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