The Sin of Angelicism Revisited

THE SIN OF ANGELICISM REVISITED ANGELS HAVE FALLEN, theologically as well as philosophically, on hard times. Thus, for Paul Tillich they are structures rather than beings, "...concrete-poetic symbols of the structures and powers of being." 1 For him they are not personal beings at all, but "...supra-idividual structures of goodness and supra-individual structures of evil. Angels and demons a;re mythological names for constructive and destructive powers of being..." 2 There are various reasons why angels have fallen, theologically , on hard times. For example, one of the reasons for the theory of angels in St. Thomas Aquinas is to provide an analogue for the sort of existence and knowledge enjoyed by the disembodied soul. Indicative of this fact is that about a third of the fifteen questions in the appropriate section of the Summa Theologiae are devoted to angelic knowledge: what knowing would be like without sensation.3 However, contemporary theologians tend to speak less of the immortality of the soul and more of the resurrection of the body. They tend to dispense with the notion of the soul as a vehicle of personal identity between the death of the individual person and the general resurrection.4 The last major philosopher to consider angels within the 1 Systematic Theology (University of Chicago Press, 1967) I, 260. 2 Ibid., II, 40. 8 Like the angels, the human soul will know through divinely imparted species. ST I, 89, 8. •Cf. Oscar Cullmann, lmmortaUty of the Soul or Resurrect~on of the Dead?, (London: Epworth, 1958). Cf. my "The Problem of the Soul in Contemporary Thought," American Benedictime Revi~w, 19 (1968) 24-81. Similarly, although the Vatican II document "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem World" does speak of man's soul and of its immortality, the general orientation of the philosophical anthropology in this document is hardly in this direction. Documents of Vatican II (New York: Guild, 1966), p. 212. 441 442 THE SIN OF ANGELICISM REVISITED context of his thought in a thematic way would seem to have been Kant. In his Lectures on Metaphysics he insists that " The spirit world constitutes a special, real world; it is an intelligible world, which must be distinguished from the sensible one." 5 Even in the philosophy of his critical period Kant allows for the existence of angels as noumena, as things-inthemselves , problematic but in no way self-contradictory.6 He even describes the sort of knowledge they would have, namely intellectual intuition.7 There are reasons why Kant takes angels into serious philo- · sophical account, and not simply his pietist Lutheran upbringing . He felt obliged to reject the spirit-world view (Pneumatologie) of Emanuel Swedenborg, namely that manhaving -reason should be able to see in his reason beings-havingreason , that is, angels. This rejection surely plays a role in Kant's denial of intellectual intuition for man.8 Nevertheless, •Ed. Politz, 257. 6 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 310. 7 " For we cannot judge in regard to the intuitions of other thinking beings, whether they are bound by the same conditions as those which limit our intuition and which for us are universally valid." K.d.r.V., A 27, B 43. It is interesting to note in an earlier work, " Triiume eines Geistersehers (1766), directed against Emanuel Swedenborg, that although Kant has no difficulty rejecting the notion that angels could somehow be present to our outer senses (Werke in seeks Biinden, I, 950), at least in this work he does not have a solid reason for rejecting a possible " inner conjunction with the spirit world " in inner sense (imdJ., p. 975). By this time Kant had not yet developed time as the form of inner sense, and with it rejected any form of intellectual intuition for the human understanding. (It is instructive to note that !the majority of the references to intellectual irltuition are in the second edition of the first Critique. Cf. K.d.r.v., B XXVII, B XL, B 72, B 159). 8 Kant's animadversions to Swedenborg's clairvoyance are clearly stated: in mundo non datur saltu.~, non datur hiatus. There is a principle of continuity in appearance which forbids any...