Our Lenten focus on conversion and the old Confiteor takes us this week to “blessed Michael, the Archangel.”
The Bible speaks of three Archangels: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Michael is always prominently featured as at war with Satan, as the leader of the “heavenly hosts” that vanquishes the devil and his minions. We should learn two things from that Biblical testimony.
First, that there are angels. There was a certain fashion in some theological circles, especially in the 1970s/1980s, to downplay the reality of the angels and to write off the devil as a “symbol” of evil. This is nonsense.
St. Augustine defined evil as “the absence of good.” Evil is not something. Evil is a nothing that should not be there. Evil is the absence of what ought to exist. But while “nothings” can hurt, they cannot act. You need agents who cause nothings, who do evil. That’s persons—and angels (and devils) are persons.
“There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy,” Hamlet reminds us, riffing on 1 Corinthians 2:9. And generations of popes and theologians have reminded us that the devil’s greatest trick is getting people to think he doesn’t exist.
Evil has been part of the drama of creation from its beginning, even before the material world. Not because God made it or that it is material, but because personal beings choose to do evil–to destroy themselves (which is what nothingness is)–in the name of false freedom and autonomy.
That was Lucifer’s temptation. It was Adam’s and Eve’s. It is ours.
The second thing we should learn from what the Bible tells us about St. Michael the Archangel is that the moral life is a struggle with temptation and evil. St. Michael is presented from the start as a warrior, as he who “fought against the dragon” (Rev 12:7) and prevailed. It is why the Leonine Prayer to St. Michael at the end of Mass, which is making a comeback in many places, invokes the Archangel to “defend us in battle.” Indeed, St. Michael tells the devil that “the Lord rebuke you!” (Jude 9). Which is why St. Michael is usually depicted with a sword.
The idea of the spiritual life as spiritual warfare is not limited to St. Michael. It is a standard theme in Biblical theology. While we are warned against the triple temptation of the world, the flesh, and the devil, St. Paul makes clear that our spiritual warfare is not “against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).
Generations of Christians would have found nothing particularly groundbreaking in all of this. One wonders, however, whether a certain “functional pacificism” has infected religious–including Catholic–thinking that downplays the reality of spiritual warfare.
Good and evil are unalterably opposed. There can be no “détente,” no “peaceful coexistence” between them. It’s not that God could have worked out some “truce” with his rebellious creatures, taking a “live and let live” approach. No, either good will prevail or evil will prevail: there is no middle ground.
Our minds are built that way: if good and evil could “coexist” (as some callow bumper stickers urge), you would have to ask “Why? Isn’t good better than evil?” And, to the last question, your response could not just be “So what?” Because the very fact we recognize self-evidently that good “is better than” evil and “better” is to be preferred to “worse,” we come back to the very first principle of all human action: “Good is to be done, evil is to be avoided.”
Not because God arbitrarily affixed labels to some things as “good” and some as “evil,” but because they are irreconcilable. And, for the same reason, modern ideas of “freedom” or “choice” that treat good choices and evil choices as equally valid or legitimate, fail completely. Such thinking fails to reckon with what is wrought through the non-being of evil.
So, in invoking St. Michael, we ask him to restore to us a healthy “sense of sin,” an awareness so many popes have lamented is on the wane in modern culture. That healthy consciousness is not a morbid guilt complex, but one that recognizes that Christ, through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, has made the ultimate victory of good—of God!—inevitable. It’s why St. Paul urges us to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling,” (Phil 2:12)—not because God is unfaithful, but we can be and so often are.
And so, in our efforts to be faithful, to be valiant soldiers in our struggle with “the spiritual forces of evil,” we can ask for no better protector than St. Michael the Archangel.
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We recite the St Michael’s prayer after every Mass as a good Pope promulgated. As far as I can tell we are alone. The Modernist clergy do not believe in angels or devils – they are Teilhardian evolutionists – and they are oblivious to the corruption of their Faith.
The present ‘pope’ just cited that fraudulent heretic favorably. This must be a chastisement – how long Oh Lord,,, how long?
Priests trained and still praying the TLM, those priests belonging to religious orders whose constitutions and charisms call for continuing the TLM do incoporate the St. Michael prayer after every Mass. Also, surprisingly, there are a few diocesan parishes in Seattle which have begun to include this prayer after Mass.
YES, I agree that chastisements are now given to us, with more to follow if we do not change our ways.
I believe it was the late Joseph Sobran who refererred to Teilhard de Chardin as the first theologian in Catholic history to go from banned and fashionable to rehabilitated and outmoded all in one generation. Would that the current pontiff and those of his ilk had gotten the message! “Liberals” nowadays often seem so far behind the times.
Poor Joseph Sobran. I used to love his columns before he became ill & went off the rails. He really was a brilliant & moving writer.
Pretty much every parish church in our diocese prays the St. Michael prayer at the end of Mass.
You are not alone.
🙂
Modern man no longer knows what the difference is between what is good and what is evil.
Modern man has no idea who he is. Because of this, he can be observed flailing about heading nowhere in particular.
Well, as observed in Alice in Wonderland, if you going nowhere in particular any way should get you there.
However, John, such a course is likely to wind up in a deep hole whose only relief is a fantasied existence (such as those born male but insist this can be changed).
@DeaconEd — I didn’t say where you wound up would be good for you or even that you’d like it. 🙂
Agree wholeheartedly. In fact, one could almost guarantee the outcome.
Disney didn’t know or learn the Cat’s lesson. Its song lyrics for “Merrily on Our Way” have this kind of stuff in its 1949 film, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad:
“We’re merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily on our way
To nowhere in particular
We’re merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily on our way
Where the roads are perpendicular
We’re always in a hurry
We have no time to stall
We’ve got to be there
We’ve got to be there
But where we can’t recall
We’re merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily on our way
And we may be going to Devonshire, to Lancashire, to Worcestershire
We’re not so sure but what do we care
We’re only sure we’ve got to be there
We’re merrily on our way to nowhere at all.”
“Evil,” what evil? This from Georges Bernanos:
“The modern world will shortly no longer possess sufficient spiritual reserves to commit genuine evil. Already . . . we can witness a lethal slackening of men’s conscience that is attacking not only their moral life, but also their very heart and mind, altering and decomposing even their imagination . . . The menacing crisis is one of INFANTILISM.”
(Interview with Samedi-Soir, Nov. 8, 1947, cited in Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence” [San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996], 457, caps added).
Don’t quote this too loud. There are already too many people in the Vatican who don’t believe in moral culpability. Don’t give ’em excuses of “invincible ignorance” or even “habit.”
You know that a phrase has reached the mainstream when it becomes the title of a book:
The Devil’s Best Trick
The title originating with Baudelaire…???”Les fleurs du mal”
The research as of March 20, 2018:
Quote Origin: The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn’t Exist
So, in invoking St. Michael, we ask him to restore to us a healthy ‘sense of sin’, an awareness so many popes have lamented is on the wane in modern culture, advises Grondelski. Good advice because it’s obvious we’ve lost it and replaced it with a secular humanist attitude. That all is okay as long as we don’t hurt anyone. Not taking into account that spiritual hurt is not immediately visible but takes eventual effect like a toxic.
If God offers us his warrior Prince for our protection we should indeed invoke him. He reminds us that the cross is our battle ensign in the war against the evil within us as well as without.