Older Christian tradition considered human beings to be connected to the world in two ways. As ‹creatures of nature›, human beings belong to an earthly world which they experience in their own life process within themselves and as nature apart from themselves.
As ‹spiritual› beings, humans belong to a heavenly world, which they experience – at least in the sense of Christian Middle Ages – apart from themselves in their relationship to angels, in themselves in their own thinking. Thinking is directly related to angels, because thinking is initially not intelectual activity of human individuals, but participation in spiritual perception of angels. An angel’s perception in turn has two sides: angels perceive themselves and perceive the world. By bringing forth (spiritual) knowledge of the world, spiritual perception of themselves arises within angels at the same time. For angels exist in what they recognize, and what they recognize exists in them. In other words, angels are the spiritual concept of reality and its objects. Translation: Simone Ioannou
FromWolf-Ulrich Klünker, Expectation of Angels. Stuttgart 2010, p. 14. In: Andreas Neider (Ed.), Children Need Time – So Do Adults. Stuttgart 2016.
Photo Vladyslav Tobolenko
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