At the beginning of The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis notes that the Devil is equally pleased by two errors about him: an unhealthy obsession with him and an ignoring or denying of his existence. The same is true of angels. Idolising or ignoring them are equally unrealistic. But of the two errors the latter is by far the most common today. Angels, like God, are easy to ignore because they are invisible. They are also easy to ignore because we believe many myths about them.
The first myth about angels is that they are myths. The word “myth” has many meanings, but all of them have this in common: myths are not literally, historically true. Father Christmas never really came down anyone’s chimney, Mother Nature has no birth certificate, no nation ever had a naked emperor and Hobbits never lived in any Shire, no matter how instructive and edifying any of these stories may be. But angels are as real as ants. Thousands (probably millions) of people have met them. Every culture and religion claims that something like angels (superhuman, sub-divine beings) are real. Belief in their non-existence is unique to the modern Western mind. To disbelieve in angels, therefore, is to commit what CS Lewis calls “chronological snobbery”.
