Such an outlook and such a temperament make for wonderful songs and thrilling stories, but not for personal peace or social harmony. Though Medb and Ailil, Derdriu and Noisiu would have been exciting to know, they could not have been fun to work for. To such a view—the view of the servant—we now turn: to Patricius, the kidnapped boy shepherding sheep on a bleak Antrim hillside.
* Consult the Pronunciation Guide at the back of the book for pronunciation or certain Irish words.
* Which will surely be the case, the king being George III.
* The name Cuchulainn means Culann’s Hound.
IV
Good News from Far Off
The First Missionary
No man is a hero to his valet. Still less could an Iron Age Irish warrior be a hero to his British slave, a boy who had spent his first sixteen years amid the comfort and predictability of a Roman civitas.
If Cuchulainn slew “one hundred and thirty kings” on Murtheimne Plain, Ireland must have had hundreds of such kings—to one of whom Patricius was bound. His name was Miliucc, and of him we know nothing but that he ruled some hills of Antrim between Lough Neagh and the mountains of Sliabh Mis. Ri, the Irish word for king, is cognate with the Latin rex, but—to our eyes, at least—these kings would appear to be petty chieftains, local strongmen ruling over a few dozen extended families of cattle ranchers. “Rustlers” might be more accurate, for here was little right except might. The epic depredations of the Tain are, after all, but enlargements of a common way: cattle raids, directed by one noble family against another, were among the events of daily life.
The life of a shepherd-slave could not have been a happy one. Ripped out of civilization, Patricius had for his only protector a man who did not hold his own life highly, let alone anyone else’s. The work of such shepherds was bitterly isolated, months at a time spent alone in the hills. The occasional contacts, which one might normally seek out, could bring their own difficulties. Deprived of intercourse with other humans, Patricius must have taken a long time to master the language and customs of his exile, so that the approach of strangers over the hills may have held special terror.
We know that he did have two constant companions, hunger and nakedness, and that the gnawing in his belly and the chill on his exposed skin were his worst sufferings, acutely painful presences that could not be shaken off. From this scant information—Patricius is not a man of many words—we can deduce that the boy had a hardy constitution and had probably been a beloved and well-nourished child; otherwise, he could not have survived.
Like many another in impossible circumstances, he began to pray. He had never before paid attention to the teachings of his religion; he tells us that he didn’t really believe in God, and he found priests foolish. But now, there was no one to turn to but the God of his parents. One is reminded of the reports of contemporary hostages about how they make it through the dreary years of captivity. “Tending flocks was my daily work, and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of him surrounded me more and more—and faith grew and the Spirit was roused, so that in one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and after dark nearly as many again, even while I remained in the woods or on the mountain. I would wake and pray before daybreak—through snow, frost, rain—nor was there any sluggishness in me (such as I experience nowadays) because then the Spirit within me was ardent.”
Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become—a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any rigid separation between this world and the next. On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in sleep his first otherworldly experience. A mysterious voice said to him: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home.”
Patricius sat up, startled. The voice continued: “Look, your ship is ready.”
Miliucc’s farm was inland, nowhere near the sea, but Patricius set out, whither he knew not. He walked some two hundred miles, through territory he had never covered before, without being stopped or followed, and reached a southeastern inlet, probably near Wexford, where he saw his ship. As he tramped toward his destiny, his faith that he was under God’s protection must have grown and grown, for it was virtually impossible that a fugitive slave could get so far without being intercepted. “I came in God’s strength … and had nothing to fear” is Patricius’s simple summation.
The sailors were loading a cargo of Irish hounds for sale on the continent, where they were highly prized. Patricius approached the captain, who eyed him suspiciously. He showed the captain that he had the wherewithal for his passage (where he got it we’ll never know!), but the captain told him curtly: “You’re wasting your time asking to sail with us.”
This was Patricius’s moment of greatest danger: recognized as a fugitive in a seaside settlement, he could not expect to remain at liberty many minutes more. “Hearing this response, I left them to go to the hut where I was staying, and on the way I began to pray and before I had finished my prayer I heard one of the sailors shouting after me: ‘Come quickly, they’re calling you!’ And right away I returned to them and they began to say to me: ‘Come on board, we’ll take you on trust.’” They even offered their nipples to be sucked, the ancient Irish version of “kiss and make up.” Patricius, too much the Roman for such outré goings-on, held back—he says “for fear of God,” but better minds than Patricius’s have succumbed to a confusion of Roman custom and Christian faith. The sailors shrugged: “You can make friends with us however you like.” Patricius jumped on board, and they sailed at once.
It took three days to cross to the continent, and as they left their ship and journeyed inland they found only devastation—”desertum,” Patricius calls it—through which they trudged for two weeks. Where on the continent is there a desert that takes hardy sailors two weeks to cross? Nowhere. But this may well have been the year 407—the very year that hundreds of thousands of hungry Germans had crossed the icy Rhine, wreaking devastation through much of Gaul. Irish sailors would have been unlikely to have heard news of this invasion, so the little party of exporters may have arrived in the wake of the German war parties. At any rate, they can discover neither a single human being nor a meal. The dogs, as well as the men, are close to expiring, “collapsed and half-dead by the side of the road.”
“How about it, Christian?” taunts the captain. “You say your god is great and all-powerful, so why can’t you pray for us? We’re starving to death, and there’s little chance of our ever seeing a living soul!” It’s hard to know whether the captain would have spoken Irish or Latin to Patricius; but Patricius, though his Latin is abysmally awkward at times, has a good ear for dialogue. Here is the original, which gives us an excellent idea of how ordinary men used the tongue of Cicero: “Quid est, Christiane? Tu dicis deus tuus magnus et omnipotens est; quare ergo non potes pro nobis orare? Quia nos a fame periclitamur; difficile est enim ut aliquem hominem umquam videamus!”
“From the bottom of your heart, turn trustingly to the Lord my God,” the visionary instructs them, “for nothing is impossible to him. And today he will send you food for your journey until you are filled, for he has an abundance everywhere.” The young man’s sincerity affects the weakened sailors, who, bowing their heads, try a moment of faith. The sound of a stampede attracts their attention; and as they raise their eyes, a herd of pigs hoofs it down the road in their direction. Not just food, but the best food of all!
It takes him a few more years, but Patricius at last makes it home to Britain, where he is “welcomed as a son” by his parents, who beg him not to go off anywhere and leave them again. (For all the awkwardness of his prose, Patricius can sometimes give us just the right details, as in this portrait of his anxious family.) But Patricius is no longer a carefree Roman teenager. Hardened physically and psychologically by unsharable experiences, hopelessly behind his peers in education, he cannot settle down. One night
in his parents’ house, a man he knew in Ireland visits him in vision: Victoricus, holding “countless letters,” one of which he hands to Patricius, who reads its heading—VOX HIBERIONACUM, The Voice of the Irish. At that moment, he hears the voice of a multitude (beside a forest that Patricius remembers as being “near the western sea”),* crying: “We beg you to come and walk among us once more.” “Stabbed in the heart,” he is unable to read further—and so wakes up.
Try though he might, he cannot put the Irish out of his mind. The visions increase, and Christ begins to speak within him: “He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.” Patricius, the escaped slave, is about to be drafted once more—as Saint Patrick, apostle to the Irish nation.
Patrick will never make up for the formal education he missed while herding sheep in Antrim. His whole life will be shadowed by his ignorance of Latin style, and his consequent inability to communicate with distinguished men on their own level. One sometimes wonders, reading his Confession (singular, unlike Augustine’s plural), if the poor man even has a language of his own. His mother tongue was possibly an early form of Welsh, though it is just as likely that, as in Augustine’s house, the “native” tongue was for the servants and only Latin was spoken by the family. He missed all but elementary Latin schooling—and then was plunged into a new language: Irish, similar in certain ways to Welsh, but even at this period markedly different.
When he can hold out no longer, he leaves his family once more and follows his voices to Gaul—probably to the island monastery of Lérins, just offshore from present-day Cannes, where he petitions for a theological education in preparation for ordination. Patrick is no complainer, so we can only imagine what this course of studies took out of him and how often he may have wished for the chill and hunger of Antrim in preference to the torturous drudgery of studies for which he was so ill prepared. The night before his ordination as deacon, he confides to a friend a rankling sin that he committed at fifteen, and receives forgiveness. At this period, as through much of Christian history, “confession” meant a declaration of the state of one’s soul, made publicly—or, as was becoming more common, to a friend, who could then confirm God’s forgiveness. This private confession would come back to haunt Patrick in his age.
At length, he is ordained priest and bishop, virtually the first missionary bishop in history. We understand that Jesus’s apostles preached his Good News—Good Spell or Gospel, to use the Old English term—after the descent of the Spirit at the Feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem and that they intended to preach “to the ends of the earth.” We are a little uncertain as to how far most of them actually got, though we think Peter was nailed upside down to a cross at Rome. Thomas—in legend, at least— got as far as India. But the first Christian missionary for whom we have extensive documentation is Paul, not one of the original apostles, but an apostle, as he puts it, “appointed not by human beings”—that is, appointed by vision. Patrick may be the second such appointment. What is remarkable is not that Patrick should have felt an overwhelming sense of mission but that in the four centuries between Paul and Patrick there are no missionaries.
To Roman citizens, the place to be was a Roman city or villa. The pagus, the uncultivated countryside, inevitably suggested discomfort and hardship. The inhabitants of the pagus—pagani, or pagans—were country bumpkins, rustic, unreliable, threatening. Roman Christians assumed this prejudice without examining it. Augustine, in his profundity, realized that the ahistorical Platonic ascent to Wisdom through knowledge and leisured contemplation was unaccomplishable and that it must be replaced by the biblical journey through time—through the life of each man and through the life of the race. Still, the words iter (journey) and peregrinatio (pilgrimage) made him shudder. As bishop of Hippo, he almost never visited the country districts over which he held nominal sway, and once when he did he was nearly ambushed by Circumcellions, radical Donatists who were a sort of Christian combination of Act Up and the Party of God. His travels to Rome and Milan as a young man were never repeated, nor would he in a million years have thought of venturing beyond the Ecumene—the territory under Roman governance. Beyond the Ecumene, outside the Imperium, lay chaos unimaginable: “Here do be monsters” the medieval maps would say of unmapped territory.
In truth, even Paul, the great missionary apostle, though he endured all the miseries of classical travel for the sake of the Gospel, never himself ventured beyond the Greco-Roman Ecumene. Thomas, presumed apostle to India, though traveling perhaps beyond the official Ecumene, would have proselytized an ancient civilization with many ties to the Greek world. So Patrick was really a first—the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law. The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus’s, and a thousand times more humane. He himself was aware of its radical nature. “The Gospel,” he reminded his accusers late in his life, “has been preached to the point beyond which there is no one”—nothing but the ocean. Nor was he blind to his dangers, for even in his last years “every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved—whatever may come my way. But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.”
Saint Patrick was a gentleman,
And he came from dacent people,
goes a music hall ditty of the nineteenth century. He did, indeed. And he was a good and brave man, one of humanity’s natural noblemen. Among simple, straightforward people, who could unreservedly appreciate his core of decency, the success of his mission was assured.
His love for his adopted people shines through his writings, and it is not just a generalized “Christian” benevolence, but a love for individuals as they are. He tells us of “a blessed woman, Irish by birth, noble, extraordinarily beautiful (pulcherrima)—a true adult—whom I baptized.” Who could imagine such frank admiration of a woman from the pen of Augustine? Who could imagine such particularity of observation from most of those listed in the calendar of saints?
He worries constantly for his people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror of slavery was never lost on him: “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.” Patrick has become an Irishman, a man who can give far more credibility to a woman’s strength and fortitude than could any classically educated man.
In his last years, he could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland: he is primatial bishop at Ard Macha (modern Armagh), a hill away from Emain Macha, seat of the Ulster kings descended from Derdriu’s persecutor, Conchobor; and he has set up a bishop close by Tara, home of the high king (chosen—in theory, by rotation!—from among the provincial kings), and beside the capitals of the kings of northern and southern Leinster. He has even created a bishopric as far west as Cruachan, Medb’s ancient capital of Connacht, though Munster in the south will remain pagan for a generation more. The practice of associating bishoprics with local kingships Patrick took no doubt from the continental model of church organization. But whereas Augustine might have viewed this arrangement as ideal for currying favor and subtly and gradually increasing the power of the church, Patrick could have had no such motives. For ancient Ireland had no civitates, no population centers of any kind—just scattered and isolated farmsteads. By placing his bishops next door to the kings, Patrick hoped to keep an eye on the most powerful raiders and rustlers and limit their depredations.
With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased. In reforming Irish sexual mores, he was rather less successful, though he established indigenous monas
teries and convents, whose inmates by their way of life reminded the Irish that the virtues of lifelong faithfulness, courage, and generosity were actually attainable by ordinary human beings and that the sword was not the only instrument for structuring a society.
Patrick’s relations with his British brothers were less happy. Rising petty kings along the western coasts of Britain, rushing to fill the power vacuum left by the departure of the Roman legions, began to carve out new territories for themselves and to take up piracy, an activity the Christian Britons had long ago abandoned. The forces of one of these kings, Coroticus, descended on the now peaceful coast of northern Ireland and, butchering many and seizing booty, carted off Patrick’s converts in the thousands—“the chrism still fragrant on their foreheads,” describes the outraged apostle.
How the Irish Saved Civilization Page 9
