Vigils Reading
June 19
THE ANGEL
AND THE MACHINE
From an article by Thomas Merton5
◊◊◊
The angels are our brothers and fellow servants in a world of freedom and
of grace. Like us, they are saved by Christ the Lord and King of Angels. With
Christ their King and sent by his command, they come to us as invisible
messengers of his divine will, as mysterious protectors and friends in the
spiritual order. Their presence around us—unimaginable, tender, solicitous and
mighty, terrible as it is gentle—is more and more forgotten while the personal
horizon of our spiritual vision shrinks and closes in upon ourselves. [The
angels] are sent to inform us that we are rooted in the very light by whom they
were sent! Yet if they were not sent our eyes would never open, our hearts would
never leap out of their own little constraint into the large freedom of a perfect
and total response…
We meet the angels, the messengers of divine help, on the frontiers of our
own freedom and our own capacity. They touch us when we reach our natural
limits…We do not usually meet them except when we ourselves are at the end of
our strength, or of our endurance, or of our understanding, or of our capacity to
hope and to believe. The angel appears when we ourselves are reduced to the
center of our deepest need.
If the angel comes as the comforter who says “fear not” and “Thy prayer
is heard“, that is precisely why man prefers more and more not to be reduced to
the extremity where he needs the angelic answer. Rather than fearing and then
being told to fear no more, he would prefer to avoid fear. Our weak faith would
rather get along without such powerful help, coming as it does from the invisible
world that is entirely beyond observation and control: in other words, we would
prefer to get along with fewer demands upon our faith. We would prefer not to
be reminded of our poverty…
Technological civilization is, as we have it now, a civilization without
angels. It is a civilization in which we have chosen the machine instead of the
angel: that is to say that we have placed the machine where the angel used to be:
at the limit of our own strength, at the frontier of our natural capacity…
The machine is fully visible… Yet the machines are “our” angels. We made
them, not they themselves. They are, we think, entirely in our own power. They
become, then, extensions of our own intelligence, our own strength. We do not
have to walk to the edge of an infinite void in order to feel the brush of their
unpredictable wings upon us in the starlight. They form part of our own
enclosed and comfortable world, they stand between us and nature… There still
remain limits where we face the void from which no mechanical rescue is
imaginable. At these frontiers, as always, the angels await us.
If technological society may seem to exclude the angels, it is because it
seeks to make us forget these other frontiers (especially death!): and this again
is no fault of the innocent machine. It is our own choice… It is our anxiety to
make our machine world completely self-sufficient and autonomous that we
render it spiritually unlivable for ourselves. More than ever we need the angels,
not to replace our machines but to teach us to live with them. For the angels
come to us to teach us how to rest, to forget useless care, to relax, in silence, to
“let go,” to abandon ourselves not to self-conscious fun but in self-forgetful
faith.
5 The Angel and the Machine”, first published in Season, vol. 5, Summer 1967, reprinted in The Merton Seasonal, vol. 22
no. 1, Spring 1997, pp. 3-6.11