Karl Knausgaard: A Time for Everything

It isn’t difficult to picture him sitting there in his apartment in Paris writing, bent over his manuscript, his thin, earnest face barely illuminated by the light of a burning oil lamp, just as it isn’t hard to imagine Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg or Descartes in Utrecht. The emergence of the type of person that each of them in their own way represented, just at the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, is, of course, no coincidence. In antiquity they would never have been understood, either for what they were or in terms of what they wrote. The people of antiquity always studiously avoided the notion of the limitless, they weren’t interested in the boundlessness of either space or time, and they clothed everything beyond the immediate in anecdote. It’s clear that their want of interest in astronomy and history is closely linked to their lack of interest in psychology; they had as little desire to forfeit themselves to infinity outward or backward as they had to forfeit themselves to infinity inward. Hence the purity of their art.

How different to those vast, medieval Gothic cathedrals! Not only did they open the way to the notion of infinite space, they made a cult of it, almost an obsession. Just how close a culture’s concrete productions are to its view of the world and itself is well demonstrated by the fact that the first alchemists began to figure prominently in Europe at the same time as the cathedrals. The results the alchemists achieved or the methods they used are irrelevant in this context, the essential point is the underlying concept they brought with them, that insight into the secrets of life is not unattainable, but can be gleaned by those in possession of the right abilities and knowledge. It was said of Albertus Magnus, for example, that he’d constructed an automaton that could talk and move like a human being, of Théophraste Bartholomeus that he could control the weather, of Robert Foxcroft that he had brought his dead child back to life. It’s not unreasonable to assume that myths like these formed the kernel of the legend of Faust, in which no doubt is left about that limitless art’s demonic character. And what was the legend of Faust warning against, if not the activities of Copernicus, Bruno, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton? We don’t normally see it this way because of the impressively effective operation that was mounted during the Enlightenment, when demonic was the label attached to the obscure and the vague, the speculative and the occult, and truthful to the precise and rational, obvious and provable, with all the fateful consequences that would entail.

Because darkness isn’t the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found.

Antinous Bellori’s name is on the whole remarkable for its absence in such contexts, something that at first glance isn’t in the least bit strange, considering the subjects that preoccupied him. It seems a long way from Newton’s books on optics and gravity to Bellori’s work on angels. But if we put what they wrote about to one side, and concentrate instead on the underlying mentality and philosophy, we will discover that the similarities outnumber the differences. Bellori employed the same methods as the others, he’d read the same literature and possessed the same knowledge. The only thing that distinguished him from them was that he looked in a different direction. That the secret into which he’d thereby gained insight would never be recognized was something of which he was ignorant, just as the other movers of the age hadn’t the slightest inkling of the consequences of their own discoveries. They lived in a period suspended between two contrasting views of the world and, like hermit crabs changing shells, were quite naked and vulnerable, always alert, always on the brink of scampering back to the old shell, until they’d crossed the invisible line and the new shell lay closer, after which they simply had to keep pushing on. The openness, fluidity, and uncertainty of the moment is there in Baroque art alongside a fascination with infinity and fixation on death. But the choice was made, the world’s new boundaries were laid, and everything that was outside them sank slowly into oblivion. And rightly so, we might cry today, for Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were right! After all, the ideas of Paracelsus, Landmark, and Bellori are monstrous, unscientific, superstitious. But if we remember that these writings date from the very start of the Enlightenment, before the new world philosophy was determined, it may be easier to see that such channels of thought represented an alternative to the road that was chosen, the one that has brought us to where we are today, and that it’s precisely this choice that makes the ideas in, for example, On the Nature of Angels seem so outlandish and unfashionable. They weren’t then. And therein lies the enticing point: what if Bellori’s ideas had won through, and Newton’s had sunk into oblivion?

We’d now be living in a different world.

We know that Antinous Bellori owned a copy of Bernard de Clairvaux’s De Consideratione , which told him, among other things, that angels are powerful, radiant, blessed, individual personalities of various ranks, which occupy that place they were accorded at the beginning of time, perfect in their kind, immortal, without feelings, of pure spirit, inseparably one in heart and mind, blessed with everlasting peace . ., while in Summa Theologica , which he also possessed, of course, he could study Thomas’s hairsplitting definitions of the angels’ form, characteristics, and knowledge. Thomas describes them as spirit without body, and then with some incredibly complex reasoning explains that they nevertheless take up room in time as well as space. Angels can remove themselves from one place to another without any expenditure of time, he writes, but this doesn’t mean that they defy or suspend time, only that their movements aren’t circumscribed by the laws of the universe. Furthermore he maintains that understanding is one with their existence, in other words, that they are understanding in pure form , a kind of perfect intellect, bereft of emotions, imagination, or senses. So angels know the world only as a concept, in its essence, as it exists (and always has existed) in God’s word. They don’t know material reality, each other, God, or themselves. The latter he justifies as follows: The intellect is moved by the comprehensible, because to comprehend is a kind of reception, as stated in The Soul 3:4. But nothing is moved by, or received from itself, as can be seen from corporeal things. Therefore the angel cannot understand itself .

In principle, Thomas of Aquinas’s notions about angels might be correct. Nothing of what he attributes to them was unthinkable. The problem was simply that the opposite wasn’t unthinkable either. How could anyone really know that that was just the way things were? None of the claims concerning angels in Summa Theologica is supported by examples, not one of the angels’ many and well-documented manifestations is mentioned, either from biblical or postbiblical times, so what is Thomas’s real basis when with such brilliance and detail he enumerates their various attributes?

Antinous Bellori had seen angels with his own eyes. Their characteristics on that occasion had so obviously been different from those the Church ascribed to them that only three conclusions were possible. The first was that he was mistaken and had not seen what he’d seen, or had not understood it correctly. The second was that the Church was mistaken. And the third was that the angels had altered since the time the dogma about them had been conceived. To maintain that the Church was wrong in so decisive a question would be heresy. To claim that the angels must have altered would also be heresy, but of a more serious kind, as it went against the fundamental concept of the divine order.