David Albert Jones

Are you curious about the history of angels? Perhaps you've seen enough paintings, or read enough Dante, or been amused by 'Dogma' or entertained by 'Angels in America,' or perhaps you just like weirdness. If so, you'll know that your two options for learning more about angels are:

i) late ancient or medieval texts by Pseudo-Dionysus or Aquinas.
ii) contemporary accounts of how angels will stop you getting in car accidents.

Now, wouldn't it be nice if there was something in between? Something that didn't treat you like an idiot, but recognized that you are not a theologian or intellectual historian?

Jones tries to fill that unnecessary gap, and more or less fails. I have no doubt he's a respectable scholar, but he seems to be the kind of respectable scholar who believes that writing for the general public means writing like a freshman who's had three composition seminars:

"In 586 BCE the King of Judah was defeated in battle and Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians. Many of the people were taken into exile in Babylon. This had a great effect on their religious beliefs, including their beliefs about angels. This was recognized by the Jews themselves."

Note the vagueness (*what* effect?), the unwillingness to follow out a train of thought (*how* did it have an effect?), the 'redrafting' that consists entirely of cutting run-on sentences into multiple sentences, but never rises to the challenge of (gasp!) 'which' clauses.

This wouldn't matter if Jones said anything interesting or informative about angels; you'll only learn something from this book if you've never seen any art, never read any of the old testament, nor quran etc. If you know literally nothing, I admit, this is the book for you, because Jones will tell you important contextual things, for instance, Paul Klee was friends with Kandinsky (p 24; I have no idea why he tells us this), or Revelations is the last book in the new testament.

Enough, before I talk myself into a one star rating.… (meer)