Dragons and Dungeons

Blessed Feast to you on St. George Day! Today we celebrate the faithfulness of St. George who laid down his life .... not as a sacrifice, for which idol would have been appeased by his red martyrdom? And the Life-giving God and Father of All and all the citizens of Heaven are offended by blood sacrifice. He died not as a sacrifice, but as a friend laying down his life for his friends — for the Christians looking on, for those not yet Christian who were on the burning point of decision as of all those separated from God must be, for angels and archangels and all the company on Heaven, and the for cloud of witnesses awaiting him in light. He did not scratch and claw at this life, which is always already dying anyway, throwing back in God's face the Empyreal gift that awaited him. He embraced the the true and the good and the abiding love that is only found in unchanging friendship rooted in the God and Father of all.

We strain to think of any saint more prominent as a national patron. In Orthodoxy, St. George is the name saint for the nation-state of Georgia, as the influential medieval book, Mandeville's Travels, avers. St. George was the patron saint of much of the world during the zenith of the British Empire. His red cross upon a white field had become synonymous with the Crusades and would become the battle raiment of the Knights Templar. St. George continues to be celebrated as a protector saint of Bulgaria. And the device of St. George and the Dragon form the coat of arms of Moscow.

Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev from 1019-1054 took George as his baptismal name. His great-grandson, who founded the oblast of Moscow, was named Yuri, Russian for George. The insignia of St. George and the Dragon, symbolizing the Tsar's duty to repel foreign intruders threatening Holy Rus' (protecting the people), persisted until the Bolshevik Revolution in the early twentieth century.

The entry for St. George in the Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church is a long one, but I will keep it brief. George was born a Christian, into a devout Syrian family who lived in Cappadocia during the Diocletian persecutions. His father received the martyr's crown when George was fourteen. His mother returned to Syria with her son but would die soon thereafter, freeing George to return to the land of his birth.

Though he was a Christian, he would seek his fortune joining the Roman Army. His outstanding aptitudes and military skills as an officer brought him to the attention of the Emperor, who, appointed him to the Praetorian Guard (the Emperor's personal detachment), then became George's advocate. But all this would be undone by Diocletian's campaign to root out Christians from among his army's ranks.

George's martyrology details more than twenty diverse tortures, which he endured with confidence and composure, displaying the same valor, which the emperor had originally noticed in him. All who watched could not help but to be inspired. Among the many people admiring him was the Emperor's wife, Alexandra, the Empress of Rome, whose noble heart was stirred to see a higher way, a more worthy path through life. And before long she also would declare herself to be a Christian, too. Both St. George and St. Alexandra would receive the martyr's crown in the imperial city of Nicomedia on April 23, 303.

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Here was a man standing at the archetypal crossroads. To the left lay a glittering career, the emperor's favor, and the assurance of preferment to high rank. You can imagine him sitting at his villa, in his courtyard, attended by servants. To the right lay a martyr's crown, which his father had also attained. Coming down to us through the centuries, then, is the story of a valorous man of arms in pitched battle becoming victor over that greatest and most persistent adversary any of us will ever face: ourselves. In this sense, the addition of the dragon myth, first appearing in the eleventh century, is not surprising. Forever after, St. George and the Dragon have symbolized the Christian pilgrim engaged in pitched battle with his or her own inner demons.

Given this association with worldly preferment and material riches, the addition of the "dragon horde" is also no surprise. The association of dragons with treasure goes back to Greek antiquity and appears in the earliest instances of English literature, e.g., Beowulf (tenth century). The classical dragon lair is filled with gold coins, diamonds, rubies .... the riches of Croesis. That is, "dragon life" represents the high point of materialist success — either in pursuing dragons or even becoming a dragon.

C. S. Lewis captures the concept vividly in the Narnian Chronicle, Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which one character who stands out in his selfishness, his greed, and his capacity for treachery morphs into a dragon. Later, repentance, confession, and baptism turn out to be the only remedy for healing and wholeness.

We continue today to link St. George and the Dragon to psychomachia, or "soul-war." I listened recently to an old Orthodox priest who related a counseling session with a young woman contemplating marriage. Pointing to the St. George icon in his office, he asked the girl, "Has your fianc´e; slain the dragon?" It was his way to ask more delicate questions: "Does he use pornography?" "Does he use drugs?" "Does he demand sex whenever you're alone with him?" "Has he slain his dragon?"

Small wonder that St. George has emerged as the primary touchstone for the Christian faith in general. For our faith life is a journey from the darkness of wrong desires and lusts to the transcendent places of soul-to-soul love, which proceeds from the heart (we would say), which opens the gates, which acquaints us even as children to the life of self-giving — to offer oneself to the one he most admires or she most admires, the helpmate, the friend, the one who will be there for him or her, leading into profound communion with the Great Self-giver, our Lord Jesus Christ. The essential cornerstone of Christianity, of course, is His love and therefore our human love.

Do I stretch to say that we are living through a dragon age? That we are surrounded by dragonish life? Has there ever been such a dark age as this one in American history? Our entire culture is soaked through with dragons. Indeed, the crossroads of St. George between material desire and bodily lust, on one side, and moral good and right, on the other is laughed off the stage — mocked on programs like Saturday Night Live as the trappings of d im-witted or, worse, bigoted life, ..... for the dragon has become the darling of our age, not St. George. "Where is our compassion for dragonish life?" they ask.

Examples abound of materialism and unchecked desire sweeping over the globe like the juggernaut it is — an idol gone of out control, crushing everyone in its path. Our oceans and even the blood running through our veins is becoming poisoned with particles of plastic that are remnants of materialist life.

But I believe another example, more precisely tied to our inner struggles, brings twenty-first-century life into sharper focus through the prism of St. George and his Dragon. We at the Hermitage are old enough to remember decency. Before the early 1970s, pornography was illegal. The first magazines "entertaining" men with pictures of unclothed women began contaminating American homes in the early 1950s. But by the 1970s and 1980s, all restrictions began falling away, and pornography began its tyrannical rule over life everywhere in the United States in every social class and in every age group.

I say tyrannical because statistics on human sexual behavior today demonstrate what was inevitable from the beginning, which is the corruption of elementary-school-age children, who have become obsessed with illicit sex. Is it any wonder that today every fetish and forbidden sex act are mainstreaming as an ever-expanding horizon of taboos are proposed?

The crossroads before each person is well-known: either we choose for our own sexual stimulation, on one side, or we choose for personal sanctity and the wholeness of our children, on the other. Which one do we want? Do we want to "go for it" or we want wholesome, shining children? ..... because we cannot have both. I grieve from the bottom of my heart to say that choice, after two generations, has been to have a depraved world figured with disfigured children who now have become disfigured young men.

The idolatry here could not be more obvious. Certainly, if anthropologists from a later age were to study us — watching our devout gaze before computer screens for hours on end (including smart-phones), they would quickly deduce idolatry and label our computers as gods. We even have applications today that record the number of hours we stare at our computer and smart-phone screens. You see, even the materialist culture concedes there is a problem.

If those same scholarly observers were to dig deeper, discovering a book with the words Holy Bible inscribed upon it, they might connect the dots and ask, "What did this idol require of these people?" The answer is "our children." Of course, blood sacrifice to Canaanite or Mesopotamian idols was commonplace. And the sacrifice of children was not unknown. Consider the words of the Psalmist:

Is this one whit different from the scene around us today?

The Christian perspective follows the ancient Hebrew teaching precisely. These blood-thirsty idols are demons. This is the teaching we receive also from St. Paul:

To "those who are not perishing" (1Cor 1:25), the meditation offered this morning is painfully obvious. But to a world who writes off morality as "the artifact of a superstitious age that is thankfully dying off" (as I heard an editor of Scientific American say), then our words fall on deaf ears ..... unintelligible to many people, if not most.

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So let us put a finer point on it to rouse the attention of everyone. In a case entitled Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed legislation attempting to prohibit child pornography on moral grounds: that all child pornography is wrong and ought to be banned on that account, driving a spear into the dragon's heart. You see, in the past legislation had been crafted to prohibit individual acts involving specific persons. Now, the aspiration of the litigants to ban child pornography altogether, to condemn all child pornography as being indecent. Amazingly, the High Court struck down "Ashcroft" on the grounds that "virtual" child porn "records no crime and creates no victims by its production." (Virtual refers to digitally-generated pornography, making it no less real on that account as nearly all "action films" attest.) This ruling distinguishes individual rights from the moral good, indeed, dismisses the notion that there is a moral good. The Court contemplates only the individual right to seek pleasure wherever one may find it.

I am reminded of a conversation I overheard in Holland not long before this High Court ruling. You see, I lectured in Hilversum, Netherlands in those days. I had a Dutch colleague at Bell Labs who would stay with me whenever he came to the U.S. And when I lectured in Holland, I would stay with him and his family.

We would have friendly duels to show each other the most remarkable in our respective countries. He would take me to a field in Holland and ask me to study it: its earthy colors, its misty light.

"What are you he would demand?! You are standing in the middle of a Rembrandt canvas!"

"You are right," I said. "I see it now."

Once when he visited the U.S. I took him to Newark, NJ in the middle of the night — its "bombed out" old houses, its city blocks surrounded by barbed wire, the mercury lamps buzzing above, a kind of wierd green light being refracted before us, our nostrils stinging from a noxious methane gas from rotting garbage and worse.

"Martin, what is this?" I asked. After a pause, I answered, "This is the end of the world."

"Truly, Steve, this is the end of the world."

As I became a friendly member, everyone felt free to speak as I were not there. One of the arguments I remember between husband and wife involved Martin's career at Bell Labs.

"But, Ilsa, if I don't go the United States, that's the end of my career! I put a gun to my head! That's it!"

"Martin, I will not raise my country in that filthy country with its pornography, homosexuality, drugs everywhere, and 'youth culture'! I am not taking my children there. We will live in poverty. I will die before I do this!"

This exchange reminded me of the same conversations I had heard in the Midwest involving Bells Labs colleagues who aspired to research. It is true. They did need to come to Murray Hill (in New Jersey) or to Holmdel if their careers were ever to get real traction.

Their wives would say, "I am not raising my children in New Jersey!"

But you see, New Jersey now has become the entire United States. New Jersey has now become Western Europe. New Jersey is now crowding in .... everywhere.

"How remarkable!" I thought. I grew up hearing my father say, the whole world dreamt of coming to the United States. But now, even in Western Europe, the U.S. is seen as a moral cess pool. When, did I say, I heard this conversation? Nearlyl thirty years ago. Mothers would rather raise their children in hard poverty, would prefer to scrub floors, that live in the upper class, watching their husbands leave home every morning from New Jersey.

In a spirit of full disclosure I should note that I was born in Newark, NJ. My mother grew up in the ghettos of Newark.

Since that time, in the last thirty years, life in the United States has only grown much worse. The updated picture is captured in a recent book, The Day Is Now Far Spent (Ignatius Press, 2019) by a highly respected Roman Catholic Cardinal, Robert Sarah — ".... a bright, shining light. His faith illuminates the path to authentic Catholic reform" says George Weigel. Cardinal Sarah argues trenchantly that the greatest enemy of the West is not Al Queda or ISIS. The greatest enemy of the West is .... the West: "its imperviousness to God and to spiritual values, which resembles a process of lethal self-destruction." Reading his book, which has emerged as a central document aimed against the dragon's heart, one gasps to realize that the war in Ukraine constitutes early signs of a global civil war — an increasingly Americanized Europe expanding into the Russian lifeworld. And the Russians will not have it.

Already in the West, hearts devoted to purity and moral right are being censured. In 2010, a Baptist preacher, Dale Alpine, was arrested in, of all places, Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, What was his crime? He quoted Scripture saying that among the things grievous to God are fornication and homosexuality.

What are Christians to do in the face of arrest and prison for being faithful to Sacred Scripture? Is this not a St. George moment for all of us? ..... with domestic tranquility and material comforts, on one side, and prison, and the depredations such a man as Rev. Alpine would endure in prison, on the other.

Sisters, remind me of the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago who said .... yes, Cardinal George, who said, "I will die in my bed. My successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a red martyr."

The see that battle goes much further than mere words now. That stage is all behind us. Now we are being dragged off to prison. Christians are literally fighting for their lives.

In the humble space of our own lives, it is fought in the valiant acts of turning one's back on drugs, deleting and then refusing pornography, seeking friendships that are wholesome and healing and trustworthy. First of all and last of all, we must wash ourselves and then re-wash ourselves in the waters of baptism and re-baptism, which we call reconciliation.

We in the U.S. say that we will die for our freedoms, that our cause is liberty. How many U.S. wars have been fought on that account alone? But liberty, taken to extremes, is not always so noble as it pretends to be. Did not gentlemen once balk at taking liberties? Did we not once deplore libertines and libertinism? And the Libertarian Party ..... shall we congratulate them for throwing the rest of us into a pit so that their lifestyle may proceed unimpeded? .... as phrases like "the public good" and "common decency" are forgotten. You have heard the replies: "Who's good?" "How do you define decency?"

Can we, in the Land of the Free, not admit that we are lost? That we have made freedom, — seeking out every form of freedom, taking every liberty .... have we not made freedom itself a great idol? Not life-giving, life-taking.

This "being lost" can reach a point of no return just as the planet we are poisoning on the altar of our liberties is reaching a breaking point. The palace of the lost is called Perdition, literally "land of the lost." It is a vast democracy, an ideal of "anything goes" life. In this world, all are equal, and no one, really, is in charge. For Pandemonium literally means "all demons." Pandemonium reigns.

Opposing these rampant liberties and high above them in every way is a Kingdom. There a King reigns. His decrees are certain. And His judgments are perfect and right. Here alone does good and truth abide without exception .... where sheep might safely graze.

We three elderly people live on the edge of the earth, at the end of the day, surrounded by a fence. And may I say, as I have again and again and again, thank God for the Russian Orthodox Church, who will be the last to bow to this idol. And when humanity makes its last stand in a dragonish fight against demons, the Russian Orthodox Church will surely be the last to be taken down.

If we are entering a global civil war, where so-called freedom becomes a form of slavery, dark dungeons indeed, and obedience to God is perfect freedom, ought we not now be reading passages in Scripture that before now seemed beyond the pale? And if we have come to this apocalyptic place and time, if the unthinkable may now be plausibly thought, then who or what must we propose to be the Anti-Christ? The question is too great for me. You see, I grew up in this country. I love this country. The thought crushes my spirit. It leaves me scarcely able to breathe, much less to think clearly.

Withal, we do not forget the dragon's presence in the chalice of the Beloved Disciple, who is perhaps our most trenchant Apostle contra mundum, speaking against the world .... remembering what he said in our Gospel lesson this morning (quoting the Lord):

With St. John's resilience and valor, therefore, let us pray to St. George who opposes the dragon, whatever form he may take today: We pray, St. George, that your mighty intercessions will help to raise up our sinking hearts, to steel our courage, and to face dragonish life with the same firm resolve that you displayed as you faced every kind of privation and suffering. May we gladly suffer with you, and may you lead us to the One Who is the dragon's greatest dread and fear. Amen.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.