The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet

Preface

It may seem unlikely that a scientist and a theologian would discuss angels in the twenty-first century. Both disciplines at the end of the modern era appear equally embarrassed by this subject.

Nevertheless, although angels have been ignored by the scientific and theological establishments, recent surveys have shown that many people still believe in them. In the United States, for example, over two-thirds believe in their existence, and one-third state that they have personally felt an angelic presence in their lives. Half believe in the existence of devils.¹ Angels persist.

We are entering a new phase of both science and theology, and the subject of angels becomes surprisingly relevant again. Both the new cosmology and the old angelology raise significant questions about the existence and role of consciousness at levels beyond the human. When the two of us held our first discussions on this subject, we were fascinated by the parallels between Thomas Aquinas speaking of angels in the Middle Ages and Albert Einstein speaking of photons in this century. Hence the title of this book, The Physics of Angels.

The grassroots revival of interest in angels is timely. Much of the present interest centers on experiences of help and assistance at times of need. It is intensely personal in nature, and individualistic in spirit.

Recently we have both had the privilege to sit down with Lorna Byrne, the Irish peasant woman and grandmother, still illiterate, who has now published three books on angels with whom she has been in contact since she was a little child. She was instructed not to tell of her encounters until given the word, and that word came after her husband died. Her books rapidly became bestsellers world wide, having appeared in at least twenty-six languages at the time we write this preface. It was clear to us both while speaking with Lorna that she is as authentic as they come, a true sod of the earth of green Ireland, direct and matter of fact, joyful and hard working and generous.

But she insists that the angels have some important messages for us today, messages of their disappointment in the paltry advances we have made as a species and, surprisingly enough, messages about the role America can and needs to play in the world’s spiritual awakening—a role based on the fact that in America so many religious traditions have gathered and interfaith practice is most developed. In her most recent book A Message of Hope from the Angels, Lorna emphasizes how we all have a part to play in the spiritual evolution of humanity.

Lorna prefers being interviewed in interfaith events rather than giving public lectures. One such event occurred in New York City at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal church when black Baptists, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Muslims gathered for her public interview. Also present at the event in New York, she tells us, were angels who packed the chapel and she reports that there was great joy and celebration among them at this wonderful gathering of different faiths. The angels were as pleased as she was because people had come not to convert each other but with open hearts in order to listen, to pray, and to celebrate, and not to justify their own religion or to claim that it was superior.

Lorna’s descriptions of angels as balls of fire parallels some of Hildegard of Bingen’s visions that we relay in this book while treating her writings on angels. Also, Hidlegard tells us that angels praise human work, and Lorna too makes many references to angels’ appreciation of the work that humans do—and might do if we were to wake up more fully—to contribute to the advancement of our evolution, one that takes us beyond reptilian brain I win/you lose dynamic to an authentic practice of our deep interdependence with one another and with all of creation.

I, Matthew, am very aware of Aquinas’ teachings that angels carry thoughts from prophet to prophet and that angels announce the divine silence and that angels can’t help but love and that angels learn exclusively from intuition, so as we develop and honor our intuition more we may well be running into angels along the way. And that they assist us in many ways including the unfolding of the process of evolution. When I met Lorna I shared some of these teachings from Aquinas and she very much seconded them based on her experience, and she has underscored them also in her books on angels. Great things can happen with the help of the angels.

How about you? Do you sense the angels among us? Do you encounter the speck of light (Eckhart called it the spark of the soul) that is within us all. If so, what is its message? What are we needing to learn? Hopefully this new version of this book will continue to ground angelology in a substantive discussion from both religious and scientific perspectives of what angels are busy trying to accomplish with us humans in these trying and significant times.

THE TRADITIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF ANGELS IN THE WEST

The traditional Western understanding of angels is much deeper and richer than the more individualistic modern angel literature would suggest, and far more concerned with community and our common development and our relationships with one another, God, and the universe. These values fit with a more holistic or organic understanding of nature and of society.

Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge common experiences that emerge in all world cultures and religions when we are living in an ever-shrinking global village. All cultures, including our own, acknowledge the existence of spirits at levels beyond the human. We call them angels, but 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 so we see that in their 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