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The Invisible Made Visible: Angels from the Vatican

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

James J. Buckley
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Abstract

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How do we make the invisible visible? How do we see, or touch, what others have made visible? Such questions can, of course, mean different things. They might be questions about how technology such as telescopes and microscopes have made visible the previously invisible things, and what (if anything) such technology leaves invisible. They might also be political questions about how previously invisible groups are made visible, and how invisible we can make ourselves to each other without ceasing to be. And there are equally important philosophical questions about whether the invisible is, if so what it means to make it visible, and whether in so doing we perfect or destroy it. Such questions are on the back burners of this essay.

But my focus is more specific. An exhibition Angels from the Vatican. The Invisible Made Visible has been touring the United States. These are artifacts of angels from the Vatican museum. Embattled church politicians might regard the title as oxymoronic; they would also not be surprised that it is sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation. But I think it is the sub-title rather than the title of the exhibition that raises (perhaps from the dead) many old and new questions about angels, precisely by considering angels under the rubric of “The Invisible Made Visible”.’ The exhibition, in its version at the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland), consists of four galleries and a lengthy balcony-corridor of about one hundred paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts ranging from a sixth century before Christ Assyrian “winged genius” to a twentieth century painting by Salvador Dali.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 80 , Issue 939 , May 1999 , pp. 244 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Duston, Allen OP. and Nesselrath, Arnold, Angels from the Vatican. The Invisible Made Visible (Alexandria, Virginia: Arts Services International, 1998)Google Scholar. I will refer to the exhibits by their number in this catalogue. This essay was originally written for those who had seen the exhibition, although 1 have revised it for an audience who has not. To that first audience I emphasized the important of words for seeing the picture. To readers who have not seen, 1 emphasize the importance of the seeing the pictures in the catalogue for these words.

2 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith, ed. and trans. Macintosh, H. R. and Stewart, J. S. (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1963Google Scholar [English original T & T Clark, 1928]), paragraph 42, pp. 156–60. For the intriguing story of how Thomas Spencer Baynes's Schleiermacher‐like essay on angels in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica played a role in his indictment for heresy, see Maclntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame. University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)Google Scholar, chapter I.

3 Church Dogmatics, trans. Bromiley, G. W. and Ehrlich, R. J. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1960)Google Scholar, volume III, part 3, p. 492.

4 Finney, Paul Corby, The Invisible God. The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994Google Scholar).

5 Angels from the Vatican, p. 13. The letter from John Paul II (p. 7) has a quite different theology of angels.

6 For a survey and bibliography, see Watson, Duane, “Angels” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Freedman, David Noel, editor‐in‐chief (Doubleday, 1992)Google Scholar, volume I, pp. 248–255. See also the articles on “Cherubim” and “Element, Elemental Spirit”.

7 Paul Griffiths, “Despoiling the Egyptians,” manuscript. Henri de Lubac highlights the instructions for treating a captive woman in Deuteronomy 21:10–13 as filling a similar role as the story of plundering in Medieval Exegesis, trans. Sebanc, Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, and Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998Google Scholar [French original 1959]), volume I, pp. 211–224

8 Marshall, Bruce, “Do Angels Exist?” in Why are We Here? Everyday Questions and the Christian Life, eds. Thiemann, Ronald F. and Placher, William C. (Harrisburg, PA.: Trinity Press International, 1998), pp. 69–83Google Scholar

9 Are the largely invisible world of “confraternities and other associations for the purpose of honouring the angels” brought to visibility in Aidan Nichols' treatment of angels entirely immune from becoming their own world? See Nichols, Aidan OP., Epiphany. A Theological Introduction to Catholicism (Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press, 1996), pp. 382–90Google Scholar.

10 Summa Theologiae la. 51,2, ad J (Kenelm Foster, OP., ed. and trans. [London: Blackfriars, with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968], volume 9, p. 36). There are, of course, no questions here about angels on the heads of pins. But the sheer detail will strike the sceptical or indifferent as the equivalent of triviality. On the other hand, the detail can only be non‐trivial against the background of an invisible world that needs an ontological scalpel to be rendered truly visible.

11 JMacDonald, ohn, “The Creation of Man and Angels in the Eschatological Literature” in Islamic Studies 3 (1964), pp. 285–308Google Scholar (here, p. 303).

12 See “Angels in the Life of the Virgin” in Angels from the Vatican, pp. 173–199.

13 Bruce Marshall, “Do Angels Exist?”, p. 77.

14 The identification of “the invisible and visible” with “the angelic and the earthly” is later than the creed, climaxing in Lateran IV in 1215 a.d. See Aquinas' discussion of traditional arguments over the incorporeality and immateriality of angels in Summa Theologiae la. 50, 1.

15 See “The Windhover. To Christ our Lord” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Gardner, W. H. and MacKenzie, H.H., fourth ed. (Oxford University Press, 1970 [First ed. 1918]), p. 69Google Scholar. If the quote I mentioned from Borromeo with which the exhibition began is correct, it is hardly natural for angels to have wings, any more than it is for humans. Wings on birds or angels have many functions (not all are for flying), but the ornithography of angel wings is a topic for another time.

16 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoö;n. An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University press, 1984 [Bobbs‐Merrill English original, 1962; German original 1766]). Lessing goes so far as to say that the distinction between visible and invisible can be made in drama but not painting, “where everything is visible and visible in but one way” (p. 66).

17 Summa theologiae ST la, 50, 1, ad 1. Aquinas' main point, of course, is that “the angels might be called material and bodily as compared with God, without implying that they are so intrinsically [in eis]”.