Vigils Reading

THE UNITY OF SPIRIT AND MATTER

By Karl Rahner5

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The history of the angels and the history of the world are at least

interlaced in many respects. The common goal of both is the eternal kingdom

of God… In the Christian teaching the angels, whether they are to be thought of

as good or bad, certainly exercise functions in this world… The angels can be

understood quite correctly, even according to scripture, as cosmic powers of the

order of nature and of its history. Christian theology has always seen the object

of the personal decision of personal spiritual powers, called angels, to live in

Christ and in his salvific function for the history of humankind and hence of the

material world.

If one looks at these data, it will be quite legitimate to be of the opinion

that, first of all, the doctrine of the angels understood as ‘pure spirits’, no matter

how materially correct, unjustifiably lends too much support to a platonic and

non-Christian removal of the created spirit from this world. Furthermore, it

will have to be said that the angels, in spite of their differences from human

beings, can be conceived in such a way that, in their own way and of their own

most proper and original nature, they are powers of the one and hence also

material world to whose material nature they are genuinely and essentially

related. It may rightly be said, at any rate, that the Christian teaching about the

angels does not basically bar the way to a decided and consequential conception

of the unity of spirit and matter in their common history.

Since ultimately we really know very little that is certain about the angels

and demons, we have the perfect right after what has been said to look at the

unity of spirit and matter as we experience it directly in the history of

humankind and also as interpreted in a way compatible with revelation, and to

look at this unity as paradigmatic in principle for the unity of spirit and matter

in the created sphere as such. The highest grade of all productive becoming is

the human spirit and matter tends towards it as towards its final principle of

nature and form, for a human being is the goal of all generative becoming.

Matter and spirit have a unity in their starting point, in their history and in their

goal. Both of them remain eternally valid before God and form for ever, now

and in the state of perfection, the mutually correlative, non-separable

constitutive elements of the one created reality.

5 Theological Investigations VI, On Angels. Karl Rahner, Seabury Press, 1974, pp. 159-160.10