Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,
Though you have shelters and institutions,
Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid
Subsiding basements where the rat breeds
Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
Or a house a little better than your neighbour’s.
When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community?’
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
(T.S. Eliot: Choruses from the Rock)

Social justice, which treats the common good as a purpose of action, and brings all the virtues into our relationships with others, is not the only requirement of living in society, but some understanding of it is fundamental, both to liberal societies and to those of a more ancient stamp. Social justice incorporates the question of distribution of wealth, of how to deal with possessions, property, things. The Church has recently uncovered the role of the laity in her understanding of the Christian life, and this aspect of social justice can perhaps be regarded as especially the province of lay people, who deal with the world of ‘ordinary life’: the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. It is not unreasonable to regard these aspects as central to modem life and indeed to Christian spirituality and philosophy. ‘For instance, my sense of myself as a householder, father of a family, holding down a job, providing for my dependents; all this can be the basis of my sense of dignity.’

The Europe of the High Middle Ages (1150-1309) was principally divided between the Latin-speaking peoples and the Germanic peoples. Although the latter had once invaded and momentarily subjected the Latins, the attraction of the latter’s originally Mediterranean culture had conquered the invaders. The universal language of western Europe had become Latin. Despite the importance of the Germanic peoples, there is no doubt that Latin and its derivatives so dominated the cultural life of Europe that, if one were obliged to find a single adjective with which to qualify the word ‘Europe’ for this period, one would choose ‘Latin,’ and describe the whole as ‘Latin Europe.’

France and Italy led Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This may seem strange. Their cultural and military preeminence and their capacity to influence other parts of western Europe seem odd when their internal constitutions are examined. During the twelfth century French law spread far beyond her frontiers, yet France herself boasted no monarchy or state comparable to that of Plantagenet England, Norman southern Italy, or even the declining German Empire. The typical Italian state that produced Europe’s common law (ius commune) and published its most elaborate statutes was an urban republic, tiny when compared to the states of Spain, to England, and to Germany’s provinces, not to speak of Empire.

But the size of political units was not the principal criterion of inventiveness or importance in this period. In Spite of the Hohenstaufen revival, the German Empire had been irreparably weakened by the alliance of the Roman Church, the German nobility and the Italian towns.

How do we make the invisible visible? How do we see, or touch, what others have made visible? Such questions can, of course, mean different things. They might be questions about how technology such as telescopes and microscopes have made visible the previously invisible things, and what (if anything) such technology leaves invisible. They might also be political questions about how previously invisible groups are made visible, and how invisible we can make ourselves to each other without ceasing to be. And there are equally important philosophical questions about whether the invisible is, if so what it means to make it visible, and whether in so doing we perfect or destroy it. Such questions are on the back burners of this essay.

But my focus is more specific. An exhibition Angels from the Vatican. The Invisible Made Visible has been touring the United States. These are artifacts of angels from the Vatican museum. Embattled church politicians might regard the title as oxymoronic; they would also not be surprised that it is sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation. But I think it is the sub-title rather than the title of the exhibition that raises (perhaps from the dead) many old and new questions about angels, precisely by considering angels under the rubric of “The Invisible Made Visible”.’ The exhibition, in its version at the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland), consists of four galleries and a lengthy balcony-corridor of about one hundred paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts ranging from a sixth century before Christ Assyrian “winged genius” to a twentieth century painting by Salvador Dali.