ABSTRACT
Perhaps, in modernity, nothing has had so much been written about it, and with so little perspicacity, as angels. Their image, at the same time beautiful and exhausted, thoughtful and efficient, has so deeply penetrated not only the daily prayers and liturgies of the Occident, its philosophy, literature, painting, and sculpture, but also its day-dreaming, subcultures, and the Kitsch, that even a merely coherent comprehension of the topic seems out of question. And when, in the twentieth century, the angel forcefully re-emerges in Rilke’s Elegies or in Klee’s paintings, in Benjamin’s Theses or in Corbin’s gnosis, his gesture does not appear to us today to be any less enigmatic than that of the seraphims who, in the etoimasia tou thronou of Palaeochristian and Byzantine basilicas, seem to protect in silence the empty throne of glory.
