The Invasion of the Cruel Angels: From Angelus Novus to Evangelion: Sacredness, Ruins, and Abstraction in Modern Images

The research question is why angels in modern visual culture increasingly cease to resemble angels. In traditional religious painting, angels are usually made recognizable through their bodies, wings, faces, and frontal gazes. Yet from Paul Klee’s \emph{Angelus Novus}, through Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”\footnote{Vgl. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in \emph{Illuminations}, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), thesis IX.}, to the Apostles in \emph{Neon Genesis Evangelion}, the angel gradually detaches from bodily representation and takes the form of abstraction, geometric structure, optical phenomenon, and historical ruins. The central transformations concern how the angel shifts from religious figure to historical allegory, how historical allegory becomes an abstract presence in modern animation, and why modern images increasingly rely on absence and abstraction to produce meaning. A comparative visual analysis of Christian angel imagery, Klee’s painting, Benjamin’s historical interpretation, and the animated Apostles traces changes in bodily form, spatial relations, light, and viewing. The central argument is that abstraction signals a shift in sacredness from the “visible body” toward an “incompletable form,” while also changing how sacredness appears in modern images. The modern angel’s cruelty lies in the destruction it brings and in the absence of a stable image of redemption; it appears as a witness to ruins, trauma, and historical rupture.