The Cult of the Seven Archangels

In Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Henry Corbin writes:

"The struggle against the Avicennan theory of the Intelligences and the Active Intelligence is a chapter or an episode in angelology in the West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is something confined to scholars; whether the two sides were equally or unequally conscious of the "motivations" that necessitated or, on the contrary, challenged the intervention of the world of the Angel remains to be studied. But there is another episode in angelology, and, this time, it is by no means confined to scholars; we refer to the extraordinary "revival" of a cult of the Seven Archangels that began in Italy in the sixteenth century, then spread as far as Flanders and Orthodox Russia.[1] Finally, to come down to our own day, there is a little book by Eugenio d'Ors that, though not a scientific book, is written with much science, but above all with the heart; it constitutes a contemporary testimony of extreme importance for anyone concerned with discovering the secret needs of the soul to which angelology answers. Its very first pages contain a short sentence that an Avicennan concerned for his philosophical system could well have used in answer to William of Auvergne, and that a devotee of the Seven Archangels could also have made his own. Indeed, it required a clairvoyant and courageous penetration of a secret that, as we have just seen, may be common to philosophers and simple souls—to write, as if in rejoinder to a famous dictum of St. Teresa's, this short sentence: "No, no es cierto que solo Dios basta" (No, it is not certain that God alone suffices) [2]. (Avicenna, 122)

[1]. Emile Male, L'Art religieux apres le Concile de Trente, pp. 298 ff.
[2]. Eugenio d'Ors, Introduction a la vida angelica, p. 9.


The illustrations here are from Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610, by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, University of Toronto Press , 2003, which has a discussion of the topic on pp. 68ff.