Angels seem to be making something of a comeback. It is now more than a decade since Glenn Peers' book, Subtle Bodies (2001), appeared; since then David Jones' book on angels (2012) and the tour de force by the distinguished Romanian philosopher, Andrei Pleşu, On Angels (English translation, 2012) have been published. These works are now joined by Ellen Muehlberger's careful study of angels in Christian thought in late antiquity. Many will be surprised by how much Muehlberger has found to discuss on the subject of angels: much, not only in quantity, but in varying contexts, to such an extent that reflection on angels seems embedded in late antique thought.

She begins by discussing the very different understanding of angels found in Evagrius and Augustine: angels being for Evagrius more an experienced reality, for Augustine more an entity necessary if we are to fashion an adequate account of God's relation to the universe. Chapters follow discussing the role angels play in the interpretation of Scripture, where much ingenuity is found in trying to negotiate the parallel roles played by angels and Christ. Augustine remains a figure in the discourse fashioned by Muehlberger, and constitutes a useful foil to the discussion found among the Greeks.

Muehlberger turns, in the three chapters that constitute the heart of the book, to ascetic discourse. These chapters are pursued through careful close reading of a variety of ascetic texts. Evagrius, and his influence, are central, and the discussion is furthered by Muehlberger's close attention to the fragmentary, or perhaps dispersed, way in which many of these ascetic texts have come down to us. Her discussion comes to focus on angels as spiritual companions (her discussion of Antony and his vita is exemplary), where she argues that this is much more important than the extant state of the texts seems to want to allow. The angel as a model for the ascetic life, the monastic life being dubbed the “angelic” life, is developed with care and subtlety; the ambiguity, manifest in the texts, is brought to the foreground.

The presence of angels in the liturgy is the subject of Muehlberger's final, substantial chapter. She argues that there is a shift in the treatment of this notion in the fourth century, where the freedom to develop the liturgy in diverse ways is made to serve the manner in which the bishops, in their catechetical homilies, attempt to respond to the challenge to what it is to be Christian posed by the fragility of the boundary between church and world that was a result of the gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire. This chapter, like the others, is carefully argued; it seemed to me, however, that her use of Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities was a bit strange. As I understand it, it is the communities that are imagined, on Anderson's model, not their members, whereas for Muehlberger angels are members of the community of the church, “imagined” by its earthly members. It seems to me, too, that her reading of these early texts on the liturgy was in some degree uncomprehending: she makes much of the ordinary people “watching” the liturgical spectacle, whereas it seems to me that it was precisely such passive participation that John Chrysostom, for example, preached against. Participation in the liturgy is more than just watching.

A concluding chapter draws Dionysius the Areopagite's Ecclesiastical Hierarchy into this discussion; it is, alas, too brief, though it makes some telling points. Philo says somewhere that what Moses called angels, Plato called daimons. One thing I felt lacking in this book was a sense that the existence of intermediary beings—angels or daimons—was an accepted part of the intellectual furniture of classical and late antique thought, pagan, Jewish, and Christian. These beings constituted the “in-between” that lay between God and humans. Some of what Muehlberger is dealing with is the consequence of Christians insisting, not necessarily very clearly, that the real bridge across the in-between is found in Christ. Pleşu would be very helpful here. Nevertheless, Muehlberger's book opens up many new ways of understanding the place of angels in the thought of late antiquity.