Saint Patrick and the Voice of the Irish

If you walk into the library of Trinity College in Dublin, into the Long Room, you can find a manuscript there that was transcribed into Latin in the year 807. The Confessio, one of the few extant writings of the man popularly known as St. Patrick, begins with these words:

I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his precepts, nor were we obedient to our priests who used to remind us of our salvation. And the Lord brought down on us the fury of his being and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where I, in my smallness, am now to be found among foreigners.

The Celtic Druids

To understand the real Patrick, the author of Confessio, we must first understand a little about pre-Patrick Ireland. Ireland was a nation shaped by the polytheistic religion of the druids. They worshiped multiple gods and goddesses associated with natural elements. Sun, water, earth, etc. all had deities connected to them. Therefore natural space became sacred, so groves and natural places were set up as a space where different sorts of religious rituals would occur, similar to Stonehenge. 

They were also a hierarchical society. At the top of the rank of the Celtic world, pre-Patrick, were the priests. Below the priests were novices. There were bards as well, who passed on the culture through oral tradition. And there were ovates, seers who gave prophetic words, and interpreted things like dreams and natural phenomena.

The Legends Debunked

It’s worth debunking some myths as we think about Patrick, because there's a lot of lore around him. What we know about Patrick– what we have that we are absolutely sure is the truth– comes down to what's in his Confessio and what's in the small number of letters that he wrote.

Everybody wants to be associated with Patrick when March comes around. But we know that this is due in part to the legend that has developed. So what are some of the myths or the legends that we know are not true? The first myth or legend is that Patrick was Irish. Patrick goes into Ireland as a missionary, but he is not Irish. He is abducted by the Irish and brought into Ireland first through enslavement, and then later he goes back as a missionary. 

The second myth is that Patrick used the shamrock to teach the Trinity. There are academic papers written on the greenage that Patrick mentions in his writing, attempting to find the shamrock as associated with Patrick. But we have nothing until the 17th century that says that Patrick used the clover or the shamrock to teach the Trinity.

It is often said that Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. When early historians used that language of “serpent,” they were talking about evil, and they were talking about the druid religion being removed from Ireland. They weren't talking about physical, literal snakes because Ireland was actually a place that didn't have snakes originally, and there are no snakes there to this day. 

Another myth is that he jabbed his staff into the ground, that staff blossomed into a tree, and all of these pagans converted to Christianity when they saw the tree blossom. That is untrue. We know that there is writing saying he used miracles against the druids, sort of in the fashion of Moses. But this is not in his writing at all. He was a preacher. He used words. He didn’t use miracles and signs and wonders.

There's a very famous writing called “Patrick's Breastplate” with words you might know: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ to me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me.” A whole poem of this prayer is associated with Patrick and it shows up in the Middle Ages, but it's not something that we find in the writings of Patrick. 

If these didn’t shock you, here's one that may. Patrick was never a saint! He's called “St. Patrick,” but he was never canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Canonization did not begin until the late 12th century. Patrick had been around for years before that. So when “St. Patrick” is used, that title of Saint is not because of canonization. 

Patrick’s Background

So if Patrick was neither Irish nor a saint, who was he really? When we look at his life, there are a few details that we can find. The first is that he's not originally named Patrick. His name is Maewyn Succat. He takes on Patrick later. In his confession, when he begins and he says, “I Patrick,” that's “Pádraig.” You might have noticed that “Happy St. Patty's Day” is sometimes spelled P-A-T-T-Y and sometimes P-A-D-D-Y. The D is right, because it comes from his name, Pádraig. His dates are a little confusing too. He's born around 385, and he lived to about 461 or 463 or 464. Historians give different dates, so we're not really sure when exactly he was born or died.

But we have an era in which Patrick goes forward in preaching.  We know that he was meagerly educated. His family was wealthy. They're said to have lived in a villa. But even though his family was wealthy, something that separates him from so many of his class in those times is that he doesn't have the same level of education. He's raised in a Christian home. He mentions his father and his father's service to the church. He says his name was Calpurnius, a deacon, son of Potitus, a presbyter. We also know that he was from Bannavem Taburniae. That location has never been found. Finally we know that Patrick was enslaved as a young man, around 16 years old. Imagine being captured from your home and dragged off with thousands of others to a location where you do not know the language and you do not know the people, and everything is different, and you are put to work.

Now, I mentioned that he comes from a location called Bannavem Taburniae. Marcus Losack says, “The established theory which most scholars accept is that he was taken captive from somewhere in Britain – some say Scotland, others Wales and others say south-west England. But there has never been any real evidence provided to support that tradition.”

So is he Scottish and goes into Ireland? Welsh? English? Some recently have argued that he is from a Celtic part of France. Here's Patrick's own words. “I am then first of all, countryfied, an exile, evidently unlearned, one who's not able to see into the future.” He doesn't give us much to go on as to where he is from other than knowing he's a countryman. He's not someone from the city or from a place of cultural elitism, but he's from the country. 

Patrick Enslaved

But we do know that Patrick was enslaved and taken from his home to Ireland. And it’s there in Ireland, where he’s enslaved for six years, that he is converted. Patrick is raised in the church, raised with a Christian family, but God has to pull him out of that family and comfort zone in order for him to come to the knowledge of God.

We're told that he herded goats, some say sheep, some say swine. Swine was likely added to the lore because of the parable of the prodigal son. He says “the Lord opened to me the sense of my unbelief that I might at last remember my sins and be converted with all my heart to the Lord my God, who had regard for my lowest state and pitied my ignorance and youth.” 

Eventually Patrick was able to escape from his enslavement and go back to his home. He had a dream that he would soon return home to Britain. And that dream was soon realized. He was somehow near the coast, and there was a ship that he heard was going back to his hometown, and he snuck onto that ship as a stowaway.

The Voice of the Irish

That ship took him home, and he would not return to Ireland for twelve more years. In that time he was away from the Irish people, that heart for the Irish grew in Patrick. “After a few years, I was again in Britain with my parents, and they welcomed me as a son and asked me in faith that after the great tribulations I had endured, I should not go anywhere else away from them.” You can imagine parents saying that, right? But God had other plans, which were revealed to Patrick in a vision.

And of course, there, in a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters. And he gave me one of them. ‘The Voice of the Irish’; and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.’ And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke. Thanks be to God, because after so many years the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry.

Patrick took time to pursue ministerial preparation and theological training. He received this call to travel back to Ireland, but he sensed that his calling was not in and of itself sufficient, and knew he would need to learn to handle God's word accurately and effectively in his mission work in order for it to prosper. He did this in a French monastery called the monastery of St. Germain. Some say that St Germain is the uncle of Patrick. Others say that he's just a mentor. But St. Germain is the one under whom Patrick is training. Patrick spends 12 years studying the scriptures to prepare him to go back to Ireland as a missionary with the gospel.

He didn’t just learn the life of Christ and the “Roman Road” way to salvation. He intensely studies the word of God and the theological tradition that had developed. After 12 years of study, in preparation for going back with the gospel, he said, “I am ready to be killed, betrayed into slavery or whatever may come my way for the sake of your name.” He did not know whether he would have success. He didn't have modern demographic research, and very little knowledge of the Irish appetite for the gospel.

Eventually Patrick reached Ireland again, and there we can only describe his work as the conversion of the Irish, again, from Confessio. He says, “For I am greatly God's debtor, who has granted me such grace that many people through me were reborn to God and afterward confirmed, and that clergy were ordained everywhere for them, for a people newly come to belief, whom the Lord took from the ends of the earth, as he once promised through the prophets... So that even before my death I should see a multitude of peoples born again in God.”

Despite lacking a corpus of the sermons of Patrick, we know he had success in his ministry as a pastor. Some historians say that this is due to the king, because under Patrick’s ministry, the magistrate put to death 800 druid priests who were unwilling to be converted. 

We do see that even those in the royal families of Ireland, sons and daughters of kings became Christian. According to Irish Central,

St. Patrick did meet with King Lóegaire, the High King of Ireland, to ask permission to preach Christianity. Of course, his mission did not always go smoothly. During his life and attempts of preaching, he had terms of imprisonment and generally upset local chieftains and druids but he always won his freedom, by presenting his captors with gifts.  For 20 years, St. Patrick traveled around Ireland baptizing people and establishing monasteries, schools, and churches. By the time of his death, believed to be March 17, 461 (or 493, depending on which scholars you side with), he had left and organized Christian church in Ireland as his legacy.

He's buried in Downpatrick in Northern Ireland. A cathedral has been built on that site, and this is said to be Patrick's stone under which he's buried.

Celtic Christianity

Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, though its harbors were known to the Romans through trade. It was probably merchants who brought Christianity to Ireland in the fourth century. In 431, Pope Celestine sent a man named Palladius from Gaul to the Christians in Ireland. Almost nothing is known about Palladius’s role in the spread of Christianity in Ireland. But the Irish people already knew something of Christianity even before Patrick arrived.​​ 

After Patrick, Celtic Christianity flourished for well over 200 years without any involvement from Rome. So it is worth asking what shaped Celtic Christianity, and studying the faith that developed under Patrick and continued for a couple of hundred years. 

The primacy of Scripture was important in Celtic Christianity, as it was the primary source of authority, and it guided the community's faith and practice. There weren’t centuries of church tradition imposed on the Celts. The Celts looked to the Word of God, and learned what Christianity is and looks like from the Word.

Another result was an interconnection between monasteries and the pastors and elders within the church. They weren’t just developing different thoughts and ideas from their own monasteries, but they were connected and there was discussion among them as to what should be going on within the church. There was a need for personal religion. There was a missionary zeal, a fervor to spread Christianity. There was a focus on what some would call “all of life Christianity.” Their Christianity affected everything for them: their homes, their private lives, their communities, and the state. And it affected the way that things were run and affected their work. We also see that they liked or loved spirituality over formality as well. They recognized that division between God revealing himself in nature and God revealing himself in scripture and were able to interpret nature through the light of the word of God. But this didn’t last forever.

There was, eventually, a romanizing of Celtic Christianity. The Synod of Whitby was called in the year 664, because the Celts in the British Isles would not follow the rules that Rome had established. Rome held authority over all of Christianity, and because of that authority they came into conflict with Celtic Christianity. Because the Celts knew the word of God, as taught by Patrick, the Celts did not acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. It was an Irish king called for the synod, and he heard arguments from both the Celtic side and the Roman side. In the end it was decided to go in favor of Roman customs. The king believed that aligning with Rome would strengthen ties to a broader Christianity. We want strength in broader Christianity. But that decision at the Synod of Whitby made a shift that in essence would destroy Celtic Christianity, replacing it with what was in Rome.

As friends and loved ones take on American celebrations around St. Patrick’s Day, be mindful that Patrick was not a green-clad, Irish, Roman Catholic saint. He was a missionary, one willing to lay down his life for the gospel. One fully committed to the advancement of the gospel– seeking worship from the voice of the gospel. Patrick is a man of grace.

As Patrick said so long ago, “I am greatly a debtor to God who has granted me such great grace that many people through me should be reborn to God.”