It just happens that in the past month or so, I’ve had occasion to look at two of these Very Short Introductions: one on angels and the other on dinosaurs. The Very Short Introduction to Angels gives a fascinating account of beliefs about angels not only in the Bible but also in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as the depictions of angels in the history of Western art, literature, and popular culture. And the Very Short Introduction to Dinosaurs has caught me up on developments in paleobiology, and theories about the evolution and extinction of the dinosaurs over the past forty-five years or so, since I last took an active interest in the subject at the age of about seven or eight.
So, in anticipation of today’s celebration, this juxtaposition of Very Short Introductions got me wondering: What, if anything, do angels and dinosaurs have in common? With a little reflection, more similarities come to mind than one might think at first.
Many dinosaurs are scary; and so are angels. Throughout Scripture, when an angelic messenger appears to a human being, the first thing he typically says is, “Do not be afraid” or “Fear not.” That indicates that most people's initial reaction to the manifestation of an angelic presence is sheer terror.
Both dinosaurs and angels are subject to elaborate systems of classification. The evolutionary charts of different classes of dinosaurs are complex, with many categories and subcategories with such names as saurischians, ornithischians, therapods, and sauropods. Likewise, mutatis mutandis, ancient thinkers classified the angels into complex ranks and hierarchies: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and angels.
But the most important similarity of all is that dinosaurs and angels are God’s creatures, just as we are; and more than that, they tend to relativize humanity’s place in God’s creation. Human beings emerged on earth as a recognizably distinct species approximately half a million years ago; and human culture began to have an identifiable material impact on the world about 10,000 years ago. By contrast, the dinosaurs first appeared 225 million years ago and then disappeared 65 million years ago – flourishing for a period of 160 million years in between.
To put those numbers into perspective, if we count the time that has elapsed since the dinosaurs first emerged as one year, then we human beings evolved about twenty hours ago – less than one day. And organic life on earth is much older still than the dinosaurs, having emerged according to most estimates 3.8 billion years ago.
We human beings are virtually new arrivals in the long timeline of the earth’s natural history. So, it’s a bit absurd to claim, as many traditional philosophies and religions have claimed, that God created the world just for us. God was delighting in his creation and the various life forms he created in it for billions of years before he brought us human beings on the scene.
The existence of angels brings home the same point in a different way. We human beings like to think of ourselves as the summit of creation in terms of self-awareness, intelligence, and the ability to shape our destinies by the exercise of free will. Yet the Church’s traditional teaching is that creation comprises not just the material world that we can see, but also a spiritual world that most of the time we cannot see. We profess this belief every Sunday in the first article of the Nicene Creed, which affirms that God is the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. And, as purely spiritual creatures endowed with intelligence and free will, the angels constitute the invisible dimension of God’s creation.
Recent Christian theological reflection on the ecological crisis pinpoints one of the chief causes of environmental degradation as anthropocentrism – the belief that we human beings are the be-all and end-all of creation, and that the earth and all its creatures exist to serve us and our human needs. Those reflecting on these issues have proposed that, as a first step towards a solution, we need to replace this human-centered perspective with a creation-centered perspective. That is, we need to learn to see ourselves as placed not over but within the natural world, set in a web of relationships of mutual interdependence and reciprocity with all other creatures.
And the real upshot of my comparison of dinosaurs and angels is that they both effectively challenge our anthropocentrism by reminding us that there is so much more to God’s creation than impinges on our conscious awareness most of the time. The earth and the natural world have been around so much longer than we human beings have, and will likely continue long after we’re gone. And intelligent and creative as the human race undoubtedly is, the invisible world contains intelligences of far greater power and subtlety.
One of the peculiarities of our Western liturgical calendar in the Church is that all our great feasts and festivals focus on the mysteries of Redemption: Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and all the saints’ days – combine to tell the story of what God has done to save us after our fall from grace and incurring of the guilt of Original Sin. By contrast, in modern times the Eastern Orthodox Church has started keeping September 1st as the “Day of Creation,” that is, as a day commemorating God’s work of creating heaven and earth in the first place, a creation that he pronounced “very good.”
Maybe in the Western Church we will eventually adopt this Festival of Creation as well. In the meantime, the closest thing we have is the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, which is, in effect, a celebration of creation in its invisible and spiritual dimension. Today, then, we contemplate the vastness, beauty, complexity, and interdependence of all that God has made. We pray that just as God’s holy angels worship and serve God in heaven, so they may protect and defend us on earth. And we look forward in joyful hope to that glorious day when all of God’s creation – angels, dinosaurs, and all – will be gathered into that Kingdom of which there shall be no end.
No comments:
Post a Comment