Re: angelism


Subject: Re: angelism
From: David Alan Beck (dabeck@IUPUI.EDU)
Date: Mon Nov 29 1999 - 21:07:17 EST


For what it is worth, my understanding of angelism is that, unlike
bestialism which is too absorbed in the physical (i.e. almost all of the
characters in Lancelot), angelism is the disease of intellectuals and
people who are too occupied with the "spiritual," as if it were divorced
from the physical (i.e. that human nature is split between the spirit and
the physical). Taylor calls angelism a movement that "tends to take one
away from the active involvement with the real world of which he is a
part" (25). It is comparable to what Kierkegaard calls the "poetic
existence" (Taylor 25).

The danger of angelism is that, unlike bestialism, the person who is lost
in it can appear to be "deep." S/he can be very knowledgeable about
intellectual/spiritual things, but is so divorced from the physical world
that s/he is unable to act. A good example of spiritual angelism can be
found in Doris, Tom More's ex in Love in the Ruins. Sutter is a good
example of intellectual angelism (in The Last Gentleman). I think Tom
himself suffers from angelism, even though he is trying to heal others
of it with his lapsometer (Physician heal thy self!).

Anyway, that is my understanding of it. I hope it is of some help.

David Beck

On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Farrell O'gorman wrote:

> I think the term "angelism" originates with Jacques Maritain's -The Dream
> of Descartes-, was picked up by Allen Tate in the 1940s (see his essay
> "The Angelic Imagination" on Poe), and came to Percy via his reading
> of both Tate and Maritain directly. Tate's wife Caroline Gordon actually
> accused Percy of "angelism" himself when she read a draft of his first
> novel in 1952 and saw that it had to do with basically "disembodied"
> thoughts of the protagonist--philosophy rather than fiction. Gordon
> paraphrased Maritain in calling angelism "the sin of the age."
>
> Farrell O'Gorman
>
>
> On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Marshall Smith wrote:
>
> > Could be off base, but I've considered angelism to be the philosophically
> > contrived separation of the rational faculty from the rest of existence. I
> > haven't seen it called "angelism" outside of Percy's work.
> >
> > Marshall Smith
> >
>



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