For those who have never read Edwin Abbott‘s mathematical fantasy, Flatland, it is well worth a look. You can read a lot of interesting and wacky ideas into it – one of the conventional takes on the book is that it is an oblique critique of Victorian morality and social mores – but I prefer to think of it as an excellent summation of the weirdness that occurs when human minds try to understand the supernatural.
If you think about the supernatural realm as something that exists in a different dimension to our own – in the mathematical sense, not the science-fiction one – then you immediately begin to understand how supernatural beings, like angels and daemons, seem so manifestly bizarre to us.
Read through the Bible, and look at the descriptions of the ophanim, seraphim, and kerubim. The mental pictures they conjure are literally the stuff of nightmares. This is what happens when you ask an Abominable Intelligence to create images of angels, based on the source material in the Bible:
Yeah, good luck sleeping tonight with those images in mind…
The point I am making is, these beings look (and feel) utterly alien and terrifying to our eyes, because we are separated from them in a lower dimension of existence, in kind of the same way that a square is related to a cube in the geometrical sense, yet is a profoundly different and simpler object.
We humans are a profoundly different and simpler object than the angels (and daemons). Yet, amazingly, the promise of God is that, for those of us who believe in Him, and follow His Law, we will sit in judgement over them.
Indeed, if you take Biblical theology seriously (and I do), then you will quickly come to understand that we have a degree of freedom and grace the angels never did, and never will.
Have you ever considered why God keeps forgiving us, and giving us so much leeway, even though we keep pissing Him off? According to Catholic exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger, it is because, basically, we are STOOOOOOPID.
Seriously. We are really dumb. We lack perfect knowledge of our actions and their consequences, because our brains are highly limited, and as such, we get a considerable degree of grace and leniency.
Angels, however, know from the very moment of their creation what their purpose and assigned task is – and what the penalty is if they refuse. They are created with perfect knowledge of everything required to permit them to fulfil that task, and therefore perfect knowledge of what happens if they disobey God’s plan.
Since we do not have that perfect knowledge, we get a lot more lenient judgement. Angels, by contrast, are cast down into the most terrible and horrifying prison imaginable, and are forever tortured by their Fallen and sinful nature.
It is all quite fascinating to consider, the moment you actually stop to think about such things. There is, of course, rather a big danger involved with thinking – you will never know what kind of strange and mesmerising rabbit holes you end up chasing, and if you do start thinking, you run the serious risk of learning.
Which is precisely what Satan would very much prefer you not do.
Anyway, that is quite enough tortured theology for one day. Let us get to the good stuff.
This here is Simona Stoy, of indeterminate origin and age, but most likely from Belgium – one of the flattest countries anywhere – and in her early- to mid-twenties. There is rather obviously nothing flat about her – I have to say, she is quite a looker.
Happy weekend, lads. Enjoy your downtime.
4 Comments
I much preferred the Biblically-accurate angels to the fallen one in the second half of the post, but she’s not without her own heavenly qualities. Ay caramba!
Spirits don’t have any particular form. They take the form that God allows them to.
If you read the texts from the early saints, angels can sometimes appear in the form of children or grown men. Satan can do so as well if God allows him.
Well yes, but that is rather missing the point. I did not say “spirits”. I specifically mentioned angels and daemons, and angels of a very particular set – the kerubim, ophanim, and seraphim. The Bible states clearly that angels appear in the form of men – which, from a mathematician’s perspective, in the context of higher-dimensional beings, is a lot like the way a sphere in 3 dimensions, is merely one layer of a hypersphere in 4 dimensions.
The texts in the Bible, like Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, get genuinely quite weird when describing angels. My hypothesis is that what we see is what God permits us to see, in a form that is somewhat comprehensible to our eyes, but the reality of angels (and daemons) is so bizarre, and so weird, that we would not be able to look upon them in their true form without going crazy – just as no man can look upon the face of God without being destroyed.
“Spirits don’t have any particular form. They take the form that God allows them to.”
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you’re not grasping the point being expounded upon by FLATLAND. a higher order dimensional entity can have a dizzying array of 3d cross sections, ie – how the cross section would appear to us visually. to us, they would appear to be completely different and often completely unrelated entities, when in actuallity, it’s all the same entity, it’s just a different appendage or 3d visible cross section that we’re seeing.
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i’m not asserting that FLATLAND has any theological validity ( i’m pretty sure that saying the Father and Son being different cross sections of the same “God” entity has been termed a heresy by the Catholics for more than a thousand years, although it would rather comprehensively solve the “Mystery” of the triune Godhead ), but it is a useful mental tool or analogy to consider the possibilies of a material and fleshly entity attempting to comprehend the possible spiritual.