Saint Michel
Saint Archange
Saint Michel, Saint Gabriel et saint Raphaël. Les anges, serviteurs et envoyés de Dieu, sont très présents dans la Bible, depuis celui qui réconforte Agar au désert (livre de la Genèse 16. 7) jusqu'à celui qui mesure la Jérusalem céleste (Apocalypse 21. 17). Parmi eux, trois sont particulièrement personnifiés. Ce sont des archanges, comme des chefs des anges, selon les termes de saint Paul (1ère Thessaloniciens 4. 16) et de Jude (Jude ch. 9). Michel, ("qui est comme Dieu?") est le prince des anges. Il joue un rôle décisif (Apocalypse 12. 7 à 9). Gabriel ("Force de Dieu") est le messager par excellence (Luc 1. 19 et suivants). Raphaël ("Dieu a guéri") accompagne le jeune Tobie et est la figure bienveillante de la Providence de Dieu. La littérature apocryphe a abondamment brodé sur ces trois personnages.
"Trois ou sept?"
"La tradition catholique ne connaît que trois archanges par leur nom. La Bible en évoque sept. Au livre de Tobie, Raphaël dit de lui-même: "Je suis l'un des sept anges qui se tiennent toujours prêts à pénétrer auprès de la Gloire du Seigneur". La vision de Zacharie complète le livre de Tobie en parlant de "sept-là qui sont les yeux de Yahvé et qui vont par toute la terre". ( Les yeux sont alors symboles de l'omniscience et de la vigilance divines.)
Si les livres de la Bible ne parlent pas des quatre compagnons anonymes de Michel, Gabriel et Raphaël, les écrits apocryphes n'épousent pas leur silence. Avec fantaisie, ils nomment ceux qui étaient appelés à rester dans l'ombre de leur Créateur, si on peut parler d'ombre dans le monde de la Gloire céleste.
Par sa discrétion à la suite des livres bibliques, l'Église a préféré suggérer
que le mystère de l'Invisible n'est pas épuisé et que le Paradis nous réserve
de nouvelles connaissances."
(source: diocèse
de Coutances)
...combattant céleste descendant sur la terre des hommes, il était légitime de le choisir comme protecteur du pays et de ses armées; déjà en 709, l'évêque d'Avranches, saint Aubert, fonda une chapelle qui deviendra l'abbaye du Mont Saint-Michel, où viendront en pèlerinage, entre autres, Charlemagne, saint Louis, Louis IX, pour demander la protection pour la France. Dans la même ligne, après la deuxième guerre mondiale, les troupes aéroportées le choisirent comme saint patron, voyant dans l'ange "ailé" qui descend du ciel comme un ancêtre, certes plus agile encore, du parachutiste contemporain... (diocèse aux armées françaises)
Fête des saints Michel, Gabriel et Raphaël, archanges. Au jour de la dédicace
d’une basilique édifiée très anciennement sous le titre de saint Michel sur la
voie Salarienne, à six milles de Rome, l’Église célèbre les trois archanges
dont la sainte Écriture révèle les missions et qui , jour et nuit au service de
Dieu, contemplent sa face et ne cessent de le glorifier.
Martyrologe romain
L’admiration, que leur
fidélité nous inspire, rejaillit jusqu’à Toi. La splendeur de ces créatures
spirituelles nous laisse entrevoir comme Tu es grand et combien Tu surpasses
tous les êtres
Préface des saints anges
SOURCE : http://nominis.cef.fr/contenus/saint/978/Saint-Michel.html
Saint Michel Archange
et tous les saints Anges
Le 8 mai, l'Église honore
l'archange saint Michel en souvenir de son Apparition sur le mont Gargan. La
fête du 29 septembre fut établie un peu plus tard pour rappeler la Dédicace de
la basilique construite par l'ordre et en honneur du glorieux Archange, au lieu
même de cette apparition.
Avec saint Michel,
l'Église, en ce jour, honore tous les bons Anges, dont il a été le chef et le
modèle au jour de la révolte de Lucifer et des mauvais anges. D'après nos
Saints Livres, ils sont divisés en neuf Choeurs et en trois Hiérarchies: Les
Anges, les Archanges et les Vertus; les Puissances, les Principautés et les
Dominations; enfin, plus haut encore, les Trônes, les Chérubins et les
Séraphins. Leur occupation est de contempler Dieu, de L'aimer, de Le louer et
d'exécuter Ses Volontés pour la conduite de l'univers et pour le salut des
hommes. Aussi les voyons-nous chargés de différentes missions sur la terre,
auprès des personnes, des familles, des paroisses, des diocèses, des royaumes,
de l'Église entière.
Ceux dont l'Écriture fait
une mention particulière sont, outre saint Michel, l'archange Gabriel, à qui
semble avoir été confié le soin de tout ce qui regarde le mystère de
l'Incarnation, et l'Archange Raphaël, qui conduisit et ramena si
merveilleusement le jeune Tobie. – Saint Michel a été fait non seulement Prince
des anges, mais aussi Prince des âmes qui doivent remplir les places demeurées
vides par la chute des démons. Son nom marque sa fidélité, car il signifie: Qui
est semblable à Dieu!
Les Saints lui attribuent
la plupart des apparitions mentionnées dans l'Ancien Testament. C'est lui,
disent-ils, qui retint la main d'Abraham prêt à immoler son fils Isaac; c'est
lui qui apparut à Josué et le rendit maître de Jéricho par la chute de ses
tours et de ses murailles; c'est lui qui dirigea l'arche de Noé par-dessus les
eaux du déluge; c'est lui qui lutta contre Jacob et le bénit; c'est lui qui
donna la loi à Moïse sur la montagne du Sinaï; qui rendit David victorieux de
Goliath et le préserva de la persécution de Saül, etc. Il a été le protecteur
de la Synagogue; il est le protecteur de l'Église.
L'Histoire nous rapporte
tant de merveilles de cet Ange sublime, qu'on ne peut douter qu'il ne soit,
dans les desseins de Dieu, l'un des principaux instruments de Sa puissance et
de Sa bonté. L'assistance que la France a souvent reçue de lui le fait regarder
comme le protecteur spécial de ce royaume.
Abbé L. Jaud, Vie des Saints pour tous les jours de l'année, Tours, Mame, 1950
SOURCE : http://magnificat.ca/cal/fr/saints/saint_michel_archange_et_tous_les_saints_anges.html
SAINT MICHEL, ARCHANGE
Michel veut dire : qui
est semblable à Dieu ? et toutes les fois, ainsi le dit saint Grégoire, qu'il
s'agit de choses merveilleuses, c'est Michel qui est envoyé, afin de laisser
comprendre par ses actions comme par son nom que nul ne saurait faire ce que
Dieu se réserve d'accomplir. De là vient qu'on attribue à saint Michel beaucoup
d'actions extraordinaires. D'après Daniel, c'est lui qui, au temps de
l’antéchrist, doit se lever pour défendre les élus en sa qualité de protecteur
et de défenseur. C'est lui qui combattit contre le dragon et ses anges, et qui,
en les chassant du ciel, remporta une grande victoire. C'est lui qui se disputa
avec le diable au sujet du corps de Moïse, que le diable voulait produire au
grand jour, afin que le peuple juif l’adorât à la place de Dieu. C'est lui qui
reçoit les âmes des saints et qui les conduit jusqu'à la joie du paradis.
C'était lui qui était autrefois le prince de la synagogue, mais qui est
maintenant établi comme prince de l’Eglise. C'est lui, dit-on, qui frappa
l’Égypte des sept plaies, qui partagea les eaux de la mer rouge, qui dirigea le
peuple hébreu dans le désert, et qui l’introduisit dans la terre promise. C'est
lui qui porte l’étendard de J.-C. au milieu des bataillons angéliques. C'est
lui qui, par l’ordre du Seigneur, foudroiera l’Antéchrist résidant sur le mont
des Olives. C'est encore à la voix de l’archange Michel que les morts
ressusciteront. C'est lui enfin qui, au jour du jugement, présentera la croix,
les clous, la lance et la couronne d'épines de Notre-Seigneur.
La sainte solennité de la
fête de saint Michel, archange, se nomme Apparition, Dédicace, Victoire et
Mémoire. Les apparitions de cet ange sont nombreuses. La première eut lieu sur
le mont Gargan. C'est une montagne de la Pouille située auprès de la ville de
Siponto (Aujourd'hui Manfredonia, au royaume de Naples). L'an du Seigneur 390,
il y avait, dans Siponto, un homme, qui, d'après quelques auteurs, se nommait
Gargan, du nom de cette montagne, ou bien cette montagne avait pris le nom de
cet homme. Il possédait un troupeau immense de brebis et de boeufs; et un jour
que ces animaux paissaient sur les flancs du mont, un taureau s'éloigna des
autres pour monter au sommet, et ne rentra pas avec le troupeau. Le
propriétaire prit un grand nombre de serviteurs afin de le chercher ; le trouva
enfin au haut de la montagne, vis-à-vis l’entrée d'une caverne. Irrité de ce
que ce taureau errait ainsi seul à l’aventure; il lança aussitôt contre lui une
flèche empoisonnée; mais à l’instant la flèche, comme si elle eût été poussée,
par le vent, revint sur celui qui l’avait lancée et le frappa. Les habitants
effrayés vont trouver l’évêque et demandent son avis sur une chose si étrange.
Il ordonna trois jours de jeune et leur dit qu'on devait en demander
l’explication à Dieu. Après quoi saint Michel apparut à l’évêque, en lui disant
: a Vous saurez que cet homme a été frappé de son dard par ma volonté : car je
suis l’archange Michel, qui, dans le dessein d'habiter ce lieu sur la terre et
de le garder en sûreté, ai voulu donner à connaître parce signe que je suis
l’inspecteur et le gardien de cet endroit. » Alors l’évêque et tous les
citoyens allèrent en procession a la montagne : comme ils n'osaient entrer dans
la caverne, ils restèrent en prières devant l’entrée. — La seconde apparition
(Cf. Mabillon, Actes des saints; — Robert de Torigny, Chronique de saint
Michel, année 708; — Aubert, évêque d'Avranches) eut lieu ainsi qu'il suit,
vers l’an du Seigneur 710. Dans un lieu appelé Tumba, près de la, mer, et
éloigné de six milles de la ville d'Avranches, saint Michel apparut à l’évêque
de cette cité : il lui ordonna de construire une église sur cet endroit, et d'y
célébrer la mémoire de saint Michel, archange, ainsi que cela se pratiquait sur
le mont Gargan. Or, comme l’évêque était incertain de la place sur laquelle il
devait bâtir l’église, l’archange lui dit de la faire élever dans l’endroit ou
il trouverait un taureau que des voleurs avaient caché. L'évêque étant encore
embarrassé sur les dimensions qu'il devait donner à cette construction, reçut
l’ordre de lui donner les proportions que les vestiges des pieds du taureau
auraient tracées sur le sol. Or, il se trouvait là deux rochers qu'aucune
puissance humaine ne pouvait remuer. Saint Michel apparut alors à un homme et
lui donna l’ordre de se transporter là et d'enlever ces deux rochers. Quand l’homme
y fut arrivé, il remua le roc avec une telle facilité qu'il semblait n'avoir
pas la moindre pesanteur. Lors donc que l’église fut bâtie, on y apporta du
mont Gargan une partie du parement que saint Michel y plaça sur l’autel, ainsi
qu'un morceau de marbre sur lequel il se posa. Mais comme on était gêné de
n'avoir point d'eau dans ce lieu, de l’avis de, l’ange, on perça un trou dans
une roche très dure et il en sortit une si grande quantité d'eau qu'aujourd'hui
encore, elle suffit à tous les besoins. Cette apparition en ce lieu se célèbre
solennellement le 17 des calendes de novembre. On raconte qu'il se fit encore
là un miracle digne d'être rapporté: Cette montagne est entourée de tous les
côtés par les eaux de l’Océan ; mais cieux fois, le jour de saint Michel, la
mer se retire et laisse le passage libre: Or, comme une grande multitude de
peuple se rendait à l’église, une femme enceinte et prête d'accoucher se
trouvait sur le chemin avec les autres, quand tout à coup, les eaux reviennent
; la foule saisie de frayeur s'enfuit au rivage, mais la femme grosse ne put
fuir, et même fut prise par les flots de la mer. Alors saint Michel préserva
cette femme, de telle sorte qu'elle mit au monde un fils au milieu de la mer;
elle prit son enfant entre ses bras et lui donna le sein, et la mer lui
laissant de nouveau un passage, elle sortit pleine de joie avec son fils.
La troisième apparition
est celle qu'on rapporte avoir eu lieu du temps de saint Grégoire. Ce pape
avait institué les litanies majeures, à cause de la peste inguinale ; et comme
il adressait de ferventes prières pour le salut du peuple, il vit sur un
château qui s'appelait autrefois la Mémoire d'Adrien, l’ange du Seigneur
essuyant un glaive ensanglanté et le remettant dans le fourreau. Saint Grégoire
comprit par là que ses prières avaient été exaucées du Seigneur. Il fit donc
construire en ce lieu une église en l’honneur des Anges : de là vient le nom de
Château-Saint-Ange que porte aujourd'hui ce fort. Or, cette apparition se
célèbre le 8 des ides de mai, en même temps que celle du Mont-Gargan, qui eut
lieu lors d'une victoire que l’archange fit remporter par les Sypontins.
La quatrième apparition
est celle des Hiérarchies des Anges eux-mêmes. La première se nomme Epiphanie,
c'est-à-dire l’apparition supérieure ; la moyenne se nomme Hyperphanie,
c'est-à-dire moyenne apparition ; la dernière s'appelle Hypophanie,
c'est-à-dire apparition inférieure. Le mot hiérarchie vient de hierar, qui
signifie sacré, et de archos, prince, équivalant à principauté sacrée. Chaque
hiérarchie renferme trois ordres ; la première contient les Séraphins, les
Chérubins et les Trônes; la moyenne renferme, d'après la distribution de saint
Denys, les Dominations, les Vertus et les Puissances ; la dernière, suivant le
même auteur, renferme les Principautés, les Anges et les Archanges. Cet ordre
et cette distribution offrent une certaine analogie avec ce qui se voit chez
les puissances de la terre. Car, parmi les ministres d'un monarque, il y en a
dont les fonctions se rapportent immédiatement à la personne royale; comme sont
les chambellans, les conseillers et les assesseurs, qui représentent la
première hiérarchie. D'autres ont des charges pour gouverner le royaume, sans
être attachés spécialement à telle ou telle province, comme les généraux
d'armée et les juges de la cour. Ils représentent les ordres de la seconde
hiérarchie.. D'autres enfin sont placés à la tête d'une partie du royaume,
comme les prévôts, les baillis et les fonctionnaires inférieurs. Ils
représentent les ordres de la troisième hiérarchie. Les trois premiers ordres
de la première hiérarchie sont ceux qui se tiennent auprès de Dieu et qui le
contemplent. Pour cela, trois qualités leur sont nécessaires : 1° un amour
éminent; ce qui appartient au chœur des Séraphins, dont le nom veut dire
enflammés; 2° une connaissance parfaite : elle est la part des Chérubins, dont
le nom signifie plénitude de science; 3° une compréhension perpétuelle ou
jouissance : ce qui convient aux Trônes, dont la signification est siège, parce
que ce sont les sièges de Dieu et le lieu de son repos, tandis qu'il les fait
se reposer en lui. Les trois ordres de la hiérarchie moyenne sont à la tête de
la communauté humaine en général et la gouvernent. Cette action de gouverner
consiste en trois choses: 1° à présider ou à Ordonner: cela regarde le choeur
des Dominations, qui ont la prééminence sur les inférieurs; les dirigent dans
l’accomplissement du service de Dieu, et leur transmettent tous les ordres, ce
que semble indiquer ce passage du prophète Zacharie (II) où un ange dit à un
autre ange : « Courez, parlez à ce jeune homme et lui dites... » ; 2° à agir :
c'est le propre des Vertus, pour lesquelles il n'y a rien d'impossible à
exécuter de ce qu'on leur commande, parce que à eux fut donné le pouvoir
d'accomplir toutes choses, telles difficiles qu'elles soient, de ce qui regarde
le service de Dieu, et c'est la raison pour laquelle on leur attribue les
miracles ; 3° à lever tous les obstacles et les empêchements : ce qui est du
ressort des Puissances, qui doivent tenir à l’écart des puissances ennemies :
qualité signalée au livre de Tobie (ch. VIII). Où il est dit que Raphaël alla
lier le démon dans le désert de la Haute-Egypte. Les trois ordres de la
dernière hiérarchie ont des fonctions déterminées et limitées. Quelques-uns, en
effet, parmi eux, sont à la tête d'une province. Ce sont ceux de l’ordre des
Principautés : tel le prince qui était à la tête des Perses. Il en est question
dans Daniel (ch. X). D'autres sont préposés pour gouverner une communauté,
comme une ville, par exemple : et ce sont les Archanges ; quelques autres
dirigent une personne en particulier, et ceux-là ont reçu le nom d'anges. C'est
pour cela qu'on les dit chargés d'annoncer des choses minimes, parce que leur
ministère est limité à un seul homme. On dit que les Archanges annoncent les
grandes choses, parce que le bien général l’emporte sur celui d'un particulier.
Dans le partage des fonctions des ordres de la première hiérarchie, saint
Grégoire et saint Bernard sont d'accord avec saint Denys, parce qu'ils
reconnaissent dans ces chœurs la jouissance qui consiste dans l’amour, quant
aux Séraphins; dans la connaissance plénière, quant aux Chérubins, - et dans la
possession continue, quant aux Trônes. Mais dans les fonctions qu'ils assignent
aux deux ordres de la seconde et de la troisième hiérarchie, savoir aux
Principautés et aux Vertus, ils semblent partagés d'opinion. En effet, saint
Grégoire et saint Bernard considèrent la chose à un autre point de vue, en ce
sens que la seconde hiérarchie possède la prééminence, et la dernière le
ministère. La prééminence dans les Anges est de trois sortes : car les Anges
ont la prééminence sur les esprits angéliques, et ce sont ceux qu'on appelle
les Dominations : ils ont la prééminence sur les hommes de bien, ce sont les
Principautés : ils ont la prééminence sur les démons, et on les appelle alors
les Puissances. Leur rang et le degré de leur dignité sont ici évidents. Leur
ministère est de trois genres : il consiste dans les oeuvres, dans l’instruction,
soit des grandes soit des petites choses. Le premier est rempli par les Vertus,
le second par les Archanges, le troisième par les Anges.
La cinquième apparition
est celle qu'on lit dans l’Histoire tripartite (Livre II, c. XIX). Auprès de
Constantinople se trouve un endroit où autrefois était adorée la déesse Vesta,
et sur l’emplacement duquel a été érigée, depuis, une église en l’honneur de
saint Michel. Ce lieu a reçu le nom de Michaelium. Un homme, nommé Aquilin,
était atteint d'une fièvre très forte, causée par des éruptions cholériques
sanguinolentes (Les textes ne s'accordent pas ici. Une version porte rubris
choleris mota, et les ms. disent rubris coloribus nota, ce qui voudrait dire
connu sous le nom de couleurs rouges, ou bien qui se manifestait par des taches
rouges. On voit plus bas reparaître le mot cholericis, qui indiquerait la
première version comme la meilleure). Dans un accès les médecins lui donnèrent
une potion qu'il vomit, et à la suite il rejetait le manger et le boire. Réduit
à la dernière extrémité, il se fit conduire à l’église de saint Michel, dans la
pensée qu'il y mourrait ou qu'il y serait guéri. Saint Michel lui apparut et
lui (lit de faire une potion composée de miel, de vin et de poivré, dans
laquelle il devait tremper tout ce qu'il mangerait, et qu'il serait délivré de
sa maladie. Il le fit et fut entièrement guéri, quoique, d'après les règles de
la médecine, il semble que l’on ne doit pas donner des remèdes échauffants aux
cholériques.
Secondement. La solennité
de saint Michel a le nom de Victoire. On trouve un grand nombre de victoires
remportées par saint Michel archange et parles anges. La première est celle que
l’archange Michel fit remporter aux Sipontins; de la manière suivante, quelque
temps après la découverte rapportée plus haut. Les Napolitains, encore païens,
guerroyèrent avec une armée en bon ordre contré les Sipontins et les
Bénéventins (Naples est cependant éloignée de cinquante milles de Siponto). Ces
derniers, de l’avis de l’évêque, demandèrent une trêve de trois jours, afin de
pouvoir vaquer au jeûne et invoquer à leur secours leur patron saint Michel.
Or, la troisième nuit, l’archange apparaît à l’évêque, lui dit que les prières
ont été exaucées, promet la victoire, et ordonne d'attaquer l’ennemi à la
quatrième heure du jour. Lorsqu'on en vint aux mains, le mont Gargan est
ébranlé d'un immense tremblement; la foudre ne cesse de sillonner les airs, et
un brouillard épais couvre le sommet entier de la montagne, de sorte que 600
ennemis tombent percés sous le fer des chrétiens et par la foudre. Le reste
reconnut la puissance de l’archange, abandonna l’idolâtrie et se soumit à la
foi chrétienne aussitôt après. La seconde victoire est celle que l’archange
Michel remporta quand il chassa du ciel le dragon, c'est-à-dire Lucifer avec
tous ceux de sa suite. Le fait est raconté dans l’Apocalypse : « Il se livra un
grand combat dans le ciel, Michel y combattit avec ses anges; etc.,» Lucifer
voulait s'égaler à Dieu, l’archange Michel, le porte-étendard de l’armée
céleste, vint et chassa du ciel ce Lucifer avec sa suite entière, et le
repoussa dans l’air caligineux pour qu'il y restât jusqu'au jour du jugement.
Il ne leur fut pas permis d'habiter le ciel, ni la partie supérieure de l’air,
parce que c’est un endroit clair et agréable, ni de rester sur la terre avec
nous, parce qu'ils nous incommoderaient trop ; mais ils résident dans l’air,
entre le ciel et la terre, afin qu'en regardant au-dessus d'eux et en voyant la
gloire qu'ils ont perdue, ils en ressentent de la douleur, et qu'en regardant
en bas et en voyant l’humanité au ciel d'où ils sont tombés, ils en soient
souvent tourmentés d'envie. Cependant Dieu permet souvent qu'ils descendent
auprès de nous pour nous éprouver, et il a été montré à quelques saints personnages
qu'ils voltigent souvent autour de nous comme des mouches. Ils sont
innombrables, et l’air en est rempli comme -par ces insectes. C'est ce qui fait
dire à Haymon : « Ainsi que l’ont avancé les philosophes et nos docteurs, l’air
qui nous environne est rempli de démons et d'esprits malins, comme le rayon de
soleil l’est des plus minces atomes. » Quoiqu'ils soient en aussi grand nombre,
cependant, d'après le sentiment d'Origène, leurs bataillons diminuent quand
nous les avons vaincus ; en sorte que celui d'entre eux qui a été vaincu par un
saint ne peut plus le tenter pour le vice à l’égard duquel il a été vaincu. La
troisième victoire est celle que les anges remportent tous les jours contre les
démons,quand ils nous délivrent des mauvaises tentations en combattant pour
nous contre nos ennemis. Or, ils nous délivrent de la tentation en trois
manières : 1° en maîtrisant la puissance du démon (Apocalypse) 2° l’ange qui
lie le démon et le jette dans l’abîme (Tobie (VIII), le diable lié dans le
désert), ce qui n'est autre chose que la puissance du démon enchaînée; 3° en
refroidissant la concupiscence, effet signalé dans la Genèse (c. XXXII) où il
est dit que l’ange toucha le nerf de Jacob et il se sécha aussitôt; 4° en
rappelant à notre souvenir la passion de Notre-Seigneur. L'Apocalypse l’indique
en disant (VII) : « Ne frappez ni la terre, ni la mer, ni les arbres avant que
nous ayons marqué au front les serviteurs de notre Dieu. » Et dans Ezéchiel
(IX) : « Marquez un Thau sur le front des hommes qui gémissent. » La lettre
Thau a la forme d'une croix, et ceux qui en ont été marqués n'ont plus à
craindre les coups de l’ange. Il est encore écrit au même livre : « Celui sur
lequel vous verrez le Thau, ne le tuez point. » — La quatrième victoire est
celle que l’archange Michel doit remporter sur l’antéchrist quand il le tuera.
« Alors est-il dit dans Daniel (XII), Michel, le grand prince s'élèvera ! lui
qui est le protecteur et le soutien des êtres, il se posera vigoureusement
contre l’antéchrist. Après quoi l’antéchrist (d'après la glose sur ce passage
de l’Apocalypse (XIII) : « Je vis une des têtes de la bête, blessée à mort »)
simulera qu'il est mort, et pendant trois jours il se cachera; puis il
apparaîtra en disant qu'il est ressuscité. Par des procédés magiques, les
démons le prendront et le transporteront dans les airs, et tout le monde, dans
l’admiration, l’adorera. Enfin il gravira le mont dés Olives, ainsi que le dit
la glose sur ce passage de la IIe épître aux Thessaloniciens (II) : « Le
Seigneur Jésus le détruira par le souffle de sa bouche », et tandis qu'il sera
dans son pavillon, et sur le trône qui lui aura été préparé en ce lieu, d'où le
Seigneur est monté au ciel, Michel viendra et le tuera. C'est de ce tombât et
de cette victoire qu'il est question, d'après saint Grégoire, dans ces paroles
de l’Apocalypse (XII): « alors il se donna une grande. bataille dans le ciel. »
Paroles qui ont rapport aux trois batailles de saint Michel : à celle qu'il
livra contre Lucifer quand il le chassa du paradis ; à celle qu'il livre aux
démons qui nous incommodent, et à celle enfin dont il est ici question, et qui
sera livrée à la fin du monde contre l’antéchrist.
Troisièmement, cette
solennité se nomme Dédicacé parce que l’archange Michel révéla que cet endroit;
sur le mont Gargan, avait été dédié par lui-même à pareil jour (Siméon
Métaphraste; — Bréviaire romain). Quand les Sipontains furent revenus après le
carnage de leurs ennemis sur lesquels ils avaient remporté une victoire si
éclatante, ils conçurent des doutes s'ils devaient entrer dans cet endroit ou
en faire la dédicace. Alors l’évêque envoya consulter à cet égard le pape
Pélage, lequel répondit : « Si c'était un homme qui dût faire la dédicace de
cette église, il le faudrait faire certainement au jour où la victoire a été
accordée. Si au contraire saint. Michel est d'un avis opposé, il faut là-dessus
s'enquérir de sa volonté.» Quand le pape, l’évêque et les citoyens de Siponto,
eurent passé trois jours dans la prière et le jeûne, saint. Michel apparut à
l’évêque en ce jour et lui dit : « Vous n'avez pas besoin de dédier l’église
que j'ai édifiée. Je l’ai dédiée comme je l’ai bâtie moi-même. »
Il lui ordonna de s'y
rendre le lendemain avec le peuple, d'y faire leur prière et qu'on ressentirait
alors qu'il était leur patron spécial. Ensuite il lui donna un signe auquel il
reconnaîtrait que l’église avait été consacrée : c'était d'y monter du côté de
l’orient par un sentier de traverse : ils y devaient trouver les pas d'un homme
empreints sur le marbre. Le lendemain matin l’évêque et tout le peuple vinrent,
à cet endroit et étant entrés dans une grande crypte, ils trouvèrent trois
autels, dont deux étaient placés, au midi et le troisième qui se trouvait du
côté de l’orient était magnifique et enveloppé d'une couverture rouge. La messe
y fut célébrée solennellement et tous ayant. reçu la. sainte communion,
revinrent chez eux remplis d'une joie extraordinaire. L'évêque y établit des
prêtres et des clercs pour célébrer continuellement l’office divin. Il coule
dans cette caverne une source d'eau limpide et fort agréable au goût. Le peuple
en boit après la communion et divers malades en sont guéris. Alors le souverain
pontife, ayant appris ces merveilles, établit qu’en ce jour on célébrerait par
tout l’univers la fête de saint Michel et de tous les esprits bienheureux.
Quatrièmement cette
solennité a reçu le nom de Mémoire : Nous y faisons en effet la mémoire de tous
les saints anges en général. Ils ont droit à nos. louanges et à nos honneurs
pour plusieurs motifs. Ils sont nos gardiens, nos directeurs, nos frères et nos
concitoyens : ce sont eux qui portent nos âmes au ciel; ils présentent nos
prières à Dieu, ce sont les plus nobles soldats du roi éternel, et les
consolateurs des affligés. 1° Vous devons les honorer, parce qu'ils sont nos
gardiens. A chaque homme sont donnés deux anges, un mauvais pour l’exercer, et
un bon pour le garder. L'homme est gardé par un bon ange dès le sein de sa
mère, dès sa naissance, et aussitôt qu'il voit le jour, et il l’est encore
quand il est devenu grand. Or, dans ces trois états, l’homme a besoin de la
garde de l’ange : car quand il est tout petit dans le sein de sa mère, il peut être
tué et être damné; hors du sein de sa mère, avant l’âge adulte il peut être
empêché de recevoir le baptême; parvenu à l’âge adulte, il peut être entraîné à
commettre différents péchés; le diable séduit la raison de l’adulte par ses
artifices; il allèche sa volonté par des caresses, il opprime sa vertu par la
violence. Il était donc nécessaire qu'il y eût un bon ange chargé de garder
l’homme pour l’instruire, le protéger contre les tromperies, l’exhorter, et le
pousser au bien malgré les caresses et enfin le défendre de toute pression
contre la violence. On peut assigner quatre résultats que l’homme obtient de la
protection de son ange gardien. Le premier, c'est de faire avancer l’homme dans
l’acquisition de la grâce l’ange le fait en trois manières : 1° en écartant
tout ce qui empêche d'opérer le bien. Ceci est indiqué dans l’Exode (XII) où il
est dit que l’ange frappa les premiers-nés de l’Egypte. 2° En chassant la
paresse, comme il est dit dans le livre du Prophète Zacharie (IV): « L'ange du
Seigneur me réveilla comme un homme qu'on réveille de son sommeil. » 3° En le
conduisant dans la voie de la pénitence et en le ramenant: ce qui est signifié
par l’ange qui conduisit et ramena Tobie (V). Le second, c'est de l’empêcher de
tomber en faute : ce que l’ange fait de trois manières : 1° En empêchant par
avance que le péché ne soit commis, cè qui est indiqué au livre des Nombres
(XXII) où il est dit que Balaam qui allait pour maudire Israël en fut empêché
par un auge. 2° En reprenant du péché passé afin de s'en corriger : comme au
livre des Juges (II) où l’on voit que quand l’ange reprit les enfants d'Israël
de leur prévarication, ils élevèrent leurs voix et se mirent à pleurer. 3° En
faisant pour ainsi dire violence afin de quitter le péché actuel : ainsi que cela
est signifié dans la violence apportée par l’ange pour chasser Loth et sa femme
de Sodome, c'est-à-dire, de l’habitude du péché. Le troisième, c'est de
s'élever après la chute: l’ange l’obtient en trois manières : 1° En excitant à
la contrition : fait signalé dans le livre de Tobie (XI) où d'après les ordres
de l’ange ; le jeune Tobie enduisit du fiel du poisson (ce qui signifiait la
contrition) les yeux de son père, c'est-à-dire, les yeux du coeur. 2° En
purifiant les lèvres pour se confesser dignement, comme Isaïe (VI) eut les
lèvres purifiées par un ange. 3° En faisant accepter avec joie la satisfaction
: d'après ce passage de saint Luc (XV) qu'il y aura une plus grande joie dans
le ciel pour un seul pécheur qui fait pénitence que pour quatre-vingt-dix-neuf
justes restant dans la persévérance. Le quatrième résultat, c'est que l’homme
ne succombe ni si souvent, ni en tant de maux, chaque fois que le diable l’y
porte et l’y entraîne. Ce que l’ange fait, de trois manières : «En mettant un
frein à la puissance du démon. 2 ° En affaiblissant la concupiscence. 3° Et en
gravant dans nos coeurs le souvenir de la passion de Notre-Seigneur. Ce qui a
été dit ci-dessus suffit pour le prouver.
Secondement, nous devons
les honorer parce qu'ils sont nos directeurs. Car tous les anges, dit l’épître
aux, Hébreux (I), sont des esprits qui tiennent lieu de serviteurs et de
ministres. Tous ont une mission par rapport à nous ; les supérieurs sont
envoyés à ceux du second rang, ceux-ci aux derniers, et ces derniers à nous. Or,
cette mission est bien en rapport : 1° Avec la bonté de Dieu. Car cette divine
bonté est manifeste en tant qu'elle veut et aime notre salut quand elle envoie
et nous transmet les plus nobles esprits qui lui sont intimement unis, pour
nous donner les moyens d'être sauvés. 2° Avec la charité des anges; parce que
c'est la fin d'une charité parfaite de désirer ardemment le salut des autres.
C'est pourquoi Isaïe dit
« Me voici, Seigneur,
envoyez-moi. » Or, les anges peuvent nous aider parce qu'ils nous voient privés
de leurs secours et attaqués par les mauvais anges. S'ils sont envoyés vers
nous, c'est que la loi de la charité angélique l’exige. 3° Avec l’indigence de
l’homme: car les bons anges sont envoyés : 1° Pour enflammer notre coeur
d'amour. Le char de feu qui les porte en est la figure. 2° Pour éclairer
l’intelligence dans la connaissance de ses devoirs. Ceci est figuré dans l’ange
de l’Apocalypse (X) qui avait un livre à la main. 3° Pour fortifier notre
faiblesse jusqu'à la fin. Ce qui est indiqué dans le IIIe livre des Rois (XIX)
où on lit qu'un ange porta à Elie un pain cuit sous la cendre et un vase d'eau.
Alors ce prophète mangea et marcha, après s'être fortifié par cette nourriture,
jusqu'à Oreb, la montagne de Dieu. Troisièmement, nous devons les honorer parce
qu'ils sont nos frères et nos concitoyens. Tous les élus, en effet, sont
appelés à faire partie des chœurs des anges ; quelques-uns des supérieurs,
quelques autres des inférieurs un certain nombre sont choisis pour rester avec
ceux qui occupent une place intermédiaire, selon leurs mérites ; mais la
bienheureuse Vierge est au-dessus de tous. Saint Grégoire paraît n'être pas de
ce sentiment dans une de ses homélies. a Il y en a, dit-il, qui ne conçoivent
que peu de choses, mais qui cependant ne laissent pas d'en faire part à leurs
frères : ceux-ci sont mis au rang des Anges. Il v en a qui parviennent à
comprendre et à manifestera ce qu'il y a de plus sublime dans les secrets du
ciel ; ils sont au rang des Archanges. Il y en a qui opèrent des miracles
prodigieux et dont les oeuvres sont marquées au coin de la puissance ; ils sont
avec les Vertus. Il yen a qui, par la force de leurs prières. et par l’effet de
la puissance qu'ils ont reçue, mettent en fuite les esprits malins ; ils 'sont
avec les Puissances. Il y en a qui, par les vertus qu'ils ont reçues,
surpassent les élus en mérite, et sont à la tète de ceux qui sont élus comme
eux ; ils partagent alors les prérogatives des Principautés. Il y en a encore
qui exercent un tel empire en eux-mêmes sur tous les vices, qu'en raison de
cette pureté, ils reçoivent des hommes le nom de Dieux; ainsi qu'il est dit à
Moïse: « Voici que je t'ai établi le Dieu de Pharaon » (Exode, VII) : ceux-là
sont avec les Dominations. Il y en a d'autres dans la personne desquels le
Seigneur, comme sur son trône, juge les actes des autres, et qui, en gouvernant
la sainte Eglise, jugent devoir être admis au nombre des élus la plupart de
ceux qui la composent et dont les actions pourraient être attribuées à la
faiblesse ; ce sont ceux qui se trouvent avec les Trônes. Il y en a qui sont
remplis plus que d'autres de l’amour de Dieu et du prochain et qui ont mérité
de partager le rang des Chérubins, parce que chérubin veut dire plénitude de
science et que, d'après saint Paul, la plénitude de la loi c'est l’amour. Il
s'en trouve encore qui, enflammés par l’amour de la contemplation des choses du
ciel, tendent de tous leurs efforts vers leur créateur, ne désirent plus rien
de ce qui est ici-bas, se rassasient de l’amour seul de l’éternité, méprisent
tout ce qui est de la terre, s'élèvent en esprit au-dessus de ce qui appartient
au temps, aiment et brûlent, en même temps qu'ils trouvent le repos dans leur
amour, qui brûlent en aimant, qui embrasent par le feu de leurs paroles, et dont
le langage a la vertu d'embraser de suite de l’amour de Dieu ceux auxquels ils
s'adressent, et alors ils n'ont pu être appelés ailleurs que dans le chœur des
Séraphins. »
Quatrièmement, on doit
honorer les anges parce qu'ils portent nos âmes au ciel ; ce qu'ils font en
trois manières : 1° En leur préparant la voie (Malach., III). « Je vais vous
envoyer mon ange qui préparera ma voie devant ma face.» 2° En les portant au
ciel sur la voie qui a été préparée (Exod., XXIII) : « Je vais envoyer mois
ange qui te gardera en route et qui t'introduira dans la terre que j'ai promise
à tes pères. » 3° En les plaçant dans le ciel (Luc, XVI) : « Il arriva que le
pauvre mourut et fut emporté par les anges dans le sein d'Abraham. »
Cinquièmement, nous
devons honorer les Anges; parce qu'ils présentent eux-mêmes nos prières à Dieu
: 1° Ils offrent eux-mêmes nos prières à Dieu, comme il est dit au livre de
Tobie (XII) : « Lorsque vous priiez avec larmes et que vous ensevelissiez les
morts, j'ai présenté moi-même vos prières au Seigneur. » 2° Ils s'interposent
en notre faveur, ainsi qu'on le voit au livre de Job (XXXIII) : « Si l’ange
choisi entre mille parle pour l’homme et qu'il annonce au Seigneur l’équité de
cet homme, Dieu aura compassion de lui. » Le prophète Zacharie dit encore (I) :
« L'ange du Seigneur parla ensuite et dit : Seigneur des armées, jusqu'à quand
différerez-vous de faire miséricorde à Jérusalem et aux villes de Juda contre
lesquelles votre colère est émue ? Voici déjà la soixante et dixième année de leur
ruine. » 3° Ils nous apportent les ordres de Dieu. Daniel (IX) rapporte que
Gabriel vola vers lui pour lui dire: « Dès le commencement de votre prière,
j'ai reçu cet ordre de Dieu (la Glose), et je suis venu pour vous découvrir les
choses dont le Seigneur m’a chargé de vous instruire, parce que vous êtes un
homme de désirs. » Saint Bernard parle ainsi sur ces trois fonctions des anges
dans son livre sur le Cantique des Cantiques: « L'ange court du bien-aimé à la
bien-aimée, offrant les voeux, rapportant les présents. Il émeut celle-ci et
apaise celui-là. » Sixièmement, il faut les honorer parce qu'ils sont les
nobles soldats du roi éternel, d'après ce qu'il est dit dans Job (XXV) : «
Peut-on compter le nombre de ses soldats? » Parmi les soldats du roi, nous en
voyons qui demeurent à sa cour, l’accompagnent et se livrent à des chants en
son honneur pour le distraire; quelques-uns gardent les villes et les places
fortes du royaume ; d'autres combattent ses ennemis; il en est de même des
soldats de J.-C. dont nous venons de parler ; toujours à la cour céleste,
c'est-à-dire au ciel empirée, ils accompagnent le Roi des rois, et. en son
honneur ils chantent constamment des cantiques de liesse et de gloire en
disant: « Saint, saint, saint : Bénédiction, gloire, sagesse, action de grâces,
honneur, puissance et force à notre Dieu dans les siècles des siècles. »
(Apoc., VII.) D'autres sont préposés à la garde des villes, des banlieues, des
campagnes et des camps. Ce sont ceux qui sont établis pour nous garder, qui sont
les gardiens des vierges, des continents, des mariés et des communautés
religieuses : « Jérusalem, est-il dit au ch. XIII d'Isaïe, j'ai établi des
gardiens sur tes murs. » D'autres enfin combattent les ennemis de Dieu,
c'est-à-dire les démons. « Il y eut, dit l’Apocalypse, un grand combat dans le
ciel, c'est-à-dire d'après une explication, dans l’église militante. Michel et
ses anges combattaient avec le dragon. » Septièmement enfin, on doit honorer
les anges, parce qu'ils sont les consolateurs des affligés. « L'ange, dit
Zacharie (I), m’adressait de bonnes et consolantes paroles.» L'ange dit à Tobie
(V) : « Ayez bon courage. » Ils exécutent cette fonction de trois manières : 1°
en donnant de la vigueur et de la force. Daniel était tombé de frayeur, quand l’ange
le toucha et lui dit (X) : « Ne craignez pas; la paix soit avec vous : reprenez
vigueur et soyez ferme. » 2° En préservant de l’impatience. « Le Seigneur, dit
le Psaume XC a ordonné à ses anges de vous garder dans toutes vos voies ; ils
vous porteront sur leurs mains, de peur que votre pied ne heurte contre la
pierre. » 3° En calmant et affaiblissant la tribulation elle-même : Daniel
l’indique (III) quand il rapporte que l’ange du Seigneur descendit avec les
trois enfants dans la fournaise et excita au milieu d'elle un vent frais et une
douce rosée.
La Légende dorée de Jacques de Voragine nouvellement traduite en français avec introduction, notices, notes et recherches sur les sources par l'abbé J.-B. M. Roze, chanoine honoraire de la Cathédrale d'Amiens, Édouard Rouveyre, éditeur, 76, rue de Seine, 76, Paris mdccccii
SOURCE : http://www.abbaye-saint-benoit.ch/voragine/tome03/146.htm
SAINT MICHEL ARCHANGE
Anniversaire de la dédicace
de la basilique dédiée à St Michel sur la via Salaria au Vème siècle et
détruite lors des guerres gothiques au VIème siècle.
Depuis, ce jour, bien que
conservant son titre de dédicace, est la fête principale de l’archange, même
s’il n’a plus aucun caractère, ni au niveau des textes ni des rubriques, de
fête de la dédicace.
Dans le sacramentaire
Léonien, 5 messes sont consacrées ce jour à St Michel.
Fête attestée depuis le
Vème siècle.
(Leçons des Matines)
AU PREMIER NOCTURNE.
Du Prophète Daniel.
Première leçon. Je
regardais jusqu’à ce que des trônes furent placés, et un vieillard s’assit ;
son vêtement était blanc comme la neige, et les cheveux de sa tête blancs comme
une laine pure ; son trône comme des flammes de feu ; ses roues, un feu
brûlant. Un fleuve de feu et rapide sortait de sa face ; des milliers de
milliers d’Anges le servaient, et dix milliers de centaines de milliers d’Anges
assistaient devant lui ; le jugement se tint, et des livres furent ouverts. Je
regardais à cause de la voix des grandes paroles que cette corne prononçait ;
et je vis que la bête fut tuée et que son corps périt, et qu’il fut livré pour
être brûlé par le feu.
R/. Il se fit un silence
dans le ciel lorsque le dragon combattait contre l’Archange Michel. * La voix
de milliers de milliers d’Anges fut entendue, disant : Salut, honneur et
puissance au Dieu tout-puissant. V/. Des milliers de milliers d’Anges le
servaient, et dix milliers de centaines de milliers d’Anges assistaient devant
lui. * La voix.
Deuxième leçon. Le
vingtquatrième jour du premier mois, j’étais près du grand fleuve qui est le
Tigre. Et je levai mes yeux, et je vis ; et voici un homme vêtu de lin, et ses
reins ceints d’un or très pur ; et son corps était comme une chrysolithe, et sa
face comme l’aspect de la foudre, et ses yeux comme une lampe ardente ; et ses
bras et ses parties basses jusqu’aux pieds, comme une apparence d’airain
étincelant, et la voix de ses paroles, comme la voix d’une multitude. Or, moi
Daniel, je vis seul la vision, et les hommes qui étaient avec moi ne la virent
pas ; mais une terreur extraordinaire se saisit d’eux, et ils s’enfuirent dans
un lieu caché. Mais moi, étant demeuré seul, je vis cette grande vision ; et il
ne resta pas en moi de force ; mais même mon visage fut changé en moi, et je
séchai, et je n’eus aucune force.
R/. L’Ange se tint devant
l’autel du temple, ayant un encensoir d’or à la main ; et une grande quantité
de parfums lui fut donnée : * Et la fumée des parfums monta de la main de l’Ange,
en présence du Seigneur. V/. En présence des Anges je vous chanterai des hymnes
; j’adorerai vers votre saint temple, et je glorifierai votre nom, Seigneur. *
Et la fumée.
Troisième leçon. Et
j’entendis la voix de ses paroles ; et, en l’entendant, j’étais couché tout
consterné sur ma face, et mon visage était collé à la terre. Et voici qu’une
main me toucha, et me dressa sur mes genoux et sur le plat de mes mains. Et la
voix me dit : Daniel, homme de désirs, entends les paroles que je te dis, et
tiens-toi sur tes pieds ; car je suis maintenant envoyé vers toi. Et lorsqu’il
m’eut dit ces paroles, je me tins debout, tremblant. Et il me dit : Ne crains
pas, Daniel, parce que dès le premier jour où tu as appliqué ton cœur à
comprendre, afin de t’affliger en présence de ton Dieu, tes paroles ont été
entendues ; et je suis venu à cause de tes discours. Or le prince du royaume
des Perses m’a résisté durant vingt et un jours : et voilà que Michel, un des
premiers princes, est venu à mon secours, et moi, je suis demeuré là près du
roi des Perses. Mais je suis venu afin de t’apprendre ce qui doit arriver à ton
peuple dans les derniers jours, parce que la vision est encore pour ces jours.
R/. En présence des Anges
je vous chanterai des hymnes ; j’adorerai vers votre saint temple, * Et je
glorifierai votre nom, Seigneur. V/. A cause de votre miséricorde et de votre
vérité : parce que vous avez élevé au-dessus de nous la grandeur de votre nom
saint. * Et je glorifierai. Gloire au Père. * Et je glorifierai.
AU DEUXIÈME NOCTURNE.
Sermon de saint Grégoire,
Pape.
Quatrième leçon. Nous
disons qu’il y a neuf ordres d’Anges. En effet, nous savons positivement par le
témoignage de la sainte Écriture, qu’il y a : des Anges, des Archanges, des
Vertus, des Puissances, des Principautés, des Dominations, des Trônes, des
Chérubins et des Séraphins. Qu’il y ait des Anges et des Archanges, presque
toutes les pages sacrées l’attestent ; quant aux Chérubins et aux Séraphins, il
en est souvent question, comme on le sait, au livre des Prophètes. De plus,
l’Apôtre saint Paul énumère les noms de quatre ordres dans ce passage de son
Épître aux Éphésiens : « Au-dessus de toute Principauté, de toute Puissance, de
toute Vertu, de toute Domination. » [1] Il dit encore en écrivant aux Colossiens
: « Soit les Trônes, soit les Puissances, soit les Principautés, soit les
Dominations. » [2] En joignant donc les Trônes aux quatre ordres dont il a
parlé aux Éphésiens, on a cinq ordres ; et si l’on y ajoute les Anges et les
Archanges, les Chérubins et les Séraphins, on trouve qu’il existe réellement
neuf ordres d’Anges.
R/. Celui-ci est
l’Archange Michel, le prince de la milice des Anges : * Le culte qu’on lui rend
est une source de bienfaits pour les peuples, et sa prière conduit au royaume
des cieux. V/. C’est l’Archange Michel, glorieusement élevé dans le paradis,
c’est celui à qui rendent honneur tous les citoyens de la cité angélique. * Le
culte.
Cinquième leçon. Or, il
faut savoir que cette dénomination d’Anges désigne leur fonction et non leur
nature ; car si ces bienheureux esprits de la céleste patrie sont toujours des
esprits, ils ne peuvent pas toujours être appelés des Anges ; ils sont Anges
seulement lorsqu’ils annoncent quelque chose. C’est pour cela qu’un Psaume dit
en parlant de Dieu : « Lui qui, des esprits, fait ses Anges. » [3] Comme s’il
disait explicitement : ceux qu’il a toujours comme esprits, il en fait ses
Anges quand il veut. Or, ceux qui portent les messages les moins importants
sont appelés simplement du nom d’Anges, et on nomme Archanges ceux qui
annoncent les plus grands mystères. Et voilà pourquoi ce n’est pas un Ange
quelconque, mais bien l’Archange Gabriel, que Dieu envoya à la Vierge Marie.
Comme il s’agissait du plus grand de tous les messages, il convenait que le plus
grand des Anges remplît ce ministère. En outre, ces Archanges reçoivent des
noms particuliers, qui expriment les effets de leur opération. Ainsi Michel
signifie : Qui est semblable à Dieu ? Gabriel, Force de Dieu ; Raphaël, Remède
de Dieu.
R/. L’Archange Michel est
venu avec une multitude d’Anges ; c’est à lui que Dieu a confié les âmes des
saints, * Pour qu’il les fasse parvenir aux joies du paradis. V/. Seigneur,
envoyez du ciel votre Esprit-Saint, l’esprit de sagesse et d’intelligence. *
Pour qu’il.
Sixième leçon. Toutes les
fois qu’il s’agit d’une chose où il faut une puissance extraordinaire, c’est
Michel que l’Écriture cite comme envoyé, afin que son nom aussi bien que l’acte
même, donne à comprendre que nul ne peut faire ce que Dieu fait par son
incomparable puissance. Aussi l’antique ennemi qui disait, dans son
orgueilleuse ambition de s’égaler à Dieu : « Je monterai jusqu’aux cieux,
j’élèverai mon trône au-dessus des astres du ciel, je serai semblable au
Très-Haut ; » [4] cet ancien ennemi, dis-je, lorsqu’à la fin du monde il sera
laissé dans toute sa force, pour être ensuite écrasé dans l’éternel supplice,
est-il mentionné comme devant combattre contre l’Archange Michel, d’après cette
parole de saint Jean : « Et un combat s’est engagé avec l’Archange Michel. »
[5] De même, l’Archange envoyé à Marie, c’est Gabriel, dont le nom signifie :
Force de Dieu. Il venait effectivement annoncer celui qui, pour faire sentir sa
force aux puissances de l’air, a daigné paraître dans l’humiliation. Enfin, comme
nous avons dit plus haut, Raphaël signifie : Remède de Dieu ; et en effet, cet
Archange, en touchant les yeux de Tobie comme pour le guérir, dissipa les
ténèbres de sa cécité.
R/. En ce temps-là
s’élèvera Michel, qui est pour vos fils, * Et viendra un temps, tel qu’il n’y
en a pas eu depuis que les nations ont commencé d’être jusqu’alors. V/. En ce
temps-là, sera sauvé quiconque de ton peuple sera trouvé écrit dans le livre de
vie. * Et. Gloire au Père. * Et.
AU TROISIÈME NOCTURNE.
Lecture du saint Évangile
selon saint Matthieu.
En ce temps-là : Les
disciples s’approchèrent de Jésus, disant : Qui, pensez-vous, est le plus grand
dans le royaume des cieux ? Et le reste.
Homélie de saint Jérôme,
Prêtre.
Septième leçon. Le
statère vient d’être trouvé et le tribut payé, pourquoi cette question inopinée
des Apôtres : « Qui, pensez-vous, est le plus grand dans le royaume des cieux ?
» Parce qu’ils avaient vu payer un même tribut pour Pierre et le Seigneur, de
cette égalité dans le prix, ils concluaient que Pierre était élevé au-dessus de
tous les Apôtres, lui qui, pour la reddition du tribut, semblait être comparé
au Seigneur ; et voilà pourquoi ils demandent : « Qui est le plus grand dans le
royaume des cieux ? » Jésus, connaissant leurs pensées et discernant la cause
de leur méprise, veut guérir en eux le désir de la gloire, en leur inspirant
une généreuse émulation pour l’humilité.
R/. En présence des
Gentils, ne craignez point : mais en vos cœurs adorez et craignez le Seigneur,
* Car son Ange est avec vous. V/. L’Ange se tint devant l’autel du temple,
ayant à la main un encensoir d’or. * Car.
Bened. Que ceux dont nous
célébrons la Fête, etc. [6]
Huitième leçon. « Si donc
ta main ou ton pied te scandalise, coupe-le et jette-le loin de toi. » Il faut,
à-la vérité, que les scandales arrivent ; cependant, malheur à l’homme qui, par
sa faute, est la cause de ce qui ne peut manquer de se produire dans le monde.
En conséquence, toute affection est à briser, toute parenté est à rompre, quand
il y a lieu de craindre que les croyants, dans leurs rapports de piété filiale
ou de fidélité, ne soient exposés à des scandales. S’il y a quelqu’un, semble
dire le Sauveur, qui vous soit aussi étroitement uni que la main, le pied, ou
l’œil est uni au corps ; quelqu’un qui vous soit utile et dévoué, qui mette à
votre service sa clairvoyance et sa pénétration, mais qui vous soit en même
temps un sujet de scandale, et qui, par l’opposition des mœurs, vous entraîne
dans l’enfer, il vaut mieux vous priver de son intimité et des avantages
temporels qui en résultent, de peur qu’en voulant gagner vos proches et vos
amis, vous n’ayez auprès d’eux des occasions de vous perdre.
R/. L’Archange Michel est
venu au secours du peuple de Dieu, * Il a couvert de sa protection les âmes
justes. V/. L’Ange se tint près de l’autel du temple, ayant à la main un
encensoir d’or. * Il. Gloire au Père. * Il.
Neuvième leçon. « Je vous
dis que leurs Anges voient sans cesse, dans le ciel, la face de mon Père. »
Plus haut, sous l’image de la main, du pied et de l’œil dont il faut se
défaire, il avait dit qu’on doit se séparer des parents et des amis, qui
peuvent être des sujets de scandale Voici maintenant qu’il tempère la rigueur
de ce principe, par cette recommandation qu’il ajoute à la suite. « Prenez
garde de mépriser un seul de ces petits. » Comme s’il disait : Je ne commande
pas la sévérité de conduite, sans apprendre en même temps qu’il y faut mêler de
la douceur : « Car leurs Anges voient sans cesse, dans les deux, la face du
Père. » Grandeur et dignité des âmes, en ce que chacun des hommes a, dès le
moment de sa naissance, un Ange préposé à sa garde. Aussi lisons-nous dans
l’Apocalypse de saint Jean : « Écris ceci à l’Ange d’Éphèse, et .aux Anges des
autres Églises. » [7] Comme aussi l’Apôtre veut que, dans les églises, les
femmes aient la tête voilée, à cause des Anges. [8]
[1] Ephés. 1, 21
[2] Col. 1, 16
[3] Ps. 103, 4
[4] Is. 14, 13
[5] Ap. 12, 7
[6] Même si
historiquement la fête du 29 septembre commémore une dédicace d’église, elle
n’est en rien une fête de la dédicace (c’est à dire une fête du Seigneur), mais
une fête des saints Anges.
[7] Ap. 2, 1
[8] 1 Cor. 11, 10
Saint Michel,
« boss » de tous les anges gardiens et peseur des âmes
Bernard
Plessy | 27 septembre 2019
L’Archange Michel a tant
de fonctions auprès de nous que nous pouvons être tenté de croire qu’il est à
la limite de ce qu’il peut. Mais rassurons-nous d’emblée : il peut toujours
tout pour nous. Et pour cause, son nom signifie : "Qui est comme Dieu".
Voyons voir du coup tout ce qu’il fait pour nous.
Michel n’est pas un saint
incarné, c’est un être céleste. Il ne relève pas du temps humain. S’il a un
commencement, il n’a pas de fin ; son existence permanente n’est pas
linéaire, mais ponctuelle ou sporadique, au gré de ses manifestations, ou
apparitions. Michel est créature de Dieu, prestigieuse, chef de corps de la
légion des anges, les anges du bien. On dit aussi Prince de la milice céleste.
Flanqué de ses adjoints Gabriel et Raphaël.
Lire aussi :
À
quelle vitesse les anges se déplacent-ils ?
Et c’est donc lui qui
livre bataille au Dragon. Qui est le Dragon ? C’est l’Ennemi. Le Rebelle,
qui dit : Non serviam, je ne servirai pas. L’Insoumis. Combat
décisif : ou lui ou Dieu. Sur le front, en première ligne, Michel, avec
casque, armure, épée. Coups terribles. Autre chose qu’Olivier et Roland
dans La Légende des Siècles. Michel l’emporte. Le Dragon est précipité dans
l’abîme. Et Michel y gagne ses galons de porte-étendard, signifer.
Quand cela se
passe-t-il ? Aux origines ? L’Apocalypse, qui raconte le combat,
permet cette lecture (Ap
12, 7-9). Elle ne la garantit pas. Elle-même est hors du temps. Sa nature
est de révéler. Elle peut le faire par préfiguration, et mettre aux
origines ce qui sera lutte finale. Jésus, dans ses prédictions apocalyptiques,
puisque les Évangiles le font donner dans ce genre d’époque, concourt à cette
lecture ambiguë : « Je regardais le Satan tomber du ciel comme un
éclair ! » (Lc,
10, 18).
Veiller à la victoire
anticipée de chaque âme
Pour nous la seule chose
qui importe, c’est que Michel ait gagné. De provisoirement on passera
à définitivement. Mais en attendant la victoire finale, Michel a la lourde
tâche de s’occuper de nous. Laissons ses apparitions — et même notre
Mont-Saint-Michel, trop à dire. L’immense victoire collective de la fin des
temps — when the stars begin to fall, comme dit un beau spiritual — ne le
dispense pas de veiller à la victoire anticipée de chaque âme venue en ce
monde. Quel travail !
Lire aussi :
13
infos que vous ignorez sûrement sur le Mont-Saint-Michel
Il s’y emploie au moins
de trois façons. Responsable des anges gardiens, il vient s’assurer que chacun
fait bien son office. Il se promène parmi nous. Mais nous ne le voyons pas !
Jeanne d’Arc, elle, le voyait. Parlant des saints : « Ils viennent très
souvent, et très souvent je les ai vus parmi les chrétiens… Je vis saint Michel
et ses anges des yeux de mon corps aussi bien que je vous vois… » Mon
Dieu, donnez-nous le regard de Jeanne. Puis il s’active au moment de notre mort,
comme en témoigne cet Offertoire de funérailles : « Seigneur Jésus-Christ,
Roi de gloire, délivrez les âmes de tous les fidèles défunts des peines de
l’enfer et du gouffre sans fond ; délivrez-les de la gueule du lion
pour que l’abîme ne les engloutisse pas et qu’elles ne soient pas précipitées
dans les ténèbres, mais que saint Michel, le porte-étendard, les introduise
dans la sainte Lumière. » Dans ce rôle les savants disent qu’il est psychopompe,
il accompagne les âmes, comme Hermès ou Mercure. Car il y a dans tout cela,
sans la moindre irrévérence, une discrète part mythologique, dont il serait
bien de parler un jour.
Et puis surtout il
continue son combat contre le Malin ou le Mauvais, tant que ce monde reste dans
le temps. Il n’y a pas si longtemps, à la fin de la messe, le prêtre, au bas de
l’autel, récitait une prière composée et prescrite par Léon XIII : « Saint
Michel Archange, défendez-nous dans le combat ; soyez notre secours contre
la malice et les embûches du démon. Que Dieu exerce sur lui son empire, nous le
demandons en suppliant : et vous, Prince de la milice céleste, repoussez
en enfer, par la vertu divine, Satan et les autres esprits mauvais qui rôdent
dans le monde pour perdre les âmes. » Les autres esprits mauvais… Ô saint Michel,
nous pourrions vous en faire une belle liste. Voilà l’Archange et ses états
d’incessants services. Et il en a d’autres. Il protège la France. Henri Pourrat
l’appelle l’Ange de la Nation. Chaque nation a son ange : nous, c’est
saint Michel. Tous les 29 septembre, il reprend sa tenue militaire à la tête
(et à la fête) des parachutistes.
Michel, le peseur d’âmes
Nous, nous avons
rendez-vous avec saint Michel au dernier jour. Cette fois Michel psychostase :
le peseur d’âmes. Nous le voyons au tympan des cathédrales, Autun par exemple,
balance à deux plateaux en main. La pesée d’une vie. Il est beau, il est sûr,
il est souriant. Le plateau des bonnes actions descend : c’est le plus
lourd. Agrippé à l’autre plateau, Satan grimace : il ne fait pas le poids.
Comment laisser Michel ? Il faut plutôt lui demander de ne pas nous
quitter. Faisons nôtre une antienne des IIes vêpres de sa fête :
« Prince très glorieux, Archange Michel, souvenez-vous de nous ; ici
et en tous lieux, priez toujours pour nous le Fils de Dieu, alleluia,
alleluia. »
Lire aussi :
Michel,
Raphaël, Gabriel : quels sont les pouvoirs des archanges ?
La prière toute simple
pour apprendre aux enfants à invoquer saint Michel
Bénédicte
de Saint-Germain | 27 septembre 2019
Le 29 septembre, toute
l’Église fête les saints archanges. L’occasion de parler aux enfants de saint
Michel et de leur apprendre à l’invoquer avec une prière toute simple.
Revêtu de son armure,
brandissant son épée, terrassant le démon, … le grand saint Michel, « chef
de la milice céleste », peut paraître un peu éloigné des préoccupations
enfantines. N’est-il pas le spécialiste des grands combats, invoqué par les
papes pour défendre l’Église ? L’archange est pourtant un allié précieux
dans la vie quotidienne. Nous pouvons l’expliquer aux enfants en leur
enseignant une courte prière. Très facile à mémoriser et, même à gestuer, elle
reprend trois missions fondamentales de l’archange :
« Saint Michel
archange, de ta lumière, éclaire-nous,
Saint Michel archange, de tes ailes, protège-nous,
Saint Michel archange, de ton épée, défends-nous. »
Saint Michel nous éclaire
Avec tous les anges,
saint Michel voit « sans cesse la face de mon Père qui est aux
cieux », nous dit Jésus (Mt
18, 10). Comme tous les bons anges, il resplendit de la gloire de Dieu.
Avec tous les esprits bienheureux, il s’émerveille de Sa grandeur et il chante
sa splendeur.
Lire aussi :
Un
Tour de France pour saint Michel
À la messe, quand nous
chantons le Sanctus, nous sommes en communion avec tous les anges et tous
les saints. Comme eux, toute notre vie doit être une louange à la gloire du
Père. Demandons à saint Michel de nous apprendre à louer le Seigneur pour
toutes les merveilles de la Création, pour tout ce qu’Il accomplit dans le
monde et dans le cœur des hommes.
Saint Michel nous protège
Le Seigneur « a donné
mission à ses anges de nous garder sur tous nos chemins » (Ps
90). Avec notre ange gardien, les archanges veillent sur nous. Les enfants,
qui éprouvent si simplement le besoin d’être protégés, avec tendresse et
confiance, comprendront la puissance de saint Michel.
Lire aussi :
Est-ce
que mon ange gardien achève ma prière si je m’endors ?
Michel signifie
« Qui est comme Dieu ? ». Ce nom un peu énigmatique nous
rappelle le combat que saint Michel a mené contre le démon, l’ange orgueilleux
qui a voulu se faire l’égal de Dieu (Ap
12, 7-9). « Chaque fois qu’il est besoin d’un déploiement de force
extraordinaire, c’est Michel qui est envoyé, explique Monique Berger dans Vivre
l’année liturgique avec les enfants (éditions Transmettre) : son
action et son nom font comprendre que nul ne peut faire ce qu’il appartient à
Dieu seul de faire. » Demandons-lui son aide pour nous protéger de
l’orgueil.
Saint Michel nous défend
Le grand saint Michel a
pour mission la
lutte contre le démon et la défense de l’Église. « Le diable
(dia-bolos) est celui qui “se jette en travers” du dessein de Dieu et de son
œuvre de salut accomplie dans le Christ » (Catéchisme de l’Église
catholique, n° 2851). Nous voulons faire le bien mais le diable met des
obstacles à notre bonne volonté : il nous présente des tentations, nous
séduit et nous détourne de nos bonnes résolutions. Demandons à saint Michel de
nous aider à enlever ces obstacles et à rendre droit notre chemin vers Dieu.
Confions-lui aussi l’Église et le monde.
Lire aussi :
Trois
façons efficaces de prier l’archange saint Michel
Les saints archanges,
bien plus que des messagers de Dieu
Edifa |
28 septembre 2020
Saint Raphaël, saint
Michel et saint Gabriel… En cette fin de septembre, l’Église nous invite à
fêter des saints pas comme les autres.
Le 29 septembre, l’Eglise
fête les archanges Michel, Gabriel et Raphaël. Des super-anges, en plus légers.
Comme tout ange,
ils sont des envoyés de Dieu auprès des hommes : « Messagers du Seigneur,
bénissez le Seigneur, vous, les invincibles porteurs de ses ordres, prompts à
exécuter sa Parole » (antienne d’ouverture).
Les archanges arrivent
les premiers parmi ces créatures spirituelles qui proclament l’inouï de Dieu.
Ils sont souvent mandatés pour des missions impossibles. Ces agents très
spéciaux ne cessent de se tenir devant la face de Dieu, Le servant jour et
nuit. Lorsqu’ils sortent de l’anonymat, ils portent un nom d’homme, et avec ce
nom une fonction.
Le combattant, le
diplomate et le compatissant
Il y a d’abord le
chef Michel,
« Qui est comme Dieu », combattant du Dragon. C’est le plus grand des
esprits angéliques. C’est le lutteur par excellence contre les forces du Mal.
Lorsque Dieu a besoin d’un ange fort et rapide, Il envoie Michel.
Lire aussi :
Le
chapelet de saint Michel, l’indispensable prière pour les combats quotidiens
Voici le diplomate
Gabriel, nom qui signifie « homme de Dieu ». Le livre de Daniel
présente Gabriel comme un ange-interprète. On le connaît surtout dans le
Nouveau Testament pour ses apparitions à Zacharie et à Marie. Lorsque Dieu veut
faire une grande annonciation, Il envoie Gabriel.
Lire aussi :
Michel,
Raphaël, Gabriel : quels sont les pouvoirs des archanges ?
Enfin, il y a le compatissant
Raphaël, qui veut dire « Dieu guérit ». Cet ange débonnaire
accompagne le jeune Tobie pour qu’il fasse un beau voyage. Avis aux pèlerins et
voyageurs, il délivre aussi des esprits mauvais. Il se présente lui-même comme
l’un des sept anges qui sont devant Dieu, Lui offrant nos supplications
gratuitement. Lorsque Dieu veut faire avancer quelqu’un sur le chemin de la
vie, Il envoie Raphaël.
Quand les anges nous
envoient de discrets signes
Ces archanges de la
lumière nous disent combien Dieu est beau. Avec d’autres anges anonymes, ils
nous font signe discrètement, sans forcer aucune porte : c’est une intuition à
faire le bien, une chute évitée de justesse, une aide à devenir soi-même, une
voix que l’on discerne, un geste au bon moment, une joie à vivre le moment
présent…
En fêtant les archanges,
l’Eglise nous dit que nous ne sommes pas seuls sur Terre. Ils combattent avec
nous contre les puissances des Ténèbres. Ils nous invitent surtout à louer
Dieu, et à faire avec eux des haltes d’adoration. C’est alors qu’on les entend
parfois passer, avec ou sans ailes, dans le silence amoureux de la
prière.
Lire aussi :
Combien
d’archanges y a-t-il dans la Bible ?
Jacques Gauthier
8 May –
Apparition of Saint Michael and Protector of Cornwall
Profile
Archangel.
Leader of the army of God during
the Lucifer uprising. Devotion is common to Muslims, Christians and
Jews, and there are writings about
him in all three cultures. Considered the guardian angel of
Israel, and the guardian and protector of the Church. In the Book of Daniel
(12:1), Michael is described as rising up to defend the Church against the
Anti-Christ.
The feast of
the Apparition of Saint Michael commemorates appearance of the archangel to
a man named Gargan in 492 on
Mount Gargano near Manfredonia in southern Italy.
Gargan and others were pasturing cattle on
the mountain; a bull wandered off and hid in a cave. An arrow was
shot into the cave, but it came flying back out and wounded the archer.
The cowherds went to their bishop who
ordered three days of fasting and prayer to
seek an explanation for the mystery. At the end of the three days Michael
appeared to the bishop and
requested a church built in the honour of the Holy Angels in the cave. If you
find medals or holy cards with ‘relics‘ of
Michael, they are probably rock chips from the cave, or pieces of cloth that
have touched it.
Born
wasn’t
hasn’t
Name
Meaning
Who is like God? (the
battle cry of the army of heaven)
cutlers,
knife grinders, knife sharpers
emergency
medical technicians, EMTs, paramedics
Guild
of Tanners and Weavers of Barcelona, Spain
hatmakers,
hatters, cap makers
mariners,
sailors, watermen, boatmen
radiologists (proclaimed
on 15
January 1941 by Pope Pius XII)
Vatican
City (given in 2013)
Worshipful
Company of Plumbers
Albenga-Imperia, Italy, diocese of
Alghero-Bosa, Italy, diocese of
Altamura–Gravina–Acquaviva
delle Fonti, Italy, diocese of
Caltanissetta, Italy, diocese of
Chieti-Vasto, Italy, archdiocese of
Coimbatore, India, diocese of
Iligan, Philippines, diocese of
Keta-Akatsi,
Ghana, diocese of
Mobile, Alabama, archdiocese of
Pensacola-Tallahassee, Florida, diocese of
Rouyn-Noranda, Québec, diocese of
San
Angelo, Texas, diocese of
Seattle, Washington, archdiocese of
Sherbrooke, Canada, archdiocese of
Springfield, Massachusetts, diocese of
Toronto,
Ontario, archdiocese of
in Belgium
in Brazil
in England
in Germany
in Italy
Domanins, San
Giorgio della Richinvelda
Zugliano,
Pozzuolo del Friuli
in Malta
in Mexico
in the Philippines
Basey,
Samar
San
Miguel, Iloilo
in Puerto
Rico
in Switzerland
Congregation
of Saint Michael the Archangel
Sisters
of Reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
balance (helping
to judge at the Last Judgment)
banner (as
the leader of the army of God)
dragon (representing
the defeated devil)
scales (helping
to judge at the Last Judgment)
Storefront
Additional
Information
A
Garner of Saints, by Allen Banks Hinds, M.A.
Act
of Consecration to Michael the Archangel
Angelic
Crown in Honor of Saint Michael the Archangel
Angels
in Art, by Clara Erskine Clement
Book
of Saints, by the Monks of
Ramsgate
Butler’s
Lives of the Saints: Dedication of Saint Michael’s Church
Butler’s
Lives of the Saints: Apparition of Saint Michael the Archangel
Legend
of Saint Michael and the Hermit, from Catholic World
Light
From the Altar, edited by Father James
J McGovern
Litany
to Michael the Archangel
Lives
of the Saints, by Father Francis
Xavier Weninger
Meditations
on the Gospels for Every Day in the Year, by Father Pierre
Médaille
‘Neath
Saint Michael’s Shield, by the Benedictine Convent of
Perpetual Adoration
New
Catholic Dictionary: Michaelmas Day
New
Catholic Dictionary: Saint Michael
Pictorial
Lives of the Saints: Saint Michael, Archangel
Pictorial
Lives of the Saints: Apparition of Saint Michael the Archangel
Prayer
to Michael the Archangel
Roman
Martyrology, 1914 edition
Saint
Michael, Defender in the Day of Battle, by Michael Derrick
Saint
Michael, Protector of the Church, by Bishop John
Edward Cuthbert Hedley
Saints
and Saintly Dominicans, by Blessed Hyacinthe-Marie
Cormier, O.P.
Short
Lives of the Saints, by Eleanor Cecilia Donnelly
Short
Lives of the Saints, by Eleanor Cecilia Donnelly
Three
Archangels and the Guardian Angels in Art, by Eliza
Allen Starr
books
Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Saints
other
sites in english
Billy Ryan: Inside the Cave-Shrine Where Saint Michael the
Archangel Appeared
Catholic
Exchange: Prayer to Michael the Archangel
Catholic Exchange: Intercession of Michael in Christian
History
Catholic Herald: Five Shrines to Michael
Christian
Biographies, by James E Kiefer
Liturgical
Year, by Dom Gueranger
New Liturgical Movement: On the Apparition of Michael
TFP Student Action: What is the Sword of Saint Michael?
Wikipedia:
Michael the Archangel
Wikipedia: Saint Michael
Wikipedia:
Chaplet of Saint Michael
Wikipedia:
Michaelmas Day
Wikipedia:
Prayer to Saint Michael
images
audio
video
webseiten
auf deutsch
sitios
en español
Martirologio Romano, 2001 edición
sites
en français
Abbé
Christian-Philippe Chanut
fonti
in italiano
Wikipedia:
Arcangelo Michele
Wikipedia: Santi patroni della città di Venezia
nettsteder
i norsk
Readings
You should be aware that
the word “angel”
denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have
indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when
they deliver some message. Moreover, those who deliver messages of lesser
importance are called angels; and
those who proclaim messages of supreme importance are called archangels.
Whenever some act of
wondrous power must be performed, Michael is sent, so that his action and his
name may make it clear that no one can do what God does
by his superior power. – from a homily by Pope Saint Gregory
the Great
MLA
Citation
“Michael the
Archangel“. CatholicSaints.Info. 21 September 2023. Web. 29 September
2023. <https://catholicsaints.info/michael-the-archangel/>
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/michael-the-archangel/
St. Michael the Archangel
St. Michael is one of the
principal angels;
his name was the war-cry of the good
angels in the battle fought in heaven against
the enemy and his
followers. Four times his name is recorded in Scripture:
(1) Daniel
10:13 sqq., Gabriel says
to Daniel,
when he asks God to
permit the Jews to
return to Jerusalem:
"The Angel [D.V. prince]
of the kingdom
of the Persians resisted me . . . and, behold Michael, one of the
chief princes, came to help me . . . and none is my helper in all these things,
but Michael your prince."
(2) Daniel
12, the Angel speaking
of the end
of the world and the Antichrist says:
"At that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for
the children of thy people."
(3) In the Catholic
Epistle of St. Jude: "When Michael the Archangel, disputing with
the devil,
contended about the body of Moses",
etc. St.
Jude alludes to an ancient Jewish tradition of
a dispute between Michael and Satan over
the body of Moses,
an account of which is also found in the apocryphal book
on the assumption of Moses (Origen, De
Principiis III.2.2). St. Michael concealed the tomb of Moses; Satan,
however, by disclosing it, tried to seduce the Jewish
people to the sin of
hero-worship. St. Michael also guards the body of Eve,
according to the "Revelation of Moses" ("Apocryphal
Gospels", etc., ed. A. Walker, Edinburgh,
p. 647).
(4) Apocalypse
12:7, "And there was a great battle in heaven,
Michael and his angels fought
with the dragon." St.
John speaks of the great conflict at the end of time,
which reflects also the battle in heaven at
the beginning of time.
According to the Fathers there
is often question of St. Michael in Scripture where
his name is not mentioned. They say he was the cherub who
stood at the gate of paradise,
"to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis
3:24), the angel through
whom God published
the Decalogue to
his chosen
people, the angel who
stood in the way against Balaam (Numbers
22:22 sqq.), the angel who
routed the army of Sennacherib (2
Kings 19:35).
Following these Scriptural passages, Christian
tradition gives to St. Michael four offices:
To fight against Satan.
To rescue the souls of
the faithful from
the power of the enemy,
especially at the hour of death.
To be the champion
of God's people,
the Jews in
the Old
Law, the Christians in
the New
Testament; therefore he was the patron of
the Church,
and of the orders
of knights during the Middle
Ages.
To call away from earth
and bring men's souls to judgment ("signifer
S. Michael repraesentet eas in lucam sanctam", Offert. Miss Defunct.
"Constituit eum principem super animas suscipiendas", Antiph.
off. Cf. The
Shepherd of Hermas, Book III, Similitude 8, Chapter 3).
Regarding his rank in the
celestial hierarchy opinions
vary; St.
Basil (Hom. de angelis) and other Greek Fathers,
also Salmeron, Bellarmine,
etc., place St. Michael over all the angels;
they say he is called "archangel" because he is the prince of the
other angels;
others (cf. P. Bonaventura, op. cit.) believe that he is the prince of
the seraphim,
the first of the nine angelic orders.
But, according to St.
Thomas (Summa
Ia.113.3) he is the prince of the last and lowest choir, the angels.
The Roman
Liturgy seems to follow the Greek Fathers;
it calls him "Princeps militiae coelestis quem honorificant angelorum
cives". The hymn of
the Mozarabic Breviary places
St. Michael even above the Twenty-four Elders. The Greek
Liturgy styles him Archistrategos, "highest general"
(cf. Menaea, 8 Nov. and 6 Sept.).
Veneration
It would have been
natural to St. Michael, the champion of the Jewish
people, to be the champion also of Christians,
giving victory in war to
his clients. The early Christians,
however, regarded some of the martyrs as
their military patrons: St.
George, St.
Theodore, St.
Demetrius, St.
Sergius, St. Procopius, St. Mercurius, etc.; but to St. Michael they gave
the care of their sick. At the place where he was first venerated,
in Phrygia, his prestige as angelic healer
obscured his interposition in military affairs. It was from early times the
centre of the true cult
of the holy
angels, particularly of St. Michael. Tradition relates
that St. Michael in the earliest ages caused a medicinal spring to spout at
Chairotopa near Colossae,
where all the sick who bathed there, invoking the Blessed
Trinity and St. Michael, were cured.
Still more famous are the
springs which St. Michael is said to have drawn from the rock at Colossae (Chonae,
the present Khonas, on the Lycus). The pagans directed
a stream against the sanctuary of St. Michael to destroy it, but the archangel
split the rock by lightning to give a new bed to the stream, and sanctified
forever the waters which came from the gorge. The Greeks claim
that this apparition took
place about the middle of the first century and celebrate a feast in
commemoration of it on 6 September (Analecta Bolland., VIII, 285-328). Also at
Pythia in Bithynia and elsewhere in Asia the
hot springs were dedicated to
St. Michael.
At Constantinople likewise,
St. Michael was the great heavenly physician. His principal sanctuary, the
Michaelion, was at Sosthenion, some fifty miles south of Constantinople;
there the archangel is said to have appeared to
the Emperor
Constantine. The sick slept in this church at
night to wait for a manifestation of
St. Michael; his feast was
kept there 9 June. Another famous church was
within the walls of the city, at the thermal baths of the Emperor Arcadius;
there the synaxis of
the archangel was celebrated 8 November. This feast spread
over the entire Greek
Church, and the Syrian, Armenian,
and Coptic
Churches adopted it also; it is now the principal feast of
St. Michael in the Orient.
It may have originated in Phrygia, but its station
at Constantinople was the Thermae of Arcadius (Martinow, "Annus
Graeco-slavicus", 8 Nov.). Other feasts of
St. Michael at Constantinople were: 27 October, in the
"Promotu" church; 18 June, in the Church of St. Julian at the Forum;
and 10 December, at Athaea.
The Christians
of Egypt placed their life-giving river, the Nile, under the protection
of St. Michael; they adopted the Greek feast and
kept it 12 November; on the twelfth of every month they celebrate a special
commemoration of the archangel, but 12 June, when the river commences to rise,
they keep as a holiday of obligation the feast of
St. Michael "for the rising of the Nile", euche eis ten
symmetron anabasin ton potamion hydaton.
At Rome the
Leonine Sacramentary (sixth century) has the "Natale Basilicae Angeli via
Salaria", 30 September; of the five Masses for
the feast three
mention St. Michael. The Gelasian Sacramentary (seventh century) gives
the feast "S.
Michaelis Archangeli", and the Gregorian Sacramentary (eighth century),
"Dedicatio Basilionis S. Angeli Michaelis", 29 Sept. A manuscript also
here adds "via Salaria" (Ebner, "Miss. Rom. Iter Italicum",
127). This church of
the Via Salaria was six miles to the north of the city; in the ninth century it
was called Basilica Archangeli in Septimo (Armellini,
"Chiese di Roma", p. 85). It disappeared a thousand years ago.
At Rome also
the part of heavenly physician was given to St. Michael. According to an (apocryphal?) legend of
the tenth century he appeared over
the Moles Hadriani (Castel di S. Angelo), in 950, during the procession which St.
Gregory held against the pestilence, putting an end to the
plague. Boniface
IV (608-15) built on the Moles Hadriani in honour of him, a church,
which was styled St. Michaelis inter nubes (in summitate circi).
Well known is the apparition of
St. Michael (a. 494 or 530-40), as related in the Roman
Breviary, 8 May, at his renowned sanctuary on Monte Gargano, where his
original glory as patron in war was
restored to him. To his intercession the Lombards of
Sipontum (Manfredonia)
attributed their victory over the Greek Neapolitans,
8 May, 663. In commemoration of this victory the church
of Sipontum instituted a special feast in honour of
the archangel, on 8 May, which has spread over the entire Latin
Church and is now called (since the time of Pius
V) "Apparitio S. Michaelis", although it originally did not
commemorate the apparition,
but the victory.
In Normandy St.
Michael is the patron of
mariners in his famous sanctuary at Mont-Saint-Michel in
the Diocese
of Coutances. He is said to have appeared there,
in 708, to St. Aubert, Bishop of
Avranches. In Normandy his feast "S.
Michaelis in periculo maris" or "in Monte Tumba" was universally
celebrated on 18 Oct., the anniversary of the dedication of
the first church,
16 Oct., 710; the feast is
now confined to the Diocese
of Coutances. In Germany,
after its evangelization, St. Michael replaced for the Christians the pagan god
Wotan, to whom many mountains were sacred, hence the numerous mountain chapels of
St. Michael all over Germany.
The hymns of
the Roman
Office are said to have been composed by St.
Rabanus Maurus of Fulda (d.
856). In art St.
Michael is represented as an angelic warrior,
fully armed with helmet, sword, and shield (often the shield bears the Latin inscription:
Quis ut Deus), standing over the dragon,
whom he sometimes pierces with a lance. He also holds a pair of scales in which
he weighs the souls of
the departed (cf. Rock, "The Church of Our Fathers", III, 160), or
the book of life, to show that he takes part in the judgment.
His feast (29
September) in the Middle
Ages was celebrated as a holy day of obligation,
but along with several other feasts it
was gradually abolished since the eighteenth century (see FEASTS).
Michaelmas Day, in England and
other countries, is one of the regular quarter-days for settling rents and
accounts; but it is no longer remarkable for the hospitality with which it was
formerly celebrated. Stubble-geese being esteemed in perfection about this
time, most families had
one dressed on Michaelmas Day. In some parishes (Isle
of Skye) they had a procession on
this day and baked a cake, called St. Michael's bannock.
Holweck, Frederick. "St.
Michael the Archangel." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.
10. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. 29 Sept.
2016 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10275b.htm>.
Transcription. This
article was transcribed for New Advent by Sean Hyland. Image scanned by Wm
Stuart French Jr.
Ecclesiastical
approbation. Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Copyright © 2020 by Kevin
Knight. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
SOURCE : http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10275b.htm
Angels
(Latin angelus;
Greek aggelos; from the Hebrew for "one going" or "one
sent"; messenger). The word is used in Hebrew to denote indifferently
either a divine or human messenger.
The Septuagint renders
it by aggelos which also has both significations. The Latin version,
however, distinguishes the divine or spirit-messenger from the human,
rendering the original in the one case by angelus and in the other
by legatus or more generally by nuntius. In a few passages the
Latin version is misleading, the word angelus being used where nuntius would
have better expressed the meaning, e.g. Isaiah
18:2; 33:3-6.
It is with the
spirit-messenger alone that we are here concerned. We have to discuss
the meaning of the term
in the Bible,
the offices of the
angels,
the names assigned to the
angels,
the distinction between
good and evil spirits,
the divisions of the
angelic choirs,
the question of angelic
appearances, and
the development of the
scriptural idea of
angels.
The angels are
represented throughout the Bible as
a body of spiritual beings intermediate between God and men:
"You have made him (man)
a little less than the angels" (Psalm
8:6). They, equally with man,
are created beings; "praise ye Him, all His angels: praise ye Him, all His
hosts . . . for He spoke and they were made. He commanded and they were
created" (Psalm
148:2-5; Colossians
1:16-17). That the angels were created was laid down in the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215). The decree "Firmiter"
against the Albigenses declared
both the fact that they were created and that men were
created after them. This decree was
repeated by the Vatican
Council, "Dei Filius". We mention it here because the words:
"He that liveth for ever created all things together" (Ecclesiasticus
18:1) have been held to prove a simultaneous creation of all things; but it
is generally conceded that "together" (simul) may here mean
"equally", in the sense that all things were "alike"
created. They are spirits; the writer of the Epistle
to the Hebrews says: "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent
to minister to them who shall receive the inheritance of salvation?"
(Hebrews
1:14).
Attendants at God's
throne
It is as messengers that
they most often figure in the Bible,
but, as St.
Augustine, and after him St.
Gregory, expresses it: angelus est nomen officii ("angel is
the name of the office") and expresses neither their essential nature nor
their essential function, viz.: that of attendants upon God's throne
in that court of heaven of
which Daniel has left us a vivid picture:
I behold till thrones
were placed, and the Ancient
of Days sat: His garment was white as snow, and the hair of His head
like clean wool: His throne like flames of fire: the wheels of it like a
burning fire. A swift stream of fire issued forth from before Him: thousands of
thousands ministered to Him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood
before Him: the judgment sat and the books were opened. (Daniel
7:9-10; cf. also Psalm
96:7; Psalm
102:20; Isaiah
6, etc.)
This function of the
angelic host is expressed by the word "assistance" (Job
1:6; 2:1),
and our
Lord refers to it as their perpetual occupation (Matthew
18:10). More than once we are told of seven angels whose special function
it is thus to "stand before God's throne"
(Tobit
12:15; Revelation
8:2-5). The same thought may be intended by "the angel of His
presence" (Isaiah
63:9) an expression which also occurs in the pseudo-epigraphical "Testaments
of the Twelve Patriarchs".
God's messengers to
mankind
But these glimpses of
life beyond the veil are only occasional. The angels of the Bible generally
appear in the role of God's messengers
to mankind.
They are His instruments by whom He communicates His will to men,
and in Jacob's vision
they are depicted as ascending and descending the ladder which stretches from
earth to heaven while
the Eternal
Father gazes upon the wanderer below. It was an angel who found Agar
in the wilderness (Genesis
16); angels drew Lot out
of Sodom;
an angel announces to Gideon that
he is to save his people; an angel foretells the birth of Samson (Judges
13), and the angel Gabriel instructs Daniel (Daniel
8:16), though he is not called an angel in either of these passages, but
"the man Gabriel" (9:21).
The same
heavenly spirit announced the birth of St.
John the Baptist and the Incarnation
of the Redeemer, while tradition ascribes
to him both the message to the shepherds (Luke
2:9), and the most glorious mission
of all, that of strengthening the King
of Angels in His Agony (Luke
22:43). The spiritual nature of
the angels is manifested very clearly in the account which Zacharias gives
of the revelations bestowed
upon him by the ministry of an angel. The prophet depicts the angel as speaking
"in him". He seems to imply that he was conscious of
an interior voice which was not that of God but
of His messenger. The Massoretic text,
the Septuagint,
and the Vulgate all
agree in thus describing the communications made by the angel to the prophet.
It is a pity that the "Revised Version" should, in apparent defiance
of the above-named texts, obscure this trait by persistently giving the
rendering: "the angel that talked with me: instead of "within
me" (cf. Zechariah
1:9-14; 2:3; 4:5; 5:10).
Such appearances of
angels generally last only so long as the delivery of their message requires,
but frequently their mission is prolonged, and they are represented as the
constituted guardians of
the nations at some particular crisis, e.g. during the Exodus (Exodus
14:19; Baruch
6:6). Similarly it is the common view of the Fathers that
by "the prince of the Kingdom of the Persians" (Daniel
10:13-21) we are to understand the angel to whom was entrusted the
spiritual care of that kingdom, and we may perhaps see in the "man
of Macedonia"
who appeared to St.
Paul at Troas,
the guardian
angel of that country (Acts
16:9). The Septuagint (Deuteronomy
32:8), has preserved for us a fragment of information on this head, though
it is difficult to gauge its exact meaning: "When the Most
High divided the nations,
when He scattered the children of Adam, He established the bounds of the nations according
to the number of the angels of God".
How large a part the ministry of angels played, not merely in Hebrew theology,
but in the religious ideas of
other nations as well, appears from the expression "like to an angel
of God".
It is three times used of David (2
Samuel 14:17-20; 14:27)
and once by Achis of Geth (1
Samuel 29:9). It is even applied by Esther to Assuerus (Esther
15:16), and St.
Stephen's face is said to have looked "like the face of an
angel" as he stood before the Sanhedrin (Acts
6:15).
Personal guardians
Throughout the Bible we
find it repeatedly implied that each individual soul has
its tutelary
angel. Thus Abraham, when sending his steward to seek a wife for Isaac,
says: "He will send His angel before thee" (Genesis
24:7). The words of the ninetieth
Psalm which the devil quoted
to our
Lord (Matthew
4:6) are well known, and Judith accounts
for her heroic deed by saying: "As the Lord liveth, His angel hath been my
keeper" (13:20).
These passages and many like them (Genesis
16:6-32; Hosea
12:4; 1
Kings 19:5; Acts
12:7; Psalm
33:8), though they will not of themselves demonstrate the doctrine that
every individual has his appointed guardian
angel, receive their complement in our
Saviour's words: "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"
(Matthew
18:10), words which illustrate the remark of St.
Augustine: "What lies hidden in the Old
Testament, is made manifest in the New".
Indeed, the book
of Tobias seems intended to teach this truth more
than any other, and St.
Jerome in his commentary on the above words of our
Lord says: "The dignity of a soul is
so great, that each has a guardian
angel from its birth." The general doctrine that
the angels are our appointed guardians is
considered to be a point of faith,
but that each individual member of the human
race has his own individual guardian
angel is not of faith (de
fide); the view has, however, such strong support from the Doctors
of the Church that it would be rash to deny it (cf. St.
Jerome, supra). Peter
the Lombard (Sentences, lib. II, dist. xi) was inclined to think that
one angel had charge of several individual human
beings. St.
Bernard's beautiful homilies (11-14)
on the ninetieth
Psalm breathe the spirit of the Church without
however deciding the question. The Bible represents
the angels not only as our guardians,
but also as actually interceding for
us. "The angel Raphael (Tobit
12:12) says: "I offered thy prayer to
the Lord"
(cf. Job 5:1 (Septuagint),
and 33:23 (Vulgate); Apocalypse
8:4). The Catholic cult
of the angels is thus thoroughly scriptural.
Perhaps the earliest explicit declaration of it is to be found in St.
Ambrose's words: "We should pray to
the angels who are given to us as guardians"
(De Viduis, ix); (cf. St.
Augustine, Reply
to Faustus XX.21). An undue cult of angels was reprobated by St.
Paul (Colossians
2:18), and that such a tendency long remained in the same district is
evidenced by Canon 35 of the Synod of Laodicea.
As divine agents
governing the world
The foregoing passages,
especially those relating to the angels who have charge of various districts,
enable us to understand the practically unanimous view of the Fathers that
it is the angels who put into execution God's
law regarding the physical world. The Semitic belief in genii and
in spirits which cause good or evil is
well known, and traces of it are to be found in the Bible.
Thus the pestilence which devastated Israel for David's sin in
numbering the people is attributed to an angel whom David is said to have
actually seen (2
Samuel 24:15-17), and more explicitly, I Par., xxi, 14-18). Even the wind
rustling in the tree-tops was regarded as an angel (2
Samuel 5:23-24; 1
Chronicles 14:14, 15). This is more explicitly stated with regard to the
pool of Probatica (John
5:1-4), though there is some doubt about
the text; in that passage the disturbance of the water is said to be due to the
periodic visits of an angel. The Semites clearly felt that all the orderly
harmony of the universe,
as well as interruptions of that harmony, were due to God as
their originator, but were carried out by His ministers. This view is strongly
marked in the "Book
of Jubilees" where the heavenly host of good and evil
angels is ever interfering in the material
universe. Maimonides (Directorium
Perplexorum, iv and vi) is quoted by St.
Thomas Aquinas (Summa
Theologicæ I.1.3) as holding that the Bible frequently
terms the powers of nature angels, since they manifest the omnipotence
of God (cf. St.
Jerome, In Mich., vi, 1, 2; P.L., iv, col. 1206).
Hierarchical organization
Though the angels who
appear in the earlier works of the Old
Testament are strangely impersonal and are overshadowed by the
importance of the message they bring or the work they do, there are not wanting
hints regarding the existence of certain ranks in the heavenly army.
After Adam's fall Paradise is
guarded against our First Parents by cherubim who
are clearly God's ministers,
though nothing is said of their nature. Only once again do the cherubim figure
in the Bible,
viz., in Ezechiel's marvellous vision, where they are described at great length
(Ezekiel
1), and are actually called cherub in Ezechiel
10. The Ark was
guarded by two cherubim,
but we are left to conjecture what they were like. It has been suggested with
great probability that we have their counterpart in the winged bulls and lions
guarding the Assyrian palaces,
and also in the strange winged men with hawks' heads who are depicted on the
walls of some of their buildings. The seraphim appear
only in the vision of Isaias
6:6.
Mention has already been
made of the mystic seven who stand before God,
and we seem to have in them an indication of an inner cordon that surrounds the
throne. The term archangel occurs only in St.
Jude and 1
Thessalonians 4:15; but St.
Paul has furnished us with two other lists of names of the heavenly cohorts.
He tells us (Ephesians
1:21) that Christ is raised up "above all principality, and power, and
virtue, and dominion"; and, writing to the Colossians
(1:16), he says: "In Him were all things created in heaven and
on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominations, or
principalities or powers." It is to be noted that he uses two of these
names of the powers of darkness when (2:15)
he talks of Christ as "despoiling the principalities and powers . . .
triumphing over them in Himself". And it is not a little remarkable that
only two verses later he warns his readers not to be seduced into any
"religion of angels". He seems to put his seal upon a certain lawful
angelology, and at the same time to warn them against indulging superstition on
the subject. We have a hint of such excesses in the Book of Enoch, wherein, as
already stated, the angels play a quite disproportionate part. Similarly Josephus tells
us (Bel. Jud., II, viii, 7) that the Essenes had
to take a vow to
preserve the names of the angels.
We have already seen how
(Daniel
10:12-21) various districts are allotted to various angels who are termed
their princes, and the same feature reappears still more markedly in the Apocalyptic "angels
of the seven churches", though it is impossible to decide what is the
precise signification of the term. These seven Angels
of the Churches are generally regarded as being the Bishops occupying
these sees. St.
Gregory Nazianzen in his address to the Bishops at
Constantinople twice terms them "Angels", in the language of
the Apocalypse.
The treatise "De
Coelesti Hierarchia", which is ascribed to St.
Denis the Areopagite, and which exercised so strong an influence upon
the Scholastics,
treats at great length of the hierarchies and orders of the angels. It is
generally conceded that this work was not due to St.
Denis, but must date some centuries later. Though the doctrine it contains
regarding the choirs of angels has been received in the Church with
extraordinary unanimity, no proposition touching the angelic hierarchies is
binding on our faith.
The following passages from St.
Gregory the Great (Hom. 34, In Evang.) will give us a clear idea of
the view of the Church's doctors on the point:
We know on the authority
of Scripture that
there are nine orders of angels, viz., Angels, Archangels, Virtues, Powers,
Principalities, Dominations, Throne, Cherubim and Seraphim.
That there are Angels and Archangels nearly every page of the Bible tell
us, and the books of the Prophets talk
of Cherubim and Seraphim. St.
Paul, too, writing to the Ephesians enumerates
four orders when he says: 'above all Principality, and Power, and Virtue, and
Domination'; and again, writing to the Colossians he
says: 'whether Thrones, or Dominations, or Principalities, or Powers'. If we
now join these two lists together we have five Orders, and adding Angels and
Archangels, Cherubim and Seraphim,
we find nine Orders of Angels.
St.
Thomas (Summa
Theologica I:108), following St.
Denis (De Coelesti Hierarchia, vi, vii), divides the angels into three
hierarchies each of which contains three orders. Their proximity to the Supreme
Being serves as the basis of this division. In the first hierarchy he
places the Seraphim, Cherubim,
and Thrones; in the second, the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; in the third,
the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The only Scriptural names
furnished of individual angels are Raphael, Michael,
and Gabriel,
names which signify their respective attributes. Apocryphal Jewish books,
such as the Book of Enoch, supply those of Uriel and Jeremiel, while many are
found in other apocryphal sources,
like those Milton names in "Paradise Lost". (On superstitious use
of such names, see above).
The number of angels
The number of the angels
is frequently stated as prodigious (Daniel
7:10; Apocalypse
5:11; Psalm
67:18; Matthew
26:53). From the use of the word host (sabaoth) as a synonym for the heavenly army
it is hard to resist the impression that the term "Lord of Hosts"
refers to God's Supreme
command of the angelic multitude (cf. Deuteronomy
33:2; 32:43; Septuagint).
The Fathers see
a reference to the relative numbers of men and
angels in the parable of
the hundred sheep (Luke
15:1-3), though this may seem fanciful. The Scholastics,
again, following the treatise "De Coelesti Hierarchia" of St.
Denis, regard the preponderance of numbers as a necessary perfection of the
angelic host (cf. St.
Thomas, Summa
Theologica I:1:3).
The evil angels
The distinction of good
and bad angels constantly appears in the Bible,
but it is instructive to note that there is no sign of any dualism or
conflict between two equal principles, one good and the other evil.
The conflict depicted is rather that waged on earth between the Kingdom
of God and the Kingdom of the Evil
One, but the latter's inferiority is always supposed. The existence,
then, of this inferior, and therefore created, spirit,
has to be explained.
The gradual development
of Hebrew consciousness on
this point is very clearly marked in the inspired writings. The account of the
fall of our First Parents (Genesis
3) is couched in such terms that it is impossible to see in it anything
more than the acknowledgment of the existence of a principle of evil who
was jealous of
the human
race. The statement (Genesis
6:1) that the "sons of God"
married the daughters of men is
explained of the fall of the angels, in Enoch, vi-xi, and codices, D, E F, and
A of the Septuagint read
frequently, for "sons of God", oi
aggeloi tou theou. Unfortunately, codices B
and C are defective in Genesis
6, but it is probably that they, too, read oi aggeloi in this
passage, for they constantly so render the expression "sons of God";
cf. Job
1:6, 2:1 and 38:7;
but on the other hand, see Psalm
2:1 and 88 (Septuagint). Philo,
in commenting on the passage in his treatise "Quod Deus sit
immutabilis", i, follows the Septuagint.
For Philo's doctrine of Angels, cf. "De Vita Mosis", iii, 2, "De
Somniis", VI: "De Incorrupta Manna", i; "De
Sacrificis", ii; "De Lege Allegorica", I, 12; III, 73; and for
the view of Genesis
6:1, cf. St.
Justin, First
Apology 5. It should moreover be noted that the Hebrew word nephilim rendered gigantes,
in 6:4,
may mean "fallen ones". The Fathers generally
refer it to the sons of Seth, the chosen stock. In 1
Samuel 19:9, an evil spirit is said to possess Saul, though this is
probably a metaphorical expression; more explicit is 1
Kings 22:19-23, where a spirit is
depicted as appearing in the midst of the heavenly army and offering, at the
Lord's invitation, to be a lying spirit in
the mouth of Achab's false prophets.
We might, with Scholastics,
explain this is malum poenae, which is actually caused by God owing
to man's fault.
A truer exegesis would,
however, dwell on the purely imaginative tone
of the whole episode; it is not so much the mould in which the message is cast
as the actual tenor of that message which is meant to occupy our attention.
The picture afforded us
in Job
1 and 2 is
equally imaginative;
but Satan,
perhaps the earliest individualization of the fallen
Angel, is presented as an intruder who is jealous of Job.
He is clearly an inferior being to the Deity and
can only touch Job with God's permission.
How theologic thought advanced as the sum of revelation grew
appears from a comparison of 2
Samuel 24:1, with 1
Chronicles 21:1. Whereas in the former passage David's sin was
said to be due to "the wrath of
the Lord" which "stirred up David", in the latter we read that
"Satan moved
David to number Israel".
In Job
4:18, we seem to find a definite declaration of the fall: "In His
angels He found wickedness."
The Septuagint of Job contains
some instructive passages regarding avenging angels in whom we are perhaps to
see fallen spirits, thus 33:23:
"If a thousand death-dealing angels should be (against him) not one of
them shall wound him"; and 36:14:
"If their souls should
perish in their youth (through rashness) yet their life shall
be wounded by the angels"; and 20:15:
"The riches unjustly
accumulated shall be vomited up, an angel shall drag him out of his
house;" cf. Proverbs
17:11; Psalm
34:5-6 and 77:49,
and especially Ecclesiasticus
39:33, a text which, as far as can be gathered from the present state of
the manuscript,
was in the Hebrew original. In some of these passages, it is true,
the angels may be regarded as avengers of God's justice without
therefore being evil
spirits. In Zechariah
3:1-3, Satan is called the adversary who pleads before the Lord against
Jesus the High
Priest. Isaiah
14 and Ezekiel
28 are for the Fathers the loci
classici regarding the fall of Satan (cf. Tertullian, Against
Marcion 2.10); and Our
Lord Himself has given colour to this view by using the imagery of the
latter passage when saying to His Apostles:
"I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven"
(Luke
10:18).
In New
Testament times the idea of
the two spiritual kingdoms is clearly established. The devil is a fallen angel
who in his fall has drawn multitudes of the heavenly
host in his train. Our
Lord terms him "the Prince of this world" (John
14:30); he is the tempter of the human
race and tries to involve them in his fall (Matthew
25:41; 2
Peter 2:4; Ephesians
6:12; 2
Corinthians 11:14; 12:7). Christian imagery
of the devil as the dragon is mainly derived from the Apocalypse (9:11-15 and 12:7-9),
where he is termed "the angel of the bottomless pit", "the
dragon", "the old serpent", etc., and is represented as having
actually been in combat with Archangel Michael. The similarity between scenes
such as these and the early Babylonian accounts
of the struggle between Merodach and the dragon Tiamat is very striking.
Whether we are to trace its origin to vague reminiscences of the mighty
saurians which once people the earth is a moot question, but the curious reader
may consult Bousett, "The Anti-Christ Legend" (tr. by Keane, London, 1896).
The translator has prefixed to it an interesting discussion on the origin of
the Babylonian Dragon-Myth.
The term
"angel" in the Septuagint
We have had occasion to
mention the Septuagint version
more than once, and it may not be amiss to indicate a few passages where it is
our only source of information regarding the angels. The best known passage
is Isaiah
9:6, where the Septuagint gives
the name of the Messias,
as "the Angel of great Counsel". We have already drawn attention
to Job
20:15, where the Septuagint reads
"Angel" instead of "God", and to 36:14,
where there seems to be question of evil
angels. In 9:7, Septuagint (B)
adds: "He is the Hebrew (5:19)
say of "Behemoth": "He is the beginning of the ways of God,
he that made him shall make his sword to approach him", the Septuagint reads:
"He is the beginning of God's creation,
made for His Angels to mock at", and exactly the same remark is made about
"Leviathan" (41:24).
We have already seen that the Septuagint generally
renders the term "sons of God"
by "angels", but in Deuteronomy
32:43, the Septuagint has
an addition in which both terms appear: "Rejoice in Him all ye heavens,
and adore Him
all ye angels of God;
rejoice ye nations with
His people, and magnify Him all ye Sons
of God." Nor does the Septuagint merely
give us these additional references to angels; it sometimes enables us to
correct difficult passages concerning them in the Vulgate and Massoretic text.
Thus the difficult Elim of MT in Job
41:17, which the Vulgate renders
by "angels", becomes "wild beasts" in the Septuagint version.
The early ideas as
to the personality of the various angelic appearances are, as we have seen,
remarkably vague. At first the angels are regarded in quite an impersonal way (Genesis
16:7). They are God's vice-regents
and are often identified with the Author of
their message (Genesis
48:15-16). But while we read of "the Angels of God"
meeting Jacob (Genesis
32:1) we at other times read of one who is termed "the Angel of God" par
excellence, e.g. Genesis
31:11. It is true that,
owing to the Hebrew idiom, this may mean no more than "an angel of God",
and the Septuagint renders
it with or without the article at will; yet the three visitors at Mambre seem
to have been of different ranks, though St.
Paul (Hebrews
13:2) regarded them all as equally angels; as the story in Genesis
13 develops, the speaker is always "the Lord". Thus in the
account of the Angel of the Lord who visited Gideon (Judges
6), the visitor is alternately spoken of as "the Angel of the
Lord" and as "the Lord". Similarly, in Judges
13, the Angel of the Lord appears, and both Manue and his wife exclaim:
"We shall certainly die because we have seen God."
This want of clearness is particularly apparent in the various accounts of the
Angel of Exodus. In Judges
6, just now referred to, the Septuagint is
very careful to render the Hebrew "Lord" by "the Angel of the
Lord"; but in the story of the Exodus it is the Lord who goes before them
in the pillar
of a cloud (Exodus
13:21), and the Septuagint makes
no change (cf. also Numbers
14:14, and Nehemiah
9:7-20. Yet in Exodus
14:19, their guide is termed "the Angel of God".
When we turn to Exodus
33, where God is angry with
His people for worshipping the golden
calf, it is hard not to feel that it is God Himself
who has hitherto been their guide, but who now refuses to accompany them any
longer. God offers
an angel instead, but at Moses's petition He says (14)
"My face shall go before thee", which the Septuagint reads
by autos though the following verse shows that this rendering is
clearly impossible, for Moses objects:
"If Thou Thyself dost not go before us, bring us not out of this
place." But what does God mean
by "my face"? Is it possible that some angel of specially high rank
is intended, as in Isaiah
63:9 (cf. Tobit
12:15)? May not this be what is meant by "the angel of God"
(cf. Numbers
20:16)?
That a process of
evolution in theological thought accompanied the gradual unfolding of God's
revelation need hardly be said, but it is especially marked in the
various views entertained regarding the person of the Giver of the Law.
The Massoretic text
as well as the Vulgate of Exodus
3 and 19-20 clearly
represent the Supreme
Being as appearing to Moses in
the bush and on Mount
Sinai; but the Septuagint version,
while agreeing that it was God Himself
who gave the Law, yet makes it "the angel of the Lord" who appeared
in the bush. By New
Testament times the Septuagint view
has prevailed, and it is now not merely in the bush that the angel of the Lord,
and not God Himself
appears, but the angel is also the Giver of the Law (cf. Galatians
3:19; Hebrews
2:2; Acts
7:30). The person of
"the angel of the Lord" finds a counterpart in the personification of
Wisdom in the Sapiential books and in at least one passage (Zechariah
3:1) it seems to stand for that "Son
of Man" whom Daniel (7:13)
saw brought before "the
Ancient of Days". Zacharias says:
"And the Lord showed me Jesus the high
priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan stood
on His right hand to be His adversary". Tertullian regards
many of these passages as preludes to the Incarnation;
as the Word
of God adumbrating the sublime character in which He is one day to
reveal Himself to men (cf. Against
Praxeas 16; Against
Marcion 2.27, 3.9, 1.10, 1.21-22).
It is possible, then, that in these confused views we can trace vague gropings
after certain dogmatic truths regarding
the Trinity, reminiscences perhaps of the early revelation of
which the Protevangelium in Genesis
3 is but a relic. The earlier
Fathers, going by the letter of the text, maintained that it was
actually God Himself
who appeared. He who appeared was called God and
acted as God.
It was not unnatural then for Tertullian,
as we have already seen, to regard such manifestations in the light of preludes
to the Incarnation,
and most of the Eastern Fathers followed
the same line of thought. It was held as recently as 1851 by Vandenbroeck,
"Dissertatio Theologica de Theophaniis sub Veteri Testamento"
(Louvain).
But the great
Latins, St.
Jerome, St.
Augustine, and St.
Gregory the Great, held the opposite view, and the Scholastics as
a body followed them. St.
Augustine (Sermo vii, de Scripturis, P.G. V) when treating of the
burning bush (Exodus
3) says: "That the same person who spoke to Moses should
be deemed both the Lord and an angel of the Lord, is very hard to understand.
It is a question which forbids any rash assertions but rather demands careful
investigation . . . Some maintain that he is called both the Lord and the angel
of the Lord because he was Christ, indeed the prophet (Isaiah
9:6, Septuagint
Version) clearly styles Christ the 'Angel of great Counsel.'" The
saint proceeds to show that such a view is tenable though we must be careful
not to fall into Arianism in
stating it. He points out, however, that if we hold that it was an angel who
appeared, we must explain how he came to be called "the Lord," and he
proceeds to show how this might be: "Elsewhere in the Bible when
a prophet speaks it is yet said to be the Lord who speaks, not of course
because the prophet is the Lord but because the Lord is in the prophet; and so
in the same way when the Lord condescends to speak through the mouth of a
prophet or an angel, it is the same as when he speaks by a prophet or apostle,
and the angel is correctly termed an angel if we consider him himself, but
equally correctly is he termed 'the Lord' because God dwells
in him." He concludes: "It is the name of the indweller, not of the
temple." And a little further on: "It seems to me that we shall most
correctly say that our forefathers recognized the Lord in the angel," and
he adduces the authority of the New
Testament writers who clearly so understood it and yet sometimes
allowed the same confusion of terms (cf. Hebrews
2:2, and Acts
7:31-33).
The saint discusses the
same question even more elaborately, "In Heptateuchum," lib. vii, 54,
P.G. III, 558. As an instance of how convinced some of the Fathers were
in holding the opposite view, we may note Theodoret's words
(In Exod.): "The whole passage (Exodus
3) shows that it was God who
appeared to him. But (Moses)
called Him an angel in order to let us know that it was not God the Father whom
he saw — for whose angel could the Father be? — but the Only-begotten Son, the
Angel of great Counsel" (cf. Eusebius, Church
History I.2.7; St.
Irenaeus, Against
Heresies 3:6). But the view propounded by the Latin Fathers was
destined to live in the Church,
and the Scholastics reduced
it to a system (cf. St.
Thomas, Quaest., Disp., De Potentia, vi, 8, ad 3am); and for a very good
exposition of both sides of the question, cf. "Revue biblique," 1894,
232-247.
Angels in Babylonian
literature
The Bible has
shown us that a belief in
angels, or spirits intermediate between God and man,
is a characteristic of the Semitic people.
It is therefore interesting to trace this belief in
the Semites of Babylonia.
According to Sayce (The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, Gifford
Lectures, 1901), the engrafting of Semitic beliefs on
the earliest Sumerian religion of Babylonia is
marked by the entrance of angels or sukallin in their theosophy.
Thus we find an interesting parallel to "the angels of the Lord" in
Nebo, "the minister of Merodach" (ibid., 355). He is also termed the
"angel" or interpreter of the will or Merodach (ibid., 456), and
Sayce accepts Hommel's statement that it can be shown from the Minean
inscriptions that primitive Semitic religion
consisted of moon and star worship, the moon-god Athtar and an
"angel" god standing at the head of the pantheon (ibid., 315).
The Biblical conflict
between the kingdoms of good and evil finds
its parallel in the "spirits of heaven"
or the Igigi--who constituted the "host" of which Ninip was the
champion (and from who he received the title of "chief of the
angels") and the "spirits of the earth", or Annuna-Ki, who dwelt
in Hades (ibid. 355). The Babylonian sukalli corresponded
to the spirit-messengers of the Bible;
they declared their Lord's will and executed his behests (ibid., 361). Some of
them appear to have been more than messengers; they were the interpreters and
vicegerents of the supreme deity, thus Nebo is "the prophet of
Borsippa". These angels are even termed "the sons" of the deity
whose vicegerents they are; thus Ninip, at one time the messenger of En-lil, is
transformed into his son just as Merodach becomes the son of Ea (ibid., 496).
The Babylonian accounts
of the Creation and the Flood do
not contrast very favourably with the Biblical accounts,
and the same must be said of the chaotic hierarchies of gods and angels which
modern research has revealed. perhaps we are justified in seeing all forms of
religion vestiges of a primitive nature-worship which has at times succeeded in
debasing the purer revelation,
and which, where that primitive revelation has
not received successive increments as among the Hebrews, results in an abundant
crop of weeds.
Thus the Bible certainly
sanctions the idea of
certain angels being in charge of special districts (cf. Daniel
10, and above). This belief persists
in a debased form in the Arab notion
of Genii, or Jinns, who haunt particular spots. A reference to it is perhaps to
be found in Genesis
32:1-2: "Jacob also went on the journey he had begun: and the angels
of God met
him: And when he saw then he said: These are the camps of God,
and he called the name of that place Mahanaim, that is, 'Camps.'" Recent
explorations in the Arab district
about Petra have
revealed certain precincts marked off with stones as the abiding-laces of
angels, and the nomad tribes frequent them for prayer and
sacrifice. These places bear a name which corresponds exactly with the
"Mahanaim" of the above passage in Genesis (cf.
Lagrange, Religions Semitques, 184, and Robertson Smith, Religion of the
Semites, 445). Jacob's vision
at Bethel (Genesis
28:12) may perhaps come under the same category. Suffice it to say that not
everything in the Bible is revelation,
and that the object of the inspired writings is not merely to tell us new truths but
also to make clearer certain truths taught
us by nature.
The modern view, which tends to regard everything Babylonian as
absolutely primitive and which seems to think that because critics affix a late
date to the Biblical
writings the religion therein contained must also be late, may be seen
in Haag, "Theologie Biblique" (339). This writer sees in the Biblical angels
only primitive deities debased into demi-gods by the triumphant progress
of Monotheism.
Angels in the Zend-Avesta
Attempts have also been
made to trace a connection between the angels of the Bible and
the "great archangels" or "Amesha-Spentas" of the Zend-Avesta.
That the Persian domination
and the Babylonian captivity
exerted a large influence upon the Hebrew conception of the angels is
acknowledged in the Talmud of
Jerusalem, Rosch Haschanna, 56, where it is said that the names of the angels
were introduced from Babylon. It is, however, by no means clear that the
angelic beings who figure so largely in the pages of the Avesta are to be
referred to the older Persian Neo-Zoroastrianism
of the Sassanides. If this be the case, as Darmesteter holds, we should rather
reverse the position and attribute the Zoroastrian angels to the influence of
the Bible and
of Philo.
Stress has been laid upon the similarity between the Biblical "seven
who stand before God"
and the seven Amesha-Spentas of the Zend-Avesta.
But it must be noted that these latter are really six, the number seven is only
obtained by counting "their father, Ahura-Mazda," among them as their
chief. Moreover, these Zoroastrian archangels are more abstract than concrete;
they are not individuals charged with weighty missions as in the Bible.
Angels in the New
Testament
Hitherto we have dwelt
almost exclusively on the angels of the Old
Testament, whose visits and messages have been by no means rare; but when
we come to the New
Testament their name appears on every page and the number of
references to them equals those in the Old
Dispensation. It is their privilege to announce to Zachary and Mary the
dawn of Redemption,
and to the shepherds its actual accomplishment. Our
Lord in His discourses talks of them as one who actually saw them, and
who, whilst "conversing amongst men", was yet receiving the silent
unseen adoration of
the hosts of heaven.
He describes their life in heaven (Matthew
22:30; Luke
20:36); He tell us how they form a bodyguard round Him and at a word from
Him would avenge Him on His enemies (Matthew
26:53); it is the privilege of one of them to assist Him in His Agony and
sweat of Blood. More than once He speaks of them as auxiliaries and witnesses
at the final
judgment (Matthew
16:27), which indeed they will prepare (13:39-49);
and lastly, they are the joyous witnesses
of His triumphant Resurrection (28:2).
It is easy for skeptical
minds to see in these angelic hosts the mere play of Hebrew fancy and the rank
growth of superstition,
but do not the records of the angels who figure in the Bible supply
a most natural and harmonious progression? In the opening page of the sacred
story the Jewish
nation is chosen out from amongst others as the depositary of God's
promise; as the people from whose stock He would one day raise up a Redeemer.
The angels appear in the course of this chosen people's history, now as God's messengers,
now as that people's guides; at one time they are the bestowers of God's
law, at another they actually prefigure the Redeemer Whose
divine purpose they are helping to mature. They converse with His prophets,
with David and Elias,
with Daniel and Zacharias;
they slay the hosts camped against Israel,
they serve as guides to God's servants,
and the last prophet, Malachi, bears a name of peculiar significance; "the
Angel of Jehovah." He seems to sum up in his very name the previous
"ministry by the hands of angels", as though God would
thus recall the old-time glories of the Exodus and Sinai.
The Septuagint,
indeed, seems not to know his name as that of an individual prophet and its
rendering of the opening verse of his prophecy is peculiarly solemn: "The
burden of the Word of
the Lord
of Israel by the hand of His angel; lay it up in your hearts."
All this loving ministry
on the part of the angels is solely for the sake of the Saviour,
on Whose face they desire to look. Hence when the fullness of time was arrived
it is they who bring the glad message, and sing "Gloria in excelsis
Deo". They guide the newborn King
of Angels in His hurried flight into Egypt,
and minister to Him in the desert.
His second coming and the dire events that must precede that, are revealed to
His chosen
servant in the island of Patmos, It is a question of revelation again,
and consequently its ministers and messengers of old appear once more in
the sacred
story and the record of God's revealing love ends
fittingly almost as it had begun: "I, Jesus,
have sent My angel to
testify to you these things in the churches" (Revelation
22:16). It is easy for the student to trace the influence of surrounding
nations and of other religions in
the Biblical account
of the angels. Indeed it is needful and instructive to do so, but it would be
wrong to shut our eyes to the higher line of development which we have shown
and which brings out so strikingly the marvellous unity and harmony of the
whole divine story of the Bible.
(See also ANGELS
IN EARLY CHRISTIAN ART.)
Sources
In addition to works
mentioned above, see St. Thomas, Summa Theol., I, QQ. 50-54 and 106-114;
Suarez De Angelis, lib. i-iv.
Pope,
Hugh. "Angels." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.
1. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 29 Sept.
2020 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01476d.htm>.
Transcription. This
article was transcribed for New Advent by Jim Holden.
Ecclesiastical
approbation. Nihil Obstat. March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Copyright © 2020 by Kevin
Knight. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
SOURCE : https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01476d.htm
St. Michael, St. Gabriel,
& St. Raphael – The Archangels
Angels—messengers from
God—appear frequently in Scripture, but only Michael, Gabriel and Raphael are
named. The memorials of Gabriel (March 24) and Raphael (October 24) were added
to the Roman calendar in 1921. The 1970 revision of the calendar joined their
feasts to Michael’s.
Michael (meaning: Who Is
Like To God?)
The name Michael
signifies “Who is like to God?” and was the war cry of the God’s angels in the
battle fought in heaven against satan and his followers. Holy Scripture
describes Michael as one of the chief princes, and leader of the forces of
heaven in their triumph over the powers of hell. He has been especially
honoured and invoked as patron and protector by the Church from the time of the
earliest Christians. Although he is called “the Archangel,” the Greek Fathers
and many others place him over all the angels – as Prince of the Seraphim.
Michael is the patron of grocers, mariners, paratroopers, police and sickness.
Michael’s name is
recorded four times in Scripture:
• Daniel 10:13. Gabriel
says to Daniel, when he asks God to permit the Jews to return to Jerusalem:
“The Angel of the kingdom of the Persians resisted me . . . and, behold
Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me . . . and none is my helper
in all these things, but Michael your prince”;
• Daniel 12, the Angel
speaking of the end of the world and the Antichrist says: At that time shall
Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people.
• The Epistle of St.
Jude: When Michael the Archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the
body of Moses, St Jude alludes to an ancient Jewish tradition of a dispute
between Michael and Satan over the body of Moses, an account of which is also
found in the apocryphal book on the assumption of Moses (Origen, “De
principiis”). St. Michael concealed the tomb of Moses; Satan, however, by
disclosing it, tried to seduce the Jewish people to the sin of hero-worship.
Michael also guards the body of Eve, according to the “Revelation of Moses”.
• Revelation 12:7, And
there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the
dragon. St. John speaks of the great war at the end of time, which reflects
also the battle in heaven at the beginning of time. According to the Fathers
there is often question of St. Michael in Scripture where his name is not
mentioned. They say he was the cherub who stood at the gate of paradise, “to
keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis iii, 24), the angel through whom God
published the Decalogue to his chosen people, the angel who stood in the way against
Balaam (Numbers 22:22), the angel who routed the army of Sennacherib (2 Kings
19:35).
Following these
Scriptural passages, Christian tradition gives Michael four offices.
• To fight against Satan
• To rescue the souls of
the faithful from the power of the enemy, especially at the hour of death.
• To be the champion of
God’s people, the Jews in the Old Law, the Christians in the New Testament;
therefore he was the patron of the Church, and of the orders of knights during
the Middle Ages
• To call away from earth
and bring men’s souls to judgment
Regarding his rank in the
celestial hierarchy opinions vary; St. Basil and other Greek Fathers place
Michael over all the angels, saying he is called archangel because he is the
prince of the other angels. others believe he is the Prince of the Seraphim,
the first of the nine angelic orders. But, according to Aquinas he is the
prince of the last and lowest choir, the angels. The hymn of the Mozarabic
Breviary places St. Michael even above the Twenty-four Elders.
Its natural to Michael
the champion of the Jewish people, to be the champion also of Christians,
giving victory in war to those who invoke him. The early Christians regarded
some of the martyrs as their military patrons: Sts. George, Theodore,
Demetrius, Sergius, etc.
In art Michael is
represented as an angelic warrior, fully armed with helmet, sword, and shield
(often the shield bears the Latin inscription: Quis ut Deus), standing over the
dragon, whom he sometimes pierces with a lance. He also holds a pair of scales
in which he weighs the souls of the departed, or the book of life to show that
he takes part in the judgment. In the middle ages, his feast (29 September) was
celebrated as a holy day of obligation, but along with several other feasts it
was gradually abolished since the eighteenth century. Michaelmas Day, in
England and other countries, is one of the regular quarter-days for settling
rents and accounts; but it is no longer remarkable for the hospitality with
which it was formerly celebrated.
Gabriel (meaning: The
Power of God)
One of the three
archangels mentioned in the Bible, only four appearances of Gabriel are
recorded:
• Daniel viii, he
explains the vision of the horned ram as portending the destruction of the
Persian Empire by the Macedonian Alexander the Great, after whose death the
kingdom will be divided up among his generals, from one of whom will spring
Antiochus Epiphanes.
• In Chapter ix, after
Daniel had prayed for Israel, we read that the man Gabriel . . . . flying
swiftly touched me, and he communicated to him the mysterious prophecy of the
“seventy weeks” of years which should elapse before the coming of Christ. In
Chapter x, it is not clear whether the angel is Gabriel or not, but at any rate
we may apply to him the marvellous description in verses 5 and 6.
• He foretells to Zachary
the birth of the Precursor (Luke 1 v8ff)
• At the Annunciation –
to Mary (Luke 1:26)
He is the angel of the
Incarnation and of Consolation, and so in Christian tradition Gabriel is ever
the angel of mercy. At the same time Gabriel is, as his name suggests, the
angel of the Power or strength of God, and it is worth while noting the
frequency with which such words as “great”, “might”, “power”, and “strength”
occur in the passages referred to above. The Jews indeed seem to have dwelt
particularly upon this feature in Gabriel’s character, regarding him as the
angel of judgment. Thus they attribute to Gabriel the destruction of Sodom and
of the host of Sennacherib, though they also regard him as the angel who buried
Moses, and as the one deputed to mark the figure Tau on the foreheads of the
elect (Ezech., 4). In later Jewish literature the names of angels were
considered to have a peculiar efficacy, and the British Museum possesses some
bowls inscribed with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac incantations in which the
names of Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel occur. These bowls were found at Hillah,
the site of Babylon. In apocryphal Christian literature the same names occur,
cf. Enoch, ix, and the Apocalypse of the Blessed Virgin.
Gabriel is mentioned only
twice in the New Testament, but it is not unreasonable to suppose with
Christian tradition that it is he who appeared to Joseph and to the shepherds,
and also that it was Gabriel who strengthened Jesus in the garden.
Gabriel is generally
termed only an archangel, but the expression used by Raphael, I am the angel
Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord (Tobit xii, 15), and
Gabriel’s own words, I am Gabriel, who stand before God (Luke 1, 19), have led
some to think that these angels must belong to the highest rank. This is
generally thought to mean their rank as the highest of God’s messengers, and
not as placing them among the Seraphim and Cherubim.
Raphael (meaning: God has
healed)
Raphael’s name doesn’t
appear in the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the Septuagint only in the Book of
Tobias. Here he first appears disguised in human form as the travelling
companion of the younger Tobias, calling himself Azarias the son of the great
Ananias. The story of the adventurous journey during which the protective
influence of the angel is shown in many ways including the binding “in the
desert of upper Egypt”, of the demon who had previously slain seven husbands of
Sara, daughter of Raguel, is graphically related in Tobit 5-11. After the
return and the healing of the blindness of the elder Tobias, Azarias makes
himself known as the angel Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord
(Tobit xii, 15. Cf. Apoc., viii, 2). Of these seven archangels who appear in
the angelology of post-Exilic Judaism, only three, Gabriel, Michael and
Raphael, are mentioned in the canonical Scriptures. The others, according to
the Book of Enoch (cf. xxi) are Uriel, Raguel, Sariel, and Jerahmeel, while
from other apocryphal sources we get the variant names Izidkiel, Hanael, and
Kepharel instead of the last three in the other list.
Regarding the functions
attributed to Raphael we have little more than his declaration to Tobias (Tobit
12) that when the latter was occupied in his works of mercy and charity,
Raphael offered his prayer to the Lord, that he was sent by the Lord to heal
him of his blindness and to deliver Sara, his son’s wife, from the devil.
The Jewish category of
the archangels is recognized in the New Testament (I Thess., iv, 16; Jude, 9),
but only Gabriel and Michael are mentioned by name. Many scholars however,
identify Raphael with the “angel of the Lord” mentioned in John 5. This
assumption is based both on the significance of the name, and on the healing
role attributed to Raphael in the Book of Tobias.
It is widely thought that Raphael is the angel in John 5:1-4, at the pool called Bethzatha, where the multitude of the infirm lay awaiting the moving of the water. The blind, the lame and the paralyzed were waiting for an angel of the Lord who, descended at certain times into the pond; and the water was moved. And he that went down first into the pond after the motion of the water was made whole of whatsoever infirmity he lay under.
SOURCE : http://www.ucatholic.com/saints/the-archangels/
Weninger’s
Lives of the Saints – The Feast of the Dedication of the Archangel Saint
Michael
Today’s festival is
called in the breviary of the Church, the Dedication of the Holy Archangel
Saint Michael. To understand this, it is necessary to know an event which took
place at the time of Pope Gelasius I in the latter part of the fifth Century.
In Apulia, there is a mountain formerly called Gargano, now Monte Saint Angelo,
or Angel’s mountain. Near this mountain, a herdsman was keeping his cattle. A
steer strayed away from his herd and went into the woods on the mountain, to
the entrance of a cave which was concealed by bushes. The herdsman, to drive
the animal out of the cave back to the herd, shot an arrow at it. The arrow,
however, turned and flew with great force back to him. The herdsman and those
who were present were terrified at this and none dared to go nearer to the
cave. They went to the bishop, who was at Siponto, a neighboring city, and informed
him of what had occurred. The bishop, not doubting that a divine mystery was
concealed under it, ordered his congregation to fast and pray three days, in
order that God might graciously reveal it to them. At the expiration of the
three days, Saint Michael, the Archangel, appeared to the bishop and announced
to him that the place whither the steer had fled was under his especial
protection, and that he desired that they should dedicate the spot to the honor
of God, and to the memory of Saint Michael and all the Angels.
The bishop, greatly
rejoiced, called the clergy and the people together, and having informed them
of the revelation, formed a large procession and ascended the mountain. They
found a large cave which was like a Church hewn out of the rock. Above the
entrance was an opening by which the whole interior received light. To offer
the holy sacrifice of the Mass in it, only the altar was wanting; but it was
speedily erected by the pious bishop. The Church itself was soon after
dedicated with great solemnity to Saint Michael and all holy Angels. The fame
of this event spread in a short time all around and drew a great many pilgrims
to the Church, while the many miracles that took place there, were a visible
sign that the veneration and invocation of Saint Michael and the other holy
angels must be very agreeable to the Most High. Today’s festival was instituted
to commemorate the dedication of the Church on Mount Gargano, hence it is
called the dedication of Saint Michael, as he is especially venerated in that
Church. The commemoration of the apparition of this holy Archangel on Mount
Gargano is celebrated on May 8th. Besides this, other apparitions of Saint
Michael are recorded, which gave occasion, at different times, to the erection
of splendid Churches in his honor, at Constantinople, at Rome and in France, as
is to be read in the history of the Church. Experience has taught that this
considerably increased the veneration of this great prince of heaven, and in
truth we have most important reasons to show him especial honor; for, he is the
head, or, as the Church expresses it, the prince of the heavenly legions. He is
the first of those happy spirits who are continually in the presence of God,
standing before His throne. It was he who, at the first moment of his
existence, turned to the Almighty and submitted to Him in perfect obedience. It
was he, who, so to say, first took up arms against the proud Lucifer, who would
not be subject, but equal to the Most High. His humility, obedience and zeal
for the honor of God raised him above all in heaven; as pride, disobedience and
perfidy abased the proud Lucifer and precipitated him into hell. Saint Michael
has been chosen by the Almighty as the protector of the Church of Christ, as in
the old Covenant he was the protector of the Synagogue. He was, in olden times,
solicitous for the welfare of the true believers in the Synagogue, as is
evident from the words spoken by the holy Archangel, Saint Gabriel, to the
prophet Daniel: “Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me” (Daniel
10). The angel, under whose protection the Persians were placed, desired that
the Israelites should remain longer in Persia, as many Persians came to the
knowledge of the true God by associating with the chosen people. The holy Archangel
Gabriel, however, desired that the Israelites should be released out of Persia,
because he feared that too great intimacy with the Persians might induce them
to become faithless to the true God. Saint Michael united his prayers with
those of Saint Gabriel, and thus evinced his care for the true believers. Not
less watchful is he now for the faithful of the New Testament and for the
entire Church.’ He comes to help her, prays for her and protects her against
her enemies. At the end of the world, he will manifest his protection of her,
especially against the Antichrist, the greatest enemy of the Christians, as
Saint Gabriel revealed to the holy prophet Daniel, saying: “But at that time,
Michael shall rise up, the great prince, who stands for the children of thy
people” (Daniel 12). This holy Archangel is also appointed to bring the souls
of men to the throne of the Most High, that they may receive their judgment;
and that their sentence may be favorable, he strongly assists them in the last
combat, which, at the end of their days, they have usually to fight with the
Evil one. The devil, at that moment, uses all his powers to overcome man and
make him unhappy for all eternity. Saint Michael, appointed by God to assist
and to strengthen our souls in this dangerous combat, helps us to conquer,
Hence the holy Church addresses him in the name of all the faithful in the
prayers for the dying, as follows: Holy Archangel Michael, protect us in our
fight, that we may not go to perdition on the day of Judgment.” She teaches us
also to invoke this holy Archangel before all other heavenly spirits, in the
litany of all Saints. But if we desire to secure his intercession, and enjoy
his assistance in our last combat, it is necessary that we endeavor to imitate
his example and fight bravely against the evil spirit, whom, at the end of our
lives, we desire to conquer with Saint Michael’s assistance. Among different
representations of Saint Michael there is one in which he has a shield in his
hand, upon which are the words: “Who is like unto God?” The word “Michael”
means in Hebrew, “Who is like God?” Saint Michael used this as a weapon, so to
say, against the proud Lucifer who desired to be equal to the Lord. “Who is
like God?” “Who is equal to God?” With these words, he conquered and
precipitated Lucifer and his followers into hell. The same weapons, the same
shield we also should use in all temptations. “Who is like God?” Who is so
mighty, so wise, so beautiful, so amiable as God.” Who is so much to be feared
as God? Who can recompense my service as God? Who can do so much good or so
much harm to me as God? Whom have I reason to serve and obey as God? Whose
grace have I to seek more than the grace of God? Whose disfavor have I to fear
more than the disfavor of God? Whosoever uses these and other wholesome
thoughts as spiritual weapons against the spirit of hell, fights after the
example of Saint Michael, and will always conquer Satan. And those who accustom
themselves now to combat thus, have reason to hope that they will vanquish
Satan in the last fight, and that the holy Archangel will surely assist them at
that important moment. In conclusion, I will add the beautiful words of Saint
Lawrence Justinian, by which he admonishes all Christians to venerate the holy
Archangel. “It is our duty,” says he, “to give honor to the prince of the
heavenly legions. We ought to praise him especially on account of the elevated
state of grace in which he is; and because God has distinguished him by
bestowing so high a dignity upon him; for his invincible strength, for the
Almighty’s favor to him and his heroic constancy in combats; hut in all these,
we must honor him only in God, who has created him and us, He is very powerful
with the Most High. The glorious victory is well known to us, which he won in
heaven, soon after the Creation, over the rebellious angels. Not without reason
does our Mother, the holy Church, endeavor to honor him especially, because she
knows that the divine Majesty has given him to her as protector, mediator and
receiver of all elect souls. Hence all should recognize Saint Michael as their
protector, and duly praising him, honor him with devout prayers, commend their
cares to him and rejoice him by reforming their lives, as his love is so great,
that he cannot refuse our prayers, nor reject our confidence, nor disregard our
love; as he protects the humble, loves the chaste, guides the innocent, guards
the pious in this temporal life, and leads them to their heavenly home.”
Practical Considerations
• Saint Michael remained
true to God when thousands of other angels became faithless to Him. He followed
not their example. You also should not follow the bad example of others, but
fulfill God’s commandments. Remain faithful to the Lord though thousands of
others leave Him. Saint Michael was zealous in honoring God and opposed those
who would not be obedient to the Creator. You can also do this. When others
speak against the true faith in your presence, against the ceremonies and
commandments of the true Church, against purity, against the honor of your
neighbor; when you see that they transgress the laws of God and of the Church,
you should defend the honor of the Almighty and prevent all the evil you can.
If you are so situated that you cannot say or do much, show, by your silence,
by your seriousness, that you are displeased by such offences against the
Majesty of the Most High. Saint Michael fought valiantly against Lucifer and
his adherents. Therefore God placed him above all the heavenly spirits.
Lucifer, with his adherents, endeavors to induce you to leave God, to become
faithless to Him. Fight bravely against him and you, too, will be exalted. Say
to him: “Who is like God? Who is so kind, so mighty, so amiable as God?” And
that you may fight vigorously, as well in life as in death, call often and
fervently on Saint Michael: “Help us here to fight and to conquer the enemy, O
Saint Michael!”
• Saint Michael is
exalted for his fidelity and for defending the honor of the Almighty. But what
was the fate of Lucifer and his adherents? They were precipitated into hell,
which God had created for the rebels, and for all those who would follow them
in disobedience. Behold, this is the end of those who are disobedient to the
Creator, and offend Him. Consider this point carefully. Lucifer and almost
numberless heavenly spirits have been cast into everlasting fire on account of
sin, of only one and the first sin. God spared not one of so many noble
spirits, nor gave them one single moment to repent; but cast them all
immediately into hell. A single sin is punished with eternal damnation, and
this a sin only in thought. Do you then at last comprehend how great the
wickedness of one single sin must be? Can you still flatter yourself that
thoughts are free, or that you cannot commit great sin with them? Can you still
believe those who say to you that God does not much regard sins; that He
pardons them very easily? Truly you must either say that God is unjust, or that
the wickedness of sin is very great. The first you dare not say, because it would
be blasphemy; hence you say the second: the just God punishes a single sin with
hell; but He punishes it not more severely than it deserves. Thus, a single
mortal sin deserves to be punished during all eternity in hell; hence the
wickedness of a mortal sin must be exceedingly great. What have you to object
to it? Certainly if the example of Lucifer and the just punishment which God
made him and his adherents suffer, have not opened your eyes to recognize the
wickedness of sin, and if this is not sufficient to induce you to avoid all
sin, you are lost. Consider further, the words of Saint Peter, who said, that
God, by chastising the sinful angels, shows all sinners how He will punish
them. If God did not spare such noble spirits, how can you imagine that He will
spare you? Make then this day, the resolution to fear sin, to fear it more than
all the evils on earth, more even than hell itself; for, it is truly a greater
evil than hell itself. “Many consider hell the greatest evil,” says Saint
Chrysostom; “I think that sin is a greater evil.”
MLA
Citation
Father Francis Xavier
Weninger, DD, SJ. “The Feast of the Dedication of the Archangel Saint
Michael”. Lives of the Saints, 1876. CatholicSaints.Info.
9 May 2018. Web. 29 September 2023.
<https://catholicsaints.info/weningers-lives-of-the-saints-the-feast-of-the-dedication-of-the-archangel-saint-michael/>
Angels in Art –
The Archangel Michael
The Archangel Michael is
reverenced as the first and mightiest of all created beings. He was worshipped
by the Chaldeans, and the Gnostics taught that he was the leader of the seven
angels who created the universe. After the Captivity the Hebrews regarded him
as all that is implied by the Prophet Daniel when he says, “Michael, the great
prince which standeth for the children of thy people.” It is believed that he
will be privileged to exalt the banner of the Cross on the Judgment Day, and to
command the trumpet of the archangel to sound; it is on account of these
offices that he is called the “Bannerer of Heaven.”
As captain of the heavenly
host, it devolved on Michael to conquer Lucifer and his followers, and to expel
them from heaven after their refusal to worship the Son of Man; and terrible
was the punishment he inflicted on them. Chained in mid-air, where they must
remain until the Judgment Day, they behold all that happens on earth. Man, whom
they disdained, has flourished in their sight, and wields a power that they may
well envy, while the souls of the redeemed constantly ascend to the heaven
which is closed to them. Thus are they constantly tormented by hate, and a
desire for revenge, of which they must ever despair.
Saint Michael is
represented in art as young and severely beautiful. In the earliest pictures
his drapery is always white and his wings of many colors, while his symbols,
indicating that his conquests are made by spiritual force alone, are a lance
terminating in a cross, or a sceptre. Later, it became the custom to represent
him in a costume and with such emblems as indicated the nature of the work in
which he was engaged; and except for the wings, his picture might often be
mistaken for that of a celestially radiant knight, since he is clothed in
armor, and bears a sword, shield, and lance. But his seraphic wings and his
bearing mark him as a mighty spiritual power; and this impression is increased
rather than lessened, when in all humility he is in the act of worship before
the Divine Infant, or stands in reverent attitude near the Madonna, as if to
guard her and her heaven-sent son.
When conquering Satan the
treatment is varied, but the subject is easily recognized. More frequently than
otherwise, the archangel stands on the demon, who is half human and half
dragon, wearing a suit of mail, and is about to pierce the evil spirit with a
lance or bind him in chains.
Such pictures date from
the earliest attempts in religious painting, and the same subject was
represented in ancient sculpture. Some of these works are so crude as to be
absurd, but for their manifest reverence and sincerity. An early sculpture in
the porch of the Cathedral of Cortona, probably dating from the seventh
century, presents the archangel in long, heavy robes, reaching to his feet; he
stands solidly on the back of the dragon, and as if to make the footing more
secure, the beast curls his tail in air and lifts his head as high as possible,
holding his mouth wide open, into which Saint Michael presses his lance without
a struggle. The whole effect is that of some calm and commonplace occurrence,
and is in striking contrast with the spirit of the conflict which is
represented, as well as with the superhuman combat depicted by later artists.
The dragon is personified
by a variety of horrible reptilian forms. Some artists even attempted to follow
the apocalyptic description. “For their power is in their mouth, and in their
tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them
they do hurt.”
Lucifer is not always
alone, but is sometimes surrounded by demons, who crouch with him at the feet
of Saint Michael, before whom a company of angels kneel in adoration.
During the sixteenth
century the pictures of this archangel took on the military aspect, to which I
have referred, and but for the wings would have represented Saint George, or a
Crusader of the Cross, as suitably as the great Warrior Angel.
An exquisite small
picture of this type, now in the Academy at Florence, was painted by Fra Angelico. The lance and shield and
the lambent flame above the brow are the only emblems; the latter symbolizing
spiritual fervor. The rainbow-tinted wings are raised and fully spread, meeting
above and behind the head; the armor is of a rich dark red and gold. The pose
and the expression of the countenance indicate the reserved power and the
godlike tranquillity of the celestial warrior, and fitly represent him as the
patron of the Church Militant.
The representations of
Saint Michael conquering Lucifer are so numerous and so interesting
technically, that any adequate account of them and of their artistic and
theological development would fill a volume, and might be considered rather
tiresome. I shall speak especially of two examples which are very generally
accepted as the most satisfactory of them all.
The first, painted by Raphael when at his best, is in the
Louvre. It was a commission from Lorenzo dei Medici, who presented it to
Francis I. The subject was doubtless chosen by Raphael as a compliment to the
sovereign, who was the Grand Master of the Order of Saint Michael, the military
patron saint of France.
It was painted on wood,
and sent with three other pictures, packed on mules, to Fontainebleau, where
Lorenzo was visiting, in May, 1518. The picture was somewhat injured on the
journey. In 1773 it was transferred to canvas, and “restored” three years
later, but at the beginning of this century the restorations were removed. We
must believe that the picture has suffered from these chances and changes, but
the fact remains that it is still a glorious work by a great master.
The beautiful young angel
does not stand upon the fiend beneath him, but, poised in air, he lightly
touches with his foot the shoulder of the demon in vulgar human form, fiery in
color, having horns and a serpent’s tail. The expression of the angel is
serious, calm, majestic, as he gazes down upon the writhing Satan, whose face,
as he struggles to raise it, is full of malignant hate. This detail is lost in
the black and white reproductions.
Michael grasps the lance
with both hands, and so natural is the action, so easy and graceful, that the
beholder instinctively waits to see the weapon do its work, while flames rise
from the earth as if impatient to engulf the disgusting demon. The head of the
angel, with its light, floating hair is against the background of the brilliant
wings, in which blue, gold, and purple are gloriously mingled; his armor is
gold and silver; a sword hangs by his side, and an azure scarf floats from his
shoulders. His legs are bare, and his feet shod with buskins, which leave the
toes uncovered. The contrast between the exquisite, angelic flesh tints, rosy
in hue, and the brown coloring of the demon, effectively emphasizes the beauty
of purity and the loathsomeness of evil.
The Saint Michael of Guido Reni so closely resembles that of
Raphael in general treatment, that it is more nearly just to compare these
works than is usually the case with pictures of the same subject by different
masters. The attitude of Guido’s saint is like that of a dancing-master when
contrasted with the pose of Raphael’s, and his demon is simply low and base,
devoid of malignity or any supreme evil.
But the head and face of
Guido’s Michael make his picture wonderful; they adequately express divine
purity and beauty, while the studied and fictitious qualities of Guido’s art –
here at their best – serve to enhance the exquisite effect of this angelic
warrior, and the picture is justly esteemed as one of the treasures of the
Cappucini at Rome.
Outside of Italian art,
the Saint Michael of Martin Schoen
is well worth notice. The figure is fully draped in a long, flowing robe and
mantle; the pose is most graceful, and the bearing of the angel dignified and
unruffled. The demon is made up of fins, a savage mouth, and numerous claws
with which to seize its victims; an entirely emblematic and most repulsive
figure.
There are occasional
pictures of the “Fall of the Angels,” in which Saint Michael contends against
the entire company of rebellious spirits. These are illustrative of the text,
“When Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought
and his angels, and the great dragon was cast out.”
The painting of such a
picture at Arezzo, about 1400, caused the death of Spinello d’Arezzo, whose
mind so dwelt upon the demons he had painted that he went mad, and fancied that
Lucifer appeared to him, and cursed him for having represented the fiend and
his angels in so revolting a manner. The horror of the artist induced a fever
of which he died.
The smaller of the two
pictures of this subject by Rubens,
in Munich, is esteemed a miracle of art. It displays the inventive power of the
great Flemish master in a wonderful tour de force, for the rebel angels are not
fallen, but falling, and tumbling headlong out of heaven, down, down, in such
confusion and affright as only Rubens could portray.
In some cases Raphael and
Gabriel are represented as witnesses of the combat between Michael and Lucifer.
To my taste, these figures, with their abundant white draperies, detract from
the simplicity and dignity of this impressive scene. Not only these archangels,
but apostles and saints are sometimes introduced, in spite of the evident
anachronism, as observers of this great spiritual struggle, while hosts of
angels are above and around the picture.
In short, the
representations of this subject, in one form and another, are almost
numberless, and can scarcely be too many, when they are regarded as embodying
the great truth of the spiritual triumph over evil.
Mrs. Jameson says: “This
is the secret of its perpetual repetition, and this the secret of the untired
complacency with which we regard it. . .and if to this primal moral
significance be added all the charm of poetry, grace, animated movement, which
human genius has lavished on this ever-blessed, ever-welcome symbol, then, as
we look up at it, we are ‘not only touched, but wakened and inspired,’ and the
whole delighted imagination glows with faith and hope, and grateful triumphant
sympathy, so, at least, I have felt, and I must believe that others have felt
it, too.”
The representations of
Saint Michael as the Lord of Souls are less numerous than those of the subjects
just mentioned, but are very interesting. In some votive pictures he appears as
the protector of those who have struggled with evil, and gained a victory. In
such pictures the angel has his foot upon the dragon, or holds a dragon’s head
in his hand, and bears the banner of victory.
Again, Michael is
represented with his scales engaged in weighing the souls of the dead; in such
pictures he is unarmed, and bears a sceptre ending in a cross. The souls are
typified by little naked human figures; the accepted spirits usually kneel in
the scales, with hands clasped as in prayer; the attitude of the rejected souls
expresses horror and agony, which is sometimes emphasized by the figure of a
demon, impatient for his prey, who reaches out his talons, or his devil’s fork,
to seize the doomed spirits.
Leonardo
da Vinci represented the angel as presenting the balance to
the Infant Jesus, who has the air of blessing the pious soul in the upper
scale. Signorelli, about 1500, painted a picture of this subject, which is in
the church of San Gregorio at Rome, in which the archangel, in a suit of mail,
stands with his wings spread out, and the balance with full scales held above a
fierce, open-mouthed dragon. The lance of the archangel has pierced through the
under jaw of the beast and entered his body, making an ugly wound, and a
hideous little demon, resting on his tiny black wings, is clutching the
condemned spirits in the lower scale.
In pictures of the
Assumption or Glorification of the Virgin, if Saint Michael is present, it is
in his office of Lord of Souls, as the legends of the Madonna teach that he
received her spirit, and guarded it until it was again united with her sinless
form.
As Lord of Souls it is
taught that Saint Michael conducted the spirits of the just to heaven, and even
cared for their bodies in some instances. The legend of Saint Catherine of
Alexandria teaches that her body was borne by angels over the desert and sea to
the top of Mount Sinai, where it was buried; and later a monastery was built over
her sepulchre. In the picture of the “Translation of Saint Catherine,” which we
give, Saint Michael is one of the four celestial bearers of the martyr saint.
In rare instances Saint
Michael was represented without wings. Such a figure standing on a dragon is a
Saint George, unless the balance is introduced. When the archangel stands upon
the dragon with the balance in his hand, he appears in his double office as
Conqueror of Satan and Lord of Souls. Memorial chapels and tombs were
frequently decorated with this subject, a notable instance being that on the
tomb of Henry VII, in Westminster Abbey.
In pictures of the Last
Judgment, Saint Michael is sometimes seen in the very act of weighing souls,
and, although I have nowhere found this explanation, it has seemed to me that
the souls being thus weighed at the last hour should symbolize those of whom
Saint Paul said, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall
sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
Since the Archangel
Michael was made the guardian of the Hebrew nation, he was naturally an
important actor in many scenes connected with their history. It was he who
succored Hagar in the wilderness (Genesis 21:17), who appeared to restrain
Abraham from the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:11). He brought the plagues on
Egypt and led the Israelites on their journey. The Jews and early Christians
believed that God spake through the mouth of Michael in the Burning Bush, and
by him sent the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. When Satan would have entered the
body of Moses, in order to personate the prophet and deceive the Jews, it was
Michael who contended with the Evil One, and buried the body in an unknown
place, as is distinctly stated by Jude. Signorelli chose this as the subject of
one of his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and I have seen no other
representation of it, although I believe that a few others exist.
It was Michael who put
blessings instead of curses into Balaam’s mouth (Numbers 22:35), who was with
Joshua in the plain of Jericho (Joshua 5:13), who appeared to Gideon (Judges
6:2), and delivered the three faithful Jews from the fiery furnace (Daniel
3:25). This last subject is one of the earliest in Christian art, and was a
symbol of the redemption of man by Jesus Christ. There are still other like
offices which Saint Michael filled as the protector of the Jews, while several
important works are attributed to him in the Apochrypha and in the Legends of
the Church.
For example, in the
apochryphal story of Bel and the Dragon, it is related that when King Cyrus had
thrown the prophet Daniel into the lions’ den, and he had been six days without
food, the angel of the Lord appeared to the prophet Habakkuk in Jewry, when he
had prepared a mess of potage for the reapers in his field, and the angel
commanded Habakkuk to carry the potage to Babylon and give it to Daniel.
“Then Habakkuk said,
‘Lord, I never saw Babylon; neither do I know where the den is.’ Then the angel
of the Lord took Habakkuk by the hair of his head, and set him in Babylon over
the lions’ den; and Habakkuk cried, saying, ‘O Daniel, Daniel, take the dinner
which God hath sent thee,’ – and the angel again set Habakkuk in his own place.”
At one period this
subject was represented on sarcophagi; but I have only seen it in prints after
the Flemish artist, Hemshirk.
In the legends of Saint
Michael we read that in the sixth century, when the plague was raging in Rome,
and processions threaded the streets chanting the service since known as the
Great Litanies, the Archangel Michael appeared, hovering over the city. He
alighted on the summit of the Mausoleum of Hadrian and sheathed his sword, from
which blood was dripping. From that hour the plague was stayed, and from that
day the Mausoleum, which is surmounted by a statue of the Archangel, has been
called the Castle of Sant’ Angelo.
The legends also give an
account of two appearances of Saint Michael when he commanded the erection of
churches; one at Monte Galgano, on the east coast of Italy, and the second at
Avranches in Normandy. The first site was found to cover a wonderful stream of
water, which cured many diseases, and made the church of Monte Galgano a much
frequented place of pilgrimage.
The church in Normandy is
on the celebrated Mont Saint Michael, and is famous in all Christian countries.
From the time when the angel appeared to Saint Aubert, the bishop, and
commanded him to build the church, this saint was greatly venerated in France,
and was made patron of France and of the order which Saint Louis instituted in
his honor.
The first church erected
here was small, but Richard of Normandy and William the Conquerer raised a
magnificent abbey, which overlooked the most picturesque scenery, and for this
reason, if no other, remains a much frequented spot.
The old English coin
called an angel was so named from the representation of Saint Michael which was
stamped upon it.
The pictures of Saint
Michael announcing to the Virgin Mary the time of her death, bear so strong a
resemblance to those of the Annunciation, that it is necessary to remember that
these have the symbols of a palm on a lighted taper in the hand of the angel,
instead of the lily of the Archangel Gabriel, as is seen in our illustration of
a beautiful picture in the Florentine Academy.
The legend relates that
on a certain day the heart of Mary was filled with an inexpressible longing to
see her Son, and she wept sorely, when lo! an angel clothed in light appeared
before her, saluting her, and saying, “Hail, O Mary! blessed by Him who hath
given salvation to Israel! I bring thee here a branch of palm gathered in
paradise; command that it be carried before thy bier in the day of thy death;
for in three days thy soul shall leave thy body, and thou shalt enter into
paradise where thy Son awaits thy coming.” Mary answering, said: “If I have
found grace in thy sight tell me thy name, and grant that the Apostles may be
reunited to me, that in their presence I may give up my soul to God. Also, I
pray thee, that after death my soul may not be affrighted by any spirit of
darkness, nor any evil angel be given power over me.” And the archangel
replied: “My name is the Great and Wonderful. Doubt not that the Apostles shall
be with thee today, for he who transported the prophet Habakkuk by the hair of
his head to the lions’ den, can also bring hither the Apostles. Fear thou not
the evil spirit, for thou hast bruised his head, and destroyed his kingdom.”
And the angel departed, and the palm branch shed light from every leaf and
sparkled as the stars of heaven.
And the duty of the
archangel was thus fulfilled until he should again appear as Lord of Souls to
receive the spirit of the Virgin, to guard it until it should again inhabit her
sinless body.
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/angels-in-art-the-archangel-michael/
Santuario di Monte Sant'Angelo sul Gargano, province de Foggia, Pouilles.
Nella Tradizione Michele è l’antitesi di Lucifero, capo degli angeli che decisero di fare a meno di Dio e perciò precipitarono negli Inferi. Michele, generale degli angeli, è colui che difende la Fede, la Verità e la Chiesa. Dante (1265-1321) illustra mirabilmente la bellezza e la potenza di questo Principe celeste e la sua solerzia nel proteggere il genere umano dalle insidie di Satana. Nelle litanie dei Santi pregate in Purgatorio da coloro che in terra furono invidiosi, San Michele è il secondo nominato, dopo Maria Santissima, segno del suo grande potere di intercessione (Purgatorio XIII, 51).
Maria Vergine e l’Arcangelo Michele sono associati nel loro combattimento contro il demonio ed entrambi, iconograficamente parlando, hanno sotto i loro piedi, a seconda dei casi, il serpente, il drago, il diavolo in persona, che l’Arcangelo tiene incatenato e lo minaccia, pronto a trafiggerlo, con la sua spada. Il suo culto è molto diffuso sia in Oriente che in Occidente, ne danno testimonianza le innumerevoli chiese, santuari, monasteri e anche monti a lui intitolati. In Europa, durante l’alto Medioevo, furono edificati in suo onore tre gioielli di devozione, di storia, di architettura ed arte: l’abbazia di Mont Saint-Michel in Normandia, La Sacra di San Michele sul Monte Pirchiriano, in Piemonte e il santuario del Monte Gargano in Puglia. Difensore della Chiesa, la sua statua compare sulla sommità di Castel Sant’Angelo a Roma ed egli è protettore del popolo cristiano, come un tempo lo era dei pellegrini medievali contro le insidie che incontravano lungo la via.
Leone XIII (1810-1903), il 13 ottobre 1884, dopo aver terminato di celebrare la Santa Messa nella cappella vaticana, restò immobile una decina di minuti in stato di profondo turbamento. In seguito si precipitò nel suo studio. Fu allora che il Papa compose la preghiera a San Michele Arcangelo. Successivamente racconterà il Pontefice di aver udito Gesù e Satana e di aver avuto una terrificante visione dell’Inferno: «ho visto la terra avvolta dalle tenebre e da un abisso, ho visto uscire legioni di demoni che si spargevano per il mondo per distruggere le opere della Chiesa ed attaccare la stessa Chiesa che ho visto ridotta allo stremo. Allora apparve San Michele e ricacciò gli spiriti malvagi nell’abisso. Poi ho visto San Michele Arcangelo intervenire non in quel momento, ma molto più tardi, quando le persone avessero moltiplicato le loro ferventi preghiere verso l’Arcangelo».
Dopo circa mezz’ora fece chiamare il Segretario della Sacra Congregazione dei Riti, ordinandogli di far stampare il foglio che aveva in mano e farlo pervenire a tutti i Vescovi della Chiesa: il manoscritto conteneva la preghiera che il Papa dispose di far recitare al termine della Santa Messa, la supplica a Maria Santissima e l’invocazione al Principe delle milizie celesti, per mezzo del quale si implora Dio affinché ricacci il Principe del mondo nell’Inferno. Tale supplica è caduta in disuso. Nessun Pontefice ha abrogato questa preghiera dopo il Santo Sacrificio e neppure il Novus Ordo la nega, anche se dagli anni Settanta si prese a non più recitarla, privando la Chiesa di una preziosa arma di difesa.
Skopje, Macedonia
In altre scritture, il dragone è un angelo che aveva voluto farsi grande quanto Dio e che Dio fece scacciare, facendolo precipitare dall’alto verso il basso, insieme ai suoi angeli che lo seguivano.
Michele è stato sempre rappresentato e venerato come l’angelo-guerriero di Dio, rivestito di armatura dorata in perenne lotta contro il Demonio, che continua nel mondo a spargere il male e la ribellione contro Dio.
Egli è considerato allo stesso modo nella Chiesa di Cristo, che gli ha sempre riservato fin dai tempi antichissimi, un culto e devozione particolare, considerandolo sempre presente nella lotta che si combatte e si combatterà fino alla fine del mondo, contro le forze del male che operano nel genere umano.
Dante nella sua ‘Divina Commedia’ pone il demonio (l’angelo Lucifero) in fondo all’inferno, conficcato a testa in giù al centro della terra, che si era ritirata al suo cadere, provocando il grande cratere dell’inferno dantesco. Dopo l’affermazione del cristianesimo, il culto per san Michele, che già nel mondo pagano equivaleva ad una divinità, ebbe in Oriente una diffusione enorme, ne sono testimonianza le innumerevoli chiese, santuari, monasteri a lui dedicati; nel secolo IX solo a Costantinopoli, capitale del mondo bizantino, si contavano ben 15 fra santuari e monasteri; più altri 15 nei sobborghi.
Tutto l’Oriente era costellato da famosi santuari, a cui si recavano migliaia di pellegrini da ogni regione del vasto impero bizantino e come vi erano tanti luoghi di culto, così anche la sua celebrazione avveniva in tanti giorni diversi del calendario.
Perfino il grande fiume Nilo fu posto sotto la sua protezione, si pensi che la chiesa funeraria del Cremlino a Mosca in Russia, è dedicata a S. Michele. Per dirla in breve non c’è Stato orientale e nord africano, che non possegga oggetti, stele, documenti, edifici sacri, che testimoniano la grande venerazione per il santo condottiero degli angeli, che specie nei primi secoli della Chiesa, gli venne tributata.
In Occidente si hanno testimonianze di un culto, con le numerosissime chiese intitolate a volte a S. Angelo, a volte a S. Michele, come pure località e monti vennero chiamati Monte Sant’Angelo o Monte San Michele, come il celebre santuario e monastero in Normandia in Francia, il cui culto fu portato forse dai Celti sulla costa della Normandia; certo è che esso si diffuse rapidamente nel mondo Longobardo, nello Stato Carolingio e nell’Impero Romano.
In Italia sano tanti i posti dove sorgevano cappelle, oratori, grotte, chiese, colline e monti tutti intitolati all’arcangelo Michele, non si può accennarli tutti, ci fermiamo solo a due: Tancia e il Gargano.
Sul Monte Tancia, nella Sabina, vi era una grotta già usata per un culto pagano, che verso il VII secolo, fu dedicata dai Longobardi a S. Michele; in breve fu costruito un santuario che raggiunse gran fama, parallela a quella del Monte Gargano, che comunque era più antico.
La celebrazione religiosa era all’8 maggio, data praticata poi nella Sabina, nel Reatino, nel Ducato Romano e ovunque fosse estesa l’influenza della badia benedettina di Farfa, a cui i Longobardi di Spoleto, avevano donato quel santuario.
Ma il più celebre santuario italiano dedicato a S. Michele, è quello in Puglia sul Monte Gargano; esso ha una storia che inizia nel 490, quando era papa Gelasio I; la leggenda racconta che casualmente un certo Elvio Emanuele, signore del Monte Gargano (Foggia) aveva smarrito il più bel toro della sua mandria, ritrovandolo dentro una caverna inaccessibile.
Visto l’impossibilità di recuperarlo, decise di ucciderlo con una freccia del suo arco; ma la freccia inspiegabilmente invece di colpire il toro, girò su sé stessa colpendo il tiratore ad un occhio. Meravigliato e ferito, il signorotto si recò dal suo vescovo s. Lorenzo Maiorano, vescovo di Siponto (odierna Manfredonia) e raccontò il fatto prodigioso.
Il presule indisse tre giorni di preghiere e di penitenza; dopodiché s. Michele apparve all’ingresso della grotta e rivelò al vescovo: “Io sono l’arcangelo Michele e sto sempre alla presenza di Dio. La caverna è a me sacra, è una mia scelta, io stesso ne sono vigile custode. Là dove si spalanca la roccia, possono essere perdonati i peccati degli uomini…Quel che sarà chiesto nella preghiera, sarà esaudito. Quindi dedica la grotta al culto cristiano”.
Ma il santo vescovo non diede seguito alla richiesta dell’arcangelo, perché sul monte persisteva il culto pagano; due anni dopo, nel 492 Siponto era assediata dalle orde del re barbaro Odoacre (434-493); ormai allo stremo, il vescovo e il popolo si riunirono in preghiera, durante una tregua, e qui riapparve l’arcangelo al vescovo s. Lorenzo, promettendo loro la vittoria, infatti durante la battaglia si alzò una tempesta di sabbia e grandine che si rovesciò sui barbari invasori, che spaventati fuggirono.
Tutta la città con il vescovo, salì sul monte in processione di ringraziamento; ma ancora una volta il vescovo non volle entrare nella grotta. Per questa sua esitazione che non si spiegava, s. Lorenzo Maiorano si recò a Roma dal papa Gelasio I (490-496), il quale gli ordinò di entrare nella grotta insieme ai vescovi della Puglia, dopo un digiuno di penitenza.
Recatosi i tre vescovi alla grotta per la dedicazione, riapparve loro per la terza volta l’arcangelo, annunziando che la cerimonia non era più necessaria, perché la consacrazione era già avvenuta con la sua presenza. La leggenda racconta che quando i vescovi entrarono nella grotta, trovarono un altare coperto da un panno rosso con sopra una croce di cristallo e impressa su un masso l’impronta di un piede infantile, che la tradizione popolare attribuisce a s. Michele.
Il vescovo san Lorenzo fece costruire all’ingresso della grotta, una chiesa dedicata a s. Michele e inaugurata il 29 settembre 493; la Sacra Grotta è invece rimasta sempre come un luogo di culto mai consacrato da vescovi e nei secoli divenne celebre con il titolo di “Celeste Basilica”.
Attorno alla chiesa e alla grotta è cresciuta nel tempo la cittadina di Monte Sant’Angelo nel Gargano. I Longobardi che avevano fondato nel secolo VI il Ducato di Benevento, vinsero i feroci nemici delle coste italiane, i saraceni, proprio nei pressi di Siponto, l’8 maggio 663, avendo attribuito la vittoria alla protezione celeste di s. Michele, essi presero a diffondere come prima accennato, il culto per l’arcangelo in tutta Italia, erigendogli chiese, effigiandolo su stendardi e monete e instaurando la festa dell’8 maggio dappertutto.
Intanto la Sacra Grotta diventò per tutti i secoli successivi, una delle mete più frequentate dai pellegrini cristiani, diventando insieme a Gerusalemme, Roma, Loreto e S. Giacomo di Compostella, i poli sacri dall’Alto Medioevo in poi.
Sul Gargano giunsero in pellegrinaggio papi, sovrani, futuri santi. Sul portale dell’atrio superiore della basilica, che non è possibile descrivere qui, vi è un’iscrizione latina che ammonisce: “che questo è un luogo impressionante. Qui è la casa di Dio e la porta del Cielo”.
Il santuario e la Sacra Grotta sono pieni di opere d’arte, di devozione e di voto, che testimoniano lo scorrere millenario dei pellegrini e su tutto campeggia nell’oscurità la statua in marmo bianco di S. Michele, opera del Sansovino, datata 1507.
L’arcangelo è comparso lungo i secoli altre volte, sia pure non come sul Gargano, che rimane il centro del suo culto, ed il popolo cristiano lo celebra ovunque con sagre, fiere, processioni, pellegrinaggi e non c’è Paese europeo che non abbia un’abbazia, chiesa, cattedrale, ecc. che lo ricordi alla venerazione dei fedeli.
Apparendo ad una devota portoghese Antonia de Astonac, l’arcangelo promise la sua continua assistenza, sia in vita che in purgatorio e inoltre l’accompagnamento alla S. Comunione da parte di un angelo di ciascuno dei nove cori celesti, se avessero recitato prima della Messa la corona angelica che gli rivelò.
I cori sono: Serafini, Cherubini, Troni, Dominazioni, Potestà, Virtù, Principati, Arcangeli ed Angeli. La sua festa liturgica principale in Occidente è iscritta nel Martirologio Romano al 29 settembre e nella riforma del calendario liturgico del 1970, è accomunato agli altri due arcangeli più conosciuti, Gabriele e Raffaele nello stesso giorno, mentre l’altro arcangelo a volte nominato nei testi apocrifi, Uriele, non gode di un culto proprio.
Per la sua caratteristica di “guerriero celeste” s. Michele è patrono degli spadaccini, dei maestri d’armi; poi dei doratori, dei commercianti, di tutti i mestieri che usano la bilancia, i farmacisti, pasticcieri, droghieri, merciai; fabbricanti di tinozze, inoltre è patrono dei radiologi e della Polizia.
È patrono principale delle città italiane di Cuneo, Caltanissetta, Monte Sant’Angelo, Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, compatrono di Caserta.
Difensore della Chiesa, la sua statua compare sulla sommità di Castel S. Angelo a Roma, che come è noto era diventata una fortezza in difesa del Pontefice; protettore del popolo cristiano, così come un tempo lo era dei pellegrini medievali, che lo invocavano nei santuari ed oratori a lui dedicati, disseminati lungo le strade che conducevano alle mete dei pellegrinaggi, per avere protezione contro le malattie, lo scoraggiamento e le imboscate dei banditi.
Per quanto riguarda la sua raffigurazione nell’arte in generale, è delle più vaste; ogni scuola pittorica in Oriente e in Occidente, lo ha quasi sempre raffigurato armato in atto di combattere il demonio.
Sul Monte Athos nel convento di Dionisio del 1547, i tre principale arcangeli sono così raffigurati, Raffaele in abito ecclesiastico, Michele da guerriero e Gabriele in pacifica posa e rappresentano i poteri religioso, militare e civile.
Autore: Antonio Borrelli
Santi Michele, Gabriele e Raffaele Arcangeli
Il Martirologio commemora insieme i santi arcangeli Michele, Gabriele e Raffaele. La Bibbia li ricorda con specifiche missioni: Michele avversario di Satana, Gabriele annunciatore e Raffaele soccorritore.
Prima della riforma del 1969 si ricordava in questo giorno solamente san
Michele arcangelo in memoria della consacrazione del celebre santuario sul
monte Gargano a lui dedicato.
Il titolo di arcangelo deriva dall’idea di una corte celeste in cui gli angeli
sono presenti secondo gradi e dignità differenti.
Gli arcangeli Michele, Gabriele e Raffaele occupano le sfere più elevate delle
gerarchie angeliche.
Queste hanno il compito di preservare la trascendenza e il mistero di Dio.
Nello stesso tempo, rendono presente e percepibile la sua vicinanza salvifica.
Martirologio
Romano: Festa dei santi Michele, Gabriele e Raffaele, arcangeli. Nel
giorno della dedicazione della basilica intitolata a San Michele anticamente
edificata a Roma al sesto miglio della via Salaria, si celebrano insieme i tre
arcangeli, di cui la Sacra Scrittura rivela le particolari missioni: giorno e
notte essi servono Dio e, contemplando il suo volto, lo glorificano
incessantemente.
> San MICHELE
Michele (Chi è come Dio?) è l’arcangelo che insorge contro
Satana e i suoi satelliti (Gd 9; Ap 12, 7; cfr Zc 13, 1-2), difensore degli
amici di Dio (Dn 10, 13.21), pretettore del suo popolo (Dn 12, 1).
Gabriele (Forza di Dio) è uno degli spiriti che stanno
davanti a Dio (Lc 1, 19), rivela a Daniele i segreti del piano di Dio (Dn 8,
16; 9, 21-22), annunzia a Zaccaria la nascita di Giovanni Battista (Lc 1,
11-20) e a Maria quella di Gesù (Lc 1, 26-38).
Raffaele (Dio ha guarito), anch’egli fra i sette angeli che
stanno davanti al trono di Dio (Tb 12, 15; cfr Ap 8, 2), accompagna e
custodisce Tobia nelle peripezie del suo viaggio e gli guarisce il padre cieco.
La Chiesa pellegrina sulla terra, specialmente nella liturgia
eucaristica, è associata alle schiere degli angeli che nella Gerusalemme
celeste cantano la gloria di Dio (cfr Ap 5, 11-14; Conc. Vat. II, Costituzione
sulla sacra liturgia, «Sacrosanctum Concilium», 8).
Il 29 settembre il martirologio geronimiano (sec. VI) ricorda
la dedicazione della basilica di san Michele (sec. V) sulla via Salaria a Roma.
SOURCE : http://www.santiebeati.it/dettaglio/21625
Église des Saints-Archanges, 9 Bis Rue Jean de Beauvais, 75005 Paris
Voir aussi : http://rouen.catholique.fr/spip.php?article1966
http://www.spiritualite-chretienne.com/anges/ange-gardien/hierar04.html