We begin with an introductory dialogue in which we explore the history of the understanding of angels in the West and the way in which they were central to the tradition of the early church and medieval theology. We explore how the mechanistic revolution in science in the seventeenth century left no place for angels in a mechanical cosmos and led to a decline of interest in this subject in science and theology. We also discuss the recent grassroots revival of interest in angels (surely Lorna Byrne’s work is part of this movement) and the importance today of an ecumenical and interfaith or cross-cultural understanding of the spiritual realms.
We then turn to our three main authors. We have selected their most important and relevant passages about angels, and each of these passages is followed by a discussion in which we try to work out their meaning today from both a theological and a scientific perspective.
In these discussions we are less concerned with the theology and science of yesterday than with the potential theology and science of tomorrow. We have both found this method of dialogue illuminating. It has taken each of us beyond any understanding we would be able to arrive at individually with our own limited perspectives. We hope that what for us was a creative process will help others in their exploration and thinking.
We conclude by considering how the exploration of angels in a living cosmos could enliven and enrich both religion and science as we enter a new millennium. We end with a series of questions.
An appendix of biblical references is provided for those wanting to study the scriptural examples in greater depth and detail.
Introduction
The Return of the Angels and the New Cosmology
Matthew: Why are the angels returning today? In recent years they have been the subject of many magazine articles and TV shows, and there is a flood of books, including several bestsellers, about angels. Is this a fad? Are angels just the latest consumer object for hungry souls? Is this a flight to another world, an escape to an ethereal realm of light, a distraction keeping us from addressing pressing social and political issues?
Or might it be that the return of the angels can inspire our moral imagination? Can they give us the courage to deal more effectively and imaginatively with these issues as we move into the third millennium?
In the 1990s I took a survey, asking people if they have ever experienced angels. Between 60 and 80 percent of the people at my lectures say that they have. Perhaps such people are not typical, but surveys of random samples of the American population show that a third have felt the presence of an angel at some time in their lives. This suggests that angels do not always have to be believed in. When you experience something, you do not have to believe in it any longer; it’s not a matter of belief but a matter of experience. Mysticism is about trusting our experience. And today, perhaps we are being asked to trust our experience of angels.
In the machine cosmology of the last few centuries, there was no room for angels. There was no room for mystics. As we move beyond this machine cosmology, no doubt the mystics are going to come back, and the angels are returning because a living cosmology is returning. St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, said, “The universe would not be complete without angels.… The entire corporeal world is governed by God through the angels.”1 The ancient, traditional teaching is that when you live in the universe, and not just in a manmade machine, there is room for angels.
What is an angel? And what do they do?
First, angels are powerful. Do not be deceived by the bare-bottomed cherubs with which the Baroque era has filled our imaginations. When an angel appears in the Scriptures, the first words are, “Don’t be afraid.” Now would those be their first words if they came as bare-bottomed cherubs? “Pin my diaper on,” would be more likely. But angels are awesome. The poet Rilke says that every angel is terrifying. What are they powerful at?
Angels are essentially understanding beings. They think deeply. They are experts at understanding—at standing under. The primal thoughts that uphold all our other thoughts, angels know through intuition, according to Aquinas and other teachers on angels. Angels don’t have to go to school to learn the essence of things. They don’t need discursive reasoning and experimentation to learn. They get it all intuitively, immediately.
They are experts at intuition, and they can assist our intuition. This is one reason that angels and artists befriend one another so profoundly. When we look at the wonderful, amazing images of angels that artists have given us, we are dealing not with just a rich subject of painting but with a relationship going on between angels and artists. Intuition is the highway in which angels roam.
Angels are also special friends to the prophets, and we need prophets today. We need prophets in every profession, in every role of citizenship, in every generation. We need young prophets and old prophets. “What do prophets do?” asks Rabbi Heschel. “Prophets interfere.” If we are going to shift the course of humanity today, we need prophets, and, according to Aquinas, angels are very much involved in prophecy.
In addition, angels have very strong wills, and Aquinas says, “Their will is by nature loving.” Angels are not abstract intellectuals; they are loving, understanding beings. Loving invades their understanding. Their knowledge is a heart knowledge. It is wisdom, not just knowledge.
And so we see that in their expert domains of understanding, knowing, loving, compassion, and prophecy, angels clearly have a lot to teach us about spirituality. And their tasks are not trivial. They have serious cosmic duties to perform, relating to the wisdom and the knowledge that they carry. One of these tasks is to praise. Wherever there is praise going on, angels seem to show up. Indeed, I think their absence parallels what I would call a praise crisis in Western civilization. As we learn to praise again, the angels will return.
Both Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Aquinas teach that the devil does not praise, and that’s what makes the devil different from the angels—a refusal to praise. How much of our culture in the last few centuries has indeed been a refusal to praise? What is praise, except the noise that joy makes, the noise that awe makes? And if we are bereft of praise, it is because we have been bereft of awe and joy in the machine, cagelike world we have been living in. The new cosmology awakens us again to awe and wonder, and therefore elicits praise.
To study angels is to shed light on ourselves, especially those aspects of ourselves that have been put down in our secularized civilization, our secularized educational systems, and even our secularized worship system. By secularization I mean anything that sucks the awe out of things.
The angels are agents and co-workers with us human beings. Sometimes they guard and defend us; sometimes they inspire us and announce big news to us—they get us to move. Sometimes they heal us, and sometimes they usher us into different realms, from which we are to take back mysteries to this particular realm. Aquinas says, “We do the works that are of God, along with the holy angels.”2 But even more than that, Aquinas warns us that angels always announce the divine silence, the silence that precedes our own inspiration, our own words, the silence that meditation and contemplation bring.
Angels make human beings happy. It is very rare to meet someone who has met an angel who doesn’t wear a smile on his or her face. To encounter an angel is to return joyful. As Aquinas says, happiness consists in apprehending something better than ourselves. Awe and wonder and the kind of power that angels represent are of such an ilk. They call us to be greater beings ourselves.
Finally, the sin of the shadow angels had to do with arrogance and the misuse of knowledge