Saint Jerome {image from the book}

. . . . Saint Jerome assured the early Christians, “that each has a guardian angel from birth. Elsewhere Jerome describes the guardian angel comes, employhing Horace’s familiar description of the ‘genius.’ It is a revealing conflation, and was repeated in other ways. Instead of swearing an oath by one’s genius, for example, or the ‘genius’ of another, early Christians took to bearing witness by angles, substituting the form ‘per angeium tuum*’ for the old Roman ‘per genium tuum**. Similarly, they addressed their sisters and brothers formally as “your angel.” Funeral inscriptions reveal that early Christian tombstones often used the form “The Angel of [the departed] in a way that directly copied the pagan practice of marking graves by reference o the ‘genius’ of the departed. ~ Page 44

* = By your anger

** = By keeping Thy

Indeed, to an ever greater degree than the pagan tutelary spirit, the Christian angel was understood to be a bearer of privileged truths, an emissary of epiphany and revelation. Clement of Alexandria maintained in the second century that angels had been active on earth at God’s command long before the coming of Christ, dispatching “the secret and occult philosophy of the Egyptians.” The “astrology of the Chaldeans,” Hindu knowledge “pertaining to the science of the most High God”, and philosophy to the Greeks. Now, with the coming of Christ, they were more active than ever before, imparting God’s infinite wisdom directly to the chosen. To feel the breadth of an angel in one’s ear was to be filled with heavenly insight -- “inspired,” as we still say, catching a breath from afar. Just as God had blown life into Adam, he could fill our souls with knowledge in a whisper. In revelation, inspiration, and epiphany, the angles had the power to disclose the deepest secrets of the universe. ~ Page 46