Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Even though the angel in one instance is full of contempt for humanity, and the angels in the other are attracted by it, the consequences, strangely enough, are the same: both lead to the angels’ fall, and to forbidden knowledge for man. As far as Bellori is concerned, the most interesting thing about the narratives is that they take place in a zone not covered by the Bible, that between angels and men, and that the relationship between them is every bit as difficult to pin down as that between the angels and God in the Bible. The word angel comes from the Greek angelos , and means “messenger” but is originally derived from the Hebrew mal’akh , which directly translated means “God’s shady side.” This is normally interpreted as meaning that the angels are the face God turns toward man, as the light that radiates from him is too powerful for any mortal eye to encounter, but as Bellori points out, the words shady side are rich in connotations and have a number of other possible meanings. The obscure, dark, black, hidden, and repressed, to name but a few. And common to the two narratives is precisely the fact that the angels are acting outside God’s will, hidden from his gaze: Satanael when he sneaks into the Garden of Eden to tempt Eve; Azazel and Shemhazai and the other guardians when they pass on forbidden knowledge to mankind, and when they have children with them.

These Apocryphal stories broaden the meaning of the angels’ role as “messengers,” as they introduce the possibility that it isn’t always God’s messages they bring, but on occasions their own as well. The strange thing is that the Bible suppresses this. Many might claim that this is turning the problem on its head: the fact that the Bible says nothing about it is because it isn’t true, and that what the Apocryphal writings speak of never happened. But the fact is that what the Apocryphal writings narrate actually is confirmed by the Bible, but only indirectly, always indirectly, in the form of half-covered tracks and remnants of sentences. For example, there is no direct explanation of the angels’ fall anywhere in the Bible, but from the many indirect references to it, one can at least ascertain with considerable certainty that it did actually happen. But the fall itself isn’t described anywhere in the Bible, not Lucifer’s, Satanael’s, Azazel’s or Shemhazai’s. Neither is any meeting between angels and man, outside the will of God.

This is strange but not incomprehensible: if it is the case that angels are attracted to earthly things, and move in the sphere between the divine and the human, this must occur in God’s shadow, and as scripture deals with God’s light, it therefore falls outside the boundaries of the image that’s relevant there. For this reason the character of the angels has never been properly understood, despite the fact that so many people have studied it over the course of the centuries. Angels have two sides, but only one is obvious in the Bible. The other is there too, but it is concealed in truncations and lacunae, and is visible only in small glimpses, best recognized from their lack of connection to the surrounding text.

In the Bible the angels are seen in God’s light, and even on the odd occasion when they venture out into the dim, shadowy recesses outside it, as they did in the case of Lot, they do not open up to it, but remain impassive and unaffected. From this it’s clear that the distance between the angelic and the human, as exemplified by Abraham, Hagar, Ezekiel, and Gideon, for instance, is of a different order from their distance from God, and only seems greater.

God is outside the human, and even though he displays intimate knowledge about what people think or want on several occasions — as is manifest when he sees through Cain, for example, or corrects Sarah by pointing out that she had indeed laughed — it is clear the whole time that the human condition is not something he has experienced . If he knows anything about it, it isn’t from within. Only someone who lacks insight into the human condition could despair over its evilness, as the Lord does time and time again throughout the Old Testament. Perhaps he knew mankind, but he couldn’t have understood them — or he wouldn’t have been so surprised that they ate from the tree of knowledge, despite his emphatic prohibition, or that they could kill their own brothers, or that they built a tower almost up to heaven.

The fact that the Lord’s feelings toward human beings alternated between sorrow and despair and a fury so great that it could cause him to destroy whole cities means that the expectations he had of them, which they could never live up to, were inhuman — that is, divine. He never saw man in his own right, never for what he was, only what he ought to be. And the few who measured up to this standard, the so-called righteous , like Abraham and Job, had their loyalty tested by a series of superhuman trials. But he never understood them. And how could he? God was far too large for man, their lives too small compared to his huge, almighty existence, which was the only touchstone he could use when he wanted to assess them. So even when he was closest to them — as when he visited Abraham and sat in the shade of the tree outside his tent and ate, or when he wrestled all night with Jacob, or when he got Ezekiel to eat his scrolls, or when he argued with Moses in the desert — the distance was still infinitely great.

It was different for the angels. If they appeared unapproachable in their divineness as they hovered above Ezekiel, or as they stood with swords raised over Jerusalem, they had, in contrast to the Lord, experienced humanity, and whether they despised it, like Satanael, or were drawn toward it, like Azazel and Shehmazai, it was never foreign to them, as it was for God. They had lust in common with man, and the fall. Humanity represented a danger to the angels, they knew how easily they could be ensnared in it, and must therefore have turned all their attention to the God they served, as appears from the descriptions of the Old Testament.

If Pseudo-Dionysius’s or Thomas Aquinas’s notions of angels have anything in them, it must be as a description of this very situation. At this time they were remote from earthly things, exalted, heaven-orientated, immutable, gathering around God in song and praise, as close to a spiritual existence as any living thing can come. That this was so is made even more likely by the notable strangeness and distance that characterized the angels’ biblical revelations. Just as snow and cold don’t bite into a body that has been immersed in hot water for a long time, the heavenly glory that had just enveloped the angels made them immune to the terrestrial. Nothing of what they saw affected them, they remained indifferent to everything that happened around them, and longed all the time to return to their spiritual existence close to God. At the same time they knew that earthly things would make demands of them if they remained too long, would draw them into its physical and material reality and, after a painful transitional phase, would provide them with pleasures considerably more intense than those they now enjoyed, and so would always remain a temptation. It was only a question of giving in to it, they must sometimes have thought, giving up the pure, abstract, stationary life and allowing themselves to be hurled into the chaos of the world. But the price was high, and each time they withdrew after doing what they’d been asked, before the lure of the world could make itself felt.

This was the way of things. And it’s easy to imagine that this was the way things could have remained. For there was a strong and meaningful order in this system. At the top reigned the Lord, the universal creator and life giver, the ruler of heaven and earth; under him were the angels, perfect and complete, with both the ethereal and the ephemeral in them, thus linking the two realities; and at the bottom gamboled man, in all his confusion and yearning, sorrow and impotence, joy and desire.