THE FEAST OF ST GEORGE

This was a St George I hadn't yet seen -- by Raphael, no less. Notice that the saint has already broken his lance on the beast, which seems oddly small and with a look on its face almost more conversational than ferocious. He is now going to try again, with his sword this time, and we know he will win.

I was pleased, this morning, to see in the printed edition Prions en Eglise that the Vatican has not quite dared to eliminate George from the calendar. The note on him was a masterpiece of diplomacy: "Died in 303. The name is linked to a Roman soldier martyred under Diocletian. Legend has made of him a slayer of dragons. Patron Saint of England." (The online edition, however, has replaced him with St Adalbert.)

He is, of course, Spenser's Red Cross Knight in Book I of the Faerie Queene, where he is the Patron (both presiding figure and pattern) of Holiness. What is fascinating about Spenser's George is that the Patron of Holiness is both rustic -- not a born knight -- and stumbling: Holiness has to be learnt, it has to be slowly achieved, with many ups and downs. If you have never read the Faerie Queene, I recommend it strongly, at least Book I. It doesn't contain definitions or allegories of holiness: it is itself, in its entirety, an allegory and an image of, an instruction in, holiness. You can't summarize it: the learning about holiness is coterminous with the reading of the whole book, with its irresistible stories and characters (including Error: a hideous serpent with a human face that vomits books). The language is a little archaic and was so already in Spenser's time; but it is easily mastered, and the whole is the best of good reads. And if you do, ask yourself at the end what you have learnt about holiness. What is it? What image of it do you have in your mind now?

If Redcrosse, the "clownish (i.e. rustic, hayseed) young man" can be picked for the adventure of saving the maiden and her parents from the Dragon, who are we to say that we couldn't be? There are dragons enough in the world today.

P.S. A few years ago, the annual Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo sold their best-ever conference T-shirt: a dragon sitting under a tree, surrounded by bits of chivalric hardware and idly picking its teeth with a lance. The inscription read: DRACO INTERDUM VINCIT ("Sometimes the dragon wins" . . . . . )