I read your fine post. I think that the ressourcement theologian for you may be Louis Bouyer. See his “Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God.” In this book, he takes Newman’s angelology and runs with it. A Thomist who takes the cosmic role of the angels very seriously is Benedict Ashley. See his “Theologies of the Body,” which was written and published before the expression was made popular by JP II. He makes a strong argument for the scientific necessity of angelic presences in the cosmos.

You make the interesting point that pre-Christian cultures saw the world in a manner that was taken up into the dispensation embodied by the Alexandrian Christians, and that is also found in folk ritual among various Christian peoples. This insight, in fact, is one of the things that drove the Romanian-born scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, in his many studies: he wanted to recover this cosmic or folk Christianity. He sought to disclose its presence in the folk culture of his native Romania, and he saw analogies for it in all of the world’s cultures.

Eliade’s influence is all over Bouyer’s book that I just mentioned, though Bouyer fully Christianizes it. Pre-Christian and Christian cultures do not have a univocal understanding of divine gift, although there is certainly an analogical understanding of it to be found between them.

It would also be useful to look into Catholic culture itself to also see how this principle works. The Church had rituals for the baptism of bells and the excommunication of locusts. In Mexican families, prayers were employed that perhaps were borderline witchcraft but were deemed to be cures for such folk ailments as the evil eye and “el susto” (fright). These practices grounded you in the idea that there were workings in the world that you couldn’t see but could affect your behavior in negative ways.

One could ask whether restoring various Catholic liturgical and ascetical traditions without restoring a Catholic cosmological viewpoint is at all effective in the long run. As long as we see the cosmos as a bunch of dead floating rocks and accidentally animated carbon, how much better are we than the unbeliever, really?

My teenage child had a Catholic religious teacher inform her class that someday humans will be able to use 100% of their brains (you see she “claimed” that humans only use 10% of their brain power) and once we humans evolve to this point we won’t need our bodies! After hearing from my child about this “Catholic religious” class discussion in the car ride home, I asked did your teacher tell you where our “brains” will sit after our bodies are no more … and how the bodily resurrection plays out in this future scenario? Upon arriving home, the two of us sat down w/scientific information about “brain usage”, new age ideas, Catholic teachings on the resurrected body etc.

I had another Christian friend who lost her eldest son tragically write to me about how he is an “angel” now. There is so much confusion in the pews about the “paranormal” and a hunger to understand properly so one discern correctly.

Late last year I purchased two book with hopes to have the time to read them: Enthusiasm, by Ronald Knox and the other Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem. Perhaps some of my questions will addressed w/in their pages.

I look forward to your Part 2.