Angels in Innsbruck

I was prepared not to like the music. Over the years I’ve developed an allergy to church music that, like an insecure job applicant, tries too hard to be noticed. Months before I’d been at the ordination of two Italians in Rome, the setting a magnificent baroque basilica, the music a polyglot jumble: drums, languages no one in the congregation spoke, vaguely aboriginal rhythms. It was spaghetti carbonara prepared by British cooks. Now at the Jesuit university church in Innsbruck, I was braced for Germanchurchy silliness—vestments too spacey for Star Trek, conceptual dances replacing psalms—but the Mass was prayerful and the choir exceptional. Only at the recessional did the same choir launch into a Negro spiritual. Another Justin Trudeau moment, I thought—but then I sat back down and caught my breath.

Sonorous voices resonated in the vault and dome—joyful with just a hint of plaintiveness—and somehow Austrian baroque and Baptist Gospel seemed one. Perhaps as a postlude, the song didn’t seem an interruption. Perhaps after a week of studying German I was relieved to understand anything at all. No, I realized, it was the words—the refrain, All day, all night, angels watching over me, my Lord—that made it work. As the music came to an end and my eyes drifted from the spare modern altar to the seraphim around the dome, I realized that it was the angels holding everything together.

As the music faded, I flashed back to an argument from seminary days—about a twentieth-century theologian who seemed to suggest that, though they pop up here and there in scripture, today perhaps angels ought to be tucked away behind the china in grandma’s curio cabinet. That theologian happens to be buried in the crypt under the spot where the choir had intoned “Angels watching over me, my Lord.” The square in front of the church—facing a copy shop, a fitness studio, and a hotel—even bears his name.

Another flashback: a walk through New York’s Central Park. I am speaking with another Jesuit, a playwright, about the difficulty of including what we refer to antiseptically as “a faith perspective” in contemporary literature and entertainment. We come upon the Bethesda Fountain over which the bronze “Angel of Waters” is passing, and he remarks offhandedly, “Angels are okay. You can write about angels, and it doesn’t offend anyone.” According to a 2016 Gallup poll, in fact, 72 percent of Americans believe in angels (only slightly behind God at 79 percent). Angels, in other words, command greater allegiance than any single religious denomination or, for that matter, either political party. Yet Karl Rahner—you guessed it—considered their very existence an “acute problem.”

On a second visit to the university church I realized just how propitious my illustrious confrere’s resting place had turned out to be; the church was packed with angels, more vigilant than the most state-of-the-art surveillance system. Some peeked out discreetly from vines in the side chapels’ molding. Biblical cherubim with six fiery wings framed the nave, though so high up they might easily be overlooked (or underlooked, to be precise). Baroque paintings swam with the usual swarms of cherubs, but their three-dimensional compatriots in marble, wood, and plaster were the church’s stars: pudgy putti, like banqueting Roman aristocrats, tugging togas over bulbous bellies; a slimmer counterpart blasting a golden trumpet over an ornate pulpit; warrior angels stepping, right there and then, out of the Bible and into the world of the congregation. Wielding thunderbolt and scepter, clothed in breastplates and the legionnaire’s skirt of leather strips, they wore no helmets, their hair curly and their faces smooth. The effect was both terrifying and encouraging, the softness of their faces, the utter absence of malice—their innocence—most unsettling of all.

Austrian baroque is more restrained than its Italian or Iberian counterparts. The color scheme of the church is strikingly simple; the high altar is russet and gold and the columns pale rose, but everything else is white. But the whiteness, like that of the clouds rolling over Innsbruck’s mountains, is not static. It is molded into garlands and shields, vases overflowing with fruit, and all those angels. Even the branches in the background are shaped to suggest the movement of an angel’s wings. As in a Bach cantata, the uniform color provides an underlying note that holds together the melisma of shapes and figures. The baroque, after all, is not just a style but also a worldview that presupposes God’s unifying will sustaining more layers of reality than can be imagined, allowing even us plodding earthlings to be caught up into the angelic sphere.

The 2004 altar and its accompanying furniture represent an altogether different worldview—or perhaps the post-war Western fear of having worldviews. Charcoal gray slabs and empty space, a bit of stainless steel, the colors of an anonymous businessman’s suit sans necktie; Magritte’s bowler-hatted, apple-faced The Son of Man comes to mind. The contemporary furniture fits the color scheme, but otherwise the styles coexist uneasily. During the liturgy a long row of ministers lines up in single file behind the altar, choreography that reminds me of a firing squad. The sense of disquiet is more than just my imagination; the plight of today’s European Christians is expressed in this dissonance of styles. We are neither at ease with what we have inherited, nor have we invented something better. And so we end up not really belonging where we are. We do the minimum required, sometimes a little less just to assert our difference.

But it is still the angels the tourists come to see.

This Western ennui finds clear expression in Rahner’s writing. “Clear” is not quite the right word, since the phenomenon is by its nature foggy, and Rahner’s voluminous work is notoriously serpentine. Rahner’s writings on angels duck, bob, and bedazzle in as baroque a manner as any seventeenth-century trompe l’oeil. The article he wrote on angels for Sacramentum Mundi, his great encyclopedia of Catholicism, is relatively straightforward, framed as a lament that “even pious but rational people of today” don’t really have much use for angels anymore; it ends with the counsel not to “place truths concerning the angels particularly in the foreground of preaching and instruction.” On the surface, Rahner strikes the pose of defending belief in angels, duly quoting magisterial texts that affirm their existence, while tracing what seem harmlessly abstruse epistemological epicycles in the background about whether angels, as part of creation, therefore the natural world, therefore, perhaps, the object of scientific study broadly understood rather than revelation properly so called and thus, presupposing the status quaestionis, whether one really must believe in what, after all, may be no more than extra-Biblical cultural incursions and, as far as the New Testament is concerned, “only marginal religious phenomena.” It is a mark of our unease that we cannot quite bring ourselves to say what we really mean.

Rahner’s Sacramentum Mundi article from 1968 is framed as a defense of traditional faith in the face of social currents that, while regrettable, we dare not resist. As such it displays a rather remarkable pastoral tone-deafness. Few figures from literary history read as quaintly today as Rahner’s “Modern Man,” who represents, I suppose, the 7 percent of Gallup respondents who believe in God but not in angels: a lonely soul lost in the jostling tweet-o-sphere of postmodernity. Of course, the Gallup poll surveyed Americans—perhaps not modern enough for continental intellectuals—and European polls would no doubt show different results. I was in Innsbruck to study German and, when I wasn’t misplacing verbs, was struck by the implicit ideology of our peppy language workbooks. I’ve now spent rather a lot of time in European foreign language courses, and I’ve come to realize the degree to which those courses assume and perpetuate the same euro-generic values. The Italian books might spend a bit more time on food and the German a bit more on salaries, but everybody knows that what really matters is career, travel, and the environment, that families are different today than they were in the past, and that modern Europe is diverse (hurray!). By the end of the summer I could discuss high-efficiency dishwashers but never learned the word for “angel.” In one particular language exercise—using adjectives to compare different advertisements—I was paired with two university students, and we all agreed that the advertisement we’d been given for the zoo was the clearest—a picture of a bear and all the relevant information in bold letters. One of my partners, a Pole studying computer science in Amsterdam, said, “But it is unfortunately old-fashioned.”

Not sure how to convey the thought that “old-fashioned family fun” was perhaps the zoo’s attraction, I responded, “For a zoo maybe it is not important to be modern.”

“But modern is always good!” he responded, as if correcting a silly child. A self-evident truth, at least within the context of the language book and its color versus black-and-white photos. Of course, the Futurists of the early twentieth century thought the same thing, and then came World War I. And no one takes pictures of the Ikea altar.

But still we Westerners feel the attitude’s tug: who wants to be out-of-date? Rahner’s theology is self-consciously awash in the drive to modernize and update, but, for a theologian whose work is so turgid with qualifications, he subjects this attitude to astonishingly little scrutiny. While he demands rigorous examination of the Christian tradition, the Zeitgeist gets let off the hook. Thus, at the end of his article in Sacramentum Mundi, Rahner ends up recommending embarrassed silence as a pastoral strategy. It does not occur to him to apply St. Ignatius’s spiritual counsel that the devil prefers tepidity and silence but cowers before a show of force.

Of course, such forthright talk of the devil—an angel after all—is precisely what makes Rahner so uneasy, as a lengthier 1978 article in Theological Investigations reveals. While in Sacramentum Mundi, Rahner ostensibly warns against excessive demythologizing, in the later work the drive to do so becomes something of an incantation. Reading Sacramentum Mundi, we might suspect that Rahner simply misjudged modern attitudes, that his data sample was skewed by identifying “Modern Man” with “post-war German-speaking theologians.” The tack Rahner takes in Theological Investigations, however, suggests a sleight of hand. For by the end of that more technical argument, Rahner is complaining not that nobody believes in angels, but that so many people still do in ways he finds, at best, distasteful. It is “the ordinary piety of Catholics” that needs “a decisive demythologization.”

At the beginning of the article Rahner identifies three positions regarding angels: (1) that they exist, (2) that they are nonsense, and (3) that we can’t really be sure. He repeatedly reminds those who hold the second position how hard it is to prove that something doesn’t exist. He holds out the prospect of getting from position three back to position one, though first we have to pass through another epistemological labyrinth. In it he asserts that only God can be the true object of revelation; within Rahner’s system, therefore, any sort of mediation—whether angels, scripture, or sacraments—ends up in an uneasy limbo. He allows that certain secondary objects might be so intimately intertwined with faith that we are bound to believe in them, though it is not clear that angels make the cut. “These lengthy reflections do not seem to have taken us very far,” he concludes. Position three wins by default.

Next, Rahner turns to the question of what angels actually are. His Sacramentum Mundi entry includes a substantial summary of scriptural angelology, though at the end Rahner tucks in a discreet sign that seems to point the way to the recycling bin. We find ourselves, he asserts, “in a historical process of salvation [in which we] become gradually more and more ‘grown up.’” Perhaps we don’t really need angels anymore. In Theological Investigations he doesn’t much bother with scripture, since the Bible provides no key to distinguish what is binding from what is merely a “time-conditioned conceptual model.”

This is breathtaking maneuvering, with implications far beyond belief in angels. Whereas Augustine argued that for knowledge of things we cannot study empirically, we are most dependent on revelation, Rahner puts the primary source of that revelation on the sidelines. With the Bible benched, he substitutes another axiom. Demythologization means that angels—if they exist, whatever they are—must be intrinsically related to matter, even if they cannot be studied scientifically. Since the magisterial statements alluded to in his earlier article have boxed Rahner into affirming the existence of angels, his strategy in Theological Investigations is to arrive at a definition that fits his axioms. The conception of “angels” he comes up with is that of “higher-order substantial principles.” In other words, if the soul is the “substantial principle” of an individual—the unity that makes it possible to speak meaningfully of billions of cells and molecules stuck together as the person Karl—so too higher order entities—groupings of individuals such as nations—have their own substantial principles. Rahner never quite works out what it would mean for the Christian story to identify higher order substantial principles with angels. It is difficult to imagine Mary mustering a particularly enthusiastic fiat when confronted with a higher order substantial principle in Nazareth. In Rahner’s reading, the Annunciation has become part of the New Testament’s “marginal religious phenomena,” the product of “folkloristic, primitive” conceptualizations.

Rahner positions his demythologization as a response to modern skepticism, but in doing so he backs into an ancient pagan concept. Not far from the Forum, the Romans erected a shrine to the Genius populi Romani, with “genius” here indicating a kind of low-level divinity expressing the vital essence of the group. Nations, cities, even the legions had their own genius. The genius of the Roman people was perhaps the best known of these, with coins depicting him as a muscular youth holding a libation bowl in one hand and a cornucopia in the other. The genii were, in fact, higher order substantial principles intrinsically connected to the physical world and, thus, essentially different from Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. Our word “angel” comes from the Greek angelos or messenger, and the angels of Christian tradition are first and foremost messengers from a dimension of reality “not dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Hamlet puts it. They come to reveal to us something of that realm which we would not otherwise know. And therein, for Rahner, lies the rub.

I suspect that what is most profoundly at stake in Rahner’s theology of angels—the reason for all the epistemological tap dancing—is revelation and its baggage: the scandal of particularity, Christian exclusivism, the fact that if such revelation happened during the first century, we moderns end up uncomfortably dependent on a tradition passed on through an awful lot of undemythologized generations. Rahner makes an obligatory angsty reference to witch trials, faulting pre-modern beliefs in the supernatural. It would be rather tiresome to investigate whether angels might be declared not guilty if it could be shown that scientific-minded twentieth-century Germans engaged in anything like witch trials or whether the basic dynamics behind such events could be detected in, say, the Twitter activity of people who think not a whit about Lucifer or Michael. In reality, the angst itself—the uneasy distancing from a past one realizes must still be ours if we are to be anything at all—is the unspoken premise of Rahner’s argument, the real Grundaxiom from which all others flow.

Innsbruck, however, is simply too lovely a city to spend all day reading Rahner. Enough Italian charm has washed up over the Alps to give a laid-back seasoning to all the Germanic tidiness. The houses are colorful, both the beer and wine are good, and everywhere has a mountain view. Innsbruck is a university town, so the population is bright, young, and sporty; an Alpine hike or mountain bike ride is never more than a stroll away. Tyrol is Catholic by culture, so little shrines dot the mountain paths, bell towers define the skyline, and paintings of St. Christopher pop up now and again on the walls. A Hapsburg palace hosts free evening concerts in an old town that seems plucked from a fable. My evening strolls along the river Inn, fast and chalky-colored from the mountain melt-off, render me more sympathetic to Karl Rahner than I am in the library. He’s said to have enjoyed taking an evening walk himself, often for an ice cream.

The surroundings make a compelling case for a benevolent, easygoing deity, and the Austrians have a good thing going. I can imagine not wanting to disturb the idyll, especially after all that Rahner and his generation lived through. After all, he doesn’t really want to argue worldviews. He knows that no modern discovery—neither electric lights nor the electric chair—makes angels more or less plausible and that the ancient world also had its skeptics; the Sadducees didn’t believe in angels, either. Rahner assumes our worldview is closer to that of the Sadducees than of Jesus and the Pharisees, and his real project is making us feel okay about it. His discussion of angels is therapeutic, not apologetic: he aims to assuage the guilt we feel for departing from the traditional narrative by transforming the angels it contains into abstractions. As long as we still believe in God, why not let him take care of all the rest?

On a rainy afternoon I wander down into the basement of the university church. Adjacent to a crypt for the Hapsburg princes who once ruled Tyrol is another for Jesuits who taught at the university. Rahner is in the same row as the liturgist Josef Jungmann, but though Jungmann’s black-and-white photo sports an impish grin, poor Karl’s frown seems to have come from a time before humor was invented. Most striking is the determination of the frown, the effort behind it. I peer through the oversize glasses and imagine the look I’ve seen in the eyes of the elderly, the look one gets after broaching the topic of whether it is still safe to drive. It’s a very specific kind of fear, more of irrelevance than death, the fear of saying too much and letting slip that one hasn’t quite been able to follow the conversation. While no one would question Rahner’s intellectual sharpness, that same kind of fear—on a grander scale—haunts his theology. It is hard not to see in all the harrumphing about demythologization an anxiety about being left behind. When he complains of simplistic believers seeing angels present “in almost childishly trivial manifestations which are of little importance either to world history or to salvation history,” one feels the determination in the frown. Theology must be taken Seriously. There is destiny in world historical events, but not the fall of a sparrow.

The angels peeking out from behind water fountains and carved into lintels in Innsbruck’s old town or hiding among the stucco foliage in the university church also make their case without argument. Rahner’s Modern Man came and went too early to have read Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on the incommensurability of moral systems, though an analogous incommensurability separates the worldview of Rahner from that of the artists who filled the university church with angels. Whether one starts with Rahner’s axioms—popping up as conveniently as sprites—or with Luke’s first chapter is as much a question of imagination and desire as of rational deduction. This is why the harmony I felt hearing “Angels watching over me”—the juxtaposition of Gospel spiritual and Jesuit baroque—so intrigued me. Could it be that ordinary Catholic piety has more in common with the worldview of post–Civil War Southern Baptists than with Catholicism’s modern theologians? And if arguments can’t explain the difference, what can?

Having dedicated sufficient time to Rahner, I return upstairs to allow the angels their rebuttal. The most striking feature of the church’s interior is the sanctuary around the original high altar. The wooden choir, though no longer in use, is neither bare nor ruined, since the Austrian church suffers no shortage of funds, and angels, hands folded prayerfully over their hearts, are carved between the stalls. But the real action is above, six seraphs bursting from balconies above the choir, representing the advent of heavenly Jerusalem; they are vigorous and apocalyptic, their dress a mix of battle array and philosophers’ robes; though the objects in their hands are those of worship—a chalice, a harp, a thurible dangling from a chain—their movement is disruptive; they arrive like a blast of stormy air pouring over the mountains, like an avalanche, like floodwaters bursting a dam. And that, I suspect, is the real key to answering my question.

Angels, as divine messengers, shatter the surface of the world we can see. Their very existence is an assertion of realities beyond our control, dimensions like the innards of a black hole that cannot be known or measured; their arrival means the invasion of our Newtonian world by black hole physics. Only we are not talking about the force of gravity or the speed of light, but of perfect justice and ultimate truth, the power to produce those earthquakes sung of in the Magnificat, overturning thrones and scattering the proud. Angels imply the fragility of all that we see and know and build, including our philosophical systems. It is not hard to imagine how their arrival would have been eagerly anticipated in Roman-occupied Palestine; a Europe in which plague, poverty, and war were daily realities; or an American South in which the chains of slavery, though legally abolished, still weighed like phantom limbs.

In idyllic Innsbruck all the scattering and shattering and casting down the heavenly hosts announce is better read about than hoped for, and who can blame the post-war Germans, grateful for the respite from the horrors of the twentieth century, for settling for the cool evening air rising off the Inn? With vestiges of Christendom still present in art and architecture, civic festivals and protocols, why risk what remains with talk of apocalyptic beings? With Christianity under attack from the followers of Kant and Marx, why not blend in and avoid the scuffle? It is hard to imagine anyone mustering much venom against higher-order substantial principles. Unlike the baroque warriors in the university church, there is no danger of such beings impinging upon the congregation’s space. Revelation, Rahner claims in Sacramentum Mundi, does not need to introduce any new reality, but only to reinterpret.

Yet the milky color of the Inn comes from the microscopic bits of mountain stone it carries, for even the Alps must fall. A siren keens in the night. Ice cream melts and dribbles on the paving stones. Political undercurrents—the latest election results—hint that even this European idyll has a price. Life still ends with death, and sin still lurks at the door. So I for one am glad it was Gabriel and not theologians bearing axioms who appeared at Nazareth in A.D. 1 to lay out mankind’s options before a girl who did not seem to have much great importance in world historical events. I’ll take ordinary Catholic piety with all its trembling and strangeness over the genius of a Modern Man who seeks not salvation but reassurance. So I make one more trip down into the crypt and, using Gabriel’s words, ask that the angels continue their good watch over Karl Rahner.