In this lovely gift book published for the holiday season, Harold Bloom again combines his lifelong interests in religion and literature. He begins by observing our present-day obsession with angels, which reached its greatest intensity as the current millennium approached. For the most part, these popular angels are banal, even insipid. Bloom is especially concerned with a particular subspecies of angels: fallen angels. He proceeds to examine representations of fallen angels from Zoroastrian texts and the Bible to Milton’s Paradise Lost to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, arguing that familiarity with this rich literary tradition improves our reading and spiritual lives. Bloom’s text is accompanied by more than a dozen original watercolors, line drawings, and illuminated letters by award-winning artist Mark Podwal.
Every angel is terrifying, Rilke wrote. For Bloom, too, this is true in one sense, since he maintains that all angels are fallen angels. The image of Satan, the greatest of fallen angels, retains the ability to fascinate and frighten us, he argues, because we share a close kinship with him. Indeed, from a human perspective, we must agree that we are fallen angels. Fallenness is ultimately a human condition: the recognition of our own mortality. Throughout world literature angels have always served as metaphors for death. We may take consolation, however, in our double awareness that angels also represent love and the celebration of human possibilities.
Library Journal
The prolific Bloom (humanities, Yale Univ.; The Western Canon) adds to the popular literature on angels, taking the reader on a light jaunt through historical representations of fallen angels, from those in the Tanakh to those of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Accompanying this wide-ranging narrative are a dozen-plus watercolors, line drawings, and illuminated letters. The book does not pretend to be a comprehensive, scholarly tractate on the subject. Had Bloom been writing from the rabbinic tradition, he would have more extensively explored encounters with angels in the oral law or in rabbinic works. Instead, he mostly relies on literary references and examines fallen angels from a historico-literary and theologico-literary perspective. It is with regards to theology that Bloom may be cited as not devoting enough attention to a crucial issue. Though he briefly acknowledges that "the Satans of the Four Gospels are essentially what we now term instances of anti-Semitism," this is an issue he fails to address adequately. Perhaps a book such as this, mass-marketed for the jolly holiday season, is not the place for such an investigation. For what it sets out to do, however, Bloom's book succeeds. A delightful read recommended for public libraries.
—David B. Levy
