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Chapter 4.1:
Patrick's writings and his claim
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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At some point in the fifth
century, a man of British birth, one of whose
names was Patricius or Patrick, found himself at
daggers drawn with the Church of Britain. It is
surprising how little we know about him, far all
that, by being the effective founder of the Irish
Catholic Church, he has made a huge difference to
European history. Furious[1] scholarly
debate has established no common ground, and in
so far as a common ground exists among a majority
of academics, that common ground, I believe and
hope to show, is mistaken, based on evidence that
is no evidence at all. The only thing everyone
accepts is Patrick's authorship of two shortish
texts, the Confession and the Letter to
Coroticus; we will start from these.
In the Letter to Coroticus,
an angry account of the crimes committed against
his Irish converts by a pirate leader with the
British name Coroticus (who is a nominal
Christian and a Roman citizen), Patrick claimed
to be Bishop "in Ireland"; but nothing
is more clear, from every surviving word of his,
than that his claim to the title was at best
doubtful. He rubs at the question of his
legitimacy like a sore spot: I hold myself to
be a Bishop; I am most certain that what I have,
I have from God...I am not usurping; I have a
share with those whom He called and predestined
to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth...
my own people do not recognize me; well, a
prophet is not without honour except in his own
country [that is to say, he was recognized as
Bishop in Ireland, but not in Britain]...Not
by my own gift; but it was God who gave this urge
in my heart, that I should be one of the hunters
and fishers whom God once foretold for the last
days... It is perhaps not even the case
that he consistently claimed episcopal rank.
In his other surviving item, the Confession
- a spiritual self-defence, largely for the use
of his Irish flock - he does not use the word
"bishop" about himself once. (This
assertion may surprise those familiar with the
text, but I intend to justify it in the next few
pages.)
Indeed, he is not the kind of man
we expect to find at the head of a diocese in the
fifth century. Bishops were as a rule
educated members of the highest classes; on more
than one occasion (the cases of Ambrosius of
Milan, Sidonius Apollinaris of Clermont-Ferrand,
Synesius of Cyrene, for instance) the populace
simply demanded that the leading landowner or
government officer in the district be made
Bishop, though he was not ordained or even
baptized. Ambrosius was not yet baptized
when he was acclaimed by the Milanese crowd;
Synesius had actually had a notable career as a
pagan philosopher when the people of Cyrene
levered him into the episcopal chair.
Now Patrick shows every sign of
not belonging to this class of men. He is
aware that his Latin grammar and usage are not
impressive, and that a lot of people look down on
him. In classical and late-classical
civilization, the purity and elaboracy of Latin
(or Greek) prose was a token of authority, both
intellectual and political, and it is not
surprising to find that the most pugnacious of
the great Fathers, Jerome, is also the one who
writes the most elaborate and artistic Latin.
He is throwing his learning in his opponents'
faces, and he knows it: in one of his polemical
letters - to a friend - he makes the point quite
specifically, that being loquax, able to
speak at length and with clarity and precision,
entitles him to silence and crush a heretic who
is infantissimus, most inarticulate. It is for that
reason, exactly, that Patrick insists on his
supposed episcopal rank - whatever you may think
of me, you must respect the staff I carry.
Self-education is hardly the worst
kind. Patrick never completed a proper
course of studies, since Irish pirates carried
him off at sixteen as a slave (Confession
1); but he did not turn out too badly. He
was a bad writer of Latin, but a great Latin
writer; or, rather a great self-taught orator.
His individual approach to public
speaking can be experienced and examined in the Letter.
He has a few basic lines of argument in mind: a)
his own legitimacy as a Church leader, b) the
fate of his converts, and c) the wretched
spiritual state of Coroticus and his gang of
murderers. He develops them one at a time,
brusquely dropping one point to pull another, so
to speak, in by the hair; but as the argument
proceeds, it becomes clear that they are all
closely connected - it is because, a), his
episcopal rank is challenged, that, b), his
converts are open to abuse; and that abuse shows,
to his genuine distress, that, c), Coroticus and
his raiders are bound for Hell. In other
words, Patrick has the one gift without which
nobody can become a good writer - the gift of
seeing the point, and sticking to it. In
this, though poles apart in temperament, attitude
and culture, he is exactly like Gildas.
He starts with his ringing claim
of being a Bishop, with a commission received
"from God". This is to get
people's attention, since the letter is not sent
for his pleasure, but to achieve a result -
namely, the excommunication of Coroticus and his
gang of pseudo-Christian pirates. In
chapter 3, he moves to a description of their
crime: they actually raided a meeting of his own
freshly-baptized faithful, butchered them while
still in their white baptismal robes, and carried
the women away to be sold as slaves, or worse, to
the distant and pagan Picts. When Patrick
sent a consecrated priest to ask for the release
of the women and of part (only part) of their
booty, these supposed Christian raiders laughed
in his face. It is truly an outrageous
story, which will shock any Christian to this day
(though - given what we have witnessed in such
places as Ruanda or Sierra Leone - hardly an
incredible one).
What makes Patrick's apparently
rough-and-ready constructive principles work is
that, to put it at the lowest possible level, he
does not repeat himself. Though his subject
is the ghastly slaughter inflicted on his
converts, he does not linger on it. What
Classically trained orator could have resisted
the temptation to embroider? - think of what
Jerome, or even Augustine, or indeed Gildas,
would have done. But Patrick doesn't; he
rightly expects that simply to say that such a
monstrous action has taken place will be enough.
He describes it once, in the opening passage; he
then develops his simple but powerful argument -
you cannot be a Christian and a murderer, let
alone a murderer of brother Christians; therefore
Cap'n Coroticus and his band must be excluded
from the Christian Church unless and until they
repent and make restitution for their crimes.
He never returns to this particular line of
argument once without adding something to it.
Authority from the Bible is given at some length
for the excommunication of Coroticus (7-9),
beginning with the death and crucifixion of
Christ "for the sake of" Irish converts
(a proposition that must have seemed almost
outrageous to some of his British opponents, with
their inbred contempt and hatred for the
barbarians across the sea); then Patrick brings
out with vigorous brevity the cannibalistic
horror of feasting on the spoils of
fellow-Christians, including a brief, marvellous
burst of indignation, one of the most successful
in all literature: "therefore do not be
pleased with this injustice against the just:
even to Hell, it will not
please!" - and culminating in a devastating
analogy: such feasts are like the food of death
that Eve ignorantly offered her husband (12-13).
Then the example of the Christians of Gaul,
treated as a paragon, is shamingly exhibited to
their British fellow-Christians and
fellow-Romans: they ransom baptized prisoners
from the Pagans at enormous cost - tot milia
solidi, so many thousands of gold coins -
while Coroticus sells baptized prisoners as slaves or worse, and
grows fat upon the proceedings (14). Finally,
whatever the justice of this world may do to this
unrepentant slaver and pirate, there is another
justice prepared, in which the Just Judge will
gather His own to Himself and place their enemies
under their feet. In a majestic, visionary
climax, Patrick describes their triumphant
progress to Paradise as if he saw it (17-20),
involving Coroticus' ultimate fate like a passing
downwards glance on the road to immortality.
Coroticus may be a master, a victorious lord, a
powerful man with plenty of influential friends,
in this world: in the next, he is less than
nothing, ashes, smoke in the wind, a footnote to
the eternal triumph of Patrick's beloved converts
and friends.
You can see that not a word is
wasted; Patrick is always moving on to the next
point, and only stops when he can linger, in his
climactic final chapters, on the blazing vision
of his friends moving, "leaping for joy like
calves freed from the bonds" of sin and
mortality, to the ultimate goal of every man.
It is not a perfect construction: more careful
writing might have placed the comparison of the
Gallic Christians ransoming captives and
Coroticus capturing them before his description
of the cannibalistic feasting in Coroticus' hall,
so that the origin of Coroticus' wealth might
come before his enjoyment of it and make it the
more horrible; it is the case, I think, that
Chapter 14 represents a certain lessening of
Patrick's forwards motion, and therefore of the
power of his polemic. But on the whole,
Patrick is able to string together in a single
speech all the points that occur to him and to
lead up to a climax; his climaxes, both minor and
major, are always superb, sometimes unexpected -
like the comparison of Coroticus' feasts to Eve's
apple, both of them being "food of
death" - but always well designed and highly
pertinent. He started with the massacre of the
white-clad neophytes, washed of sin and innocent,
new-born children of God; he ends with an
unwontedly long, ecstatically repetitive account
of their progress beyond death and to God, in
which his vehement forward progress halts, adding
variation after variation on joy, liberation,
triumph, reigning with the Saints:
"...baptized as believers, you have
abandoned the world for Paradise. I see
you: you have begun the journey to where there
will be no night nor grieving nor further death,
but you shall exult like calves loosed from the
stocks, and you shall tread over evil men, and
they shall be like ashes under your feet; soyou shall reign with the
apostles, and the prophets, and the martyrs.
You [i.e.: not Coroticus, who brags of his
temporal kingdom] will achieve everlasting
kingdoms, as He Himself bears witness: 'They
shall come from the East and from the West, and
lie down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the
kingdoms of Heaven'; 'Outside are dogs and
poisoners and murderers'; 'To perjured liars,
their share is in the lake of everlasting fire'.
Not unworthily says the Apostle: 'Where the
righteous shall hardly be saved, where shall the
sinner and the blasphemous transgressor of the
law be recognized?' For this reason, indeed, Coroticus with
his most villainous rebels against Christ: where
shall they see themselves, who distribute poor
little baptized women for a prize, for a wretched
kingdom in this world of time, that time will
blow away in a moment? Like clouds or smoke
scattered by the wind, so the sinners and
deceivers shall perish from the face of God: but
the just shall feast for ever and ever with
Christ, shall judge nations and rule over unjust
kings for all the world to come. Amen!"
Never mind how little he knew of
post-Ciceronian rhetorical principles: this is
great oratory. Despite the prevailing
Biblical tone, Patrick uses imagery with great
freedom, altering it to make it say even more
than the original does. In "you shall
tread over evil men, and they shall be like ashes
under your feet", Patrick clearly has in
mind Psalm 110: "The Lord said to my Lord:
sit by My side, till I have made your foes the footstool
under your feet", a strong and sufficiently
suggestive image whether you are speaking of an
earthly King of Jerusalem threatened by his
neighbours, or of one of the blessed dead
triumphing over spiritual evil. But Patrick
turns the "footstool" into
"ashes", introducing into this scene of
triumph, centred entirely on the victory of the
righteous, an objective view of the final state
of rebellious and unrepentant villainy. Sub
specie aeternitatis, Coroticus is not only
defeated, he is ashes. The image of
defeated evil under the feet of triumphant good
is relevant only to the triumph of good; on the
other hand, the image of Coroticus' soul as ashes takes an
interest in his own spiritual state, not only in
who triumphs over him. To the Psalmist, all
that matters is that his King and his God should
both triumph; once their enemies have submitted,
he is not interested in them except than as the
"footstool" of the King. But
Patrick has a vivid vision of the reality of
Coroticus' soul, not only as it relates to his
triumphant converts, but as itself, doubling and
redoubling the sense of total spiritual ruin that
goes with his revolt against God; and the Letter
rings with lamentations about his and his
followers' moral catastrophe. Patrick does
not know whether to weep for their sorry bondage
to sin less than for the death they inflicted
(4), quotes the Gospel to ask what good it is to
him to gain the world and lose his soul (8),
calls his people "miserable" in their
ignorance of the poisonous nature of what they do
(13), and cannot close this most vehement of
denunciations without a hope, however dim and
dismal, that Coroticus should repent, however
late (21). His concern for his enemy's soul
is not an affectation, but a strong current of
his whole work, genuine and moving; and, as with
the fate of his converts, Patrick does not touch
the subject once without developing it.
This approach to construction is
an individual achievement, the result of a
distinctive personality, with a gift for
communication and a very firm grasp of
essentials. Patrick never meanders off;
however jerky his motion from point to point, he
sticks to them, and even the jerkiness is
dictated by a constant awareness of the important
points to cover, so that, even while he is
dealing with one idea, he has another in mind,
not repeating, but growing out of, something he
has previously said. I doubt that Patrick's
ars oratoria could be taught - at least
not so as to allow the next generation to produce
equally valuable pieces of writing - since it
includes some very considerable formal flaws; but
it makes for a very effective approach to
oratory, and shows all the signs of having been
built on an experience of public and
extemporaneous speaking. It was in having
to stand up and speak, to indifferent or hostile
audiences, or to inspire fearful or hopeless
believers, that Patrick learned to stick to the
point and not to repeat himself; which does a lot
to explain his success as a missionary.
In the Letter, this
approach is particularly bald and unadulterated,
each line of argument being brought to a
screeching halt when Patrick wants to say
something about a different point; in other
words, the way the Letter is written confirms
that it was, as it claimed to be, an
extemporaneous performance, written when the
massacre was still recent. Its tone is
telling: it is that of a man forced into speech
and anger by intolerable wrong - someone who had
ducked confrontation, though provoked, until this
last enormity. He sounds as if he had
ignored a great deal of provocation, in the hope
that he might finally be left alone to do his
work, only to find that meek acquiescence only
brought on more and more outrages; "I am
hated", breaks the typically direct cry from
his heart; "what shall I do, Lord? I
am greatly despised".
But there is a wider political
context to this, which is very clear in Patrick's
mind. It is the widespread contempt for
himself as a person that has caused this outrage:
Coroticus' raid follows from the fact that
"his own people" do not recognize him
(11-12), and is part of a pattern of destructive
interference on the part of unnamed enemies of
whom Coroticus is only the last and worst. "It
does not come together: one destroys, another
builds." And yet, he says, he asks for
no more than what is his by right - what the Lord
Himself has placed in his heart: missionary work
among the still pagan Irish, the building of a
Church of God among this new people. He is
not, he means, interfering with anyone else's
work: why is his own being interfered with?
Patrick (for once) makes good use of Latin
grammar, using the imperfect to say that things
had been so fine in spite of everything - gregem
Domini, quem utique in Hiberione cum summa
diligentia optime crescebat - the Lord's
flock, that, with [so much] hard work, had been
growing so well everywhere in Ireland; and what the imperfect
implies is that that growth may now have ceased,
that Coroticus' bright little venture has put
everything at risk.
We have a right to wonder whether
this was only the unpremeditated action of a
raider. Patrick says clearly that Coroticus
has friends in the Church, and he dreads his
letter being hidden or altered - by churchmen!
And, given that the destructive interference he
suffered seems to have come from Britain (he
says, being British himself, that "his own
people do not recognize him" and all but
charges them with wanting to "destroy"
what he has worked so hard to "build"),
I think that the fact that Coroticus should just
have happened to raid a gathering of Patrick's
converts, enslaving the women and butchering the
men, on the day after their baptism - that is, at
the moment where he could not only take a bit of
plunder, but also devastate Patrick's image among
his followers - is one of those coincidences that
just don't happen. Patrick certainly
regards it, if not as part of the generalized
campaign against him, at least as a by-product of
that campaign: "my own people do not know
me... I am hated; what shall I do, Lord? I
am greatly despised: behold, Your sheep are
butchered and rustled around me, and by those
mean robbers I mentioned..." It is
hard not to feel a continuity between "I am
greatly despised" and "Your sheep are
butchered around me", especially if you
speak it, as Patrick meant it, aloud, with the
rushing vehemence it so obviously demands. Patrick
(in whom the thought of Christians raped and
driven like sheep to serve as slaves in heathen
lands must have raised dreadful memories) is
saying that it is because he, Patrick, was
regarded as contemptible, that Coroticus took it
upon himself to raid and butcher his converts.
And as Dumville observed, "[Patrick's tone]
leads one to believe that the very fact of the
converts' baptism made them targets. The
Devil showed his resentment through the unjust
rule, per tyrannidem, of
Coroticus, who does not fear God or his priests."
On the other hand, I doubt that he
regarded Coroticus as being in the mainstream of
the opposition to him. The Letter seems to
me to carry a sub-text saying "do you see
the kind of attitudes you foster when you try to
tear down my missionary activities? This
rogue took seriously your personal attacks on me,
learned that I was a contemptible person and no
Christian leader, and promptly decided that the
thing to do was to butcher my flock, baptized
though it was - which also led to the small
matter of large profits for him". There
is a visible distinction between the people in
Britain who oppose him and try to tear down his
mission - whose activities Patrick deplores, but
does not attack - and Coroticus, who is regarded
as totally in thrall to the Devil. Patrick
stresses that, while claiming to be a
fellow-citizen of "the holy Romans",
Coroticus makes his money by dealing with
apostate Picts and still-pagan Irish
("Scots"): he may claim to be a
citizen of an empire consecrated to the One God, but his citizenship is
in fact with the pagan gods ("demons")
worshipped by these barbarian peoples. All
the time, Patrick is trying to draw a distinction
between proper Romans and/or Christians, and
Coroticus; Coroticus becomes the focus of all the
negativity that Patrick has encountered in his
enormous task, and surely part of his purpose is
to make the less barbarous among his opponents
recoil from the consequences of their actions.
Probably later in date, the Confession
is a much more calculated and meditated piece of
work, though it does not escape the limits of
St.Patrick's Latin learning. I accept
Howlett's finding that it is built on a
continuous formal imitation of the first chapters
of the Gospel according to Matthew; I just don't
accept that this represents any great
demonstration of literary skill on the Saint's
part. Quite to the contrary, it is a device
any schoolchild could master in a couple of
lessons; take one well-known piece of writing and
use it as a template to build another. Having
experienced the fantastic formal elaboracy,
polished grammar and gem-like vocabulary of
St.Gildas, I do not understand how anyone could
speak of the Latin of St.Patrick in the same
terms. Patrick's sentences are simple - or
else very confused; his use of standard
rhetorical devices such as alliteration is
obvious; his connectives are even feebler and
more confused than those of Gregory of Tours - he
uses ergo, "therefore", when
there is nothing to be proven and no premise to
prove it from - and he frequently makes a most
odd use of cases. When he claims to be indoctus
and rusticissimus, we need not doubt that
he is saying what he knows to be true.
However, the structure of the Confession,
in spite of its Matthew framework, is quite as
original as that of the Letter. It
can roughly be divided into nine or ten large
sections, each several chapters long, and each
ending with an outburst of praise to God. In
chapters 1-3, Patrick introduces himself and
gives a brief and elliptical account of his
irreligious childhood and youth, his enslavement,
and the awakening of his Christian faith; this
gives rise to his first burst of praise. Chapter
4 is his confession of faith, copied from an
ancient credal statement by Victorinus of Pettau,
and rather isolated in the flow of successive
sections - in the sense that it does not, like
the rest of the work, lead up to anything, or end
in a burst of praise (it has no need). 5-8
are a very serious and rather naive assertion of
Patrick's duty to tell the absolute truth, as he
will answer for it before God; here, too, there
is no final burst of praise.
But this is introductory material.
With 9-15, we get into the meat of the argument.
This is Patrick's apologia for his poor Latin and
comparative ignorance: he asserts that, in spite
of them, he still has a duty to make known God's
gifts according to his faith in the Trinity (14)
and praises God for having given him this quite
undeserved opportunity (15). This is not
only a manifestation of Patrick's well-known
sense of educational inferiority: the statement
that he has a duty, ignorant or not, to preach
the Gospel he knows, sounds like an answer to a
statement - unheard by us, but ringing painfully
in his ears - that such an illiterate fellow
should not presume to even get close to a pulpit.
The tone of answer in ch.14 is, to me, obvious.
The fact that he makes his poor
Latinity and general ignorance part of his
argument means that those recent scholarly views
which try to maintain that he was a great and
learned Latin stylist stand upon a most boggy
foundation. The Saint's admission of
ignorance is not a graceful convention, but a
matter of serious business, one of the headings
of his opponents' attack on him; and he admits it
- yes, I am ignorant, but even the ignorant
have a duty to proclaim the Gospel according to
their faith in the Trinity. Compare
this to St.Jerome's aggressive (and justified)
claims for his own learning: no graceful
convention is going to stand in his way of
asserting Catholic dogma, for which his education
definitely is an argument - as I know more
than the heretics, so my arguments are better
founded. Patrick is at exactly the
opposite position - yes, I am less educated
than my enemies; but I preach good Trinitarian
Catholic orthodoxy, and the Lord has called me to
do so. The potentially ruinous nature
of this admission, which conceded an important
part of his enemies' claims, shows that it was
spoken, not as a polite demurral, but in deadly
earnest, under that duty of speaking the absolute
truth asserted with such naive fervour in the
early chapters of the Confession. Patrick
also associates his defence of his rustic ways
with his faith in the Trinity, which, in his day,
meant an assertion of orthodoxy, since most
heresies had been anti-Trinitarian in some
fashion. I think that Patrick's enemies may
have suggested that, as he was uneducated, so his
theology was bound to be flawed: in replying to
them, he excuses his ignorance and defends his
orthodoxy at the same time. He admits the
charge of ignorance, but utterly rejects that of
bad theology.
The next section (16-25) deals
with Patrick's vocation and his direct experience
of God, at a length that is startlingly at odds
with the brevity of his section on his childhood.
Part of it is a strong denial of having had
anything to do with Pagan practices: in Ireland,
he took the opportunity of his solitary time as a
shepherd boy to pray as often as a hundred times
a day; on his way back to Britain, he put his
very escape into danger by refusing to
participate in the pagan practices of the sailors
who ferried him over. This section is
dominated by his direct experience of the reality
of God and Satan, and ends, not with his joyful
reunion with his parents, who beg him never to
leave again (23), but with his dream of
Victoricus bearing him letters from other
faithful in Ireland, begging him to return to
them (24), and with his tremendous sense of the
Spirit Himself praying for him (25). It is
not clear that this is answering any accusation,
as all other sections are, but it ties up to the
previous section in that it gives a startlingly
mystical account of that "rustic"
vocation which 9-15 defended against the
oh-so-well-educated clergy, the dominicati
rhetores, the ultra-learned beneficed
ecclesiastics: how can they deny the validity of
such a direct experience of God?
But with 26-33, we have reached
the heart of the matter. Patrick's seniores
charge him with a grievous sin as he is
performing a "laborious episcopate",
and, to make the matter even more galling, it is
Patrick's amicissimus, his dearest friend,
who informed them! These seniores
must be ecclesiastical superiors, since they have
jurisdiction to charge and condemn him for his
sins; the effect of their condemnation, it seems,
would be that he would be removed from Ireland,
since part of his response is that he did not go
to Ireland of his own accord (28). On the
night when he receives news of his condemnation,
he has another vision, this time "a writing
against my face without honour", scriptum
contra faciem meam sine honore - that is, his
written condemnation and degradation. But
he hears a voice saying male uidimus faciem
designati nudato honore, "ill have We
seen the face of the designatus with [its]
honour stripped off"(29). This gives
him courage, and he carries on the fight - he
does not tell us how - to a brilliant victory: fides
mea probata est coram Deo et hominibus, my
faith was proved in the presence of God and men
(30). He cannot leave the subject without a
mournful and puzzled reference to his friend's
betrayal (32); but neither does he leave it
without renewed praise to God for "seeking
him out in his land of exile and protecting him
from all evils" (33).
This leads to a section, 34-36,
that is all praise, describing in terms both
exultant and elliptical his ministry in Ireland.
Patrick still cannot imagine unde mihi haec
sapientia, quae non erat in me, qui neque numerum
dierum noueram neque Deum sapiebam,
"whence to me this learning? - which was not
within me, I who neither could reckon the number
of days, nor knew God".
It is sapientiam, knowledge, knowledge of
something real, not a feeling but a fact; and it
is a knowledge that he can, as a missionary,
communicate to his hearers; but it was nothing
that he made for himself. He had it, he is
sure, from an outside Source. This echoes
and extends his previous rebuke to the wise,
confiscating the very notion of sapientia
for the use of the indoctus peccator
rusticissimus et contemptibilissimus apud
plurimos, and giving thanks for it to God.
The brusque jump to the next
section (37-46), with absolutely no connecting
idea, reminds us of the jerkiest moments of the Letter:
Patrick is still Patrick. This section
accounts for his refusal to come to Britain to
defend himself, and that is why he jumps back in
time, from his condemnation in Britain (when
already a missionary leader in Ireland) to the
last days before the start of his mission. When
he first decided to go back to Ireland to preach
God, he says, his family even offered him large
gifts, weeping, to convince him to stay, and a
number of his elders - probably not the same seniores
who condemned and traduced him - grumbled at his
resolution; but, he says, he was inflexible, or
rather God was inflexible in him (37). Now
he wants to stay in Ireland, because here God has
worked through him to bring so many nations to
Himself (38-39), and therefore it is his duty to
"fish diligently". For this he
brings up the largest number of proof-texts
anywhere in his writings, in the longest of all
his chapters (40): whatever happens, he simply
will not stop his apostolate in Ireland, and that
is that. Above all, women who have taken
monastic vows need his protection from their very
disapproving parents (42), and to go to Britain
to his family, or to Gaul to his fratres
and the "Saints of God", would mean to
leave his work in Ireland without protection
(43). Patrick is torn, because, being all
too aware of his own tendencies to sin, he does
not trust his own judgement (44); but he intends
to follow the will of God as it becomes clear to
him. Being rather slow and stupid, it has
taken him a long time to see it, even when it was
as plain as the nose on his face, and he is
grateful to God, among other things, for His
patience with his, Patrick's, stupidity (45-46).
Patrick then addresses his own
converts, dealing with the practical aspects of
running a mission (47-58). Some elements
lead us to believe that he had led his
organization, financially speaking, on the rocks,
through a combination of unwillingness to accept
large gifts from converts, especially women (49)
and the inescapable need to pay large sums to
kings and brehons (Irish justiciars; 51-53).
The reason for this is not clear, but it must
have something to do with his assertion that he
has always been honest to the heathen and never
cheated them in anything (48); so he says that he
is more suited to poverty after all, and that,
though exalted far beyond what he expected,
poverty he has to the full (55). All this
strongly suggests that, as he was writing, his
diocese was very low on funds. He is imperitus
in omnibus, inexperienced in all sorts of
things, which harks back to his address to the
wise, who are legis periti et potentes... in
omni re, expert in law and powerful in all
sorts of things (13). Patrick, I think,
meant that he had never been trained in
administration, like the higher ranks of the
Roman nobility, and therefore was not really
qualified to run the organizational side of a
diocese; this, coupled with his refusal on
principle to be paid for baptizing or teaching
the Gospel or ordaining priests (50) - matters in
which his scrupulosity went far beyond ordinary
Church rules ("for the labourer is worthy of
his hire"), but which he justifies by the
urgent need that the pagans should not consider
him and his Church money-grubbers or swindlers
(48) - cannot be good news for the diocese's
finances. (Elsewhere, he says that he is
not good at providing for the future, nescio
in posterum prouidere - 12). The
defensive tone especially in 50-51 strongly
suggests that questions had been asked about his
financial probity: forte autem quando
baptizaui tot milia hominum sperauerim ab aliquo
illorum uel dimidio scriptulae? Dicite
mihi, et reddam uobis... "But
perhaps, when I was baptizing so many thousand
people, I should have hoped for something from
them, or for half a scriptula? Tell
me, and I'll give it back to you..." The
tone is unmistakable: someone has been spreading
stories about the Roman-age equivalent of
numbered Swiss accounts. This section, too,
ends in praise; and leads to four final chapters
of praise (59-62), including a prayer to be found
worthy of martyrdom (59) and a haunting
comparison of the sun, worshipped by pagans but
created and doomed to perish, with the splendour
of Christ, Who created the sun, and Who lives for
ever.
Now, in the Confession,
Patrick does not use the word episcopus of
himself a single time. His amicissimus,
the one who was to let him down, told him that he
was to be "given over to the upwards step to
the episcopate" (a ridiculously intricate
formulation in English, but quite natural in
Latin: dandus es tu ad gradum episcopatus);
but we are never told that that "upwards
step" had been passed. And yet we can
see that the tract is written from the point of
view of the leader of the Irish church; he has
baptized thousands of people, ordained many
priests, managed the mission's finances,
improvidently and inexpertly perhaps, but with
probity. This is the attitude of a man in
charge, accounting for the things charged to him.
But the closest he gets to calling himself a
bishop is when he said that he "functions as
an embassy for my God", Deo
meo pro quo legationem fungo, an ambiguous
expression to say the least, and one which has an
interesting echo of the periphrases used in the
Letter when he is trying to assert his status:
"I have a share with those whom He called
and predestined to preach the Gospel... Not by my
own gift; but it was God who gave this urge in my
heart, that I should be one of the hunters and
fishers whom God once foretold for the last days".
When Patrick has to speak of the
consecrated authorities of the Church, he calls
them sacerdotes. It has been said
that by sacerdos he always means bishop; I
think, rather, that he is trying to emphasize the
unity of the sacerdotal class, presbyters and
bishops, in order to stress those things in which
he was indubitably a sacerdos endowed with
the power to bind and loose that Our Lord had
given the apostles. According to Catholic
doctrine, the legitimate successors of the
Apostles are the college of Bishops, rather than
the order of priests. Priests are certainly
given the power to bind and loose, even to the
point of excommunication; but they "exercise
it to the extent that they have received their
commission either from their bishop (or religious
superior) or from the Pope", since their
status is that of "collaborators" of
the bishops. As an ordained
priest (which nobody doubts he was) Patrick
certainly has the canonical right to bind and
loose, and this is no more than he claims for sacerdotes;
but he intended to claim for himself the
superior, autonomous authority of a bishop.
He places the word in contexts where it is bound
to refer to himself and to be associated with the
episcopal dignity he claims.
In other words, while in the
rushed and furious performance of the Letter
Patrick is willing to claim the rank of bishop,
in the Confession - his reasoned spiritual
self-defence - he is reluctant to say anything
that implies the claim. Particularly
significant is the heading of the two documents.
In the Letter, he introduces himself as Ego
Patricius peccator indoctus scilicet Hiberione
constitutus episcopum me esse fateor: I,
Patrick, an unlearned sinner indeed, declare
myself raised up in Ireland to be a bishop.
In the Confession, this becomes Ego
Patricius peccator rusticissimus et minimus
omnium fidelium et contemptibilissimus apud
plurimos: I, Patrick, a most rustic sinner,
the least of all the faithful, and an object of
great contempt to many. Apart from the
self-abasement, which could even be seen as
formulaic - the Pelagian De uita christiana,
written in a very different spirit, has a rather
similar opening - the most interesting point is
that episcopu(s) constitutus Hiberione is
replaced by minimus omnium fidelium, the
least of all the faithful. This formula is
in the spirit of the Pope's servus servorum
Christi. If the Gospel orders that he
who is greatest among Christians should be their
servant, it is certainly legitimate to signal an
effectively leading and pre-eminent position by
the language of service; and the higher the rank,
the lower the word of service. That is what
Patrick has done; but he will not, in a
deliberately solemn opening, use the word episcopus.
Perhaps, having done it once in the Letter,
he is reluctant to do it again - if, as most
scholars (including myself) agree, the Confession
is later than the Letter.
And it is clear enough why he
should claim episcopal rank for himself in the Letter
but not in the Confession. In the Confession,
Patrick states passionately his duty to say
nothing idle or mendacious (6-8); it is a
considered statement, written to a comparatively
elaborate literary pattern; but the Letter
is a sudden necessity forced on him by the
villainous actions of his enemies. Patrick
had to assert his authority at all costs, to
protect, if he could, his Irish converts; with
Irish Christianity reeling under the blow, with
many of his people murdered or enslaved - he had
no choice but to go on the offensive; even to the
cost of stretching a point. Apart that the
prestige of episcopal rank will give his words
more weight, there is the practical point that he
wants Coroticus excommunicated. Even so,
Patrick's excommunication is a pretty strange
affair - not a formal sentence, but a repeated
plea with "the holy and humble of
heart" that Coroticus should be boycotted.
Its import is unmistakable, but in terms of form,
it avoids the actual words of doom as carefully
as the Confession avoids the title of
Bishop; it is not a sentence of excommunication,
but a plea for such a sentence. Of course,
a regularly appointed Bishop would still not want
to interfere in another Bishop's diocese, and,
other things being equal, he would not pronounce
sentence of excommunication on a member of
someone else's flock; but other things weren't
equal. The treacherous slaughter of
freshly-baptized converts has to count as one of
those acts for which excommunication is
automatic: St.Ambrose threatened to throw the
Emperor Theodosius out of the Church for less.
Yet Patrick does not announce that such an event
has happened - he only pleads for excommunication
to be pronounced.
There is something familiar about
all this. Patrick, clearly the leader of
the Church in Ireland, is extremely nervous about
claiming the title of Bishop. He only does
so in an emergency, when driven beyond endurance
by an unheard-of crime; and even so, he cannot
bring himself to act as one, declaring a sinner
excommunicated in his own name. Why should
he behave like this? Is he a
self-proclaimed bishop? That does not agree
with his character as we see it in his writings -
hesitant, convinced of his educational
inferiority, all too aware of his ignorance of
administration, eager to preach the Gospel to the
Irish but equally desirous not to give scandal or
do anything irregular. Has he usurped an
existing see? His firm denial that he is
usurping anything - since God has given him a
share with all those who are predestined to
preach the Gospel - sounds rather significant;
but again, the personality of the Saint hardly
seems to agree either with the self-seeking
qualities, or with the fanaticism, needed to
drive out and replace a reigning bishop. There
are only two reasons for such an act: either
lawless ambition, or violent doctrinal opposition
to the incumbent - plenty of Sees have been
usurped on the excuse that the incumbent was a
heretic.
But Patrick, far from looking for
doctrinal divisions, deliberately avoids
contentious statements. He uses an
uncontentious primitive Creed (Confession 4),
which denies no contemporary heresy except
Arianism and Dualism, both of which had long been
beyond the pale and were as much opposed by
Pelagians as by Catholics. It has been
argued that its archaic nature shows that Patrick
moved in provincial and conservative circles; I
think it results from an eirenic decision to
avoid anything that might reflect on current
doctrinal controversies - i.e. Pelagianism.
That Patrick never makes a single direct
statement about, let alone against, Pelagianism,
is remarkable, and the notion that this might
result from a provincial and/or conservative
theological milieu is simply a non sequitur;
neither conservatism, nor provinciality, nor
indeed ignorance, have ever prevented Christians
from engaging in the most contemporary
theological arguments. If anything, they
make it easier; conservative, provincial or
ignorant priests tend to weigh in like tanks,
where more educated and urbane individuals tend,
other things being equal, to be nervous about
taking a hard line.
My point is that Patrick was not
the man to mount a coup against an incumbent on
doctrinal grounds. I feel absolutely
confident that he was Augustinian. The
whole nature of his faith, an internal revelation
given by God through no merit of his own; his
constant sense of being led and protected by a
Power above himself; his sense of sin; his
astonishing description of the presence of God
working above and within him (Confession
24, 25), are in the most complete opposition to
the spirit of Pelagianism, a spirit militant,
disciplined, austere to excess, bent on
sanctifying oneself by one's own unaided efforts,
and completely unaware of the devastating
experience of the infinite inferiority of
creature to Creator, so that, in meeting Him, the
self is experienced as such a small thing that it
might as well be nothing. To the end of his
life, or at least to the end of the polemic,
Pelagius failed to see the point of Augustine's
insistence on Grace, Grace alone, Grace
undeserved, or of his angry rebuttal that, by
Grace, Pelagius meant nothing more than law and
discipline. No Christian who has
experienced God in the manner that Augustine did
can be a Pelagian, because the experience of the
reality of God makes every thought of personal
self-discipline and morality as nothing; as less
than nothing. All our morality is filthy
rags.
Patrick was exactly such a
Christian, and his descriptions of mystical
experiences, though brief, are among the most
convincing I know. The bishop of Hippo is
among the authors who influenced his style,
though Patrick only shows signs of having read
the Confessions; but then it was just the Confessions,
with its famous prayer to Omnipotence and Perfect
Goodness - "Give me what You command, and
command what You will" - that first shocked
Pelagius and awoke him to the contradiction
between his view of the Faith and Augustine's.
You cannot approve of the Confessions and
be a Pelagian.
Every other author Patrick can be
shown to have read is orthodox: Cyprian, Pastor
Hermas, the Corpus Martinianum[17]. And you can only
argue that he shows no trace of Augustinianism if
you believe that people's philosophy and religion
are unrelated to their actions and are not
reflected in their language. There is not a
word in Patrick that does not flow from an
Augustinian position, not perhaps extreme, but
certainly with nothing in common with Pelagian or
even semi-Pelagian attitudes. His whole
attitude is Augustinian, stressing that he does
nothing by himself and that the grace (that very
Augustinian word!) of God is responsible for
every good thing that happened to him and every
good thing he has done. Indeed, he makes of
his very smallness and sinfulness a stick to beat
his opponents, making his missionary success in
spite of his own disabilities an argument for the
presence of God at his side. He does not
even consider the possibility of being righteous,
and admits to being tempted every day (Confession
44), but claims never to have lost the love of
God. This is not a direct statement of
absolute dependence on God's Grace, but that
statement is everywhere else, including his
striking accounts of direct experiences of the
will and presence of God. He is, unlike
Gildas, not practised in irony and sarcasm, but
if it was possible to feel it anywhere in his
writings, it would be in his allusions to not
having led a perfect life "like other
believers"; which seems like a veiled
comment on the members of that British
ecclesiastical forum which condemned the old sin
he had admitted to his amicissimus. Let
them think themselves righteous if they like:
Patrick knows he is a sinner - but for whom did
Jesus come?
Patrick's reason to avoid
doctrinal debate is clear enough. Leading a
missionary church in difficult circumstances, in
an island where Pelagians were certainly present,
he cannot allow himself the luxury of splits and
clashes. It is also the case that this
policy of keeping one's head low, not challenging
fellow-Christians, not looking for trouble, is
very much in the nature of Patrick the man as we
are beginning to know him - a mixture of
warm-hearted concern for his converts and for all
sorts of people (even Coroticus!), nervous and
sometimes excessive sense of his poor education
and personal shortcomings, and single-minded
concentration on his work, too important to
endanger it by a comparative side-issue like the
aristocratic fad of Pelagianism. Again and
again, we have to say: if ever a man's character
shone through his writings, Patrick's character
shines through his writings; if ever a man was
unlikely to want to usurp a title either out of
ambition or of fanaticism, Patrick was that man.
There is a scenario that can
account for the facts as we have them: Patrick
might have taken over, or been propelled to, a
vacant Irish see. In that case, his non
usurpo might mean: I have taken no man's
place (since the see was empty); and a couple of
points in the Confession tend to support
this.
The first is that, though Patrick
does in fact never use the word episcopus
of himself in that work, he does speak of his
"laborious episcopate", laboriosum
episcopatum meum. There is, I think, a
difference between calling oneself a bishop and
claiming to be performing a laborious episcopate;
that is, one may do the work of a bishop without
actually being a bishop oneself. And I
would suggest a parallel between this apparent
emphasis on the office rather than the
office-holder and Prosper's mention of the Bishop
of the Irish. Praising Pope Celestine's
establishment of this new See, Prosper does not
mention any name. Celestine's first bishop,
as we know, was Palladius, whom Prosper showed
himself, elsewhere, very willing to play up; but
here he has nothing to say of him. The
emphasis on the institution, Scotis episcopo,
rather than on any individual, tends to underline
- in the course of a review of Celestine's great
deeds - that any individual who is or has been on
the Irish episcopal throne owes it to that
particular Pope. Prosper also seems quite
confident that the conversion of the Irish to
Christianity is an achievement solid enough to
last - fecit etiam barbaram [insulam]
christianam - which suggests that the diocese
had already shown some durability. It does
not sound as if it was still in the position of
depending on the enterprise of one man,
Palladius.
The second point is longer and
more complex, and depends on the reading of
Patrick's own very elliptical account of the
great crisis of his career (Confession
26-34). This is a fairly tightly worked
passage, obviously written to people who had a
good idea of the facts and concerned mainly with
self-justification. Patrick was
"tempted" - in the Lord's Prayer
meaning of "led into the time of trial"
- by people who were senior to him, and
who struck him such a blow that, but for God's
help, he might not have risen again (26). How
did God help him? When at his lowest ebb,
he had one of his decisive visions, of a document
written "against my face without
honour" and a Voice that said "Ill have
We seen the face of the Selected One with a bared
name". Grammatically, the phrase is
none too clear; but when Patrick describes the
words of Divine praise for his piety, he uses Bene
ieiunas, "well do you fast"; and by
that he means, it is good that you fast. His
fast is to be rewarded by his semi-miraculous
escape. Therefore, what the Lord meant was:
"it is ill that We have seen...". What
comforted Patrick enormously was to hear
"Ill have We seen" rather than
"Ill have you seen"; that is, he felt
that God was literally on his side. If He
had said "It is ill that you have
seen", it would be a mere statement of the
obvious: it was a bad thing for you to go through
this experience; but Patrick's God reassured
Patrick that Patrick's own bad treatment was a
bad thing for God as well. The Selected
Man, Designatus (or even God's Chosen, Dei
signatus) had his name "denuded,
bared", which suggests that he was stripped
of some dignity, and probably deprived of the
other meaning of Latin nomen - good name,
renown. And what God did for him was to
give him the strength to go on. As Patrick
tells it, this desolate time ended in triumph;
some time after the terrible blow, "his
faith was proved before God and men", in a
forum and in a way that cleared him
incontrovertibly and very visibly.
Patrick's lowest moment came at
the hand of the very friend who had gone to
Britain to argue for him, telling him Ecce,
dandus es tu ad gradum episcopatus. This
strongly suggests that the point at issue was,
exactly, the gradum episcopatus, Patrick's
promotion to Bishop. But in the course of
his discussion with obviously hostile seniores,
this friend, though malice or - more likely -
naivety, blabbed the story of the serious sin
Patrick committed in his teenage years; the
opposing party pounced on it, and "stripped
naked the name of Designatus" - and
here we realize that designatus might also
mean "appointed, designated to a post".
Patrick had already been designated to the
episcopate, when he was not only denied the rank,
but almost ruined by the spread of an account of
his youthful folly, probably inaccurate,
certainly exaggerated; and what the vision of God
did for him was to give him the strength to fight
on, not so much for his "laborious
episcopate" as for his good name and
reputation. We must conclude that the seniores
attacked Patrick's laboriosum episcopatum
in the course of a debate on whether he should be
made a bishop: Patrick was working hard at episcopatum
when his promotion to bishop was still, at best,
up in the air.
This confirms that, at that point,
episcopatum meant not "the title of
bishop" but "the work of a
bishop". Patrick was picked, designatus,
for the task, because he had already been doing
it in practice. For what other reason
should this provincial priest of poor education,
middling birth, and obscure past, be suggested
for a bishop's staff, even by a close friend?
It was probably his flock that selected him:
election to the post of Bishop was, at the time,
the standard way (one hears frequently of riots
between supporters of rival candidates), subject,
of course, to approval from higher authorities.
In Patrick's case, the approval, one suspects,
had to come from Britain: and that was what was
at issue.
The confrontation took place in
Britain, and it was from Britain that the
slanders against Patrick proceeded.
Patrick's writing talents give us
a clue as to the nature of his "great
sin". Patrick's climaxes always grow
from the material he has been treating: nothing,
in his writing, can be assumed to be alien to the
flow of his argument, we have seen that. He
keeps to the point. Therefore the Confession's
haunting climax, with his unforgettable attack on
the Pagan worship of the Sun and its calm (and
soaringly beautiful) assertion of the superiority
of the Christian God, must be related to its
central issues. Patrick completes his
spiritual self-defence with a declaration that
the Sun itself is a perishable creature, made by
a Power greater than itself, and doomed to die,
while its Maker endures for ever and grants His
worshippers His own eternal life. This must
have a direct relevance to the issues treated in
the Confession[18].
So what does the Confession
say? That Patrick, along with some
unspecified people around him, had "turned
away from God" in his teen-age years, and
refused to pay attention to the teaching of God's
priests (even though Patrick's own father was a
deacon, and his grandfather a priest); that he
had subsequently been kidnapped by Irish slavers
and taken to Ireland; and that it was in his time
in Ireland that he first began to know God - in
other words, his sin was still unrepented when he
was kidnapped. It is at this point that he
asserts that non est alius deus nec umquam
fuit nec ante nec erit post haec, praeter Deum
Patrem...et huius filium Iesum Christum... et...
Spiritum Sanctum, there is not, neither has
there ever been, neither will there be hereafter
any god other than God the Father, and His Son
Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit: he has
inserted his declaration of faith at the moment
where he began to have that faith, and completely
- indeed, startlingly - dropped the narrative
line in favour of a vehement series of
self-defences.
First, he admits he is poorly
educated. Why? Because he was
abducted as a boy, before he had the sense to
know what to pursue and what to avoid. This
is a twofold admission: it is as he was in that
juvenile, foolish state of rebellion against
"our priests", that he also neglected
his classes, "not knowing what to pursue and
what to avoid". The same state of
teen-age rebellion that led him into the
"great sin" - a sin which involved
disbelief in, and ignorance of, the Trinity -
also led him to neglect his classes and meant
that his Latin remained poor and ungrammatical.
Admitting his poor Latinity is part of admitting
his great sin; and the abduction to Ireland is in
effect his punishment. In the course of six
years of servile employment, during which he
grows from a boy to an adult, he returns to the
God of the Romans. He prays continuously,
and is rewarded with a clear hint that he should
escape; he does so, successfully, and his
conversion to Christianity is sealed when, in the
course of his escape, he refuses to take any of
the honey that the sailors had sacrificed to the
pagan gods.
It is this "great sin"
which, after decades of priestly and missionary
work, comes back to haunt him when his enemies in
the British episcopate make use of it to defame
him publicly; a sin which involves apostasy
against the Christian God, and incidentally
slackness or worse in the matter of Latin
studies. The issues it raises dominate the Confession
from one end to the other, since Patrick clearly
and consciously ascribes his other failings to
it; if he is neither properly educated nor a
decently prepared administrator, it is because he
has not been able to study; and he has not been
able to study, because he was atoning his Great
Sin by being a slave in Ireland. His answer
to the main charge - that, whatever his failings,
he believes in and preaches the Trinity - is
meant to be comprehensive: as he has atoned for
the core of the sin in returning to God, its
by-products in terms of poor education and
preparation are compensated. Indeed, he
claims to have been given by God a sapientia,
a learning or knowledge, which he never expected
nor thought of, and which should silence the
beneficed rhetors who criticise his grammar.
The attack on the pagan worship of
the Sun is the climax of this whole sequence of
argument, which begins with Patrick's great sin
and works its way through its consequences in his
later life, from enslavement to subsequent
ignorance to the contempt of the wise and
learned. The great sin is therefore,
clearly, pagan worship of the Sun, and its
atonement is Patrick's passionate avowal of faith
in the Trinity, and his going to Ireland to
convince others of Its superiority to the
natural, created object they too worship.
We remember that Patrick was the
son and grandson of clerics; that he and his
companions - whoever they were - took on
themselves to worship a pagan deity, cannot have
been a small matter. Patrick's first
chapter seems to imply that all the thousands who
were taken in that particular raid were involved
in the act of apostasy in question; one thinks,
therefore, of something collective, along the
lines of re-erecting or re-consecrating a pagan
temple. I will later
argue that Patrick was 30 or more by 407; this
places his youth in the last couple of decades of
the previous century, a period in which such a
phenomenon is anything but incredible. Chronologically,
it would stand half-way between the reign of
Julian the Apostate (361-63), in the course of
which, almost certainly, the Littlecote Villa was
turned into some sort of Orphic religious or
intellectual establishment and the great temple
of Nodons at Lydney, Gloucestershire, was built, and the
grant of religious freedom to Pagans by John
(425); bang in the middle of it there would be
the last attempted Pagan restoration, that of
Eugenius and Arbogast (394). When Augustine
wrote De ciuitate Dei, in the 410s, a
pagan restoration still seemed a definite
possibility. Patrick’s fifteenth year
was, I think, in or before the year 392.
Patrick's own participation in
this movement sounds like an episode of teenage
rebellion. He associates it with a refusal
to study his lessons; and we remember that part
of Julian the Apostate's reason to reject the
Christianity of his family was his unpleasant
experience at the hands - and cane - of the
Christian teacher Eusebius. (This,
incidentally, might clear Patrick's family of the
imputation of weak or nominal Christianity made
by many scholars.) But there might be more
to it than that: it does look as if the worship,
specifically, of the star of day, had a strong
emotional hold on Patrick. On the night
after he had refused the honey sacrificed by the
sailors, Patrick suffered a violent physical
experience, feeling crushed as if by an enormous
stone. In his grief, he says, and ignarum
- unconscious, unaware; perhaps torn out of sleep
by this horrible sensation - he called upon Helia
- a name that sounds closer to that of the Greek
god of the sun than to that of the Jewish
prophet. There is no doubt that at this
point he was falling back, consciously or not,
into his old Pagan ways; and this in spite of the
fact that he had argued for Christianity with his
pagan sailors all the way from Ireland. And a
great sun, he says, came upon him and freed him
from the terrible weight. But he attributes his
deliverance, nevertheless, to Christ, the true
Sun: et credo quod a Christo Domino meo
subuentus sum, et Spiritus eius tunc clamabat pro
me. In spite of his already acquired
Christian faith - or as much Christian faith as a
bottom-of-the class fifteen-year-old in rebellion
against his family's faith could be expected to
know - the hold of pagan, and specifically solar,
images, was strong on him still.
This is the background used by the
British to publicly attack both Patrick's rank
and his faith. If an act of collective apostasy
such as Patrick hints at did actually take place
in his part of Britain in his youth, it is almost
certain to have been a famous scandal, and well
known to the ecclesiastical authorities; the
participation of the priest's son in the
adoration of Helios may well have been known to
living witnesses when, decades afterwards, this
same teenage tearaway resurfaced as claimant to a
bishopric[21].
If I read the Letter
correctly, Patrick was already under attack by
the time of Coroticus' assault. Despite repeated
demands, he never went to Britain to defend
himself: missionary work, and especially the
protection of young women and female slaves who
had taken monastic vows, meant he had to stay in
Ireland to watch over his flock. (A suspicious
reader could think that just to get Patrick out
of Ireland might ruin him quite as effectively as
any trial, since the mission might collapse
without him; if that was the case, the game of
his seniores would turn out to be even
dirtier than he describes it.) He mentions,
with what seems to me sincere regret, his
inability to travel even to see his parents -
surely, by now, an elderly and much-tried couple.
But his "faith" was
"vindicated" in a very public forum.
What forum? The forum which had decided against
him and taken action to blacken his character was
of high enough status to be able to decide about
episcopal nominations; that is, it was certainly,
a synod of bishops. To whom, then, could Patrick
appeal, above the bishops of his province? The
answer is obvious: to the patriarch of the West.
There is evidence in the Confession that
Patrick's enemies had not stopped demanding his
presence in Britain up to the time of his
writing, since he apologizes for being unable to
go there even now; but the Pope would not demand
Patrick's presence, rather judging his slandered
faith from a "sistatic epistle", a
written statement of faith; and against his
judgement there would be no appeal. Since the
council of Sardica (343), the Pope had been the
last court of appeal for accused bishops[22].
I am not guessing here. There is a
well-witnessed tradition in the Irish annals[23]that Pope Leo I the Great
carried out the probatio of St.Patrick in
the Catholic faith, and found for him. Two
annals, the Annals of Innisfallen and the Annals
of Ulster, date this probatio at Leo's
second year in office, 441, which suggests that
he found this sensitive matter in his in-tray
almost as soon as he was crowned. If this hot
potato had been dumped in the Pope's lap at the
beginning of his term, this would explain what
seems like a reference to the Christianization of
Ireland in his sermon for Sts.Peter and Paul's
day (29 June) 441: the row between Patrick and
his British opponents would have drawn his eyes
to that distant barbarian land. And the fact that
he mentions it as a triumph of Christian Rome
would seem to suggest that he was well disposed
to its leaders[24], which supports our
scheme, so far as it goes. But it is not at all
clear that Leo was speaking about Ireland; the
conclusion is reached mainly by a most
problem-laden process of exclusion - he could not
have been speaking of other non-Roman Christian
areas, since they were either under Eastern
administration[25], or heretical (Arian,
etc.)[26].
Probare, probatio, do mean
"testing", but with an inevitably
positive overtone. Any user of Latin would
be aware of their derivation from probus,
upright, righteous - one of the oldest, strongest
and most widely used words of approval in the
language. In spite of Bishop Hanson's vehement
opposite view, there is no reason whatever to
think that an early annalist invented Leo the
Great's probatio to bring St.Patrick and
the celebrated Pope into contact; if he had, he
would have brought the two saints face to face,
as Celtic hagiographers invariably do - to the
extent of making Patrick and Brigid meet, even
though Brigid was supposed to have been three
(precocious young lady!) when Patrick died[27]. And Patrick's very
brief statement is, at the very least, not
incompatible with being justified by the Pope,
which in fact suits the universality of that coram
Deo et hominibus rather better than any
approval by an lesser ecclesiastical forum.
What is more, the date is simply
too good. If I am correct, by June 29, 441, the
Pope had heard nothing to make him uneasy about
the fate of the Christian Britanniae; he
was concerned with a severe row between their
established church and the missionary claimant to
the Irish diocese, whose right to exist was
unchallenged since it had been established by his
predecessor-but-one. Roman Britain still existed,
and the British Bishops could still try hard to
browbeat and hammer the little man in the
barbarian island by the favourite Romano-British
means of legal procedure (trickery?); within a
year, the Saxon revolt had wiped everything out.
This would explain the whole unfinished feel of
the story - Patrick's faith vindicated, but his
episcopal title not established - people still
trying to summon him to Britain for further
hearings - "for as in the days that were
before the flood, they were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage, until the day
that Noe entered into the ark; and knew not until
the flood came and took them all away..." It
would explain why we seem to be seeing the whole
thing as if half-way through, as an interrupted
process: because it was in fact interrupted.
Patrick refers to his probatio
in two lines, and says nothing of who carried it
out and where; from which Bishop Hanson
vehemently argues that it cannot have been the
Pope who probauit him, since otherwise
Patrick was bound to have played up the fact. But
there is one circumstance in which Patrick would
not have needed to do so; and that is if the probatio
had just happened and everyone knew about it.
When a period of tremendous trial has just ended
in victory, there is a natural impulse not so
much to celebrate the victory as to go back over
the whole struggle, still feeling the wounds,
still justifying one's actions, still talking and
feeling as if the struggle was a present reality
- but looking on it, already, as a finished
whole. And this is in fact exactly the impression
one gets from the triumphant but brief note of
the Confession: in spite of his victory,
Patrick still feels the battle as if he was
fighting it, and the victory is too recent to
feel real. The Confession seems to me
sodden with the relief, still tinged with pain
and self-doubt, of a man whose most devout
beliefs have been slandered for years; a
sensitive and scrupulous, perhaps over-scrupulous
man, bound to feel weakened by others'
denunciations of his sin, yet desperately
clinging to his knowledge of his own good
intentions; eventually subjected to probatio
by a distant and awesome authority - and finally,
thunderingly, beyond all hope, probatus.
But he still does not have the episcopate[28]. Once the Saxons had
hammered Christian Britain, all the terms of the
equation would shift; we don't know what
happened, but it is likely that the British
episcopal structure would suffer, and it is even
possible (and it is nice to imagine) that some of
Patrick's former enemies would take refuge with
his mission.
This seems to give us a couple of
dates: 431, Palladius is appointed bishop of the
Irish; 441, Pope Leo approves Patrick's Catholic
faith, and Patrick, who has been claiming the
episcopate for years, writes his Confession.
But it is only fair to state that most current
Patrician scholars would reject this dating
scheme out of hand. The pillars of most Patrician
scholars are the supposed death-date of 493AD
(supported by the genealogical work of the great
scholar James Carney) and the rejection of the
historical - to most historians,
pseudo-historical - account of Patrick's youth
and the beginnings of his mission found in some
of the Lives, including the earliest, Muirchu's.
To support my dating scheme, therefore, I must
defend the latter and attack the former; and that
is just what I intend to do in the next chapter.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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