Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and the Other Bodiless Powers

The angels in Scripture and the Church's faith

The existence of a vast created order of spirits, "ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation" (Hebrews 1:14), runs through the whole of Scripture: the cherubim set at the gate of Eden, the angel of the Lord that stays Abraham's hand and wrestles with Jacob, the hosts seen by Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel, the archangel Gabriel who announces the Forerunner and the Incarnation, the angel who rolls back the stone, the "war in heaven" of the Apocalypse. The Church confesses the angels in the first article of the Creed, among the "things invisible" made by God through the Son (Colossians 1:16); they are creatures, not gods — bodiless, deathless, mighty, but finite and made — and the whole point of a feast of the angels is to honour them rightly, as fellow-servants, without the idolatry that turns servants into lords.

That danger was real and local. The valley of the Lycus in Phrygia, where the Miracle at Chonae would later be set, had been warned by the Apostle Paul himself against a "worshipping of angels" (Colossians 2:18), and the mid-fourth-century Council of Laodicea, meeting a few miles away, condemned in its thirty-fifth canon the practice of "naming" and invoking angels as though they were rulers of the world, anathematizing it as a forsaking of Christ — while affirming the angels' true veneration. The received tradition sees in that same council the establishing of the November 8 feast: the Church's positive answer to a crooked piety, fixing the honour of the angels within the confession of the one God whom they serve.

The nine orders: the hierarchy of Dionysius

The Church's ordered account of the angelic world — nine "ranks" (τάγματα) gathered into three triads — is drawn from Scripture but systematised in the treatise On the Celestial Hierarchy, part of the Corpus Areopagiticum transmitted under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul. Whatever the true date and authorship of that profound mystical-theological corpus — a question treated in the Areopagite's own entry — its scheme of the nine orders was received by the Fathers of East and West (Gregory the Theologian and Gregory the Great among them) and became the Church's common language for the invisible world; the hymns of this very feast presuppose it.

Dionysius names the nine from the words of Scripture and arranges them by their nearness to God:

• The first and highest triad, immediately about the throne: the Seraphim ("burning ones," Isaiah 6), six-winged, aflame with love and kindling it in others; the Cherubim ("fullness of knowledge," Genesis 3:24; Ezekiel 10), many-eyed, radiant with the light of the knowledge of God; and the Thrones (Colossians 1:16), who bear God mystically and are the ministers of his justice.
• The middle triad, the order of governance: Dominions (Κυριότητες), who rule the lower angels and teach the mastery of self; Powers (Δυνάμεις), who work the miracles of God and strengthen the patient; and Authorities or Virtues (Ἐξουσίαι), who hold power over the demons and shield men from temptation.
• The lowest triad, nearest to the created world and to us: Principalities (Ἀρχαί), who watch over nations and rulers; Archangels, the messengers of God's great tidings, who reveal the prophecies and mysteries of the faith; and Angels, the lowest and closest to men, the guardians who guide, uphold the steadfast, and raise the fallen, and "never abandon us, and are always ready to help, if we desire it."

All nine are called, loosely, "angels," from their office of being sent (ἄγγελος, messenger); the Lord reveals his will to the highest, who pass it in turn to the lower, so that the whole hierarchy is a single ladder of light from God to man. The feast keeps them all together — this is the force of the word Synaxis, an assembly — with Michael at their head.

Michael the Archistrategos and the fall of Lucifer

Over all nine ranks the tradition sets the Archangel Michael as Ἀρχιστράτηγος, chief-commander of the hosts of the Lord — the title under which he appears to Joshua (below) and the character in which the Church invokes him. His pre-eminence is bound up with the primal catastrophe of the spiritual world. When Lucifer, "son of the morning" (Isaiah 14:12), the highest of the creatures, was lifted up in pride and would set his throne above God's, drawing after him a third of the stars of heaven (Revelation 12:4), it was Michael who stood fast and rallied the angels who remained faithful. The Church hears in his Hebrew name itself — mi-ka-El, "Who is like God?" — the war-cry of that first battle: not a name only but a confession, the humble creature's refusal of the creature's self-exaltation, hurled against the "I will be like the Most High." "Let us attend! Let us stand aright before our Creator," the tradition puts on his lips, "and let us not consider doing what is displeasing to God." So the Apocalypse: "there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not" (Revelation 12:7–9). The feast of the Bodiless Powers is therefore also a feast of the great confession by which the angelic world was divided and confirmed: the good angels fixed for ever in the love of God, the fallen fixed for ever in their revolt.

The named archangels

Beyond Michael, Scripture and tradition give the names and offices of the chief archangels — seven "who stand before God" (Tobit 12:15; Revelation 8:2), to whom an eighth is often added. The Church names them and reads their names as their ministries:

• Michael — "Who is like God?" — chief commander, defender of the people of God, who treads down the dragon.
• Gabriel — "the strength of God" — the herald of the divine counsels, who announced to Zachariah the birth of the Forerunner (Luke 1:19) and to the Virgin the Incarnation of the Word (Luke 1:26), and who is honoured in his own synaxis on the day after the Annunciation (March 26) and again on July 13.
• Raphael — "the healing of God" — the companion and healer of the Book of Tobit (Tobit 3:16; 12:15).
• Uriel — "the fire (or light) of God" — the enlightener of darkened minds (2 Esdras 4–5).
• Selaphiel — "the prayer of God" — who moves men to prayer and prays for them.
• Jegudiel (Jehudiel) — "the glorifier of God" — who encourages labour for the glory of God and intercedes for its reward.
• Barachiel — "the blessing of God" — the distributor of God's blessings on good works.
• Jeremiel (Jerahmeel) — "the exaltation of God" — the eighth name, added in many books from 2 Esdras 4:36.

The biblical appearances of Michael

The Church's veneration of Michael rests on a chain of scriptural manifestations, which the hymns of the feast and the synaxarion rehearse:

• Joshua at Jericho. When Joshua son of Nun stood before the walls of Jericho, "there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand," who declared himself "captain of the host of the Lord" (ἀρχιστράτηγος δυνάμεως Κυρίου), and bade Joshua loose his sandal, for the ground was holy (Joshua 5:13–16). The tradition reads this captain of the Lord's host as Michael, and it is from this passage above all that his standing title Archistrategos derives.
• Daniel. In the visions of Daniel, Michael is "one of the chief princes" who comes to the aid of the people (Daniel 10:13, 21), and "the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people," who shall arise at the time of the end (Daniel 12:1) — the angelic guardian of Israel, and so, the Church reads, of the new Israel.
• Jude. The Epistle of Jude records that "Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee" (Jude 9) — a fragment of ancient tradition witnessing both to Michael's authority over the adversary and to his own creaturely humility.
• The Apocalypse. In Revelation 12:7 Michael leads the angels in the war against the dragon, the definitive scriptural image of his office as commander of the heavenly host.

To these Scripture and tradition join the many acts of the "power of the Lord" wrought through the Archangel: the pillar of cloud and fire before Israel in the Exodus and the drowning of Pharaoh's host; the smiting of the hundred and eighty-five thousand of Sennacherib's army in a night (4 Kingdoms 19:35); the protection of the Three Youths in the furnace (Daniel 3) and of Daniel among the lions; and, in the age of the Church, deliverances without number — among them the Miracle at Chonae, where Michael cleft the rock to swallow the flood loosed against his shrine, a wonder so beloved that it holds its own feast on September 6 and shares its hymns with this day.

Why the eighth of the ninth month

The date is chosen to teach. In the old reckoning the year began in March; November is therefore the ninth month, kept for the nine ranks of the angels. And the eighth day is chosen because the number eight is, for the Fathers, the number of the age to come: the present world runs in the seven days of its creation, but "after the end of this age will come the Eighth Day," the day of the Dread Judgment that has no evening, when — as the Gospel of the feast proclaims — "the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him" (Matthew 25:31). The angels who now minister unseen will then be revealed as the reapers and the retinue of the Judge; to keep their feast on the eighth day is to set the whole angelic world under the sign of that consummation.

The spread of the feast and the dedication of churches

From its Byzantine establishment the Synaxis of the Bodiless Powers became one of the great fixed feasts of the angelic year and the head of a whole cycle of Michaelite commemorations — with the Miracle at Chonae (September 6), the Synaxis of Gabriel (March 26 and July 13), and countless local dedications. Its hold on the Christian imagination is measured in stone: from the sanctuary of Monte Gargano and the Michaelion at Constantinople to the innumerable churches, cathedrals and monasteries of the East, the Archangel is among the most widely dedicated of all the saints. In Rus' the devotion was especially intense — "there was not a city," the old accounts say, "without a church or chapel of the Archangel Michael"; the Archangel Cathedral (Arkhangelsky Sobor) in the Moscow Kremlin became the burial church of the grand princes and tsars, and cathedrals of the Archangel rose at Kiev, Smolensk, Nizhny Novgorod, Great Ustiug and elsewhere. Michael was invoked as the defender of cities and of armies, the conqueror of every spiritual and bodily enemy — the "Blessed Host of the Heavenly King," as a famous Kremlin icon names the Christian soldiery ranged under his command.