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Narrow World
Thrones and Dominions Part 2
BY Melinda Selmys
November 4-10, 2007 Issue |
Posted 10/30/07 at 9:11 AM
One of the reasons people find it so difficult to believe in
angels, is that our picture of them is puerile.
When an ancient Jew thought of angels he pictured a host of
terrifying beings, tremendous in size, many-winged and many-eyed, brandishing
swords of flame. Such angels were more magnificent and terrible than all of the
idols that captured the imaginations of the surrounding cultures.
They were powerful and worthy of fear, and so he happily
gave them his credence.
The medievals took this biblical conception, and brought it
into the realm of the rational. The wings and eyes became symbolic
manifestations of the angels’ spiritual properties. They established that the
bodily form under which the angel appeared was an assumed body, and that the
angel did not impart life to this form as human souls impart life to human
bodies.
They determined that angels could not know the secret
thoughts of man, but that they could discern anything that betrayed itself in
the movements of the body. They discovered that angels could not tell the
future, but having a much wider sphere of knowledge and much greater
intellectual capacities, could make a much better guess than we could. These
highly abstract and intellectualized angels captured the medieval mind, and
took on forms that were more humanized, less grotesque, but just as firmly
believed.
Already, though, in the medieval era, we see a division
between the abstract angel that satisfied the theologian and the anthropomorphized
angel that appealed to the heart of the illiterate.
Over time, this gap was to widen until the common conception
of an angel became a cherub in a pink loincloth or a winged woman draped in
bedclothes, while the theoretical angel became a vaguely interesting thought
experiment washed away on the tides of mind-body reductionism.
Such visions are so uncompelling that most people have come
to disbelieve in angels altogether. The result is a narrowing of the world.
The limits of things that we cannot fully understand are
compressed, and in this compression we lose not only the hosts of heaven and
hell, but also heroic virtue and diabolic evil; the vision of eternal beatitude
and the dread of unquenchable fire.
The angels that Christians are called to believe in — the
angels of the Bible and of Tradition — are neither harp-endowed human souls nor
candied saps. Far from being the epitome of feminine emotion, they are
intensely rational, possessed of a luminous understanding, and have been given
the power to slay enemies — both human and diabolic — on the battlefields of
earth.
That such beings exist is attested to by the universal
witness of human experience. The apparition of supernatural messenger from
heaven is a theme that is found in all cultures, in all times. From Plato to
Pascal, discussions of spiritual beings have been a part of philosophical
dialog, while nearly every major world religion relies on some form of
knowledge revealed by spiritual powers, whether by avatars or Olympian gods, by
archangels or by channeled masters.
The teachings of Scripture, and the theology of the Middle
Ages, do us a great service: They allow us to understand something of the
nature of these beings, and also to make a clear distinction between the good
and the evil.
This is of tremendous importance: As St. Paul makes clear,
Satan is perfectly capable of disguising himself as an angel of light. Those
who do not believe in angels are the most susceptible to deception; an
unexpected experience of the supernatural is usually overwhelming, and when one
lands on the shores of a brave new world, one easily forgets to ask whether its
inhabitants are worthy of his trust.
The contemplation of angels is not an idle pursuit for the
intellectual who has nothing important to occupy his mind. It is an invitation
to look beyond oneself and to enjoy the humility of knowing that God has
created a world filled with wonders that we will never fully comprehend.
Modern man is beginning to rediscover these shores.
Unfortunately, the modern scientists of the paranormal tend to stumble forward
without the doctrines of the Church, rather like a man who, having finally
hammered out the secrets of the wheel, seeks to reinvent the horse. The result
is a mishmash of incoherent doctrines, over-simplifications and, like the old
paganism, “gleams of celestial light falling on heaps of imbecility.”
What is needed instead is a new theology of angels that weds
the discoveries of St. Thomas Aquinas with the discoveries of Einstein.
If we do not manage this, we will continue to stumble along
through the dark — and as we will discover, there are plenty of malevolent
forces waiting there to ensnare the unwary.
Melinda Selmys is a staff writer
at VulgataMagazine.org.
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