Above the angels are three saintly figures. I’m not a Christian, just a person exploring spirituality as I pass through the entrance into the vast interior of the cathedral for a respite from the world outside.
You don’t hear the Catholic Church talk much about angels these days. Though it has held out resolutely for a long time in many respects, it too is influenced to a degree by the dominant materialist world view that holds physical, objective reality as the only truth.
Angels belonged to the Church’s pre-modern tradition. They, and their demonic counterparts, appear in both Testaments of the Bible (see for instance Genesis 28:12 and Matthew 12:24). Until relatively recently in history, Western culture accepted the existence of angels and demons. Christianity built on and refined the pagan heritage of various spirit beings existing in particular places and in the heavens. The Reformation, followed by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment effectively put an end to this rich world teeming with good and evil “presences”, showing that it was mere superstition, mere myth, the product of culture weak in logic and reason.
Despite this momentous shift, these beings have never completely disappeared, thanks to the attraction they have held for the human imagination. The romantic strains of Western culture, those most appreciative of nature and folk traditions, have helped to keep them alive: one can think of the poetry of Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the music of Wagner and Greig, the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. The popularity in contemporary times of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the genre of fantasy fiction generally is testament to an abiding attraction to beings and powers that transcend purely material existence.
Why are angels and demons at all relevant to contemporary reality? The answer lies in our attempts to bring greater connection and meaning to the universe. Recently science has started to challenge and overturn its own long-held mechanistic cosmology of discreet and disconnected objects in favour of the notion of the inter-relatedness and interdependence of all life. In this new way of seeing, humanity is not “alone in the universe”, as some influential 20th century thinkers maintained, but is an integral part of a vast patchwork of inter-related and interdependent phenomena. If this is the case at the physical levels of existence, why should it not also be true at the inner dimensions of reality?
The discovery by Freud, Jung and their contemporaries of the unconscious depths of the human mind has helped modern Western society understand itself better. Jung concluded that angels and demons were manifestations of aspects of human nature or energies of the psyche. In older times humanity had projected those energies onto the world, believing in the actual existence of various gods, fairies, demons and the like. Modern society had turned the projections inwards, and the psychic energies to which they corresponded were now unconscious. Jung famously saw the presence of the ancient Germanic storm god Wotan in the rise of the Nazi movement.
Thinkers like the American philosopher Ken Wilber and the Christian monk Bede Griffiths have started to broaden the reach of the psyche beyond humanity and to conclude that there are psychic or “subtle” dimensions to all reality. For Griffiths, writing in A New Vision of Reality, this means a rediscovery of a pre-modern sensibility in which all things have spiritual as well as material existence; all things are part of one spiritual life. Reason is not abandoned but connected to intuitive wisdom in service of meaning and soul.
I think Griffiths is right. If humanity is part of nature, of a greater life, then the energies of the human psyche must relate to or be present in other phenomena. The discernment of something as an “angel” is a human attempt, through limited human means of perceiving, to define a particular type of energy present in reality. We do the same in naming a “demon”. Both can be seen as aspects of human nature, but they are also present in the universe at large. If we are not isolated beings, this has to be so.
Our actions, no matter what they are, touch on this psychic level. Loving acts invoke angelic energies or angels, bringing them into our individual psychic sphere and allowing those energies to influence us. Likewise, evil deeds court demonic energies. Mostly unconsciously, we pick up the subtle energies around us – for instance discerning certain qualities about a particular place, or a particular person when we walk into a room.
Problems arise when we literalise or overly concretise psychic beings, holding them to be real in a material sense. They’re not – they exist subtly and are best approached through intuition and the imagination. They are powerful and effective in the world, if it is understood that power can be held at a multitude of levels. They should also not be the cause for people losing reason: angels and demons need the moderating hand of the best qualities of humanity in the work towards true wholeness.
