By contrast, Wallace came to the conclusion that evolution involved more than natural selection and was guided by creative intelligences, which he identified with angels. His conception is summarized in the title of his last book, The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose6 We hear a great deal about Darwin today, but we don’t hear much about Wallace. I am fascinated that these very different conceptions of evolution were expressed by the two founders of evolutionary theory; they show that evolution can be interpreted in quite different ways. If you are a materialist, evolutionary creativity can only be a matter of blind chance. But if you believe there are other forces or intelligences in the universe, then there are other possible sources of creativity, whether you call them angels or not.
This raises a problem that Aquinas and other medieval thinkers did not and could not deal with, namely, the role of angels in evolution. For example, as new galaxies appear, presumably the appropriate angels that govern the galaxy must come into being with the galaxy, unless all the angels are there, waiting at the moment of the Big Bang for their moment to come.
Matthew: And maybe angels are recycled, like those that hovered over the dinosaurs; they would otherwise have been out of a job for sixty million years.
Rupert: These are questions that were inconceivable in the Middle Ages. Our evolutionary cosmology does not have less room for angels, but vastly more.
Matthew: Yes. I feel very strongly that as a living cosmology comes back, the angels are returning, because they are part of any sound cosmology. Maybe the angels themselves will bring into our culture some of the imagination that we’re calling for.
In my book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ7 I coined the term “deep ecumenism.” For me, deep ecumenism is going beyond the level of world religions relating to one another in terms of doctrine and theological study papers, and entering more into their mystical traditions and doing prayer and ritual together.
All religious traditions that we know of have something to say about angels, spirits other than human beings. Buck Ghosthorse, a Lakota spiritual teacher, once said to me, “What you Christians call angels, we Indians call spirits.” This is common ground on which all our religious traditions can come together today, in deep ecumenism. Angels are not labeled Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic; they are beyond denominationalism.
Clearly, angels will be part of the movement of deep ecumenism. We are living in a moment in history when we as a species have to ask, what do we have in common? The boundaries are melting between cultures and religions. This makes it important to have a serious discussion of our tradition of angels in the West, not out of jingoism but out of knowing our own tradition well enough so that when we encounter angels and spirits from other traditions, we are not put off or threatened by them. Instead, we can look for the common links, the common truths among the traditions.
The shamanistic traditions of the world are particularly important in our search for wisdom today. Indigenous peoples lived and survived for thousands of years amid such travails as wild beasts and inclement weather and ice ages; they had to discover ways of creating community, healing, educating, and learning. There is a tremendous lore here that has almost been lost, but not entirely, and it has everything to do with spirits and with angels. When praying with Native American peoples, I have experienced remnants of it that fill a gap in my own religious experience. Our Celtic ancestors too had a well-developed theology of angels and spirit guardians.
Rupert: Yes. The awareness of nonhuman spirits is fundamental to the religious experience of practically every tradition, maybe from the time we became human. This may be the primordial ground of religious experience. The awareness of spirits comes before the idea of a single God. It’s significant that in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, as in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, there is the continuing presence of a multiplicity of spirits. Even in the most monotheistic of faiths, namely Islam, we find no denial of angels. This ancient strand of religious experience is not negated, but rather amplified by the later evolution of religions.
Matthew: Yet we have one moment in human history when these spirits were excommunicated, and that is the last few hundred years, the modern era. This shows what an amazing rupture and perversion has occurred in human consciousness in the last few centuries as we have attempted to divorce ourselves from our relationship to angels and spirits. I think this helps to explain the price we have paid in terms of ecological disaster, war, and greed. Perhaps the ultimate secularization of our relationships is to banish the angels to a place of ridicule or sentimentalism.
Rupert: Or reduce them to mere manifestations of our own psyche. Many modern people would say, “Okay, people experience angels. But these are just figments of their own imagination. Angels do not exist out there; they are subjective, within people’s minds.”
It’s not difficult for people to accept the subjective existence of angels. The big challenge is to recognize the objective existence of nonhuman intelligences, and that’s the challenge that faces us now.
Matthew: I also think we should extend deep ecumenism to science itself. What are the implications of today’s science for rediscovering the rich, deep, and broad appreciation of angels that we get from the Western tradition as represented by Dionysius, Hildegard, and Aquinas?
Rupert: This is very important, because what science now reveals to us goes far beyond anything that any tradition in the past has been able to glimpse. They didn’t have telescopes, or radio telescopes, or a sense of the vastness of the universe that science has opened up, or a knowledge of the variety of heavenly bodies, or the story of cosmic evolution. As we leave the old, machinelike universe and move toward a more organic sense of evolving nature, we need to ask what kinds of consciousness are there in the universe besides our own.
Dionysius The Areopagite
Dionysius lived in the sixth century, probably in Syria. For many centuries he was wrongly identified with Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by St. Paul in Athens (Acts 17.34). He is more correctly called Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, and is also known as Pseudo-Denys. This confusion gave his writings great authority up to the sixteenth century, and his influence on Orthodox and Western theology has been enormous.
Deeply influenced by the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (A.D. 411-485), he combines Neoplatonism with Christianity in his four principal books, The Celestial Hierarchies, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Divine Names, and Mystical Theology. It is in his Celestial Hierarchies that he discusses at length the nine orders of angels as mediators from God to humankind, and it is from that book, which has been so influential in Christian angelology, that most of the following passages are taken. He has been called a “moderate Monophysite” in his theology, Monophysitism being the heretical doctrine that denies the human side of Christ at the Incarnation. But at the Lateran Council of A.D. 649 his works were invoked to combat more extreme Monophysite thinkers, and this invocation of his work by a church council also helped embellish the doctrinal authority of his teachings. Because he elaborates at such length on the nine orders of angels that St. Paul only alludes to lightly, his angelology has greatly influenced Christian theology.
The Multiplicity Of Angels
The scriptural tradition respecting the angels gives their number as thousands and thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand, multiplying and repeating the very highest numbers we have, thus clearly showing that the Orders of the Celestial Beings are innumerable for us; so many are the blessed Hosts of the Supermundane Intelligences, wholly surpassing the feeble and limited range of our material numbers.1
Matthew: