On Angels

This wonderful book published by Berlin University Press (Germany) and Cross Meridian (Canada) invites you to rediscover the culture of the world. Christian sources, Greek philosophy, Persian mysticism and medieval scholastic philosophy are extensively cited in this rigorously researched treatise. Andrei Plesu's exuberant style is reflected in his essays contained in Part II: "The angel and the moment", "The silence of the angels", "The world in the mirror", "Angelic love", "The aroma of the world", "The intellect as angel", "Universal man" and others.«However rational we claim to be, we resort with unacceptable frequency, and with a certain nonchalance, to magical explanations. To get exactly the topic you had prepared for in an exam, to win the lottery, to escape a serious accident unscathed, generally seem to us to be signs of something mysteriously elect: "destiny" was on our side, we were "lucky", we escaped "by a miracle". Such "miracles" are more frequent than we imagine... For modern man, the world is a sum of harsh natural laws, combined with obscure random episodes, while for traditional man... the world is an order without remainder, a harmonious ensemble of providential events. No reasonable metaphysics of chance can be constructed. But what can be constructed is a theology of angels, founded on universal sacred texts and on a vast hermeneutic tradition. Modern man has difficulty in believing in angels not because he is "rational" and "atheist" but because he does not believe in order, or has an inconsequential image of order. In contrast, traditional man tackles the problem of the lack of evidence for the invisible and unclassifiable with dizzying daring, preferring to force understanding, provocatively to systematise that which nowadays we primitively put down to "chance".»