The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet is a co-authored dialogue volume by the theologian Matthew Fox and the biologist Rupert Sheldrake. The book sets out to reopen angelology as a serious subject by reading three major figures of the Western tradition against the background of contemporary cosmology. Its method is conversational rather than experimental: Fox supplies the historical and theological argument, Sheldrake supplies a naturalistic framework drawn from his own work on morphic resonance and fields, and the two compare notes in alternating passages. The digitized copy examined here is a 2021 Internet Archive scan funded by the Kahle/Austin Foundation.
What the book is trying to do
The stated purpose is to recover a body of thought that the authors believe was pushed aside. Fox argues that during the Newtonian–Cartesian industrial age angels were not merely doubted but banished and then trivialized — there was no room for angels in a machine, and, he adds, not even room for souls. He points to seventeenth-century Baroque church art, produced in the same century that science and religion split, as evidence of the demotion: angels became chubby, cute infants rather than cosmic powers. For roughly three centuries, he says, it was an embarrassment for theologians even to mention angels, despite their constant presence in the Bible. His phrase for the remedy is "angel liberation."
The authors connect this recovery to the ecological crisis. Their preface argues that the crisis demands "all the wisdom we can muster," and that angels may prove to be indispensable allies — "truly guardian angels" — instructing humanity in the safeguarding of an endangered planet. This ecological thread is announced as a motivation rather than developed at length in the material available here.
The three anchor thinkers
The book organizes its exploration around three figures the authors consider the most influential and broad-ranging students of angels in the West.
Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk whose The Celestial Hierarchies was written in the sixth century, is presented as having synthesized Neoplatonic currents of the Middle East with Christian theology and experience. Fox reads Dionysius's nine celestial spheres as a link between macrocosm and microcosm: the ordering of the heavens corresponds to the ordering of the human person, and Fox associates the spheres with the chakras. On this reading angels are connectors, administrators and messengers who integrate the human being with the spheres of cosmic forces. Fox also highlights Dionysius's ecumenical statements about angels assigned to other nations — angels who guided Pharaoh and the Prince of Babylon as well as Daniel and Joseph — and calls this "angelic ecumenism": there is one providence, and all angels serve it.
Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century German abbess, is described as working within the angelology handed down through the monastic tradition of the Western church but drawing especially on her own visionary experience of the angelic realms. The excerpt available here barely develops her contribution, so the book's treatment of Hildegard cannot be summarized in detail from this material.
Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian, is presented as having created a synthesis of angelic study that drew on the Muslim philosopher Averroës, the writings of Dionysius, the science and philosophy of Aristotle, and the biblical tradition. The authors credit him with raising speculative questions that remain provocative, particularly in light of contemporary cosmology, and suggest that these three thinkers devoted more intellectual labor to angelology than any other three major Western figures.
Sheldrake's framework: habits, holarchy and morphic fields
Sheldrake's contribution to the introduction is a compact statement of his own position. He proposes that the regularities of nature are better regarded as habits than as the decrees of an eternal mathematical mind, and that the habits of nature evolve. On this view the universe may depend on an inherent memory rather than on external governance — the basis of his hypothesis of morphic resonance, which he glosses as "memory in nature." He cites his own earlier books, A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past, for the full account.
He then offers a second structural claim: rather than explaining everything in terms of smaller bits and ultimate particles, the universe can be thought of holistically as a nested hierarchy or holarchy of levels of organization. At each level things are simultaneously wholes and parts — atoms as wholes of subatomic parts, molecules as wholes of atomic parts, crystals of molecular parts, and upward through cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, ecosystems, Gaia, the solar system and the galaxy. At each level, he says, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and this wholeness depends on what he calls a morphic field: an organizing field that underlies a system's structure, is structured by morphic resonance, contains memory, and is the bearer of the memory inherent in nature. Morphic fields, in his account, animate organisms at every level, giving them their habits and their capacity for self-organization — which leads him to say that molecules, stars and galaxies are "alive," not only microbes, plants and animals.
From there he poses a conditional question. If the fields organizing Gaia, the solar system or the galaxy are associated with spirit, intelligence or consciousness, then we are talking about superhuman consciousness — a mind inconceivably larger in scope than any human intellect. The claim is explicitly framed as a speculation about what would follow if a premise held, not as a finding.
The photon–angel parallel
The most concrete comparison in the excerpt concerns Aquinas's account of angels and the physics of photons. Sheldrake notes that a photon is a quantum of action, that photons are localized through their action, and that a photon is not material in the ordinary sense — it has no mass, so it is not really a body but is incorporeal. He finds this a close parallel to Aquinas's immaterial, disembodied angels that are nonetheless capable of containing bodies and being present through their action. He is careful to describe what science offers here as "important metaphors or parallels," not as an identification, and Fox responds by marveling that Aquinas's imagination, when thinking about angels, arrived at relationships that contemporary science also plays with.
Fields, place and angelic localization
A second comparison concerns place. Asked whether a field can be called a place, Sheldrake answers that it cannot: a field has a place in which it acts, and it has a certain localization, but fields do not have rigid boundaries. An electron field spreads out with decreasing probability over an infinite distance; a magnetic field around a magnet has no sharp edges and diminishes indefinitely; the earth's gravitational field keeps the moon in orbit and influences the sun and planets, and reaches distant stars and galaxies with negligible effect.
This is set beside a passage from Aquinas holding that an angel is in place insofar as its power is applied to a place, that it is never simply everywhere at once nor in several places but in one place only at a given moment, and that the place need not be spatially indivisible — it can be divisible or indivisible, greater or less, according as the angel chooses voluntarily to apply its power to a more or less extended body. Sheldrake reads this as an even clearer anticipation of fields: a field is a whole, and you cannot have a bit of a magnetic field. Chopping a magnet into pieces yields complete magnets each with a complete field; reassembling them joins the fields into one. Fields unify what they act on — the gravitational field of the solar system unifies sun and planets — and Sheldrake says the morphogenetic fields that shape a growing embryo have the same quality.
Tensions the book leaves open
The dialogue holds together positions that pull in different directions. Sheldrake warns against psychological reductionism — against treating angels as mere projections of archetypes within the human psyche — while at the same time offering physicalist analogies in which angels resemble photons and fields. Fox's "angel liberation" is a theological and historical program; Sheldrake's parallels are naturalistic. The book stages the exchange rather than resolving it.
There is also a cosmological tension the authors acknowledge. Sheldrake observes that Dionysius's classification of angels is confusing — that he "doesn't seem to know quite what to say" about dominions, virtues and powers, and seems to be grasping for distinctive features — and that the fact that other writers produced different classifications shows there was no exact agreement. He explains the hierarchies as a response to the old cosmology of concentric spheres, which required angels to be linked to the order of the heavens as then understood. That cosmology is obsolete, yet Sheldrake still values the microcosm–macrocosm correspondence, because it avoids both the idea that celestial powers have no relation to us and the reduction of angels to archetypes. The book thus deliberately retains a discarded framework for its symbolic value while conceding its astronomical obsolescence.
Evidence and limits
This is a dialogic trade book, not a research report. Its claims are philosophical, theological and analogical. Sheldrake's morphic-resonance and morphic-field proposals are presented as hypotheses, and the photon–angel and field–place comparisons are explicitly labeled metaphors or parallels. No experimental data, measurements or citations to controlled studies appear in the available material. The excerpt is also fragmentary: the Hildegard section is barely represented, and the ecological argument is introduced in the preface but not developed. Readers should treat the book's assertions as belonging to the frameworks of their respective authors — the morphic-resonance and holarchy claims to Sheldrake, the angel-liberation and ecological-ally arguments to Fox, and the localization argument to Aquinas as quoted — rather than as established results.
Related work in this wiki
The book extends the existing Sheldrake cluster, including morphic-resonance-experimental-tests, habits-of-nature and laws-of-nature-critique, and connects to the pages on matthew-fox, dionysius-the-areopagite, hildegard-of-bingen, thomas-aquinas, photon-angel-parallel, field-place-analogy, speed-of-thought-claim and conscience-as-battleground.
Keep reading
- Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness — Adds context.
- The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God — Adds context.
- Modern Aether Science — Adds context.
Source notes & attribution
- https://rexresearch1.com/SheldrakeMorphicResonance/Physics%20of%20angelsSheldrake.pdf