Which dragon does St Michael need to slay today?

Explore the cultural impact of the dragon killer.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

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.

Article

Assisted dying

Creed

Suffering

5 November 2024

4 min read

Assisted dying: in praise of being a burden

It's not a reason to end a life, it's the very possibility of our being human.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A younger hand holds a wrinkled older hand of someone in a bed.

A lot has been said already about assisted dying. In the raging bonfire of public discourse, there has been a lot of heat, but not a lot of light. But amid all the noise surrounding Parliament’s upcoming discussion around assisted dying, a recent conversation hosted by Prospect between Brenda Hale (former President of the Supreme Court) and Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) served as a reminder that we are, despite everything, still capable of having meaningful and fruitful discussion about even the most divisive of issues.

The conversation is earnest and hard-won throughout; both Hale and Williams each push and probe the other for more detail, more nuance, more outworking of implications. And yet their tenor remains respectful. There is no cheap point scoring, no trite comments or easy aphorisms. These are two people working to understand the other, in full recognition of the gravity of the topic.

One particular moment, however, was frankly spine-chilling. As the conversation progresses, Hale is asked the following: “How do you deal with the pressure questions – pressure from family or financial pressures? What safeguards can you build in?” Her response – in full, for context – is as follows:

“Well, you can build in the safeguards that the decision must be made without undue influence, coercion, duress or fraud. But in the end, it’s a matter of evidence, isn’t it? One of the things I find most difficult is that I don’t think it’s necessarily irrational for somebody to take into account the suffering their suffering is causing to the people dear to them, or the burden that looking after them is placing upon the whole community.

I wouldn’t call that “undue influence”, but it’s one of the questions I find most difficult about all of this. You know, obviously there’s duress, there’s financial abuse, there are all of those sorts of things that have got to be checked against, and there ought to be objective evidence of absence of that. But when it comes down to somebody thinking, “I don’t want to be a cause of others suffering,” that seems to me to be a reasonable thing for somebody to take into account.”

The idea that my dependency or burdensomeness might factor into decisions about whether I continue to live, seems to me to be contrary to the very notion of the Christian message. Let me explain why.

We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

We are, whether we like it or not, now rapidly approaching Christmas. At this time of year, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus; the divine Son of God made flesh and born of a virgin. As the divine Son of God, Jesus lived the perfect human life of joy, grace, and faithfulness; the kind of life I can only aspire to.

Because of this, as a Christian, I look to Jesus’ perfect life of faithfulness as a model for what a truly healthy human life looks like. And I am often surprised by what I find there. For example, it turns out true human flourishing does not involve getting married, having sex, or having children; Jesus’ perfect life of flourishing featured none of these things.

But crucially, Jesus’ perfect life often involved depending upon others; upon being a burden to those around him. As an itinerant travelling teacher, Jesus relied on the financial support of his followers to make his ministry possible. He relied on being made and given food to eat, and a roof to sleep under. He was far from self-sufficient. Rather, he gladly made himself a burden to others in service of his ministry.

But more than this, we often overlook the radical significance of the Christian claim that, at Christmas, we celebrate God’s becoming a baby. For the first years of his perfect life, Jesus was entirely – entirely – dependent upon his parents for all his needs. Here we see God, in the person of Jesus, depending upon Mary and Joseph to feed him, to clothe him, to cuddle him, to clean up his sick and his excrement. This is what human flourishing looks like.

This is mirrored at his glorious death, too. Prior to his arrest, Jesus asked his friends for support; to stay awake while he prays for comfort. The Gospels go on to tell us that, having been mercilessly tortured, beaten, stripped, and interrogated, Jesus had his cross carried by a man named Simon of Cyrene. After his death, having no tomb of his own, Jesus was buried in the family tomb of his follower Joseph of Arimathea. And this, too, is what human flourishing looks like.

Throughout his entire life Jesus lived the perfect life of human joy and faithfulness. And this often involved depending upon others and being a burden to them in every way conceivable. We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

To think, then, with Baroness Hale, that my dependency and burdensomeness upon others might somehow serve to underwrite a decision to end my life, is fraught with difficulty for me as a Christian. I simply cannot reconcile her words with the life I see Jesus living in the Bible: a life of joyful, difficult burdensomeness.

There may be many other reasons why people decide they want their lives to end. But a sense of burdening others ought not to be one of them. Being a burden is not a reason to bring one’s life to an end, because it is the very possibility of our being human in the first place. To need others, to place ourselves into their care, does not make us less human, it makes us more human. And therein lies its glory.