Invoking angels by name — what did the Council of Laodicea (canon 35) forbid?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the canon condemns a specific heterodox cult of angels — the Phrygian practice of making angels mediators to a too-distant God, bypassing Christ, and adjuring them by name in the manner of the amulet and the spell — and not the honouring or naming of angels as such. That is the reading the earliest interpreter of the canon states outright (Theodoret localizes the abuse to Phrygia and Pisidia and notes that lawful oratories of St Michael stood among the very same people), the reading modern scholarship confirms (Lightfoot ties the canon back to the “worshipping of angels” Paul rebuked at Colossae), and the reading the church’s own practice presupposes (it went on venerating Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael by name while forbidding the invention of unknown angel-names). The rival — that the canon is a blanket ban on all invocation of angels — reads the bare words in isolation from the abuse they targeted and is not the sense the tradition gave them.

The claim

— Council of Laodicea, canon 35 (mid-4th c., Phrygia; Percival’s translation), NPNF2 vol. 14.¹ The canon is the church’s one explicit legislative boundary-marker on the invocation of the heavenly names, and its scope is genuinely disputed. It can be read narrowly — as condemning a particular heterodox cult of angels that flourished in Phrygia (angels as intermediary powers whose favour must be won to approach God, invoked by name in the manner of the magical adjuration) — or broadly, as forbidding all invocation and honouring of angels. This page advocates the narrow reading: the canon forbids the angel-cult and its magical name-adjuration, not the naming or veneration of angels as such.

The abuse the canon targeted

The canon does not legislate in a vacuum; it names a concrete practice — forsaking the church’s assembly to “go away and invoke angels and gather assemblies” — and both the earliest interpreters and modern scholarship read it against a documented Phrygian cult. Theodoret of Cyrus, commenting on the “worshipping of angels” Paul had condemned at Colossae (Colossians 2:18), traces the abuse forward to this very synod and gives it a place on the map: the false teachers “were leading to worship angels… for, said they, the Law was given through angels. And this vice lasted for a long time in Phrygia and Pisidia. Therefore it was that the synod which met at Laodicea in Phrygia, prohibited by a canon, that prayer should be offered to angels” — adding, tellingly, “and even to-day an oratory of St. Michael can be seen among them, and their neighbours.”² The mechanism of the cult is what the Greek fathers describe on Colossians: it made the Only-Begotten too high and remote to be approached directly, and slotted the angels in as the necessary go-betweens. Chrysostom states it flatly — “There are some who maintain that we must be brought near by Angels, not by Christ, that were too great a thing for us” — and Theophylact spells out the same logic: the deceivers held it “unworthy… of the greatness of the Only-Begotten” that he should bring men to the Father, so “it is more reasonable to suppose that angels served in your bringing to the Father… and persuaded the simple-hearted to turn to them, as if to our saviors.”³ This is the “covert idolatry” the canon anathematizes: not the honouring of angels but the transfer to them of a mediatorship that belongs to Christ alone — “he has forsaken our Lord Jesus Christ… and has gone over to idolatry.” The invocation condemned is invocation in place of Christ, of a piece with the magical adjuration of named angels in the amulets and papyri, the very line Irenaeus had drawn against the church working “not… by means of angelic invocations, or by incantations.”

What “invoking angels by name” looked like: the Jewish adjuration-magic in the milieu

The canon’s teeth are easy to miss if its “invocation of angels” is pictured as no more than a prayer to Michael. What the fourth-century church in Phrygia was policing was a concrete, well-documented technology of angel-adjuration — the summoning and binding of named heavenly powers, by their names, to secure healing, protection, love, victory, or knowledge. And it flourished in precisely the milieu the canon and Colossians address. Phrygia held a large and old Jewish diaspora — Antiochus III had resettled some two thousand Jewish families from Babylonia into Lydia and Phrygia around 200 BC, and by 62 BC the Jewish population of the Lycus valley (Colossae, Laodicea, Hierapolis) ran into the thousands — and within its syncretistic “folk Judaism,” where formal monotheism still held, angels were venerated and invoked in a frankly magical register. This is the reconstruction modern scholarship on the Colossian error has drawn into the foreground: the “veneration of angels” Paul rebuked, and the cult canon 35 later outlawed, belong to a local folk piety in which invoking angels by name for protection was at home in pagan and Jewish practice alike.⁴

The handbook. The Sepher ha-Razim (“Book of the Mysteries”), a Jewish magical manual of about the fourth century — the canon’s own age — is built as a tour of the seven heavens, each stocked with its ranks of angels, and it catalogues the angels of each heaven together with the names by which they are to be adjured and the ends they serve: to heal, to divine, to send or read dreams, to overturn a court verdict, even to win at the races. It is the very thing the canon has in view — heavenly powers filed by name as forces to be conjured — and it circulated among the Greek-speaking Jews of the eastern Mediterranean, its own preface tracing the book from the angel Raziel down to Solomon.⁵

The amulets, the bowls, and the adjuration-texts. The practice is not merely literary. Hundreds of surviving Aramaic amulets (inscribed metal lamellae from Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor) and incantation bowls (from Babylonia), of the fourth to seventh centuries, adjure named angels — Suriel, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and a swarm of lesser and manufactured names — to heal the wearer, bind a demon, or compel a lover; the whole efficacy turns on knowing and pronouncing the right name. The same current supplies the Hekhalot (“palaces”) literature its ritual: beside the visionary ascent to the chariot-throne, a large part of that corpus is given over to adjuration — coercing the “Prince of the Torah” (Sar ha-Torah) or the “Prince of the Presence” (Sar ha-Panim) by seals inscribed with divine names, to obtain wisdom or mastery of Torah without the labour of study. Here is the concrete referent of the canon’s ban: not the honouring of an archangel but the manufactured-name adjuration of the amulet and the spell.⁶

How it bears on the canon — weighed, not endorsed. Two cautions keep this backdrop honest. First, it is a backdrop, never instruction: this magical name-technology is exactly what the church drew its line against, and it is cited here only to show what the line excluded. Second, the tie from the amulets to Paul’s precise phrase is genuinely contested — F. O. Francis argued (and Larry Hurtado has followed) that the “worship of angels” of Colossians 2:18 may mean the worship the angels render, a visionary’s claim to join the angelic liturgy, rather than worship offered to them, so that the verse by itself does not prove a first-century Jewish angel-cult.⁴ But the canon does not hang on that exegesis. The named-angel adjuration it forbids is independently and abundantly attested in this region and this century, whatever the exact sense of Colossians 2:18 — and that documented practice is what gives canon 35 a real target, and what the church’s rule (revealed names honoured, invented and adjured names forbidden, and no name set where Christ’s mediation stands) was framed to exclude.

The evidence for the narrow reading

The earliest witness localizes and dates the abuse — and reports lawful angel-devotion surviving alongside it. Theodoret does not read the canon as a universal prohibition; he reads it as aimed at a regional “vice” that “lasted for a long time in Phrygia and Pisidia,” and in the same breath he records that an oratory of St Michael “can be seen among them, and their neighbours” — i.e. the church that forbade the angel-cult was, in the same place, honouring the archangel Michael by name in a licit shrine. The condemnation and the veneration coexist because they are different things: one makes the angel a saviour to be invoked instead of Christ; the other honours a servant of God under God. This is the distinction the whole argument turns on, drawn by the canon’s own earliest interpreter.²

Modern scholarship reads canon 35 as the legislative echo of the Colossian heresy Paul had already rebuked. J. B. Lightfoot, in the classic study of the “Colossian heresy,” renders the canon — Christians must not “invoke angels (&aggr;&ggr;&ggr;&eacgr;&lgr;&ogr;&ugr;&sfgr; &ogr;ν&ogr;&mgr;&aacgr;ζ&egr;&igr;ν) and hold conventicles” — and identifies its target as the same cult that “three centuries before had called forth the Apostle’s rebuke and warning in the Epistle to the Colossians.” The Colossian error (Paul’s “worshipping of angels,” Colossians 2:18) treated angels as intermediary powers whose favour secured access to a transcendent God — approaching God through the angels rather than through Christ — which is precisely what the canon, and Theodoret after it, single out as a distinct heterodox cult localized in the Lycus valley and its hinterland.⁷

The church’s reception of the canon distinguishes licit angel-names from illicit ones. When the Frankish church took up the canon it read it exactly this way. The Capitulary issued under Charlemagne (789) invokes “that same council” of Laodicea to rule “that angels should not be given unknown names, and that such should not be affixed to them, but that only they should be named by the names which we have by authority. These are Michael, Gabriel, Raphael.” The prohibition, so received, falls on the invention of strange angel-names (the stock-in-trade of the adjuration-magic that filled the amulets with barbarous angel-words) and expressly permits the three names Scripture reveals. This is the same instinct Origen had voiced when he said the angelic names Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are fitted “appropriately to the duties which they discharge” — a revealed name honoured, not a secret name conjured. The line is not naming-versus-not-naming; it is the revealed name held in reverence against the manufactured name worked as a spell.⁸

Legitimate Michael-devotion grew up beside the canon, with Christ’s sole mediatorship guarded. Far from extinguishing the honour of angels, the post-Nicene church built the great shrines of Michael — the Michaelion at Sosthenion near Constantinople, the archangel venerated there chiefly as healer, the synaxis of 8 November that spread through the Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic churches. And where the older Phrygian region kept its Michael-cult, the tradition took care to keep Christ central: at the healing spring near Colossae the sick were cured “invoking the Blessed Trinity and St. Michael” — the pairing that honours the archangel while leaving the invocation anchored in the Triune God. The church could forbid the angel-cult of canon 35 and foster the veneration of Michael at once because the two are opposites: one puts the angel in Christ’s place, the other keeps him in his own.⁹

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The narrow reading is the one the sources give in their own voice. The canon itself names the abuse — forsaking the church to “invoke angels and gather assemblies,” a rival cult with its own conventicles, which it calls “covert idolatry” because it “forsakes our Lord Jesus Christ.” Theodoret, the earliest interpreter, localizes it to Phrygia and Pisidia, dates it, and reports lawful Michael-oratories surviving among the same people; Lightfoot ties it to the Colossian heresy Paul had condemned; the Carolingian reception permits the revealed names and forbids the invented ones; and the church’s own Michael-devotion, guarded by the Trinity-and-Michael pairing, went on unbroken. Every line of evidence converges: what the canon anathematizes is the treatment of angels as mediators to be invoked in Christ’s stead, and the magical adjuration of them by manufactured names — not the honouring or naming of the angels God has revealed.

The rival reading, and why it is weaker. Taken as a bare sentence — “Christians must not… invoke angels” — the canon can be, and in Reformation polemic often was, pressed as a blanket condemnation of every invocation of angels, and so of the later Catholic and Orthodox cultus of Michael. But this reads the words apart from the abuse they name and against the whole reception. Theodoret, who stood nearest the practice, did not read it so, and set the surviving Michael-oratory beside the very canon; the same council that issued canon 35 approved the commemoration of the martyrs, which the blanket reading would equally have to forbid; and the churches that received the canon (Frankish, Byzantine) simultaneously honoured the archangels by name. A reading that makes a fourth-century Phrygian synod contradict its own age’s settled devotion, and that Theodoret’s eyewitness note directly refutes, is not the sense of the canon but a later use of it. (One genuine uncertainty lies upstream, at Colossae: Paul’s phrase “worshipping of angels” is itself debated — worship offered to angels, or a visionary’s claim to share the worship the angels render — but on either construal the Phrygian cult Theodoret describes, and the canon condemns, is angel-invocation that displaces Christ, which is what this page assesses.)

The wider tension the canon settles. The line canon 35 draws is the same one the whole doctrine polices: the Name (and the names heaven bears) has real power, yet is not a formula severable from faith in, and belonging to, the One named. To invoke an angel as saviour is to make the name a technique and the angel a rival mediator — the drift into magic that the intrinsic-power argument identifies and the sons of Sceva dramatize. To honour Michael under Christ, by the name Scripture gives, is devotion. The canon marks the boundary between them in law, exactly where the fathers had marked it in exegesis.

Assessment

sound. Canon 35 of Laodicea forbids a specific heterodox cult of angels — the Phrygian practice, already rebuked by Paul at Colossae, of making angels intermediary saviours whose favour must be sought to approach a too-distant God, and of invoking them by name in the manner of the adjuration-magic — and not the honouring or naming of angels as such. The earliest interpreter of the canon (Theodoret) localizes and dates the abuse and records lawful Michael-oratories surviving beside it; modern scholarship (Lightfoot) reads the canon as the legislative echo of the Colossian “worshipping of angels”; the church’s reception permits the revealed names Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael while forbidding invented ones; and licit Michael-devotion grew up unbroken, guarded by the pairing of the Trinity with the archangel. The blanket reading — that the canon bans all invocation of angels — lifts the bare words out of the abuse they name and out of the reception the canon actually had, and is the weaker of the two. The line the canon draws in law is the line the whole doctrine draws: the power of the Name is not a technique, and no name in heaven or earth may stand where Christ’s mediation stands. The magical and pagan angel-adjuration is present here only as the historical practice the canon was written to exclude, weighed critically and never as instruction.

Sources

Council of Laodicea, canon XXXV, in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. Henry R. Percival (NPNF2 vol. 14; also at newadvent.org) — Percival’s text, with the Ancient Epitome (“Whoso calls assemblies in opposition to those of the Church and names angels, is near to idolatry and let him be anathema”) and his note that some Latin versions “of great authority and antiquity read angulos for angelos” (“corners” for “angels”), a reading with “no Greek authority.” The Greek is &aggr;&ggr;&ggr;&eacgr;&lgr;&ogr;&ugr;&sfgr; &ogr;ν&ogr;&mgr;&aacgr;ζ&egr;&igr;ν, “to name angels.” The council is dated to the mid-4th century — commonly c. 363–364, within Hefele’s window of 343–381 (Percival, following Hefele, History of the Councils of the Church, on the internal evidence). ↩
Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on Colossians, on 2:18 (PG 82), as quoted in Percival’s note to canon XXXV (NPNF2 vol. 14) — the Colossian teachers “were leading to worship angels… for, said they, the Law was given through angels. And this vice lasted for a long time in Phrygia and Pisidia. Therefore it was that the synod which met at Laodicea in Phrygia, prohibited by a canon, that prayer should be offered to angels; and even to-day an oratory of St. Michael can be seen among them, and their neighbours.” (Cited via Percival; not from a directly-consulted Migne text.) ↩
John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians, Homily VII (on Colossians 2:18; NPNF1 XIII) — “There are some who maintain that we must be brought near by Angels, not by Christ, that were too great a thing for us… he said not ‘introduction by,’ but ‘worshiping of’ Angels.” With Theophylact of Ohrid, Commentary on Colossians, ch. 2 — the deceivers held it “unworthy… of the greatness of the Only-Begotten” that he should bring men to the Father, so “it is more reasonable to suppose that angels served in your bringing to the Father… and persuaded the simple-hearted to turn to them, as if to our saviors”; and Ambrosiaster, Commentary on Colossians (on 2:18) — the enemy “simulates religion… he inflates the movement of the stars, which he calls angels… They refuse to hold onto the faith of Christ, who is the creator and Lord of all.” ↩
On the Phrygian Jewish diaspora and the syncretistic folk-Judaism behind the Colossian error, Clinton E. Arnold, The Colossian Syncretism: The Interface Between Christianity and Folk Belief at Colossae (WUNT 2.77; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996) — the “veneration of angels” took place “in the context of magic, not only in pagan circles but also within Judaism, where monotheism still prevailed,” a blend of “Phrygian folk belief, local folk Judaism and Christianity.” The diaspora data: Lightfoot, “The Churches of the Lycus” (Josephus, Antiquities 12.147–153, on Antiochus III’s resettlement of c. 2,000 Jewish families from Babylonia into Lydia and Phrygia; Cicero, Pro Flacco 28, on the gold confiscated at Laodicea c. 62 BC — Lightfoot’s estimate of > 11,000 adult Jewish freemen in the district). Weighed critically: the tie to Paul’s exact phrase is contested — F. O. Francis, “Humility and Angelic Worship in Col 2:18,” Studia Theologica 16 (1962): 109–34, reads “worship of angels” as a subjective genitive (the worship the angels render, which the visionary claims to share), a reading Larry Hurtado has endorsed as unrefuted — so Colossians 2:18 alone does not establish a first-century Jewish angel-cult; the canon’s target is secured instead by the independently attested adjuration-practice (nn. 5–6), not by this verse. ↩
Sepher ha-Razim (“The Book of the Mysteries”), a Jewish magical handbook of c. the 4th century CE — trans. Michael A. Morgan, Sepher Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries (SBL Texts and Translations 25; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), from the Hebrew edition of Mordecai Margalioth (Jerusalem, 1966). The work is arranged as a tour of the seven heavens, each with its ranks of angels listed by name together with the adjurations and ends they serve (healing, divination, dream-sending, reversing a legal verdict, winning at the races), and frames itself as passed from the angel Raziel through Noah to Solomon. Its parallels reach the Talmud, the Enochic literature, and the Hekhalot corpus (n. 6). ↩
On the amulets and incantation bowls: Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press / Leiden: Brill, 1985) and their companion Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993) — metal amulets from Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor and Babylonian incantation bowls of the 4th–7th c. that adjure named angels (Suriel, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and many lesser and invented names) to heal, protect, bind demons, or compel love, the efficacy resting on knowledge of the powerful name (their glossary cross-references Sepher ha-razim). On the Hekhalot (“palaces”) adjuration-texts — coercing the Sar ha-Torah (“Prince of the Torah”) and Sar ha-Panim (“Prince of the Presence”) by seals inscribed with divine names — see “Heikhalot Literature” (My Jewish Learning), with Peter Schäfer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), and Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition (New York: JTS, 1960). ↩
J. B. Lightfoot, St Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (Macmillan, 1875; the dissertation “The Colossian Heresy” and “The Churches of the Lycus”), full text — renders canon 35 (Christians must not “invoke angels… and hold conventicles”) and identifies its target as the same cult that “three centuries before had called forth the Apostle’s rebuke and warning in the Epistle to the Colossians” (Colossians 2:18, the “worshipping of angels” — angels treated as intermediary powers securing access to a transcendent God, in place of Christ). ↩
Capitulary of Charlemagne (A.D. 789), quoted in Percival’s note to canon XXXV (NPNF2 vol. 14) — “In that same council [Laodicea] it was ordered that angels should not be given unknown names, and that such should not be affixed to them, but that only they should be named by the names which we have by authority. These are Michael, Gabriel, Raphael.” With Origen, Against Celsus, I.24–25 (ANF IV) — the angelic names Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael fitted “appropriately to the duties which they discharge” (see the Origen detail page); the manufactured barbarous angel-names of the amulets are the counterpart the canon excludes, the same magical adjuration Irenaeus condemned (the church works “not… by means of angelic invocations, or by incantations”; see the Irenaeus detail page). ↩
“St. Michael the Archangel,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1911) — the Michaelion at Sosthenion near Constantinople, Michael venerated as healer, the synaxis of 8 November spreading through the Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic churches, and the cure at the Colossae-region spring by “invoking the Blessed Trinity and St. Michael” (Phrygia called “from early times the centre of the true cult of the holy angels”). Cf. the Michaelion; on the Colossian phrase’s disputed sense (worship of angels vs. worship the angels render), “Epistle to the Colossians,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (citing T. K. Abbott). ↩