Abstract
Andrei Pleşu, On Angels: Exposition for a Post-Modern World, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform: North Charleston, SC, 2012; 280 pp.: 9781478132219, £12.45/$17.96 (pbk)
Angels are making a comeback. In the days of the ‘death of God’, angels died too, but now they seem to be returning. Not long ago David Albert Jones published a delightful little book, Angels: A History (2010); serious works on angels in Christian thought are appearing, in 2013, Ellen Muehlberger’s Angels in Late Ancient Christianity; and angels have been making their appearance in novels, not least Sally Vickers’s very popular novel, Miss Garnett’s Angel (2000). This book is, however, rather different. It is the work of a Romanian philosopher, Andrei Pleşu, one of the intellectuals who opposed the Communist regime under Ceauşescu, and after the fall of Communism became involved in politics himself, first as Minister of Culture, later as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He also founded a research institute, New Europe College, in Bucharest. This volume is a work of philosophy, though there are the historical sections you would expect in a book on angels, discussing how the notion emerges in relation to the notion of daimon in the Greek classical world.
The work falls into two parts: the first is more systematic – an introduction to the study of angels; the second more impressionistic – ‘experiences, soundings, readings’. The first part makes it clear why angels interest Pleşu: they belong to the realm of the ‘in between’, the metaxu, to use the Greek preposition; they are concerned with relating, bringing things together, or, more precisely (though the point is rather that the precise is out of place here), the realm of the imaginal, the imagination. Not surprisingly, Pleşu does not limit himself to Christian sources, especially when he explores the relationship between the angels and the realm of the imaginal: he draws on Sufi mysticism and the Kaballah, for example – the names of Corbin, Guénon and Scholem are frequent in the footnotes. For his Christian sources, one notes his frequent recourse to the texts gathered together in the Philokalia. Pleşu’s style matches his subject: evocative, tentative, inclusive. In the first half of the book, there are chapters on the guardian angel and on the monk: the ‘angel next to man’ and the ‘man next to the angel’. The guardian angel is given us for our protection; he is one of the ways in which God’s love is extended to us: ‘[i]t is a love that is harsh and exigent, but alien to the oscillating course of human love’ (p. 90). In contrast, the monk lives an ‘angelic’ life; he, too, relates the realm of the material with that of the spiritual. If we lose sight of either our celestial guardian or the monk as living the celestial life, as it were, on earth, then we lose sight, too, of the relatedness built into created reality. Pleşu builds around these two figures a series of arabesques, as it were: the first part ends with a discussion of music and its relation to the angelic, while the second part pursues the angelic through a whole range of ‘experiences, soundings, readings’, involving time, silence, the mirror, symbolic thinking, love, days, letters, and so on. He opposes ‘symbolic thinking’, characteristic of the angels, to ‘diabolic thinking’: angelic thought ‘gathers together (sym-ballein) … an agglutination of disparate fragments, a meaningless sum of solitary elements’; in contrast, diabolic thought ‘is disjunctive (dia-ballein), unravelling, dissolving thinking … The Devil cannot see connexions between things, he does not register contexts, he cannot see associative verve’ (pp. 167–8). There is an extraordinary verve about Pleşu’s thought; it constantly sparks off thoughts in the reader, which makes it impossible, nearly pointless, to summarize. He essays a kind of thinking that is alive and in contact with life, quite the opposite of arranging and rearranging concepts, abstractions. As he remarks in one place, ‘concepts are the corpses of angels. While those who, in the exercise of thought, see nothing beyond concepts practise—not necessarily in bad faith—a pathetic form of necrophilia’ (p. 180). Andrei Pleşu has written an exciting work of philosophy.