Article

Belief

Creed

Monsters

26 September 2024

5 min read

Which dragon does St Michael need to slay today?

Explore the cultural impact of the dragon killer.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

A patch depicting a angel in armour, wielding a sword, on camoflague uniform.

Thomas Tucker on Unsplash.

St Michael is everywhere. But only if you have eyes to see him. He’s probably somewhere in your town. He may even be hiding in your wardrobe in one of your jumpers. Retailer Marks and Spencer trademarked the ‘St Michael’ brand in 1928. It was inspired by their best-selling hosiery brand – St Margaret. The name Michael came from the founder of M& S, Michael Marks. But the logo they used, a winged angel holding aloft a sword, was a reference to the archangel St Michael mentioned in the Bible.

Even in the pages of that book, however, St Michael is a little elusive, being named only a handful of times. Perhaps that was his mystique. Less is more. But whatever St Michael was doing worked really well in the Middle Ages. A tradition arose around him, culminating in a feast day known as Michaelmas on 29th September. This feast day had extra significance as it become a ‘Quarter Day’.

In days gone by, the year was divided into four, bookended by quarter days. Michaelmas was one, at least in England. The next is Christmas Day, followed by Lady Day (March 25), and Midsummer (June 24). Rents were traditionally due on quarters days. Legal and financial contracts were to be settled. Michaelmas was particularly associated with the domestic servants moving around. You will hear it referred to Michaelmas along those lines in Chapter One of Pride and Prejudice.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades.

Many schools called their autumn term ‘Michaelmas’. Mine did, although no-one ever explained what it meant. As schools began to dominate British life, the calendar year ceased to be broken into four but three. Now our lives are regulated by school holidays, ‘back to school’ days and half term, when it is traditional to double the cost of your holiday rental. Christmas remains. Lady Day morphed into the end of the tax year. (I’m sure the Virgin Mary would be thrilled). And Midsummer Day has vanished almost completely.

St Michael had a good run. He had been a wildly popular figure from Anglo-Saxon times and Michaelmas a firm fixture in the calendar. Many churches founded in that period were named after him. Over 800 of those churches dedicated to St Michael remain in England, scattered across the counties. (I walked around one on Sunday afternoon in East Coker, Somerset where the ashes of TS Eliot have been interred.) Only the Virgin Mary, St Peter and All Saints are more popular in the church dedication charts.

In short, St Michael was a big deal. Why? Because he was a dragon killer.

In fact, Michael was not just ‘a killer of dragons’ but ‘the killer of the dragon’. That dragon is the silver-tongued serpent, Satan himself. The final reference to Michael in the Bible reads thus – and yes, it sounds better in the King James Version:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

St Michael is the defeater of evil itself. This is a comforting figure when boatloads of Vikings could appear in your shire at any minute in order to destroy, steal, rape and pillage. The fact that these longboats had a dragonhead on the prow served only to reinforce this image that the enemy were representatives of Satan himself.

Dragon-slaying was a staple of heroic tales. Beowulf naturally fights a dragon. Merlin is mixed up with a dragon called Kilgharrah. There are also dozens of accounts in which dragons are slain, often presented in a prosaic and serious way, like a report of pest control. Not far from me in the woods near Wells, the Bishop Jocelyn killed a dragon in 1320s. The latest account like this is in 1614 , reporting a “strange and monstrous serpent” living in St Leonard’s Forest near Horsham in Sussex “to the great annoyance and diverse slaughters both of men and cattle, by his strong and violent poison”.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades. Dragons are everywhere. Our TV screens are constantly invaded by insatiable fire-breathing serpents. Bookshops bulge with titles about dragons.

When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping off their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts.

Has the time come for St Michael to return? Surprisingly not.

St Michael has not been summoned because he is a dragon killer, and we don’t want to kill dragons. Not anymore. We want to tame them. We want to understand them. We want to harness their power.

That’s what happens in Game of Thrones. Daenerys Targaryen wishes to assert her claim to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros using the dragons that she has hatched. But can she use those dragons to bring about justice or ‘the greater good’ without being consumed by them or becoming dragon-like herself? It is an eternal question, played out in the Cold War with nuclear weapons and in Middle Earth with a powerful ring.

We are seduced by the allure of the dragon all too easily. It’s there at the very beginning of Western Culture in the Bible: Eve is approached by a persuasive snake who tempts her to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She falls for it. But throughout the Bible, the one blamed for the sin is not Eve, but Adam.

But how is it Adam’s fault? Adam failed to give the serpent the Archangel Michael treatment. Adam should have killed the serpent or chased it out of the garden. He didn’t because, well, things were just starting to get interesting. And the rest is theology.

St Michael is the extinguisher of evil. But we don’t want to destroy evil. We just want to see it diminished. A bit. In fact, the talk of Good and Evil is rather embarrassing. We don’t do Good and Evil. We do ‘values’. We don’t condemn sins. We seek to re-educate those with ‘anti-social behaviours’.

We have the dubious luxury of speaking this way because we aren’t about to be attacked by Vikings any times soon. When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping of their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts. Evil is very real. That’s when you might need some clean pairs of Marks and Spencer’s famously excellent underwear.

Scroll the news and you will find that millions around the world live with the reality of Viking-like terror right now. For them the virtues of St Michael might be more apparent.

Explainer

Belief

Character

Creed

3 May 2023

6 min read

Soren Kierkegaard is the godfather of authenticity

He was the intellectual bombshell that destroyed smug satisfaction. Soren Kierkegaard’s influence is still felt today.

Stephen Backhouse

Dr Stephen Backhouse is the author of the biography "Kierkegaard: A Single Life" and “Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism”.

A sculpture of a early 19th century man with a quiff and sharp suit.

Kierkegaard captured in sculpture. The Royal Library, Denmark.

Holger Damgaard, via Wikimedia Commons

Do you value authenticity? Do you distrust herd-instinct? Do like it when people walk the talk and practice what they preach? Have you, or someone you know, ever faced an existential crisis, rejected cultural religion, or taken a leap of faith?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then you have been shaped by the words and life of the Danish thinker and rabble-rouser Søren Kierkegaard. He died in 1855, never knowing an audience for his philosophy outside of his native Copenhagen. Yet today, more perhaps than any other, Kierkegaard stands as the philosopher you never knew you knew.

Søren Kierkegaard (SOO-ren KEER-ka-gor) lived during the Danish Golden Age, the most civilised era of Europe’s most civilised country. Danish science, poetry and thought were at their highest, political ideas were thriving and the economy booming. Copenhagen’s chattering classes were at their most confident. It was into this coterie of smug satisfaction that Kierkegaard burst like a bombshell. The result was a man of deep contradictions. A literary genius who poked holes in literary pretensions. A brilliant philosopher who openly mocked philosophy. A religious thinker who wrestled with faith, God and questions of ultimate meaning yet he despised priests and theologians above all else. He is one of history’s most profound Christian thinkers who devoted his entire life to attacking Christendom. The weapons in Kierkegaard’s arsenal of this attack are the gifts he has bequeathed to the modern world.

Authenticity

For Kierkegaard, the main problem with 'Christendom' was the way that all matters of ultimate personal meaning were answered by one’s membership in the group. To put it bluntly: Europeans and Americans assume they are Christian, not because they have made a compelling decision regarding faith, but simply because they are European and American. The result is a boon to nationalism, but a blow to 'authentic existence'. Our modern culture values pliant civilised citizens above all else. People are rewarded for aligning their purpose according to that of their nation, and punished when they deviate from the path, for example, when they make ultimate life choices that put them in a collision course with the values of their home culture. The outcome is that modern life amounts to not much more than herd-instinct. We live in mobs which require personal authenticity to be subsumed into the crowd. As a result, Kierkegaard saw that the modern civilisation Christendom built is largely inauthentic and deeply inhuman.

It is only by rejecting the false identity offered by pliant membership of the herd that one can find one’s authentic self.

The Leap

His solution for all this civilised inauthenticity was 'the leap', often understood as 'the leap of faith'. For Kierkegaard, 'leaping' is what happens when you risk jumping out of your comfort zone for the sake of becoming a real person. The leap is away from meagre safety and out into the unknown. When people make the leap, two things happen: one, they find themselves. And two, they find their enemies. It is only by rejecting the false identity offered by pliant membership of the herd that one can find one’s authentic self. And yet the herd hates being rejected. People who refuse to let their inherited culture and nationality dictate their whole story will soon find that nation and culture do not offer unconditional love. The leap of faith is a leap into the unknown which offers fulfilment, but it is also a leap away from that which falsely offers security.

You have a say in who you are and who you will become.

Existentialism

Kierkegaard is often described as “the father of existentialism”, which is simply another way to describe a philosophy based on the assumption that your existence matters. “You” are more than the country you were born into, the race you are a part of, or the religion you inherited. Your existence matters more, and your authentic identity is grounded in more, than simply being a cog in a faceless system. You have a say in who you are and who you will become. Existentialism then, is a way of living and thinking which attempts to recognise the responsibility you have for your own existence. For Kierkegaard, most human beings elect not to face the existential questions of their own life, content to remain in the warm bath of the herd. But there will always be a minority for whom meaning and truth matter more than the cold comfort of common sense. Kierkegaard was deeply suspicious of the “sense” that we all share “in common.” The wisdom of the crowd might be good for all sorts of things when it comes to daily life, but it is spectacularly bad when it comes to matters of ultimate meaning.

For daring to suggest that the Danish Golden Age might be smoke and mirrors, Kierkegaard was pilloried by the popular press.

Kierkegaard recognised that existential minorities are rare, good, and often deeply unpopular in their lifetimes. His two favourite examples were Socrates and Jesus: public thinkers who loved authenticity and other people above all else, and were killed as a result by the powers that be. It was for this reason that Kierkegaard felt himself on a “collision course” with Danish Christendom, the religious patriotic culture of his day.

Sure enough, when he died in 1855 it was in the midst of public outcry and demonisation by the established church. The attack came from two fronts, but the undercurrent was what today we would recognise as “nationalism”. For daring to suggest that the Danish Golden Age might be smoke and mirrors, Kierkegaard was pilloried by the popular press. Mean-spirited cartoons lampooning his physical appearance were published weekly, and children were encouraged to mock him in the streets. It is said that a whole generation of boys were not called “Søren” because of the association with his name. For their part, the official representatives of Danish Christianity were also appalled at Kierkegaard’s cheek for pointing out that their beloved apparatus of church, state and patriotism bore zero relationship to the way, words and life of Jesus. The culture that Christendom was proud to have built, was, for Kierkegaard, the very thing that was stopping people from discovering their true selves, authentic existence and real love. Behind the sentimental language of the love of nation lurked a hard-hearted herd mentality built on exclusion, hypocrisy and pride.

‘Here was someone who was seriously wrestling with this terror, this suffering and this sorrow. It resonated deeply with me.’

Cornel West

Kierkegaard’s existential protest against religious nationalism was largely unheeded in his lifetime. Yet in 1944, the world war still raging, US President Franklin D Roosevelt called an aid into his office. “Have you ever read Kierkegaard?” asked FDR. “Well, You ought to read him. It will teach you about the Nazis. Kierkegaard explains the Nazis to me as nothing else ever has. I have never been able to make out why people who are obviously human beings could behave like that... Kierkegaard gives you an understanding of what is in man that makes it possible for these Germans to be so evil.”

In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to write about his path to peaceful and lasting social change. In Pilgrimage to NonViolence he wrote about discovering the philosophy of Kierkegaard: “Its perception of the anxiety and conflict produced in man’s personal and social life […] is especially meaningful for our time.”

In 1965 a young African-American man, barred from using his main library due to racist nationalism, gets his reading from a different source: “In reading Kierkegaard from the Bookmobile...here was someone who was seriously wrestling with this terror, this suffering and this sorrow. It resonated deeply with me.” Cornel West would go on to study philosophy, eventually becoming a leading public intellectual and activists for racial justice. T

To this list of Kierkegaardians we can also add Ludwig Wittgenstein, TS Eliot, Jean Paul Sartre, Dorothy Sayers, Flannery O’Connor, and Hannah Ardent, to name but a few. Surely the Inkling, author and publisher Charles Williams was correct when he wrote of Kierkegaard in 1939: “His sayings will be so moderated in our minds that they will soon become not his sayings, but ours.” If you value authenticity, if you mistrust the herd instinct of crowds, if you have had an existential crisis, if you or someone you know has ever taken “a leap of faith” then you are living and thinking with words and along lines laid down by Søren Kierkegaard, whether you know it or not.