*But I think that it's true -- if we ever saw an angel in its full, undisguised nature we'd likely drop dead of shock.  The sight of true perfection would do that to people.  Because we'd realize just how terribly inferior even the best of us actually are.

*It's possible that meeting a genuine, postcode-Paradise angel would be a bit of a jolt to the system, but it would have nothing to do with the angel's perfection.   As imperfect creatures, we self-evidently aren't capable of identifying perfection.   We may think we can and we may even be right, but we can't possibly be sure.   Artists may like to aim at their own idea of what constitutes perfection, but artists' admirers also have a disconcerting tendency to ascribe perfection to their heroes.   Fans of Mozart are given to making daft claims about the "perfection" of his music.   My response is:  "How do you know?"  

There was a commission, back in the Eighties,  that studied every painting in the world attributed to Rembrandt and eliminated more than half (I think - my memory is imperfect) as not being genuinely the work of the artist .   Often, they had identified a fault in the draughtmanship and reasoned that a painting with a conspicuous defect could not be by Rembrandt - about as circular an argument as you could find.  Ironically, I don't think that Rembrandt ever attempted to create perfect beauty.   Although he experimented widely with his technique, beauty for beauty's sake doesn't seem to have been his aim.   Just as well, because some of the folks he painted could have scared horses at a hundred paces.