When the three angels appeared to Abraham, and he had a whole calf dressed to regale them, they did not tell him their names. One of them said: "I will come to see thee next year, if God grant me life; and Sarah thy wife shall have a son."
Calmet discovers a great affinity between this story and the fable which Ovid relates in his "Fasti", of Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury, who, having supped with old Hyreus, and finding that he was afflicted with impotence, urinated upon the skin of a calf which he had served up to them, and ordered him to bury this hide watered with celestial urine in the ground, and leave it there for nine months. At the end of the nine months, Hyreus uncovered his hide, and found in it a child, which was named Orion, and is now in the heavens. Calmet moreover says that the words which the angels used to Abraham may be rendered thus: A child shall be born of your calf.
Be this as it may, the angels did not tell Abraham their names; they did not even tell them to Moses; and we find the name of Raphael only in Tobit, at the time of the captivity. The other names of angels are evidently taken from the Chaldæans and the Persians. Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel, are Persian or Babylonian. The name of Israel itself is Chaldæan, as the learned Jew Philo expressly says, in the account of his deputation to Caligula.
We shall not here repeat what has been elsewhere said of angels.
Whether the Greeks and the Romans admitted the Existence of Angels.
They had gods and demi-gods enough to dispense with all other subaltern beings. Mercury executed the commissions of Jupiter, and Iris those of Juno; nevertheless, they admitted genii and demons. The doctrine of guardian angels was versified by Hesiod, who was contemporary with Homer. In his poem of "The Works and Days" he thus explains it:
When gods alike and mortals rose to birth,
A golden race the immortals formed on earth
Of many-languaged men; they lived of old,
When Saturn reigned in heaven—an age of gold.
Like gods they lived, with calm, untroubled mind,
Free from the toil and anguish of our kind.
Nor sad, decrepit age approaching nigh,
Their limbs misshaped with swoln deformity.
Strangers to ill, they Nature's banquet proved,
Rich in earth's fruits, and of the blest beloved:
They sank to death, as opiate slumber stole
Soft o'er the sense, and whelmed the willing soul.
Theirs was each good: the grain-exuberant soil
Poured the full harvest, uncompelled by toil;
The virtuous many dwelt in common, blest,
And all unenvying shared what all in peace possessed.
When on this race the verdant earth had lain,
By Jove's high will they rose a Genii train:
Earth-wandering dæmons, they their charge began,
The ministers or good and guards of man:
Veiled with a mantle of aerial night,
O'er earth's wide space they wing their hovering flight;
Dispense the fertile treasures of the ground,
And bend their all-observant glance around;
To mark the deed unjust, the just approve,
Their kingly office, delegate from Jove.
ELTON'S Translation.
The farther we search into antiquity, the more we see how modern nations have by turns explored these now almost abandoned mines. The Greeks, who so long passed for inventors, imitated Egypt, which had copied from the Chaldæans, who owed almost everything to the Indians. The doctrine of the guardian angels, so well sung by Hesiod, was afterwards sophisticated in the schools: it was all that they were capable of doing. Every man had his good and his evil genius, as each one had his particular star—
Est genius natale comes qui temper at astrum.
Socrates, we know, had his good angel; but his bad angel must have governed him. No angel but an evil one could prompt a philosopher to run from house to house, to tell people, by question and answer, that father and mother, preceptor and pupil, were all ignorant and imbecile. A guardian angel in that event will find it very difficult to save his protege from the hemlock.