St Michael and All Angels
King's College Chapel
Halifax, September 26, AD 1985
by Rev Dr Robert Darwin Crouse
“There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not...” Rev. 12:7
For the modern, secular mind, a celebration of angels must seem to have about it something of the air of fantasy. It seems to represent a universe teaming with strange creatures of imagination – the stuff of occult dreams, or the stock-in-trade of science fiction. Insofar as we share that secular mind – and I’m sure we all do, to some considerable extent – our real world is limited to empirically observable phenomena, and what our scientific methods can extrapolate from those phenomena. In that view of things, angels seem to have no place at all, and when we hear of “war in heaven”, we seem to be presented with some sort of extravagant metaphor of “Star Wars”. And who wants to celebrate that?
Yet, we can’t quite close the door to angels. They insinuate themselves, if only in the lingering suspicion that something might just possibly be missing in our prosaic view of things: some deeper dimension of reality, some awesome truth which has somehow just escaped our calculations, a hint of rustling wings which we have almost, but not quite, heard. They insinuate themselves, by our sense of the empty space their absence leaves in our universe of thought and imagination.
When we read the history of man’s religious consciousness, we meet them everywhere, in every place and culture; when we consider our finest traditions of philosophy, and theology, and art and poetry, they are there in plenty. Above all, we meet them in the sacred word of God, at every crucial juncture: there they are, in Creation, in Redemption, and in Judgement. They are there so decisively that even the most earnest demythologizers of religion cannot quite explode them.
But who, or what, are these angels, these messengers and messages of God? Philo of Alexandria, the great first-century Jewish philosopher and interpreter of Scripture, calls them logoi – reasons, ideas, intellectual principles, according to which God’s universe is constituted and governed; they are the agents, the messengers of the Providence of God. They are the everlasting reasons, the pure ideas of things, hovering around the throne of God in praise and adoration. Dante, with his mind ‘imparadised”, lifts us to a glimpse of them:
This as the sparks from molten iron sped
So did the sparks about the circles chase…
From choir to choir I heard Hosanna rolled
to that fixt point which holds them in their home,
hath held them ever, and shall ever hold.
They are the pure, living, governing ideas of things in the Providence of God. Thus Jesus speaks of them in today’s Gospel lesson, when he says of the children that their angels do always behold the face of their heavenly Father. That is what is meant by guardian angels: all things in creation are upheld by the pure ideas of them in the Providence of God lest they slip away into nothingness.
But a further dimension to all this is added by our lesson from the Book of Revelation: “There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels….” Here, surely, is a shocking thought: are there, can there be, in God’s creation, living principles of evil, angels who rebel? Can there be such contradiction at the very heart of things? Who are those wicked angels against whom Michael wages war?
There are, strictly speaking, no living principles of evil: the wicked angels have reality and power only as willful perversions of principles of good. Satan, after all, is Lucifer, bearer of light, who has chosen the darkness of his own fraudulent divinity; and he has now only a kind of parasitical reality, and he is fierce, “because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
His deceptions are unmasked; his power – seductive power of willful perversions of the good – is shattered, by the freely willed obedience of the Son of God. “Now is come salvation…. For the accuser of our brethren is cast down….And they overcame him through the blood of the Lamb.”
When we keep this festival of Michael, “warrior primate of celestial chivalry”, we do not indulge in fantasy; rather, we celebrate those living principles of good, which inform God’s natural and spiritual creation. This feast sets before us the context and dimension of our Christian conflict, which are so largely lost to us in the pedestrian standpoint of modern secular religion. It reminds me, as the Epistle to the Ephesians has it, that
“we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness
in high places.”
And it tells us that, in principle, that war is won. “The dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.” That war is won. So sings St. John, the seer of Patmos, enraptured as he gazes towards the open heaven. Ah yes, and we too “shall see the heavens opened, and we shall see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
Tim Wynne-Jones, best known in these parts for his mystery novel, Odd’s End, set in King’s College and Lunenburg County, has written some verses in honour of St. Michael, specially for our choir to sing today, and I’m going to conclude by quoting the first verse:
There are no shadows in the dark
Which Total Darkness brings,
When Earth enfolded in the wings
Of Dragon Death, most misses light,
And cries with one voice, Raise us up!
Michael, Prince of Daniel’s Dream,
Up to where the war is won,
Lift us, Angel of the Sun.
Amen +
