What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the dark but the light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental. Yet, as Rudolf Otto established in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is initially misrecognised as "daemonic dread". He saw encounters with ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person would experience religiously. But Otto´s account is an attempt to fit the abstract and traumatic encounter with "angels" and "demons" into a settled field of meaning.
Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experienced with a "piercing acuteness and accompanied by the mos uncompromising judgment of self-depreciation." But, contrary to today´s ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to "sell ourselves"), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us.
Mark Fisher - Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures