"Madeleine L'Engle noted that this repetitive request to banish terror suggests that angels aren't beautiful winged humanoids, but deeply alien, startling creatures."
"Every angel is terrifying," wrote Rilke in the Duino Elegies, echoing L'Engle's sentiment. You see it in other places in the gospels: Zachariah "was troubled, and fear fell upon him" and the angel tells him not to fear; Mary was "troubled" and told to fear not; the shepherds on Christmas were "sore afraid."
The modern image of the angel seems to be this comforting, gentle figure, almost half human, half dove. Whereas the angels two thousand years ago (and further back) seem rather to manifest the ineffable majesty of the Divine.
Or, perhaps more mundanely, the appearance of something (whatever it may be) out of thin air scares the crap out of you, for obvious reasons. Not to be too glib, but the Metatron's manifestation in Dogma seems a good example: a winged dude with an echoing voice has just appeared in my bedroom!
Fair enough. What interested me here is that Jesus is not previously depicted as majestic or ineffable - and the angel in the scene is just sitting there on the rock, hanging out. But both are still pretty darn terrifying. :)
But it needs the lead-up: "Beauty is only the first touch of terror that we can still bear, and it awes us so much because it so coolly disdains to destroy us. Every single Angel is terrible!"
For Rilke (and the Romanticists), it's both. Beauty and terror are the same.
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"Every angel is terrifying," wrote Rilke in the Duino Elegies, echoing L'Engle's sentiment. You see it in other places in the gospels: Zachariah "was troubled, and fear fell upon him" and the angel tells him not to fear; Mary was "troubled" and told to fear not; the shepherds on Christmas were "sore afraid."
The modern image of the angel seems to be this comforting, gentle figure, almost half human, half dove. Whereas the angels two thousand years ago (and further back) seem rather to manifest the ineffable majesty of the Divine.
Or, perhaps more mundanely, the appearance of something (whatever it may be) out of thin air scares the crap out of you, for obvious reasons. Not to be too glib, but the Metatron's manifestation in Dogma seems a good example: a winged dude with an echoing voice has just appeared in my bedroom!
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For Rilke (and the Romanticists), it's both. Beauty and terror are the same.
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