Saint George
The dragonslayer
He is risen!
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- Hugh
Join me today as we meet Saint George the dragonslayer, athlete of God and first among the military saints.
Name: George
Life: Probably died 303 AD
Status: Saint
Feast day: April 23
Who is Saint George? There are almost too many answers to that question. Saint, martyr, Roman soldier; it would be hard to tell the story of the last 1700 years of Western civilization without mentioning the handsome young warrior, distinguishable by his curls of blonde hair and quick sword. Saint George is a patron to soldiers, farmers, various diseases both human and animal and too many places to name. Across history, where people fight in the name of Christ or just for a noble cause, Saint George stands with them, whether that means wading into the middle of a battle or helping a small boy to defend himself. Bold, commanding, decisive, generous, direct: Saint George is the very picture of Catholic manliness.
And then, of course, he killed that dragon. It’s a story many of us learned growing up:
Once upon a time in a far away land, a kingdom was troubled by a dragon. The citizens had to sacrifice their own children to the beast. On the day that the king’s own beautiful daughter was to be eaten, Saint George happened to be passing by. Saint George fought the dragon and killed it. He brought the beast’s huge head to the king, and the grateful king gave him the hand of the princess in marriage. Saint George and the princess were married and they were very happy.
The funny thing about Saint George is that when it comes to his life and martyrdom near the beginning of the fourth century, we know very little. So perhaps the best way to tell the story of Saint George is backward, starting with what we know and working back across the centuries, past even his martyrdom, until we come to his strange encounter with the dragon.
Saint George has left his mark on Christendom, from London to Moscow, from Stockholm to Addis Ababa. In Catalonia, one of many places under Saint George’s patronage, his feast on April 23rd is marked with a tradition of gift giving for the one you love. Women receive a red rose for the one that grew where the blood of the dragon spilled into the ground. For men, the appropriate gift is a book.
If you start looking online for recent miracles of Saint George, it won’t take you long to find them. Scanning down one forum you read that a man was cured of bipolar disorder. A family thanks the saint for saving their daughter from a serious fall. Another credits Saint George with help getting a job.
For a more lighthearted take on Saint George’s encounter with the dragon you might try Mons, in Belgium, on Trinity Sunday at the annual Combat de Lumeçon. The town square fills up with cheering onlookers as a man on a horse, portraying Saint George, battles a dragon looking like a very fat wooden crocodile.
Over the course of half an hour, the dragon and 11 men representing devils do battle with Saint George and his army of men dressed as ‘chin-chins’. The tradition is so old that everyone has forgotten what a chin-chin actually is, but it doesn’t matter. There is shouting and jostling and finally Saint George prevails with his sword and his somewhat anachronistic flintlock pistol.
Oddly enough, Mons in Belgium was also the location of one of Saint George’s recent wartime appearances. At the beginning of the First World War, before the fighting settled into trench warfare, English soldiers had pushed too far forward and were being forced back by the German army. They seemed to be about to be encircled and destroyed, and yet somehow they escaped the German trap. Soldiers swore afterward that they had seen angels alongside them in the mist and smoke, and several reported seeing Saint George. One Protestant young man in hospital asked his Catholic nurse to see a prayer card of Saint George. He wanted to confirm that the man on the white horse with the curls of blonde hair that he had seen was in fact the saint.
On the other side of the conflict, brave Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front were earning the Cross of Saint George medal, as they had been it was instituted by Catherine the Great in 1769. It would be abolished by the communists in 1917, but Saint George has never been one to be held back by such things. His icons were somehow reappearing, being reissued on Soviet stamps by the 1970s, and today the military decoration of Saint George is back in its rightful place.
Even Protestant monarchs found themselves paying homage to the saint. The Swedish King Charles XI built a statue of Saint George to be unveiled amid a burst of fireworks in 1669. Saint George had assisted Sweden at its birth as a nation. But also Charles was being received into the English order of the Knights of the Garter, or to give it its full name, “The Order of Saint George Named the Garter”.
Other Protestants were not so generous. In 1596 John Rainolds had tried to popularize the notion that the real George was an Arian heretic and a “bloody butcher of Christians”. Even at the time, I doubt that many thought this would catch on - Saint George had simply been far too active in the previous centuries.
It was in these centuries that Saint George became established as a helper of the underdog, a saviour of Christians in war. From Sweden (1470) to Moscow (1380) to Valencia (1237) to Novgorod (1170) those fighting against the odds for Christ or for national independence credited the saint with aiding their victory.
And it wasn’t only nobles who were praying for the saint’s intercession. As Europe descended into the plague years of the 1300s, commoners and nobles alike cried out to the 14 Holy Helpers, fourteen saints of healing. Saint George was one of them.
In these dark days, many were encouraged by religious plays, and Saint George’s battle with the dragon was always a crowd favourite. That is why in 1349 a Belgian knight returning from the East donated the stuffed head of a crocodile to make the first dragon in the Combat de Lumeçon.
It wasn’t really surprising, therefore, that Saint George became the patron saint of England, as well as of the Knights of the Garter, in 1348. Besides, the English had seen what Saint George could do during the crusades.
Saint George was especially active during the first crusade. Early on, it seemed that the crusade might be wiped out by a Turkish counterattack. The crusaders were surrounded, when to their own amazement they were saved by an attack on the rear of the Turkish lines by mysterious riders in white. The Christians recognized the warrior saints, led of course by Saint George, and it was his intercession the Christians sought as they travelled through hostile lands.
As the army approached Jerusalem, we read in the chronicle of the chaplain Raymond of Aguilers that they came across some relics of an unidentified saint. Since they weren’t sure of the saint’s identity, Raymond didn’t think it was right to carry them, so they left them behind. It was the wrong decision, as apparently they belonged to Saint George, who showed up, armored and annoyed to talk to one of the priests.
“Do you know who the standard bearer of this army is?” he asked.
After some hemming and hawing, the priest said that it was Saint George.
“Well that’s me,” the angry saint said, “So go get my relics and put them with the rest.”
And of course Saint George was, in a figurative way, the standard bearer of the crusade, because the red cross of Saint George was the also the symbol of the crusaders. Later legend has it that in the final assault on Jerusalem, Saint George himself led the men up the wall.
Meanwhile in Spain, Christians were fighting the five hundred year campaign to reclaim Christian lands from the armies of Islam. There too Saint George was the standard bearer for the armies of Christendom. On one occasion, at the battle of Huesca, the Christians seemed unable to get the momentum to move forward, until a single man whom no one recognized pushed into the thick of the enemy alone. The knight laid about him with his sword until he had cleared a space, and the Christians behind him surged into it. As they did, the knight raised his sword high above his head and it seemed to the advancing Christian forces to become a red cross.
Even before the crusades, Saint George was a wildly popular saint, with eight churches in Constantinople alone. By the 7th century, miracles of Saint George were already being passed around, and one story that recurs is the story of the boy who is abducted by slavers. Alone in a faraway land he realizes it is April 23rd and asks for Saint George’s help. In some versions of the story the boy is on an errand to fetch a jug of hot water for his master. Saint George’s approach, direct as ever, was to show up in the courtyard on his white horse, telling the boy to hop on, and dropping him off at home. In the story, the water is still warm when the boy arrives.
On another occasion, a boy asks for Saint George’s help because he is bad at wrestling. He promises to leave an offering for the Saint: a pancake. When he improves the boy makes good on his promise and leaves a pancake at the shrine. Older boys, who know better, go and eat the pancake, because what possible use could a saint have for a pancake? Saint George, though, is not amused. To their horror, the older boys find themselves unable to leave the shrine until they have apologized and left their own offering.
As we come to the beginning of the 7th century, we encounter the remarkable friendship between Saint George and the future saint, Theodore of Sykeon. When Theodore was a boy, he first encountered Saint George who appeared to be another boy. He showed Theodore to a nearby chapel dedicated to Saint George. Theodore’s faith grew. When Theodore was subject to peer pressure, as his biographer tells us, from the devil in disguise, Saint George was there to back him up. When Theodore was sick, Saint George came to help. When, in Elizabeth Dawes’ translation, “the wicked demons, the enemies of truth, appeared on either side of him in the semblance of wolves and other wild beasts, and with gaping mouths they rushed upon him as though to kill him”, Saint George stepped in front of him and warded them off, suddenly looking much more like the swordsman he was.
As Theodore grew up, he came to understand the identity of his friend. With this guidance, Theodore became an ascetic, maturing so quickly that he was made a priest at only 17. He would be a dynamic force in Eastern Christianity: an abbot, a bishop, a counsellor and chastiser of Emperors, and after his death in 613 AD, a saint in his own right. Along the way, Saint George was his constant companion, helping in exorcisms and healings.
Years later, when Theodore was an old man, he dreamed about Saint George. The saint had come on his customary white horse, but this time he had brought a second horse, saddled for a long journey. Theodore knew that it was for him. He set his affairs in order and died on the night of April 22nd, the eve of the feast of the great saint. We know all this from his biographer, who was one of his servants. The biographer’s name was Eleusius, but Saint Theodore had renamed him - what else? - George.
Even a century before that, Saint George was being venerated. The earliest Church of Saint George is all the way in Syria. It was built in 518 AD.
But when we try to push back to the actual life and death of Saint George, history grows murkier. George was a soldier - probably. He was probably martyred in the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. George possibly lived and probably died in Cappadocia, a Roman province occupying much of modern Turkey. He is said to have died in 303 AD. Tradition has it that George was martyred through the torture method known as the wheel.
The fact that we know so little about the life of Saint George is puzzling, because something about Saint George’s life or death energized the early Church. Something made his fame flow out from Cappadocia until it filled every part of Christendom. To make sense of this, we are left holding the last piece of the puzzle… and it is a story about a dragon.
Did Saint George literally kill a dragon? The tendency to dismiss this as impossible irritates the philosopher in me. Some people imagine that a God who built the stars would be flummoxed by the logistical challenge of, let us say, preserving a family of otherwise extinct dinosaurs and bringing them to the right place at the right time. It’s silly to think that this is impossible. So I don’t dismiss the story, but I do think there is another way to read it. And to do that, we should leave behind the fairy tale version of Saint George’s encounter with the dragon, and look at the oldest surviving tale.
Once upon a time, in the far away and imaginary land of Lasia, God punished the sins of the godless emperor and his people by sending a dragon.
The dragon took up residence near the city, by a lake, and began to prey on the townsfolk. One way to appease it, we infer from the story, would be for the emperor to give up his godlessness. But another way was to give the dragon what it wanted: human beings.
The emperor persuaded the citizens to create a list of all the citizens. All of them would feed feed the dragon one of their children. Even the emperor signed his name, and added his own daughter to the list.
When it came time for his daughter to be eaten by the dragon, the emperor tried to get out of the problem in a different way. He tried to bribe his fellow citizens. He offered them money and power if they would let someone else go in his daughter’s place. But by now so many of them had lost their own children that they no longer cared about the power or the money. And so, with a heavy heart, the emperor dressed the princess in the clothes she would have worn for her wedding, and sent her to the lake.
Now as it happens George was returning to Cappadocia by way of Lasia. He paused at the lake to let his horse drink, and that was when he heard the princess crying.
George spoke to the girl. She told him to run. Her fate was sealed, but if the dragon found him it would kill him as well as her. George learned from her that Lasia was a godless empire, which is to say a pagan one. And so George prayed that God might use this dragon to work a sign. God spoke to George, telling him that it would be so.
Just then the dragon came out of its lair and charged. But George didn’t fight it. He made the sign of the cross, and the dragon became docile. George asked for the girl’s girdle, her belt, which symbolized both status and femininity. He used it to make a leash for the dragon. With the now docile dragon on a leash, the princess walked it into the city as you might walk a dog.
At first everyone was terrified. But George calmed them, and pointed out what was really obvious from the beginning: God had power over the dragon, and it was a manifestation of God’s punishment. If the people of Lasia became Christians, the problem of the dragon could be solved. They converted in the thousands, including the emperor himself.
A bishop came to baptize the people of Lasia. George killed the dragon with his sword. Then the locals set up a shrine in George’s honour, and when George went into it, a fountain of healing water began to flow from near the altar.
This is the story that was told over and over again, until gradually Saint George had a pistol and an entourage of chin-chins. But in this early version, we find that things are a little different. Most interestingly, Saint George doesn’t kill the dragon until later. What he does instead takes away its power.
This might lead us to reconsider the figure of the dragon. When I was a little boy, my mother showed me a picture of Saint George. I was disappointed at the size of the dragon. I wanted it to be big, clawed and spewing fire. Instead it was just a little thing, coiling around the legs of Saint George’s horse.
“It’s too small,” I said. “A dragon should be big and fierce.”
My mother is an artist, a painter, and tends to see things that most people miss.
“Or perhaps it’s the right size to slither around your legs and into your mouth and become you,” Mom said. “Perhaps it’s another kind of dragon.”
The earliest picture of Saint George fighting the dragon suggests that it is, indeed, another kind of dragon. In a stone carving from the early 6th century, the dragon isn’t big or fierce at all. It’s a snake with a human face.
Saint George encounters this dragon in a place that has twisted itself into a knot because they are running away from God. They are so far gone that they are sacrificing their own children. Saint George helps them to see the dragon as it truly is: a symbol and symptom of sin. And so by the time the people of Lasia convert, they no longer have anything to fear from the dragon. They have found new life. It’s not an accident, I think, that in the last words of the story, George provides the people of Lasia with a fountain of living water. Jesus tells us in John 7:38 that rivers of living water will flow from those who believe.
The story of the dragon, then, points us dimly toward whatever it was that the early Christians saw in Saint George. The actual events are lost in time, and from this distance we can only make out the shape of greatness.
H. F. Rance, who died just before the turn of the 21st century, spent years assembling a history of Saint George. At the end of his study Rance ends up where we are, considering the question of what it was about Saint George that led generations of Christians to venerate him. Here is Rance’s answer.
I can think of only one possible answer. Simply, that of all men who have existed, this man was uniquely good and brave, perhaps to a degree greater than all other mortal humans. Although every man is ‘capax Dei’, capable of reaching God, and although in this sense we are all equal in the eyes of God, our moral achievements in this world are demonstrably variable: otherwise all of us would already be seen as Saints. This means that there are a few who are outstanding even among the ranks of the declared Saints; and that among these few there is just one who stands above all others. This is perhaps the reason why this particular Saint, known only by his name and by the fact of his martyrdom, has been chosen by so many to be their patron and protector. Perhaps ordinary people can sense the presence of unique goodness and bravery without the need for officially documented records. Perhaps St. George was quite simply the best man among us, the best that we, the race of created human beings, have achieved in our struggle towards salvation.
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