"...As for Angels 19 of whom were just gunned down"

Review by Anatole Broyard 

ANGELS. 

By Peter Lamborn Wilson. 200 pages Illustrated.  Pantheon Books. 

WHAT a good idea, to write a book called ''Angels,'' to tell us something about those enigmatic-looking figures we've seen in so many medieval and Renaissance paintings. Peter Wilson is, among other things, a poet, and perhaps we need a poet to describe angels to us.

As we read Mr. Wilson's ''Angels,'' we see how science has sophisticated us, how it has married us to the matter of fact. When medieval man looked up, he saw hierarchies, ''impassioned geometries,'' to borrow Pascal's phrase - and we see weather or airplanes. What a frenzy for distinctions men used to have! In ''Celestial Hierarchy,'' Pseudo-Dionysius describes the final stages of spiritual distillation: ''From the most holy imagery to formless, unific, elevative principles and assimilations.''

Angels, Mr. Wilson says, were intermediaries between God and man. There were reasons for this arrangement. To name just a couple, God was beyond man's understanding, and the mere sight of him, or contact with him would be too powerful a stimulus for a human being. Entering into the spirit of ''Angels,'' one feels also that God created them for his pleasure, because they are so decorative. Gliding Above It All.

''Where angels are concerned,'' Mr. Wilson observes, ''the art of Christianity is far richer and more prolific than its theology.'' The illustrations in the book bear this out: many of them are both beautiful and striking. A medieval German manuscript shows a seven-headed serpent ''swallowing the waters of the earth, sucking all the time and matter into the maw of chaos and world's end,'' while an angel glides above it all, a ''promise of safe harbor beyond time itself.''

A splendid double-page spread of Giotto shows several angels experiencing ''pure grief'' in response to Christ's suffering. As Mr. Wilson tactfully points out, we ourselves can know only impure emotions, for ''our reactions are mixed with our imperfections.'' Another fine picture from the ''Tres Riches Heures'' of the Duc de Berry, depicts streams of angels hurling themselves down from heaven in a spirit of wanton forgetfulness. A 15th-century Russian icon showing a soul in ecstasy is also particularly good.

Angels, Mr. Wilson informs us, figured not only in Christianity and Judaism, but also in classical myth and philosophy, in Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam as well. Sometimes, he seems to stretch the term to accommodate this claim. From 1971 to 1978, Mr. Wilson lived in Iran, where he edited the Journal of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. This may or may not explain why Oriental angels play such a large part in his book.

Most angels, he observes, are masculine or androgynous and rather passive looking. Perhaps they practice apatheia, the suppression of visible emotion. Hindu angels, who are sometimes voluptuously feminine, are more playful. Before the time of Noah, a legend says, angels came down to earth, fell in love, married and sired human heroes. Another legend has them fathering cannibalistic giants. Some chaste angels reproduced by sweating. Weeping 70,000 Tears

Early descriptions of angels are filled with baffled hyperbole. An angel has 1,000 tongues, for example, or weeps 70,000 tears. The Archangel Michael, together with Gabriel, has captured popular imagination. The poet in Mr. Wilson is evident when he describes Michael slaying the dragon: ''Solar, chivalrous, victorious day against the lunar, watery and reptilian night.'' The dragon represents evil, the ego and human weakness, among other things.

Azrael, the Hebrew angel of death, ''turns the world this way and that, just as men turn their money in their hands.'' Here is a characterization of the guardian angel from the Mandean ''Liturgy of the Dead'': ''I go to meet my image and my image comes to meet me: it caresses and embraces me as if I were returning from captivity.'' William Blake complained that angels had no sense of humor.

Despite what seems a bias in favor of Oriental angels, Mr. Wilson has written a picturesque and original book. At the end of it, he leaves us with a heartening thought: according to Clement of Alexandria, men, too, can become angels. One wishes, though, that Clement had recommended something other than philosophy as the path to that condition.