Dear Reader: Michaelmas keeps the feast of St Michael and All Angels, and with it a truth the modern mind resists: the world is not only material, nor its battles only human. The Church calls on the Archangel as defender in that battle, and this issue keeps returning, in different registers, to what it means to take the unseen seriously again.
Patrick Neve opens with the politics of angels, taking aim at the Madisonian assumption – “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” – that underwrites the whole liberal account of the state. Drawing on Dionysius and Aquinas on the angelic hierarchies, he argues that the angels model not a sinless anarchy but a real order of subsidiarity, higher choirs governing lower, and asks what it might teach the Church today.
