events in the buff. What were God-fearing academics to do? How could they admit that these heathens were smarter than the people of faith?

In the mid-13
^th
century, a brilliant theologian named Thomas Aquinas figured out how to handle these pre-Christian works of genius. Instead of burning them, he baptized them. He took the braininess of Aristotle and reinterpreted his work in the light of Christian thought. Aquinas believed spiritual knowledge could only be gained through divine revelation. But rational thought could also come up with factual answers about nature. Since God created nature, man could understand God better by studying his creation. This made science and logic okay because they would verify the reality of God and the authority of the Church. Or so he hoped.