Saint Patrick

The Man and his Works

Thomas O'Loughlin, Thomas O’Loughlin

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780281072132
• eBook ISBN: 9780281072149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The only true apostle of Ireland who more or less converted the country the single-handed? or A Christian bishop from the embattled edge of a crumbling empire?

All that can really be known of Patrick comes from his authentic writings - the Confession and the Epistola (Address to the Soldiers of Coroticus).

Thomas O'Loughlin's engaging yet scholarly reflections on these fifth-century texts lead us into a greater understanding of the mind of Patrick, the man, believer and missionary.

— One —

THE ENIGMA OF PATRICK

SOMEONE FOREIGN?

We all know about St Patrick, do we not? First of all, there is the legend, in which he was the man who brought Christianity single-handedly to Ireland. With this goes an image of big bunches of shamrock and greenery. There are also umpteen tales about him: he fought the Druids, he banished snakes, he was an all-round mighty man. Next, there are the snippets of history. Many people say he went to Ireland to bring Christianity in AD 432, some say he died in 461, but others say it was 493. And there are over a dozen places – from Devon and Somerset, through Wales and the Severn valley all the way up to Carlisle – that claim to be his birthplace. And new candidates for this honour appear, on average, once every decade.

Then there are theories: there were two Patricks (aptly named ‘Patrick’ and ‘Old-Patrick’); one died in 461 and the other in 493. He did not bring the ordinary Christianity of the Roman Empire but a special kind of Christianity that is, as it happens, far more user-friendly for today called ‘Celtic Christianity’. Another theory is that he was more a shaman than a bishop, or that he was the last possessor of strange Druidic powers. Lastly there is the saint: an apostle of Ireland, a patron, an intercessor for the Irish, who bestows ‘a sweet smile’ ‘on Erin’s green valleys’, and the possessor of a liturgical feast on March 17. The list goes on and on: everyone with a religious drum to beat and any contact with Ireland or the fringes of Europe has lined him up as ‘on their side’. And if not a full member of their group then he is at least a forerunner who would endorse their activities be they religious, political, military or some deadly combination of all three.

Here is the enigma of Patrick: he looms large on the imaginative horizon of so many people, yet he saw himself as a Christian bishop from the embattled edge of a crumbling empire. As such he is a man whose world, lifestyle and understanding are in many respects wholly foreign to us. With modern Christians he shares a faith – or, at least, both he and they recite the same creed. But many things taken for granted in his religious world hardly appear in the consciousness of Christians today; and many of the concerns of Christians today never crossed his mind.

Patrick was convinced that the universe was in its last days, that those who did not believe in Christ once they heard his name belonged to the party of the devil. He viewed the material creation as an arena where the divine was not only close, but constantly intervening. He lived in a world where demons are wicked creatures that dwell in the lower atmosphere and wander around doing wanton and wilful evil to the children of light. Angels too are everywhere. They behold the face of God, yet also dwell in the created universe; they can appear with messages, they can intervene with solace and power. All these interventions by non-material creatures are as nothing to the most perfect intervention and revelation of God: the first coming of the Word made flesh. Through him all the secrets of the universe are laid bare; and from this vantage point of perfect knowing the Church preaches. Christ is still in the universe in his body, has imparted his power to that body, and Patrick as a bishop is one of those who wields that power. So we recite the same creed, but our expectations of how believing involves us in the whole structure of reality are radically different.

Likewise, Patrick would not understand modern religious concerns. He may be the saint of green valleys and green beer for his feast day, but he had no interest in ecology! On a more serious level, today Christians would consider slavery an evil opposed by both the gospel and natural human rights. Patrick knew slavery from the inside. Yet while he opposed the killing of Christian hostages, he never offers any criticism of slavery for, like St Paul writing to Philemon, it was just something in his world. The list of differences goes on and on.

READING PATRICK

Patrick has been the centre of a well-developed cult as a patron saint since sometime in the mid-seventh century. Since then he has been pressed into service in many ways as ‘a national saint’, a symbol more than a man. However, he has always attracted attention from the cult back to himself. In large part this can be explained as the natural interest in the man behind the legend, or because it is with Patrick that Ireland moved from prehistory (the time before which texts do not survive from a society) into history.

However, there is a wider appeal which has to do with the fact that from Patrick’s hand have come two, rather personal, documents. These draw to him people who are attracted neither to the cult nor to the earliest stratum of Irish history. Moreover, from the fifth century in the West we have no shortage of brief works in Latin by bishops – this was the period of the great flowering of theology in Gaul – but few of these works can boast a readership today to equal Patrick’s. Both Patrick and those other bishops would have been shocked by this fact! But while the sermons of Caesarius of Arles and the wise instructions of Eucherius of Lyons bring us face to face with profound Christian learning, Patrick’s works bring us a living human being. We read Patrick’s two surviving documents and feel we are coming into contact with a real man of flesh and blood. We sense that he puts himself into his writings; we sense his hurts, angers, hopes and fears. Yet we also know that he lives in an alien place to us: it is neither the landscape of Ireland nor the landscape of Christianity (of whatever denominational variety) as we know it today. We sense the continuity and the foreignness. It is precisely this ‘mixed feeling’ of him being close to us and so very far away that makes his two short writings so valuable. Moreover, this value is not limited to those interested in religion in Ireland or the Celtic lands.

Reading these documents brings us face to face with a basic religious question: how can a religious document written in one culture and world of understanding be the bearer of a religious message that is larger than that culture? Can an account of human experience of the divine communicate that experience to someone who does not share the same understanding of the universe, the same frames of reference in scientific and religious belief, or the same cultural values? This is as true of the documents that make up the New Testament as it is true of Patrick, but Christians today have heard the Gospels so often that their foreignness is passed over, or we are so used to accommodating them into our view of reality that we do not notice that we hear them in a way very alien to that of the audience for whom they were first written. Patrick’s documents are so short that we can get an overview of them in a way that we cannot with other longer texts such as one of the Gospels. In addition, they are unfamiliar and so pull us up sharply when they jar with our expectations about the Christian life or reality. Hence reading Patrick both fuels our interest in this curious figure, and raises basic questions of understanding and faith.

‘THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY’

Confronting texts from the foreign country of the past is both difficult and challenging. If we accept the possibility that we can make sense of documents from another culture and view of reality, then when we read them we are engaged in a complex act of translation, not just from Latin into English – a simple and straightforward technical matter – but from another culture and perception of reality into our own. This requires that we try to imagine how Patrick viewed reality – himself, life, others, the universe, and God – as we read his words. Only through this leap of imaginative sympathy can we hope to understand him. Only when we know his cultural language, his language-game, can we know what he wants to say. This cultural language is not Latin, Late Latin, Vulgar Latin, nor any other systems of sounds, but his values, beliefs, and assumptions about what life is about, where it comes from, what it is for, and how people go about living and getting to that destination.

Learning a past language is difficult. A start is to learn from others who have made the past their special field of study; they can tell us about ancient social structures, fill in context, show how passages in Scripture were understood at a particular period, and explain what were the assumptions of Christians at that time about their religion. But trying to understand a writer is also an individual task: reading the words and seeking to imagine the sort of mind which that writer thought would be reading his words. For instance, Patrick would never have imagined that a woman would read his writings. So this task is neither simple nor swift, but it holds out the possibility that we meet the mind of the writer. The encounter is also unsettling; we see that many things that both our writer and we ourselves hold dear are relative. For instance, Patrick saw a direct link, based on his reading of the gospel, between his work at the very ends of the earth and Christ coming again ‘to judge the living and the dead’. We have a different sense of space, a different way of reading Scripture, a different notion of the second coming, yet we may both be baptized and consider ourselves believers. The ancient text, in its very irrelevance to us, disturbs us.

Faced with this, one could pretend that cultures and human discoveries do not affect religious belief; one could escape to an imaginary world where we do not live in time as beings whose understanding is always partial. This world of ‘eternal truths’ and ‘unchanging certainties’ is the make-believe realm of fundamentalism. Another option would be to say that Christianity arose in that foreign past world and was part-and-parcel with that world; just as that world is gone, so its belief system is out of date. We are the successors of the past who must, if we are honest, jettison those beliefs that no longer fit with our understanding of the universe. But the world of modernity is as imaginary as that of fundamentalism. First, it assumes that we exist wholly independently of the past; and second, that we stand at the pinnacle of knowledge. Yet we are as much products of the past as of our own making. We inherit understandings, institutions and life itself. We exist in a culture in history. The past makes us, and we have to take that as a starting point. The past cannot be simply cut adrift. The past may be a foreign country but, to continue the metaphor, it is one with which we share a common border. We can only know the cultural language of our day by comparison with the past out of which it grew. Moreover, when it comes to matters of ultimate concern, each individual, each culture and each epoch is limited. Some aspects of the mystery of existence were clearer in the fifth century than today; some things clear to us were invisible to them. There is intellectual progress on the one hand, but the awareness that mystery is always beyond us on the other.

UNDERSTANDING IN TENSION

Confronting an ancient religious text which sincerely sets out its author’s faith forces upon us the question of how we can say we share a faith with that author when we do not share the rest of the author’s world. In the discovery of the writer’s world we realize that all religious understanding exists within a set of tensions. There is the tension of past and present; neither is complete. There is a tension between our confidence in our understanding and our acknowledgement of our ignorance; we cannot opt for just one of these positions. There is the tension between speaking and silence. If we seek to express that which is beyond experience we betray the mystery in our reducing it to our culture; but we also betray that experience if, for fear of failure, we remain silent. These tensions are part of the basic tensions of faith. We are in this world and here we are called to live and love, to think and act; yet we see origins and ends beyond this world in the mystery of God.

Reading Patrick with this sense of tension turns a curious text from the last days of the Roman Empire in the West into an interesting adventure into what it is to know and believe. This is made all the more pointed as, in the process,we have to confront the difference between what we can actually find out about the historical Patrick and the image of Patrick that is conveyed in the legend. So we read this text with a triple agenda. First, we have to search out the man from the legend as best we can. The first task falls into the province of the historian and calls for critical detective work to set out what exactly we know of his life and times. Second, we have to extend our understanding to try to take in his world-view. This is the realm of the exegete, translating the foreign text into our world without compromising the integrity of either Patrick or ourselves. And third, we confront the questions of faith which are mysterious in every culture. This is the world of the theologian, asking if Patrick is a witness to a truth that is larger than any culture and its language. The first two tasks will be addressed in this introduction; the third cannot be addressed in a work whose primary aim is to present the text in translation. That is a task for the reader to take up, having read Patrick.

REINVENTIONS OF PATRICK

Patrick is probably the best known fifth-century Christian in the world today. Theologians may argue that Augustine (354–430) was, and perhaps still is, more influential for how Christians present their beliefs, but how many New Yorkers parade on 28 August (his feast day)? However, the price of Patrick’s popularity has been that he has been smothered by his legend and cult. Each age has adopted him, adapted him to a particular agenda, and remade him in its image. For example, in the seventh century Patrick was being used as the main plank in a campaign to establish the hegemony of the See of Armagh – that see’s principal claim to primacy was that its bishops were the linear successors in the see Patrick had established. To this end they produced lives of the saint and lists of the places he visited. The message was clear: these were churches that had been established by him in his travels through the country and they now owed allegiance to his coarb (successor). By the time that the Book of Armagh was assembled (early eighth century), Patrick was not only the successful missionary, but was the one who determined the legitimacy of Irish centres of church authority and its policy towards the rest of Christendom.

Another medieval re-evaluation was that of Patrick as the wonder-worker of the Irish: his miracles and his intercession would save the people. As such he was seen to preside over all that was most noble in art, literature and society. He became Patrick, ‘the national apostle’. This image was later developed as both ‘national’ and ‘apostle’. Thus as the saint of the nation he stood for an independent country with a glorious past of gold and learning and saints. Pressed into this mould, the emphasis on St Patrick’s Day in the latter part of the nineteenth century was an important feature in the development of an awareness of an Irish ‘nation’ as a culturally distinct entity. His day became the national holiday and 17 March takes its place with 4 July and 14 July. This should be balanced by earlier reuses of St Patrick in the service of the state, to which the now-ragged banners of the Knights of the Order of St Patrick in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin and the distribution of shamrock by their royal colonel-in-chief to the Irish Guards in London still bear witness.

Patrick as apostle also emerged from the realities of Ireland in the nineteenth century. As the Irish diaspora spread over the English-speaking world, they brought St Patrick as a characteristic element of the Catholicism that was often their only badge of proud identity. No one familiar with the dark probation to which the Irish emigrants were subjected can deny that Archbishop Hughes’s decision in 1858 to name his cathedral in New York after Patrick – after facing down a decade of anti-Irish riots – gave these suffering people a well-earned pride. And similar, if smaller, buildings scattered across the English-speaking world remind us of the role of Patrick for a people who wanted to assert both their religion and, in muted way, their ethnic identity.

Patrick has also been employed by the theologians. In the aftermath of the Reformation his memory became disputed property. Was he in union with Rome or not? The affiliation of each writer seems always to have coincided with that of Patrick. Thus was his mission distinct from, or even in opposition to, that of Palladius sent by Pope Celestine? Was his ‘Celtic Church’ another distinct ‘branch’ of the ancient Church or was it ‘one with Peter’? Both sides thought they could prove their credentials by having this fifth-century missionary on their side in a contest about sixteenth-century problems.

The need to re-evaluate has not subsided. On the one hand there is the view that he brought a killjoy religion with taboos about sex and pleasure to a fun-loving people. For others, he was exempt from this as was the ‘Celtic Church’ he founded (the killjoys came later with another ‘institutional’ Church that was guilt-ridden). Since we have so few documents from the period after him (what there are, are either obscure or show hardly any significant difference from the continental Church at the same time), there is little in the way of evidence to limit the scope of invention or the possibility of creating a ‘Celtic spirituality’ or ‘Celtic Church’ with whatever elements one would like to have in the Church today. Alas, the great surge of interest today in Christianity among those people who spoke Celtic languages runs the risk of smothering him again.

LETTING PATRICK SPEAK

If Patrick is to be heard we have to impose upon ourselves two strict disciplines. The first is to resist the natural desire to fill out the immediate background to Patrick with circumstantial evidence. We would all like to know when he lived, where he came from, what happened in his youth, and what he thought about a host of issues. But we know very little, and must be content with our ignorance. This is frustrating and against our instincts, so we should acknowledge that the desire to fill in gaps with speculation is a powerful one. We may laugh at some of the imaginary fillers invented by medieval hagiographers, but we are not automatically immune.

Second, we must try to see the text against its background, not as a preparation for us and our background. Patrick was a citizen of the Roman Empire, a bishop of the catholic Church, a pr...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Full imprint
• Dedication
• Note
• Table of contents
• 1. The Enigma of Patrick
• 2. Patrick: Life and Times
• 3. Patrick’s World
• 4. Introduction to the Confessio
• 5. Patrick’s Acknowledgement of God’s Dealings with Him (The Confessio)
• 6. Introduction to the Epistola
• 7. Patrick’s Address to the Soldiers of Coroticus (The Epistola)
• Further Reading
• Index of Patrick’s Use of Scripture