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The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas is unavailable, but you can change that!

The makers of Encyclopaedia Britannica bring you one of the Great Books of the Western World. This text captures major ideas, stories, and discoveries that helped shape Western culture.

Influenced by a long tradition of religious symbolism in painting and poetry, our imagination responds to the word “angel” by picturing a winged figure robed in dazzling white and having the bodily aspect of a human being. This image, common to believers and unbelievers, contains features which represent some of the elements of meaning in the abstract conception of angels as this is found in the writings of Jewish and Christian theologians and in related discussions by the philosophers.
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