The Origins of the Cult of Saint George (original) (raw)

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THE ORIGINS OF THE CULT OF SAINT GEORGE

Christopher WALTER

At the fourth international symposium on Georgian art, held in Tbilissi in May 1983, I presented a paper entitled "Le culte, les légendes et l'iconographie de saint Georges, un projet de recherche". The organisers had the intention of publishing all the papers given, and, in fact, two volumes did appear in 1989 '. However, mine was not among them. It seems now unlikely that the complete acts of the symposium will ever be published. In any case, my own contribution would need to be updated, although I would still consider my main point to be valid: some sort of comparative, structural method is necessary for the study of Saint George.

In my Tbilissi paper, I was particularly concerned with the Lives of Saint George. When the material was studied assiduously at the beginning of the century, the main concern of scholars in hagiography was to establish what was historically exact in the Life of a saint2. Their method was to eliminate later accretions and so proceed back to the original authentic core. As is well known, this method did not work for Saint George. The earliest Life had long been recognized to be fabulous, and a main preoccupation of those who later produced new versions was to make them historically more plausible. Another method used at that time, particularly when sceptics called in doubt the very existence of a saint, was to establish the ancientness of his cult. Thus, for Saint George, Hippolyte Delehaye maintained that his cult was "parfaitement localisé: il avait son centre à Lydda ou Diospolis en Palestine"3. However this statement may need some qualification.

Revue des Etudes Byzantines 53. 1995. p. 295-326.