So I'm in Shaw's around Easter of last year, and I wander through the flower section. In amongst the lilies and tulips, I see a small fuzzy white teddy bear with angel wings and a halo, bearing a card that says something like, "Wishes of the season".

Not for Valentine's Day, where a Cupid-like teddy bear might be understandable. For Easter.

And this is when I decide that this whole cutesy-angel thing has gone too far. I acknowledge that there are two parts of Easter, and that one is indeed all about fluffy stuffed toys and candy. It is secular, it is cute, and it is for children. But the other is powerfully and solemnly religious–the holiest of Christian holy days. Images of angels go with the religious one, not the fluffy bunny one. And angels should not be depicted as cute. Angels are not supposed to be cute. The divine should be, you know, divine. Something that inspires awe, not something you want to pat on the head.

This cutesy-fluffy thing is a comparatively recent interpretation of the angelic, as these representations go. Original representations of angels–the divine messengers of the Old and New Testament–are just about as far as it's possible to get from "cute." The first appearance of an angel in Genesis is the cherub God "places at the east of the garden of Eden... [with] a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way of the tree of life" in order to prevent Adam and Eve from re-entering. [Genesis 1:24] Not a teddy bear, that.

Nor do they soften noticeably as the Old Testament progresses. They are powerful figures, striking blind the men who threaten Lot, walking through the flames to protect the Jews who Nebuchadnezzer orders burnt alive. It is an Angel of Death (in some translations, anyway) who kills the firstborn children of Egypt.

Divinity as represented in the New Testament is commonly supposed to be gentler; but the greeting of nearly every angel depicted in it–from the messenger who comes to Mary and the shepherds to the one who appears when the stone is rolled back from the tomb–is "Do not be afraid." And even with the reassurance, most descriptions of angels include the note that those who were nearby were indeed very frightened by the sight.

Angels of the Bible are powerful and awe-inspiring figures. Angels as represented in modern America are teddy bears with wings, happy perky little guardians, or stars of sappy dramas. Not powerless, exactly, but far from awesome.

What happened?

When I first floated this article idea (all right, sent an e-mail rant) to Fish, he pointed out that Raphael and his cherubic cherubim bear a lot of the blame for this trend. He's absolutely right, and Raphael did encourage the perception of angels as cute, fat babies. And shame on him. I myself, however, am more inclined to blame the Victorians for the corruption of the angel from powerful figure to cutesy figure. As a culture, we are far more influenced by the turn of the last century than by Raphael. Besides, blaming the Victorians is fun.

In Woman and the Demon, feminist scholar Maxine Hong Kingston describes the iconography of the angel before the Victorian era. Angels were most often depicted as warriors, male or androgynous, breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly mobile, guarding and influencing wide-open skies. They were associated with transformations, with flaming swords, with a channeling of the divine. "Do not be afraid! I come bringing joyful tidings..."

In Victorian England rose the concept of the "angel of the house"–the perfect domestic woman, the one who makes the home a haven from the evils of the world outside. She had some moral influence up on her pedestal within those four walls, but she was the antithesis of the striding, powerful androgynous warrior. Her trait was not overt power, but self-denial for the good of others. It did not take long for the angel in the home to displace the angel with the flaming sword in religious iconography.

Such angels do not say, "Fear not, I bring tidings of great joy" but rather, "Do you take sugar with your tea?" And while most scholars describe this as a weakening of women–"giving women unprecedented power over a prisonlike space", in the words of Nina Auerbach–it is a weakening of the divine as well.

This is, on some level, no more than to be expected. The Victorians were the torchbearers of the Enlightenment–of science, of reason, of the light that banished the dark superstitions of the past. Such an aggressively rational society might be expected to consider the divine nothing to fear, and to construct angels that no one would think to tremble before.

And we today are children of the Enlightenment. We have put aside superstition; we have rejected fear. Pain and illness and squalor are no longer seen as judgments of God, needing the intervention of the divine and the sending of angelic messengers. They are human problems, that humans can fix, and what are we waiting for? Let's get on with it! Man is powerful. We need not construct images of the powerful divine.

And good for us. No, truly, good for us, in many ways. We don't burn witches or heretics, we don't run Inquisitions, we criticize our government, we fight disease, we protect those who cannot protect themselves. We don't need angels with swords and power to solve our problems. We seek out problems ourselves and fix them through human agency. The helpless need not wait for heaven; not necessarily, anyway. We try to fix problems here.

But we lost something, somewhere along the way. Once they strode across the sky and the horizon of the imagination–and they inspired music and architecture and paintings and writings that endure now, that bring a gasp to the throat and tears to the eyes.

Teddy bears with wings have no such effect. And while there is merit in the idea of softening the divine to make it more accessible, teddy bears with wings water it down to the point where the divine can no longer be detected.

A wonder so deep that it scares you is not a bad thing. That's divine; that's angelic. That's what we lost as we became "enlightened." We inherited the earth and we solve our own problems now; but the angels we are left with are cute and fuzzy and helpless and mass-produced and incapable of inspiring anything like Paradise Lost, St. Paul's Cathedral, or Handel's Messiah.

And that kind of angel just shouldn't represent a celebration of the triumph of life and immortality.

I bought the lilies. Not the teddy bear.