One final question in relation to the depiction of angels relates to the sex of angels. Are they male, female, or sexless? When the angels appear to Abraham, they are described as ‘three men’ (Genesis 18: 2). So also when Mary Magdalene sees an angel, his appearance is of ‘a young man dressed in a white robe’ (Mark 16: 5). The names of the angels that appear in Jewish literature (Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and so on) are all masculine in form, and the earliest Christian images are clearly masculine. This is all the more striking if, as art historians argue, the typical Christian representation of a winged angel was influenced by the image of the goddess of victory, Nike.

 In Christian iconography the Archangel Michael is typically represented in military uniform, and this is sometimes also true of other angels. The heavenly host is the spiritual army of God. This has the effect of reinforcing the male imagery.

Jesus says of the angels that they do not marry (Matthew 22: 30), and it is the standard Christian view that they are pure spirits without bodies (Hebrews 1: 14; compare with Luke 24: 39). This would seem to imply that angels are neither male nor female. Nevertheless, the portrayal of angels in early Christian iconography is exclusively male.

A similar pattern is found in Islam. The common opinion of scholars in Islam is that angels do not marry and that they are neither male nor female. On the other hand, the Quran states that, ‘had we sent an angel, we would have sent him in the form of a man’ (6: 9), and seems to condemn the view that angels are female: ‘Did we create the angels to be females?’ (37: 150; see also 43: 19). Hence, while in reality angels are neither male nor female, their appearance is always male.

The Renaissance saw not only the representation of angels like children (putti) but also an increasing tendency towards portraying angels as androgynous or effeminate. The historian Henry Mayr-Harting links this development with a shift from seeing angels as intervening on earth in the social sphere, bolstering the power of kings and of providing an occult power used by sorcerers, to seeing angels as benign and well-ordered beings whose activity was safely focused in heaven, with the contemplation of God. He calls this the ‘aetherialization’ of angels. It should also be noticed that Renaissance artists looked as much to classical Greek sources for their inspiration as they did to the Bible. The young men who visit Abraham had to compete in the artists’ imagination with the feminine figures of Nike and the Muses.

The high point of this process of feminization came in the nineteenth century and was strongly associated with the Romantic Movement. Whereas in the Middle Ages angels had been thought of as pure intellects, in the nineteenth century they were thought of as representing the imagination. Angels became elements in a romantic vision that was now only loosely attached to the Christian tradition. In this context, angels were portrayed not as androgynous but clearly as young women, and it is these nineteenth-century images that shape contemporary popular culture.

Thus, if someone is described as ‘an angel’ in a modern context, the typical cultural assumption is that the person is a woman. That is why the all-female detective agency of the American 1970s TV series was called Charlie’s Angels and why the British TV series of the same era about student nurses was called Angels. This tendency has its exceptions in film and other popular media, but in post-Christian society the portrayal of angels remains predominantly feminine. This gradual shift from male to female also seems to confirm the suggestion of the feminist thinker Michele Le Doeuff, that once a category becomes devalued and loses its grand philosophical status then it starts to become regarded as feminine. Angels are as popular as ever, but they are not so intellectually respectable as they once were. As they are taken less seriously and command less cultural respect, so men portray them as female.

David Albert Jones, Angels: A Very Short Introduction (2011)