Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

This was the fault line on which philosophy and theology found itself in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the gap between the verifiable and the non-verifiable, scripture and the world, which increased with each passing year, was only a symptom, the fever of the age, and not the disease itself. Newton was as far away from the divine in his religious speculations as in his purely scientific calculations. The same held true for the sixteenth century’s great alchemists as well as for Pascal and Galileo or for that matter Thomas Aquinas. The Calvinists, Lutherans, Arians, Anglicans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, whether influenced by Plato or Aristotle, Democritus, Hermes Trismegistus, Humanism, or Jewish Kabbalism — every one of them was blind to the true nature of the divine. And the thing that blinded them was scripture. For all of them acknowledged the authority of scripture, it was incontestable, even for the most deviant and idiosyncratic of sects, and all that Newton and his ilk did, when all is said and done, was simply to replace the authority of one writ with another.

It is only against this backdrop that the real significance of Antinous Bellori can be seen. In On the Nature of Angels , he argues that scripture is only one of the myriad manifestations of the divine, neither more nor less important than the others, and so invalidates the contradiction that had arisen between scripture and the world in a different and more sincere way than his contemporaries, who merely exchanged one value for another, without understanding that, in reality, they were two sides of the same coin.

It was of course the appearance of angels in his childhood that made Bellori’s insight possible. Angels existed, they were here in the world, he knew that, and what was written about them in scripture must stem from observations similar to those he himself had made. And so there was no reason to attach more importance to the angels’ appearances in the Bible than to the others. Another conclusion he could draw from his revelation by the river was that the angels were in a different state to those described in the Bible. This meant that the nature of angels wasn’t unchanging, as had always been thought. And this led him to see how the hypothesis of their immutability had influenced everything that was known about them. Everything was taken as support for permanence. Even the most obvious differences in angelic behavior were seen in this light.

Once the notion about divine changeability had been thought, huge passages of scripture needed to be interpreted in new ways. It is through these tracts that On the Nature of Angels moves. And the first area it enters, having listed all the places where angels are mentioned in the Bible, is the one opened up by the cherubim. The cherubim are the angels scripture mentions first, and the ones that (with the exception of the seraphim) appear least often. Both facts indicate that their presence is especially significant.

Having guarded the tree of life for sixteen hundred years, the cherubim left the earth. The first time they’re mentioned in the scriptures after that is in Exodus 25:18–20, where the Lord gives Moses the following instructions, after ordering him to build a sanctuary:

And thou shalt make two cherubim of gold; of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy-seat.

And make one cherub on the one end, and the other cherub on the other end; even of the mercy-seat shall ye make the cherubim on the two ends thereof.

And the cherubim shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy-seat with their wings, and their faces shall look to one another; toward the mercy-seat shall the faces of the cherubim be.

This passage is almost as bereft of information about the nature of the cherubim as the story of the fall. Nevertheless, one can draw certain conclusions from it. In On the Nature of Angels , Bellori notes that the Lord doesn’t describe the appearance of the cherubim but says simply “two cherubim.” Neither does he say “they have wings” but “ their wings,” from which Bellori concludes that Moses must have known what cherubim looked like. So they must have shown themselves more often than scripture mentions.

Furthermore, we can assert that the cherubim are corporeal beings, says Bellori, and that they have wings. To what extent this is their only form, or if they are capable of altering their shape, to pure spirit, for example, it is impossible to conjecture.

The cherubim are mentioned again in chapter six of the First Book of Kings, under circumstances identical to the above, apart from the fact that it is now Solomon who is making the statues.

And within the oracle he made two cherubim of olive-tree, each ten cubits high. And five cubits was the one wing of the cherub, and five cubits the other wing of the cherub: from the uttermost part of the one wing unto the uttermost part of the other were ten cubits. And the other cherub was ten cubits: both the cherubim were of one measure and one size. The height of the one cherub was ten cubits, and so was it of the other cherub. And he set the cherubim within the inner house: and they stretched forth the wings of the cherubim, so that the wing of the one touched the one wall and the wing of the other cherub touched the other wall; and their wings touched one another in the midst of the house. And he overlaid the cherubim with gold.

We learn nothing about the cherubim’s appearance or origin here, either. And that’s how it remains throughout the entire Bible.

With one splendid exception.

More than three thousand years after man’s banishment from paradise, the cherubim revealed themselves again, and in contrast to those who’d seen them so far, this witness described everything he saw. Their faces, their bodies, the way they moved. He even described the peculiar sound of their wings.

His name was Ezekiel, and he was a priest among the exiled Judeans in Tel Aviv around 590 BC. He wasn’t a popular man. If he was not actively hated, there were few, if any, who with hands on hearts could say that they liked being in his company. He was the sort who knew everything. He didn’t listen to other people’s opinions. He didn’t even bother to correct them, but preferred to interrupt the conversation, or in a rude and unsubtle manner push it in a different direction.

But they did respect him. He had a burning will. They saw that, the way his eyes glowed; the speed at which he walked, as if something constantly hung in the balance. Life and death, heaven and hell, God and Satan: that was Ezekiel’s world.

He had redeeming features, of course he had; Ezekiel could be tender and considerate; Ezekiel could suddenly realize that he’d done something unjust and hurry back to make amends or ask for forgiveness, Ezekiel could also melt entirely and stare at someone with a look of innocence, open and vulnerable like a child’s. Everyone can do that.

And this intensity of his, which was born of the enormous pressure of thoughts that raced around inside his head, and which gave him that characteristic, slightly jerky and stilted gait, could sometimes alter into a state near apathy, in which he walked so slowly and noticed so little of what was around him that you would have thought he was going to his own funeral. What he was doing, as he shuffled along like a sleepwalker, was meditating. But not with his thoughts, he was way past thought, this was something else, a sort of flood of images and concepts and feelings and presentiments that drifted through him. He didn’t understand it, it was more just a question of being present in it.

One morning in this state, he had gradually left the town behind him without realizing it. At first he’d wandered through the streets, then he’d gone through the city gate and along the river, where he’d suddenly come to himself.