Mirrors of the Human: Angels in Iris Murdoch and Karl Ove Knausgård

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Abstract

While contemporary theologians tend to skirt around the field of angelology, atheist novelists have creatively used the angel motif to explore the human condition. In this article, we attempt to re-imagine the human by drawing on two such works, Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels (1966), and Karl Ove Knausgård’s A Time for Everything (2004). Engaging with these novels allows us to explore fundamental tensions in theological anthropology: immanence-transcendence, self-other, contingency-perfection, historicity-immutability, vulnerability-immortality, body-soul. As we will show, Murdoch and Knausgård, in different ways, offer a literary mirror confronting contemporary theology with a certain (theological) anthropological one- sidedness and invite a retrieval of angelology.

‘You will see heaven opened the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man’ (John 1:51, English Standard Version)

After Francisco Suárez’ baroque synthesis De Angelis (1620), theologians increasingly left angelology to poets, writers and artists.1 The present reflection on the contemporary significance of angels begins with an analysis of Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels and Knausgård’s A Time for Everything.2 In both stories, the figure of the angel does much more than convey a sense of myth and mystery. The angelic trope allows to consider fundamental questions regarding the nature of the human being and his or her place in the world. Somewhat ironically, these atheistic thinkers thereby continue the Christian tradition, wherein angels functioned as models for human life,3 and thus call us to reconsider the modern theological tendency to dismiss angelology as frivolous speculation.4 The figure of the angel, so our interpretation will suggest, is of direct relevance to questions regarding the nature of inter-human relations, the possibility of moral and spiritual development, and the grounds on which we can embrace our vulnerability, bodiliness and change.

A Knausgård

In Knausgård’s intelligent bestseller, a certain Henrik Vankel, who lives around the year 2000 in Norway, tells the story of Antinous Bellori, who is said to have written an unpublished study on angels in the 16th century. Through the pseudo-historical reconstruction of the life and work of this fictive person, there develops a profound theological discussion over angels in Scripture and tradition, including citations from classical theologians. The mood that

1 connects Vankel, Bellori and the angels is one of deep despair. In what follows, we briefly examine how the angel motif functions in this complex novel.

1 Bellori’s Critique of Spiritualization and Perfectionism

Knausgård presents Antinous Bellori as a contemporary of Newton, Pascal, Shakespeare, Bruno, Descartes and Leibniz whose ground-breaking ideas led to a radical shift in worldview.5 Bellori thus lives at a time when, in mathematics, the notion of infinity breaks previously established limits. The developing natural sciences, on the other hand, confront the human being with radical finitude and materialistic models of explanation. The immutable, static order gives way to a world in constant change. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, so Knausgård notes, is merely a later off-shoot of a paradigm that was developed much earlier – for example in the area of angelology, by Bellori. The story begins with the account of a strange experience. The young Bellori gets lost in the woods and, by the riverside, sees two angels entirely unlike the classical image of an angel. They are hungry, devouring raw fish; their fingers look like claws; one of them utters an unbearable cry of despair. For Bellori, this empirical observation of angels is the beginning of a lifelong scientific study. Basing himself on a critical reading of Scripture, Bellori publishes On the Nature of Angels (1584), which challenges the official angelology that considered angels to be purely spiritual, perfect beings,

powerful, radiant, blessed, individual personalities of various ranks, which occupy that place they were accorded at the beginning of time, perfect in their kind, immortal, without feelings, of pure spirit, inseparably one in heart and mind, blessed with everlasting peace.6

According to Bellori, this characterization of the angels in Bernard of Clairvaux’s De consideratione (ca. 1150) is the product of our human projection. Pseudo-Dionysios’ influential angelology in On the Heavenly Hierarchy (ca. 500), similarly, is seen to constitute an adaptation of the angel figure to the ideals of the antique Greek dualist paradigm, which valued the abstract over the concrete, the bodiless over the embodied, the spiritual over the physical, the immutable over the changing.7 ‘The system into which Pseudo-Dionysius organizes them is’, so Bellori,

perfect and harmonious… But if there is one thing that characterizes human nature, it is the fear of the small and ugly, the foolish and insignificant, and nowhere in history has this fear found a greater or more monumental expression than in the notion of God’s luminous majesty and the celestial hierarchy of the angels.8

While angelology thus reflects the human dream of a harmonious order that is immutable and, as such, under perfect control, Bellori puts forth an entirely different thesis. According to him, the angels are far from being eternal, perfect and spiritual. Rather, both they and God have undergone a radical historical process of change and degeneration. As Bellori points out, the angels’ mutability is suggested by Scripture, where God and His angels appear in concrete, historical, embodied ways, ‘with swords and fire’ (e.g., Ezechiel 1:4-28), ‘in human guise’ (e.g., Genesis 18-19 or Judges 6:11-22). Bellori considers it

2 confirmed by his own ‘empirical observations’ of hungry angels, even of an angel dying (1600). Knausgård adds to this the evidence provided by visual art. Seventeenth century art curiously begins to depict the Biblical cherubim, once the tremendous guardians of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:24), as funny, infantile figures – the putti. Overpopulating paintings of the time, these childlike angels manifest an important step in the reduction of the angel to the familiar, even the vulgar. With their disorderliness and frivolity, the putti can indeed be seen to ‘satirize their model, the heavenly hosts’.9 In this process, the angels also lose their halo – anticipating what Walter Benjamin indicated as the Modern ‘loss of aura’. In short, the angels increasingly became human, all too human: they undergo a kenotic process, through which they become increasingly perverse animals like ourselves.

2 Kenosis and Mutation: The Angels and the Cross

According to Bellori, the angels’ gradual and unbefitting humanisation constitutes a helpless reaction to their loss of purpose. It is because God betrayed his nature by leaving his throne in order to become, and die as, a human being that the angels have fallen into disorientation and despair. Bellori considers this ‘humanisation’ of God himself to begin as early as the Old Testament, pointing out for instance God’s regret of what he did in the great flood, as well as many emotional outbursts of divine sorrow and rage. Already then, ‘the divine was incomplete and not in balance’.10 God, Bellori considers Scripture to tell us, is imperfect, incoherent and confused. This reaches its culmination in the incarnation: ‘Is there any greater imbalance imaginable than the one incarnation brought with it? Is there any greater change?’, Bellori asks.11 The fact that ‘in Jesus Christ the divine became flesh and blood, heart and lungs, sinew and tissue’ signifies the upheaval of the systematic order theologians (wrongly) assume and seek out.12 God entered the world in a body. In a language that, for many postmodern readers, must sound all too theological, Bellori advances the claim that God’s kenosis, his self-emptying in Jesus Christ up unto his death on the cross, constitutes the fatal blow for the state of perfection that the angels embody. This insight comes to Bellori when he faces Giotto’s fresco The Lamentation of Christ in Padua:

The picture of a Christ who has just relinquished his spirit, as Mary kneels before him, while the angels above them seem to be breaking forth from the sombre heavens. Their movements are violent and expressive, they fill the sky with motion and drama, in [421] contrast to the lifeless Christ, the grieving Mary. The picture is condensed: there is redemption here, resignation, adoration, sorrow. It shows the moment when Jesus is most like us, he’s dying, he’s dying like a man, at the same time as he’s moving away from us, in an impossible movement, a reverse death, presence and absence at one and the same time, God and man.

The novel’s narrator, who presents the picture as expressing a mixture of the positive and the negative, continues:

What would Bellori have seen? He would have seen the angels. One of them closes his eyes, his mouth twisted in tears, as he clutches his face

3 with both his hands, fingertips to his cheeks as if about to claw himself. Another is pictured in a strangely distorted posture, the upper half of his body lifted as if in ecstasy. A third opens his arms as if in embrace or surrender. The angels’ grief is frenzied. […] God was dead. […] God had emptied himself into Christ and become man. And as a man he’d died. The angels alone remained, that was why they were insane with grief, and why their lives had altered so dramatically in the centuries that followed. God was dead on the cross, and the angels were imprisoned here.13

Against the background of God’s death, it is not, as traditionally assumed, the hybris (à la Lucifer) but the despair of the orphaned angels, which drives their process of degeneration, their slow fall. For more than a millennium after the Christ event, the angels were still able to ‘keep up appearances’. In this, they were supported by medieval angelology, which, as Bellori suggests, functioned as a sophisticated form of wishful thinking, in which the devastating consequences of the death of God (the Cross) were covered up.14 This interpretation chimes in with existing theories in the study of religion, which suggest that, by placing themselves in the gaps between paintings, or paintings and their frame, the baroque putti sought to cover up the underlying emptiness by drawing the viewer’s attention to themselves.15 On Bellori’s reading, this emptiness is the absence of God himself – an absence which evokes a horror vacui, a fear of emptiness, which the angels could ultimately not conceal and contain. Eventually, their despair caused their supposed immunity to the temptation of the terrestrial to give way. The angels increasingly sought solace in all things human. No longer anchored in God, they spent, so Bellori speculates, more and more time among human beings, and became increasingly subject to the laws of nature. Bellori’s study on the angels thus concludes: ‘The angels have fallen. They are out there somewhere’.16 As Knausgård points out, the omnipresent putti of the 17th century constituted the angels’ last attempt to regain their innocence – an attempt which only draws them deeper into a process of regression. They finally take on the form of seagulls, which in Knausgård’s wild fantasy were first observed in Norway, 1732. Fighting over garbage, these birds are, so the narrator notes, most similar to human beings. The fate of the angels (and of angelology with them) illustrates a larger movement foreshadowed by the terrifying emptiness that, according to Knausgård, characterizes the angelic gaze.17 It signifies a shift in worldview, away from the transcendent, and ever more deeply into a materialist immanentism and, ultimately, nihilism. The angels’ humanisation (or even ‘animalisation’) serves as a literary mirror for the human being’s increasing sense of contingency and hopelessness, as experienced also by the novel’s postmodern narrator Vankel himself.

B Murdoch

The question of what happens to the angels after the death of God is one that haunts also Iris Murdoch’s darkest novel, The Time of the Angels. An atheist herself, Murdoch shares Knausgård’s sense that, bereft of their old telos, the forces that once connected us with God are at risk of turning in on themselves and falling into disarray and debasement. In

4 Murdoch’s eyes, however, this does not lead to the pitiful irrelevance of these forces, for which the angels stand. On the contrary, Murdoch’s post-theistic angels retain considerable spiritual power and challenge our claims to autonomy by seeking to orient us towards transcendent Good.

1 Enslaving Idols: Autonomy without Transcendence

The Time of the Angels centers on Carel, a priest who has lost his faith in God and who weaves a demonic web of power relations among the inhabitants of his household. Carel proclaims that ‘the disappearance of God does not simply leave a void into which human reason can move. The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible.’18 As he sees it, the forces that draw us in the direction of illusions of the absolute are as alive as ever. Our insight into the death of God has simply left ‘the spiritual world […] scattered. There is nothing anymore to prevent the magnetism of many spirits’. Carel describes these spirits as ‘principalities and powers’, as gruesome ‘forces’ which ‘operate’ us and which ‘we do not understand’. For Carel, ‘we are the prey of the angels’, who call forth in us ‘angelic delusions’ that enslave us.19 These statements must be read against the background of Christian accounts of the angels and of Murdoch’s own moral philosophy. In the earliest Biblical literature, the angels are the creatures who safeguard God’s transcendence, the thrones and dominions, who form a first, lower level of transcendence that protects the higher transcendence of God himself.20 As the Christian tradition evolves, the angels increasingly function as helpers and, then, as what Anselm Grün has called ‘images of the deep and lasting longing for help and healing that does not come from within ourselves’.21 In all of these senses, the angels constitute mediating figures. As Murdoch shows in the figure of Carel, it is precisely as such that the angels may – in an atheistic context – appear as a threat. In contrast to Knausgård, Murdoch here challenges the assumption that atheism necessarily leaves behind a spiritual and moral void: unlike Bellori, Carel realizes that our desire for a transcendent Other, and the forces that speak to this desire, remain in place. We are still susceptible to being carried above and beyond ourselves, and into potential submission to external forces or realities. Yet Carel cannot but perceive this spiritual aspect of our humanity as a threat to the autonomy he believes to have gained in renouncing God. In fighting the angels, Carel thus bitterly fights his own openness to the unknown Other, to transcending himself. Carel’s abusive behaviour and eventual demise, however, serves to expose such a stance as both inadequate and dangerous. For, his attempt to forego any form of submission to a transcendent Other causes him to make himself the ruler of his world. Enthralled with sheer, contentless power and dominance, he consistently destroys the ‘separateness’ and dignity of others.22 This is epitomised in his sadistic sexual relationship with the servant girl Pattie, and in his incestuous relation with his daughter – a metaphor for ‘a love of one’s self- reflection, […], a deathlike emotional self-enclosure’.23 Leading to an immoral and unsustainable totalitarianism24 and self-obsession, and ultimately to a suicidal despair not dissimilar to that of Knausgård’s Henrik Vankel, Carel’s fight against the angels is unmasked as a dead end. Like Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, he is unable to fully extricate himself from the transcendent and has, instead, created a new God

5 in the form of his own ego. This not only demands its own submissive servants but also creates new, enslaving illusions. Carel, ‘the priest of no God’, ends ups deifying himself.25 On Murdoch’s account, then, atheism is sustainable only insofar as it holds on to the notion of a transcendent Other, which she identifies as ‘Good’. In contrast to the modern philosophical trend to ‘make good into a mere matter of personal choice’, this Good is, as Murdoch states, a principle that is entirely other than self, ‘above being, non-personal, non- contingent, not a particular thing among other things’.26 Though connected to ‘ordinary existence’, it is ‘above it in the position of its judge’.27 It is precisely with respect to connecting us with this newly conceived transcendent that the ‘angels’ retain an important role.

2 Icons of the Good: Melancholy and Orientation

Murdoch illustrates this in the figure of Eugene, Carel’s Russian housekeeper whose most treasured possession is a copy of Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity represented as the three angels visiting Abraham at the oak of Mamre (Gen 18). The story of Eugene’s icon is woven into the novel as a quiet subtext, continuously offering itself to the novel’s various characters as an alternative to Carel’s dark world. Though Eugene, too, has lost his faith in God, he ‘loved’ the icon as ‘a blank image of goodness from which all personality had been withdrawn’28. The mediatory power it has for Eugene entails several levels, one historical- biographical and one aesthetic-mystical. The icon firstly connects Eugene with a bygone world, with his only experience of real happiness and love – indeed, of the Good. For the first six years of Eugene’s life, the picture hung in his mother’s bedroom, until the October Revolution drove Eugene’s wealthy family into exile, dispersion and poverty. It represents the happy childhood years that form the core of who he is. Just as there is no full return to this world, so the Good itself ultimately remains out of reach.29 This at least seems to be suggested by the melancholy Eugene considers the angels to exude – as if they ‘knew that all was not well with their creation’ and ‘felt that they themselves were drifting quietly away from it’.30 Elsewhere in the novel they are referred to as ‘weary with humility and failure’ but nonetheless dignified and ‘graceful’.31 Yet despite this sorrow, the icon provides enough of a glimpse of the Good to inspire hope for, and aspirations towards, Goodness. On a second, deeper level, the angels convey transcendent Good also independently of Eugene’s historical-biographical context – an effect that is felt by (almost) all who come into touch with the icon. This is literally the case if one considers the Biblical scene of which the icon tells (something Murdoch does not do): during their visitation the angels at Mamre bring Abraham the good news that, despite her age, Sara will conceive a child. Murdoch herself focuses on the more mystical sense in which the icon is a harbinger of Good. With their ‘calm beauty’32 and glowing wings and haloes, the angels ‘embody the inassimilable otherness, the surplus of the other’ that is not imposed by our imagination but that points us to infinity.33 Their striking yet serene presence draws the viewer away from the destructive ego and towards the Good. They thereby order the viewer’s conflicting desires, and free him or her to lovingly confront reality as it really is, and thus to respect the other in their individuality. Eugene’s angels announce that there is an unambiguously good and life-giving world beyond the ego, beyond contingency and the here and now. The genuinely spiritual, yet

6 nonetheless also visible, concrete, material character of Eugene’s angels signifies an ability to connect the ordinary and the sublime, as well as self and other.

C Implications for Theological Anthropology

In deploying the figure of the angel in a post-theistic context, Knausgård and Murdoch give a new twist to traditional angelology. Both writers use the angelic trope to reflect on the effects the death of God has on human life. Does the death of God condemn the human being to sheer immanence, such that the angels become irrelevant mutants (Bellori and Knausgård’s postmodern narrator, Henrik Vankel) or dangerously deluding idols (Carel)? Or is there room for a new kind of relationship with the transcendent that the angels might help establish (Eugene’s icon)? Thus put, it becomes obvious that the fate of the angels is significant for the fate of the human being, and that both of these are tied to whether there is anything beyond what is immediately visible and empirically verifiable. With the angels falls, or rises, the legitimacy of our hopes for self-transcendence, meaning, and moral and spiritual growth.

1 The Death of God: Immanence and Transcendence, Autonomy and Alterity

In Knausgård’s view, the death of God reveals the illusory nature of all forms of transcendence. The degeneration of his angels signifies the consequent collapse of the intermediate, and mediatory, sphere, which facilitated the human being’s access to the divine. As such, it tells of a development that implies also the human being’s closing in on itself. The figure of Henri Vankel illustrates that the immanentising process undergone by the angels is undergone, in all its pain and vulgarity, also by human beings themselves. This process affects humans’ relations with each other and themselves. Cut off from the transcendent, Vankel is cut off also from others and himself. His sense of alienation causes him to flee human society to a lonely island. Yet it persists even there, in his solitude, insofar as he cannot feel himself other than through self-harming.34 Vankel’s consequent despair drives him to the brink of self-destruction. This post-modern condition is foreshadowed in Bellori : after his Padua experience, Bellori concludes that there is no meaning in anything, only the endless and blind struggle for survival, a never-ending process of change and mutation. ‘The earth was a living hell. Everything lived, and everything wanted to go on living. But why? It was blind, it couldn’t see itself, it just was and it wanted more.’35 As we saw, Carel’s more active attempt to fight the angels has similar effects. Constituting a fight for (an illusory) autonomy and against his intrinsic openness to the transcendent Other, it causes him, too, to close in on himself – an attitude symbolized by his stubborn refusal to receive the persistent visitors at his door, or to leave the rectory and visit his church, as well as by his systematic destruction of the individuality of the rectory’s fellow inhabitants.36 Surely also a form of compensation for the bottomless pit with which his (desired) immanentism confronts him, Carel’s idolatrous self-aggrandisement reveals itself to be unsustainable. It soon becomes incapable of concealing his actual and total fragility, helplessness and despair, and thus leads, almost logically, to suicide. In the figure of Eugene, by contrast, Murdoch illustrates the liberating and self- empowering effects of allowing the mediatory angels to connect us with the transcendent,

7 even where this is no longer identified with the Christian God. Despite having lost his faith in God, Eugene remains open to the guiding light of his iconic angels and, through them, becomes able to live his life calmly and virtuously, in the light of transcendent Good. Drawing him out of himself, Eugene’s angels enable him to truly see and love the people around him.37 In line with Murdoch’s philosophy as a whole, the angels help to establish an intermediary space, connecting self and o/Other without undoing their respective individuality. Knausgård, then, implies that, for both angels and humans, the death of God corresponds with an inevitable degeneration into pure immanence and contingency. Murdoch, in contrast, claims the continued relevance of a transcendent reality, and links the very possibility to survive as human beings to our willingness to orient ourselves to this reality, the Good. Angels are icons of the Good, safeguarding the space in which the nowadays much sought-after recognition of the O/other is mediated without crushing the self.

2 The Ascent of the Soul: Murdoch’s Plea for Perfection

In all of the above cases, the angels stand for that, at once internal and external, dimension, which opens the human being up to the world beyond the material: human desire, the spirit, and, ultimately, the soul. Knausgård’s and Murdoch’s various conceptions of the angels reflect the extent to which this dimension is still deemed alive, relevant, and fruitful in a post-theistic world. Implicitly, both novels signal the danger of closing off this spiritual realm. Knausgård does not advocate a continued belief in the transcendent but the nihilistic despair to which his account leads invites a quest for alternative perspectives. Murdoch’s exposure of Carel’s moral depravity and eventual ruin, coupled with her portrayal of loving and virtuous Eugene, amounts to a more explicit call for a transcendental turn. Murdoch utilizes the figure of the angels with moral philosophical intent. As mediators of transcendent Good, the angels connect the human being with what Murdoch considers to be the necessary foundation of human morality. Carel may be right that ‘the disappearance of God does not simply leave a void into which human reason can move’, yet nor does it simply expose us to immoral forces that we must single-handedly fight. Universal, unified Good remains real – and essential to human life. We cannot and, in Murdoch’s eyes, do not go about our moral and spiritual lives without an objective reference point, a standard of perfection that utterly transcends anything to be found within the contingent world: our experience of grades of perfections, every sense of failure, every attempt to try harder implicitly invokes such an absolute benchmark.38 Faint though this absolute standard necessarily remains, it is only through its mediators, symbolized by the angels, that it can become present to us at all. (This is all the more so the case where, as in Murdoch’s atheistic context, the transcendent cannot reach out to us.) The (real or symbolic) angels stand not so much for perfection itself (a notion we saw Bellori criticise), but for the possibility of establishing a connection between the immanent and the transcendent –which constitutes the human being’s only hope of escaping sheer contingency and chance with which Vankel and Carel grapple so desperately and impossibly.39 Constituting ‘an intermediary position between created and mortal mankind and uncreated and immortal deity’, the angels ‘establish the line, the continuum

8 between imperfection and perfection’40 and thus hold out the (no longer obvious) promise that spiritual and moral progress is possible. Though driven by her atheism, Murdoch’s use of the figure of the angels clearly resonates with the way in which the ‘six-winged seraph, the two cherubim of the Ark […] provide Bonaventure and others with ways of speaking about the ascent of the soul’ – a consequence, perhaps, of a shared Platonism.41 As Knausgård’s fallen angels illustrate our imprisonment in the material world (thus leading to a certain nihilism), so Murdoch’s persevering angels stand for the world’s continuing openness to the transcendent. In both cases, it is obvious that the reality of any space outside the self, or what some philosophers refer to as the ‘between’, is in fact tied to the reality of the transcendent.42 It is, as Murdoch argues, only in relation to a standard located utterly and absolutely outside of ourselves that we can hope to be saved from utter and absolute self-imprisonment. In contrast both to the figure of Bellori and the contemporary push for a pragmatic ethics, Murdoch, like Scheler before her, thus speaks out in favour of the ideal – or, as she prefers – of perfection as an indispensable moral philosophical concept.43

3 Preconditions for Love: Knausgård’s Kenotic Mirror

Knausgård’s deployment of the angels can be read as supplementing Murdoch’s angelic warning against the debilitating effects of neglecting perfection and its mediation, with a warning against the contemporary theological infatuation with vulnerability, dependency, historicity, and openness to change.44 Against a traditional tendency towards spiritualization, contemporary theologians tend to embrace the fore-mentioned qualities, which are often captured under the heading of the ‘body’, affirming them as fundamental indicators, for instance, of human relationality, and thus as the precondition for love. By contrast, Knausgård’s account of the kenosis of the angels, in which these previously inviolable, heavenly creatures become earthly, emotional, bodily, and desirous, throws a more dubious light on these immanent features. While contemporary theologians may recognise their own concerns in Bellori’s critique of spiritual perfectionism, Knausgård’s literary mirror contradicts the formers’ positive evaluation of a kenotic turn. The suspicion is that where life becomes all too earthly, it becomes unlivable. The angels’ mutability and dependency, for instance, is associated with an imprisonment in the chains of nature, culminating in their degeneration to seagulls. Bellori’s mounting sense of vulnerability serves merely to feed a naturalism and radical historicism breeding fear and despair, and centered on death, meaninglessness and failure. As we have seen, Vankel, too, is a desperate man, who feels compelled to flee into isolation and whose only strategy for feeling alive consists in self- mutilation. From a theological point of view, Knausgård’s narration of God’s self-emptying is of course flawed. It parodies Christianity by isolating God’s kenosis from God’s love and redemption. To this the theologian must respond that, apart from God’s loving desire to save the human being, kenosis is indeed indistinguishable from self-destruction. Knausgård’s implicit suggestion that the oftentimes one-sided postmodern concern with bodiliness and vulnerability leads to a radical nihilism is nonetheless relevant for contemporary theologians who – in reaction perhaps against an earlier, one-sided focus on the immortality of the soul – have tended to adopt such an emphasis in their accounts both of the human being and of God.

9 Knausgård’s vision of a loveless universe reminds us that without transcendence, perfection, impassibility, immortality, our very capacity to love is bound to wither. Murdoch also argues that it is only in relation to transcendent Good that we can love. Love must doubtlessly realize, or incarnate, itself in the body. But, as Knausgård’s and Murdoch’s reflections on the angels suggest, it can endure only on the basis of, and in relation to the soul, symbol of life eternal. In and through the motif of the angel, Knausgård, like Murdoch, thus brings our attention to the inadequacy of a one-sidedly immanentist perspective on God and the human being. The end of divine transcendence and immutability, so his narrative suggests, spells the gradual death of the angels and of the human spirit. For contemporary theological anthropology, this raises the question of how redemptive the turn towards vulnerability and dependency, contingency and historicity really is. These human features are surely important, and a return to previous, static, and spiritualizing definitions of the human being would be inadequate – as Bellori’s critique of the angels’ spiritualization, and Murdoch’s stress on the contingent world as the locus for transcendent Good, readily reveal. Yet current critiques of the essentialist anthropology of the past risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.45 The value and resourcefulness of the ‘bodily’ dimension rides on its being connected with its counterpart, the dimension traditionally indicated by the word ‘soul’. It is this connection, which the angels symbolize, and help enable. Knausgård’s and Murdoch’s angels thus urge the theologian to reconsider the transcendent and spiritual counterparts to the bodily realm.46

D Mediation and Grace: Towards a Theology of the Angels

As iconic mediators, angels connect body and spirit, time and eternity, immanence and transcendence and thus help establish precisely the continuum between these poles that is constitutive of human flourishing.47 Undergoing a one-sidedly immanentising, kenotic process, Knausgård’s angels are no longer capable of such mediation. Their demise spells the fate also of the human being. Murdoch’s retrieval of the angel as a turn to transcendence may, at first glance, seem more theologically viable. Yet her angel figure, too, is truncated. Where Knausgård’s angels move only downwards, Murdoch’s move only upwards. The latter view contradicts the Christian emphasis on God’s kenosis, which Knausgård is nonetheless right to stress. In different ways, Knausgård and Murdoch thus undermine the dynamism contained in the image of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:12; John 1:51) by isolating the angels’ ascent from their descent and vice versa.48 This divorce is illustrated by the two above-mentioned excerpts from Knausgård’s novel on Giotto’s Lamentation of Christ, which display a crucial tension between the narrator’s initial description of the image (‘there is redemption here, resignation, adoration, sorrow. … presence and absence at one and the same time, God and man’)49 and what Bellori is reported to have seen, standing in front of the fresco. For Bellori, there is only darkness and despair, kenosis without any perspective of ascent and glorification. Paul’s famous kenotic hymn is truncated, as it were – Philippians 2:6-8 (‘emptied himself to the point of death’) without 2:9-11 (‘Therefore God has highly exalted him…’). A theological reading of the scene, by contrast, entails an act of faith that the last word about the cross is not the ‘death of God’, but the resurrection, proclaimed by the angel at the empty tomb as a

10 victory of God's love (Mark 16:6). Only in this light is the human condition no longer to be fled, and can vulnerability and change be embraced. A theological critique of Murdoch’s view, similarly, points to the fundamental impasse of her Platonism: how is it possible to orient our desire to the Good, which, being impersonal, does not reach out for us? Whereas Eugene is said to love the angels as ‘a blank image of goodness from which all personality had been withdrawn’,50 in a Biblical-theological perspective the angels testify precisely to the personal nature of reality. In this regard it is significant that Murdoch nowhere explicitly refers to the visit of the Lord to Abraham and Sarah, the scene to which Eugene’s icon alludes. Murdoch’s impersonal Good does not send messengers and leaves humankind to itself and its own striving. The motif of the Annunciation would fundamentally reorient Murdoch’s plea for perfection: the Good, unattainable in itself, comes to us. In order to prevent our longing for the good from turning into a pathological perfectionism, a theological view recalibrates perfection as a completion not to be accomplished, but to be received. Angels teach that Christian perfection is not an achievement, but that it consists in the grace of being perfected. Separated from divine love and grace, Knausgård’s and Murdoch’s respective emphases on kenosis and perfection illustrate the risk of the angelological paradigm becoming oppressive and destructive. Nevertheless, our theological reading of both philosophical novels is fruitful in calling theologians to re-envision the angel as a figure who evokes the dynamism of descent and ascent that characterises every authentic process of becoming human, and thus to consider what the angelic work of mediation might look like.51

11 1 Cf. D. A. Jones, Angels: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For an approach to the arts, see Y. De Maeseneer, ‘Un ange passe… A Conversation between Theology and Aesthetics: the Case of Jan Fabre’, Literature and Theology 17 (2003), 374-387; this article can be read as a contrast perspective to the present one. 2 I. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (London: Vintage Classics, 2002) (first published 1966); K. O. Knausgård, A Time for Everything (New York: Archipelago, 2009) (ET of En tid for alt, Oslo, 2004). 3 Cf. J. Duhr, ‘Anges’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. I (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937), 580-625, pp. 621-623. 4 As an exception to the rule: J. Ev Hafner, Angelologie (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010). The general theological neglect stands in contrast to the philosophical fascination for the angel figure. Cf. M. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel (New York: SUNY, 1994); G. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 144-166. 5 Cf. Knausgård, 30-33. 6 Quoted in ibid., 33. 7 Ibid., 48. 375-376. 8 Ibid., 377. 9 Hafner, Angelologie, 34. 10 Knausgård, 419. 11 Ibid., 394. 12 Ibid., 402. 13 Ibid., 420-421. 14 Art historians will notice that the shift in iconography of the angels is parallel to the emergence of expressive images of the suffering Christ, after a millennium of glorious Christ figures. 15 Hafner, Angelologie, 34. 16 Knausgård, 404. 17 Ibid., 30-33, 416-417, 424, 478. 18 All quotes in this paragraph: Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 171. 19 Ibid., 172. 20 Hafner, Angelologie, 21. 21 Quoted in ibid., 27. 22 I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 64. 23 T. Jackson Rice, ‘Death and Love in Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels’, Critique, 36:2 (1995: Winter), 130-144, p. 136. 24 On ‘the Totalitarian Man’ of Sartrean existentialism, see I. Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, ed. P. Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 268-270. 25 Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 168. 26 I. Murdoch, The Unicorn (London: Vintage Classics, 2000), 100; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 38. 27 Ibid., 479. 28 Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 54. 29 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 91. 30 Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 52. 31 Ibid., 173. 32 E. Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982), 70. 33 T. Bényei, ‘Angelic Omissions: Iris Murdoch’s Angels and Ethical Criticism’, European Journal of English Studies 7:2 (2003), 151-163, p. 162. 34 Cf. Knausgård, 494-495. 35 Ibid., 422. 36 Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 3, 17, 30, 77 etc. 37 See ibid., 233-234. 38 See e.g. Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 23, 27f; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 430, 427. 39 Ibid., 250. 40 Jackson Rice, ‘Death and Love’, 139. 41 D. Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 201. 42 Cf. W. Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 43 Cf. M. Scheler, ‘Christian Love and the Twentieth Century’ in On the Eternal in Man (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 359-402, p. 362. 44 Cf. Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Y. De Maeseneer et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). The Leuven research group Anthropos asked all authors to sketch the key challenges for developing a new theological anthropology on the basis of the recent literature. A.J. Godzieba focused, for instance, on ‘bodily particularity’; M.A. Gonzalez and R.P. Carbine on culture, praxis and historical context from the perspective of feminist, Latino and black theology. Moral theologians like S.J. Pope and C. Deane-Drummond emphasized the close relationship between the human being and other animals. In his final reflection (pp. 183-193), D. G. Kirchhoffer summarized the pressing questions in terms of ‘relationality’, ‘anthropocentrism’ (ecology), ‘historicity’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘language’ (culture). In light of our experiment in theological anthropology in the footsteps of Murdoch and Knausgård, however, this no longer seems as evident as we thought during the editing process. 45 Cf. A. James, Reading Meister Eckhart for Theological Anthropology: Toward the Inclusion of Intellectual Disability, unpublished dissertation, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, 2013, 74-82. James analyses M. Haslam’s A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Being as Mutuality and Response (New York, 2011). From a philosophical perspective: A. Visala, ‘Imago Dei, Dualism and Evolution: A Philosophical Defense of the Structural Image of God’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 49 (2014), 101-120. 46 Cf. The Soul Conference organised by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy (Nottingham), St. Anne's College, Oxford, 28 June-1 July 2013. 47 Murdoch’s perspective runs contrary to 20th century political theologians like J. B. Metz, who, inspired by W. Benjamin present the angel as figure of discontinuity. Cf. B. Wunder, Konstruktion und Rezeption der Theologie Walter Benjamins. These I und das “Theologisch-politisch Fragment (Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 1997). 48 Cf. S. Bulgakov, Jacob's Ladder: On Angels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 49 See supra, A.1. 50 See supra, B.2. 51 Cf. E. Falque, God, the Flesh, and the Other. From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), part III.