additional lecture material
A RUMOR OF ANGELS

Almost forty years ago sociologist Peter Berger brought out a book with the title A Runor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural.  Berger was one of the writers I encountered while in my graduate studies, and his approach greatly influenced how I would come to talk about religion in my classes once I began my college teaching.  At that time the counterculture had hit, and one aspect of it that I followed through in a series of articles and then several books was the revival of a new orientation toward the supernatural, including the desire for a more personal experience of supernatural realities than was expected in traditional religious institutions.  Ultimately I found myself insisting, as had William James in writing about Spiritualism at the turn of the twentieth century, that experiences could be "real" to the one involved but what they actually were in themselves was always a matter of interpretation. 

As we come to the last part of the course I want to return to a particular type of experience that has been an enduring part of religious legend in both Asia and the West.  This would be the notion of an encounter with supernatural entities taking on a physical form.  While on a death fast in search of enlightenment, Gautama is tempted by Mara, a jealous demon who cannot permit a mere human to aspire to a state of awareness that was beyond his own capacity.  In the Gospels Jesus retreats to the desert after his encounter with John the Baptist and is similarly tempted by Satan.  In the Torah we find Abraham instructed by supernatural entities who act as messengers (translating the Greek angeloi), his nephew Lot advised by other such messengers in human form to escape Sodom before its destruction, and his grandson Jacob involved in a wrestling match with another such messenger who then renames him Israel.  Again in the Gospels (as well as in the Qur'an) the angel Gabriel comes to the woman who will be the mother of Jesus to ask her consent to a miraculous conception.  In the Qur'an again it is Gabriel who will provide Muhammad with the teachng that allows him to become the final prophet after Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

One thing common to all these stories is that ontologically (meaning, as a type of entity) humans and angels are absolutely distinct. In the Abrahamic vision human beings might have immortal souls but these did not preexist their definitely mortal bodies.  Medieval theologians might debate the degree to which angels were intrinsically physical (this was the basis for the somewhat whimsical debate topic of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin), but there was no question about angels being completely superior to humans, with "good" angels as heavenly courtiers and "bad" or fallen angels as condemned to eternal punishment although still allowed to manifest themselves to test humanity..  This was reinforced through artistic depictions of very muscular angels with the anatomically bizarre characteristic of having both arms and wings.

In the eighteenth century, however, there was also to be a drastic redefinition of the very concept of an angel.  In Scandinavia Emanuel Swedenborg presented a new concept.  As the Swedenborgian Church explains it: "We believe that people are spirits clothed with material bodies. At death our material body is put aside and we continue living in the spiritual world in our inner, spiritual body, according to the kind of life we have chosen while here on earth."  Swedenborg, then, is the basis for the popular image, reinforced in the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life, that human beings can become angels after death.

In the United States the Spiritualist movement elaborated on the idea that surviving spirits continued to enjoy a type of physical existence in a place called Summerland.  Joseph Smith, who claimed to have been guided by the angel Moroni in his finding of the golden tablets that would be the basis for the Book of Mormon, also closed the gap between angels and human beings by seeing God the Father and God the Son as both having immortal physical bodies with the assertion that this was also the destiny of human beings, who already had existed as spirits before being born into mortal bodies, to become like them after death.  

A belief in angels can be comforting, as in the thought that each individual has an angelic guardian.  Similarly, a belief in fallen angels out to deceive humanity can be  comforting in that it provides an otherwordly explanation for why bad things can happen to good people.  Even more, the idea that the problems of our present human existence can be explained through events in earlier lifetimes (the classic view of karma in Indian thought, asserted in a new way by Scientology's understanding that we are thetans now caught up in human form) allows a sense of meaning that now, perhaps more than ever, is what many individuals claim to be looking for in turning to religion.