Dad,
We’re really getting somewhere here. As a professional nerd, I often shuffle around in poorly-lit ancient dungeons called “libraries.” I do this because we in the Nerd Community have a competition to see who can find the smelliest book, written by the author with the funniest name. So it gives me great satisfaction to say that our conversation this week reminds me of an ancient author by the name of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. This translates into English as “The Artist Formerly Known as Dionysius the Areopagite.” But I think he just went by Di.
Anyway, my guy Di has this idea that there are higher and lower ranks of angels—sort of like how frequent flyers can get bumped up to a fancier section on the airplane, closer to the front. The workaday angels that bring messages here to Earth are the humblest kind, the ones who fly coach (and boy are their wings tired). There are also economy-class angels called “principalities, powers, and dominions,” and first-class premium select angels called Cherubim and Seraphim. They sit at the front of the plane, i.e., closest to God.
And what’s really interesting is that these Seraphim know God directly in a way the theologians can’t: “they are perfect not because of an enlightened understanding which enables them to analyze the many sacred things,” but because “they are full of a superior light beyond any knowledge.” They behold God, so they don’t need any explanation of him. To use an analogy: you and I know that there is a place called Beijing, but people who live there don’t even need to be told that sort of thing: it’s implicit in their direct experience.
We humans long for that kind of face-to-face knowledge—of God, of ultimate truth, of the world around us. But unlike the Seraphim we have to get it at a distance, reflected through the experience of our senses. We have to get our knowledge of the sacred mysteries “through a glass darkly,” approaching inside knowledge by way of outside experience.
Technology and science are all about the surface of things: what we can build, what we can predict, what we can observe. This is what Greeks called “appearances,” phenomena. Some of the greatest scientists, like Isaac Newton, thought that we could use the phenomena of the physical world to reason about the underlying mind that built it. But instead we are always tempted to stop at the surface, to imagine that by gaining power over matter we can dominate or dismiss the things of the spirit.
We need to turn that on its head. It’s the spirit that has to rule the flesh. You write that “the baseline of our humanity” is “about making the connection between spirit and spirit.” That means putting the inside first, rather than the outside. It means judging our outward engagement with matter by our inward knowledge of the soul. And hopefully it also means getting a little more legroom on the plane.
Love,
Spencer
I disagree with Di on the perfection of angels. I had once heard, from someone far more knowledgeable on the Bible than me, that angels don’t have free will. I immediately disagreed there, as well. And this goes back to my point on Dionysus. If angels were perfect, and if they had no free will, how did they fall? How did they rebel against God and be cast out of Heaven?
Further, if Lucifer was cast out, how did he stroll back in and make the wager with God over Job?
Things that make you say, “Hm…” 🤔
“The Spirit-filled, prayerful Christian actually possesses the mind of Christ, so that his reactions to the external world are the same as Christ’s”
-A.W. Tozer