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Participation and Polemics: Angels from Origen to Augustine*

When I shared an earlier draft of this article with a colleague who spends much more time in the modern theological world than I do, his reply was simple: “So, angels are a thing? And people want to talk about them?” Angels receive fairly short shrift in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology, but in late antique Christianity they certainly were “a thing,” if by “a thing” we mean an essential part of religious discourse, manifest in textual and material sources that testify to the significance of angels in theological speculation, popular piety, and ascetic practice.