transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.

Speaker 2:
[00:20] Hello, and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Dr. Jessica Ewell, and I'm joined today by Dr. Jean-Paul Juge. Welcome, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 3:
[00:32] Thank you, and very excellent French pronunciation. I love it when I hear it that way, thank you. Good to be here.

Speaker 2:
[00:39] Awesome. Can you tell us, do you have a favorite course that you're teaching right now in the graduate school?

Speaker 3:
[00:45] Yeah, so I teach a course called Catholic Faith, Church of the Fathers, and this is for our MA in Biblical Studies students, this is an introduction to early Christianity and the writings of the early Church Fathers. So since that was my area of specialty in studies and in research, I always enjoy going back over that material.

Speaker 2:
[01:05] That sounds amazing. Sounds like a really fun course to take. Could you tell us how the Saints come into your teaching?

Speaker 3:
[01:10] Yeah, we teach another course. It's one of the common courses we take here at the August Institute, which is called Light to the Nations. It's an introductory church history course of sorts, but it's church history taught through the lives of crucial saints in the tradition. So we try to use those saints as lenses to look at church history in a wider way.

Speaker 2:
[01:33] That's beautiful. That's really neat. So today, we're going to be talking about one of my favorite saints, Saint George. My son's name is Jorge Andres. And so when this opportunity came up, Saint George sounds amazing. And I'm sure you have connections to the saint as well. His feast day is on the 23rd of April. So do you want to tell us a little bit about your connections with Saint George?

Speaker 3:
[01:58] Yeah, I was excited for you to ask for me to come speak because my two boys are pretty obsessed with Saint George. He is the patron saint of our household, I think. And they are frequently going outside attacking bushes to pretend they're dragons. I have read the story of Saint George more times than I can count because of the version of the story by Margaret Hodges, Saint George and the Dragon, a great children's story, which was based on Edmund Spencer's version of this tale in the Fairy Queen in I think 1590 is when that was published.

Speaker 2:
[02:29] We know a lot of legends about Saint George, and sometimes it's hard to parse fact from fiction. Maybe you could start by telling us about some of those legends.

Speaker 3:
[02:41] That's great. Most famous of all the legends of Saint George is his battle with the Dragon. Probably again, the most famous version of this tale comes from the 13th century collection of lies of the saints called the Golden Legend. We have this village, in this version of the story, it's a pagan village, and it's being plagued by this serpent creature, this serpent dragon, and it's eating all their sheep. And finally, a lottery is created so that the children of people who are unfortunate enough to draw from this lottery are going to have to offer up their children to placate this evil, man-eating dragon. And the king's daughter is the one that's chosen, and so the king asks for a few days for her to mourn the loss of her future. And while she's out mourning, Saint George comes across her and hears of her troubles about this dragon and being a knight in this story and traditional kind of chivalric hero. He's going to go out and defeat this dragon. And we usually hear of him just killing the dragon, but an interesting thing is he, in this version of the story, binds the dragon and then brings the dragon back into the village. And he says, I'll kill it for you only if everyone becomes baptized. And so this version of the story is him leading to the conversion of all the people, right? And so he slays the dragon at that point.

Speaker 2:
[04:12] It seems a bit strange for us with more modern sensibilities. It almost seems like there's some baptism under duress going on there. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 3:
[04:22] Sure. I mean, of course, making exceptions for the legendary character of this, for the story. I think the point here is more that the villagers can only share in this victory over the dragon, right? They can only really slay that dragon for themselves and to annihilate this threat for themselves insofar as they are baptized, insofar as they share in this very power that George himself receives from Christ, right? Because it's not George's own strength. It's the strength of Christ and Christ crucified working through him, right, to conquer this dragon. And so I think that's ultimately the point that's trying to be conveyed here, right, that they can't really conquer the dragon unless they allow Christ to work through them.

Speaker 2:
[05:05] Yeah, so it's the engagement with their wills, kind of like the lizard on the shoulder in St. Louis. In CS. Lewis's The Great Divorce, right? It's really their having to consent to and to cooperate with their own salvation.

Speaker 3:
[05:19] That's right. That's a great scene. For those of you who don't know, right, there's an angel and it's angels desperately trying to get rid of this demon that's taking the form of an ugly lizard, right, on a man's shoulder or a deceased person's shoulder. And he has to give the consent for this angel to squash it. So he keeps saying, can I kill it? Can I kill the dragon?

Speaker 2:
[05:40] Can I kill the dragon?

Speaker 3:
[05:41] He's not having any conversation. And ultimately, right, this person has to consent for that dragon, that evil, that sin to be annihilated, right? And so again, I think that, yeah, that's a great point to bring up. I think it's a similar message that's being conveyed here in this legend. Now again, right, we wonder, okay, but this is a really great story. This is really fun to tell your kids. But, you know, is there anything true about this? I think that there's some deeper truths, right? A kind of deeper allegorical truth behind this that connects with the legacy of Saint George as a martyr, right? So he's also famously remembered as a martyr.

Speaker 2:
[06:17] So what do we know about him?

Speaker 3:
[06:20] Yeah, so he's really hard to pin down, right? It's hard to kind of get behind the more legendary aspects to the historical figure. But in the Golden Legend, right after this dragon story, it tells us about his martyrdom. And it's kind of a fantastical telling of his martyrdom. I can get back to this. But it seems to point back to a historical George who was probably martyred during the reign of Diocletian. So there's this what's called the Great Persecution that was in 303. And so this is a kind of systematic universal order for those who are inhabiting Rome to offer sacrifice to the image of the emperor. And the Holy Scriptures have to be handed over. So this is a universal persecution that really leaves its mark on Christian history. And it's believed that George was a member of the Imperial Guard and refused to offer sacrifice to the emperor, refused to give up his faith, and so was martyred at this time.

Speaker 2:
[07:23] That's... In so many ways, you can see some parallels, right? Would you mind drawing some of those out for us?

Speaker 3:
[07:30] Well, I'd be happy to. You know, going back over the Golden Legend, one of the funniest things is you would think that fighting a dragon would be the most fantastical kind of legendary aspect of the story and that the martyrdom would be the very serious historical part. But there's a lot of humor, right? There's a lot of legendary aspects of the account of his martyrdom. So in the Golden Legend, it talks about this official named Dacian who is trying over and over again to get George killed. But every torture he throws at him, George miraculously escapes, right? So first, he tries all kinds of brutalities and George miraculously recovers. He gets a sorcerer to give him some poison. But when the poison doesn't work, eventually the sorcerer wants to be baptized because he realizes that the God who's protecting George is more powerful. Later on, he's thrown into a cauldron of molten lead, but George just thinks this is a warm bath, right? And then finally, Decian is getting nervous and he says, George, I just want you to offer a sacrifice, right? That's all I want. So can you just go in the middle of everyone and perform this act of worship? And he said, yeah, I'll go in front of everyone and perform an act of worship. And so what he does is he in front of a great crowd, he prays that God will call down fire, right? And so these pagan temples are destroyed by this great fire, right? This is all part of the story. And finally, there is a sacrifice and it's George's own where he receives martyrdom and is decapitated, okay? So we should also remember in our popular imagination, the Roman Empire is constantly enacting laws against Christians, so that's not quite how this worked, right? For most of the time, I'd say from about AD 64 to 250, persecution of Christians were mostly local, right? And they were kind of sporadic. It wasn't this systematic, you know, universal thing. You know, in 250, Decius does enact the first universal persecution, which lasted for several years. And then some time goes by until 303, which basically until 311, so for a really long time, there is this kind of systematic, you know, universal persecution where the emperor is hoping to re-unify the empire by re-establishing religious unity, right? And especially the cult of the emperor, right? Now, it's only a couple years after this that Constantine is going to issue the Edict of Milan, which is this kind of act of religious toleration. So, just before there's religious freedom for Christians, there's probably its most severe period of persecution in the empire, and that's when it's believed that George himself was martyred.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] So, the knight is in the midst of battle, and he probably feels like things are at their most desperate straits, and yet, victory is just a hair's breadth away, just a few years, and how often do we feel that way, right? Battles in our own lives where we feel like, how in the world am I going to win this? But we're right there, we're with Christ, he's already won.

Speaker 3:
[10:43] Exactly, right, the victory already is present, insofar as he can unite himself with Christ on the cross. So again, okay, how does this connect to fighting a dragon? Right, what about martyrdom has to do with fighting a dragon? I'm going to throw something out there, maybe this will help. Let's open up our Bibles, let's go to Romans 16, 10, right? Where St. Paul writes about the God of peace crushing Satan under our feet, right? So he's calling back to the promise, right, in the Garden of Eden that one of Eve's offsprings will crush Satan. Satan is this serpent, this dragon. And the tradition sees Christ's cross as this ultimate defeat of a dragon, this ultimate defeat of Satan. And so the early martyrs and martyrs of all times, right, are understood to share in this cross of Christ, and so to share in the victory of Christ over a dragon, over Satan. And so, you know, I suggest this is one way in which we can understand why George has depicted a slaying dragon, because in his union with Christ on the cross, right, he does conquer the dragon, he conquers sin in himself, and shares in Christ's victory. And there's one last, you know, kind of interesting detail here, that in the Golden Legend, George will drag the dragon back into the village before defeating it. One of the texts we read in our patristic, you know, Catholic Christian theology course is Athanasius' work called On the Incarnation. And he compares Christ defeating the devil on the cross to a wicked king who's been overthrown, right, by a good king. And that wicked king is put in the middle of a village. And now, because of this victory of the good king, all the villagers feel free to go, you know, spit upon, kick this wicked tyrant, right? This is the kind of power they didn't have over this evil tyrant before, but now, because of the good king, they can. And so similarly, right, we can see George bringing this defeated, bound up dragon into the village, and all those who were baptized, right, now have this kind of power to slay the dragon, right, to kill the dragon along with him.

Speaker 2:
[12:46] I love that. That is so powerful. And I can't help but think about the story from the Old Testament of Jephthah's daughter and how this fulfillment really, in some ways, is kind of the answer to that question of why did she have to go through something so horrible? Well, now, we see in the story of the maiden, no, there's a redemption, there's a fulfillment through typology of all of us as the maiden who are rescued.

Speaker 3:
[13:11] That's right.

Speaker 2:
[13:12] That's great. There's so many beautiful, beautiful applications.

Speaker 3:
[13:16] That's great. So, yeah, so hopefully, we don't have to lose our excitement about this kind of imaginative story of Saint George and the Dragon, because I think it leads us to actually a deeper truth that is even more epic and more exciting than fighting a big, scary snake, right?

Speaker 2:
[13:33] What can Saint George teach us today, do you think?

Speaker 3:
[13:38] There are a lot of things, right? It certainly teaches my little boy's courage, right, over things that they're afraid of, and he's been a great patron for that, and also courtesy and chivalry. But the Golden Legend offers many different explanations of what this meaning of George's name, right? What was the etymology of George's name? Most likely, of course, this name George comes from the Greek word for farmer, Giorgos, right, to till the land, to work the land. But one early interpretation of this is that the soil that's tilled or cultivated is the, you know, is a metaphor for the soil of George's soul, right? He kind of cultivates his soul, right, and virtue in his soul. So I think, you know, within all of us, we can participate with Christ to slay the dragons of sin, right, and to cultivate our souls in virtue and is a place that can receive our Lord.

Speaker 2:
[14:32] Mm, it's beautiful. What is Saint George the patron of?

Speaker 3:
[14:35] So he's the patron of as many different countries as want to claim him the patron, right? He's such a great hero, especially, you know, there's a story of crusaders having a vision of Saint George on their way to Jerusalem. And so many, you know, nations have like Portugal and England and Ukraine and others have taken him on as their patron saint. You know, even though he was probably born in Cappadocia, right, martyred in Diaspolis, which is modern day lawed Israel. So even though he's not from England, right, and he, you know, the identification of the values that they want to champion has made Saint George the saint of patron saint in many places.

Speaker 2:
[15:14] Oh, do you have any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

Speaker 3:
[15:20] I was certainly, you know, I was daunted when I was asked to talk about someone that we don't know as much historical information about as we would like, and yet I still found myself walking away, you know, more inspired about martyrdom, right, about the kind of daily courage that it takes to fight the good fight against vice, right, and to realize that our own battles with vice again, can be just as great moments of courage as, you know, fighting a dragon versus a knight or something like this.

Speaker 2:
[15:57] Thank you so much for being with us today, and thanks to all of our listeners. Thanks for joining us for Catholic Saints. Saint George, pray for us.

Speaker 1:
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