Horror Angelorum: Terroristic Structures in the Eyes of Walter Benjamin, Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Rilke and Slavoj Žižek

In search for a European theological contribution to the debate on the new global context, this essay undertakes a theological‐aesthetic exploration of theological motifs in the current political imagination, in particular: the theme of the angel. After a problematisation of the theological reception of Benjamin's Messianic‐apocalyptic angel figure, I develop a critical position in the wake of von Balthasar. Von Balthasar's interpretations of Rilke and Bonaventure lead to two angelological paradigms, the monad and the crucified seraph, which occur in current political debates, as exemplified in recent essays of Zizek.