they go under different names in other traditions (Native Americans call them “spirits”). Angels constitute one of the most fundamental themes in human spiritual and religious experience. It is difficult to imagine deep ecumenism or interfaith advancing among the world’s cultures and religions without acknowledging angels in our midst and angels in our own traditions.
Other experiences that all human beings face together include the ecological crisis, for which we require all the wisdom we can muster. Angels may be able to assist us in this work and may well prove to be indispensable allies, truly guardian angels, instructing us in safeguarding our inheritance of a once healthy but today endangered planet.
For all these reasons it is important to return to our own spiritual tradition to examine what it tells us about angels, and to connect that wisdom to today’s evolutionary cosmology. This is necessary in order to set the stage for deeper explorations in the future—a future we believe will be characterized by a more eager effort to examine consciousness on this planet and beyond.
To assist us in this task of exploring our own spiritual tradition, we have chosen to concentrate on three giants of the Western tradition whose treatment of angels is particularly broad, deep, and influential. They are Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk whose classic work The Celestial Hierarchies was written in the sixth century; Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess of the twelfth century; and St. Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher-theologian of the thirteenth century.
Dionysius the Areopagite made an amazing synthesis of the currents of the Neoplatonic philosophies of the Middle East in the light of his own Christian theology and experience. Hildegard of Bingen, though she called on the tradition of angelology handed down through the monastic tradition of the Western church, nevertheless worked especially out of her visionary experiences with the angelic realms. Thomas Aquinas created a synthesis of the study of angels, including the views of the Muslim philosopher Averroës, the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, the science and philosophy of Aristotle, and the biblical tradition. He also raised profound, speculative questions that are provocative even today, and are especially interesting in light of the cosmology now emerging from today’s science. It is likely that these three thinkers devoted more of their intellectual labor to angelology than any other three major thinkers of the West.
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
