Читать книгу The Physics of Angels - Rupert Sheldrake - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
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 the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the universe was mechanized, and at the same time the heavens were secularized. They were made up of ordinary matter gliding around in perfect accordance with Newtonian laws. There was no room in them for angelic intentions. Angels have no place in a mechanistic world, except perhaps as psychological phenomena, existing only within our imaginations.
But this mechanistic worldview is now being superseded by science itself. Recent scientific insights are leading us toward a new vision of a living world. This is a key theme of my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK).
The old mechanical universe was a vast machine, gradually running out of steam as it headed toward a thermodynamic heat death. But since the 1960s it has been replaced by an evolutionary cosmos. The universe began very small and hot in the primal fireball, less than the size of a pinhead, and has been expanding ever since. As it grows, it cools down. More and more structures, forms, and patterns develop within it. At first, there were no atoms, no stars, no galaxies, no elements like iron and carbon, no planets, no biological life. As the universe expanded, all these things came into being somewhere for the first time, and were then repeated countlessly in many places and times. This growing, evolving universe is nothing like a machine. It is more like a developing organism.
Instead of nature being made up of inert atoms, just inert bits of stuff enduring forever, we now have the idea that atoms are complex structures of activity. Matter is now more like a process than a thing. As the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper has put it, “Through modern physics materialism has transcended itself.” Matter is no longer the fundamental explanatory principle but is itself explained in terms of more fundamental principles, namely fields and energy.
Instead of living on an inanimate planet, a misty ball of rock hurtling around the sun in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion, we can now think of ourselves as living in Mother Earth. The Gaia hypothesis puts into a contemporary scientific form the ancient intuition that we live in a living world.
Instead of the universe being rigidly determined, with everything proceeding inexorably in accordance with mechanical causality, we have a world to which freedom, openness, and spontaneity have returned. Indeterminism came in through quantum theory in the 1920s. More recently, chaos theory has confirmed that the old ideal of Newtonian determinism was an illusion. Science has been liberated from the idea that we live in a totally predictable and rigidly determined universe.
Instead of nature being uncreative, we now see it as creative. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace gave a scientific formulation to the idea that plants and animals are brought forth by Mother Nature herself. But for a long time, physicists denied that evolution had any part to play in the cosmos as a whole. They went on believing that it was an uncreative machine until the 1960s. But we have now come to see that creative evolution is not confined to the realm of biological life; the evolutionary development of the entire cosmos is a vast, creative process.
Instead of the idea that the whole of nature would soon be fully understood in terms of mathematical physics, it turns out that 96 percent of the matter and energy in the cosmos is “dark matter” and “dark energy,” utterly unknown to us. It is as if physics has discovered the cosmic unconscious. We don’t know what this dark matter and energy is, or what it does, or how it influences the way things happen.
Moreover, the evolutionary cosmology throws the old idea of eternal “laws of nature” into doubt. If nature evolves, why shouldn’t the laws of nature evolve as well? How could we possibly know that the “laws” that govern you and me—the crystallization of sugar, the weather, and so on—were all there at the moment of the Big Bang? In an evolutionary universe, it makes more sense to think of the laws of nature evolving too. I think it makes even better sense to regard the regularities of nature as more like habits. And the habits of nature evolve. Instead of the whole universe being governed by an eternal, mathematical mind, it may depend on an inherent memory. This is the basis of my hypothesis of morphic resonance, memory in nature.3
Nested hierarchy of morphic units. The diagram could represent, for example, cells in tissues, in organs, in organisms; or planets in solar systems, in galaxies, in galactic clusters.
Finally, instead of everything being explained in terms of smaller bits and ultimate particles, we can now think of the universe holistically, organized in a series of levels of organization in a nested hierarchy or holarchy. At each level, things are both wholes and parts. Atoms are wholes consisting of subatomic parts, themselves wholes at a lower level. Molecules are wholes made up of atomic parts; crystals are wholes made up of molecular parts. Likewise, cells within tissues, tissues within organs, organs within organisms, organisms within societies, societies within ecosystems, ecosystems within Gaia, Gaia in the Solar System, the Solar System in the Galaxy, and so on—everywhere there are levels within levels of organization, each system at the same time both a whole made up of parts and a part within a larger whole.
At each level, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I suggest that this wholeness depends on what I call a morphic field, an organizing field that underlies the system’s structure. Morphic fields are structured by morphic resonance. They have memory within them. Indeed, they are the bearers of the memory inherent in nature.
At each level of organization, morphic fields animate the organisms, giving them their habits and their capacity to organize themselves. In this sense, molecules, stars, and galaxies are alive, not just microbes, plants, and animals. And if they are alive, are they conscious? Do they have minds or intelligences associated with them?
Consider levels of organization such as Gaia, or the solar system, or the galaxy. If the fields that organize them are associated with spirit, intelligence, or a consciousness, then we are talking about superhuman consciousness. If a galaxy has consciousness, spirit, or mind, that mind is going to be inconceivably larger in scope than that of any professor at Harvard or intellectual in Paris.
Matthew: Yes. During the Newtonian-Cartesian industrial age, angels were banished. There’s no room for angels in a machine. There wasn’t even room for souls in a machine. And not only were angels banished, they were trivialized. Think of Baroque churches built in the seventeenth century, the same century that science and religion split. Religion took the soul, which became more and more introverted and puny, and scientists took the universe. In Baroque architecture, angels became chubby, cute, little babies that you want to pinch. What we need today is angel liberation.
For theologians it became an embarrassment for three hundred years even to mention angels. But angels are mentioned throughout the Bible. In fact, there are legions of angels. Whenever you talk about cosmology, the angels come out.
In the first century, when the Christian scriptures were written, the number-one question going around the Mediterranean basin was: Are the angels our friends or our foes? Everyone believed in angels in Greece and Rome; they were part of the accepted cosmology. But the question was: Can we trust these invisible forces of the universe that are moving planets and the elements? How trustworthy is the universe?
That’s so interesting because in the twentieth century Einstein was once asked, “What’s the most important question you can ask in life?” And his answer was, “Is the universe a friendly place or not?” It’s the same question. I tell my students that every time you see angels mentioned in the Bible you should think Einstein, because you’re dealing with the same issue. It’s the ultimate cosmological issue. Can we trust the cosmos? Is the cosmos benign?
In the numerous hymns to the Cosmic Christ in the Bible, there are allusions to the angels (see, for example, Romans 8.38-39; Ephesians 1.20-21; Colossians 1.15-16; Hebrews 1.3-4). The early Christians were responding to this buzz question in the first century: Christ has power over the angels and archangels, the powers and principalities. What are they saying? They’re saying, no matter what these invisible forces are doing with the elements of the universe, the smile of God as represented by the Christ means you can relax, be cool. The universe is a friendly place. There is a benign power over the angels: it is the Christ. The Cosmic Christ tradition is set up in the context of angelology because it’s set up in terms of cosmology.
Rupert: Even though the heavens have been secularized and mechanized, these questions have not gone away. A spiritual void was created when the religious imagination withdrew from the heavens, and because the scientific imagination is so impoverished, science fiction has risen up to fill the gap. The heavens have been peopled by the fantasies of science fiction writers. Some of these writers are talented and use the heavens as a projection screen for stories of interest and value. But most are banal; they’re not up to the job of giving us a real sense of the awe and wonder of the universe. Spaceships shifting into time warps, the evil empire, star wars, space cops, and aliens—these are hardly adequate representations of the cosmic intelligences. Yet science fiction is the main influence on the way most children first think of the heavens. The cosmological void caused by the expulsion and trivialization of the angels has simply been left to science fiction writers and UFO enthusiasts.
What an incredible loss this is! The conventions of science fiction were established in the context of the mechanical universe, before the cosmological revolution of the 1960s, and take little account of what has been discovered since. We now have a vastly expanded view of the heavens, with countless galaxies, quasars, pulsars, black holes, and 15 billion years of cosmic history. I think one of the things we need to do is recover a sense of the life of the heavens so that when we actually look at the stars, when we actually look at the sky, we become aware of this divine presence in the sky and of the intelligences and the life within it.
Matthew: Yes, today we are recovering the sense of the living earth, Gaia, and in many native traditions, Mother Earth, but it is equally important to recover the sense of the life of the sky, and to bring the two together. Jose Hobday, a Seneca woman who teaches with us, says that when native people dance, their knees bend to go into Earth, but their shoulders roll to pick up Father Sky energy, and it is the two energies together that give the whole complement of energy.
We have not only secularized the sky, we have shot our rockets out there and left our debris out there. We are now out there. But the universe is so much vaster and more amazing and constantly expanding than we had ever imagined. And we are not just talking space; we’re talking time. We are picking up light from billions of years ago. When we relate to the sky as well as to the earth, we’re talking about the resacralization of time as well as space.
Rupert: In the past, people had a sense that what happened on earth was related to what happened in the heavens. This is the tradition that is preserved in a living form today by astrology. But unfortunately, in the seventeenth century astrology split off from astronomy. Astrology gave meaning to the movements of the heavens and their relation to Earth. The planets still bear the names of gods and goddesses, like Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, who in the Christian world were regarded as angels. These planetary gods, spirits, or angels with their different dispositions and relationships affected life on earth.
In India it’s still generally believed that this relationship between the heavens and the earth is of vast importance. When people arrange marriages—and many marriages are still arranged—an astrologer consults the charts of the prospective bride and bridegroom to make sure they’re compatible. If they are, the astrologer will then select the time that they should be married. When I first started living in India, I was surprised to receive wedding invitations from Indian friends and colleagues stating, for example, that the marriage of Radha and Krishnan will be celebrated at 3:34 A.M., or some such outlandish time. And although Indians are late for almost everything, they got it right for such an important event. The tying of the knot linking the two together in marriage would happen at the exact moment when their union was in harmony with the heavens.
Elective astrology, choosing the right dates and times for important events, was still practiced in England up until the eighteenth century. And it was even practiced in the White House by President and Mrs. Reagan!
The relation of the heavens and the earth was very important in the old cosmology. But because astrology and astronomy have split apart, astronomers see no meaning in what’s happening in the stars; they see no life, intelligence, or consciousness in the heavens. Astrologers see meaning, pattern, and a relationship between what happens in the heavens and what happens on earth, but unfortunately most never look at the sky. I know very few astrologers who can actually identify the stars and planets. Astrology is done from books, or nowadays, from computer programs. I hope someone will soon start giving courses on astronomy for astrologers. I think it is important to bring these two traditions together again.
In many traditional cultures, myths tell of the way that the people are either inspired by or actually come from particular stars. For example, the Dogon in West Africa have a strong relationship with Sirius, the Dog Star. And to my mind it’s perfectly possible that by looking at stars and connecting with the intelligence that’s there, by forming a direct link to stars and their spirits, some influence or inspiration could pass from the star to the person consciously opening to it. This has certainly been the belief of people through the ages.
The implications of this tradition are staggering. When we look at the stars, we can consider the possibility not only that some may have planets around them with living beings on them, which I think very probable, but also that the very stars themselves may have a kind of life, intelligence, or spirit.
The stars are organized in larger units, galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars and has a galactic nucleus at its center with unknown properties. There are billions of galaxies in the heavens. And there may be a governing intelligence for each galaxy. And galaxies usually come in clusters, which may in turn have an organizing spirit.
Thus there may be hierarchies of organizing intelligences. Galactic clusters include galaxies; galaxies include solar systems; and solar systems include planets. And at each level there’s a wholeness, which is included within a higher level of wholeness. So we have many levels of organization, all of which can be thought of as associated with some kind of intelligence or mind.
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which some scientists like discussing, they usually concentrate on the possibility that intelligent beings on other planets will transmit signals by radio that are mathematically meaningful, such as the sequence of prime numbers, and from these signals we will be able to infer the existence of intelligent beings wishing to communicate with us.4 But it may be that communication with other forms of intelligence could be far more direct. It may not rely on radio transmissions. It may not need spaceships. It may not depend on UFOs. Direct mental contact with these celestial intelligences maybe possible through a kind of telepathy.
Matthew: For me, there’s no doubt that previous civilizations that we call indigenous knew much more than we do about communicating over large distances without technology. It’s there too in the lore of some of our Western saints who were psychics.
Rupert: And technology may in any case be of very limited use in communicating with intelligences in other parts of the universe. The SETI program, intermittently funded by the U.S. government, shows up these limitations quite clearly. The standard assumption is that the inhabitants of a solitary planet would broadcast radio signals of a mathematically meaningful kind in the hope of finding another intelligent species somewhere in space. This is what astronomer Timothy Ferris calls the lonely-heart scenario: “Lonesome, technically proficient species seeks same. Object: Communication.”5
Even if we were to receive and recognize such messages from a planet around a nearby star, communication would be very slow. The nearest star is about 4.2 light-years away, so even if we reply immediately, it will take 8.4 years between their sending a message and receiving our reply. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, so it would take 100,000 years for radio messages to pass from one side of the galaxy to another, and 200,000 years before replies could be received. What civilization would have a life span and record-keeping system adequate to communicate over periods such as that? And as for communication with inhabitants of planets in other galaxies, forget it! The nearest regular galaxy to our own, the Andromeda galaxy, is 1.8 million light-years away, so replies will take 3.6 million years to arrive. For galaxies a billion light-years away, replies will take two billion years.
If the transfer of thoughts can happen faster than the speed of light, then the whole question of interstellar and intergalactic communication looks very different, as it does when we broaden our thinking about intelligences elsewhere in the cosmos. Instead of confining our attention to minds of biological organisms, such as ourselves, living in technological civilizations, we can explore the possibility that planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters also have a kind of consciousness. This is where the traditional understanding and experience of cosmic intelligences may be able to help us, and especially the angelology of Dionysius the Areopagite, Hildegard of Bingen, and Thomas Aquinas.
Consider, for example, the possibility that the sun is conscious. This is not a very far-fetched idea, even in terms of the standard materialistic assumptions of orthodox science. Materialists believe that our own mental activity is associated with complex electromagnetic patterns in our brains. These patterns of electromagnetic activity are generally assumed to be the interface between consciousness and the physical activity of our brains. Consciousness is somehow supposed to emerge from these patterns. But the complex electromagnetic patterns in our brains are as nothing compared with the complexity of electromagnetic patterns in the sun.
The sun is a fireball of plasma assumed to be fuelled by nuclear fusion reactions. A plasma is an ionized gas, and it is highly sensitive to electrical and magnetic influences. The sun is the theater of extremely complex, rhythmic patterns of electromagnetic activity, with an underlying cycle about twenty-two years long. About every eleven years the magnetic polarity of the sun reverses: its north magnetic pole switches to the south, or vice versa; after another eleven years, the poles return to their previous positions. These reversals correspond with cycles of sunspot activity, great flares on the surface of the sun. This reversal of polarity is connected with complex harmonic cycles of vibration, swirling resonant patterns of electromagnetic activity.
If people are prepared to admit that our consciousness is associated with these complex electromagnetic patterns, then why shouldn’t the sun have a consciousness? The sun may think. Its mental activity may be associated with complex and measurable electromagnetic events both on its surface and deeper within. If there’s a connection between our consciousness and complex, dynamic electromagnetic patterns in our brains, there’s no reason that I can see for denying the possibility of this connection in other cases and especially on the sun.
If the sun is conscious, why not the other stars too? All the stars may have mental activity, life, and intelligence associated with them. And this is, of course, precisely what was believed in the past—that the stars are the seat of intelligences, and these intelligences are angels.
Matthew: I’m surprised to hear you say this. You are really sticking your neck out. I’ve never heard you speak of the sun and stars like this before. But ideas like these would have many implications for worship. We need to set our prayer circles in the context of this vast, alive, complex, and amazing universe, for example. Today we have the electronics to do this. To take worship out of the hands of little books and put it into a cosmology again. Then the angels will be present at worship once again.
The angel that has something to do with the incredible intelligence of the sun ought to be there. In our worship, we ought to be awakening the sense of awe—and awe includes terror—with reality. The universe is our home, and everything we’re talking about is our home. This is the temple of God, it’s God’s home.
Angels are so often depicted as light-beings reflecting the luminosity of the divine one. I know you were struck in reading Thomas Aquinas’s statement that angels move from one place to another with no time lapse. You said it reminded you of Einstein’s thinking about light. What about the idea of angels as photons, light-bearers?
Rupert: When Aquinas discusses how angels move from place to place, his reasoning has extraordinary parallels to both quantum and relativity theories. Angels are quantized; you get a whole angel or none at all; they move as units of action. The only way you can detect their presence is through action; they are quanta of action. And although when they act in one place and then in another, from our point of view time elapses while they are moving, from the point of view of the angel this movement is instantaneous; no time elapses. This is just like Einstein’s description of the movement of a photon of light. Although we as external observers can measure the speed of light, from the point of view of the light itself, no time elapses as it is traveling. It doesn’t get older. We still have light around from 14 billion years ago, from soon after the Big Bang, in the form of the cosmic microwave background radiation. After all that time, it’s still around and still going strong.
So in modern physics there are remarkable parallels to the traditional doctrines about angels, and I think the parallels arise because the same problems are being considered. How does something without mass, without body, but capable of action, move? Angels, according to Aquinas, have no mass, they have no body. And the same goes for photons: they are massless, and you can detect them only by their action.
Matthew: Does that mean that photons are immortal?
Rupert: Yes, as long as they are moving at the speed of light from place to place. But when they act, they are extinguished through their action, so in that sense they come to an end; they pass on their energy as they act. This, I presume, makes them different from angels.
Although there are parallels between modern physics and medieval ideas about angels, the aspect of modern science that raises the most interesting questions is the theory of evolution. In the Middle Ages, nature was regarded as fixed: the cosmos, the earth, and the forms of life upon it were not seen as evolving. In biology, the idea of evolution was first proposed in a scientific form in 1858 by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. In physics, the notion of cosmic evolution became orthodox in the late 1960s as a consequence of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Now we see everything as evolutionary in nature. This means that there is a continuing creativity in all realms of nature. Is this all a matter of blind chance, as materialists believe? Or are there guiding intelligences at work in the evolutionary process?
As far as I know, one of the first people to explore this possibility was Alfred Russel Wallace. After he and Darwin together published the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin went on to develop a gloomy materialism, which now pervades the thinking of neo-Darwinism, the orthodox doctrine of academic biology. All of evolution must have happened by chance and through unconscious laws of nature, and it has no meaning or purpose.
By contrast, Wallace came to the conclusion that evolution involved more than natural selection and was guided by creative intelligences, which he identified with angels. His conception is summarized in the title of his last book, The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose6 We hear a great deal about Darwin today, but we don’t hear much about Wallace. I am fascinated that these very different conceptions of evolution were expressed by the two founders of evolutionary theory; they show that evolution can be interpreted in quite different ways. If you are a materialist, evolutionary creativity can only be a matter of blind chance. But if you believe there are other forces or intelligences in the universe, then there are other possible sources of creativity, whether you call them angels or not.
This raises a problem that Aquinas and other medieval thinkers did not and could not deal with, namely, the role of angels in evolution. For example, as new galaxies appear, presumably the appropriate angels that govern the galaxy must come into being with the galaxy, unless all the angels are there, waiting at the moment of the Big Bang for their moment to come.
Matthew: And maybe angels are recycled, like those that hovered over the dinosaurs; they would otherwise have been out of a job for sixty million years.
Rupert: These are questions that were inconceivable in the Middle Ages. Our evolutionary cosmology does not have less room for angels, but vastly more.
Matthew: Yes. I feel very strongly that as a living cosmology comes back, the angels are returning, because they are part of any sound cosmology. Maybe the angels themselves will bring into our culture some of the imagination that we’re calling for.
In my book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ7 I coined the term “deep ecumenism.” For me, deep ecumenism is going beyond the level of world religions relating to one another in terms of doctrine and theological study papers, and entering more into their mystical traditions and doing prayer and ritual together.
All religious traditions that we know of have something to say about angels, spirits other than human beings. Buck Ghosthorse, a Lakota spiritual teacher, once said to me, “What you Christians call angels, we Indians call spirits.” This is common ground on which all our religious traditions can come together today, in deep ecumenism. Angels are not labeled Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic; they are beyond denominationalism.
Clearly, angels will be part of the movement of deep ecumenism. We are living in a moment in history when we as a species have to ask, what do we have in common? The boundaries are melting between cultures and religions. This makes it important to have a serious discussion of our tradition of angels in the West, not out of jingoism but out of knowing our own tradition well enough so that when we encounter angels and spirits from other traditions, we are not put off or threatened by them. Instead, we can look for the common links, the common truths among the traditions.
The shamanistic traditions of the world are particularly important in our search for wisdom today. Indigenous peoples lived and survived for thousands of years amid such travails as wild beasts and inclement weather and ice ages; they had to discover ways of creating community, healing, educating, and learning. There is a tremendous lore here that has almost been lost, but not entirely, and it has everything to do with spirits and with angels. When praying with Native American peoples, I have experienced remnants of it that fill a gap in my own religious experience. Our Celtic ancestors too had a well-developed theology of angels and spirit guardians.
Rupert: Yes. The awareness of nonhuman spirits is fundamental to the religious experience of practically every tradition, maybe from the time we became human. This may be the primordial ground of religious experience. The awareness of spirits comes before the idea of a single God. It’s significant that in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, as in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, there is the continuing presence of a multiplicity of spirits. Even in the most monotheistic of faiths, namely Islam, we find no denial of angels. This ancient strand of religious experience is not negated, but rather amplified by the later evolution of religions.
Matthew: Yet we have one moment in human history when these spirits were excommunicated, and that is the last few hundred years, the modern era. This shows what an amazing rupture and perversion has occurred in human consciousness in the last few centuries as we have attempted to divorce ourselves from our relationship to angels and spirits. I think this helps to explain the price we have paid in terms of ecological disaster, war, and greed. Perhaps the ultimate secularization of our relationships is to banish the angels to a place of ridicule or sentimentalism.
Rupert: Or reduce them to mere manifestations of our own psyche. Many modern people would say, “Okay, people experience angels. But these are just figments of their own imagination. Angels do not exist out there; they are subjective, within people’s minds.”
It’s not difficult for people to accept the subjective existence of angels. The big challenge is to recognize the objective existence of nonhuman intelligences, and that’s the challenge that faces us now.
Matthew: I also think we should extend deep ecumenism to science itself. What are the implications of today’s science for rediscovering the rich, deep, and broad appreciation of angels that we get from the Western tradition as represented by Dionysius, Hildegard, and Aquinas?
Rupert: This is very important, because what science now reveals to us goes far beyond anything that any tradition in the past has been able to glimpse. They didn’t have telescopes, or radio telescopes, or a sense of the vastness of the universe that science has opened up, or a knowledge of the variety of heavenly bodies, or the story of cosmic evolution. As we leave the old, machinelike universe and move toward a more organic sense of evolving nature, we need to ask what kinds of consciousness are there in the universe besides our own.
