La guerra in cielo: angeli alleati dei santi

The struggle against the evil and the demon is the essential presupposition for the attainment and the exercise of the holiness. In the Acts of the martyrs and in the Lives of the saints, there are frequent appearances of angels sustaining the witness of Christ during the spiritual athletic struggle. The angelic element belongs to the thaumaturgic style typical of the hagiopraphic literature, however, its insertion comes from to the biblical tradition, with one of the principal archetypes in the apocalypse, the scriptural text with an amazing incidence of mentions and references to the angels. The author is a Christian anchored to the Judaism, that uses the apocryphal intertestamentary literature and the Prophets of the ancient Testament, and therefore the Apocalypse is a fundamental text to understand the passage from the Jewish angelology to that Jewish-Christian and in turn to verify its transposition in the hagiographic literature. Following the path of the angelic image according to the Apocalypse, texts of the Acts of the martyrs and of the Lives of the Saints are examined.