Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

But from the very beginning there was a dissonance in the system. Something within it moved restlessly back and forth. The even flow of life on earth was broken up by sudden interventions, irrational and incomprehensible, and yet the humans, driven this way and that, didn’t grumble but told one another that the ways of God are inscrutable. They had no idea of the disquiet they occasioned simply by their presence in the world. For them God was infinitely far away, and their lives were so short that nobody noticed that one day the interventions ceased. Three hundred years without a single revelation followed. Then, suddenly, everything was turned upside-down. In a reversal that was as grotesque as it was surprising, God became man.

WHEN GOD became man, the world order changed in such a radical and comprehensive way that the results of the great flood were as nothing by comparison. God becoming man not only altered humanity forever, but also the divine. The balance between the earthly and the divine was completely upset, marking the definitive turning point in the history of the divine. In On the Nature of Angels , Bellori therefore divides up the world’s history into three widely separated periods:

THE FIRST REALM: From the creation to the great flood.

THE SECOND REALM: From the great flood to the birth of Jesus.

THE THIRD REALM: From the death of Jesus to the time of writing.

There is one small pocket of time in this division that isn’t covered, namely, the time between Jesus’s birth and his death. This is because Bellori’s subject is angels, not man, and in angelic history this small lacuna, of just more than thirty years, was an exception. The angels were there at Jesus’s entrance: first when Gabriel gives his message to Mary, next when the angels sing the praise of the Lord in the field outside Bethlehem after he’s born, and they are there at his exit: when Mary Magdalene and Mary go to the grave on the third day, and an angel descends from heaven — his face shone like lightning; his garments were white as snow . But during his actual life, when he was on earth, the angels were not present. No one knows why. But it could be that they were shaken to their core — if one can use such a mild word as “shaken” to describe the angels’ reaction to what was happening in front of their eyes. Since the start of creation, humanity had been the angels’ lower limit, the one they were not to cross. If they did cross it, they lost themselves, lost their identity. At the same time they were required to cultivate man, as the Apocalypse of Baruch relates. Man was created in the image of the angels, they resembled them, and the angels lusted after their women, as scripture narrates. But this lust was the result of coming too close. At a distance they saw only the image. And that they could cultivate. The image was of all mankind, the human race as such, and not the individual human being, who was entirely meaningless and could therefore be slaughtered and killed or saved and raised up without making the slightest difference. During the First Realm they overstepped the boundary of humanity, and the Lord killed the two hundred angels responsible, he slew their progeny, the giant Nephilim, and he sent a great flood over the earth to eradicate all traces of what had happened. It must never happen again, it was dangerous, the world order became unbalanced, things that didn’t belong together could be pushed close and get caught up in each other and begin to grow in new and unknown directions. This must not happen, and he covered everything with water and let it all die. In the Second Realm the distance to mankind was infinitely greater, and the number of revelations increased radically. Man came closer to the angels at the same time as the angels’ remove from man increased. This was how it was supposed to be.

And then the Lord was born again as a man.

Innumerable are those who, through the centuries since Christ, have speculated about his constitution, and imagined it as half human and half divine, as it had a part in both the temporal and the ethereal, and therefore also something in common with the angels. One of the many Cathar sects of the medieval period even maintained that Christ was an angel. But this was not the case: the constitution of the Son of Man was essentially different from that of the angels. Even when the angels were at their closest to men, and had children by their daughters, they relinquished none of their divine nature. The angels interfered with the human, and lived in the earthly realm, but the changes lay in what they did , not what they were. Everything radiated from the angels, and the movement only went one way; if anything from the outside penetrated them, it never did so with sufficient force to alter what had been there before. For example, the pull toward earthly things had always been there within them, as a potential, and so the intercourse with mankind can be seen as a realization or perfection of the angel’s nature.

With the Son of Man it was different. In him the divine became human. And in contrast to the angels, the change was fundamental. In Jesus Christ the divine became flesh and blood, heart and lungs, sinew and tissue. What the angels must have thought when they saw what he was doing, we can never know, only guess at. He was their Lord, he took them to task when they flouted his will, and now he’d flaunted the greatest prohibition of them all.

The only thing they could do was withdraw. They looked on and waited. Only when he died did they return. That marked the start of the Third Realm. And if the angels in the first were close to men but not visible to them (apart from those who breached the prohibition), and in the second were visible to men but distant from them, in the Third Realm they were both visible to men and close to them.

Angelic life in the Third Realm must further be subdivided into two epochs. The first was characterized by revelations , in form not so very unlike those described in the Old Testament. In many instances they come to people linked to the Church. Bellori gives fully a hundred examples. Among them is the revelation of Meinrad of Luzern in Switzerland, who was seen several times in the middle of the ninth century in the company of a young angel who radiated a shining light. Francis of Assisi saw an angel with six wings — a seraph — in 1224. Saint Frances of Rome, who was seen together with one and the same angel over a period of more than twenty years at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and who wrote: His eyes generally turned toward Heaven: words cannot describe the divine purity of that gaze . Lydwine of Schiedam, who in 1424 saw an angel in a robe woven of threads of white fire . Teresa of Avila, who at the start of the sixteenth century saw an angel she described in her autobiography as having a burning face . Bellori supplies a hundred examples, he could have given a thousand. Never before or since have there been angels on earth in such profusion as there were at this period. There is something almost febrile and restive about it, time and again they reveal themselves in all their splendor, to all kinds of people — why?

Bellori thought it was a type of intoxication. Christianity’s wonderful advance, with the ecstatic adoration it brought the angels, caused them to give way to an element in their nature that previously hadn’t been activated, since for a large part of human history they had worked clandestinely, or with the few, or hadn’t been there at all. It wasn’t just women they lusted after, as scripture relates, but also human attention.