Angeology: observing the world from a different angle

In Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel”, it is a mysterious and apocalyptic presence that imprisons the protagonists; in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Damiel and Cassiel observe, listen to and sympathise with human beings; Paul Klee depicted many of them in their imperfect state, caught between the spiritual and the earthly; Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, portrays their indifference to humanity’s pleas for help; Dante, in Paradiso, describes them in their absolute purity, ‘which no snow at that height can reach’; whilst in the Old Testament they guard the divine throne or are visible manifestations of God himself. But what is the nature of the angel? What is the function of these figures suspended between Heaven and Earth, who have fascinated theologians, mystics, poets and painters throughout the ages and, at the same time, have also shaped a collective imagination based on mass-produced images that soften their contours?

The philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who has long focused his attention on seemingly ‘pop’ topics whilst delving into their deeper meanings – as in his recent work Il continente ignoto, which centres on love – had already explored these figures some time ago, gathering accounts of them from the three major monotheistic religions. His new book, La gerarchia degli angeli (il Mulino, 224 pp., €18), is a rigorous analysis that begins with the nature of these figures in Christian mythology to examine how their organisation has exerted a subtle yet decisive influence on the development of those reflections that link politics and theology; but also – and this is the aspect that makes the essay all the more interesting – how this hierarchy of ‘creatures so ambiguous and, moreover, belonging to myths that have often served to justify prolonged forms of domination and alienation’ still reverberates in the structures of Western society. Coccia’s essays take their starting point precisely from the concept of ‘hierarchy’, a term which literally means ‘power over sacred things’ and thus denotes a form of imbalance between those who hold it and those who lack it, delving into the nebulous boundaries of these phantasmal beings who rebelled against God out of jealousy at the sudden importance acquired by humankind, and who formed a ‘society as a space for the exercise and circulation of power’.

Thus, by setting aside the error – so dear to us because it offers solace even in relation to our own world – that amongst the angels, ‘courtiers of God’, ‘one is as good as another’, Coccia demonstrates how these are far from removed from our own world, for the mechanisms which, according to theology, govern their mutual relationships and their relationship with God bear witness to a certain exercise of power which, to anyone who engages conscientiously with the world, will not seem new: the fall from heaven of the rebellious angels ‘who have lost their glory, their honour and their closeness to God’ symbolises how this celestial society, even before the birth of humanity, experienced conflicts and tensions that highlight how power, by its very nature, gives rise to the possibility of revolt.

Thus, Coccia suggests that angelology is not merely a remnant of a distant, bygone world, but a paradigm for observing the world from a different angle. In a landscape dominated by ‘surveillance capitalism’ and an annoyingly hyperuranic bureaucracy, by a clear separation of roles and an obsession with order, by the algorithmic machine that fuels the anaesthesia of thought, and by a ‘culture of surveillance’ that leads everyone to become their own overseer, the stories recounted by Coccia show how these processes of the celestial society continue to be replicated in the present, supporting that ‘survival of the Ancient’ of which Aby Warburg spoke—that is, the cyclical reappearance of patterns from the past which thus reveal themselves to be timeless.

With La gerarchia degli angeli, just as with La vita delle piante, which showed how forms of plant life were far from alien to humankind, and with Filosofia della casa, which instead described domestic space as a living prism onto which we project ourselves, Coccia reveals to us the extraordinary and surprising closeness between worlds that are worlds apart: between the mechanisms of today’s monsters and the ‘oldest of societies’, ‘the most perfect’, that of the angels, whose members ‘live entirely for their task, and in accordance with it’, because for them ‘to exist means “to work”, “to fulfil a task”’. It is a complete short-circuit, one of those extreme reversals of thought that help us understand who we are.