Of Angels and Faeries
The poetic angelology of the Middle Ages
Sunday’s essay, which introduced the Middle Ages as the Age of Angels, began with a reflection on Mont-Saint-Michel, which was not only a singularly captivating monument to medieval spirituality but also an active monastery and a favored pilgrimage destination.
The origin of the abbey can be traced back to one of those miraculous and disturbing legends that seemed to circulate so freely in the Middle Ages:
The story goes that in 708 the archangel Michael told Aubert, the Bishop of Avranches, to build a church on Mont Tombe for him. St Aubert ignored him at first, but the archangel returned and reputedly burned a hole in Aubert’s skull with his finger. The Bishop realized that he could ignore the archangel no longer and Mont Tombe was dedicated to Michael on October 16, 708. St Aubert built the first church on the island and it has been known as Mont Saint-Michel ever since.1
I’m not sure how to assess the historicity of this account, but the moral of the story is clear enough: if an archangel asks you to do something, do it.
In any case, it is fitting that Mont-Saint-Michel should originate in a legend that evokes the literary qualities of a (rather grisly) fable, because it is one of the most literary places on earth—when I look at it, I feel like I’m seeing the real-life version of Camelot. But maybe it’s not so surprising that a poetically inclined medievalist like me, seeking refuge from the concrete jungles of postmodernity, would struggle to disentangle Mont-Saint-Michel from the dreamy realms of chivalric Romance. The more interesting thing is that medieval people themselves might have had a similar reaction. I can’t know what exactly they were thinking as they made their way to the Benedictine monastery on that tidal island “in peril of the sea,” as the pilgrims used to say. But I can ponder the medieval imagination through medieval artwork, and when I do so, I notice that depictions of idealized castles bear a certain resemblance to the Mount:
I guess what I’m saying is that maybe a few medieval people reached the same conclusion that I did: The Mount of St. Michael the Archangel is clearly a physical place, but it doesn’t really belong in the physical world. It belongs, first and foremost, in a faerie tale.
If you’re wondering why I used the spelling “faerie” instead of “fairy,” the Oxford English Dictionary explains it: “sometimes … the form faerie is deliberately chosen to describe beings which differ from the conventional representation of fairies as small, delicate winged creatures, [especially] in being more dangerous or sinister.” In medieval literature, faeries were not fairies; they were threatening, supernatural beings with magical powers. Their proper home was not middangeard, the “middle-earth” where mankind dwelt, but faerie land, which bore resemblance to human lands yet was somehow beyond the reach of human sight. This place was not the Underworld; it was the Otherworld.
What are we to make of these medieval faeries, which seem like relics of paganism but were swirling around in the medieval imagination long after the arrival of Christianity? Dangerous, magical, supernatural, nearby yet unseen, mysteriously powerful—to me they sound rather like angels who were cast down from heaven but got tangled in the web of human folklore and didn’t make it to their infernal destination. They ended up in the Otherworld, trapped between earth and hell, suspended between innocence and guilt—not really at war with mankind, like the demons, but not exactly friendly either, and certainly not to be trusted. Medieval faeries didn’t have wings, but then God’s bodiless envoys don’t really have wings either, and the Bible showed that angels were sometimes indistinguishable from ordinary human beings: the angels that visited Abraham appeared as “three men standing by him,” and the encounter between Joshua and the angelic visitor was described thus: “there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand.”
I say all this because it gives us insight, I believe, into the remarkable angelology of the Middle Ages. It provides psychological context for what Dr. David Keck, a historian whom I mentioned in the previous article, calls “the pervasive ministries of the angels” in medieval culture. “Pervasive” is a strong word, but think about it: If you grew up in a folkloric ambience populated by faeries, and if a chill, fey breeze sighing through an autumnal woodland were enough to make you worry that those faeries were real and near at hand, would it not be natural to believe that angels—which the village parson insisted were true and noble spirits sent by the good God—would it not be natural to believe that angels were all around you? Or even that they were, in a certain sense, everywhere? For as Dr. Keck assures us, that is indeed what medieval Christians believed: “In the Middle Ages, angels were ubiquitous.”
One of my main objectives in this essay is to start framing the medieval angelic experience as a deeply literary experience. I don’t mean that medieval folks understood angels as fictional or folkloric beings, in the way that we now understand faeries as fictional and folkloric beings—angels were real, and they were inseparable from the religious truths upon which all of medieval society was built. I mean, rather, that their extraordinarily rich angelology was rooted in and nourished by their inherently poetic life, their love for mystical and mythological stories, and—above all—their profoundly literary encounter with the Bible. We will continue this line of thought on Sunday. For now, let’s conclude with a historical vignette in which medieval literature crosses paths with the medieval world’s favorite angel; the encounter takes place on the Mount that this very angel claimed for himself.
In the tenth century, Mont-Saint-Michel’s original church was seriously damaged in a fire. Restoration began in the early eleventh century, and after the completion of the new abbey in 1080, the site rapidly gained popularity among the faithful—the enchanting location was no less appealing to medieval folks than it is to modern tourists.
Nowadays, when people build or establish something—presumably a business of some kind—that grows and thrives and eventually becomes highly successful, what might they do? They might start selling shares on the stock market (I think that’s called an IPO), or wait for a major anniversary and turn the success into a promotional event, or even sell the business to a larger corporation, which seems to happen frequently and be very profitable though I don’t really understand why (you can perhaps discern that I’m out of my depth here). I suppose all those things make sense when you live in a culture that thinks a lot about money and perceives it, often subconsciously, as the solution to most of life’s problems—a perception, by the way, which is quite strange given that the world’s most revered book says the opposite: “the desire of money is the root of all evil, which while some lusted after, they erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
But what if you lived in the High Middle Ages, when the poetry of life resonated so much more strongly in the human heart, and when money wasn’t quite so alluring because you couldn’t eat it, or make an herbal remedy from it, or pasture sheep on it, or fend off a Viking raiding party with it? And what if the thing that someone built was not a business but a monastery, which certainly had its place in the local economy but also served as a spiritual refuge where men spent multiple hours every day singing Latinized Hebrew poems about God? What might you do then?
Well, we know what a young man named Guillaume de Saint-Paier did. He was a monk at Mont-Saint-Michel in the twelfth century and wanted the monastery’s many pilgrims to know more about its history. To that end, he wrote Li Romanz du Mont-Saint-Michel, a prodigious historical chronicle in vernacular verse: almost 3800 lines composed in the octosyllabic rhyming couplets that Marie de France was using around the same time to delight the readers of her secular poems. Guillaume’s “Romance” of Mount St. Michael survives as a literary monument to the profoundly poetic spirit of the Middle Ages, to the spiritual grandeur of Mont-Saint-Michel, and to the great love that medieval folks had for the mysterious and glorious creatures who are, in Greek, angeloi: those who deliver the messages of God.
“The Romance of Mont Saint-Michel,” Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Blog, published by the British Library.
Imagine getting a visit, in person, from the Archangel Michael, and just going, "Mmm... Nah."
Great! Even more to learn about Mont-Saint=Michel! Thank you!!