Saint Patrick: The Man and his Works

By Thomas O’Loughlin

The only true apostle of Ireland who more or less converted the country 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 Confessio 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. Explanatory notes woven through the translations illuminate a very different world and time; it is not long before we realize, however, that Patrick's theology is no less relevant to our own. Includes a full index of biblical references

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Feb 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780281072149

Book preview

— 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