MIRRORS OF THE HUMAN: ANGELS IN IRIS MURDOCH AND KARL OVE KNAUSGÅRD

While contemporary theologians tend to skirt around the field of angelology, atheist novelists have creatively used the angel motif to explore the human condition. Two examples of this are Iris Murdoch in The Time of the Angels (1966), and Karl Ove Knausgård in A Time for Everything (2004). Engaging with these novels allows us to explore fundamental tensions in theological anthropology: immanence-transcendence, self-other, contingency-perfection, historicity-immutability, vulnerability-immortality, body-soul. As we will show, Murdoch and Knausgård, in different ways, offer a literary mirror confronting contemporary theology with a certain (theological) anthropological one-sidedness and invite a retrieval of angelology.