SAINTS
OF THE
Since I customarily think in terms of what I
call the intercardinal axial compass stretching, on
church-hegemonic/state-subordinate terms, from southwest to northeast and, on state-hegemonic/church-subordinate
terms, from northwest to southeast, I am inclined to place a British Isles
saint at each point of this compass, rather than to treat them all as identical
(as one would suppose saints should be treated) and therefore positioned at the
northeast point, where metaphysics rules supreme over pseudo-metachemistry.
For it seems to me that the only saint fully
commensurate with this position (composed, as noted, of two elements) would be
St George, although not in relation to English Anglicanism but, rather, to the
Catholic tradition that preceded the Reformation and subsequent schismatic
activities of those deriving from Henry VIII’s [VIII’s]apostasy.
But if St George with his foot on a prone or neutralized dragon, akin to
pseudo-metachemistry under metaphysics, is the ideal
candidate for the northeast point of our intercardinal
axial compass, and this irrespective of England's departure from that position
several centuries ago in favour of state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria
rooted, metachemically, at the northwest point of the
said compass, then it would seem feasible to position St Patrick, the
vanquisher of snakes, at the southwest, in typically mass Irish Catholic vein
(snakes don’t fly, unlike dragons), and allow Saints David and Andrew, the
national saints of Wales and Scotland respectively, to stand at the northwest
and southeast poles of what would be the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate
axis, as though in a kind of metachemical-to-physical
polarity suggestive of a distinction between fire and earth rather than, say,
water and air, a distinction that, politically, would have
autocratic-to-democratic implications and, religiously, Methodist-to-Puritan
ones; though, in point of fact, I don't see that axis in terms of such a
religious polarity but, rather, in relation to an Anglican-to-Puritan one such
that would have more applicability to England than to either Wales or Scotland,
even granted the puritan or protestant traditions of these latter countries.
Nevertheless that, ironically, is how I view
the various saints of the British Isles, not all in one basket, as one would
expect, but with one truly saintly individual, the metaphysical St George with
his foot on a pseudo-metachemical dragon, and three 'bovaryized' saints - namely the watery or
chemical/pseudo-physical St Patrick, the fiery or metachemical/pseudo-metaphysical
St David, and the earthy or physical/pseudo-chemical St Andrew, all of whom one
would expect to symbolize their respective countries in a way that
distinguished them from the English saint.