A summer stroll in the downtown district of the city of Santa Ana, a predominantly Latino city in Orange County, California, had me wandering into Alta/Baja, a specialty grocery store and café. There, nestled among spices, handcrafted baskets, and sundry ceramic goods stood a patient row of hand-carved figurines, each wearing a long, colorful tunic and featuring a bird on his shoulder and a wolf at his feet. A label on the shelf informed shoppers that they were representations of Saint Francis, patron saint of animals and the ecology more widely.
The presence of a medieval Italian saint in a store specializing in the foods and crafts of California, Mexico, and the American Southwest may initially seem incongruous, but my recent engagement with Aaron Hollander’s thought-provoking Saint George Liberator: Hagiography as Resistance in the Modern Mediterranean made me think twice before dismissing it as a mere example of kitsch commodification or cheap secularization. Hollander’s book shows that saints have always had a way of crossing borders, of speaking across languages and religious affiliations, and of serving as cultural, political, and ethical models and resources for engaging in what he calls “the beautiful struggle” to live whole and free.
Historians of Christianity, especially those, like myself, interested in its medieval and early modern iterations have long asserted that saints are good to think with. Echoing the felicitous phrase “good to think with” from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ observation in Totemism that the significance of totemic animals resides less in how useful or feared they are in actuality than in the way they allow for the articulation of speculative thought, historian of early modern Europe Simon Ditchfield has argued that the cult of saints exceeds the translation of other concerns (dogmatic, symbolic, pragmatic) into particular practices. In a programmatic essay published in Saints: Faith without Borders, he laid out what he called a synesthetic approach to the cult of saints that would focus on how it endures through the availability of saints as tropes or discursive tools to think about issues of common concern such as the scientific, political, and social changes that characterized the transition to modernity.
Ditchfield contrasts this synesthetic approach to the synthetic, where the scholarly quest to elucidate the specific conditions that gave rise to certain beliefs risks explaining those beliefs away. The synthetic approach imagines the practices of the past as always safely past, available to us as objects of study to be analyzed and labeled as conscious or unconscious responses to now-understood circumstances. The instrumental value of the saints for a particular community is accounted for—as the embodiment of fears and aspirations or as guarantors of material safety—but why and how the saints are alive as resources for thinking and living for that community get obscured.
Hollander’s Saint George Liberator instantiates a model for the sort of synesthetic approach championed by Ditchfield. It is a sensitive tracing of the dynamic cultural and spiritual work Saint George performs for Orthodox Christians in Cyprus as they navigate both the vagaries of everyday life and the political and ecological turmoil of the island’s history. The book is the fruit of ethnographic research, a dialogical engagement with a wide range of people willing to discuss their engagements with St. George, put in conversation with historical and contemporary archives of stories, images, and places. Attending to a range of senses—textual, visual, olfactory, and spatial; literal and symbolic; spiritual and material—Hollander parses out the grammar of a vernacular theology of liberation articulated through various mediations of the hagiography of St. George.
The plural of mediation is important. If they do their job right, saints (and holiness itself) proliferate. The life of a singular individual gives rise to a multiplicity of reflections and representations that inspire and edify. As Hollander shows, the narrative kernel of a third-century Cappadocian Christian soldier in the Roman army, tortured and executed for refusing to denounce his fidelity to Christ, has flowered into the legend of St. George honored in Cyprus through numerous epithets, among which are “the Near, the Far, the Poor, of Those Without Livelihood, the Deliverer, the Exiler, Liberator of the Captives.” To glance at the kaleidoscopic appeal of this military saint who is also patron of farmers is one of the pleasures of the book.
Another is to follow Hollander as he explores the contranymic quality of the saint’s characteristics. A contranym describes a word that refers to two opposite meanings such as the verb “to dust,” which can mean to wipe away tiny particles, as in a household chore, or to sprinkle tiny particles onto a surface, as in a dusting of glitter for an art project. Let us take a look again at two of the epithets associated with St. George. We learn from Hollander that various parts of Cyprus have churches dedicated to St. George the Poor in reference to the dispossession the saint suffered before his torture and execution which in turn makes him particularly sympathetic to the plight of the destitute who turn to him for deliverance.
The saint’s double valence as both the one who knows material distress and the instrument of its relief comes alive in the story Hollander shares from Modestos, a conversation partner, about the founding of the original church of St. George of Those Without Livelihood in Avion, in the eastern district of Avgorou. A poor woman worked as a baker in a rich household in a nearby village. To feed her own children, the poor woman would leave her work without washing her hands as to bake them some bread with the bits of dough that remained. When the ruse was discovered and she was forbidden from taking home even that meager sustenance, the poor woman worried about how to provide for her children. She placed flat stones in the oven hoping that her children would fall asleep waiting for the non-existing bread, and she prayed for help. Then, a poor man knocked at her door, asking for food and shelter. She welcomed the man but said that she had no food to share. The man asked what was baking in the oven, and the woman was suddenly made aware of the smell of baking bread, but when she turned back to the man, he had already disappeared. When she told her neighbors of the miracle, they agreed that it must have been St. George “since he is the one who rushes to help the poor and desperate, those who are at the mercy of cruel and powerful lords” (89).
The story speaks transculturally and across time as the expression of a desire for economic redress, but Hollander’s account doesn’t end there. Instead, he brings us back to the specificity of the Greek Orthodox Cyprian context to highlight the tale’s significance in a political realm. He points out that Modestos, who told him the story, is an active participant in the Greek Cypriot national struggle, and that for him and for his family the site of the church of St. George of Those Without Livelihood is unthinkable without considering the fact that many of the Greek families exiled from the north of the island by Turkish forces after 1974 chose to settle around St. George, “their homes standing on all sides of the church” (89). This is a powerful image: the solace offered by the saint is not only to be found in a future promise of reparation but is activated in the here and now.
Politics is at the heart of Hollander’s prismatic reading of hagiography. This is palpable from the description of his methodology. He brings to bear three basic psychosocial processes for understanding the force of hagiography: imagination, representation, and appropriation. He is careful to note that these seemingly familiar terms carry specific connotations in a Greek Orthodox Christian context. Imagination, for example, does not so much refer to a creative process of the mind as to the spiritual capacity to lend sensory concreteness to what cannot be seen by “the eyes of the flesh” (in Patricia Cox Miller’s formulation) with the aim of making it come alive in thought and life, that is to say in action, and therefore, in politics. Similarly, appropriation has more to do with belonging or figuring out what is proper than with possession. This nuance, which Hollander brings to the reader’s attention by noting that “appropriation” is an approximate translation of the Greek term oikeiōsis, resonates with edification (oikodomoumai/oikodomia), the construction of a home (oikos). This home, he is careful to point out, has two sides: it can be, on the one hand, beneficial as it affords security and intimacy but also detrimental in so far as it might keep out other perspectives. It is hard not to think here again of the houses built by the walls of St. George of Those Without Livelihood.
Hollander’s careful attention to the complexities of hagiography results in an equally subtle treatment of political keywords such as freedom and resistance. Of the multiple manifestations of Saint George in Cyprus, he retains “the Liberator” as touchstone, in the book’s title and in his meditations on freedom and liberty. He often reminds the reader of the essential duality of freedom: the desire to break away from perceived chains (freedom from) and the aspiration to create (freedom to). This duality informs his description of the theology of liberation that he encounters in his engagement with the people of Cyprus and their archives as comprising “whatever theological understanding warrants, incentivizes, and validates an integrally spiritual-political resistance to perceived subjugation or captivity, while imagining, articulating, and fueling the pursuit of rectified alternatives to that corrupt state of being” (4). The liberation at stake here responds to the deep history of imperial conquests and occupations that have marked Cyprus as refracted through an understanding “of the divinely imparted holiness by which all that corrupts the human being and the human world may be resisted, rectified, and ultimately assimilated to the likeness of God” (303). Similarly, resistance emerges in Hollander’s account as another contranym: it is “standing against” that implies “standing with” or “standing forth” (102). The first sense is more recognizably “political” as a contestation of power, but it is inseparable from the second, more spiritual if not theological, perception of an alternative form of life toward which the first must move, whether it is ever achieved or not.
Hollander uncovers this theology of liberation throughout the book’s chapters, organized in pairs, each couplet covering a facet of St. George as Swifthelper, Greatmartyr, and Dragonslayer. This last one perhaps holds the strongest grip on the popular imagination, and it exemplifies most readily the spiritual-political dynamics at play. The iconography of St. George with his dragon is a relatively late development, occurring in the tenth century, most likely as an attempt to lend flesh to metaphorical references to Diocletian, the saint’s imperial antagonist, as a dragon.
In the version that opens the sixth chapter of Saint George Liberator, the setting has been moved to Istanbul, and the hero who liberates the people from the dragon that was poisoning the land and required the sacrifice of the kingdom’s children is transposed from George to Alexander the Great. Hollander gathers this account from puppeteers active in the first half of the twentieth century, and he notes that, in some performances, Alexander charges at the dragon with the cry “Help me, Christ and Panagia!” (227). The identification of the saint with the great Hellenic hero testifies to an aspiration for military and political prowess capable of toppling the evil forces that hold people captive. But the destruction of this dragon—Turkish imperialism—is made possibly only by a positive vision, a rectification of the imperial project in the image of Alexander, paragon of an idealized Greek world. In the conflation of Alexander-George, Hollander recognizes a moral orientation sustaining a call for political action. Resistance, as he puts it, is therefore both right and good (245).
The story doesn’t end there, however, as Hollander explores the complications of what happens when the call is heeded. This comes through most clearly in his analysis of the resonances of Saint George as liberator that are at play in the multiple accounts of anticolonial Greek freedom fighter George “Digenis” Grivas (1897-1974). Hailed initially as a hero in the struggle against the British occupation, his pursuit of Cyprus’s unification with Greece ultimately led to more violence against Greek Cypriots who disagreed with his project. It is to Hollander’s credit that he explores with great sensitivity the very real risk that the dragon-slayer becomes himself a monster or that the monster assailing us is to found within.
The final chapter of Hollander’s book takes up the mediations of St. George as liberator from spiritual corruption and the political implications of this “struggle for holiness” (269), as present in material meant for or produced by children in contemporary Cyprus. In the analysis of a children’s book, O Drakos O Dikos Sou (Your Very Own Dragon), the dragon represents the anger and resentment of a little girl who cannot forgive a friend’s offense. The monster, an externalization of an existing threat, comes to dominate the little girl’s life to such an extent that she loses all her other friends until a butterfly comes to break the spell. The lesson of the story thus centers on forgiveness as a virtue that turns the individual towards holiness and makes possible again the connection to others. Soitras, a writer who runs a local bookshop in Nicosia, explains to Hollander that the dragons in both the children’s book and in St. George’s legend “make a complicated reality easy to understand” (293). This holds true in the last part of the chapter where the children of Cyprus imagine their island home besieged by dragons.
The didactic nature of the image of the dragon (and of its slaying) must be read in the edifying light Hollander brings to all his materials. Let us then unpack Soitras’s dictum slowly. First, if the metaphor works, it is not because it takes away from the reality of lived experience, abstracting it into an image, as it were. On the contrary, it adds sensorial heft, making an individual experience communicable to others. Second, just because the complicated reality can be made “easy to understand” doesn’t imply that the understanding reached is itself simple or comforting.
The metaphorical affordance of the dragon has a wide reach, as it may represent external and material threats as much as internal and spiritual ones. Yet, to point out that the dragon is a metaphor does not invalidate its force. Playing on the Greek meaning of metaphor as the movement from one place to another, Hollander underscores the moving function of the images of the dragon-slaying saint as they “instill, activate, and validate the imaginative, precognitive conditions for political action” (261, emphasis in the original). In other words, hagiography matters not just symbolically as the representation of lived experience but also affectively—and politically—as an appeal to liberate the potential of futures conceived otherwise. Hollander’s book, schooled in the violent revolutions that have shaped Cyprus through the centuries, is too wise to assume that the appeal will necessarily result in the desired change. Yet, that is no reason to despair; it is instead an invitation to try again.
