…I thought I would do something very tangentially related to good St. Michael the Archangel.
Michael, as we know, is the go-to guy for defeating Satan, and the ancient Jewish and Christian imagination long ago sacralized the image of the dragon as it sacralized pretty much every image it came in contact with. The big issue for ancients tended not to be first, “Is it real?” but “What does it mean? How is this image connected to the vast web of other images that populate our mental world and how does it connect to and reveal the nature of the hidden spiritual world behind this one?”
So when you dug up enormous skeletons of creatures buried in the earth, they were amazing, but the primary questions (especially for thinkers in the Judeo-Christian tradition) were not scientific but spiritual. These giant bones were a dragon, of course. You could see that by looking at it. But what do dragons, crocodiles, and great monsters of the deep mean?
Well, they meant lots of things:
They were big, wonderful animals you could see at play from the deck of a boat.
O LORD, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
which teems with things innumerable,
living things both small and great.
There go the ships,
and Leviathan which you formed to sport in it. (Ps 104:24–26)
But they were also images of primal forces in the world, shading off into myth just as horses, lions, and sheep did. They were also made by God, of course. But they were also terrible in power and images of the daunting world in which man lives and of God’s greater power:
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook,
or press down his tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in his nose,
or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he make many supplications to you?
Will he speak to you soft words?
Will he make a covenant with you
to take him for your servant for ever?
Will you play with him as with a bird,
or will you put him on leash for your maidens?
Will traders bargain over him?
Will they divide him up among the merchants?
Can you fill his skin with harpoons,
or his head with fishing spears?
Lay hands on him;
think of the battle; you will not do it again!
Behold, the hope of a man is disappointed;
he is laid low even at the sight of him.
No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.
Who then is he that can stand before me?
Who has given to me, that I should repay him?
Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine. (Job 41:1–11)
They were primal mythic beasts against which God fought in the day of Creation and whom he defeated to make food for his creatures:
Yet God my King is from of old,
working salvation in the midst of the earth.
You divided the sea by your might;
you broke the heads of the dragons on the waters.
You crushed the heads of Leviathan,
you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. (Ps 74:12–14)
And they were images of vast cosmic forces at work in the heaving and tormented world of the nations that Jewish imagination tended to identify with the chaos of the sea, forces that would only be tamed on That Day, the great and terrible Day of the Lord:
In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Is 27:1)
This is, to say the very least, not a mentality that dwells within a thousand miles of scientific analysis. It is, in a word, sacral imagination being brought to bear on a deeply mysterious and wonderful world in which, among other things, giant monsters abound.
The kinds of questions that are asked about such monsters for the most part take place, in antiquity, in a world that has not yet made any clear distinctions between science, philosophy, theology, or art.
I mention all this because it is vital to understand that when the early Christian imagination tells us this:
Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Re 12:7–9)
…it no more intends to say that St. Michael fought an ancient reptile than it means to tell us that Satan is a dinosaur. Dinosaurs and other fossils undoubtedly contributed to the growth of the human myth of dragons and other mythical monsters such as the cyclops. But consideration of whether such monsters were “real” was secondary to ancients. Very likely, those who had seen giant fossil remains took it as self-evident proof that such monsters did exist. But what mattered was their meaning. In the case of St. Michael, what mattered was that the God of Israel worked, much as the Persian King of Kings, to rule the world in order and keep the various primal forces that sometimes erupted (who knows why?) in line through his well-ordered ranks of angelic satraps.
The modern mind, of course, immediately rushes to assert that we are therefore free to assume that angels are just as unreal as dragons. The problem is that this does not follow logically at all. The fact that human imagination is forced to clothe invisible spirits in imagery familiar to us does not mean such spirits don’t exist any more than it means God does not exist. It just means that humans always have to talk about what is not present to the senses in terms of things that are present to the senses. God does not really have a right hand, a mighty arm or a thunderous voice. But we speak of him in those terms because all human language depends on sensory images to speak of the non-sensory.
And now, as a reward for your patience with my little reflection, here is a fun documentary!
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