Ulysses Essay 10 (20:14)

Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 10

 “Michael’s host”

Having admitted to Haines his ill-tolerated subservience to the Catholic Church, Stephen contemplates the theological challenges that Catholic dogma confronted and overcame through the centuries: he recalls how the church mercilessly excommunicated the “heresiarchs” within the church for their heretical opinions (which mainly consisted of variant conceptions of the ”consubstantiality” of the Holy Trinity). Finally Stephen considers the earth shattering Protestant Reformation against which Catholicism – shaken to its core by this unprecedented revolt  – found it necessary to enlist the militant sword-wielding archangel Michael as its “defender” in order to disabuse Luther’s adherents of their traitorous heresies (unsuccessfully, as it turned out).

But the archangel Michael that jumps into my mind is a much more amiable being and relates to the Yom Kippur synagogue service. Jewish liturgy has very few mystical elements, but every now and again there are references to angels. One such occasion is during the “Minchah” (afternoon) service on Yom Kippur just before the highly devotional “Kedushah” (“Sanctification”) prayer. At this point, the reader intones the following delightful quatrain (quite unexpected in the context of the solemn confessional and atonement texts where it suddenly appears) and pauses while the congregation repeats it. I give it here in the original Hebrew because of its inimitable rhyming quality:

“Micha’el mi’yamin me’halel;

Ve’Gavriel mi’smol me’malmel;

Ba’shamayim ein Ka’El;

U’va’aretz, mi ke’amcha Yisrael?”

“Michael praises at [your] right;

And Gabriel murmurs at [your] left;

There is none in heaven like God;

And on the earth, who is like your people Israel?”

This origin of the quatrain is a statement in an early Midrashic work called “Pirke de’Rabbi Eliezer” (“The Sayings of Rabbi Eliezer”), which is traditionally attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (early second century C.E.), although probably it was only finally codified in the ninth century C.E. as it includes unmistakable references to the rise of Islam, including the Islamic conquests of Arabia, Spain and Rome (whose outskirts were plundered by Saracen raiders in 830 C.E. but which never actually fell to the Islamic forces).

The original statement in Pirke de’Rabbi Eliezer reads as follows, and is indeed more reminiscent of the fiery archangel Michael of the Catholic Church:

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“Four legions of the serving angels give praise before the holy One, Blessed be He:

The first host is that of Michael at his right;

The second host is that of Gabriel at his left;

The third host is that of Uriel in front of him;

The fourth host is of Rafael behind him.”

The Yom Kippur adaptation is both milder and more poetic. But I wonder whether its third line (“There is none in heaven like God”) is not a somewhat seditious attempt by its (unknown) composer to deny the Trinity, and to recapture, as it were, the archangel Michael from the clutches of the then sovereign Catholic Church under whose anti-Jewish domination most of the poetic sections of the Yom Kippur liturgy were composed.