Michael

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Michael is an archangel — in the Abrahamic traditions, one of the highest of the created spirits — named in scripture as a captain of the heavenly armies and the celestial opponent of the powers of evil. The Hebrew behind the name reads as a question, mi ka-el, “who is like God?”; later devotion took the question as a battle cry, the answer to which is none. It is a strange name for a warrior to carry: not a boast but an interrogation, the refusal of any rival to the throne spoken as the angel’s own title. Wherever Michael appears, the question travels with him, and the scenes in which he acts are scenes in which the answer is being contested — by an adversary, by an empire, by a dragon.

He appears by name only a handful of times in the canonical texts, and each appearance is consequential. The figure is built less from biography than from a few charged moments, each of which a later tradition expanded into a whole office.

The few canonical scenes

The earliest of the named appearances stands in the Book of Daniel, in the visionary chapters composed in the crisis of the second century BCE. There Michael is one of the chief princes, who comes to the aid of a lesser angel locked in struggle with the prince of the kingdom of Persia; he is named again as the visionary’s own prince, the celestial patron of his people; and at the book’s climax he is the great prince who stands guard over the children of Israel, rising at the time of trouble that precedes the resurrection of the dead. The picture is precise and consequential. Behind the rise and fall of empires runs a second war, fought between the guardian-princes of the nations, and Israel’s prince is Michael. The unseen contest decides the visible one. This is the seedbed of nearly everything later said of him: the warrior, the patron of a people, the angel whose battles are the inner side of history.

The Epistle of Jude, near the close of the New Testament, preserves a stranger fragment. There the archangel Michael, contending with the devil over the body of Moses, does not presume to bring a railing accusation against the adversary but says only that the Lord rebuke him. The episode is drawn from a lost Jewish work — the Assumption, or Testament, of Moses — and survives chiefly in this glancing citation. It fixes a second role: Michael as the angel who contends with the devil at the threshold of death, even over a corpse, and who wins not by his own power but by appeal to a higher one. The restraint is the point. The greatest of the angels claims no authority of his own.

The scene that fixed his image for the West stands in the Revelation of John. There is war in heaven: Michael and his angels fight against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fight back and do not prevail. The dragon is thrown down — the old serpent, called the Devil and Satan — and with him his angels, cast out of heaven to the earth. Here the Danielic warrior becomes cosmic. The enemy is no longer a foreign empire’s prince but the adversary himself, the serpent of the beginning; the battlefield is the whole of heaven; and Michael’s victory is the hinge on which the apocalypse turns. From this passage descends the saint of a thousand altarpieces — armored, winged, spear or sword raised above the writhing dragon underfoot.

The named archangels and the apocalyptic literature

Beyond the canon, in the apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic writing of the Second Temple period, Michael takes his place within a small, ordered company of named spirits. The brief canonical notices give the warrior; this literature gives the rank. The Book of Enoch — preserved in the Library here in R. H. Charles’s translation — names him among the four great archangels who look down from heaven on the violence of the earth and carry the cry of the slain up to its gates: Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel. When the fallen Watchers are to be punished, it is Michael who receives the command to bind their chief, Semjaza, and his associates. In the great catalog of the holy ones in the twentieth chapter he is fixed by office, named as “one of the holy angels, to wit, he that is set over the best part of mankind.” Elsewhere he stands first among the four presences before the throne — Michael the merciful and long-suffering, beside Raphael, Gabriel, and Phanuel, the four who fend off the accusers and intercede for those on the earth.

This is where the familiar idea of the archangel takes shape — not in the canonical books, which name only a few angels and rank none, but in the Enochic and related literature, where the host is sorted, stationed, and given names. Michael is set over the elect; Raphael over healing and the spirits of the dead; Gabriel over Paradise; each holds a standing charge. In the Qumran War Scroll, the sectarian manual for the final battle, the same figure becomes the prince of light who leads the angels of light against Belial and the angels of darkness, while on earth the Sons of Light fight the Sons of Darkness; the two wars are one war, and Michael commands the heavenly wing of it. The motif of Daniel — the unseen battle decides the seen — has hardened into a cosmology.

What the three traditions made of him

From these few passages three religions drew three Michaels, overlapping in outline and distinct in emphasis.

In the rabbinic literature of Judaism, Michael is above all the advocate and guardian of Israel — the celestial patron who pleads the people’s case before the throne of glory. The premise of the Danielic vision, that each nation has its angelic prince, is carried through: against the princes of Persia, of Greece, of Rome, stands Michael, Israel’s sar, who answers their accusations and intercedes for his charges. The legends multiply the office. Michael serves as the high priest of the heavenly sanctuary, offering the souls of the righteous on a celestial altar; he stands at the right hand of God, where Gabriel stands at the left; he is the angel of water and snow, as Gabriel is the angel of fire, the two balancing one another in the governance of the world. What runs through all of it is intercession. The greatest of Israel’s defenders fights less with a sword than with a plea.

Christianity inherited the guardian and the warrior and added more. The church came to assign Michael four standing roles, of which only the first is plainly stated in the Bible. He is the champion who fights Satan and the fallen angels — the Revelation scene, read as his charter. He is the angel of death, who descends to receive the souls of the faithful and carry them upward, a psychopomp who guides the dead as he guarded the living. He is the weigher of souls at the judgment, standing with the scales in which the deeds of each life are balanced — an image the scriptures nowhere state but devotion supplied, drawing on a far older motif of the weighing of the heart, and made commonplace in the Last Judgment scenes of the medieval West. And he is the guardian and patron of the whole Church, as he had been of Israel before it. He acquired feast days — Michaelmas on the twenty-ninth of September, marking the dedication of an ancient basilica near Rome — and a second old feast on the eighth of May for his apparition on Monte Gargano in Apulia, where, by the account of the eighth-century Liber de apparitione, the archangel showed himself near a mountain cave in the years around 490 and claimed it for his own. From that legend spread a chain of high-place sanctuaries across Europe — Mont-Saint-Michel rising from the tidal sands of Normandy, the rock of San Michele, the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, where Gregory the Great in 590 saw the archangel sheathing his sword above the city as a plague lifted. Michael’s shrines tend to stand on heights and at the edge of the sea, the places where heaven and earth seem to touch, and he is the patron of soldiers, of mariners, and of the dying.

In Islam he is Mīkāl, named once in the Qurʾān — in the second sura, beside Jibrīl — in a verse declaring that enmity toward God’s angels, toward Gabriel and Michael, is enmity toward God. The single naming is enough to fix his rank among the angels closest to God. The commentators give him a distinct charge: where Jibrīl carries the revelation that nourishes the soul, Mīkāl is set over the provision that nourishes the body — the rain, the growth of plants, the sustenance apportioned to every creature. The pairing is exact and old: two great angels, one of the word and one of the world, the one feeding the spirit and the other the flesh. Later Islamic tradition counts four archangels in all — Jibrīl, Mīkāl, the trumpeter who will sound the last hour, and the angel of death — though only the first two are named in the Qurʾān itself.

The solar prince of the magicians

In the Western esoteric inheritance Michael keeps his martial character but acquires a new coordinate. The angelologies of Kabbalah and of Renaissance magic assign each of the great archangels to a planet, a direction, an element, and a metal, fitting the scriptural host into a scheme of correspondences in which every part of the cosmos answers to every other. Michael’s place in this scheme is the sun. He governs Sunday and the solar sphere; his direction is the south, his element fire, his metal gold; in the Kabbalistic synthesis his sphere is often the solar sefirah, the radiant center of the Tree. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whose De occulta philosophia of 1533 gathered this material into a system, ranks Michael among the angels who preside over the planetary governments of the world. The assignment is not arbitrary. The warrior of the dragon-fight, the brightest and foremost of the host, falls naturally to the brightest of the heavenly bodies; the angel who is set over the best part of mankind becomes the angel of the light that rules the day. The continuity with scripture is real and worth marking; it is also a reframing, the biblical guardian-prince recast as a node in a planetary diagram, invoked under his hour for the ends the diagram serves.

Texts and scholarship

The primary witnesses for Michael are few and uneven, and the critical study of them is correspondingly concentrated on the apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic corpus. The fullest early source is the Book of Enoch, available here in R. H. Charles’s standard translation, The Book of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912; Library text), which preserves the catalogs of the named archangels and Michael’s offices among them. The foundational modern monograph is Wilhelm Lueken’s Michael: Eine Darstellung und Vergleichung der jüdischen und der morgenländisch-christlichen Tradition vom Erzengel Michael (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1898), which first laid out the Jewish and Eastern-Christian Michael traditions side by side and remains the point of departure for the field. Saul M. Olyan’s A Thousand Thousands Served Him: Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1993) reconstructs how the names of the angels, Michael among them, were generated and fixed by the exegesis of scripture in ancient Judaism. For the passage of the figure into the church, Darrell D. Hannah’s Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999) traces the Michael traditions from the Hebrew Bible through Qumran, Philo, the rabbis, and the Merkavah literature into the New Testament and the early Fathers, and weighs their bearing on the early Christian language for Christ. The Danielic figure and the Qumran prince of light are treated in the standard scholarship on the apocalyptic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the same warrior-guardian is followed across the texts that name him.

The guardian near at hand

A named angelic figure emerges in late–Second-Temple Jewish writing, gathers a cult across the three traditions, and becomes one of the most depicted beings in all of Western art — winged, armored, the dragon under his heel and the scales in his hand. But the figure was never, for those who kept his feasts and built on his mountains, a matter of art or of history. He was a presence invoked at the two thresholds where a life is most exposed: the hour of danger and the hour of death. The soldier going into battle, the sailor on a dark sea, the dying person at the edge of the dark — each called on the same captain of the host, and called on him for the same thing. Not a doctrine and not an emblem, but a guardian assumed to be near, with his face toward the enemy and on the side of the one in danger.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

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