Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred

Angels Fear is the final sustained thinking of the great Gregory Bateson, written in collaboration with his anthropologist daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Here we have set out before us Bateson's natural history of the relationship between ideas. This book incorporates writing by both father and daughter, including essays written by Gregory in the last years before his death. There are also conversations—Metalogues—written since then by Mary Catherine to convey the way the two might have worked together to forge the essays into a single work. Angels Fear is a unique demonstration of thinking in progress, playful and wide-ranging, an attempt by the Batesons to find a view of the mind and the universe that is neither mechanistic nor supernatural.