The Angelic Real

Beauty today? No time for anything. Work and disappointment - with X announcing his resignation. Surprising and unexpected. He was doing a good job. I will miss him. But beauty? Y's verbal expresssion of support, comparing me to Brazilian pastors. That's beauty, after a fashion: encouraging.

And doing some work on Angels for Streetlevel theology. That's beauty too, in a weird sort of way - a re-version of the disenchantment of reality by modernity. Not that we should revert to an enchanted world, where there was magic, but also fear, lest we fail to propitiate the magical but malevolent powers. But still, a world full of mystery and beauty: yes, mystery too. The bignesss of the world: the expanse, and expansiveness, of reality.

The Real is more than we can see, or imagine: there are realms of what we are only dimly, and ever occasionally, aware. the vast host of spiritual and metaphysical beings, all deriving existence from God. The universe is more than the universe, more than even a multiverse: what is seen is outweighed by what is unseen; there is simply more of it. And this can lead us to wonder, amazement.

Beauty is a spiritual value and perhaps corresponds to a level of spiritual reality that Plato intuited: a Form,  Transcendental, an Absolute. Abstract, but real: and the abstract concretises, according to Ilyenkov. The virtual becomes actual, factual. Instances of the beautiful participate in the Form of Beauty. As the Greeks and Romans personalised concepts, could this too be an Angel - of Beauty?

Or, maybe an angelic dimension? A field of Force, like Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance? The undergirding of all beautiful things, the particulars, by a spiritual, metaphysical, range of being, a spectrum of beings, a variation of natures. A continuum of angelic nature, not personal, not individual; but various, variform - the thrones, powers and dominions, structures of existence, created but underlying what God has made.