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" . . . . . )

GUARDIAN ANGELS

Today is the Feast of the Guardian Angels -- a celebration of which I confess I was unaware until this morning. Most Anglicans don't think about angels much: their metaphysical specificity is a little embarrassing. However, only a churl would deny their existence, and the thought of there being one heavenly being assigned to each human is a comforting one. They must work awfully hard at keeping us from the worst consequences of our actions and omissions; one feels a certain sympathy for them, and one wonders what they do after their human dies. Do they get another one, or do they go back to eternal praise? Curious: the merest touch of irony creeps into any Anglican discussion of them, all by itself. It's as if there is something vaguely childish about belief in them, and we have put away childish things. On the other hand, childlike is not childish, and childlike is what we are urged to become, by an Authority higher even than St Paul. So perhaps, like a very small child crossing the road, we should just put our hand up without looking, in the absolute trust that there will be a protective hand to grasp it. 
It is pleasing also that Sir Thomas Browne, definitely a man of the seventeenth century with whom one would like to have dinner, liked guardian angels:

Therefore for Spirits I am so farre from denying their existence, that I could easily believe, that not only whole Countries, but particular persons have their Tutelary, and Guardian Angels: It is not a new opinion of the Church of Rome, but an old one of Pythagoras and Plato; there is no heresy in it, and if not manifestly defined in Scripiture, yet is it an opinion of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions of a man's life, and would serve as an Hypothesis to salve many doubts, whereof common philosophy affordeth no solution.  (Religio Medici)

Image: Raphael, "The Deliverance of St Peter" in the Vatican. Peter's was the most famous guardian angel in the New Testament.