By Fr John Flader
Question – St Michael the Archangel is usually depicted with a spear overcoming the devil. Why is this?
ALONG with St Gabriel and St Raphael, St Michael is one of the three archangels whose feast we celebrate each year on September 29. The name Michael in Hebrew means “Who is like God”, alluding to his special place among the angels and his power over Satan.
St Michael appears four times in the Bible, two of them in the book of Daniel. In the first, Daniel has a vision of a powerful man or angel who tells him, “The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, so I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia and came to make you understand what is to befall your people in the latter days… There is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince” (Dan 10:13, 21).
The second is more succinct: “At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people” (Dan 12:1). In these texts we see St Michael as a prince, the prince of the heavenly host, a powerful warrior doing battle against the enemy.
In the New Testament letter of St Jude we again find St Michael, now called an archangel, battling against the devil: “But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, ‘the Lord rebuke you’” (Jude 9).
St Jude alludes here to an ancient Jewish tradition of a dispute between St Michael and Satan over the body of Moses, mentioned in an apocryphal book on the assumption of Moses (cf. Origen, De Principiis III.2.2).
According to the tradition, St Michael concealed the tomb of Moses but Satan revealed its location in an effort to entice the Jewish people to worship Moses as a hero.
The most well known biblical reference to St Michael is in the book of Revelation:
“Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him” (Rev 12:7-9).
It is especially on account of this text that St Michael is often depicted as a warrior, with a helmet and shield, standing over the dragon and striking him with a lance.
Christian tradition has attributed to St Michael such roles as fighting against Satan, rescuing souls from the enemy especially at the hour of death and defending them in the judgment, and being the patron of the Church and of the orders of knights in the Middle Ages.
To protect the Church against Satan Pope Leo XIII in 1886 ordered the prayer to St Michael to be said after every Mass (cf. J. Flader, Question Time 1, Connor Court 2012, q. 137).
The veneration of St Michael goes back to the early centuries of the Church.
In Phrygia, in modern-day Turkey, where he was first venerated, St Michael was regarded more as a healer of the sick than as a warrior against Satan.
According to one tradition, St Michael caused a medicinal spring to spout near Colossae so that all the sick who bathed there and invoked the Blessed Trinity and St Michael were cured.
At Constantinople too St Michael was regarded as the heavenly physician.
A shrine dedicated to him, the Michaelion, was located at Sosthenion, some eighty kilometres south of Constantinople, where St Michael is said to have appeared to the emperor Constantine.
Another famous church dedicated to St Michael in Constantinople was at the thermal baths of the emperor Arcadius. The feast of the archangel was celebrated there on November 8 and this feast soon spread throughout the East.
In Rome the feast of St Michael has been celebrated since at least the sixth century. In that century the Leonine Sacramentary has a feast of the Basilica of the Angel on the Via Salaria celebrated on September 30.
Of the five Masses for the feast, three mention St Michael. The Gelasian Sacramentary of the seventh century has a feast of St Michael the Archangel on September 29, and the eighth century Gregorian Sacramentary has a feast on the same day, commemorating the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael the Angel.
So devotion to St Michael is very ancient and we do well to pray to him for protection against the snares of the devil, both for ourselves and for the Church.
