Professor Harold Bloom has always lingered in the spiritual world, devoting bits of his study to the Historical Jesus and The Yahwehist . His new book is a small volume on Angels.

Bloom’s Angels are not the Angels that spend their days lying around on clouds playing harps. (That image is man-made, he argues, and is based on no actual scripture in any known text, just as our image of God as an old man with a beard living up in the clouds, is a human invention.) Bloom is referring to the more well-known Angels (those that are given names), our perception of them, and our need for a spiritual world.

Bloom spends a good portion of this book writing not only about Angels in general, but asking the questions, “Are we fallen Angels?” and “Are all fallen Angels Demons?” As always, he does his best to answer.

Professor Bloom shows the reader again, as he did in his previous books, Jesus and Yahweh and The American Religion, that he is not afraid of expressing a hearty critique of religion, particularly of American religious values. I applaud his courage in The American Religion to point out that the values of Americans who call themselves religious rarely line up with the values represented as written in the Bible, and often go against the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Here, he criticizes the way we fool ourselves into believing the public perception of Angels. He places those public images in a battle against what appears in the Bible and various other religious and literary texts.

Bloom explains that the images we create of the spirit world do not often line up with what we are told in the Bible. He talks about how literature has both suffered and gained from the public perception of Angels, even saying that the German poet Rainer Rilke (1875-1926) would not have written about Angels in the same way if he had confronted a screen upon which John Travolta cavorted as an Angel.

Bloom is not just critiquing an Americanized idea of religion with this book. He is also taking time to critique modern American culture, including the movement away from the book to the video screen:

Deep reading is in decline, and if we forget how to read and why, we will drown in the visual media.

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Harold Bloom s name has become synonymous with great literary criticism. He seems to split his time between showing the faults in modern readership, the contemplation and study of literature, and criticism.

However, Bloom may or may not be a voice that will last as long as his hero and precursor Samuel Johnson s has lasted. Bloom finds himself threatened by more obstacles than Johnson, including a more politicized version of the literary world and a world that is quickly moving away from books to the video screen.

This book also is a portrait of Bloom in his study of religion, to the rejoicing or to the dismay of religious groups.

This book, though, barely resembles his earlier book, The American Religion, in terms of content. Here, he spends more time on one aspect of the divine spiritual world (Angels) and less time on the American view of Angels.

The small nature of this volume presents fewer pages for Bloom s arguments to take hold, but that doesn t mean that he doesn t develop his views and defend them. He has presented a clear case for people to meditate on the way society views Angels.

There are moments when I disagree with his thoughts (such as when he refers to Mephistopheles from Christopher Marlowe s Dr. Faustus as being a jolly Demon ), but these are rare moments. Bloom has a remarkable way of viewing the spirit world of Angels and Demons, as this small book clearly shows.

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