Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Surely one of the most interesting cultural phenomena of recent years is the proliferation, on television and in radio, of shows dealing with the so-called “paranormal.” Apparently, the world is filled with ghost hunters, many of them have television shows, and people love to watch them in action.

Of course, there is little doubt that many of these ghost hunters are hucksters. But the existence of these people, of their shows, and of their presumably large audiences, points to an interesting fact of our culture: people are starved for the supernatural.

One wonders how truly representative the braying spokespersons of the new atheism can be when more people probably tune in nightly to broadcasts of Coast-to-Coast AM than who have read, in sum total, the books of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.

Given that this situation obtains, it is lamentable that Catholic theologians for the past 40 years have been, by and large, silent on the existence of one important element of the supernatural in our midst: the unseen world of pure spirits. Nowadays, Catholic theologians are so unremittingly concerned with the eschatological that they have forgotten to teach people about the reality of this unseen world.

Liberation theologians politicize the eschaton, the end of times, telling us that salvation will come through socio-political revolution. They ignore the unseen world entirely. Many other theologians, even orthodox ones, are chary to discuss the intermediate state of the soul before final judgment, indeed, to discuss the immortality of the soul at all. And where is to be found any serious discussion of the angels?

Many theologians seem embarrassed to admit that the Church’s scriptural and liturgical heritage compels us to recognize the universal presence in and above our world of angelic persons.

We would do well to turn to Cardinal John Henry Newman to remedy this situation. Cardinal Newman was imbued, both by faith and by his innate poetic gifts, with a strong sense of the reality of what he called the “invisible world.”

From a young age, he recognized the presence within this world and beyond it of hierarchies of angels, created personal presences charged by God with ministering both to humans in history and to the entire cosmos. Also, he understood the religious seriousness that should accompany one who has a full sense of the reality of the immortal soul.

He pleaded with his Christian brethren, especially in his Parochial and Plain Sermons, to be open to seeing the whole world through the eyes of faith. This requires seeing the world as filled with angelic presences, and also of recognizing the ultimate seriousness of Christ’s revelation of the spiritual soul. Indeed, this latter, according to Newman, when it is understood in its full meaning, is the central doctrine of revelation.

Newman, then an Anglican vicar, powerfully articulated his understanding of the unseen world, which he later called his “Sacramental system,” in two early sermons: “The Powers of Nature,” and “The Invisible World.” The modernist Newman scholar, Hénri Bremond, was so taken with the latter sermon that he considered it to be one of the most important sermons in all of the Church’s history.

It is a clear and consummately artistic disclosure of the presence and power of the angelic hierarchies.

I would like in the rest of this post to provide a brief synopsis of Newman’s “Sacramental system,” focusing on what he says about the angels, which I draw verbatim from a book that I am writing:

In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, written later in life, after his conversion, Newman explains his understanding of the invisible world, his “Sacramental system.”

His reading of the Church Fathers, he tell us, confirmed him in this sacramental way of seeing. He relates to us that some portion of the teachings of the Fathers “came like music” to his inward ear:

…as if in response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal. I understood these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel.

Newman saw the whole of creation and history as a praeparatio evangelii, directly manifested in the Jewish prophets and indirectly manifested in the pagan prophets, whose bards too were inspired by thoughts beyond their own. It is especially in the school of the Alexandrian masters that Newman found resonance with this intuitive, poetic vision of the universe.

This “Christian Platonism” of his comes to the fore in his discussion of how near to his own thinking he found the Alexandrian masters to be in regard to the angels. For both Newman and the Alexandrian theologians, the angels are not only:

…the ministers employed by the Creator in the Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of Scripture, but as carrying on, as Scripture also implies, the Economy of the Visible World. I considered them as the real causes of motion, light, and life, and of those elementary principles of the physical universe, which, when offered in their development to our senses, suggest to us the notion of cause and effect, and of what are called the laws of nature.

In this same passage, Newman repeats what he had said in “The Powers of Nature,” a sermon that he had preached for Michaelmas day in 1831: “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.” Though he speaks in the Apologia of his cosmology of the angels in the past tense, a view that he had long cherished, there is no indication that he ever forsook his “Sacramental system.”

In his two sermons mentioned above, Newman endeavors to bring the modern congregation to whom he is preaching to a conscious awakening to the reality of the invisible world. In the “Powers of Nature,” he argues that if we are to see the world in its deepest, most religious significance, we must strive, through faith, to recognize that all created things are in the service of God. The world itself is a revelation of God, and all things have meaning in proportion to their glorification of God.

In “The Invisible World,” Newman shows the rationality of the scriptural view of creation. It is no less stunning, he argues, to our quotidian sensibilities to consider the angelic world than it is to consider the myriad unseen worlds that constitute visible nature, and even human society.

Even the physical and historical worlds are constituted by worlds within worlds, a known fact whose consideration should make it less strange for us to acknowledge the existence of the angelic realms. The physical world is constituted by animals whose nature we can never fathom, whose activities go largely unseen by us.

Indeed, their existence, as we experience it, though we can never fathom the depths of their brute natures, points to the reality of will and reason at the heart of nature. Reason and will are realities which go far beyond the limits of the scientific philosophies of our day to dismiss reductively.

History itself is constituted by human societies within societies, whose activities are unknown outside of their respective spheres. Each of us lives in a particular society or sphere: of poets, of scientists, of religious men, of scholars, of artists, of artisans. And we live in our respective spheres, going about our daily lives, as if other societies or spheres did not even exist.

Newman teaches that the invisible world of the angels is no less present to us than the worlds within our visible world that go unseen by us but that we know to exist. Through the light of faith we know that the invisible world of the angels is always present to us, in our own world, though it will only burst forth, into the open, in the future.

Yet, we can reasonably anticipate this eschatological breaking-in of the invisible world by considering it as analogous to the yearly emergence of the flourishing of springtime in nature, in which life and activity bursts forth from out of the frozen winter.

Just as in the change of the seasons from winter to spring the budding of the trees and the flowering of the earth transfigures the barren, wintry soil, so the eternal springtime that is to come will break through into our world. The veil that at present covers over the invisible world will be removed. The eternal kingdom of God, hidden within the world of our direct experience, will shine forth in Christ’s Second Coming.

“Shine forth, O Lord,” Newman prays in order to hasten the coming of the eternal springtime, “as when on Thy Nativity Thine Angels visited the shepherds: let Thy glory blossom forth as bloom and foliage on the trees; change with Thy mighty power this visible world into that diviner world, which as yet we see not….” We would all do well to join him in that prayer.