Day: September 29, 2024

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

We dance in the company of angels today and always. “Prayer the churches banquet, Angels age”, as George Herbert puts it. This captures something of the meaning of the angels in the order of creation and their connection to us that God’s question to Job highlights so wonderfully about the joy of creation and redemption.

Michaelmas is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. It signals the larger dimensions of creation as spiritual and intellectual and of our humanity as spiritual creatures within that order. Our liturgy is emphatic on this point. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name”, we sing as we prepare to enter into the eucharistic sacrifice of Christ. We are in the company of angels.

We cannot see them. We can only think them. The most important things in life are the things we cannot see. The angels belong to the deeper sense of creation and redemption. They are pure, spiritual and intellectual beings, the very thoughts of God in motion, the thoughts that gather us to God. Angelic thinking offers an important corrective and critique to the confusions of our times.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th century German theologian, claimed that “the old world made spirit parent of matter; the new world makes matter parent of spirit.” This influenced Marx to a considerable extent, leading to dialectical materialism and the various forms of material determinism, the legacy of which still remains with us in the forms of technocratic determinism. The dominance of a kind of instrumental reason leads to the illusions of power and control over nature and ourselves and to the ideology of progress, the religion of science or scientism, on the one hand, and the reactions against this kind of reductionism in the flights of fantasy into the abstractions and confusions about the self, on the other hand, what Michel Henry called sociologism. Such are some of our current confusions.

Charles Taylor, Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher, in a recent book, Cosmic Connections, undertakes an intriguing survey of English and German romanticism in the 18th and 19th centuries to show the strong desire for a deeper sense of connection to the larger dimensions of creation or the cosmos; reality, if you will. But this book like others is premised in part on the idea of disenchantment. The claim is that modernity for the last five hundred years is disconnected from the natural world. Our disenchantment is really about the dominance of a practical and instrumental relation to the world which is ultimately destructive of both the world and ourselves. This is certainly part of the story but is it the whole story or is this also part of ‘the myth of disenchantment’? The Angels, it seems to me, have always been with us and belong to the imaginary of our spiritual and intellectual culture in every age and period including modernity, whatever is meant by that term.

(more…)

Print this entry