Afterlives of the Saints Page 14

  This was just the beginning. George was killed three separate times and resurrected three times by the Archangel Michael so he could undergo more torture. During this orgy of violence, George managed to raise some 460 people from the dead and convert them, miraculously producing water from the ground for their baptism. He turned the throne of the emperor into a fruit-bearing tree, cured a child of blindness, and resurrected an ox. The molten lead poured into his mouth did not stop him from summoning and directly engaging Apollo, whom he forced to confess that he was not a real god. When George was finally beheaded, a rain of fire consumed his tormentors, an earthquake terrified all who remained, and then milk and honey flowed from his corpse.

  It's easy to see why Gelasius and others were so quick to discount George. The absurdity of these tortures makes a mockery of martyrdom, substituting for a life-and-death moment a caval cade of goofy violence so extreme yet disembodied that it feels like a Looney Tunes cartoon.

  Of all the tortures recorded in the Vienna Palimpsest, though, the most fascinating is the one involving the bronze bull. Assuming, as Pope Gelasius certainly did, that most of the tortures listed in the Palimpsest are invented, this one in particular is a curiously literary touch since anyone who heard it would immediately have thought of an earlier pagan story that was well known throughout the Roman Empire. That story involves the king of Crete, Minos, who, along with his wife, Pasiphaë, was cursed by the gods (according to different sources, either he offended Poseidon with his hubris or she offended Venus by failing to make offerings). As punishment, Pasiphaë developed an unnatural lust for one of Minos's bulls, and had the king's mechanical genius, Daedalus, build a wooden cow covered in hide that she could fit inside. In this manner Pasiphaë had sex with a bull and ultimately bore a son— the half-human, half-bull Minotaur.

  Pasiphaë, to Minos's great shame, is the mother of a monster born of an unnatural desire. The Vienna Palimpsest recasts George the martyr as an echo of Pasiphaë, as though he, too, is on the verge of giving birth to something monstrous, something beyond the understanding of the human mind.

  The cult of George is a study in the evolution of a belief across continents and across cultures. He was originally popular throughout the Middle East and had shrines and churches dedi cated to him in Cairo, Antioch, Syria, Constantinople, and Lydda in Palestine (his supposed birthplace). His name means "worker of the land"; from his earliest days, he was a saint of agriculture, and he was largely unknown in Europe.

  All this changed with the Crusades. In 1098, European Christians attempted to sack the city of Antioch, which had a shrine to George at its gates. According to the crusaders' story, as they descended on the city, a vision appeared of three knights on white horses, carrying white banners— the saints George, Demetrius, and Mercurius, who led them to victory over the city's Muslims.

  George soon became a favorite saint of the crusaders, who claimed he helped them to spread Christendom in his native land by force. Accordingly they brought him back to Europe on their return and began to build shrines and churches for him throughout their homelands. But it was Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend that truly cemented his reputation: George's story is one of the longest in the entire book, and it is the first appearance of the story of George and the dragon. In this version, George was a wandering knight who happened upon a town somewhere in the desert of Libya that was besieged by a dragon. The townspeople had been regularly offering sheep and human sacrifices to appease it when, by lottery, the king's own daughter was chosen. George heard her cries and attacked the dragon, driving his lance into its side and commanding the young girl to throw her girdle around its neck. As the girdle landed on the dragon, the creature became instantly docile, and George and the princess were able to lead it back to town on a leash.

  George, it should be said, was far from the only saint to deal with dragons. Saint Margaret of Antioch was swallowed by a dragon, so the story goes, but when she held up her cross in the belly of the beast, he disgorged her. Saints Matthew, Donatus, and Martha all also faced and defeated dragons. The dragon is a regular feature in these stories because it was a recognizable symbol of evil for many European audiences, and these encounters with dragons would have been largely read as symbolic. But what made George's story particularly popular was the fact that he was a knight. Jacobus was writing during the burgeoning age of chivalry, when the concept of the heroic knight was appearing in popular romances, particularly in France and England. Jacobus's version of George appropriated those secular stories, subordinating the chivalric knight and courtly love to a grander Christian narrative.

  Rereading the story recently, I was struck by a scene that seems inexplicably cruel: Having tamed the dragon so that it is no longer a threat, George offers to decapitate it if all the townspeople adopt his religion. After some twenty thousand pagans convert to Christianity, he indeed beheads the dragon. The monster, we're to believe, is no longer dangerous, and so its death is offered as part of a distasteful bargain: Pledge your soul to my religion, and I'll satisfy your bloodlust and your need for revenge. George was fast becoming, like Foy, a violent saint. Of course you could argue that any military saint, including Barbara, dealt in violence, but Barbara you called on to keep you from harm. George was the saint you took to war.

  England's Edward I took George along when he invaded Wales in 1277. He adopted George as his patron for two reasons: first because he was eager to justify his conquest as a holy crusade. Second, and even more to the point, Wales had long adopted the dragon as its own symbol, and Edward's invocation of George helped to transform an image of strength into a symbol of evil. Edward prevailed as George had over the dragon, bringing English law to Wales, which was in time incorporated into what became the United Kingdom. In the process, the English sought to bring homogeneity to their island, erasing any cultural, linguistic, or national differences. The warrior-saint, George, now a national symbol, became inherently bound up in national conquest, in colonization.

  Later kings Edward III and Henry V also invoked George as their protector, and the relative success of these three monarchs helped to establish the saint's iconic status as the patron of England. When the fiercely anti-Catholic Edmund Spenser wrote his epic in honor of Queen Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene, he began with George— though he could not, of course, call him that. Instead, George is stripped of his Catholicism and rechristened "the Redcrosse Knight" (after George's famous red cross on a white background, which became England's flag). Spenser's hatred of Catholicism went beyond matters of doctrine: Like many Anglicans, he despised the proliferation of "idolatrous" artwork and decoration in the Catholic Church, and so the Redcrosse Knight's supreme antagonist is named Arch-Imago, the " Great Image." Spenser was equally suspicious of the writings of the Catholic fathers, which is why the first beast Redcrosse slays, Error, vomits "bookes and papers" along with "loathly frogs and toades." By Spenser's reckoning, a disguised George now wages war against Jerome and Gregory the Great, as Elizabeth was engaged in purging England of Catholics.

  It may seem odd that in critiquing the Catholic Church, Spenser used as his champion one of its most famous saints, but the warrior-knight has always had shifting allegiances. The obscurity of his origins have given him a fluidity to be whatever he is needed to be: Now he gives birth to monsters, now he fights against them, now for Catholicism and now against it. It seems as if the sword of George, a holy mercenary, is always for hire.

  As a saint without fixed loyalty, George is free to represent all things to all people. The crusaders may have taken him with them back to Europe, but of course he also remained a presence in the Middle East. As a result, George's legend evolved in two different strands. In England, he's become the crusader knight, the slayer of dragons; in the Middle East, he is still the agricultural patron who brings good crops and healthy livestock and is particularly helpful in matters of fertility.

  English Protestants like Spenser were perfectly comfortable calling on George as their patr
on, but then, so were members of other religions. That is, as the Middle East continued to evolve over the centuries, Islam gradually displacing Christianity, George didn't disappear; he instead became one of those exceedingly rare figures: an interfaith saint. Muslims came to know him as Khidr, "the Green One," affording him the same respect as did the remaining Christians, and now in the Middle East, both Muslims and Christians come to pray at his shrine.

  In the town of Beit Jala, outside Bethlehem, is a chapel devoted to George, a shrine that has long been used as a makeshift insane asylum. According J. E. Hannauer's Folklore of the Holy Land: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, published in 1907, George's shrine is described as a "sort of madhouse. Deranged persons of all three faiths are taken thither and chained in the court of the chapel, where they are kept for forty days on bread and water, the Greek priest at the head of the establishment now and then reading the Gospel over them, or administering a whipping as the case demands." Although this practice has been discontinued in the hundred years since, one can still speak of someone going mad as "going to St. George's."

  When William Dalrymple visited George's shrine in the 1990s, the Greek Orthodox priest who ran the shrine complained of hundreds of Muslim pilgrims, "all over the floor, in the aisles, up and down . . . bottoms in the air, prayer mats on the floor: yes— in an Orthodox church!" They brought prayer mats adorned with images of Mecca to show their devotion to George-Khidr and told Dalrymple of miraculous sightings of him on his white horse, performing miracles for the faithful and unconcerned by which faith they might represent.

  It is odd that a saint who is so strongly associated with nationalism and conquest, with the obliteration of monsters and of other cultures, should also be a symbol of heterogeneity and contradiction, his shrine a place where devout Muslims leave tokens of gratitude for Greek Orthodox priests. One is left wondering if George, for all his chivalric virtue, is himself a monster of conflicting ideas and beliefs— as if the dragon he's fighting is also himself.

  ·fifteen·

  In the Darkest Nights of the Year: Lucy

  Van Gogh's The Night Café is an image of destitution, its garish colors unable to hide its bleak desperation. Around the edges of the room huddle silent patrons, beneath the dandelion-halos of a few harsh overhead lights. The painting's perspective is skewed: A billiards table juts out at an improbable angle, and the floor tilts forward as if the whole room is ready to spill onto the ground at the viewer's feet. It's an unsettling image, a distorted view through diseased eyes, vertiginous and bleak. "I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime," Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. "So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin." Van Gogh sought to unearth the darkness in something as banal as an all-night bar to show us what's hiding underneath.

  A month after Van Gogh finished The Night Café, Paul Gauguin arrived in Arles, invited by the younger painter to form something like an artist's colony in a small yellow house where Van Gogh had been living. Gauguin arrived at night, waiting until daybreak at the same all-night café, that place of infernal solitude. Things did not go well; within a few weeks, their relationship had begun to sour. "Gauguin," Van Gogh wrote to his brother, "does not like the little yellow cottage." They quarreled about art, and about money. ("One thing that made him angry was having to acknowledge that I was very intelligent," Gauguin later wrote with characteristic humility.) Even as they painted each other's portraits and encouraged each other's work, Van Gogh's behavior became increasingly erratic, and a few times Gauguin awoke in the dead of night to find Van Gogh standing directly over his bed, silently staring at him.

  Just after the winter solstice, on one of the darkest nights of the year, Van Gogh ended an argument by flinging a glass of absinthe at Gauguin's face, and the latter resolved to leave Arles for good. The next night— December 23— Gauguin was walking home when, as he later recalled, "I heard a well-known little step behind me, quick and jerky. I turned around just as Vincent rushed at me with an open razor in his hand." Van Gogh halted abruptly, and in that bleak alleyway the two men stared at each other for a long, perhaps interminable, moment. "The look in my eyes at that moment must have been very powerful," Gauguin wrote, "for he stopped, lowered his head and ran back toward the house."

  Van Gogh took Luke the Evangelist as his patron because Luke is the saint of painters. But the saint whom I most associate with this artist, and particularly with that dead winter night in Arles, is not Luke but Lucy, patron of the darkest nights of the year. Lucy's story began as a sort of sequel to that of another saint— as a young girl she'd come to pray at Agatha's shrine, bringing along her mother, hoping to cure her dysentery. Agatha not only cured Lucy's mother but also appeared to the young girl in a vision, telling her that she, too, would one day be revered in her home of Syracuse as Agatha was in Catania. Lucy, like Agatha, subsequently pledged her virginity and paid a similarly high price for it— she, too, was sent to a brothel at one point and later tortured. And, like Agatha, she's now recognized by the body part cut from her during these tortures: her eyes.

  At least, that's the most common version of Lucy's story; there are differing accounts of how she lost her eyes. Another involves a suitor who relentlessly pursued the virginal Lucy, repeatedly complimenting her on the beauty of her eyes. Lucy, wanting to be left in peace, simply gouged out her eyes and sent them to the suitor, telling him he was free to have them if he felt they were so beautiful and asking to be finally left in peace.

  This story is likely apocryphal, but it has echoes of another, a story that also happened on December 23, 1888. After threatening Gauguin with a straight razor, Van Gogh took that same razor to a nearby brothel, where he cut off a portion of his right earlobe, giving it to a prostitute named Rachel and asking her to hold it for safekeeping.

  It was these dual stories of self-mutilation that initially led me to equate Van Gogh and Lucy, but there are other reasons why I think he should have adopted her over Luke. "The symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, is, as you know, an ox," Van Gogh wrote to Émile Bernard in the summer of 1888. "So you just be patient as an ox if you want to work in the artistic field." But Van Gogh didn't need a patron saint of patience; he needed a saint of the night, when he was most troubled. ("The thing I dread most is insomnia," he wrote to his brother after he'd been hospitalized.) He needed a saint to offer hope in the darkness, salvation from the darkness of winter.

  The details of Van Gogh's self-mutilation remain murky, in no small part because the primary account of the event comes from Gauguin, hardly a reliable source. But, then, it is hard to understand self-mutilation at all. What must Lucy's act have looked like? Was it slow, grinding, bloody work as she grunted and moaned, working the knife? Or was she hardly conscious of it, distracted by her own sublimity, perhaps humming?

  F I G U R E 1 2 : Statue of Saint Lucy, Saint Roch's Cemetery, New Orleans © JOANNA EBENSTEIN

  I imagine that no one but I thinks much about the specifics of Lucy's gouging out her own eyes, even though this is what makes her the saint she is. Yet I'll confess that I have trouble not thinking about the particularities of the event, even supposing it's apocryphal. Many saints are defined almost exclusively by their bodies, by what they did with them and what was done to them. And yet their bodies are what we cannot or will not face. In Lucy's act hide these paradoxes of devotion, complications of faith, and the body we'd rather not see. Earlier audiences, I think, would not have overly troubled themselves with questions as to the details of such a horrific moment. One's own time and place, I suppose, greatly influence how one feels about the bodies of the saints and the degree to which one seeks to understand those bodies.

  Dante Alig
hieri, for one, didn't seem too concerned with the body of a saint like Lucy. Like Van Gogh, he was half mad, wandering through a desolate forest in the middle of the night when Lucy found him in need of salvation. Lucy plays a key role in the Divine Comedy; alerted to Dante's presence by the Virgin Mary, Lucy turns to Beatrice to aid this pilgrim through the perilous night:

  Beatrice, true praise of God,

  why do you not help the one who loved you so that for your sake he left the vulgar herd?

  Do you not hear the anguish in his tears?

  do you not see the death besetting him

  on the swollen river where the sea cannot prevail?

  The Dante scholar Robert Hollander notes of these lines, "As tormented a passage as may be found in this canto, and one of the most difficult in the entire work." Readers of Dante have spent a great deal of time puzzling out that swollen river, that sea— it seems a metaphorical death besetting him; perhaps he is wasting away from love of Beatrice. But what an odd image, where the swollen river is that figure of death while the sea is salvation.

  Dante's Lucy often calls attention to her own eyes. In Purgatorio, Canto IX, it is Lucy who picks up the sleeping Dante and carries him to the gate of Purgatory to begin his ascent. "Here she set you down," Virgil tells him, "but first her lovely eyes showed me that entrance, standing open." It is Lucy's lovely eyes, her occhi belli, that guide our hero, who does not pause to mention the stories of the violent fate that befell such beautiful eyes. For Dante, Lucy's power and her life could be contained in her name alone, from the Latin lux, "light." Scholars have even suggested that these stories about her mutilated eyes were created years after Dante; it was not until the Middle Ages, some have argued, that she became known as the patron saint of blindness, bearing those startling eyes on her tray. Lucy's story, perhaps, evolved simply from the meaning of her name, like Foy's. And like Foy, it may be that she was originally less a person than an ideal, a symbol.