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 BBC 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.

Review

Art

Character

Creed

Easter

Suffering

18 April 2025

5 min read

Why sculpt the face of Christ?

In Nic Fiddian Green’s work we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A man looks up a shaft of light that illuminates him and a crucifix higher up a wall.

I Accepted, 2025.

Richard Foster.

The seeds of faith were sown in the life of Nic Fiddian Green by his father. As he has explained recently, he “was shown a way and a faith, and an understanding around the faith of Christianity, in the way my father lived”.

Later, his wife-to-be, Henrietta Hutley, asked him to help create Stations of the Cross for the Wintershall Estate in Surrey where, today, The Nativity and the Life of Christ are regularly performed. Henrietta’s father, Peter, wrote and brought The Passion of Jesus to Trafalgar Square, while her mother, Anne, had the vision for the Stations of the Cross project after a life-changing visit to Medjugorje.

Fiddian Green says that “The Face of Christ has been with me for over 40 years” and that he has “searched for His face through my art as part of my spiritual journey, and also in the work of many others – especially Renaissance artists like Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo”.

Fiddian Green, who is internationally celebrated for his monumental equine sculptures, has created a deeply personal and spiritually resonant exhibition entitled The Face of Christ. The exhibition features 20 new sculptures including works in bronze, copper, lead, marble, plaster, and silver, together with a series of drawings. The exhibition ranges from the Nativity to the Resurrection but focuses primarily on the crucifixion.

The exhibition is deeply personal for Fiddian Green because it is informed by the harrowing encounters he had with an array of life-threatening illnesses a few years ago. These caused an obvious and honest creative re-assessment and it is from these experiences that a stronger, deeper and more contemplative vision has emerged. One that permeates the new work via modes of stillness and reflection.

The Face of Christ offers a profoundly meditative engagement with the image of Christ, capturing a sense of serenity, resilience, and transcendence in bronze and stone. In these works, he shows us how his spirit and his faith help him triumph over the physical as he explores the enduring power of faith, suffering and redemption. In the eyes of his work, we feel pain, strength, fear, wisdom and more as he asks questions of the viewer that leave a powerful and spiritual resonance.

Fiddian Green says: “These works are a reflection of my journey of faith. I have come to find that His power to elevate us underpins everything I strive to do and The Face of Christ is an attempt for me to convey in my work all that He conveys in my heart. Christ gives me the key, but will I open the door…?”

A sketch shows the hanging head of Christ wearing a crown of thorns.

This Storm Will Pass, 2024. Slademore Gallery.

A crucifix hands on a round-topped slab.

I Paid, 1993. Slademore Gallery.

Crown of Thorns, 2025. Nic Fiddian Green.

While the exhibition focuses on the crucifixion and the face of the crucified Christ, the expression on Christ’s face is generally one of peace, rather than pain. In part, this is because many of the heads of Christ included are images of Christ resting in death prior to the resurrection. The brokenness that the crucifixion brought is shown in these images through damage to the body of Christ, as opposed to the expressions on his face. This is most powerfully the case with ‘Broken for You’, a bronze crucifixion sculpture where Christ’s torso, as well as being scarred by a long spear-like fissure, has also been fractured with the two parts fused together using brace brackets. Similar fissures appear on other of the crucifixion sculptures but ‘Broken for You’ goes furthest in graphically showing the pain Christ endured on our behalf.

It seems to me that Fiddian Green could go further in revealing the horrors that Christ endured and that his love of Renaissance art with its focus on beauty and balance might hold him back in this regard. Another artist to have regularly depicted the Crucifixion in images shown in mainstream galleries in recent years is Peter Howson, whose images of the crucifixion are much more expressionist graphically capturing the depth of pain that Christ endured. Fiddian Green’s drawings, more than his sculptures, tap into the sense of pain endured, particularly ‘This Storm will Pass’, a partial image of the face of the crucified Christ which in its frenetic pencil-marks and incomplete state speaks particularly powerfully.

Fiddian Green, by contrast, primarily gives us a sense of the peace that he receives from Christ on the face of Christ. ‘I Forgive’, a bronze head of the crucified Christ depicts the love with which Christ looks on us as he endures the cross. ‘Christ is Laid to Rest’ is a huge head encircled by a crown of massive spikey thorns with green verdigris overtones suggesting the sweat and blood of anguish which has led to the completion of purpose that Christ finds in death. ‘Peace’, a plaster sculpture of Christ’s head, is also redolent of the supreme achievement of the cross; ‘It is finished’, meaning that all his work is complete and done, enabling him to rest and enabling us to enter rest.

In these images, Fiddian Green is reading back into the events of the crucifixion the outcomes that it gains for us and showing, in his Christ figures, the peace that he personally finds in the love and forgiveness which overflows from the crucified Christ to each and every human being throughout time and history.

Fiddian Green writes of having “been given materials to use by the God of heaven and earth” – those materials of the earth that he uses in his sculptures – and says that “it is my hope that some of these pieces may rest and resonate with those who see it; that they may find a deep connection by gazing on the works which takes the eye, the heart and the soul to the One who helped me create them”.

While Lent, Holy Week and Easter are often times when art is offered to enable us to walk in the footsteps of Christ it is not common for commercial galleries to specifically invite meditation on these events, so don’t miss the opportunity for contemplation that the Sladmore Gallery is providing through this exhibition.

The Face of Christ, 10th April – 2nd May 2025, Sladmore Gallery, London.

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