And the petition was granted, for on the third day the great Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop and told him that the portent of the returning arrow was intended to show that he wished to have a sanctuary consecrated in that cave to the glory of God, and in honour of the angels. So immediately the Bishop came forth, and, gathering all the people to him, led them, with prayers and chants, into the heart of the hills to the mysterious cavern, and entering in, they found it hollowed out and disposed in the form of a church, with all things ready, so that the Bishop at once said Mass there; and from that hour so many wonderful miracles took place on that spot that all men knew certainly that it was greatly favoured by heaven. And from that day to this it has been a place of holy pilgrimage, where many sinners have been converted, and many, afflicted with terrible diseases, cured.
The church celebrates the Apparition of St. Michael the Archangel on Monte Gargano, on May 8, but the feast of that spring morning is not the only one in which she commemorates his glorious interventions on her behalf. Far away in the north, another promontory, strangely like that of Monte Gargano, once encircled by forests too, but now cut off from the land at each return of the tide, the Mont Saint-Michel, stands as the last outpost of France, flinging defiance at its twin peak across the water in Britain. There is something strangely significant in the choice of these two points for the most notable apparitions of the great Archangel who commands the heavenly hosts and watches with such sublime benignity over the destinies of men. One in the north and one in the south, the great lonely rocks rise sheer from the sea as if set apart as resting-places where the glorious pinions might be folded for a while, and the effulgence of the angelic countenance, too overwhelming for man to bear as it comes straight from the Presence of God, a little tempered and veiled by the mists of sorrowful earth. But one feels, too, that the purity of the lonely rock, the brave song of the wind, the long roll of Atlantic surge and the chant of Adriatic billows, were dear and welcome to the Warrior Angel, who holds our world in his hands as the Creator’s chief Minister, who carries out His mandates, chastizing when he must, but so tender to the contrite, so inspiring to the valiant, so royal in protection to the oppressed!
Of all the peaks that bear his name through the length and breadth of Europe none has been more signally his own than this one on the coast of Brittany. The East has its own, in Phrygia, where also the Archangel deigned to manifest his love for us poor mortals by his visible presence, and where the marvel of that love is commemorated under the title of “The Synax of Michael, Prince of the Army and of the other Incorporeal Powers.” The Greeks always give such thunderously full titles to their friends in heaven! But I am sure they cannot honour their great protector half so heartily as he has been honoured on the Mont Saint-Michel ever since he touched it and consecrated it for all time, in the eighth century. The details that have come down to us of that Apparition are somewhat less full than those of the one at Monte Gargano, but the subsequent history of the French sanctuary, which stood for just a thousand years as an impregnable fortress, is connected, right through, with humanity as the lonely shrine of the South has never been. Its name alone is like a war-cry—“Saint Michel au Péril de la Mer,” Saint Michael of the Peril of the Sea—and bespeaks the invincible ally of the race that was once the ardent apostle of Christianity and its most valiant champion.
It was to Saint Aubert that the revelation came, when he was Bishop of Avranches, in the reign of Childeburt II. The Archangel appeared to him in his sleep, says the Breviary, and bade him build a church on the sentinel rock, round which already many pious hermits were gathered to serve God in solitude. Now Saint Aubert was a man who reflected much before taking any new step, and he hesitated so long that the Archangel had to repeat his visit three times before he was obeyed—a great encouragement, this, to timid souls!—but then the Saint went to work valiantly enough. The rock was of a strange rounded shape, and he built on its summit a great round church, as closely resembling the holy cave at Monte Gargano as possible. Then he sent to that place to fetch stones and relics from it, all of which he set with great honour in the newer sanctuary; and when all was done he established and endowed there a monastery of twelve “holy clerks for the perpetual service of the Blessed Archangel.”
But Richard I, Duke of Normandy, wished still further to honour St. Michael, so he sent away the clerks and established the Benedictines in their place; and the fame of the Shrine and of the many miracles performed there drew a great concourse of pilgrims from all over the world, especially royal pilgrims from England and Europe generally, so that when the Order of the Knights of St. Michael was instituted, this was their Chapter House. By that time it was already one of the most ancient and one of the few “maiden” fortresses of the realm, and never, until the monarchy succumbed to the Revolution, did a single foe to France succeed in setting foot within its walls. For a thousand years, seven times a day, the praises of God had rung out from it over the sea; for a thousand years the standard of France floated stainless above its battlements. “Monsieur Saint-Michel, Archange, premier Chevalier, qui pour la querelle de Dieu victorieusement batailla contre le dragon” (it is thus that his titles are given in the Institutes of the Order founded in 1469), took care of his own—till France drove him away.
INDEX
A
Acciajuoli, Lorenzo, [262]
Acciajuoli, Nicholas, [246], [251-2], [261] et sq.
Aglaë, [3] et sq.