The Angel Who Wanted a Hamburger

It’s 1980 Berlin, the Berlinest of years. A hushed picture in black and white. This Berlin’s dreariness is to be seen more on its inhabitants’ faces than in the city’s crumbling grandeur. Tending this wilderness of the spirit is a pair of mismatched shepherds: fatherly Bruno Ganz and the unlikely figure of Peter Falk – comic antidote and every man’s everyman. These are the bare bones of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, a film that depicts two angels traveling around Berlin, ministering to its desperate population. This ministry, it soon becomes clear, is one of consolation. Its blessings are served in touches and whispers. In this novel recasting of an angel’s workweek, Ganz’s angel, nursing the downcast of Berlin, begins to feel within himself some of their un-angelic cravings. He wants to love. He wants his wings clipped to make way for unbridled human experience. He wants hamburgers (I repeat myself?).

This dramatic complication can be read as a nod to contemporary theology’s daring re-examination of the arcane field of angelology.

©️ROAD MOVIES FILMPRODUKTION/ARGOS FILMS / Alamy Stock.

To begin with, some concessions about the road’s rockiness. In our minds, angels are creatures lambent with a saccharine holiness we can’t help but find off-putting, or else they cut the terrible form of sword-wielding agents of apocalyptic judgment. But both remain angels, and we remain untroubled by this either/or. These castings have so monopolized our imaginations that attempts to encounter the bare meaning of the angelic are rare. With good reason – thinking about angels is hard. Hard because whatever angels might be, they seem by widespread consensus to be so unlike us as to render analogy impossible. What on earth is an angel like? Like nothing on earth. Our culture of rationalistic scientism, starting from the principle that things are knowable by their material make-up, can only scoff at mention of angels. At best – presuming politer company – they are shooed away as unsuitable table talk. Every scornful “get a grip” will hit the mark, because as the MGMT song “Flash Delirium” decries, “you can’t get a grip if there’s nothing to hold.”

In spite of the existence of angelology, we can’t actually study angels. There are no genealogies as there are of Christ or Abraham. A few overzealous theologians have written weighty tracts detailing angelic hierarchies, with each echelon’s job descriptions (the seraphim assigned to love and the cherubim to know). But this fails to answer our more pressing question: What does this all mean for me? The twentieth-century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner had the rare skill of posing and relentlessly pursuing precisely this question.

Rahner echoes our mystification at “angel lore,” not least the biblical texts with their casual references to these prodigiously uncasual beings. Rahner diagnoses the confusion surrounding angels as an error of genre. The Bible speaks about these beings with an undeniable matter-of-factness, but not in such a way as to allow us to map the territories of angels. It doesn’t begin to bother with such a task. Angels are just there, couched in the biblical cosmos as naturally as the men and women to whom they’re sent.

The slipperiness of angels has to do with some unresolved underlying questions. Most urgent among these for Rahner is the question of spirit’s relationship to matter. Rahner takes issue with the classical definition of angels as “pure spirits.” In this he detects too heavy a whiff of the Platonic, which can consider the body an unsuitable host for the spirit. For him, the associated risks are catastrophic: too easily this exaltation of spirit over against the material world leads to matter’s denigration as something secondary, even irrelevant. A profoundly incarnational theologian, Rahner urges us to consider that created matter and created spirit are both destined to share in God’s eternity. Given this, we must avoid the kind of slavish subordination of matter to spirit all too common in the theological tradition. Wenders’s angels soothe the spirit through the flesh. Wenders is entertaining more than visual poetics here – he’s joining the best in the Christian tradition in translating the body (in all its bodiliness) into the language of the spirit. This right relationship is what steadies our side of the equation when God takes flesh. We can speak of one cosmos precisely because God intends for all creation to share in his life and love both materially and spiritually.

If we are to avoid the Platonic trap exposed by Rahner, which would have us dividing the universe into spirit and matter, we must cast off such dualism and instead set our sights on the central matter of Christianity: the relationship between God and the world. In order to think about angels, then, we need to think of them as finite objects of God’s infinite love, just as we are. We must momentarily put aside specific questions about the nature of their creation and see them first as created.

In an essay on the humanity of Christ, Rahner suggests that just as God becomes man without ceasing to be God, we are saved without ceasing to be human. Our creatureliness as beings created by God is precisely not what we need saving from. We are not saved from creatureliness but restored to the full glorious truth of being God’s creatures. In the same way, angels are not some other name for what in the last analysis is God. Instead, they are symbolic of God’s love for what is finite and created – and this in a religion in which the symbolic does not compromise but rather constitutes reality. A religion in which the cross stands for itself.

We would not have the words to articulate any of this if it weren’t for the Word made flesh. This Rahner takes as his starting point; Jesus’ humanity provides our own its fundamental openness to God. Rahner wants to unravel this point to its most radical implications. It means, first, that coming to God involves nothing of the Eastern mystical flight from self as illusion. It is rather from within one’s humanity – redeemed by God’s taking it on as his own – that one reaches God, who has already reached man in the miracle of the Incarnation. But as Rahner knows, it’s one thing to lend assent to this in abstract and another to become the embodied truth of it. The temptation remains to dismiss the material world as what the Hindus call maya, a cloud of smoke hiding the face of God. We want to love God directly and immediately. But loving God means loving what he loves, and the Christian God loves the world. Accepting this and living it out in the form of Christian charity means moving beyond the pesky Platonic to a love of the finite, created world, a love that is uniquely Christian because it has the Incarnation as its justification.

From this vantage point Rahner makes the daring proposition – novel in the history of Christian theology – that “if God is love, one comes closest to [this love] where, having given itself as love to the world, it is furthest away from itself.” Which brings us back to his ministers we call angels. The heights that made us despair of approaching them are irrelevant: it is they who have approached us. They come close to us because that is where God’s love has traveled. God’s love has become human love. In becoming man, God has scrambled any spiritual hierarchy we might invent. After all, God has worn a human face. But for all this, the angels remain those whose name is identical to their mission, which is to bring God’s love to man, to the country of finitude where they again discover, in the unlikeliest of places, his bottomless love for his creation.

So of course Wenders’s angels desire to take on flesh, since flesh is the terminal point of God’s love in the world, so much so that God chooses to make it his own reality. Reversing the trope that good people die and become angels, Wenders’s good angels are rewarded with the true pleasures of being human. The next time you eat a hamburger, don’t take it for granted. There might just be an angel salivating on your shoulder. And even under the golden arches of your local 24/7 McDonald’s – which during fast food’s longest hours appears a godless place – the God who seems impossibly far could not be closer at hand.