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THAT dragons should appear in the life-stories of so many of the saints is to be expected, when we remember that the monster so often stands for sin in general and paganism in particular. The majority of the saints of early Christian times devoted their whole lives to combating paganism, to mighty efforts for vanquishing ignorance and unbelief ; their daily lives were one great fight in the cause of light over darkness, of good over evil.
St. George of Merrie England claims first attention here. Till the thirteenth century the patron saint of England was very rightly an Englishman, namely, King Edward the Confessor, who built Westminster Abbey, and around whose shrine there are the tombs of many of the mightiest of his successors on the throne of England. But St. George was always greatly honoured here, even in Saxon times, and steadily gaining in popularity, he was in the year 1222, at a synod or council of bishops and clergy held at Oxford, formally acknowledged as the patron saint of England - a land of which St. George had probably never heard.
There are widely differing accounts of the life of this remarkable man. According to the one generally believed, he was a native of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, where he was born at the close of the third century, and passing thence into Palestine, he entered the army of Diocletian. In the year 303 this Roman emperor commenced a great persecution of the Christians, at the severity of which the soldier-saint made loud complaints, going so far as to tear down from the doors of Christian churches the bloody edicts affixed to them against the worship of Christ, and against all who dared follow that new religion. For this the daring soldier was cast into prison, and after many dreadful tortures was at last beheaded. So that St. George is accounted also a martyr.
Alban Butler, who a century ago wrote a large work for the Roman Calendar, called The Lives of the Saints, states that our hero was the son of noble Christian parents, that he entered the army and rose to a high grade in its ranks, until the persecution of his co-religionists by Diocletian compelled him to throw up his commission and upbraid the emperor for his cruelty. By which bold conduct he lost his life and won his saintship. The place of his martyrdom was Nicomedia (A.D. 303), where he had torn the edicts from the church doors.
Gibbon, the great historian, gives a poor account of St. George. He says that he was born in a fuller's shop in Epiphania, Cilicia, and became a contractor for supplying the army with foodstuffs, but for doing something wrong in this business had to fly the country. Afterwards he became a Christian, joining himself to the sect called Arians, at Alexandria, in Egypt. Being very zealous, in time he was appointed by the Christian emperor Constantius to be the Archbishop of Alexandria. Later on the archbishop, during a great religious commotion in the city, was seized, with two of his supporters and cast into prison ; from which after twenty-four days they were dragged out by another mob and murdered in the streets of the disturbed city, their bodies being then thrown into the sea. Death at the hands of fierce, raging pagans naturally endeared his memory to the Christians, who regarded him as a martyr and a saint of the highest order. Whichever version is true, it seems that the imagery, in language in which the evils and errors of paganism he had to combat were represented as a dragon, was employed in the centuries which immediately followed his martyrdom. It was the love of romance in that age which transformed the symbolic dragon into a real monster which he was said to have slain in Lybia, to save a beautiful maiden from a dreadful death.
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Originally presented to the Society of Antiquaries in November 1883 and printed in Archæologia, volume xlix, this is part one of the second chapter of historian Frederick William Hackwood's comprehensive study of dragonlore.
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CH 2 - (Part 4/8) St.George and the Dragon (Part 4 of 8)by HackwoodHistory858 views
dwagon
HolyDamnation 9 months ago
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RocktheSocks 1 year ago
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TheBoevermovies 2 years ago