St. George, Anglo-Hellene
By C. M. WOODHOUSE
NOBODY knows exactly who St. George was or when he lived or how he earned his martyrdom. Like the other great figure of our national tradition whose day we celebrate at the end of this week, St. George of Merrie England has left hardly a trace of certainty for his biographers. There is no particular reason even for the choice of April 23rd to be his day. But we can at least be pretty certain who St. George was not, and that is the character with whom the perverse ingenuity of Edward Gibbon sought to identify him.
In the twenty-third chapter of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a paragraph of incomparable prose and almost incredibly bad taste, Gibbon related the story of one George of Cappadocia, who held a contract to supply the Imperial Army of Rome with bacon about the middle of the fourth century A.D. This man raised himself, says Gibbon with a barely disguised sigh of satisfaction at the scholarly duty of exposing him, from an obscure and servile origin by the talents of a parasite. At the distance of two centuries the reader's imagination can still hear the smacking of the historian's lips over the scandal he had uncovered at the distance of fourteen centuries: " His employment was mean ; he rendered it infamous. He accumulated wealth by the basest arts of fraud and corruption ; but his malversations were so notorious that George was com- pelled to escape from the pursuits of justice. After this disgrace, in which he appears to have saved his fortune at the expense of his honour, he embraced, with real or affected zeal, the profession of Arianism."
This is as much as to say that he climbed on to the likeliest ideological band-wagon of the day, much as the semi-redeemed collaborationist in Eastern Europe turned Communist at the end of the Second World War. For Arianism, the creed of the heretical theologian Arius, was in process of splitting the early Christian Church from top to bottom, and for the moment it was the winning heresy. In next to no time (in fact, within two sentences of Gibbon's matchless prose) George of Cappadocia acquired a priceless library (" from the love, or the ostentation, of learning ") and, more valuable still, the vacant Archbishopric of Alexandria.
So far the story of many years' effort is condensed into Gibbon's most economical style. But he had another more flamboyant Muse, and the approaching climax called for her lushest arts. We can guess with what satisfaction Gibbon gave her free rein, for nothing .more brilliant can be found in all his work than the purple riot of rhetoric in which he displays the next (and last) five years of George's career. His tyranny at Alexandria was secular as well as religious, and no victim was exempt from his arbitrary whims: " The Catholics of Alexandria and Egypt were abandoned to a tyrant, qualified, by nature and education, to exercise the office of persecution; but he oppressed with an impartial hand the various inhabitants of his extensive diocese. The Primate of Egypt assumed the pomp and insolence of his lofty station ; but he still betrayed the vices of his base and servile extraction."
This tirade is the more remarkable because, reading between the lines, we should find George guilty of little out of the ordinary in the way of peculation and bullying. It might be unworthy of an Archbishop, but none of it was unusual. Gibbon chose to think otherwise, however, and to his delight the people of Alexandria at last arose against their oppressor.
After five years in office George was picturesquely murdered, carried dead through the streets on the back of a camel, and flung ignominously into the sea. There Gibbon might have been content to leave him, commemorated with a nicely pointed moral, had he not had a more satirical pleasure in store. " The meritorious death of the Archbishop obliterated the memory of his life," Gibbon continues, and plunges triumphantly on to the fantastic conclusion which is the point of the whole story : " The odious stranger, disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the mask of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero ; and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England, the patron of arms, of chivalry, and of the garter."
In the face of this tantalisingly brilliant feat of imagination, it seems hardly fair to point out that there is not a shred of evidence for Gibbon's identification. The two men have nothing but the name and his mischievous imagination to connect them. There are many likelier candidates for the glory of St. George's martyrdom, and certainly none less likely than George of Cappadocia. Some say that the saint was a professional soldier, converted to Christianity and put to death in consequence under the Emperor Diocletian. Some say the slaying of the dragon is a Christian transfiguration of the Greek legend which tells how Perseus rescued Andromeda from a sea-monster. Certainly the scenes of the two heroic actions are near enough together to make this hypothesis a possibility ; and if it be so, then St. George is one of many Christian heroes whose roots go deep into the pagan past. Old religions and their gods die hard, and the easiest way for Christianity to conquer them was often to absorb them. Perhaps it was this that outraged Gibbon, for he was a sceptic about religion, and he had more than half a mind to lay the whole blame for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire on the growth of Christianity within it.
But leaving aside Gibbon's tasteless and deliberately provocative cynicism, I have one contribution to make to the identification of St. George on the eve of his anniversary. We may fairly concede that, although he is by adoption an Englishman, he was probably by birth a Greek. Of this the Greeks themselves have never had the least doubt, and they celebrate his day as fervently as we do ourselves. St. George has, in fact, a divided loyalty, which might well be embarrassing between two nationalities less closely allied in history, tradition and sentiment than we are with the Greeks. Fortunately, it does not cause any embarrassment in our case, and a war-time story may perhaps help to illuminate the reasons why.
One year, during the German occupation of Crete, I happened to spend St. George's Day in- the Monastery of St. George at the village of Epano Siphi. My recollection is that the monks there belonged to a sect of the Orthodox Church concisely known as the palaiohimerologites, who have refused ever to adopt the new calendar, so that the date of the celebration was some twelve days
different from our own ; but the slight difference in chronology is immaterial. The abbot, a large and kindly man after the Cretan pattern, sat quietly stropping a large and less kindly-looking knife on his knee as we, talked together through the morning ; he was keeping it sharp, so he explained enigmatically, against the day of the Allies' return to drive the Germans out. I was telling him meanwhile that St. George, whose day we were celebrating, was my country's patron saint, to which he replied politely that this could not be so, since St. George was a Greek ; indeed, he was inclined to think that so noble a character must have been actually a Cretan.
Undeterred by the mechanical rhythm of his stropping, I stuck to my point, and the abbot stuck to his. We dropped the subject. But towards evening, when the service of commemoration was due to begin, after long rumination it was he who made the great concession: " Since it is for England, we will share him With you ; but with any other country—never! Let us call him an Anglo- Helene. With a deep sigh of resignation and accomplishment he put away his knife and prepared for the service. I accepted in silent gratitude a concession which went too deep for words. That St. George was an Anglo-Hellene seems a fitting and welcome addition to the meagre body, of known facts in his biography.
Previous page
