Karl Knausgaard: A Time for Everything

On the Nature of Angels consists of three parts. The first contains a catalog of all 189 angelic manifestations in the Bible, and the second discusses what conclusions can be drawn about the angels from these. The third, which initially looks at angels’ non-Biblical appearances, ends in a discussion about the question that is the work’s main theme: Can the nature of the divine undergo change?

Bellori’s ambition was to chart the angels’ appearance and characteristics with the same care and precision with which anatomists mapped the blood system, astronomers the constellations, and cartographers the coastlines of continents. The catalog formed his basic material, and it was thanks to this that he did not lose himself in the desert of speculation where most others who had written about angels before and after him had ended up. Bellori’s angels aren’t the figments of a fevered mind, they are concrete creatures with a history closely linked to that of humans over several thousand years. At the same time the catalog also reveals a problem. Rather than pinning down the angels and thus establishing a firm foundation for the discussions that follow, as Bellori must have intended, it makes apparent right from the outset the complexity, changeability, and consistent nebulousness of their presence in the world. Almost nowhere in scripture are we able to see angels as they really are, in their own right. Almost every one of their appearances is linked to an action and is always, therefore, woven into a specific context. And how can one sort out what is part of the angel from what is part of the context in which it operates? This is a recurring problem in On the Nature of Angels , in which attention is always being focused on the dynamic between that which changes and that which is immutable, honing in on the peripheral parts of the text in a belief that the small irregularities and aberrations found there will throw a different light on the angels’ substance than a bland illumination of the celestial. Bellori moved step-by-step closer to the conclusion he’s now famous for, which went against all current concepts of the nature of the divine. It is not the divine that is immutable and the human that is changeable , he wrote. The opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration in the divine from the creation to the death of Christ .

The first time angels appear in human history is in the story of the fall of man. When human beings ate from the tree of knowledge, the Lord drove them out of the Garden of Eden, and to prevent them from returning and helping themselves to the fruit of the equally desirable tree of life, he set the cherubim to guard the way to it: He cast him out , run the Bible’s exact words, and to the east of the garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and a sword whirling and flashing to guard the way to the tree of life .

This is all it says. Not a word about who they were, where they came from, or what they looked like. Just a name, cherubim ; a weapon, the flashing sword whirling round; and a task, the guarding of the tree of life. But even though we can’t say anything about their origins or appearance from this passage, it is nevertheless invaluable as a source for understanding their nature, Bellori writes, as the context it places them in is so unambiguous. Because they guard the tree of life, they are following God’s will, to which they are therefore subject. At the same time because of their role as guards, they are set above man’s will, which they are there to curb. In other words, the cherubim stand somewhere between God and man. And if one looks more closely at the Lord’s words when he drove man out of the Garden of Eden, it is clear that they’re considerably closer to the former than the latter. The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil , were God’s words. He could have said “like me” if that was what he meant, but he didn’t, he said “one of us” — and who else but the cherubim could that have referred to? No matter which way one looks at the text, one can see only three active parties there: the fallen human beings, God and the cherubim. As man stands in direct opposition to “us” in this context, it can hardly be anyone other than the cherubim he was referring to. This means, firstly, that the cherubim were similar enough to God for him to include them in the same expression as himself, secondly, that they knew the difference between good and evil and thus were in possession of free will. As Bellori saw it, this more than indicated that the cherubim also had eternal life. It’s hard to imagine God including a mortal creature in a description of himself, and even if he had done so, it is certainly unthinkable that he would have allowed this mortal creature, also in possession of free will, to guard the way to the tree of life after the fall of man.

Hesitantly Adam took a step forward. A twig cracked beneath his foot and the Lord turned to the shadowy figure that slowly emerged from the gloom of the trees.

“I heard you in the garden,” he said. “I was afraid because I was naked and so I hid.”

“Who told you you’re naked?” asked the Lord. “Have you eaten from the tree I forbade you to eat from?”

Behind him the woman also came into view. In a clearing in the middle of the garden the human beings stood, the Lord and the people he’d created. It was evening. In the grove around them the shadows lengthened, and now and then the air was filled with the sighing of the leaves that rustled in the wind.

“The woman you made me for company gave me fruit from the tree,” Adam said, “and I ate it.”

The Lord turned to the woman.

“What’s this you’ve done!” he said.

“The serpent tempted me and I ate,” she said.

One after the other, the Lord cursed the serpent, the woman, and the man. When he’d done this, he made clothes for the two human beings and then banished them from the garden.

His shouts indicate that the Lord didn’t know where they were, his questioning that he didn’t know what they’d done, and the little detail of the clothes made out of skins, which he handed over between the cursing and the banishment, gives a little hint of the inconsistent and impulsive nature of his presence. Everything, in other words, that is written about the fall in scripture tends toward the Lord being ignorant of it in advance. And if he hadn’t foreseen the fall how could “Christ,” even before human beings were created, be a part of him?

And if he knew that “Christ” would one day appear on earth in flesh and blood to save humanity, why did he as good as exterminate all living things in the great flood? And if he’d always known that he would at some point send a great flood over the earth, how can it be that he regretted it afterward? Because as it says: And the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease .

This element of improvisation is apparent in a great many of the Lord’s actions in the Old Testament. It can often seem as if he is borne along by his own emotions, and whether they have their basis in great rage or sudden kindness, it’s difficult to draw any conclusion other than that he doesn’t always see the consequences of his own actions.

Let us make man in our image and likeness . Who other than the angels could the Lord have been thinking about when he said this? He has created heaven and earth, sun and the moon, day and the night, plants and the animals, birds and the fishes. And he has done it alone. Now that he is about to create mankind he turns, for the first time, to others. They are not named, nor are they described, but their proximity is undeniable. Let us! says the Lord, and creates man in his own image and that of this enigmatic third party.