Mont-Saint-Michel is thought to date back to 708 when the Bishop of Avranches had a sanctuary built in honor of the Archangel Michael on this rock in the Normandy region of the French coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The mount soon became a major focus of pilgrimage. In the 10^th century, the Benedictine order of Catholic monks settled into the abbey, while a village grew up below its walls. Mont-Saint-Michel was also a fortress impregnable to invasion during the Hundred Years War with France in the 14^th century. It is surrounded by water when the tide comes in and only barely accessible when the tide goes out.

Why build a cathedral dedicated to the worship of Saint Michael instead of the Jesus or to Mary? Saint Michael whose statue is situated on the very top of the cathedral was thought to be the head of the heavenly militia. He appears in the New Testament in the Book of Revelation: he fights and defeats a dragon, symbol of the devil. For relatively new Christians, Jesus’ message of forgiveness and mercy was just too foreign to their nature and experience. As we see in the epic of Beowulf, early Christians, so very recently pagan, looked for something more familiar in the Christian story. Militancy and the sword were what they lived by, so God’s general, so to speak, was easier to relate to than other figures in the new religion.

Henry Adams in his book Mont Saint Michel and Chartres writes “The archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath . . . Saint-Michael held a place of his own in heaven and on earth which seems, in the eleventh century, more to leave hardly room” (7) for the Virgin or the gentle Jesus. “The archangel stands for Church and State, and both militant. He is the conqueror of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God. His place was where the danger was greatest. . . . So the Normans, when they were converted to Christianity, put themselves under his powerful protection. So he stood for centuries on his Mount in Peril of the Sea . . . So soldiers, nobles and monarchs went on pilgrimage to his shrine; so the common people followed . . .”(7)

The statue of Michael is too high to see, but a statue of similar composition is found in Paris at the fountain Place Saint Michel in Paris.

Soon after building began on the cathedral, Duke William of Normandy raised an army of forty thousand men from this area to invade England in 1066 where they stayed and ruled. For 150 years Normandy and England were united, so one might say that the same people who invaded, ruled, influenced and mingled its genes with the Anglo-Saxons of England were the same people who continued pressing west to discover and settle North America.

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. 1904. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Burckhardt, Titus. Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1995.