Feisal Mohamed's In the Anteroom of Divinity investigates early modern England's various interpretations of (and negotiations with) Dionysius the Areopagite's system of angelology. Dionysius, a shadowy historical figure mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as one of Paul's converts, is credited with giving Christianity its hierarchical ordering of the angels. Dionysius's heavenly hierarchy offered precedent to the Catholic Church's ecclesiastical structuring—an idea best outlined in the works of Saint Bonaventure. Although the authenticity of Dionysius's angelology was already in question before the Reformation, Mohamed notes that Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin consider Dionysius as they each imagine a new Christian church. Although these early writers largely move away from Dionysius's ideas, angelology continued to influence Renaissance poets and theologians in their writings on sacred and secular ecclesiastical hierarchies. The problem that arises during the seventeenth century is that Dionysius's “strain of angelology confirms God's special concern for … a personal religion potentially opposed to the communitarian views of worship favored by the state church” (165). Two questions drive Mohamed's work: How are angels reimagined during the Renaissance, and how does that reimagining influence the political structure of the church itself?
Beginning with John Colet's pre-Reformation writings, works that reflect and alter Saint Bonaventure's writings, Mohamed establishes a distinctly English interpretation of angels and divine order that will directly influence late Elizabethan and seventeenth-century thinking. For example, in his chapter on Richard Hooker and Edmund Spenser, Mohamed convincingly locates strains of Dionysian thought in each author's works, but beyond that, he considers how, when thinking of church doctrine and ecclesiastical hierarchy, both authors consciously mediate between a traditional reliance on divine illumination and contemporary humanist interpretations of religious order. For Mohamed, both authors’ works tend to side with a more traditional Dionysian understanding of God's ordering of the universe (and therefore, we assume, the intended ordering of earthly institutions). This theme continues in the chapter on John Donne. For Mohamed, Donne's theology responds to Dionysian thought in that it resists Neoplatonism, instead focusing “attention on a sola gratia relationship between God and the individual” (84). Mohamed's reading of Donne's eschatological leanings questions traditional assumptions made by critics such as R. V. Young and Louis Martz. Our author locates a more Calvinist and less predictable churchman, one who fails to narrowly adhere to Anglican indoctrination.
Mohamed's first four chapters are insightful. One cannot help but to be impressed at the wide variety of both canonical and more obscure theological and literary texts the author weaves together as he illustrates the evolution of angelology over the course of the Renaissance, but those chapters lack the energy and flow apparent in the work's final two chapters, both of which focus exclusively on Milton's Paradise Lost. Mohamed's interpretation of Milton's angels is captivating, yet at the same time these chapters move away from the book's earlier concerns about Dionysius, leaving that original investigation somewhat unresolved.
Chapter 5, “Raphael, the Celestial Physician,” understands Raphael's role in Paradise Lost as something more than what past critics have read him to be, either “an Edenic schoolmaster embodying the principles in Milton's treatise Of Education” or “the spiritual physician described in Church Government” (118, 120). For Mohamed, Raphael engenders an awareness of spirituality that surpasses Adam's grasp, one that pushes Adam to form a more pure relationship with God, an extension of the Calvinist relationship imagined by Donne. This is Raphael's angelic purpose. Yet his careful teaching of “reason, [free] will, and obedience” toward God is for naught once Eve arrives (125). Distracted by his sensual body, Eve disrupts Adam's understanding of order, ultimately pushing him to ignore Raphael's lessons.
This failure leaves the reader with the frustrated feeling that “Raphael's is a ‘fools errand’ and, consequently, that one third of Milton's great epic is a rather pointless exercise” (133). For Mohamed, Milton's goal must lie somewhere else. Adam's failure to comprehend “the physical sight granted by the apocryphal Raphael thus acts as a type of the ‘Celestial Light’ that for the bard shines ‘inward’” (139). Continuing this argument, the final chapter, “Michael of Celestial Armies Prince,” moves away from Adam and instead places the angels in the position of student, showing how Milton's God teaches Michael (and the other angels) by illuminating their knowledge of divine order. Mohamed argues that in those lessons we can locate Milton, “the Tobit-Bard experience[ing] a spiritual awakening that the Tobias-Adam does not” (163). Mohamed's reading of Paradise Lost and his arguments concerning Milton's ecclesiastical considerations and negotiations with himself on the eve of the Restoration are convincing and exciting.
Anteroom ties pre-Reformation thinking on eschatology and divine order to the works of Spenser, Donne, and Milton, showing how Dionysian thought influenced these authors but also how that thinking materializes in each man's response to Renaissance politics, both secular and sacred. In doing this, Mohamed repoliticizes, or maybe just politicizes differently, the way we read these canonical Renaissance authors. Mohamed's work is well worth reading, both for its study of early modern theology and more for its reading of Milton's less famous but, as Mohamed convinces his readers, equally important angels, Raphael and Michael.
