by CCW | 29 September 2023 06:00
We are in the company of angels. How to think about angels? The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only useful if it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels.
Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them, sensibly as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.
The angels are pure intellectual beings. They have no bodies. They are beyond number. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of understanding,” as Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor puts it. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thinking. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem as in Oedipus Rex.
Intellection is the gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in the division and dissolution of things; of the endlessness of ‘this and that’. Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which one thing is distinguished from another within an ordered whole.
The pageant of creation in Genesis 1 offers a cosmic vision in which God speaks things into being. Such is the activity of an intellectual principle in which everything has its truth and being, and, most importantly, where each created thing in the order of the litany of creation is seen and said to be good, and the whole order is “very good.” That is a strong affirmation of the essential goodness of all creation, literally, of everything, because it is the product of the essential principle of all goodness and being, God.
Even “the great dragon, that old serpent, …the devil … Satan” as created is good. He lives in contradiction with the principle of his own being. He exists, we might say, in denial, as a standing contradiction, dependent upon what he rejects and opposes. Such is the nature of all sin and evil. A lie after all depends utterly upon the truth. When we lie we assume that others will take what we say to be true. A lie has no power apart from the truth. It is nothing without the truth. And yet there is a struggle, a cosmic battle between good and evil. But this war even in heaven is overcome. The good is prior and greater than our evil.
Former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks notes that one of the sad and destructive features of our world and day is a “pathological dualism which sees humanity itself as radically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad,” into good and evil where “you are either one or the other.” This is false and destructive of any kind of life in an ordered community and destructive of the life of the soul. Such are the deadly forms of dualism in our current social and political world. The cosmic visions of Genesis and Revelation counter such follies; if we will think with the angels.
“The line dividing good and evil,” Solzhenitsyn acutely observes, “cuts through the heart of every human being.” The real truth and dignity of our humanity is God-given; not human made. This is wonderfully imaged in the Romanesque Basilica di San Michele Maggiore in Pavia, Italy. Above the portal is an image of St. Michael, serene and calm and staring straight ahead, while his feet stand upon a serpent. Below that image, around the arches of the portal, are depictions of animals, natural and fantastical, all in motion where they are, as it were, devouring one another. Human reason left to its own devices and limits can only create a world that devours itself. The cosmic vision of Michaelmas recalls us to the truth and goodness of God and to our participation and membership in a spiritual company.
And it belongs to the life of intellectual institutions to Colleges and Schools. This is Michaelmas term, associating this feast with the beginnings of intellectual inquiry and pursuit that properly defines a School. Such is a strong reminder of the essential overlap between Church and School. The great good news of Michaelmas is that “they overcome him”. Who? They are St. Michael and all Angels who overthrow “him”, Satan, the devil, the great deceiver. How? Not by any power of ourselves but “by the blood of the lamb.”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of Michaelmas
Sept 28th, 2023
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