I am honoured and excited at being invited to preach in College on a theme of my choice. Honoured for obvious reasons—excited because as a Roman Catholic I am used to everything being forbidden unless it is compulsory. It is an exciting change to taste Anglican freedom, and to choose one’s texts and one’s theme.

So, I have chosen to reflect on angels, basing myself on those intriguing biblical texts we have just heard from the prophet Isaiah and from the book of Revelation. But has the subject of angels been a wise choice? Is there not something irresponsible in preaching on such an abstruse and specialised subject in our day and age? Is this going to be an exercise in Christian day-dreaming and telling fairy tales? It might be said that if angels prove anything, they prove the irrelevance of our faith today. Some will say that this is what you should expect if you invite a Dominican friar to preach; antiquarian theology. Some will say that this is the kind of concern that makes Christianity beautiful but of no real use; well-meaning silliness.

What does it mean to say that we live in a ‘scientific age’ when that is contrasted with ‘a religious age’? Or again, to say that ‘Because we live in a scientific age we don’t need religion’?

What sort of competition is this, in which two apparently very different kinds of concern are seen as embattled? In particular, what does ‘scientific’ mean when one talks of a scientific age, and just what are the needs that science is now held to satisfy? (The spotlight is usually turned on religion, but I think we should sometimes turn it the other way). These are not just disinterested, sociological questions. We have all been hearing the voice that expresses this rather mysterious faith in science all our lives. The force with which it comes home to us must, I think, show that some of the things it is saying are important. Yet in a dozen obvious ways what it says is muddled and wildly wrong.

I must talk here somewhat crudely, because I am talking about something crude. The voice is part of the imagery out of which our conscious thought arises, merging into a dark background of which we are hardly aware. It is full of crude notions. But they can be very influential. Let’s have a closer look at this one.

The church of San Miniato al Monte lies on a hill on the north side of the Arno, overlooking the city of Florence. It is dedicated to a deacon, reputedly the son of the king of Armenia, who was martyred in the city around 25 A.D. during one of the imperial persecutions. The church which presently stands on the site was begun in 1013. It is one of the oldest and certainly one of the most beautiful churches in Florence—a perfectly preserved Romanesque basilica with a striking facade of mosaics and green and white marble in geometric designs. The church is attached to a monastery of Olivetan monks and their services attract large congregations, both tourists and native Florentines.

At Mass opening the Octave of prayer for Christian unity this year, the abbot of San Miniato preached a sermon on the Christian vision of Europe. He spoke of the two great scourges which had afflicted Europe in this century, Nazism and Stalinism. He talked of the post-War division of Europe at Yalta by the agreement of the triumvirate of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. He presented this division as a rending of Europe in two, as the creation of a dualism in the world which was antithetical to the Christian vision. However, he saw a Christian response to this division, to this freezing of Europe in a state of war, in the work of three other men: De Gasperi of Italy, Schumann of France and Adenauer of Germany. These men were responsible for the formulation of the idea of a European Community.

No commemoration is without its controversy, as the burghers of Genoa and Columbus, Ohio, have been discovering this year. And there may be some, in Lorenzo, Nebraska, or Lorenzo, Texas, to murmur about the sack of Volterra in 1472, or the revenge taken on the Pazzi conspirators in 1478, but in Florence they are confidently celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the death of II Magnifico. Perhaps Lorenzo de’ Medici was not quite as finely magnificent as his grandfather, Cosimo II Vecchio, but it does seem largely right to recall a man who put his extraordinary energies into the seeking-after peace between the Italian states, the encouragement of artists, and the education of his children, in especial the graceful direction of his second son, Giovanni.

Almost from his birth, on 11 December 1475, Giovanni had been dedicated to the cardinalate by his pious father. And from 1 June,1483, when he was confirmed and tonsured by the bishop of Arezzo in the Medici family chapel, Lorenzo insisted that the whole household, parents, brothers, sisters, address the youngster as ‘Messire’, even in those garden games at Careggi in which, as Machiavelli sneered, their father might roll with them on the grass. Tonsuring made Messire Giovanni capable of benefices and, ever forward-looking, Lorenzo had spent some time the previous year sounding out patrons of some conveniently vacant abbey or bishopric.

Concepts of space have been the subject of a great deal of debate in a number of areas of contemporary social theory. The work of the sociologists Erving Goffman and, more recently, Anthony Giddens have been particularly important and influential components of many of these debates. In theological discussions of space, however, many of the insights offered by the social sciences have yet to be assimilated. In the following discussion I shall suggest that there are a number of valuable elements in Goffman’s theories which might fruitfully be incorporated into theological reflection. Initially, however, I shall consider the approaches to the religious significance of space by Mathew Fox and Robin Green which are, I believe, indicative of major flaws in much contemporary Christian discussion of the subject. After discussing some limitations in these approaches, I shall briefly sketch out the basic lines of Goffman’s and Giddens’ arguments, and offer a few suggestions relating to how these theories might be of relevance to theology. Specifically, I shall draw attention to the importance of what Giddens refers to as the regionalisation of social life which is, I suggest, particularly relevant to the study of religious activity.

Name your three best friends, and then name the three nations that you most admire. This test for self-knowledge generally reveals the discrepancy between the truly significant others in our lives and what we esteem as the great and glorious nations. Generally, the three most significant and dear persons in our lives are not particularly wealthy, or powerful or prestigious, or from ‘superior’ ethnic backgrounds. Yet still we persist in identifying glory with manifest power, a fact which underscores the urgent need for Christians to recapture a proper understanding of “glory’, now almost obscured by the modem secular notion of power. For surely it is our Christian conviction that the glory of God has been revealed in the poverty of Christ?

God speaks his word of hope and love in human images (in Greek eikones—‘icons’), sacraments or ‘efficacious signs’ which move our hearts and enlighten our minds. We cannot do what we cannot at least in some way imagine or envision. We cannot believe, hope and love—our most significant ‘doing’—without enabling images (’icons’, in other words) or sacraments. We cannot perform the deeds of faith and hope and love without the living icons that constitute orientations to action. The Eternal Word of God became flesh in the perfect image of God that is Jesus Christ, in order to transform all human hearts and minds, enabling us through the gift of his Spirit to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus Christ and his Church are the sacrament or efficacious sign of God’s creative and sustaining and predestining activity in the universal, human story, making possible our responding love and faith and hope in God. The Christian community affirms that it has seen or experienced the ‘glory’ of God in his perfect image Jesus Christ, for the glory is the impact of God’s active presence transforming our lives.