Ireland in the early fifth century
He sends a delegation of priests to the court of Coroticus in the hopes of ransoming the captives, but when they get there they are laughed to scorn. Having failed to gain a hearing from the king and now at his wit’s end, Patrick writes an open letter to British Christians in an attempt to put pressure on Coroticus. It is a wail of mourning for his lost people: “Patricide, fratricide! ravening wolves eating up the people of the Lord as it were bread! … I beseech you earnestly, it is not right to pay court to such men nor to take food and drink in their company, nor is it right to accept their alms, until they by doing strict penance with shedding of tears make amends before God and free the servants of God and the baptized handmaids of Christ for whom he was crucified and died.”
When he writes of this “crime so horrible and unspeakable,” Patrick’s ardor is fueled, of course, by the memory of his own horrible experiences. In this period of human development, only a former slave could have condemned the slave trade with such heat. The mention of alms alerts us that the correspondents on whom Patrick hopes to have the greatest effect are the British bishops—which is also why he alludes constantly to his people’s baptism. If these bishops will bestir themselves and excommunicate Coroticus, it will only be a matter of time before a well-organized conspiracy of social isolation will break the king’s resolve.
We don’t know if Patrick’s ploy was successful. But we do know that, even in the midst of his agony, he saw clearly the obstacle to his success: “In sadness and grief, shall I cry aloud. O most lovely and loving brethren and sons whom I have begotten in Christ (I cannot number them), what shall I do for you? I am not worthy to come to the aid of either God or men. The wickedness of the wicked has prevailed against us. We are become as it were strangers. Can it be that they do not believe that we have received one baptism or that we have one God and Father? Is it a shameful thing in their eyes that we have been born in Ireland?”
The British Christians did not recognize the Irish Christians either as full-fledged Christians or as human beings—because they were not Roman. Patrick, whose awkward foreignness on his return to Britain had been the cause of numerous rebuffs, knows in his bones the snobbery of the educated Roman, who by the mid-fifth century had every right to assume that Roman and Christian were interchangeable identities. Patrick, operating at the margins of European geography and of human consciousness, has traveled even further from his birthright than we might expect. He is no longer British or Roman, at all. When he cries out in his pain, “Is it a shameful thing … that we have been born in Ireland?” we know that he has left the old civilization behind forever and has identified himself completely with the Irish.
His British brothers find his conduct inexplicable, and they look for some ulterior motive. He went to Ireland to con riches from the guileless Irish—haven’t you heard that he charges for baptisms and bishoprics? Did you know that he was a swineherd to begin with, a filthy little pigkeeper? Did you know— it’s quite a scandal, really, almost cost him his ordination—did you know that in his youth he … ? Against such vicious whisperings, Patrick writes his plainspoken Confession, defending his life of service in the face of the publicly expressed doubts of those he calls “dominicati rhetorici”—the classically trained priests of Britain, the clerical intelligentsia. Somehow, even the private confession he had made on the eve of his ordination has become grist for their mill, and the sin he had confessed then has become current gossip.
My guess is that the sin was murder. He was fifteen—and how many sins are available to a fifteen-year-old that would still bother him by midlife, especially after a life as various and harsh as Patrick’s? (Patrick committed the sin in, let us say, 400, was kidnapped the following year and escaped perhaps in 407, but was not ordained till about 430, since he did not return to Ireland till about 432, when he would have been—at least, according to this reckoning—forty-seven.) Despite Augustine’s later preoccupations, sexual sins were not high on most people’s lists in those days. Theft on a grand scale would have been even more unlikely, given his family’s atmosphere and attentiveness. But murder, especially of a slave or servant, would have borne no social consequences—nor would it have meant much to the murderer until he found himself at the receiving end of someone else’s brutality. In any case, the ferocity of this normally placid, quiet man courses to the surface only when slavery or human carnage is the subject.
However blind his British contemporaries may have been to it, the greatness of Patrick is beyond dispute: the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery. Nor will any voice as strong as his be heard again till the seventeenth century. In his own time, only the Irish appreciated him for who he was; beyond their borders he was as little known as Augustine was in Ireland. Patrick himself probably never heard of Augustine, who died two years before Patrick set sail as bishop; and if he did hear of him he undoubtedly never read him. In those days, news could take a year to travel from one end of the crumbling empire to the other; books could take a decade or two—or even half a century. But Patrick shows us that he understood the dual concept of the City of Man and the City of God as well as Augustine himself when he derides Coroticus and his men as “dogs and sorcerers and murderers, and liars and false swearers … who distribute baptized girls for a price, and that for the sake of a miserable temporal kingdom which truly passes away in a moment like a cloud or smoke that is scattered by the wind.” But of his beloved, slaughtered warrior children: “O most dear ones … I can see you, beginning the journey to the land where there is no night nor sorrow nor death…. You shall reign with the apostles and prophets and martyrs. You shall seize the everlasting kingdoms, as he himself promised, when he said: ‘They shall come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.’”
Patrick’s emotional grasp of Christian truth may have been greater than Augustine’s. Augustine looked into his own heart and found there the inexpressible anguish of each individual, which enabled him to articulate a theory of sin that has no equal—the dark side of Christianity. Patrick prayed, made peace with God, and then looked not only into his own heart but into the hearts of others. What he saw convinced him of the bright side—that even slave traders can turn into liberators, even murderers can act as peacemakers, even barbarians can take their places among the nobility of heaven.
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to, theirs, his faith to their life. For Augustine and the Roman church of the first five centuries, baptism, the mystical water ceremony in which the naked catechumen dies to sin, was the foundation of a Christian life. Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination—making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish. No longer would baptismal water be the only effective sign of a new life in God. New life was everywhere in rank abundance, and all of God’s creation was good. The druids, the pagan Irish priests who claimed to be able to control the elements, felt threatened by Patrick, who knew that a humble prayer could even make food materialize in a barren desert—because all the world was the work of his Creator-God.
Of the many legends surrounding Patrick, few can be authenticated. He did not chase the snakes out of Ireland. There is no way of knowing whether he used the shamrock to explain the Trinity. He probably did have a confrontation with a king, possibly the high king at Tara, and it may have been over his right to commemorate Christ’s resurrection by lighting a bonfire—the same fire that has become a permanent feature of all Easter liturgies. Even Patrick’s great prayer in Irish—sometimes called “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” because it was thought to protect him from hostile powers, sometimes called “The Deer’s Cry” because it was thought to make him resemble a deer to the eyes of those seeking to do him harm—cannot be definitely ascribed to him. Characteristics of its language would assign it to the seventh, or even to the eighth,
century. On the other hand, it is Patrician to its core, the first ringing assertion that the universe itself is the Great Sacrament, magically designed by its loving Creator to bless and succor human beings. The earliest expression of European vernacular poetry, it is, in attitude, the work of a Christian druid, a man of both faith and magic. Its feeling is entirely un-Augustinian; but it is this feeling that will go on to animate the best poetry of the Middle Ages. If Patrick did not write it (at least in its current form), it surely takes its inspiration from him. For in this cosmic incantation, the inarticulate outcast who wept for slaves, aided common men in difficulty, and loved sunrise and sea at last finds his voice. Appropriately, it is an Irish voice:
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth with his baptism,
Through the strength of his crucifixion with his burial,
Through the strength of his resurrection with his ascension,
Through the strength of his descent for the judgment of Doom.
I arise today
Through the strength of the love of Cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In prayers of patriarchs,
In predictions of prophets,
In preaching of apostles,
In faith of confessors,
In innocence of holy virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.
I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me:
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in multitude.
I summon today all these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me abundance of reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness,
Of the Creator of Creation.
* I take the sea to be the Irish Sea—“western” to the Britons who are the audience for P.’s Confession. Others, who doubt the tradition surrounding Miliucc (a king in Antrim), place the forest in Mayo and imagine that P. served his time in the west of Ireland. But this is unlikely, given the area of Ireland to which he returned. The Patrician material is full of such difficulties: e.g., the sailors who rescued P. may not have been transporting dogs (it depends on which manuscript you follow)—though they were almost certainly transporting some cargo. Likewise, many think that the “desert” was in Britain and that P.’s party journeyed in one direction for twenty-eight days! The dates of P.’s life and travels are also in dispute. See Bibliographical Sources for additional information.
V
A Solid World of Light
Holy Ireland
Patrick devoted the last thirty years of his life—from, roughly, his late forties to his late seventies—to his warrior children, that they might “seize the everlasting kingdoms” with all the energy and intensity they had lately devoted to killing and enslaving one another and seizing one another’s kingdoms. When he used that phrase in his open letter to the British Christians, he was echoing the mysterious saying of Jesus, which seems almost to have been uttered with the Irish in mind: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”* In the Gospel story, the passionate, the outsized, the out-of-control have a better shot at seizing heaven than the contained, the calculating, and those of whom this world approves. Patrick, indeed, seems to have been attracted to the same kinds of oddball, off-center personalities that attracted Jesus, and this attraction alone makes him unusual in the history of churchmen.
This thirty-year span of Patrick’s mission in the middle of the fifth century encompasses a period of change so rapid and extreme that Europe will never see its like again. By 461, the likely year of Patrick’s death, the Roman Empire is careening in chaos, barely fifteen years away from the death of the last western emperor. The accelerated change is, at this point, so dramatic we should not be surprised that the eyes of historians have been riveted on it or that they have failed to notice a transformation just as dramatic—and even more abrupt—taking place at the empire’s periphery. For as the Roman lands went from peace to chaos, the land of Ireland was rushing even more rapidly from chaos to peace.
How did Patrick do it? We have noted already his earthiness and warmth. But these are qualities that make for a lowering of hostility and suspicion; of themselves they do not gain converts among the strong-willed. We can also be sure that the Irish found Patrick admirable according to their own highest standards: his courage—his refusal to be afraid of them—would have impressed them immediately; and, as his mission lengthened into years and came to be seen clearly as a lifetime commitment, his steadfast loyalty and supernatural generosity must have moved them deeply. For he had transmuted their pagan virtues of loyalty, courage, and generosity into the Christian equivalents of faith, hope, and charity. But, though this singular display of virtue would have made friends, it would not necessarily have won converts—at least, not among a people as stubborn as the Irish.
Throughout the Roman world, Christianity had accompanied Romanization. Its spread through the empire cannot be understood apart from Romanization. Just as the subject peoples had wanted to be Roman, they came quickly to understand that they wanted to be Christian, too. From the fourth century on, instruction in Christianity could even serve as a shortcut to Romanization, as joining the Episcopalians was till recently a shortcut to respectability in America. Once the emperor had conferred on Christianity its position of privilege, most Romans had little difficulty in reading this sign of the times for what it was and grasping that their own best interest lay in church membership. Though it would be cynical and ahistorical to conclude that conversions to Christianity in late antiquity were made only for the sake of poli
tical advancement or social convenience, it would be naive to imagine that Christianity swept the empire only because of its evident spiritual superiority. Certainly, the Christians of the first three centuries, whose adherence to Christianity could easily prove their death warrant, were devout and extraordinary. But from the time of Constantine, the vast majority of Christian converts were fairly superficial people. Despite Augustine’s enormous influence on subsequent history, the bland, detached, calculating Ausonius was a far more typical Christian of the late empire than was the earnest bishop of Hippo.
The Roman Empire in the early fifth century
Patrick, unable to offer worldly improvement to prospective converts, had to find a way of connecting his message to their deepest concerns. It was a challenge no one had had to face since the days when Christianity was new and women and slaves had flocked to it as a way of life that raised their status and dignity as human beings. In order to rediscover the amazing connection that Patrick made between the Gospel story and Irish life, we need to delve deeper into the consciousness of the Irish people at this singular hinge in their history.
Their consciousness—and, maybe even more important, their subconscious. For in the dreams of a people, if we can read these aright, lie their most profound fears and their most exalted aspirations. We know something of Irish dreams, for we can piece together their mythology—their collective dream-story—from the oral tales of the pre-Christian period (such as the Tain) that were subsequently written down and from the artifacts uncovered by archaeologists. Since neither the tales nor the artifacts can offer us a whole mythology—the complete Irish dream cycle—we must read these materials as if they were the fragments of a great papyrus.
How the Irish Saved Civilization Page 10
