Repost from: https://lenapecathbob.livejournal.com/59333.html
Today is the Feast of St. George, a saint for whom I have both an academic and a personal attachment, a saint I suggest we very much need this year. Our need of and my fascination with St. George have nothing to do with George the martyred Roman soldier, whose life story was known as early as the 400s, but rather with what I’m quite sure is mythical: his famous dragon slaying. St. George was beside me through a year of cancer treatment four years ago precisely as dragon slayer, even though I’ve established in my research that story is not only legendary but non-Christian in origin: borrowed like so much else in Christianity (and Ancient Israelite religion before it) from “paganism.” George’s dragon slaying comes from the Canaanite stormgod Baal’s victory over Leviathan. The Greek historian John Malalas even says that Alexander the Great’s general Seleucus I offered sacrifices to the stormgod Zeus on Mount Zaphon, the home of Baal, on an April 23rd.
The dragon slaying is paramount precisely because it is myth. Myths combine imagery and poetry into a surplus of meaning that helps us venture further towards the inexpressible.
And in this case, what that myth of a monster-slaying saint addresses is suffering and the problem of evil. As Duke Divinity School professor Anathea Portier-Young writes (concerning the book of Daniel), while we do tend to see everything through a “myth of redemptive violence” and that has attendant dangers, cosmic conflict imagery is deep engagement with human suffering. St. George’s dragon slaying myth rejects the compromise on God’s goodness inherent in the platitude that “It must be God’s will somehow” for a child to die of COVID-19, in favor of a possible compromise on God’s omnipotence: as the Anglican theologian Andy Angel says, “foregoing some traditional ideas of God being in control of reality in the meantime in favor of the idea that forces of chaos (pictured in myth as [the dragon]) sometimes rage and that God [and his saint] battles against them.” Or, if you prefer a more secular version, as Evelyn Underhill wrote: “We see in this muddled world a constant struggle for Truth, Goodness, Perfection; and all those who give themselves to that struggle—the struggle for the redemption of the world from greed, cruelty, injustice, selfish desire and their results—find themselves supported and reinforced by a spiritual power which enhances life, strengthens will, and purifies character.”
Today’s world is worse than a muddle. Achille Mbembe, the Cameroon philosopher, blogged last week in “The Universal Right to Breathe,” “There is no doubt that the skies are closing in. Caught in the stranglehold of injustice and inequality, much of humanity is threatened by a great chokehold….COVID-19 is the spectacular expression of the planetary impasse in which humanity finds itself today.” The Corona Dragon is upon us all, albeit disproportionally, according to the ways we have divided and devalued each other. The horror of death, escorted by the dread of poverty from loss of work, and the terror of confinement for others.
When I say we need a mythic hope, a St. George, I am not minimizing the need for we mortals to act—like the Ontario shopkeeper who bagged up a supply of food for the shoplifter he nabbed—nor the longer-term enterprise ahead building solidarity and dismantling what Mbembe calls “a vicious partitioning of the globe…the destruction of the biosphere…the criminalizing of resistance, repeated attacks on reason.” But when those who know what they are talking about advise us to do as little as possible right now, I’d suggest an appeal to St. George—again, to quote Mbembe, not “so much against a specific virus as against everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing.”
And one final reason to invoke St. George today, with Ramadan beginning tomorrow. St. George enfolds Muslims, as well, under his title of Khidr. (Jews, too, as Khidr is also Elijah, but we won’t get into that.) Today is the feast of Khidr for Sunni Muslims in Turkey; in the Crimea and Azerbaijan today marks Hıdırellez, the day on which Khidr and Elijah met on the earth. “Khidr” means “Green One,” the discoverer of the Water of Life in the Alexander Romance, and so the Turkish EMS is called “Khidr-Service.” There’s even a story of a Turkish soldier calling on Khidr during the Korean War and being saved from capture by the Chinese. Not a bad idea, then, for any of us.
I’ve an icon of St. George over my front door—a common sight at Palestinian Christian homes, too—as well as a St. George sweatshirt my wife got me during chemo. Today, they’re helping me remember the dragonslayer whose day it is.