"It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it"
About this Quote
Hillman’s line is a polite grenade tossed into the fantasy that we perceive reality with innocent eyes. “It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it” turns on a simple but destabilizing claim: imagination doesn’t decorate perception; it enables it. The “angel” isn’t just a winged being. In Hillman’s archetypal psychology, it stands for any numinous pattern - a presence, a meaning, a calling - that can’t show up for you until your mind has built a landing pad for it.
The intent is corrective. Modern psychology, especially in its clinical-industrial mode, tends to treat images as symptoms to decode or distortions to eliminate. Hillman flips the hierarchy: the image is primary, and the psyche is an image-making organ. If you don’t already carry a symbolic vocabulary for awe, guidance, or soul, then even a genuine encounter with those qualities will register as noise, coincidence, or “just a mood.” The subtext is almost political: a culture that starves symbolic education - myth, art, ritual, poetry - produces citizens who are perceptually impoverished. They can’t recognize what they haven’t been trained to imagine.
Context matters here. Hillman is pushing back against both strict rationalism and simplistic New Age literalism. He’s not demanding belief in angels as metaphysical fact; he’s arguing for the discipline of “notion” as a way of seeing. The line works because it indicts our obsession with objectivity while offering a quietly radical alternative: cultivate the inner forms, and the world becomes legible in richer, stranger ways.
The intent is corrective. Modern psychology, especially in its clinical-industrial mode, tends to treat images as symptoms to decode or distortions to eliminate. Hillman flips the hierarchy: the image is primary, and the psyche is an image-making organ. If you don’t already carry a symbolic vocabulary for awe, guidance, or soul, then even a genuine encounter with those qualities will register as noise, coincidence, or “just a mood.” The subtext is almost political: a culture that starves symbolic education - myth, art, ritual, poetry - produces citizens who are perceptually impoverished. They can’t recognize what they haven’t been trained to imagine.
Context matters here. Hillman is pushing back against both strict rationalism and simplistic New Age literalism. He’s not demanding belief in angels as metaphysical fact; he’s arguing for the discipline of “notion” as a way of seeing. The line works because it indicts our obsession with objectivity while offering a quietly radical alternative: cultivate the inner forms, and the world becomes legible in richer, stranger ways.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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