AngelicArtistry's GoToHeaven Jophiel's Game Question 44
"____________________________"
the broad term given for the study of angels and all things pertaining to the angelic and the celestial hierarchy.
It can be said that it began at the earliest time when humans first wondered about the nature and attributes of angels, or whatever name they gave to divine messengers or emissaries of heaven.
The Bible was subsequently one of the main sources for the study of angels, with its many references to the angelic, although only two angels were actually named in the Jewish Old Testament, Michael and Gabriel, with a third angel, Raphael, named in the Book of Tobit.
More angels were mentioned in the New Testament, especially so in the Book of Revelation, where angels play a leading part in the events of the Last Judgment.
Beyond the Bible, there is a host of so-called apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings that were not accepted into the canonical writings of the Bible, either by the Jewish faith or by the Christian.
These works, such as the Books of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and numerous Gospels, often contain extensive details about angels and their place in the heavens.
While they are not accepted as writings of revealed faith, such compendiums of lore remain some of the most interesting sources of the supposed characteristics, attributes, and hierarchy of the angels.
The golden age of ____________________ was during the Middle Ages, specifically in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Christian scholars, members of the intense intellectual movement called Scholasticism, gave much thought to the place of angels in God's Creation, their functions and attributes, and the organization of the entire heavenly host.
Much of their research was based on the work of earlier writers, such as the sixth-century Dionysius the Areopagite (or Pseudo-Dionysius), who is credited with designing the generally accepted organization of the angelic choirs.
The foremost angelologist, perhaps of all time, was St. Thomas Aquinas (d.1274), who devoted a part of his mammoth theological work Summa Theologica to angels.
In the era of the Renaissance and the subsequent Enlightment, angels fell out of favor as objects of serious study; nevertheless, they remained potent and favorite subjects of art and literature, reaching their literary zenith in Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, a work ranked with Dante's Divine Comedy as one of the foremost sources for the angelic.
In modern times the angel has undergone a truly remarkable rebirth, standing as one of society's great expressions of the divine, the spiritual, and the endless possibilities of the transformation of the soul with the help and encouragement of the entire realm of the sacred.
What is this study of angels called?