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THE RETURN OF ANGELS

Mikhail Epstein

The figure of the angel is a key image in postmodern spirituality. The angel represents the purest form of God-presence in the absence of God himself. The angel is a peculiar form of the Divine, alienated from both God and Man, roaming in a mysterious expanse between sky and earth. Although it appeared that angels had left our world in the Renaissance, remaining only as a rhetorical figure in poetry and serving as a shibboleth for mystics, they have returned in the Postmodern age.[1] They are a kind of exquisite machine for the production of alienated forms of spirit. These forms are distinct from both the theocentrism of the Middle Ages and from the anthropocentrism of Modernity. In the religious tradition, the angel is a mediator between God and Man. In contemporary consciousness, the angel appears as the "other," the absolute "stranger," a pure mark of difference.

In recent times, a number of serious books and films have appeared, whose main heroes are angels. The most famous of these is the film Wings of Desire, directed by the German Wim Wenders,[2] where angels descend to partake of earthly existence, mingling with human beings and even becoming human. Hugging them and peering into human eyes, the angels smile their lucid and sad smiles, in which ubiquitous understanding borders on complete non-understanding. The key here is that the angels have no specific message, they are not trying to teach human beings anything. The film ends with a scene in which an angel named Daniel, having become a man, stands in a circus arena, firmly holding a rope on which his beloved acrobat Marion is flying, turning and soaring. The masculine awakens in the angel, the angelic is revealed in the feminine. As he descends, she ascends.

These new angels cannot be segregated neatly into light and dark spirits. Unsure of their own mission, they enter tortuous relationships with human beings, unable themselves to make sense of them.

The question is: why do artistic works dealing with angels and their simultaneously alienated and participatory relation to earthly life, elicit such mass interest? Why are they perceived as a revelation of the spiritual condition of our times?

In the Middle Ages, God stood in the center of the universe. In Modernity, Man came to occupy this spot. It is now clear that both theocentrism and anthropocentrism have negative aspects: the pyres of the Inquisition and the furnaces of Auschwitz. This is why it is now necessary to find an intermediary link in the spiritual hierarchy, one that is not so other-worldly as to deny the taste of earthly life, but not so worldly as to lose touch with a higher mode of existence. It is angels that occupy this intermediary zone. And this is why angels are at the center of the contemporary semi-religious consciousness.

One could suggest that the privileging of the world of angels in contemporary spirituality is in step with the development of the most 'alienated' layer of culture, namely the "technosphere." Telephones, television sets, computers, airlines and rockets are all angelesque. They represent the otherness of spirit in self-propelled physical bodies. The ultimate technologization and depersonalization of the social sphere reveals within itself theomorphic identities of "other spirits," called angels. Angelization is thus the newest phase of history, or rather of post-history, following industrialization, automation, atomization and other radical technological accomplishments of the modern age. At the end of the twentieth century, we are witnessing not simply the "soulless" results of technological progress but also the mysterious and trans-human forms of its strange, alienated spirituality. What the Modernist critics of Western civilization—Marxists, Existentialists, humanists and psychoanalysts —regarded as alienation and de-humanisation was, in fact, angelization, now revealed to the Postmodern consciousness. Thus the Modernist critique of a soulless civilization and nostalgia for either archaic and elemental, or classical and rational forms of culture, is replaced by the Postmodern admiration for the new, spiritually alienated angelesque forms of that civilization.

Following several decades of technological innovations, the supernatural and esoteric is making a come-back in the flesh of this world, as the sum-total of the world's estrangement from itself. Images separated from their originals, sounds divorced from speech, silver airplanes disappearing into clouds, are the hallmarks of our civilization on the eve of the 21st century. Were a medieval man to stray into this world, he would surely perceive it as the habitat of angels (whether dark or light ones is another issue). This angelesque sphere features super-human capacities realized in the form of automotive and self-propelled instruments. The world is covered with an invisible communications network. The telephone, with its ability to immediately transmit the sound of a voice from one end of the globe to the other, is reminiscent of those 'voices' that come from who knows where, or from the vibrating waves of the air itself. Even the computer, on which I am at this moment writing these lines, and which is capable of storing them forever in its memory, is not merely a machine facilitating physical labor. It is an angelesque body, accomplishing for me, in my place, the work of my mind, and showing me its fruits by conjuring them up from the invisible radiant depths of the disk.

According to ancient belief, angels were servants of God, sitting at His throne, singing hosannas to him. In contemporary angelism, as a rule, there is not even a mention of the Creator. Contemporary angels are messengers without a Message, sovereign spiritual beings who do not relate to any single supernatural will or Supreme Being. They are spirits in and of themselves, manifesting the plurality of the transcendental worlds almost in the same manner in which multiculturalism demonstrates the plurality of the social worlds. One can thus say that angelism is multiculturalism, or rather multispiritualism of the supersensible realm.

The interest in angels is symptomatic of the contemporary state of culture, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to be religious. The anatomy of the angelesque is at the same time an anatomy of Postmodern spirituality, which has escaped monotheistic religiosity but does not dare return to polytheism. The tortuous temptations of atheism and the tired insipidness of agnosticism having been overcome, Postmodern religiosity has left behind both the belief in the Almighty and the dis-belief in Him. What remains is communion with angels as pure spirits, representing a plurality of supersensible reasons and wills. Angelism is a sort of heavenly pluralism. It is the religion of Postmodernity, which affirms the multiplicity of equally valid and self-valuable spiritual pathways in place of a single truth and a single ruling canon. If the traditional religious outlook subordinated the diversity of the earthly world to the single will of its Creator, and if agnosticism celebrated the diversity of the earthly world as opposed to the presumably unitary and authoritarian Will beyond, the contemporary post-agnostic era has rediscovered the transcendental as the realm of pure difference.

Angelism is a new transcendental adventure of the Western spirit, seeking pluralism not only as an empirical phenomenon of cultural and political life, but as the ultimate revelation of the diversity of spiritual worlds. One could ask: if the idea of pluralism is so crucial to the contemporary West, why does it not return to polytheism, which worships nature's elements in their diversity? The answer is because neopaganism, which is presently making tentative inroads into religious practices, knows the locus and origins of the gods, whereas angelism is profoundly and principally ignorant about them. The difference between gods and angels, despite the grammatical plural which they share, is that angels are transparent and lonely, while gods rule the earth with glee and fury. Paganism sacralizes the originary forces of nature and can act in concert with ecological and neo-fascist movements. But it scarcely touches the nerve of the new religiosity, born of the death of God and not of His transformation into Pan or a Naiad. Polytheism cannot bring true satisfaction to the contemporary mind that quests for a trace of the Divine rather than its fleshy presence. The sumptuously carnal gods of paganism can satisfy only desparate fringe-groups and those who have fallen outside their own times, living in dreams about an 'archaic revolution' — that is, of a revolutionary return to the "Great Tradition."[3] To adulate the gods of fire or earth is a bookish project. The direction of neopaganism is thus backwards, into the world of children's book illustrations and the primal polytheism that has long since been thought through and discarded. Paganism does not look ahead, beyond monotheism and atheism.

Angelism, by contrast, is a post-atheistic and post-agnostic phase of religiosity. Angels are not gods, they are merely emissaries, who have forgotten who sent them, or who conceal that knowledge. This mission without a cause endows angels with a certain absent-mindedness and an alienated look. The contemporary individual recognizes himself in angels because he, too, has severed his connection with the ground of tradition and is flying in who-knows-what direction. Having left all points of orientation behind him, seeing the exhausted earth disappearing in industrial fumes, he has no sign-posts to direct forward, toward the fading outline of the One Creator. Is it possible, in such a situation of uncertainty, spiritual transparence and loneliness, to worship the all-powerful gods, to celebrate the play of elemental forces?

Angels appeal to the contemporary religious sensibility because, unlike the gods of old, they wander bodiless at the limits of the earth. From time to time, at their own risk, they transgress these limits, with a feeling of guilt and under peril of punishment. Angelism overthrows the metaphysics of God's presence. It cleanses faith of the inevitable attributes of knowledge, religious certainty and ontological authenticity. The origin of angels is unclear and can never be clarified, while God originates from Himself. Both the pagan gods and the God of monotheism are endowed with the fullness of a self-produced essence. Angels, by contrast, are representatives of some Other, which never manifests itself. An angel is a trace in the Derridean sense, a trace leading into a world beyond but not attesting or bearing witness to its reality. Angelism is thus the consequence of a religious deconstruction of the other world, which leaves its 'traces' or signifiers but does not reveal its signifieds. It sends messengers but does not reveal the Sender of the messages. Angelism is thus testimony to a profound groundlessness of the world. Even the forces from beyond this world, which are called upon to explain and substantiate it, remain without 'origins' or 'divine nature' and are 'secondary' and 'mediating.' Postmodernism thus languishes in this infinite circle of representability, a continuous annunciation without a Sender.

Rumors are passed on, but it is impossible to reveal their origin. Arising as rumors, they are by definition something 'already' heard. Angels are these rumors from the world beyond, but no one knows who started them, or what they correspond to, or who is behind them. Angelism can also be expressed as the construction of faith in the subjunctive mood, following the demise of faith in the indicative and imperative moods, which stood for what was essentially true and what ought to be. The religious mind in this hypothetical modality thus moves along the thin line separating thesis and antithesis, faith and non-faith, avoiding taking sides and finding their synthesis impossible. This narrow line between them is the mark of a gentle difference, not sharp opposition. Difference, in turn, generates angels, which constitute the pluralist choice of the religious mind no longer prone to dogma and infallibility.

In the Postmodern age, pure polytheism, monotheism or agnosticism are impossible. All that remains possible is the condition of possibility itself, embodied in the phenomenon of angels without God, messengers without a Message, and vague metaphysical rumors instead of Revelation reaching us from the beyond.

May 1994

Transl. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover