Author's Introduction
- ... Before the discovery of gravity, energy or magnetism, it was unclear why the cosmos behaved in the way it did, and angels were one way of accounting for the movement of physical entities. Maimonides argued that the planets, for example, are angelic intelligences because they move in their celestial orbits.
- While most physicists would now baulk at angelic forces as an explanation of any natural phenomena, without the medieval belief in angels, physics today might look very different. Even when belief in angels later dissipated, modern physicists continued to posit incorporeal intelligences to help explain the inexplicable. Malevolent angelic forces (ie, demons) have appeared in compelling thought experiments across the history of physics. These well-known ‘demons of physics’ served as useful placeholders, helping physicists find scientific explanations for only vaguely imagined solutions. You can still find them in textbooks today.
- But that’s not the most important legacy of medieval angelology. Angels also catalysed ferociously precise debates about the nature of place, bodies and motion, which would inspire something like a modern conceptual toolbox for physicists, honing concepts such as space and dimension. Angels, in short, underpin our understanding of the cosmos.
Author's Conclusion
- While it is easy enough to ridicule the suggestion that movement is the result of occult forces such as angels, we cannot, having ascended the ladder of knowledge, so easily kick that ladder out from under ourselves. Studies in embodied cognition (Wilson & Golonka - Embodied cognition is not what you think it is) are showing that our knowledge is built upon our experience of the world. George Lakoff & Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) shows how our bodily experiences come together to create complex metaphors, grounding abstract concepts. We equate ‘up’ with ‘more’ when we say ‘the stock market rises’ because when we see, for example, rocks piled up, we learn to equate higher with more. We say we ‘grasp’ an idea because we have experienced reaching for a piece of fruit on a tree. In addition, we have a very hard time imagining a nonphysical thing. What we imagine, when we imagine a soul or an angel or a demon, is some kind of insubstantial, but still ghostly, object.
- Although occult forces such as angels and demons may be ridiculed in modern culture as ‘hand-wavey’ explanations of quite logical, down-to-earth scientific phenomena, I would suggest the inverse. That what is most down-to-earth might in fact be to think about the invisible forces of nature as angels, agents, immaterial intelligences with certain properties familiar to us, but amplified. Properties like agency and intention. It is only in thinking through, and with, these more familiar concepts that we can then discover a less intuitive set of concepts, like spacetime, which require grounding in concepts like dimension, body, place and movement. These necessary grounding concepts were sharpened, historically, by thinking through the relationship between the material and immaterial world, and angelology played a significant role in their honing.
- The use of supernatural intelligences such as angels and demons to think through physics stuck around long after the actual belief in the existence of these beings had dissipated. It seems that this imaginative framework resounds in the actual structure of how our thought operates. By virtue of this, angelology lay the groundwork for thinking through the nature of place, time and motion in quite complex ways. Did angels and demons carve a conceptual space for the invisible forces that physics would later come to discover? Though it may seem that the scientific and the demonic are at polar ends of the spectrum when it comes to explaining the natural world, angels and demons have actually shaped modern scientific explanation as we know it today.
Author Narrative
- Rebekah Wallace is a junior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford where she writes and researches on science and religion. She is also a lecturer in philosophy, religion and ethics at the University of Winchester, UK.
Notes
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "When medieval scholars sought to understand the nature of angels, they unwittingly laid the foundations of modern physics"
- For the full text see Aeon: Wallace - Legacy of the angels.
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