In Dedicatione S. Michaëlis Archangeli — 29 September, I classis
Benedicite Dominum, omnes Angeli eius: potentes virtute, qui facitis verbum eius, ad audiendam vocem sermonum eius. “Bless the Lord, all ye his angels: you that are mighty in strength, and execute his word, hearkening to the voice of his orders.” — Introit of the Mass, Ps. 102:20
I. Identitas et Origines
This entry cannot begin as the others do. Michael has no birthplace, no parents, no year of birth to be disputed between the Roman accounts and the archives. He is a creature, and so he has an origin; but his origin is the one act of God by which the whole invisible order was brought out of nothing. St. Augustine, reading the first chapter of Genesis, proposes that the creation of the angels is contained in the words Fiat lux: the angels are that first light, made partakers of the eternal Light, and the separation of light from darkness is the separation of the angels who stood from those who fell (De civitate Dei XI, 9; cf. XI, 19–20). The Church has not defined this reading, but she has defined the substance beneath it. The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God, by His almighty power, from the beginning of time made out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, the angelic and the earthly, and that the devil and the other demons were created good by nature and became evil of themselves.
Michael is therefore not a symbol, not a personified attribute of God, and not a mythological survival. He is a person: a pure spirit, possessed of intellect and will, created in grace, tested, and confirmed in glory.
His name is his identity. In Hebrew, Mi-ka-El is a question: Who is like God? — in the Latin tradition, Quis ut Deus? St. Gregory the Great observes that the names of the angels are not names of nature but of office: in the heavenly city they have no need of names to be known, but when they are sent to us they take their names from what they do. Michael is sent, he says, whenever something of marvellous power is to be accomplished, so that by the very act and by the very name it may be understood that none can do what God does (Homiliae in Evangelia II, 34, 9).
The question in his name is not a request for information. It is a war-cry, and tradition has always heard in it the answer to the first rebellion. Lucifer said in his heart, I will be like the most High (Is. 14:14); Michael answered with the question that ended the argument.
As for the feast itself: the day is not, strictly, Michael’s natale, for an angel has no dies natalis in the martyrological sense. It is the anniversary of the dedication of a church in his honour. Which church is taken up in Section IV.
II. Testimonium Scripturae
Michael is named in Sacred Scripture five times, and in every instance he is in combat or at the point of judgment.
The prince of the people of God (Daniel). In the tenth chapter of Daniel, the angel who comes to the prophet explains his delay: the prince of the kingdom of the Persians resisted me one and twenty days: and behold Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me (Dan. 10:13). A few verses later, none is my helper in all these things, but Michael your prince (10:21). And at the close of the book, in the prophecy of the last things: But at that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people: and a time shall come such as never was from the time that nations began even until that time. And at that time shall thy people be saved, every one that shall be found written in the book (12:1). Here is the foundation of everything the Church later says of him: he is the guardian of the people of God, the one who stands for them, and his rising is bound up with the final tribulation and the resurrection that follows.
The disputation over the body of Moses (Jude). When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee (Jude 9). This is the only place in Scripture where he is called archangel by name, and the verse carries a moral lesson that the Fathers did not miss: the prince of the heavenly host, contending with the devil himself, does not revile him. He appeals to the judgment of God. Michael’s power is entirely referred beyond himself — which is what his name already said.
The war in heaven (Apocalypse). And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world (Apoc. 12:7–9). The Church has read this vision on several levels at once: of the primordial fall of the angels, of the persecution of the Church in every age, and of the final conflict. It is the text from which the iconography of Michael over the dragon descends, and it is the reason the Church invokes him as her defender in battle.
The Mass of the day gathers the angelic witness of Scripture around him. The Epistle (Apoc. 1:1–5) opens with the revelation which God signified, sending by his angel to his servant John — the angels as ministers of revelation. The Offertory takes up the angel at the golden altar of Apoc. 8:3–4, Stetit Angelus iuxta aram templi, habens thuribulum aureum in manu sua, from whose hand the smoke of the incense, which is the prayers of the saints, ascends before God. And the Gospel (Matt. 18:1–10) closes with the sentence on which the whole doctrine of guardian angels rests: See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. The angels who guard the least on earth never cease to behold God: their mission does not interrupt their vision.
To these the tradition adds, with less certainty, the archangel’s voice at the Second Coming (1 Thess. 4:15), which many commentators have understood of Michael, though the Apostle does not name him.
III. Theologia: Natura et Officia
What an angel is. St. Thomas teaches that the angels are wholly incorporeal, subsistent forms without matter; that each angel, lacking matter to individuate it, differs from every other as one species from another; and that they know not by abstraction from the senses, as we do, but by ideas infused by God (Summa Theologiae I, qq. 50–58). An angel does not learn by degrees. When the angels were tested, each chose with the whole of his intellect and will in a single act, and that choice was final (I, qq. 62–64). This is why the fall of the demons is irreparable and why the fidelity of Michael is fixed for ever.
The ordering of the choirs. From the names scattered through Scripture — Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels, Angels — the tradition of the Pseudo-Dionysius (De caelesti hierarchia) and of St. Gregory the Great (Hom. in Ev. II, 34, 7) arranges nine choirs in three hierarchies. St. Thomas adopts the arrangement and gives its rationale in the order of illumination: the higher angels enlighten the lower, and the lowest are sent to men (I, q. 108). The Collect of the day is a one-sentence summary of this whole doctrine: God miro ordine, in a wonderful order, dispenses the ministries of angels and of men.
Where Michael stands in that order has been disputed. His title in Jude places him among the archangels; his office as prince of the heavenly host has led many, especially in the East, to hold that he is first among all the angels. The theologians have left the question open, and it is prudent to leave it there. The Church’s own liturgical language calls him princeps militiae caelestis, prince of the heavenly host, and that title names an office rather than settling a rank.
The offices of Michael. Traditional Catholic theology gathers his offices under four heads, all of them rooted in Scripture and the liturgy:
First, to fight against Satan, as he did in the beginning and does now in the life of the Church (Apoc. 12:7–9).
Second, to rescue the souls of the faithful from the power of the enemy, and above all at the hour of death, when the last assault is made.
Third, to be the champion of the people of God: of Israel under the Old Law (Dan. 12:1), and of the Church under the New, which has therefore always venerated him as her protector.
Fourth, to call souls from this life and present them for judgment. The Offertory of the Mass for the Dead asks exactly this: that the holy standard-bearer Michael — signifer sanctus Michael — may bring the souls of the faithful departed into the holy light which God promised to Abraham and his seed.
Guardianship. The Gospel of the day reminds us that the ministry of angels to men is not reserved for prophets. St. Thomas holds that every man has a guardian angel from his birth, and that the guardianship of angels extends to all men, the unbaptized included (I, q. 113). Michael’s guardianship of the whole Church is the summit of a ministry that reaches down to the least child.
IV. Ratio Cultus et Propagatio
The Dedication. The feast of 29 September is, by its oldest title, the dedication of a church. The Roman sacramentary tradition preserves Masses for the anniversary of a basilica of the angel on the Via Salaria, some seven miles from the city; that basilica was certainly in existence before the seventh century and has long since vanished, and the feast outlived it. The Roman Martyrology, following a medieval tradition, refers the day instead to the consecration of the sanctuary on Monte Gargano in Apulia, and some hand missals connect it with a church dedicated by Pope Boniface II in the sixth century. The Via Salaria identification rests on the oldest liturgical witness and is to be preferred; the other two are later explanations of a feast whose original church had been forgotten.
The East. Devotion to Michael is older in the East than in Rome. Theodoret of Cyrus, commenting on St. Paul’s warning against a false religion of angels (Col. 2:18), records that in Phrygia and Pisidia oratories of St. Michael were to be found in his own day; and the Council of Laodicea in the fourth century forbade Christians to abandon the Church in order to invoke angels privately. The Church has always distinguished the dulia rightly given to the angels from the worship owed to God alone, and the warnings of Colossae and Laodicea were directed at a cult that had lost that distinction, not at the veneration of Michael as such. The Greek historian Sozomen relates that Constantine built a church in Michael’s honour near Constantinople, the Michaelion, which became a place of healing. The pious tradition of Chonae, near ancient Colossae, tells of a sanctuary saved when the archangel split the rock to turn aside a flood directed against it; the Byzantine Church keeps that miracle on 6 September, and on 8 November keeps the Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and of all the bodiless powers — Archistrategos, the chief commander of the heavenly host.
Monte Gargano. On the spur of the Gargano peninsula, above the Adriatic, stands the cave-sanctuary of Monte Sant’Angelo, the oldest shrine of Michael in the West. Its cult is ancient and its fame was enormous: the Lombards took him as their national patron, and for a thousand years pilgrims on the road to the Holy Land and to Rome climbed to it. The account of its origin, preserved in an early medieval Liber de apparitione, belongs to traditio pia: it tells of a herdsman’s bull found in the mouth of the cave, of an arrow that turned back upon the archer, and of the archangel appearing to the bishop of Siponto, in the last decade of the fifth century, to declare that he himself had chosen and consecrated the place, so that it needed no consecration by human hands. The historical sanctuary is certain; the details of its founding are retained with reverence rather than asserted as history. The feast of the Apparition, kept on 8 May, was removed from the General Calendar by the rubrical reform of 1960, and 29 September has since been Michael’s one feast in the universal Roman calendar.
Rome, Normandy, and the nations. Two further sanctuaries shaped the Western imagination. The mausoleum of Hadrian became the Castel Sant’Angelo from the tradition that St. Gregory the Great, leading a penitential procession through Rome during the plague of 590, saw the archangel above the mausoleum sheathing a bloody sword as a sign that the pestilence had ended. The procession is historical; the vision is first recorded in later medieval sources and belongs to pious tradition. In Normandy, St. Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, founded a sanctuary on the tidal rock of Mont-Saint-Michel in the early eighth century, according to an account that credits his action to three commands of the archangel; the abbey that rose there became one of the great pilgrim shrines of Christendom. In England the feast gave its name to Michaelmas, one of the quarter days of the year. And in the fifteenth century, before the judges who condemned her, St. Joan of Arc testified that the first of the heavenly voices to come to her had been St. Michael’s.
Michael in the Roman Mass. The traditional liturgy names him at its most solemn points. In the Confiteor, the priest and people confess their sins beato Michaeli Archangelo, first after the Blessed Virgin. At the incensing of the offerings in the Solemn Mass, the celebrant blesses the incense per intercessionem beati Michaelis Archangeli, stantis a dextris altaris incensi — through the intercession of blessed Michael the Archangel, standing at the right hand of the altar of incense. (The phrase echoes the angel who appeared to Zachary at the right of the altar of incense, whom St. Luke names as Gabriel; the Roman text has long stood in its present form with Michael’s name.) And in the Mass for the Dead, as noted above, he is the standard-bearer who leads the souls into the light.
Leo XIII and the prayers after Low Mass. In 1886 Pope Leo XIII added to the prayers already prescribed after Low Mass the prayer Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; four years later he published a longer exorcism against Satan and the apostate angels. Pius XI in 1930 directed that the prayers after Low Mass be offered for the Church in Russia. These prayers were said at the foot of the altar throughout the Latin world until their suppression in 1964. A widely repeated account holds that Leo composed the prayer after a vision, experienced after Mass, of the powers of hell arrayed against the Church; that account first appears in print some decades after his death, and it is retained here as pious tradition, not as history. The prayer itself needs no such origin to commend it. It was prescribed for eighty years by the Supreme Pontiffs, and it remains one of the most widely prayed prayers in the Church.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
St. Gregory the Great, on the names of the angels (Hom. in Ev. II, 34, 8–9). The angels, Gregory teaches, bear names that signify their ministry. Gabriel, the strength of God, was sent to announce Him who came to overthrow the powers of the air; Raphael, the medicine of God, touched the eyes of Tobias and took away his darkness; Michael, who is like God, is sent where a work of wonderful power is to be done. Gregory adds that at the end of time, when the adversary is to be destroyed, it will be Michael who is seen to act, so that the proud one who wished to be like God may learn by his destruction that none is like God.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on the presence of the angels (Sermones in Psalmum Qui habitat, sermo 12). Commenting on He hath given his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways (Ps. 90:11), Bernard draws three duties from the verse: reverence for their presence, devotion for their good will, and confidence for their guardianship. Walk carefully, he says, as one who has angels present in all his ways; in every lodging and every corner, show reverence to your angel, and do not dare to do in his presence what you would not dare to do in mine.
St. Thomas Aquinas, on the angels as ministers (S. Th. I, q. 112). The angels are sent to men not because God needs their help, but because it pleases His goodness to communicate to His creatures the dignity of being causes: the higher are made instruments of His providence toward the lower. Michael’s power is borrowed power, gladly exercised under Another’s command; this is the whole meaning of Quis ut Deus?
St. Alphonsus Liguori, on the hour of death. The saint teaches that the powers of hell assail the dying Christian with their last and fiercest temptations, and that God has appointed St. Michael, with each soul’s guardian angel and patron saints, to come to the aid of His faithful servants in that final combat. Devotion to Michael is, in this sense, a preparation for death.
The lesson of Jude. The only words of Michael recorded in Scripture are The Lord command thee. The greatest of the loyal angels, in the gravest of confrontations, does not rail and does not claim authority of his own. He refers the judgment to God. No teaching on spiritual warfare is complete without this: the soldier of Christ fights the devil by standing under the command of God, not by matching the devil’s pride with his own.
VI. Oratio
The Collect of the Mass:
Deus, qui miro ordine Angelorum ministeria hominumque dispensas: concede propitius; ut, a quibus tibi ministrantibus in caelo semper assistitur, ab his in terra vita nostra muniatur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti, Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
“O God, who in a wonderful order dost dispense the ministries of Angels and of men: mercifully grant, that as Thy holy Angels always do Thee service in heaven, so by them our life may be defended upon earth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”
The prayer turns on a single contrast: in caelo — in terra. The same spirits who stand in ceaseless attendance before God are those who defend us here. Their service above is not interrupted by their mission below — the Gospel’s semper vident faciem Patris rendered as petition.
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio: ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio. “Holy Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle: that we may not perish in the dreadful judgment.” — Alleluia verse of the Mass
And, for the moment of temptation, the archangel’s own question made into a prayer of adoration:
Quis ut Deus? — Who is like unto God?
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Scripture. Daniel 10–12; Jude 9; Apocalypse 1:1–5, 8:3–4, 12:1–17; Matthew 18:1–10; Psalm 90; Tobias 5–12 (for the ministry of Raphael, which illuminates the angelic office generally).
Fathers and Doctors. St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, Book XI; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Hom. 34; the Pseudo-Dionysius, De caelesti hierarchia; St. Bernard, Sermones in Psalmum Qui habitat and his sermons for the feast of St. Michael; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 50–64 (the nature and fall of the angels) and qq. 106–114 (their ministry and guardianship).
Magisterium. The Fourth Lateran Council, chapter 1, Firmiter, on the creation of spiritual and corporeal creatures; the prayers after Low Mass as prescribed by Leo XIII and extended by Pius XI.
History and reference. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Michael the Archangel” and “Angels”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 29 September; the Roman Martyrology for 29 September and, in older editions, 8 May.
Learning paths. The Theology and Doctrine path treats angelology in the Thomistic order — the angelic intellect, the single irrevocable choice, and why the demons cannot repent. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the angels in the Roman Mass: the Confiteor, the incensation, the Supplices te rogamus of the Canon, and the Offertory of the Requiem. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats spiritual warfare and the prayers of Leo XIII. The East-West Comparative path follows the Archangel’s cult from Chonae and the Michaelion to the Synaxis of 8 November.
Practice
Examine. Where do I claim for myself what belongs to God — credit, control, the last word, the right to judge? Put Michael’s question to the place in your life where pride is most comfortable: Quis ut Deus?
Do. When you are tempted this week, do not argue with the temptation and do not rail at the tempter. Say what Michael said: The Lord command thee — and turn to prayer.
Pray. The prayer of Leo XIII, once daily, for the Church:
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray: and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”
Devote. Pray for a happy death, entrusting that hour to St. Michael and to your guardian angel; or pray the Chaplet of St. Michael, which salutes the nine choirs of angels in turn.
Sancte Michael Archangele, signifer sancte, defende nos in proelio.