St. Michael “Casting” or “Thrusting” Satan Into Hell?

When I began praying to St. Michael with my parishioners after every Mass, I didn’t realize that there was some issue with the translation. The prayer I had said for years asked the archangel to “thrust into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Some people say “cast into Hell” and others that the evil spirits “wander through the world for the ruin of souls” instead of “prowl.” Once, at a presbyteral council meeting in my diocese, the bishop, apparently indifferent or at least unopposed to the practice, mentioned that many priests said the prayer publicly after Mass, and a young priest asked, “thrust or cast?” but the bishop did not hear him. 

There is a USCCB publication, “Rebuke the Devil,” which prints many collated remarks of His Holiness Pope Francis about the devil (FYI: he hates him). In the book, the pope recommends the St. Michael prayer, and the paperback has it printed on the back cover just like I say it. Which is as it should be.

I suppose I say that because the words are familiar to me, and that may be just personal taste and a bias. Nevertheless, I think there is a real case for staying with what I know, both with “thrust” and with “prowl.” Consulting the old Raccolta, I note that words in Latin for them are based on detrudere and pervagor. The Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin by Fr. Leo Stelten (recommended by Cardinal Burke when he was still a lowly monsignor working in Rome) translates detrudere as “force away” or “thrust down.”

The prayer refers, of course, to Revelation 20:2-3, 

He [St. Michael] seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and locked and sealed it over him, so that he would deceive the nations no more.

Though I am a Shakespearean classicist (“small Latin and less Greek,” as a contemporary characterized the bard) I went back to the Greek text of the New Testament. The word in Greek for the verb translated as “thrust” or “cast” has many different meanings in the New Testament. According to Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider’s Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, it has many different nuances: such as “put,” as when Jesus puts his fingers into the ears of the deaf man (Mark 7:30); or “throwing,” as in Revelation 2:22 when the “woman Jezebel,” the false prophet of the Church at Thyatira, is forced into bed; also, “deposit,” as when Jesus sees the people giving to the Temple treasury (Mark 12:41).

The archangel “seizes” Satan, which gives the idea of wrestlers grappling in contest. The archangel takes the devil and forces him into the pit, which St. Michael then “seals.” One Bible commentary I saw on the internet took this as a reference to the mythological battle of the Greek god Apollo with the giant Python who was the enemy of his mother Leto. Apollo thrust Python into the hole at the shrine of Delphi, from which the serpent never could exit. 

“Cast” gives the impression of throwing a bundle off the side of a cliff down a deep chasm. But then St. Michael seals the cavity. Was the association with Apollo unconscious, or was it meant to redeem a myth by showing how good will conquer evil? One school thinks that where the myths seem to anticipate reality, like gods returning to life and the hostility of a serpent to the mother, were a kind of pre-evangelization of the unconscious to make minds ready for the reality of Redemption.

Another reason to opt for “thrust” is the reflection great artists have given of the passage we are dealing with. The great masters who painted the combat between St. Michael and Satan depict a kind of “mano a mano” physicality (e.g., the painting from the school of Peter Paul Rubens). This “imaging” or imagination of the fight makes the battle between good and evil more like a scene from an action movie. Perhaps it is because of such pictures that I see this passage of Revelation as an intimate contest of force, resonating with what I see as the strange intimacy with which the devils seem to treat Christ in the New Testament, speaking to Him, carrying Him up to high mountains, and the like. I do not comment here about the prophecy of “one thousand years” the devil loses power, which is a question great minds have puzzled about for centuries.  

Satan certainly didn’t lose all power to tempt mankind and lead us to self-destruction. “Lead us not into temptation” is about the testing we will always have in this world. Which is why I prefer “prowl” rather than wander. Pervagor is similar to what the devil admits to in Job, when God asks him where he was coming from, although the word perambulare is used. “Wander” has, for some, the connotation of “without destination,” which would be misinterpreted here for “without purpose.” The Latin of the St. Michael Prayer says the devil travels around “ad perditionem animarum” for the ruin of souls. “Prowl” conveys more of that intention. This recalls what St. Peter says about the devil “seeking whom to devour” (1 Peter 5:7).

A priest recently criticized saying the St. Michael Prayer after Masses because it was distracting from the Eucharist. Bishop Paprocki answered that objection well. A prayer after Mass cannot be an obstacle to the spiritual life. Why can’t we face the crisis in the world that includes our being on the field of battle between Christ and Satan publicly and communally? We need all the help we can get; and in the Mass, we are in the vestibule of Heaven and can connect with the saints and angels in an open channel, as every Preface reminds us.

The more I pray the St. Michael Prayer, the more I am convinced of its benefits. It is a biblical prayer in the sense that it is based on Scripture and the role given there to St. Michael. As St. Ignatius of Loyola insisted in the Exercises, we ought to envision the two armies on the battlefield in order to choose the side we’re on. The recent Joe Rogan interview with Mel Gibson showed the actor’s insight into the spiritual combat we are all engaged in. Why not communicate with God’s captain, St. Michael? 

And it is a prayer for individual help and that of others. I would almost, as a postscript, beg some prayers for special people. Pray for priests and religious. Patrick Fermor, not a devout Catholic but a friend of monks and the monastic vocation, imagined Satan’s devious plans against those committed to a vocation of special asceticism. It is worth reflecting on: 

Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumored to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism. Piety has always been singled out for the hardest onslaught of hellish aggression. The empty slopes of the wilderness become the lists for an unprecedented single combat, lasting forty days and nights, between the leaders of either faction; when the Thebaid filled up with hermits, their presence at once attracted a detachment of demons, and round the solitary pillar of St. Symeon the Stylite, the Powers of Darkness assembled and spun like swarming wasps. (From A Time to Keep Silence)

If you haven’t said the prayer in a while, get back to it. Whatever wording you use for the prayer, keep on praying it.