Saint Michael the Archangel

Section one

What this figure is

Begin with the classification, because it is the thing people get wrong. Michael is not a saint in the sense that Anthony or George are saints. Those are human beings who died. Michael is an angel — a pure spirit, mentioned by name in Scripture, venerated but never canonised because there was nothing to canonise.

His name is a question. In Hebrew, Mikha'el means Who is like God? — not a statement but a challenge, and the tradition has always heard it as the war-cry that answered Lucifer's pride. That single feature, a name thrown in someone's face, explains almost everything about how he is portrayed.

He appears in three places in the Bible and one outside it. In Daniel — a Jewish apocalypse written in the second century before Christ — he is named twice as the prince who defends Israel, and at the end of the book it is said that Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise at the end-time. In the letter of Jude he is the archangel who disputes with the devil over the body of Moses, and does not presume to condemn him but says only, May the Lord rebuke you. In Revelation he leads the heavenly army against the dragon. And in the book of 1 Enoch, a Jewish text of the third century BC, he is listed as one of seven archangels.

That is unusually rich documentation for an angel, which is exactly why he is one of only three angels the Church names with confidence. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael are the three whose names appear in Scripture; the rest of the traditional angelic names are guesses, which is why Rome quietly removed them from the calendar in 2001.

His feast is 29 September, shared with Gabriel and Raphael. Until the reform of the calendar in 1969 they had separate days; they were gathered into one celebration, which is a nice piece of housekeeping and a slightly deflating fate for the commander of the heavenly host to share a date with two colleagues.

Section two

The moment in the sculpture

This one does freeze a moment, and it is the most violent moment in Christian cosmology. Revelation 12 describes a war in heaven: Michael and his angels fighting the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fighting back, and the dragon losing. He is thrown down — he and his angels with him — and there is no longer any place for them in heaven.

The sculpture picks the instant after the throw and before the execution. Michael is standing on the thing. His right arm is up and the sword is raised, blade clear, hilt with a gold cord and tassel trailing; his left arm is set over a small round shield. His foot is planted on the back of a dark, reptilian, horned creature that has been driven into the rock. The blow has not fallen. That is the most deliberate choice in the piece, because the raised sword gives the sculptor a diagonal line and gives the viewer a moment of held breath.

The colour scheme does more work than it first appears. The armour is silver with gold trim; the tunic beneath is a muted green; the cloak is a dark maroon with gold edging, thrown back so that it streams. Gold wings sweep out on both sides and up. Against the plain wood of the cabinet, the wings are the thing you see first, and they are the least human part of the figure.

One absence is worth noticing. The most common attribute of Michael after the sword is a pair of scales, for the weighing of souls. This figure has no scales — the sculptor has chosen the shield instead. It is a warrior's Michael rather than a judge's Michael, which is the version households tend to want.

Section three

What the objects mean

The iconography of Michael is one of the tightest in Christian art: four objects, and each of them answers a different question about him.

The armour is the most interesting, because it is Roman infantry equipment on a being who existed before Rome. That is not an error. It is a deliberate borrowing from the language of Ephesians 6, where believers are told to put on the whole armour of God — the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. Michael is shown wearing what the letter describes.

The gilded wings

Gold-feathered wings, sweeping outward and up, the widest element of the figure.

Wings are the standard sign of an angelic nature — a creature that is not limited by a body. The gold is a further step: it marks him out from the human saints in the same collection, who are painted in ordinary colours.

The raised sword

A silver blade held high in the right hand, with a gold cord and tassel at the grip.

The sword is the word of God in the language of Ephesians 6, and the instrument of the casting-out in Revelation. It is raised, not swung — the piece shows authority rather than violence, which is the difference between a soldier and a butcher.

The breastplate and the shield

Silver breastplate with gold trim over a green tunic; a small round shield held on the left arm.

The breastplate of righteousness and the shield of faith from Ephesians 6, worn by the one who is described as the guardian of God's people. Note what this figure does not have: the scales of judgement, which are his other common attribute.

The devil underfoot

A dark, scaled, horned creature driven down into the base, one foot planted on its back.

Not a man and not an animal — a spirit given the shape of a reptile. This is the serpent of Genesis 3:15 with a heel on its head, and the dragon of Revelation thrown out of heaven. The pose is the oldest gesture of victory in Christian art.

Section four

What Scripture says, and what it does not

Michael is a rarity: a figure whose every major attribute can be traced to a text. That does not mean the sculpture is illustrating a photograph. It is worth being precise about what kind of writing each text is.

The Daniel passages are apocalyptic literature from the second century BC, and they describe a struggle between angelic princes — Michael against the prince of Persia — rather than a battle anyone watched. The Jude passage is a single verse, and it is remarkable chiefly for its restraint: the archangel does not curse the devil, he defers the judgement to God. The Revelation passage is a vision, one of a series of symbolic tableaux, and its dragon is explicitly identified as the ancient serpent, the Devil and Satan.

That last identification is the key to the whole iconography. The dragon Michael fights is not a monster from natural history; it is the serpent of Genesis and the accuser of Job and the tempter of the Gospels, given a body so that a foot can be put on it. When you see a statue of Michael standing on a reptile, you are looking at a summary of the entire biblical story of evil in one object.

What Scripture does not give us is almost all the detail people assume. There is no biblical account of Michael's appearance, no description of his armour, no scene of him striking a blow. The cinematic war-in-heaven narrative — with the rebellion, the battle, the fall like lightning — is assembled from Revelation 12, from a passage in Isaiah 14 that is actually about the king of Babylon, and from a single verse in Luke 10. It is a coherent picture, and the Church has always treated it as imagery rather than reportage.

What Michael does have, uniquely among the angels, is a long and specific liturgical footprint: the Leonine prayer to him, composed in the nineteenth century and recommended for use after Mass, and the older Eastern offices in which he is titled the Taxiarch, the commander. He is the only angel whose feast day was once a public holiday in much of Europe.

But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, "The Lord rebuke you!"

Jude 9

Section five

Why it sits on a shelf

Michael is the figure people put by a door. Not for decoration — for the same reason a house puts a lock on one. He is invoked against evil, against violence, against accident, and above all at the hour of death, which is why he appears so often on hospital and sickroom shelves and why the Leonine prayer asks him to defend us in battle and by the power of God thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

He is also, oddly, a patron of ordinary commerce. Bankers, grocers and police all claim him, the first two because of an old association with the weighing of souls and honest scales. He is the guardian of the Church itself, which is why he stands on top of fortresses — Mont Saint-Michel off the coast of Normandy, the sanctuary on Monte Gargano in Italy, and a long list of hilltop shrines.

For a household, the uses are simpler. He is protection; he is the answer to a nightmare; he is the figure you put where children sleep. In the standard assortment of domestic Catholic figures he is almost always present, usually paired with an angel of healing, and almost always placed higher than eye level.

And there is one more thing he does that no other figure in this collection can. George and Anthony and Raphael and the Holy Family all belong to the human story — born, living, dying. Michael is the only one on the shelf who was there before the world was made, and who is described in Scripture as still standing in front of God.