Angels, Cherubim, Seraphim and Covid-19. Analogical imagination or a matter of nightmares?

Inhalt

1. Introduction

2. The Covid-19 and Apocalypse

3. Getting to Grips with Apocalypse

4. What’s Analogical Imagination got to do with Angels, Cherubim and Seraphim ?

5. A Twitter Discussion about Angels, Cherubim and Seraphim

6. The Death of a King and Existential Crisis

7. A Prophet or Seer is invited into the Celestial Throne Room

8. What’s Going on in these Two Texts?

9. Isaiah’s Vision

10. John’s Vision

11. An Exemplar from the Prophet Ezekiel

12. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

This article was inspired by a question my daughter-in-law put to me via our family WhatsApp forum. She posted the following query. “Dad, an interesting discussion on Twitter last night. How accurate is this before I have nightmares thinking about these angels?” Certainly, this was interesting stuff but it was about a genre most social media aficionados know the least about. But with my MPhil hat on in Biblical Sciences and a Masters’ thesis on apocalyptic literature with particular reference to the book of Apocalypse to boot, this was irresistible red meat to an apocalyptic carnivore or junkie like me.

My first objective in this article is to provide some clarity about these often-times bizarre creatures known as angels, Cherubim and Seraphim and to follow my daughter-in-law’s short Twitter discussion in the hope of showing that such artistic impressions of these angels, Cherubim and Seraphim were meant to jog our imagination of the transcendent — what I have referred to as our analogical imagination, borrowing a term from David Tracy (Tracy 1977 and 1981) — rather than to provide fodder for nightmares. Visions in both the first part of the Christian Bible and the second part are of this kind. They are usually found in literature written at times of great discombobulation in both society and religion, such as the Covid-19 pandemic in our own times. The pictorial language is used to assure the reader and for a long time in the life of the Bible, the listener (Mukuka 2016) that God is still in control, despite appearances to the contrary, and not the enemy, the devil or the pandemic. The enemy may be other nations or even an evil ruler. In the case of Isaiah and John, whom we meet in the course of this article, the enemies were Assyria and the Roman Emperor respectively.

My second objective, a corollary of the first, is to demonstrate using texts from both the first part of the Christian Bible and the second that apocalyptic visions served to calm nerves — those of the author or the Seer and those of the nation. In the second part of the Bible, we have the visions of John in the book of Revelation with a similar objective. John utilised animal symbology from Isaiah and Ezekiel, once again to calm frayed nerves on account of the persecution of the Romans. These mythical creatures connect us to something of the divine or the supernatural, their alacrity in coming to our aid, signified by the wings, and knowledge of our situation, signified by the eyes. Nothing escapes their attention. The creatures often have eyes both in front and at the back. A bit like the Roman god Juno who has two faces, one facing in front and the other facing backwards. He had both our past and future in his purview.

My third objective is to show that the current Covid-19 pandemic is an existential crisis such as faced by Isaiah and John or any of the apocalyptic writers and one way to deal with the crisis is through the media of angels, Cherubim and Seraphim and to show that although we are at war with an invisible enemy, this is “a sign that a phase of deficiency is reaching its nadir and a new beginning is at hand” (Aldrovandi 2014: Kindle).

My epistemological framework for this article is what I am calling analogical imagination, a term I borrow from American fundamental theologian, David Tracy, as I explain below. Analogical imagination is a philosophical concept about coming to terms with transcendental truth which cannot be wrapped up in ordinary language. It is a bit what the artist attempts to do by painting a picture.

2. The Covid-19 and Apocalypse

Simon Dean rightly notes that “Historically, pandemics have been attributed to both religious and naturalistic causes. While epidemics in the ancient world were generally accounted for in religious terms, a concept of contagion still existed (Feder 2013). Throughout history, pandemics and apocalyptic narratives have run closely together. As one example, explanations of the Black Death (1347–1352) involved ideas of sin and apocalypse, acts of God and alignments of the planets” (Dean 2020). He goes on to say that “Pandemics indicate the fragility of life and the world, chaos, engender paralysing anxiety that the world is dissolving, a sense of detachment and raise significant issues of meaning resulting in existential crises. Self-isolation and quarantine create a sense of being separated from the community and world generally — a sense of anomie” (Ibid). The same feelings were engendered by the existential crises of Isaiah and John or the other apocalyptic writers which gave rise to the media of angels, Cherubim and Seraphim, as one way to deal with the crises.

3. Getting to Grips with Apocalypse

Since we are already here, let’s get to grips with Apocalypse, which as I said in my introduction was the subject of my Masters’ thesis in 1993. In popular thinking, the term apocalypse signifies a violent or cataclysmic ending of the world but the word Apocalypse is a lot more innocent than that. It derives from Apokalypsis — the ordinary Greek word for revelation or unveiling. As Carlo Aldrovandi (2014) explains, “Apokalypsis in the original, etymological understanding of the word: a sudden breaking point in human destiny unveiling an ultimate truth (aletheia) that has always been present, but remains most of the time hidden, denied or forgotten” (Aldrovandi 2014: Kindle Edition).

For apocalyptic writers such as John, apocalyptic scenarios provided an opportunity for letting off steam and meaning-making in the midst of the nihilism around. As Carlo Aldrovandi explains once more, “It has been repeatedly argued that the apocalyptic is a ‘self- contained’ myth whose strength resides in a dialectic binding together of dissolution and renewal. Seeing the world through an apocalyptic prism entails the possibility that even the most unsettling catastrophe can be symbolically tamed by being interpreted as a sign that a phase of deficiency is reaching its nadir and a new beginning is at hand” (Aldrovandi 2014: Kindle Edition).

In this light, the Covid-19 crisis has revealed that although inequalities in terms of healthcare access, divisions of class and race, continued denial of equal access to women, concentration of power in the hands of the elite, and the sad fact that the most important workers, especially nurses, are among the least paid and the most vulnerable, the scourge will be tamed. Health inequalities have been brought into sharp relief and the crisis has exposed systemic disadvantage and discrimination faced by black, Asian, Hispanic and ethnic minorities, especially in the United States of America. An apocalyptic framework says that something has to change, in fact, everything has to change and per chance the “New Heaven and a New Earth” (Rev 21.1) of John may just be in our grasp and “a new beginning is at hand” (Aldrovandi 2014: Kindle Edition). Covid-19 ha revealed to us the crass nature of our insane society but we keep repeating the same failed solutions to problems instead of putting new wine in new wineskins as the young Palestinian Rabbi advised us millennia ago.

4. What’s Analogical Imagination got to do with Angels, Cherubim and Seraphim?

First, what are Cherubim and Seraphim ? A cherub [plural: cherubim ] is a mythical creature, most likely borrowed from the Akkadian karābu, meaning “to bless.” This creature directly attends on God in Abrahamic religions and other ancient Middle-eastern societies. The numerous depictions of cherubim give them many different roles, such as protecting the entrance to the Garden of Eden (Gen 3.24). A seraph, the burning one [plural: seraphim ] is a type of celestial or heavenly being originating in Ancient Judaism. Second, an angel in the Hebrew Scriptures is often a human figure who acts as a messenger from God. In Greek mythology, an angel performs a similar function. Third, I borrow the term “analogical imagination” from David Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1981) according to whom analogical imagination is interpretation of “real-similarities-in-real-difference.” It focuses on a primary meaning or analogue and seeks to articulate the harmony of meaning in relation to the realities of God, the self, other selves, and the cosmos. The harmony achieved in such imagination is rather a unity-in-difference, always involving negations of any claim to full adequacy, yet perceiving nonetheless an emerging harmony (Tracy 1981: 408‒413).

David Tracy is not exactly bedtime reading. If you look closely at the language used, it is more like he is painting more pictures in order to explain his primary picture. Here is another attempt at painting the same picture. Only this time he calls it “The Catholic analogical imagination.” Think of Catholic with uppercase C, meaning universal. Rather than delve immediately into his definition, he takes a short detour. “Before attempting to define this Catholic analogical imagination in more strictly theological terms, allow me to ask some questions,” he tells us, “Do you believe, with Albert Camus, that there is more to admire in human beings than to despise? Do you find with Erasmus and Francis of Assisi that in spite of all folly, stupidity, illusion, and even sin, reality at its final moment is trustworthy? Do you find in yourself, a belief with Aquinas and Thomas More that reason is to be trusted for finding the order of things; that faith transforms but does not destroy reason? Is your final image of God one like John’s gospel of love, not fear; of Christ as fundamentally a community of hope, not a ghetto of escape and fear? Does your image of society include a trust that it can be somehow ordered short of radical disjunction? Does your image of the cosmos itself include a trust that it too is somehow ordered by relationships established by God for all reality; and that reality itself — in spite of all serious, sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary — is finally benign? Then you possess, I believe, a Catholic analogical imagination” (Tracy 1977: 235).

Phew, but how does that help us to make sense of analogical imagination? Let’s see if what he says next is of any help. “To describe that horizon prior to our explicit beliefs of the meaning of the whole more theologically, I use the word ‘imagination.’ For when we use our imagination creatively, we do not simply report upon the reality we ordinarily see in our everyday way. Rather, when we imagine — especially when we imagine the reality inspired and nourished by God’s gift of faith and revelation — we redescribe the creative possibilities of all reality. We literally reimagine reality as a new series of ordered possibilities; we then choose some central clue for the whole of reality — for Catholics that central clue to the whole — to the relationships between God and humanity, the individual and society — is found in what T. S. Eliot called the half-guessed, the gift — half-understood — incarnation as the secret of both God and humankind and the relationship of both Church and cosmos as finally sacramental. Every great religious tradition begins in some special occasion of revelatory insight and then through the centuries expands that vision through ethical, aesthetic, philosophical and logical efforts into an ever-encompassing and finally classical vision of the whole of reality; and within that vision, some understanding of every major moment in that whole is ordered to all other moments within the whole” (Tracy 1977: 235‒236).

I empathise if analogical imagination is still Greek to you. The easiest way I can express what it is, is that it tries to imagine the unimaginable using pictorial images. We had this way of speaking in African folklore using stories for pedagogical purposes, even stories such as the genie with only one hair. We even had friendly ghosts mixing it with mortals. In my use, analogical imagination is trying to wrap our heads around a God who is infinite or ultimate reality, using finite metaphors and symbols. What we call angels, Cherubim and Seraphim are part of that pictorial language. They help us to imagine what we cannot see. After my granddaughter was born, I showed our housemaid a photo of her after only 5 months. Her response was “Iye, aka kamwana ukucha” [Wow, what a jacked up little baby]. As the English saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” meaning, that complex and often multiple ideas can be conveyed by a single image or picture, which conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a verbal description. Now, as my wife would tell you, I am quite verbose. She says I can talk for all of Luwingu and I have never even lived there. So, I would probably not have been very helpful in my daughter-in-law’s Twitter discussion referenced immediately below without a 2-hour lecture on apocalyptic literature. I would have needed more than a thousand words.

5. A Twitter Discussion about Angels, Cherubim and Seraphim

What follows is a summary of a Twitter discussion, at least part of it, which forced my daughter-in-law to ask whether angels, Cherubim and Seraphim were not the stuff of nightmares. The first tweet shows the “stuff of nightmares” depiction of one of these “cute creatures.” The person who tweeted this adds, “This is what your average cherubim angel looks like according to the most accurate texts of the Bible.” I hate to disappoint the person who tweeted this. The original manuscripts of the Bible were not illustrated with pictures. Clearly, this tweet was meant to be a joke. The giveaway is, “You think angels are supposed to be some holy cute creatures lol.” Art is about jogging our imagination rather than to represent reality accurately. I have no idea what the artist was trying to depict in the first tweet but one thing is for certain, there is nowhere one can find the depicted creature in reality. It is a figment of the art’s imagination. The second tweet by Biscoff [the name appears to be originally German: Bischoff, meaning, bishop] with the Twitter handle @ The ElectricZero (16 November 2020) was more to the point: “Cherubim angels do not look like this. Another example of whitewashing history.” Actually, they don’t look like anything in our real world. I would not go so far as to claim that such depictions are an example of whitewashing history. First, it is not quite accurate to call them “Cherubim angels.” Cherubim were understood as a type of celestial figure but as far as we can tell, the Bible does not call them angels, especially in the Hebrew Bible. The only angels we meet are human messengers sent by God and in some cases, as in the case of those who visited Abraham, they are a synonym for God appearing in human form. “The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him” (Gen 18.1‒2). Second, coming from an African country, I never saw an angel or Cherubim depicted black, with the exception of the devil. The reason is simple. The white man who brought the Bible could only think of biblical creatures as white even though the land of the Bible was not inhabited by white people. They were closer to brown rather than white. So, most depictions of Jesus as a white man are clearly inaccurate. If anything, western depictions of the devil tended to be black as I have just noted. The one question, they never bothered to ask was, if God was a spirit, why would his nemesis, the devil need a body? In the same vein, if angels were spirits, why would they need a body and wings. Clearly, the language of angels is metaphorical. They speak to us about extra-terrestrial reality where bodies and wings are surplus to requirement anyway. They paint a thousand words. There is a lot of confusion in the third tweet. It looks like a bricolage from more than one source. If I was a betting man, I would say that the likely sources are Isaiah 6.1‒13 and Rev 4.1‒11. The only way I can try to remove the confusion is to provide the two examples of where such creatures are described in the Bible and use that as a jumping off point for discussing these creatures as aids for our analogical imagination. The first text is from Isaiah 6.1‒13.

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