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 and power. Doesn’t this sound familiar as we reflect on the last three centuries of Western civilization? Some amazing knowledge has come forward during this period, and some amazing and healthy empowerment too. But there has also been a dark side. Arrogance has brought about so much of our ecological despair today. The Faust myth is a statement about the misuse of knowledge, power, and arrogance in our effort to know the universe. Do the shadow angels not represent the shadow side of Western civilization, a side that has taken arrogance and the misuse of knowledge and power as a normal way of life?
Rupert: I would like to take up your point about the close links of angels to cosmology. The association of angels with the heavens is what came to me first of all. I grew up in Newark-on-Trent, a market town in Nottinghamshire, England, where there’s a magnificent medieval parish church. In the roof of the church, as in many late-medieval churches, the beams are supported by carved angels. And in the great Gothic cathedral of Lincoln, only fifteen miles from Newark, there’s a part of the cathedral called the angel choir. High up are these angels playing musical instruments—the celestial choirs. To see them you have to look up, so from childhood this is my image of the angels. They are associated with the stars. And this is what I’d like to talk about first, the cosmological aspect of the angels and particularly their association with the heavens.
In the Middle Ages, as in all previous ages, it was generally believed that the heavens were alive, the whole cosmos was alive. The heavens were populated with innumerable conscious beings associated with the stars, the planets, and maybe the spaces in between. When people thought of God in heaven, they were not thinking in terms of some vague metaphor or some psychological state, they were thinking of the sky.
“Our Father, who art in heaven.” Nowadays, I suppose, many Christians assume that this is a merely metaphorical statement, nothing to do with the actual sky. The heavens have been handed over to science; the celestial realm is the domain of astronomy. And astronomy has nothing to do with God or spirits or angels; it is concerned with galaxies, the geometry of the gravitational field, the emission spectra of hydrogen atoms, the life cycles of stars, quasars, black holes, and so forth.
But this isn’t how people used to think. They thought that the heavens were full of spirits and of God. And indeed if you think of God as omnipresent, everywhere, divinity must be present throughout the whole universe, of which the earth is but an infinitesimal part.
Through the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the universe was mechanized, and at the same time the heavens were secularized. They were made up of ordinary matter gliding around in perfect accordance with Newtonian laws. There was no room in them for angelic intentions. Angels have no place in a mechanistic world, except perhaps as psychological phenomena, existing only within our imaginations.
But this mechanistic worldview is now being superseded by science itself. Recent scientific insights are leading us toward a new vision of a living world. This is a key theme of my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK).
The old mechanical universe was a vast machine, gradually running out of steam as it headed toward a thermodynamic heat death. But since the 1960s it has been replaced by an evolutionary cosmos. The universe began very small and hot in the primal fireball, less than the size of a pinhead, and has been expanding ever since. As it grows, it cools down. More and more structures, forms, and patterns develop within it. At first, there were no atoms, no stars, no galaxies, no elements like iron and carbon, no planets, no biological life. As the universe expanded, all these things came into being somewhere for the first time, and were then repeated countlessly in many places and times. This growing, evolving universe is nothing like a machine. It is more like a developing organism.
Instead of nature being made up of inert atoms, just inert bits of stuff enduring forever, we now have the idea that atoms are complex structures of activity. Matter is now more like a process than a thing. As the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper has put it, “Through modern physics materialism has transcended itself.” Matter is no longer the fundamental explanatory principle but is itself explained in terms of more fundamental principles, namely fields and energy.
Instead of living on an inanimate planet, a misty ball of rock hurtling around the sun in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion, we can now think of ourselves as living in Mother Earth. The Gaia hypothesis puts into a contemporary scientific form the ancient intuition that we live in a living world.
Instead of the universe being rigidly determined, with everything proceeding inexorably in accordance with mechanical causality, we have a world to which freedom, openness, and spontaneity have returned. Indeterminism came in through quantum theory in the 1920s. More recently, chaos theory has confirmed that the old ideal of Newtonian determinism was an illusion. Science has been liberated from the idea that we live in a totally predictable and rigidly determined universe.
Instead of nature being uncreative, we now see it as creative. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace gave a scientific formulation to the idea that plants and animals are brought forth by Mother Nature herself. But for a long time, physicists denied that evolution had any part to play in the cosmos as a whole. They went on believing that it was an uncreative machine until the 1960s. But we have now come to see that creative evolution is not confined to the realm of biological life; the evolutionary development of the entire cosmos is a vast, creative process.
Instead of the idea that the whole of nature would soon be fully understood in terms of mathematical physics, it turns out that 96 percent of the matter and energy in the cosmos is “dark matter” and “dark energy,” utterly unknown to us. It is as if physics has discovered the cosmic unconscious. We don’t know what this dark matter and energy is, or what it does, or how
