The St. Patrick You Never Knew
He didn't chase the snakes out of Ireland and he may never have plucked a shamrock to teach the mystery of the Trinity. Yet St. Patrick well deserves to be honored by the people of Ireland—and by downtrodden and excluded people everywhere.
Some 1,500 years ago a teenage boy from what is now
Great Britain was kidnapped and enslaved by marauders from a neighboring
country. Not since Paris absconded with Helen of Troy has a kidnapping
so changed the course of history.
The invading
marauders came from fifth-century Ireland. The teenager they captured
eventually escaped, but returned voluntarily some years later. In the
meantime, he had become convinced that he was handpicked by God to
convert the entire country to Christianity.
Apparently, he was right.
In
the process of converting the primitive people of Ireland, however, the
former slave experienced a conversion, too. In the years that followed,
he not only shared God with the people of Ireland, but also grew in his
understanding of God through them.
And so it was
that a young Briton named Patricius died an Irishman named Patrick. And
neither Ireland nor Christianity was ever quite the same. This
conviction of Thomas Cahill, Catholic author of the best-selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, was made clear in an exclusive interview for St. Anthony Messenger last August.
No,
Patrick never chased the snakes out of Ireland. Nor do we really know
whether he used the shamrock to teach converts about the Trinity. But
what we do know about St. Patrick is far more interesting than many of
the legends that grew up around him.
And
the fact that we know anything about him at all is as great a miracle
as any that later traditions ascribe to him. For Patrick is literally
the only individual we know from fifth-century Ireland or England. Not
only do no other written records from Britain or Ireland exist from that
century, but there are simply no written records at all from Ireland
prior to Patrick's.
Surprisingly
enough, however, scholarly debate about the authenticity of what
Patrick left us is almost nonexistent. The chronology of his life is
very confused. Indeed, we can't even identify for sure when he was born,
ordained a bishop or died! Experts agree, however, that the two
examples of his writing that we have are clearly written by the same
man, the man we know as Patrick.
These two brief documents, Patrick's Confession
and his "Letter to Coroticus," are the basis for all
we know of the historical Patrick. The Confession, because
its purpose was to recount his own call to convert the Irish and
to justify his mission to an apparently unsympathetic audience
in Britain, is not a traditional biography.
And
the "Letter to Coroticus," apparently an Irish warlord whom Patrick was
forced to excommunicate, is a wonderful illustration of Patrick's
prowess as a preacher but doesn't tell us much by way of traditional
biography either.
The uncontested, if somewhat unspecific, biographical facts about Patrick are as follows:
Patrick
was born Patricius somewhere in Roman Britain to a relatively wealthy
family. He was not religious as a youth and, in fact, claims to have
practically renounced the faith of his family.
While
in his teens, Patrick was kidnapped in a raid and transported to
Ireland, where he was enslaved to a local warlord and worked as a
shepherd until he escaped six years later.
He
returned home and eventually undertook studies for the priesthood with
the intention of returning to Ireland as a missionary to his former
captors. It is not clear when he actually made it back to Ireland, or
for how long he ministered there, but it was definitely for a number of
years.
By the time he wrote the Confession
and the "Letter to Coroticus," Patrick was recognized by both Irish
natives and the Church hierarchy as the bishop of Ireland. By this time,
also, he had clearly made a permanent commitment to Ireland and
intended to die there. Scholars have no reason to doubt that he did.
Though Patrick's writings tell us little in terms of
names and dates, they do reveal much about Patrick the man. But
traditional biographies of Patrick, suggests Thomas Cahill, author and
former religion editor for Doubleday, don't really do him justice.
"I
think they missed a lot of what Patrick was about because they
approached him as a kind of plaster-of-paris saint. Two things," he
says, "really shine through his Confession: his humility and his strength. That strength is what has been missing in the earlier biographies and portraits of Patrick."
In
fact, Cahill says, "The Patrick who came back to Ireland with the
gospel was a real tough guy. He couldn't have been anything else—only a
very tough man could have hoped to survive those people. I don't mean to
say he wasn't a saint—he was a great saint—but he was a very rough,
vigorous man."
And he was his own man, writes Noel Dermot O'Donoughue, O.D.C., in his 1987 biography Aristocracy of Soul: Patrick of Ireland.
When Patrick receives the vision that he believes calls him to
evangelize the Irish, he doesn't hesitate, despite the fact that in 400
years no one had taken the gospel beyond the boundaries of Roman
civilization. "He goes his own way following his own dreams and divine
'responses,'" says O'Donoughue, even though by doing so he is
challenging the structure and ordinances of the Church he serves.
It
doesn't take a scholar to recognize how he was able to do this. Patrick
was so certain that he had been specifically called by God to do
exactly what he did—return to the land of his captivity and convert the
barbarians to Christianity—that his Confession leaves even the
modern reader little room for doubt. In this certainty, Patrick finds
his strength—strength sufficient, in fact, to overcome every obstacle he
will encounter in the remaining years of his life.
The
first obstacle was his education. The six years Patrick was enslaved in
Ireland put him permanently behind his peers in terms of his classical
education. His Latin would always be poor. Later in life when he used
Latin less frequently, it was practically unintelligible at times.
Despite
the fact that Patrick would be self-conscious about his literary
limitations to the end of his days, he was not uneducated. One suspects,
however, that he was primarily self-educated. His use of biblical
quotations, Cahill says, "is far more accurate and appropriate than many
of the Fathers of the Church."
HYMN - I Bind Unto Myself Today (St. Patrick's Breastplate)
And although almost
any other qualification pales by comparison to Patrick's zeal for his
mission, he must have set off equipped with an intellect both subtle and
supple. For he not only decided, unilaterally, to do what no man in 400
years of Christian history had done before him—to carry the gospel
message to the ends of the earth—but he also found a way to do it.
It's
hard to grasp just what an accomplishment that was, says Cahill. When
Patrick decided to "willingly go back to the barbarians with the
gospel," Cahill explains, "he had to figure out how to bring the values
of the gospel he loved to such people. These were people who still
practiced human sacrifice, who warred with each other constantly and who
were renowned as the great slave traders of the day.
"That
was not a simple thing. This was before courses were given to
missionaries in what is now called inculturation—how to plant the gospel
in such a culture," Cahill says. "No one had ever even thought about
how to do it; Patrick had to work his way through it himself.
"I
know that Paul is referred to as the first missionary," Cahill says,
"but Paul never got out of the Greco-Roman world, nor did any of the
apostles. And here we are, five centuries after Jesus, who had urged his
disciples to preach to all nations. They just didn't do that. And the
reason they didn't is because they did not consider the barbarians to be
human."
Patrick's enslavement as an adolescent had to have been a
critical factor in the development of his unique attitude toward the
Irish. Even in captivity, he must have come to know them as human,
hence, deserving of the gospel. This set the stage for his call to
convert them.
As a result of his enslavement, Cahill,
whose particular interest is the "hinges of history," says, "Patrick
grew into a man that he truly would not otherwise have become. So you
would have to say that Patrick's kidnapping was a great grace, not just
for the people of Ireland, but for all of Western history."
Had
he never been kidnapped, it seems quite likely that it would have been
decades, probably centuries, before Ireland was converted. It certainly
would not have been in a position to "save civilization," as Cahill so
dramatically puts it in his book, when the Roman Empire crumbled and
literacy was lost—lost, that is, by all but the Irish monasteries
planted by Patrick and his successors.
Not
surprisingly, his own experience in captivity left Patrick with a
virulent hatred of the institution of slavery, and he would later become
the first human being in the history of the world to speak out
unequivocally against it.
"The papacy did not condemn
slavery as immoral until the end of the 19th century," Cahill says,
"but here is Patrick in the fifth century seeing it for what it is. I
think that shows enormous insight and courage and a tremendous 'fellow
feeling'—the ability to suffer with other people, and to understand what
other people's suffering is like."
In fact, although
he is renowned as the patron saint of the country and the people he
evangelized, a better advocate than Patrick cannot be found for anyone
disadvantaged or living on the fringes of society.
Related:
http://tradcatknight.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-prophecies-of-st-patrick.html
http://tradcatknight.blogspot.com/2014/06/catholic-endtimes-prophecy-ireland.html
Related:
http://tradcatknight.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-prophecies-of-st-patrick.html
http://tradcatknight.blogspot.com/2014/06/catholic-endtimes-prophecy-ireland.html
"He
really is one of the great saints of the downtrodden and
excluded—people that no one else wants anything to do with," Cahill
says.
Women find a great advocate in Patrick. Unlike
his contemporary, St. Augustine, to whom actual women seemed more like
personifications of the temptations of the flesh than persons, Patrick's
Confession speaks of women as individuals. Cahill points out,
for example, Patrick's account of "a blessed woman, Irish by birth,
noble, extraordinarily beautiful—a true adult—whom I baptized."
Elsewhere,
he lauds the strength and courage of Irish women: "But it is the women
kept in slavery who suffer the most—and who keep their spirits up
despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives
grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so,
they follow him with backbone." He is actually the first male Christian
since Jesus, Cahill says, to speak well of women.
"The
Fathers of the Church had the most horrible things to say—it's
frightening to read what people like Augustine or John Chrysostom had to
say about women. As remarkable as anything about Patrick is that in his
writings there is never anything remotely like that."
In
fact, there are clear instances of him saying warm and appreciative
things about women. O'Donoughue adds, "It is clear that the man who
wrote the Confession and "Coroticus" is deeply and sensitively
open to women and womanhood....But he does not take refuge in either
'the pretentious asceticism, nor yet in that neurotic fear of and
contempt for the feminine' that has entered so deeply into the attitudes
and structures of the Christian Church....In this respect he is a
complete man."
Facts, myths about St. Patrick
Modern Catholics might have a hard time reconciling the
portrait of the rugged individualist that Cahill describes with the
current notion of a mystic. Yet O'Donoughue says that in the Confession,
"the main lines of Patrick's spiritual development show through, and
they are unmistakably the lines of a mystical journey." In fact, his
biography of Patrick is the first in a series of works edited by
Michael Glazier called "The Way of the Christian Mystics."
So what makes Patrick a mystic?
First, as recounted in the Confession,
most of the major events in Patrick's life are preceded by a dream or
vision. The visions were usually simple—almost self-explanatory—but they
were also very vivid and carried enormous emotional impact with
Patrick.
The first vision, which he received after
six years of servitude in Ireland, came by way of a mysterious voice,
heard in his sleep. "Your hungers are rewarded: You are going home," the
voice said. "Look, your ship is ready." Indeed, some 200 miles away,
there it was. (Patrick was nothing if not tenacious.)
The
second vision—the one that came to him after he'd returned home and
that called him back to Ireland—was equally straightforward. Victoricus,
a man Patrick knew in Ireland, appeared to him in this dream, holding
countless letters, one of which he handed to Patrick. The letter was
entitled "The Voice of the Irish." Upon reading just the title, he heard
a multitude of voices crying out to him: "Holy boy, we beg you to come
and walk among us once more." He was so moved by this that he was unable
to read further and woke up.
But the dream recurred
again and again. Eventually Patrick tells his dismayed family of his
plans to return to evangelize Ireland and soon begins his preparations
for the priesthood. What is interesting about this dream calling Patrick
to his lifelong mission to the Irish is that it comes not as a
directive from God, but as a plea from the Irish.
It
is also significant, O'Donoughue says, that "the voices in the dream do
not ask for preaching or baptism but only that Patrick as one specially
endowed should come back and share their lives, come and walk once more
with them." In other words, at least according to his recollections
decades later, Patrick wasn't commanded to bring civilization or
salvation to the heathens. He was invited to live among them as Christ's
witness.
When he finally returns to Ireland, he
proceeds to treat the barbarians with the respect implicit in his dream.
From the outset, Patrick feels humbled and honored that God has
selected him to convert the Irish. Apparently he never doubted that he
would be able to do so.
Patrick even came to see his
own kidnapping as a grace, Cahill says. From the time Patrick sets off
on his 200-mile journey to his "waiting ship," he is convinced "once and
for all that he is surrounded by Providence and that he is really in
the hands of God. And that is what gets him through the rest of his
life. That is what enables him to do the incredible thing that he does
by returning to the barbarians." And that closeness to God in no way
diminishes as the years progress.
"Patrick was a
mystic who felt the presence of God in every turn of the road," Cahill
says. "God was palpable to him, and his relationship to him was very,
very close." In fact, he says, it was very much like the relationship in
the Bible that Jesus has with God the Father. "It is very familiar and
comfortable, and that is how Patrick saw God at work in the world."
When
Patrick looked back at the end of his life on his service to Ireland,
Cahill says, he must have been pleased with his accomplishments.
By
the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, "the Irish stopped slave
trading and they never took it up again." Human sacrifice had become
unthinkable. And although the Irish never stopped warring on one
another, "war became much more confined and limited by what we might
call the 'rules of warfare.'
"I think that though he
probably died knowing that he had succeeded [in his mission]," Cahill
adds, "he also died hoping that success would be permanent and not
temporary."
In fact, Patrick's success couldn't have
been more permanent. Not only had he accomplished what he'd set out to
do—convert the nation to Christ—but in the process he'd retrieved from
obscurity the primary objective set by Christ for his apostles: the
spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
The inadvertent results of his conversion of Ireland, however, were equally astonishing and long-lasting.
First, as Cahill makes the strong case in How the Irish Saved Civilization,
it is Patrick's conversion of Ireland that makes possible the
preservation of Western thought through the early Dark Ages by the Irish
monasteries founded by Patrick's successors. When the lights went out
all over Europe, a candle still burned in Ireland. That candle was lit
by Patrick.
Second, by converting the Irish pagans to Christianity without
making any attempt to romanize them as well, he founded a new kind of
Church, one that was both Catholic and primitive.
Third, with Patrick's introduction of Christianity to Ireland,
Cahill says, the faith was introduced for the first time into a culture
free of the sociopolitical baggage of Greco-Roman civilization. Prior to
Patrick's gift of the faith to Ireland, to be Christian was to be
Roman, or at least to be a product of Roman civilization.
The conversion of Ireland, however, sees the
faith thrive in an entirely different environment—in a culture that
celebrates rather than abnegates the natural, a culture in which,
according to Cahill, there is a "sense of the world as holy, as the Book
of God—as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages."
In
this tradition, Cahill explains, "there is a trust in the objects of
sensory perception, which are seen as signposts from God. But there is
also a sensuous reveling in the splendors of the created world, which
would have made Roman Christians exceedingly uncomfortable."
As
a result, Cahill says, "The early Irish Christianity planted in Ireland
by Patrick is much more joyful and celebratory [than its Roman
predecessor] in the way it approaches the natural world. It is really
not a theology of sin but of the goodness of creation, and it really is
intensely incarnational."
And since it was the Irish
monks who served as the bridge between classical Christianity and the
Middle Ages, medieval Christianity tends to reflect the celebratory
nature of Irish spirituality rather than the gloom and sin-centeredness
of its classical predecessor.
Finally, Patrick gave the Irish
himself—knowingly, willingly, joyfully, proudly. He did this despite the
fact that, even at the end of his life, "after 30 years of missionary
activity," Cahill says, "he knows he's still living in a very scary
place. You don't change people—people who offer human sacrifice and who
war on one another constantly—you don't change them overnight."
But change them he eventually did. And the
example of his life—his courage, his intelligence, his compassion and
his incredible, indomitable faith—made the lives of all Catholics, even
those living 1,500 years later, just a little easier.
To
millions of modern-day Catholics, an Ireland without Patrick is
unthinkable. But so, too, Cahill says, is the prospect of modern life
without saints like him. The saints are for the ages, and ours no less
than any other.
"Life would be almost unbearable without such people," he says. "I think it would be
unbearable. The saints are for everyone—believer, unbeliever,
Christian, non-Christian—it doesn't really matter. They are the people
who say by their lives that human life is valuable—that my life is
valuable—and that there is a reason for living. Without them, history
would just be one horror after another."
There
is no question that Patrick taught us by his example that all life is,
indeed, precious. Yet it's hard to imagine that there isn't a soft spot
in his heart reserved just for the Irish.
In fact,
there is an old legend that promises that on the last day, though Christ
will judge all the other nations, it will be St. Patrick sitting in
judgment on the Irish.
When asked whether that spelled good news or bad news for the Irish, Cahill doesn't hesitate.
"That's great news for the Irish," he says with a laugh.
Full Movie: St Patrick - The Irish Legend