Angels: Heavenly Schematics

I am still circling the subject of angels but now would like to enlarged upon the concepts I first outlined in the last post on this subject (“Angels: A Short Overview”). There I proposed two sharply distinct views of angels. We could call these Western and Eastern. The Western view represents a highly-developed cluster of philosophical conceptions; the Eastern provides a very sophisticated image but much less developed in philosophical terminology—perhaps of necessity; the Eastern is much more dynamically complex.

The western view is dominated by the concept of Creation. In that conception God creates a universe. It has a hierarchical structure. Seen from above God is the summit, the angels are a lower order; they are creatures of pure spirit. Beneath that level are humans, composed of spirit and of matter—indeed these two components are considered permanently fused by God’s choice so that the strictly human must always be both. Hence, after the Judgment at the End of Time, we shall have resurrection bodies. Beneath that level come animals, plants, and non-living matter. We can also see this hierarchy from below. To do so we can turn to the poetic formulations of Genesis. There matter is made first; heaven and earth are created, the darkness illuminated. God next makes lower forms, finally man. Angels are missing in this view, but the presumption might be that the creation of “heaven” also includes the creation of angels. The angels then later appear as messengers of God. Here, of course, I’m tracing the Aristotelian, Thomistic formulations in which the two fundamental realities are unformed prime matter and immaterial form.

While the hierarchy is pleasing, the cosmology altogether lacks any kind of justification for matter, as such, except as the wax in which lower orders (not the higher) may be made visible by the impress of form. Matter-form duality admirably fits Aristotle’s concept of substance, but Aquinas has problems maintaining a rationally pleasing hierarchy as he moves on up to the angelic level. If substance is matter-form (hylomorphic), are angels then insubstantial? To get around this problem, Aquinas introduces the notion that angels are also marked by a dual composition; their essence is “substantiated,” as it were, by existence. Aquinas separates essence from existence. God, finally, in Aquinas’ view, is a Being whose essence and existence are one and the same. All I can do here is confess to the opacity of my own intellect. My intuition will not follow me into this thicket. Nothing resonates.

An emanationist schematic of reality pleases me much more—although it has its own challenges. To express that model in static terms—just to make it visible—we might say that reality manifests in degrees of subtlety, from the most gross to the most subtle. But at every level a duality exits—call it matter-form, passive-active, receptive-creative, body-soul, what have you. We might picture each being, substance, or entity as a temporary fusion of two distinct aspects of reality that, in the Ultimate, are one. These two core realities cohere less and less as we descend (or move away) from the Source (God) and appear more and more complexly fused as we ascend to (move toward) the Ultimate. Within the Ultimate the duality disappears into Pure Act. At the other extreme the duality also fuses, but in the sense of “locking up,” thus losing actuality and becoming, at the extreme, the closest imaginable something to non-existence. Here images of Satan, as depicted by Dante in the deepest pit of hell, produce an interesting picture to contemplate.

Still holding the static view, in this schematic angels may be seen as higher entities, thus more complex and unified beings. Humans as simpler and more fragmented entities—but on a much higher level than animals or inorganic matter. But everywhere, at every level, the dualism holds. At every point, from tiniest to greatest, there are analogues to body and to soul. Thus even the minutest subatomic particles of matter have a “pilot wave,” to cite Louis de Broglie and the elaboration of his notion by David Bohm. As above, so below.

The emanationist schematic, which is more akin to the Eastern philosophical traditions, is, however, a dynamic system. That is where, viewed from a Western perspective, problems appear. What we call creation is, in this view, a continuous outflow of divine substance. It “descends” in a way. It becomes ever more coarse as its “distance” from God increases. The problem? The problem is that spatial concepts are required to understand this model. But so does, of course, the Western notion of creation, but we are just more used to that one and rarely bother wondering if God first had to create a “space” for his creation. The Kabbalists (Isaac Luria, for instance) did actually wonder—and proposed that God’s first act was to create a vacuum. The scheme also appears to be a species of pantheism—but that need not be so. We need only make two assumptions to redeem it. One is that this outflow is a circulation. The other is that, on it ascent back to the One, the creation has achieved a higher degree of perfection. A third assumption might be that the creation itself, in the persons of the souls God has created at the outset of the downward flow, participate in the creation by using their free will—or don’t. This freedom, of course, only resides in one of the two core “elements” that make up creation, not in the other. That one is what we call soul, the entity. The other, by contrast, always follows strict laws—which even the free soul cannot suspend. Thus what we call a miracle consists of the lifting of matter from a lower to a higher level, not the violation or suspension of God’s law at all.

In this dynamic model, beings are perpetually descending and ascending, some outward bound to learn or to experience limitation, some inward bound to realize a higher form. Both the down and upward trajectories are spiraling structures—away from unity and back toward it. In this view separate creation of angelic orders, of humans, of animals, of plants becomes unnecessary—which would please Occam. The creation begins to take on a vastly more elegant form. And, pleasingly, what we see through the narrow lens of science appears in harmonious concordance with what our intuitions of the great whole whisper to us in the silence.