If I Speak With the Tongues of Angels But Have Not Love

If I speak in the tongues of humans or even of angels, and do not have love, I have become sounding brass rather than a resounding cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy … and do not love, I am good for nothing. (1 Cor. 13:1-2)

This chapter is a digression in the apostle’s instructions to the Corinthians, but it has become one of the most recognizable chapters in the New Testament. Chapters 12 and 14 of the epistle are about the Church but Chapter 13 is about the essential quality of Christian life: agape, translated simply as “love” is the clearest expression of Christian faith and practice.

St. Paul mentions angels a few times in this epistle (chapters 4, 6, and 11) but this is the only place where he refers to “the tongues of angels.” Perhaps he is thinking of the Testament of Job (written between 100 BC-100 AD), in which the daughters of Job are given the ability of ecstatic speech to make up for their not being allowed to inherit their father’s property on an equal footing with their brothers. The ecstatic speech of the daughters is described as the language of angels and cherubim.

Paul chooses speaking in tongues as his example because the Corinthians thought that it was the greatest of the gifts…. The tongues of angels are those perceived by the mind, not by the ear.

Theodoret of Cyr, Commentary on the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians

But this ecstatic speech is useless without love. Even prophecy, which St. Paul had earlier said was truly the greatest of the gifts, is useless without love.

Balaam prophesied even though he was not a prophet (Numbers 22-24). Even his donkey prophesied…. King Saul prophesied but was filled with an evil spirit (1 Samuel 16, 19).

Ambrosiaster, Commentary on Paul’s Epistles

Love is not just a quality of Christian life. Love is what is natural to divinity.

Since true charity loves all, if someone knows that he hates even one other person he should hasten to vomit up this bitter gall, in order to be ready to receive the sweetness of charity [Christ] himself.

St. Caesarius of Arles, Sermon 23.4

Many people have heard that there are four different words in Greek that are commonly all translated by the English word “love.” C.S. Lewis wrote a well-known book about these words, known as The Four Loves.

SS. Raphael, Gabriel, and the Trumpet

The Archangel Raphael is said to be the angel always ready to blow the trumpet to announce the General Resurrection and the End of Time, according to Islam. Christians, on the other hand, expect the Archangel Gabriel to be the one who will blow the trumpet on the Last Day to announce the General Resurrection and Judgement.

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

(1 Thess. 4:16)

A statue of Gabriel, often depicted with the lily which is associated with the Mother of God (because he brought the Good News of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin), is frequently found atop the roof at the east end of churches already blowing the trumpet. It is always Gabriel’s job to announce; he is the “announcer” of God.

We are told in the Old Testament to blow a trumpet to celebrate the New Year (Leviticus 23:24) or to announce a fast (Joel 2:15). Trumpets announce the coming of God as king and call the people to get ready to greet him. In the New Testament, trumpets announce the arrival of God’s judgement and call the people to turn their lives around (“repent”) in order to face the coming judgement. That is why Gabriel blows the trumpet atop a church: to announce the End that comes during the celebration of the Eucharist on the altar below the statue’s feet.

The most famous trumpets in the Bible are the seven trumpets blown in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 8-11). Angels blow the first six trumpets to call sinners on Earth to repentance. Each trumpet blast brings a plague, each one more disastrous than the one before it. The trumpet is used to build anticipation and tells the reader that an alert, announcement, or warning is about to take place. The seventh trumpet does not bring a plague with it. Instead, an angel blows the seventh trumpet to announce the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom.

How did Raphael get associated with the trumpet in Islam? Islamic folklore says that Raphael was the first of the archangels to be created and that he visited Mohammed even before the archangel Gabriel came to reveal the Qur’an. The Islamic folktales also say that Raphael is a master of music, who sings praises to God in a thousand different languages. It is probably this association with music that results in Raphael being given the honor of blowing the trumpet.

We never read explicitly in the New Testament that Gabriel is the archangel that will blow the trumpet on Judgement Day. I think we have come to expect him to do this precisely because he is God’s “announcer,” who announced the meaning of Daniel’s visions to the prophet (Daniel 8-9) and the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zachary as well as the birth of Christ to the Mother of God. So we expect him to announce the End of Time and the General Resurrection as well.

But the association of Gabriel with the trumpet can only be dated with certainty to the 1300s: the earliest known identification of Gabriel as the trumpeter comes in John Wycliffe’s 1382 tract, De Ecclesiæ Dominio. In the year 1455, there is an illustration in an Armenian manuscript showing Gabriel sounding his trumpet as the dead climb out of their graves. Two centuries later, Gabriel is identified as the trumpeter, in John Milton‘s Paradise Lost (1667).

St. Raphael, Looking Out For Mankind–and New York!

A modern painting of the Archangel Raphael in 17th-18th century Peruvian style by Elizabeth Alvarez. He is holding the fish that was so important in healing the blind and the possessed.

Archangel Raphael tells us in the Book of Tobit that he is one of the seven archangels that stand before the throne of God, offering the prayers of the saints like incense. We know the names of three other archangels: Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel. Michael is known as a warrior and Gabriel is a messenger while Uriel is a keeper of secrets but Raphael is known as a healer.

In Tobit, St. Raphael tells Tobias how to use the heart, liver, and gall of a large fish to save Sarah and heal his father’s eyes. Because of this, Raphael is often considered the patron of the blind and of pharmacists who mix or oversee the use of medicinal herbs and drugs for healing ailments. Because he also bound the demon Asmodeus in chains when Asmodeus fled to Egypt, the archangel is also the guardian of those possessed or under attack by the demons. Asmodeus attacked Sarah at night, so Raphael is invoked against nightmares.

In the Old Testament, the land of Egypt is both a symbol of fertility or safety and the “land of the shadow of Death,” the region most associated with all that is opposed to God. Egypt was the source of food that saved Joseph and his brothers and the people of Israel who came to escape the famine in the Promised Land. Egypt is the fertile bread basket of the Ancient World, including Greece and the Roman Empire. The importance of Egypt as food source continued into the Byzantine period. The known world relied on Egypt to survive for centuries. The prophets refer to Egypt as a garden similar to Eden (esp. Jeremiah and Isaiah), providing all that humans need to live. Yet Origen says that “Egypt” is the world steeped in Death because Pharaoh opposed God, inflicting suffering and death on the Chosen People; Pharaoh brought down the Ten Plagues, killing many of his own people as the water was undrinkable or the cattle sickened and died even before the firstborn were slain. Most of his soldiers drowned at the Red Sea. The gods worshipped in Egypt were thought to be devils in disguise by the Christians as well. The wilderness of the Egyptian desert was the home of devils and demons so mons and nuns went out into the wilderness to pray and fight against the devil on his own turf.

Asmodeus fled to Egypt because that was the natural home on earth of all demons. Raphael bound him in chains and imprisoned Asmodeus in Egypt because the desert of Egypt is the icon of Hell.

In Greek, the words “health” and “salvation” are slightly different versions of the same word. Miracles of healing are paradigms of salvation. Raphael brought health and salvation to Tobit, Tobias, and Sarah–the family that stands in for the human race. Because Raphael saved them, he guards and protects us all.

St. Raphael keeps an eye on New York as well. He stands atop the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park (designed by Emma Stebbins, who was the first woman to receive a public commission for a major work of art in New York City and completed in 1873) because the fountain refers to Healing the paralytic at Bethesda, a story from the Gospel of John (chapter 5) about an angel blessing the Pool of Bethesda, giving it healing powers. Folklore has always insisted that the angel who troubled the water at Bethesda was St. Raphael.