Accessing The Divine:Cherubim as Guardians in Medieval Christianity

The subject of man’s relationship to the divine has occupied academics, theologians, and laymen throughout history. The western medieval mindset, of which we are inheritors, engaged this subject using the language of symbolism – a language that still surrounds us, but eludes the comprehension of most. This paper is intended to add to the modern scholarship that has contributed so much to the interpretation of medieval symbolism. The symbols I will be dealing with center around the cherubim, God’s guardians who demarcate the heavenly and earthly realms. By observing how artists, mystics, and theologians used the symbol of the cherub, we can better understand how they and their audiences thought of God’s accessibility and the relationship between heaven and earth.

As part of the language of medieval Christian symbolism, cherubim represented an exceptionally important concept of the Christian message. Cherubim were embroidered on the curtain in Solomon’s temple that separated the Holy of Holies from the Holy Place. They guarded Eden from Adam and Eve and covered the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, providing a throne for God’s presence. According to the New Testament gospel, however, the divide between holy and earthly space was bridged by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. If the curtain in the temple was rent at Christ’s death, why were the cherubim depicted on it still major figures in medieval Christian art and theology? What place could cherubim have in a religion that offers union with God? The answers to these questions lie in how artists and mystics used and often molded cherubim to relay their narrative or instruction.

The artist’s comparatively minute set of options helps explain why symbols are such an important part of medieval art. As most commissions were for religious art depicting a small repertoire of subjects, many artists were shackled by their limited choice in subject matter. Consequently, in order to understand the intellectual world of medieval artists, one must go beyond the subjects of their paintings to examine other elements of their work, such as spacing, medium, function, figural arrangement, and the use of symbols. Thus, for art as well as culture, symbolism was much more significant and prevalent in medieval Europe and served as a means of communicating important theological and philosophical ideas.

In a similar way, Christian mystical writers often used symbolism to access ideas. When Psuedo-Dionysius (whom Bonaventure called the prince of mystics) wished for the “darkness so far above light,” he was using darkness as a symbol for the God who is “beyond all vision and knowledge.”1 This is clearly a departure from the traditional good and evil connotations of darkness and light. Another illustration that Psuedo-Dionysius played a large role in publicizing was the model of angelic and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Pope Gregory the Great endorsed these hierarchies, in which the bottom of the angelic linked with the top of the ecclesiastical or earthly. It was taught that divine union flowed like a stream from heaven to earth via these conjoined hierarchies. The prospect of such a clear link was surely exciting, but the guardian cherubim still loomed at the second highest rank among the angels. Perhaps to give the model its full potential or perhaps in an attempt to retake the soteriological value of the cherubim, mystics, Pseudo-Dionysius chief among them, functionally reversed the Old Testament role of cherubim. Instead of prohibiting humanity’s access to God, they helped enable it as the penultimate step in a journey towards holiness.

What can be drawn from these observations? The main constant in my study was the intermediary role of cherubim throughout Judeo-Christian thought. Whether they protected God’s glory or provided access to him, cherubim have always been in between this world and the other. It is this position, either linking or dividing, that is so important in Western thought and makes medieval conceptions of cherubim worth studying.

1 Pseudo-Dionysius; Paul Rorem, ed., The Complete Works, (Paulist Press, 1987), The Classics of Western Spirituality, p. 138.