From  7/13/17 Daily Log – Angels

Excerpt from “Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman” by Tom Cheetham. Kindle edition, location 1047 of 2584.

This means that the central concern for all the monotheisms, the search for the Lost Speech, is a quest to recover the connection with the Angel, to cooperate in being spoken rather than simply speaking. The Angel is the empowering force and the North Star that orients the life of every believer. Corbin writes,

This Angel endows the soul with the aptitude for thinking it and rising by it; he is the archetype, the finality without which a cause would never be a cause. He is the “destiny” of that soul … The act of thinking is simultaneously a being-thought by the Angel, causing the soul to be what he himself is.

 Living oriented by the Angel means that “every verb is mentally conjugated in the middle voice.” The person is neither entirely autonomous and active, nor entirely passive and acted upon. Rather, she acts upon herself in such a way as to make herself be in the image of the archetypal Angel. Finding the middle voice is the key to recovering the Lost Speech. There is neither victimization of the individual by the impersonal forces of society, nor the blind abandonment of the person to an authoritarian Master. Finding the middle voice is a choice, a consciously chosen orientation, and a profoundly personal, intimate and individualizing stance towards the reality of the Angel. It is action of exquisitely sensitive response, and profound responsibility.