Download PDF | The Footprints of Michael the Archangel_ The Formation and Diffusion of a Saintly Cult, c. 300-c. 800-Palgrave Macmillan (2013).
293 Pages
THE PROBLEM WITH MICHAEL
During the 860s, a Frankish monk named Bernardus returned to his likely home monastery at the end of his Holy Land pilgrimage. Bernardus described the house dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel as situated “on a mountain that juts out of the sea as if two islands.” Having visited the great and fabled cities of Rome, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, the pilgrim now ended his travels while looking out from a rocky beach upon two granite peaks covered with lichens, brambles, and birds. Perhaps the monk could discern below the summit of the nearer isle a small shrine, “round in the manner of a crypt and holding one hundred men.” He would wait until low tide to cross, when the waters would withdraw to reveal a natural passage from the shore to the island. Even then, Bernardus would need to carefully pick his way past the quicksands that lay amid the exposed mud flats and tidal pools.!
This lonely outpost at the edge of the Frankish Kingdom of Charles the Bald is today known as Mont Saint-Michel, one of the most visited attractions in all of France. Were he alive today, Bernardus surely would be grateful for the paved elevated causeway that now safely funnels visitors onto the island at all hours, but perhaps not so appreciative of the kitschy tourist village at its base. While the sheer walls of La Merveille might overpower him, the monk could only approve of the golden statue of Michael soaring atop the high spire. Otherwise, he would undoubtedly find today’s crowded, noisy mount as uncongenial as the modern tourist would the ninth-century monastery. The Mont Saint-Michel of Bernardus’s day, however, is gone, perhaps obliterated during the tenth-century construction of the chapel now found beneath the western end of the present abbey church and known as Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. The eastern end of its south nave masks a fragment of a “cyclopean” rock wall, often construed as a remnant of that earlier round shrine said to have been built in 708 by St. Aubert, bishop of Avranches. This is not the case, however, for recent analysis of its mortar dates it to the tenth century.”
When building a sanctuary in honor of Michael the Archangel Aubert had, however, consciously imitated an earlier Michaeline sanctuary, the grotto on Monte Gargano in southeastern Italy. It was on that Puglian mountain some 60 miles north of Bari that Bernardus essentially started his pilgrimage, for it was only from there that he recorded more than a sketch of his travels. When the monk stood erect beneath the rounded ceiling of that cavern and gazed upon the footprint that Michael had impressed in the rock, he seemingly experienced the protective embrace of the archangel. His patron clasped him fast within his wings until Bernardus’s return from Jerusalem to Mont Saint-Michel.
Bernardus entrusted himself to a heavenly figure that the Latin Church had venerated as a universal intercessor only for some 50 years. The Greek, Syrian, and Coptic churches had formally recognized Michael’s powers since the sixth century, if not the fifth. In Anatolia, Antioch, and Egypt throngs of Christians had sought out the archangel for healing and protection since the dawn of the apostolic age, and had done so alongside their non-Christian neighbors. They had begged Michael’s assistance even as Christian intellectuals viewed such veneration with alarm. The Pauline Epistle to the Colossians had, after all, warned of the dangers of “angel worship” (2.18) while John revealed that when he fell at an angel’s feet, it exclaimed, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your comrades ...Worship God!” (Rev. 22.89).
This early rejection of “angel worship” has been thought to contribute to a fundamental rethinking of the role of angelic beings as spiritual intermediaries with God. As Peter Brown observed in his classic The Cult of the Saints, the nonhuman angels failed to fulfill the devotional needs of latefourth-century Christians, who instead craved spiritual ties that reflected mundane interaction among patrons and their clients. The human saints satisfied this yearning for an idealized friendship that bound the earthly and heavenly dimensions through bonds of love and kindness. Angels appeared inadequate to form and honor such ties. Far from bridging the divide between a transcendent and perfect God and a mutable humanity, this category of bodiless intelligences in fact divided them further. The ethereal host proved untrustworthy companions because they lacked that “constancy and steadfastness in the face of danger and death” as displayed by the martyrs, God’s ideal servants, and special friends.*
To be sure, the entire cosmic drama of salvation had begun with the terrifying fall from Heaven of the greatest angel Satan. He not only had carried with him the myriad spirits that admired his proud and greedy stance, but had also made way for Michael to assume the leading position as Commander of the Host of the Lord. Humanity must therefore discern among the blessed spirits and their evil comrades who waited to ensnare the faithful. Venerating false angels meant worshipping demons rather than the True God who alone could repair and restore a fallen humanity. Far better to obey the apostolic injunction against angelic reverence and find solace among human intercessors!
In particular, Christians should look to Christ for salvation, for only the divine Son of God who had assumed human flesh might reconcile mankind to God and God to mankind. As St. Augustine bishop of Hippo put it shortly after his conversion to Christianity, mankind became blessed “‘not by seeing the angels, but by seeing the truth.”> For this reason, Augustine had long rejected honors for the human saints as well as the angels, and used similar reasoning to do so. Christians, he insisted, ought not “build temples, and ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices for these same martyrs, for they are not our gods, but their God is our God.” The martyrs through their relics merely “stirred” other Christians to imitate them by calling down the aid of “the same God on whom they called.”° The saints, like the angels, denied worship, directing it to God alone.
Augustine finally recognized, however, that both angels and _ saints instructed Christians in that submission to God that Greeks called “worship” (latrefa).’ Angelic humility and acts of intercession brought humanity into contact with God’s blessings. Augustine carefully asserted that “even when His angels hear us, it is He Himself who hears us in them, as in His true temple not made with hands, as in those men who are His saints.”* By implication, humans who venerated the agency of angels and saints as vessels of God offered “that service due to men” (douleta). Paul referred to this when he stated that “servants must be subject to their own masters” (Eph. 6.5). As Augustine pithily put it, “Veneration is owed to God as if Lord and
Master, but worship truly to none except God as God.”’ Christians either worshipped God directly or through veneration of His designated intermediaries, but might never worship the intermediaries themselves. Augustine’s vacillations and development as to the veneration of angels mirrored a wider debate over their role as intermediaries in divine worship, one that increasingly centered on the figure of Michael, known as Quis ut Deus, “He who is as God.” During the half-millennium from c. 300 to c. 800, Christians came to venerate Michael as if a human saint. My goal in this book is to better understand the nature of this Christian preoccupation with Michael. Specifically, I ask why and how Christians, in the face of apostolic and patristic resistance, found solace in the embrace of this particular angel at this particular time. Michael was an odd choice for such reverence, not the least because he was never human. Gabriel would appear the more obvious candidate among the angels for Christian recognition.
He, after all, had articulated to Mary the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Even Raphael, the “healer of God,’ had occupied center stage as the main character of the apocryphal Book of Tobit. Instead Christians celebrated an ecumenical figure not at all exclusive to the Christian tradition. Jews revered Michael as the Guardian of Israel, Heavenly High Priest, Commander of the Heavenly Hosts, and psychopomp. They petitioned his power through prayerful invocation or the wearing of amulets. Polytheists also adored Michael as a portal to the higher gods, if not a lesser divinity in his own right. Pagans gained the attention of “the perfect eye of Zeus” by burning incense, intoning prayers, and manipulating objects. The pagan archangel could overcome enemies, attract numerous business customers, impart strength, or foil rival charioteers. Only after centuries of cultural and religious contestation did Christians refashion the identity and personality of the Jewish warrior-priest and pagan mediating healer into a figure humble enough to accept veneration in God’s name.
It is startling how little serious scholarly attention Michael has received in modern times. One of the more important studies, still valuable today, is the 1898 German-language monograph Michael: eine Darstellung und Vergleichung der jiidischen und der morgenldndisch—christlichen Tradition vom Erzengel Michael.'° Its author, the Lutheran professor of theology Wilhelm Lueken (1875-1961), established the parameters that have shaped subsequent research on Michael’s cult. Lueken followed the lead of hagiologists (i.e., scholars who study saints) whose work focused on saints’ cults in terms of their origin and diffusion. That is, they located the origins of a cult at a tomb, a sacred place where the presence of the saintly corpse made possible acts of intercession in response to prayers of the faithful. These scholars then tracked the growing popularity of the saint through hagiographies that served as advertisements to draw pilgrims to the shrine. Pilgrims’ accounts of miracles, coupled with a dispersal of relics from the place, further encouraged the spread of the devotion to other locales. Hagiographies and liturgical texts commemorated the saint’s “birthday” or dies natalis, the day on which she or he died and entered the Heavenly Court. Sermons extolled the benefactions awaiting the pious pilgrim. These were the methods by which to recognize and create a cult prior to the assertion of papal control over the process that would develop only in later centuries.
Michael, of course, does not fit this model. His divinity and incorporeality made the customary path to sainthood impossible. Lueken nevertheless discerned the origins of the angelic cult in an early legend, that of Michael’s apparition at a spring located at Chonae in Phrygia (near ancient Colossae in modern-day Turkey). Here the archangel performed a miracle in order to save an oratory dedicated in his name. When pagans attempted to submerge the prayerhouse with diverted waters, Michael forced the approaching current into a chasm that he opened into the earth. Lueken therefore read the miracle at Chonae as a mythical explanation for an actual peculiar sacred landscape, one where streams inexplicably disappeared into the ground.!!
He also found in this legend two reasons to establish Chonae as a point of cultic origin. First, the paper trail seemed to begin there. Greek hagiographic accounts of Chonae were at the time the earliest documents known to describe Michael’s apparitions. Perhaps more importantly, Chonae’s proximity to, and scholarly confusion with, ancient Colossae resonated with the injunction in the Epistle to the Colossians against “worshipping angels” (2.18).'* Lueken approached his subject from the then cutting-edge methodology of Religionsgeschichte, “history of religions.” Religionsgeschichte emphasized a comparison among religious traditions so as to analyze their development as sociocultural phenomena.'? Drawing on the concept of historical continuity, Lueken discerned a continuous pattern of “angel worship” in the area of Chonae dating back as far as the apostolic era. In addition, his emphasis on comparison led Lueken to view early Christian reverence of angels within a broad context of ancient religious practices. He attributed Michael’s presence in the region to large Jewish populations found there and conscientiously described Jewish and pagan engagement of the archangel. In doing so, however, he emphasized an evolutionary development from “primitive” polytheism to rational universal monotheism, a stance that construed the activities at Chonae as merely a continuation of an “ancient local heathen cult.”!* When Michael’s votaries healed themselves through paraliturgical baptisms and the invocation of the archangel, they effectively substituted the Judeo-Christian Michael for some previous non-Christian divinity. As such, the Michael cult in Phrygia conformed to the Pauline injunction against “angel worship” found in Colossians 2.18, an observation that had special meaning for Leuken as a Lutheran theologian. Furthermore, the circumscription of this theologically egregious cult within Phrygia provided a discernable starting point for subsequent diffusion. From there, Lueken argued that the cult spread to Rhodes, Constantinople, and Egypt, continually mixing Jewish and pagan elements with Christian beliefs to secure within the dogma of the Church the teaching of the intercession of angels for humanity.
Subsequent work has refined these positions without significantly altering them. This book, however, makes use of recent research methods and a broad spectrum of evidence to reject the notion of origin and diffusion from a single geographical point. It denies as well the notion of a pristine JudeoChristian archangel corrupted by “pagan” elements. A cult of a Christian Michael instead emerged in numerous formations occasioned by the archangel’s ecumenical status and distinguished by mixed pilgrimage, imperial patronage, and episcopal validation. The archangel’s votaries discerned no fixed, inherent meaning within his figure, but in fact created his identity by engaging him through their own understanding of his abilities and roles as constituted in time and place.!°
The second chapter thus situates Michael within Jewish, pagan, and Christian traditions so as to make clear his broad appeal. Scriptural, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphical texts as well as amulets, inscriptions, magic spells, and philosophical writings demonstrate Michael’s widespread reverence during the first and second centuries. While the archangel’s theological functions within these traditions often conflicted, his Jewish, pagan, and Christian followers expressed similar expectations as to his abilities. Those who discussed and venerated the archangel always engaged, whether implicitly or explicitly, in more extensive considerations of divinity and its relationship to the universe and humankind. To speak of Michael was to speak of God, hardly a topic of idle speculation.'®
The authors of the Epistle to the Colossians and Revelation thus expressed their concerns over “angel worship” with complete seriousness. They voiced, however, but one early Christian viewpoint. Votaries engaged Michael and other angels within sacred landscape, particularly water sources. Chonae was such a place where followers of different traditions beseeched angelic aid. In chapter 3, I present case studies of shared pilgrimage sites where Jews, Christians, and pagans mingled together to encounter Michael. At these places pilgrims exchanged and blended rituals, performing “whatever worked” at the particular locale to experience healing. A thaumaturgical cult of Michael emerged, not at one site, but simultaneously at many for, unlike human saints, the bodiless archangel was not confined to one place or constricted by corporeal matter. Concurrently, emperors eagerly incorporated Michael into their imperial ideology as an embodiment of a “theology of Victory.” Bishops soon recognized in the archangel a figure they could promote as the champion of the Doctrine of the Trinity. Most importantly, veneration for Michael did not originate and move outward from one place. Rather, it emerged out of multiple sites of thaumaturgical wonder that flourished through a combination of popular devotion on the one hand and imperial and ecclesiastical patronage on the other. Michael thus became known during the fourth century as the Archistrategos, the “Field Marshal” who led God’s angelic forces in protection of orthodox belief and the empire that embodied it as symbolized by healed bodies.
Nevertheless, practices of personal invocation through private prayer, extraliturgical rituals, and the wearing of amulets worried the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Malignant forces responded to these spiritual overtures so as to corrupt and overpower those Christians weak in faith. To avoid summoning demons, Michael should respond to appropriately supervised liturgical appeals. At Monte Gargano supplicants encountered the archangel’s presence through his relics: footprints, heavenly clothing, and healing waters, all extolled by means of hagiography. These human attributes of sanctity paradoxically ensured the reality of Michael’s ethereal presence, especially within a rural pagan landscape without clear episcopal control. The fourth chapter, “The Politics of Angelic Sanctity,’ explores this anthropomorphization of Michael at Monte Gargano as well as the context in which it occurred. The prayers of pilgrims especially resonated during the years of the Gothic War (535-556), the period during which the Garganic cavern emerged as an important shrine. Michael supported the emperor Justinian I as he “rescued” Italy from the hands of “heretical” Arian Ostrogothic kings to restore orthodox doctrine.
Michael’s support of the Trinity thus bolstered imperial authority, a potent mixture adopted north of the Alps by kings, bishops, and monastic founders. An angel approached as if human proved amenable to control by ecclesiastical and secular authorities; they might carry his relics and place them wherever they wished. Italy served as a “sacred center” from which the veneration moved beyond the Alps from the sixth through the eighth centuries. Pilgrims to Monte Gargano and Rome brought back relics, hagiographies, and liturgical texts to found Michael dedications, primarily that of Mont Saint-Michel. I follow this development in “Michael Goes North,” the fifth chapter, where my findings coincide with recent European scholarship to overturn an “insular” model of diffusion. Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks hardly spread a Celtic devotion for the archangel on the continent. They instead used Garganic relics and Roman liturgical texts to disseminate a Roman cult already known to the Frankish Church. Bishops, in fact, saw Michael’s liturgical veneration as normal while viewing all other approaches as suspect. Their proscription of amulets for appeal to angelic protection resulted in the trial of the shadowy Frank named Aldebert. Chapter 6 examines the Roman Synod of 745 and its declaration that Aldebert’s invocation of a group of seven archangels was heretical and dangerous. The prayer’s resemblance to an amulet unfortunately summoned demons to pose as angels. The only angels that could be named were those mentioned specifically in Scripture: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. The Carolingian Church forbade the use of amulets and personal appeals to Michael, encouraging instead his licit celebration by means of a standardized Roman liturgy. When in 813 the Council of Mainz recognized the archangel as a universal intercessor, the assembled bishops merely acknowledged a devotion already widely observed across western and northwestern Europe.
Between 300 and 800, the Christian Church shaped a cult for Michael in apparent violation of the specific angelic refusal of veneration found in scripture and echoed by later patristic authors. It centered this veneration on a Jewish heavenly figure whose healing and protective capacities threatened to infringe on those of Christ. Invoked through private prayers, the wearing of amulets, and ritual performances at shared religious sites, the anthropomorphized archangel became the guardian of the Church, the conqueror of Satan, the protector of the faithful from the Devil, and the guide of souls to judgment.” Tracking his footprints discloses why this numinous creature only briefly mentioned in scripture received a sanctioned liturgical cultus celebrated in the manner of the human Christian saints.
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