St. Michael the Archangel: Who he is, history in the Church, and Courage at the End of the World.
If you’ve read the book of Revelation or been at all involved in church history, you’ve heard of St. Michael the Archangel. Very few angels are named in scripture. Gabriel, Michael, and (if you follow the book of Tobit) Raphael. Because of this, many of us have questions. Who is he? What does he do? Why was this angel so important as to be given a name?
“Michael” means Who is like God?, a name that isn’t a boast, but a rebuke to pride. In Scripture, St. Michael appears as the warrior of heaven, the guardian of God’s people, and the angel who contends with the devil. Daniel calls him “the great prince who stands guard over the children of your people” (Daniel 12:1). Jude remembers him refusing to trade insults with the evil one, appealing instead to the Lord’s authority (Jude 9). John’s Apocalypse shows him leading the armies of heaven, casting down the dragon and his angels (Revelation 12:7–9). The Church has always read these scenes as more than ancient poetry; they are theological windows into the unseen realm. Michael is not an imaginative figure or an artistic rendition of theological truth. He is an archangel, a personal creature of God, a pure intelligence who serves the Triune Lord and defends the Church.
Christian memory kept that vision near the surface. In the West, Michaelmas (September 29) became a fixed feast, a day to remember that the Church is never unguarded. In the East, the Synaxis of the Archangels gathers the faithful under its patronage every November 8. Between the Testaments and the feasts stands the prayer of generations: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle…,” a late nineteenth-century text attributed to Pope Leo XIII that distilled an older idea, when evil presses in, we ask the captain of the heavenly host to marshal our courage and bear our petitions before God. Shrines rose on promontories and high places across Christendom, Monte Sant’Angelo on the Gargano, Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, because the imagination of the Church associated Michael with edges, thresholds, and the meeting of near and far.
Sometimes that devotion left its mark quite literally. Among the oldest known Christian tattoos ever identified is the name “Michael” inked in Greek on the inner thigh of a woman’s mummified remains from the Nile Valley, evidence that believers as early as the first millennium marked their very bodies with trust in the archangel’s protection. It is a small, poignant detail: Christians have long believed that spiritual warfare is not an abstraction. It touches time and place and flesh; it calls for humble, embodied fidelity. Michael’s name became a prayer you could carry on your skin.
As we stated earlier, Michael was often associated with the edges of civilization, the place between the known and unknown. One group of monks in particular took this to the extreme, casting themselves further from civilization than any others and trusting in Michael’s protection.
Sail southwest from Ireland’s Kerry coast and a jagged tooth of rock rises out of the Atlantic: Skellig Michael. If you have watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the place where Luke Skywalker was in hiding was not a set, but Skellig Michael. What you see in the movie are the ruins of this ancient monastery. On that sea-battered summit, a community of monks built a monastery between the 6th and 8th centuries, dry-stone beehive cells corbelled against the wind, narrow steps hewn into cliff, an oratory open to the endless sky. To live on Skellig Michael was not a stunt; it was a confession. The monks sought a life so stripped of distraction that prayer could hold the horizon.
It isn’t hard to see why generations linked this rock with the archangel. Michael’s name frames reality with a question (Who is like God?), and Skellig answers by removing everything else. The Divine Office punctuated toil with praise: dawn psalmody before day’s first light, work in the plots of poor soil, a scrap of fish pulled from cold water, scripture murmured against the wind, compline under a wheeling vault of stars. If Michael stands, sword drawn, at the edge of heaven, casting down the accuser, these monks stood at the edge of earth, pushing back another kind of chaos: ignorance with learning, fear with prayer, and the despair of isolation with the companionship of a common rule. Their strength was not spectacle but stability; not fury, but fidelity.
To speak of Skellig is to speak about a way of resisting the unknown. It is not that the monks tamed the ocean; they let the ocean teach them their place. They did not try to erase the edge; they learned how to keep watch on it. That is spiritual warfare in its most Benedictine register: attention, humility, constancy. Michael fights as a servant, not a rival. The monks lived in that same posture on a stone where the weather could kill a man. Both, in their distinct orders, angelic and human, say the same thing: there is One who is like God, and we are not Him; therefore, we will trust, and we will stand.
Most of us won’t scale Skellig, and none of us commands angelic hosts. But the archangel and the monks offer a pattern we can live right where we are. The first practice is Michael’s own name. Make Who is like God? your prayer when pride swells or when fear tells you it’s all on you. Whisper it at your desk before a hard conversation, in the car before you walk into a hospital room, in the doorway of your home when anxiety tries to move in. That sentence disarms both arrogance and panic. It restores proportion: God is God; I am not; that is good news.
Let the monks teach you edges. Choose a little Skellig in your daily geography, a chair by a window, a corner of the yard, a stretch of sidewalk, and make it a place of watch. Keep a short psalm there. At the same time each day, return to that spot, open the page, and pray. It is not the romance of remote cliffs that changes a life; it is the stability of a kept hour. If you can, anchor your morning with the Lord’s Prayer and your night with Compline’s closing plea, “Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.” In between, insert one deliberate silence of two or three minutes and let the Holy Spirit re-center your thoughts. Skellig is less a destination than a habit.
Build a home strong against storms. Bless your thresholds and rooms with Scripture and prayer; keep a Bible and a candle where you actually sit; sing the doxology over meals; confess quickly and forgive faster; refuse to bring occult practice or manipulative “manifesting” techniques into your household and replace them with gratitude and intercession. The monks’ beehive cells were small because small places are easier to warm. A family or single person can do the same thing; craft a warm cell where God is explicitly welcomed and fear is explicitly turned away.
Finally, accept that courage usually looks like steadiness. Michael’s victory in Revelation culminates in praise, not pride. The monks’ triumph on Skellig was measured in crops grown from stingy soil and the unbroken chain of psalms across winters. Let your victories be similarly ordinary: the next right thing done without fanfare, the unglamorous repentance you don’t postpone, the consistent reappearance at prayer after yet another distraction. If you need a beginning, take it now: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; guard my mind, protect my home, strengthen my will to love. Lord Jesus Christ, teach me to stand.” Then go stand . . . at the edge of your day, at the edge of your fear, at the edge of the unknown and hold it back with prayer. That is how an angel’s name and a rock in the Atlantic become your life: not in spectacle, but in faith.