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Chapter 4.2: James
Carney and St.Patrick's date
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Many modern experts follow, at
least to some extent, the famous Patrician
scholar James Carney, who made a thorough
examination of Patrician entries in Irish annals
and other literature. It was a great work
of scholarship, whose findings are justly
celebrated - except that they prove the opposite
of what he thought they did.
As he discovered, all the
historical personages Patrick is said to have met
in the course of his missionary career, according
even to the earliest sources (two biographies by
a Leinster ecclesiastic called Muirchu and a
Bishop Tirechan) cluster in the second
half of the fifth and first half of the sixth
century. Carney's work has major
implications not only for Patrician legend but
for the historical reality of the dates of the
kings of Tara; and so far as I can see, he seems
perfectly right in redating the famous Niall of
the Nine Hostages, King of Tara and
forefather of the vast Ui Neill/O'Neill group of
clans, whose death he places at 452. But, though it
goes against the grain for paruitas nostra
to oppose such a man as Carney and such men as
his followers, including F.J.Byrne and Dumville,
far above me in scholarship and to whom I owe
great debts - a cat may look at a king; and I
hold him and them to be plainly wrong about, not
the facts, but the historical implications of his
study of the Patrician legend. They take it
to mean that Patrick's date of arrival must be
moved down by some decades; and I take it to mean
that Patrick never met Loegaire nor any of the
people he is meant to have met, and that the
death-date implied by these meetings - 493AD - is
unacceptable.
The central episode in Patrician
legend is his confrontation with king Loegaire
and his wizards at Tara, where, while Loegaire
was celebrating a great pagan festival, Patrick
lit Ireland's first Easter-fire in defiance of
the king's sacred fire, from which all the
hearths in the island were supposed to be re-lit.
Loegaire, High King of Tara, son and successor of
the great Niall, belongs to the four-fifties and
four-sixties; and everyone accepts that the
"great festival" challenged by
Patrick's Paschal fire was in fact the Feis
Temro - that is, not, as Muirchu says, an
annual spring festival, but a once-in-a-lifetime
ritual of royal consecration.
What are we to make of the fact
that Muirchu, who makes this Feis Temro the first
act of Patrick's public ministry - and Loegaire's
Feis Temro took place in or about 454 - also
makes him reach Ireland one year after Prosper's
date for Palladius, who he says had just died -
432? This is consistent with all the other
traditions noticed by Carney, which made Patrick
meet practically only with people from the second
half of the century or later, and give us hardly
any account of activities or encounters datable
before 454, and I think it easy enough to argue
that Muirchu was correct in making it the first
major act of Patrick's apostolate, at least
according to the accounts he had received.
I hope no scholar is willing to
take it seriously as a historical event. It
is a blatant national legend, with the national
Saint confronting and defeating the King: a kind
of tale that, as Dumville pointed out in another
context, is absolutely typical
of Celtic royal foundation stories. And the
element of foundation is present on Patrick's
side as well; I mean that this encounter is the
beginning of his Irish ministry proper. The
only things he does before this are the
conversion of the owner of Saul, Dichu, and an
attempt to compensate the master he had fled as a
slave, an Ulster kinglet called Miliucc, with
twice the price - which failed because Miliucc
burned himself alive with all his possessions
rather than see the face of the Saint. Both
events are preliminaries: they amount to giving
Patrick, literally and figuratively, a locus
standi, a home base, in the island, and to
settling the troubling matter of his being an
escaped slave - how could an escaped slave, in
that very rank-conscious society, dare to look at
kings in the face? Both stories, therefore,
only set the stage for Patrick's confrontation
with Loegaire and his druids; and the whole
complex fits prodigiously well with the national
significance of Tara and Patrick, the Royal seat
and the national Saint. In other words, it
bears every sign of being constructed to satisfy
the demands of an ideology. It cannot be
historical.
Patrician tradition has three firm
points: 1) Palladius came to Ireland, but died
(most versions say, in Britain) after only a
year; 2) Patrick, who had not been in Ireland
until Palladius died, followed to take his place
as Bishop; 3) Patrick challenged the fire of
Loegaire's Feis Temro with one of his own. But
Muirchu relates that during Loegaire's festival,
all fires in Ireland were extinguished and then
re-lit from his newly lit fire: if the heart of
Patrick's legend is that he challenged Loegaire's
fire, then Patrick's own must be as new, as
virgin. Therefore Patrick cannot have lit a
fire in Ireland before; therefore he cannot have
even been in the island before - for who can
imagine a stay of any length, in rainy, cold
Ireland, without a fire? - i.e., he must have
just come to the island from outside. Therefore
point 2) seems to depend on point 3); and this
consideration strengthens the suspicion that
Patrick's journey to Ireland, as we have it, is
quite legendary. So, if Patrick's legendary
reaching Ireland after Palladius' death depends
on a need to make him a fresh arrival when
Loegaire has his festival, it follows that there
is no evidence that the historical Patrick was
outside Ireland when Palladius died; a point
which we will do well to remember.
The three stages of the story of
Patrick's journey to Ireland - a first tentative
landing at Inverdee; his arrival in Ulster and
meeting with Dichu; his disastrous non-meeting
with Miliucc - articulate a coherent progression
that is to end at Tara. Loegaire himself is
introduced as soon as Patrick takes to the ocean,
and his druids predict Patrick's coming before he
reaches Inverdee. This, narratively
speaking, places Patrick's journey, from his
embarkation to the arrival at Tara and the first
Easter fire, in the frame of the fate of Loegaire
and his druids, as a fated, foreseen,
pre-ordained process; in other words, one single
legend. There is a definite dimension of
social ideology. The first man Patrick
meets in Ireland, Dichu, is a free man who owns
land (and therefore has a right to allow Patrick,
escaped slave or not, on to his own land); the
next person he - fails to meet, but at any rate
affects by his presence - is a kinglet, who seems
not only to own a considerable amount of
property, but to be defined by it, since he
destroys his property along with himself (and we
remember that in Gildas ideology, the king,
any king, both teyrn and gwledig,
is rich by nature, but that it is only
lower-class boors like Cuneglasus who are defined
by their wealth alone). Finally, having
moved across the spectrum of the freeborn world,
Patrick reaches the top - the High King, a king
above kings, surrounded by such venerable figures
as druids and poets, the summits of Celtic
society.
The progression may not
necessarily be limited to freeborn society.
Patrick does not meet any slaves; but it is
possible to argue, either that he himself
represents the slave element, or that his first,
abortive landing at Inverdee represents a sterile
contact with Ireland, without any future to it;
in its own category of ideas, this would be
equivalent to the meaning of slaves within the
social ideology. In Celtic Heritage,
Alwyn and Brynley Rees argue that Partholon's
first invasion of Ireland, which is wiped out and
leaves no descendants - i.e. is sterile - has an
ideological correspondence with the slave element
in society, while the succeeding one, of Nemed,
from which all following invaders of Ireland are
descended, corresponds with the lowest freeborn
element, the nemed or religiously
sanctioned freemen, who, unlike slaves, are
admitted to the sacrifice and have a juridic
personality. In this sense, Patrick's
progression, from a sterile landing in which he
can meet no man, to a landing where he meets an
Irish nemed freeman who lets him into the
country, to a non-meeting with an aggressive
lesser king, to a successful meeting with a
supreme king surrounded by members of the highest
caste, druids and poets, clearly represents a
similar progression (joined with a dyadic element
by which one failure is followed by one success,
one failure, and one final crowning success).
Mankinds first landing in Ireland - in the
person of Partholon - achieves nothing; just like
Patricks first landing achieves nothing.
And that Dichu is able to allow Patrick into the
country, while nothing could be done at Inverdee,
seems to have some sort of correspondence with
the fact that freemen were allowed to the
sacrifice and slaves were not; royal enclosures
in Celtic countries shared the characteristics of
(temporary) sacrificial enclosures in
India - a fellow Indo-European culture whose
sacred institutions have frequently been compared
to Ireland's - and it is possible to see them as permanent
sacrificial enclosures. Ireland might, in
this sense, be seen as the greatest of
royal/sacrificial enclosures, "this kingly
island".
In other words, every single
feature of the story represents a coherent
ideological part of a whole, and has the internal
logic, not of historical reality, but of fiction,
determined by ideology. And while all this
is easily argued from Muirchu's Life
alone, the wholly legendarynature of the story, as
well as its narrative unity from Patrick's
landing to his struggle with Loegaire, is best
proved by comparison with another Celtic legend
of the arrival of a great Saint in a pagan
country: Nennius' legend of St.Germanus (Historia
Brittonum 32-35, 39, 47). While we will
pay more attention to this story in a later
chapter, here is a table setting out their common
points.
1)- St.Patrick
reaches Ireland from the sea. |
1)- St.Germanus
reaches Britain from the sea. |
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2)- His chief
mission is to convert pagans, and he
deals chiefly with kings.
|
2)- His chief
mission is to convert pagans, and he
deals chiefly with kings. (This is
unhistorical: the Britain to which
Germanus travelled was already
Christian.) |
|
3)- The first
person he meets is the friendly Dichu,
who gives him a place to stay in the
island. |
3)- The first
person to welcome him is the friendly
Cadell, who makes him his guest. |
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4)- Rather than
meet him and be helped to his salvation,
the tyrant Miliucc sets fire to himself
and all his property.
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4)- The tyrant
Benlli shuts him out of his fortress,
refusing to meet him and be helped to his
salvation; shortly after, he and all his
fortress are destroyed by fire from
heaven. |
|
5)- As a result
of this, Patrick predicts that the
descendants of Milliucc will never have
the throne and will always be slaves.
|
5)- As a result
of this, Germanus predicts that Cadell
and his descendants will have the kingdom
for ever; Benlli and all his family are
wiped from the face of the earth. |
|
6)- Patrick then
faces and defeats the High King of Tara,
Loegaire, in front of the crowd at a
royal festival (probably the feis
Temro). |
6)- Germanus then
faces and defeats the King of all
Britain, Vortigern, in front of a large
royal assembly. |
|
7)- Though the
druids oppose Patrick, the poets of the
court favour him i.e. the Irish
specialists of the sacred Word (who can,
on occasion, dethrone kings by satire)
are on his side.
|
7)- Vortigern is
driven from the throne of all Britain by
the voice of the Saint and the clergy of
the island, i.e. by the power of the
sacred Word. (This also has
something to do with the notoriously
devastating power of Celtic poetic
satires, which can deprive a king of
sovereignty.) |
8)- Loegaire is
defeated and in danger of death, and his
wizards are killed. The conflict is
between two forms of fire, Loegaire's
pagan fire and Patrick's Christian one,
and Patrick's proves the stronger. |
8)- Vortigern is
driven from his throne and eventually
burned with fire. Fire seems to be
an attribute of Germanus, who has already
used it to destroy Benlli. |
|
The stories are clearly not copied
from each other. Loegaire's struggle
against Patrick and his God has little in common
with the clash of Germanus and Vortigern; and
while in Patrick's story the first fire we see is
Miliucc's disastrously self-willed one, and then
Patrick has to overcome Loegaire's, in the
British legend Germanus alone controls fire,
using it to destroy at will, and there is no such
thing as a pagan fire. If there had been a
direct borrowing, it is these colourful incidents
that we would expect to have been carried over.
The more interesting, then, that
both stories should have practically the same
plot. Interesting, and not coincidental;
for what both stories represent is the irruption
of the Sacred into a previously darkened and
blasphemous realm. The social ideology we met in
the Patrician version, is fully confirmed and
indeed made clearer: the Nennian equivalent of
the hero's non-royal first meeting, Dichu, is the
impoverished non-royal landholder Cadell, the
king's servant with a little plot of his own, who
owns a single cow and a calf; and we remember
that owning a single head of cattle (bo airig)
was the token of the lowest rank of free status
in Ireland. But while Dichu has no great
destiny prophesied to him - though we would
expect it, in view of his auspicious welcome to
Patrick - and has nothing to do with the next
rank of person involved, king Miliucc, Cadell is
a servant of king Benlli and will, by the saint's
grace, succeed the tyrant, who is consumed by
fire as a direct result of refusing the salvation
they carry.
Germanus journey ends with
Vortigern. Nennius makes it quite clear
that once Vortigern and his people had been
destroyed, Germanus left Britain and went home.
And, while there are no poets or druids at this
particular meeting, there is another saint -
Faustus - and all the clergy of Britain. The
fact that they all are on Germanus' side, and
that Vortigern has no such surrounding of holy
and wise highest-caste members as Loegaire, is
probably of the same order as Germanus'
apparently exclusive possession of fire; that is,
the stories differ in that in the Irish there is
a real contest for the control of fire between
Patrick on one side and Loegaire and his druids
on the other, while in the British, Germanus had
a monopoly of it. Nevertheless, it is in
fire that both saints triumph.
Patrick, therefore, was assigned a
pre-existing legend of what happens when holy
things come to the land. The social ideas
involved have no demonstrable connection with
Christianity, but quite a bit with obviously
pre-existent Celtic society. And the
arrival of a new and higher fire can only
indirectly be related to a Christian view of the
world; but fire, its sacred status, and its
purity, was a chief concern in all sorts of
Indo-European religions - compare, for instance,
the enormous importance of the god of fire, Agni,
in early India. Christianity in both
Britain and Ireland adopted forms of thought,
story plots, and ideas, that pre-dated it.
The importance to our research of
these parallels is that they prove that the
central block of legends in Muirchu's life of
Patrick - which was carried over, with
elaborations, into every subsequent Life - is,
from his arrival to Ireland to his defeat of
Loegaire, a unified and quite legendary whole.
It follows that there is no proof, and no
particular reason to believe: a) that Patrick
came to Ireland as a consecrated Bishop; b) that
he only came - as Muirchu has it - after
Palladius' death; c) that he lit any Easter fire;
or, d) that any of the other acts attributed to
him by this particular strand of the legend ever
happened - including any meeting with Loegaire.
There is no reason why Patrick should have met
the High King; there is no reason why he should
not; but what is as certain as tomorrow's sunrise
is that he did not meet him in anything like the
terms of the legend.
This also means that it is quite
impossible to use the Loegaire episode as a
dating marker, since it is so obviously
unhistorical. And as the dating and the
legend come as a package deal, we are not
authorized to accept the one and reject the
other: we either accept that Patrick had some
dealings with Loegaire's Feis Temro
practically as soon as he reached the island, or
we have no reason to think that anything
particular happened to him in 454 or any such
year, let alone that he met the king of Tara.
How can we say that Patrick met the King at some
point, but that we reject the consistent
testimony of the documents as to how and when he
met him? What would we have
left? All the documents tell the same
story, in a thoroughly internally-consistent
fashion. Either we accept the legend of the
confrontation at Loegaire's feis Temro,
which no serious historian could, or we have no
evidence that such a meeting happened.
What is more, there are problems
in envisaging the historical Patrick meeting any
king of Tara, whether Niall himself or any of his
children. He never speaks of it in his
writings; he only dealt with reguli,
lesser kings, and brehons, mainly to pay them
money; and it is all but certain that - while he
claims to have travelled throughout Ireland - his
residence was in Saul, among the Dal Fiatach,
claimants to the High Kingship of Ulster and even
of Tara, and sworn enemies of Niall and his
descendants. This
automatically placed him in a difficult position
towards the warlike house that held Tara in the
face of Ulster power. Whether or not Tara
had any claim at the time to the high-kingship of
all Ireland, its central position
makes it a far more sensible place for a mission
to the island of Ireland than the eccentric
north-east coast, surrounded on all sides by
hostile Ui Neill, Airgialla and Connachta power.
That Patrick did not set up base near Tara can
only mean that he was not welcome there (perhaps
we should take seriously the Irish notice that
Palladius went to Britain after being driven out
of Leinster and Meath), and that he stayed in
Saul, and perhaps Armagh and Downpatrick, because
that was the only place whose lord allowed him to
reside.
What has impressed historians has
been the sheer consistency of the number of
connections Carney made: most people recorded as
having had to do with Patrick, and in particular
every layman, belonged to a specific time, to wit
460-530 or so. But this is only evidence if
you do not take into consideration the way a
people, as a whole - and especially a literate
people such as the Christian Irish - construct
mythological pictures. Single myths may
originate with single individuals, but a
large-scale mythological framework with clear and
elaborate depictions of time and space is the
product of a social group, and must be seen in a
social as well as a documentary light; and it
just is no good to draw up the most elaborate and
brilliant pictures of textual history, showing
how and when certain data entered the written
tradition and what its state is likely to have
been - as O'Rahilly, Carney, Dumville have done,
and done to a standard I would not dream of
criticizing - if the whole textual history is not
approached with an idea of what its various
authors and transmitters were about, what social
pressures drove them, what basic beliefs shaped
their work.
It was the bad luck of Carney and
his followers not to be lovers of superhero comic
books, as I am; and please believe that I am not
being flippant. My comics reading gave me
experimental evidence of how myths and
legend-cycles are created, not only individually
but collectively, at the level of social
organization. American superhero comics
have spawned a lively and fascinating social
group, superhero fandom, one of whose main
activities is the constant exegesis of what it
calls the continuity of superhero universes,
vast interlocking chronologies, different
according to the various publishing companies or
creative artists involved - the Marvel Universe,
the DC Universe, the Jim Lee Universe. These
universes are built out of the fictional
histories of all the characters involved; and, as
these characters all have vast and frequently
contradictory histories, often invented by people
with no idea that anything of what they wrote and
drew would ever be remembered, let alone fitted
into a continuity, and then carried on by people
whose vision was either nonexistent or
contradicted that of the original creators - the
amount of data is both enormous and baffling.
Impassioned argument and great intellectual
effort goes into fitting it all, whatever the
contradictions, into coherent universes;
two talented writers, both sadly deceased (Mark
Gruenwald and E. Nelson Bridwell) made quite a
speciality of it, but there are very few fans who
do not take a thoroughly informed interest in
time-sequences and allied aspects of the
mythology. Some, being rebellious spirits,
tend to reject it, at least in theory; but it
remains the common ground, the world of ideas
from which they started and in which they are
rooted; and when they develop their own superhero
mythologies - as the present writer has done -
they automatically supply them with an equally
elaborate continuity. Discussion of continuity
is practically the distinguishing mark of the
superhero fan; it is the way fans, at their first
meetings, recognize each other as fans and
establish social relations.
An instance of how continuity
works. The character Captain America was
created a year before America entered World War
II, and retired after its end. In 1963, one
of its creators, Jack Kirby, was induced to
resurrect him, which he did by literally bringing
him out of deep freeze: from 1945 to the early
sixties, the hero had apparently been frozen in
the Arctic. Kirby (one of the greatest
cartoonists who ever lived) was known to laugh at
this contrivance later on, but fans took it in
deadly earnest, and it is now set in stone as
part of the mythology. However, someone
remembered that a version of Captain America had
briefly been published in the fifties, with a
rather inglorious kill-the-Reds slant. Had
the Captain come out of deep freeze for a time,
or should we pretend this had never happened?
No; and with a spirited display of interpretative
invention, the writer Steve Englehart made the
Fifties Captain an unfortunate imitation of the
original, who, due both to inborn fanaticism and
to flaws in his process of empowerment, became a
mad murderous Red-baiter who eventually
confronted and was taken down by "the one,
true Captain America!" (Is this not
reminiscent of the double and triple Patricks of
later hagiography?) It was quite a good
story, and, at the same time, it removed a continuity
bug.
Multiple saints have even closer
parallels. In the past, DC Comics had
developed a whole system of separate
"Earths" to explain the extraordinary
duration of their main characters: hence the
1940s/50s Superman, Batman, Flash and Wonder
Woman lived on "Earth 2", while their
1960s/70s counterpart - which were all somewhat
different in costume, powers and even name -
lived on "Earth 1". Thanks to
comic-book cosmology, these characters met easily
and frequently, though the Earth-2 Superman was
shown to have graying hair - but no receding
hairline. (With incredible folly, DC discarded
this useful and amusing device in 1984, and have
since been forced to simply delete and rewrite
the history of characters who last too long.)
The business of an older and a younger Superman,
an older and a younger Batman, an older and a
younger Green Lantern, whose distinguishing
characteristics depend on different stages of
development of the legend, and who can meet and
even become friends even though they started as
one and the same character - is closely
reminiscent of "Old Patrick",
"Patrick", and "Patrick of Ros
Dela", or for that matter of the two
separate Saints in which the historical Uinniau,
correspondent of Gildas, was split when the Dal
Fiatach of Ulster and the Ui Neill made two
separate and incompatible claims to his memory.
What this shows is that an intense
interest in the chronological and genealogical
aspects of a mythological complex can spread far
beyond the schoolroom, and become a basic aspect
of the common interests of a whole social group;
that it can be discussed among people not because
it is part of a set subject, but simply because
it is a part of the sort of people they are - the
sort of group they belong to. Now, is there
any social group in Ireland that might be
expected to behave - with respect to religious
history or legend - as superhero fandom behaves
towards the dates and adventures of Captain
America? Heavens, yes! Absolutely the
first thing anyone learns in their first lesson
of Irish church history is that the early Irish
church had a peculiar organization based not on
dioceses but on monasteries. Think about
it: dozens, even hundreds, of adult men, grown
from boyhood to take a surpassing interest in
Christian literature and legend, living in
contact with historical and annalistic
literature, and with the facilities to produce
more if they want to, each group with a strong esprit
de corps and common identity based on one or
more great individual of the past - heroes -
Saints.
Scholars such as Eoin MacNeill,
and Carney and Dumville, have caught a glimpse of
the process at work. My problem
is that - probably influenced by their social
experience of classroom environment and learned
publication - they seem to miss the extent to
which the obsession with continuity can be
not just a subject taught at school, but part of
a shared experience and of a social identity.
Nothing could be more subtly, yet more evidently
off the point than MacNeill's statement of his
theory, published seventy years ago, but still
worth quoting for its concrete, clear-headed,
even down-to-earth quality: "The probability
is that, after a certain amount of tentative
history-building had gone on in a random way, the
subject began to attract the attention of the
schools. Once in their hands, the work had
to be done thoroughly and systematically..."
Extremely well put, but... no no no no no no.
The lives of the saints, their
interrelationships, and the whole history of the
island - they were not a "subject", but
the very water in which the fish of Irish
monasticism swam, the intellectual space in which
it lived and moved and had its being. MacNeill's
description is no doubt correct in that there was
no doubt a swift growth of historical speculation
followed by systematization at the hands of
monastic schools; but, far from being a result of
the introduction - as a separate process,
probably by imitation of contemporary Christian
schools on the continent - of professional
scholarly ethics and conscience, as a separate
factor, it was part of the motive power to set up
regular schools in the first place; part of the
universal intellectual activity in which every
monk and every Christian interested in Christian
tradition was as much at home as an otter in his
native waters. (Bear in mind that by
intellectual activity I do not mean advanced
intellectual activity: superstition and the most
elementary kind of learning can both be regarded
as intellectual activity, so far as they centre
on the mind rather than on any other focus.)
A superhero fan familiarizing
him/herself with Celtic ecclesiastical legend
finds him/herself in a subtly familiar world,
with the same fascination with awesome heroes
endowed with super-powers (St.Patrick
regularly resurrected the dead, and was seen to
cast light from his uplifted hand as if from a
halogen lamp - a typical superhero feat) and - a
defining feature - with the same obsession with crossovers.
Fans all have their favourite heroes - mine
include Captain America, Savant, the Fantastic
Four, Supergirl, Thor, and a few characters of my
own creation - and find it thrilling to have them
meet each other, or be given the recognition of
meeting a greater hero, Spider-Man, the X-Men,
Superman; this is called a crossover[17]. Now Celtic saints
always meet each other: St.Patrick met
half a squillion Saints (the list of his
encounters in Tirechan's "life" takes
up almost a page of Dumville's book, and more
were added later) including St.Brigid, who, in my
view, never existed; St.Columba meets
St.Kentigern, who meets St.David, who could not
meet St.Patrick because the latter was much
earlier, but that did not stop him from being
placed in St.David's life anyway. St.Patrick
tries to lay claim to St.David's future see of
Vallis Rosina and is driven away from it by an
angel - it is reserved for a future great Saint
(David), and Patrick must go to Ireland instead.
My point is that the discussion on
continuity is ongoing and pervasive.
Superhero fandom is constantly engaged in
a work of debate and establishment of continuity,
demanding internal cohesion and consistent
chronology for all the characters in a given universe
and indeed for as many universes as
possible, or ripping up those that exist (for
nobody is ever satisfied); and I argue that the
same sort of ongoing collective debate took place
in the Irish church (and for all I know elsewhere
as well) in establishing the supposed
"facts" about ancient heroes and
saints. You can see its fingerprints all
over the material. But no historian before
me, I believe, ever had the experience of arguing
(unsuccessfully) that Jack Kirby's Eternals did
not belong in the same universe as the
Marvel super-heroes, or (successfully) that Thor
should never be made to fight Superman because
Superman cannot cope with magic and one tap from
Thor's magic hammer would mince him like beef -
with and against dozens, even hundreds of people
passionately interested in the same kind of
"facts" but with radically different
ideas about them; therefore historians cannot
properly understand how the legend of St.Patrick
was formed - and are over-impressed by the
internal consistency of the sequel of crossovers
that make up Patrician documentation. Ma'ams
and Sirs, that is exactly what we should expect!
Above all, the picture of tiny
tentative efforts at harmonization, followed
after some considerable while by more systematic
work by the schools, developing over a matter of
centuries, done not out of passion but because it
was the way professional school monks did things
- is very wide off the mark indeed. It is
very important to realize that the most
fantastically elaborate chronological and even
cosmological pictures can arise in an
astonishingly short time. Superhero
continuity began to be discussed less than
forty years ago; and I am sure nobody outside fandom
would credit the fantastic, baroque complexity
(and number! - the amount of superhero
universes, each with its own continuity,
must by now have reached three figures) achieved
in such a short period of time, driven by a
flaming, a burning interest in these
awe-inspiring characters.
At the same time, there is an
attractive mixture of intense invention and
intense conservatism. As soon as they are
created, these baroque creations become set in
stone, no more to be changed than lava once it
has cooled: even the most ludicrous bits of
continuity - such as the story of Captain
America's deep freeze, and in general all the
embarrassing bits of ignorant pseudo-science
accumulated especially by Marvel Comics in its
early days - are to be preserved, and if possible
made sense of. Fans react to blatant continuity-rewriting
with a sense of intellectual betrayal and
outrage. And there is a curious rationality
in their designing: the saying "entities are
not to be feigned without necessity" applies
nowhere better than in the invention of superhero
continuity, where most of the intellectual
work goes into explaining, connecting,
rationalizing the existing data. This is
what the process of creating a mythology is like.
A literary critic once said that J.R.R.Tolkien
"became, in a single lifetime, the creative
equivalent of a people"; this process takes
place in superhero fandom every day.
The one huge difference is that
the Irish sages worked on material they believed
to be historical. Comics fans know that the characters they
are dealing with are fictional, and that
continuity is largely an intellectual game; but
the Irish learned classes took the characters
they were dealing with as thoroughly historical.
This raises the question whether the people who
invented the various crossovers between
people who "must" have met, saints,
kings, other notable people, knew that they were
writing fiction, and to what extent their work
was accepted by their audience. How much
force had the argument "these people must
have met; therefore what I say about their
encounter cannot have been entirely wrong, since
I keep within the likelihood of what two men such
as them can be expected to have said and
done"? It is my impression that, in an
age hungry for heroes and for heroic encounters
and starved of records of some of their own
founders - especially Patrick himself - such
stories, when not blatantly impossible - that is,
conflicting with continuity - would tend to be
accepted; first, perhaps, on approval; and then,
as they became ancient and hallowed, as received
fact. The one thing we must not on any
account do, is to fall ourselves into the trap of
believing them - and that is what Carney's
argument does.
After all, to argue from the
proximity of St.Patrick, in Irish records, to
persons known to have lived in the late fifth and
early sixth century, is to argue that the Irish
could not read their own annals. If they
had decided that Patrick had died in 493 or so,
of course they were going to tie him up with what
they regarded as his contemporaries! And is
anything in Irish literature clearer than its
desire to bring Patrick into contact with as many
historical figures as possible, in search of an
ancestral blessing or of the consecration of a
royal or abbatial or episcopal or presbyteral
title; or even, as in the extraordinary Colloquy
of the ancients, to give Christian blessing
to the ancient, pagan, legends of the Fianna and
Finn mac Cumhail? It is a consistent fact
that Patrick's role in every legend is to
validate an institution - kingdom, monastery,
church, bishopric. Whether he founds it, or
whether he has a sharp conflict with existing
incumbents and puts them in their place (sacrally
as well as in the more mundane meaning of the
expression), he is the talisman by which Irish
institutions are sacrally placed in a Christian
world. Patrick's name in any story, any
charter, any genealogy, was the token of
regularity, of consecration, of national and
Christian value; is this not an enormous spur to
the creation of such stories? In ancient
Ireland, communities such as monasteries and
little kingdoms felt involved with their
ancestral heroes to the point of genuine
identification, that is, they genuinely felt that
what had happened to their great ancestors
affected their lives and defined who they were.
If, therefore, St.Patrick was identified with
Christianity in Ireland, they, themselves being
Christian, felt it was natural that one of their
ancestors should have met St.Patrick. Also,
if one of their ancestors was known to be the
contemporary of a great figure in the past -
St.Columba, CuChulainn, King Cormac - of course
they should have met. It is not even
necessary to imagine that their authors were
lying. Their mental process is better
described as: St.Patrick established Christianity
in Ireland; I and my family/community/kingdom are
good Christians, part of the Christian Irish
world; therefore Patrick must be a part of our
ancestral past. The person or persons who
made these stories (for we cannot get away from
the fact that someone, at some point, was
responsible for their creation - stories do not
self-generate) probably did not think that they
were indulging in a fiction, so much as
restoring, in some fashion, a lost reality.
It follows that if a royal family
or church establishment wanted to validate itself
by attaching its bona fides to the
national saint, it would naturally look to its
member closest to the Saint's estimated time, and
bring that member into contact with the Saint;
beginning with the powerful Ui Neill clan, who
evidently estimated that Loegaire and two of his
brothers, Coirpre and Conall (whom Patrick
encounters in Tirechan's account), were
chronologically the likeliest candidates. This
is particularly significant in that it excludes
the great patriarch himself, Niall of the Nine
Hostages, from a role to which his position of
founder would seem to designate him; in other
words, by the time the Ui Neill felt the need to
have their lineage validated by contact with
Patrick, they held the Saint to have lived in the
time of Loegaire - at least two decades after
Prosper's date for Palladius. And Loegaire
had to come first: having the highest dignity and
the highest significance for the island as a
whole, he had to be the first to encounter
Patrick. Other ancestral figures had to meet the Saint
after him. If Patrick had
been assigned 39 (or the lovely Biblical round
number 40) years of apostolate, this would have
to start from the date of Loegaire's Feis
Temro; and would account, give or take a
year, for the fixing of his death-date at 493,
allowing him a credible - if longish - human
lifespan. And as Loegaire came first, all
the historical figures brought into contact with
Patrick would belong to the following two or
three generations - easily covered (if Patrick is
held to have met some of the younger individuals
as children, or baptized them) by a forty-year
mission. Is this not reason enough for all
the regularities observed by Carney?
Now, let us go back to the first
of the three firm points I identified in
Patrician tradition: the death of Palladius after
only one year in his diocese. We know of
Palladius from two sources: Prosper of
Aquitaines chronicle entry, and the
mentions in the various Irish Patrician
materials. We know that later Irish schools
knew Prospers chronology and made use of
it; but Prosper has nothing to say about Patrick,
nor about the time of Palladius' death. Nobody
could ever deduce from him that Palladius was
unsuccessful, let alone that he died early in his
mission. If the memory of Palladius had
been lost in Ireland before Prosper's chronology
was published in the island and brought its
chronicle-writers their "first"
knowledge of their true first bishop; there would
have been no reason to date Patrick's coming to
Ireland as early as one year after Palladius'.
It has been argued that Palladius was assigned
such a short career because he had to be got out
of the narrative way to avoid overshadowing the
national saint; which is a non sequitur.
The weight of a legendary character (as we must
regard Palladius and Patrick in so far as they
feature in legends) has absolutely nothing to do
with his duration: does Moses matter less than
Methuselah, or Achilles than Nestor, or
CuChulainn than Tuan?
And let us remember the obsession
with continuity. From its beginning,
Irish church history was annalistic, and if the
Pope's appointee had not been known to Irish
learned classes before the discovery of Prosper's
chronicle, the chronological problem would hardly
even arise. Patricks dates, in the
legend, were anchored to those of Loegaire; and
Loegaire was crowned in 454; if an earlier Bishop
Palladius was found to have reached Ireland in
431, there is no reason to make Palladius last so
little, and die so far away. It would have
been easy to assign him a long and obscure
episcopate. Nor would this do anything to
diminish the national Saints stature, just
as the fact that St.David was certainly not the
first Christian in Wales did nothing to dimish
his.
The tradition that Palladius died
within a year from his arrival in Ireland, to be
promptly succeeded by Patrick, does not depend on
later annalistic chronology, and cannot therefore
be bound by the terminus ante quem of 550
(minimum) for the compilation of the first Irish
annals. But the annals are unanimous on the
matter, even where they attribute erratic dates
to Palladius and Patrick both. We admit, of
course, that Irish annalistic tradition does not
even begin to be reliable before about 550; the
more so since I have insisted that Gildas had not
learned annalistic skills in Britain - and the cultural
levels of the British and Irish Churches are
likely to have been equal (since by then the
Irish church had ceased to be a front-line
missionary organization). But to deny that
any reliable tradition of Palladius and
St.Patrick, written down before living memory
faded, could have been preserved in Armagh or one
of the Patrician sites - Saul, Downpatrick - is
the same as to deny that a written tradition had
existed there. And if it did, what are we
to make of the transmission of the two certainly
Patrician texts, the Epistle and the Confession:
how were they preserved, unless a thread of
written Latin tradition had come down to
Muirchus Ireland from Patricks
beginning?
Christianity is a religion of the
book. It demands literacy. Do we
accept, or do we not, that there was a Christian
Church in Ireland from the time of Patrick?
Do we accept, or do we not, that this Church had
made provisions to preserve and reproduce its
sacred texts, that it must have had scribes and
facilities for the production of written matter -
either in parchment (there is no shortage of
sheep in Ireland) or on some other material, but
to a standard worthy of sacred text? Do we
accept, or do we not, that the Christian Church
in Ireland, both Catholic and Pelagian, trained
and ordained its own clergy from the beginning,
in a training of which literacy and Latin were
certainly parts? Do we accept, or do we
not, that it is through the institutional
channels of such a Church that Patrick's own
writings were handed down? And if we do, on
what grounds, may I ask, do we deny that
substantially correct written notices about
Patrick could be handed down from a time in which
he was either alive or within living memory? We
have no grounds to do so; in fact, the
presumption must be that they were - uerba
uolant, scripta manent, words are air, but
paper is tough.
No: the only possible reason for
the dislocation in date is that the Irish knew,
before they received the text of Prosper, that
Palladius had only been Bishop of the Irish for
about a year before dying in Britain; and that
Patrick had succeeded him. This tradition
was not securely anchored chronologically, but
rather noted as a prelude to Patrick (hence it
must have pre-dated the earliest Irish annals),
and would have been, at the beginning of the
Irish annalistic tradition, worked backwards from
whatever date was assigned to Patrick's arrival -
that is, to Loegaire's inauguration in Tara.
This cannot have involved mention of Pope
Celestine, since otherwise the fallacy of the
Loegaire date must have been evident as soon as a
list of Popes was obtained - and that would have
been as soon as coherent annalistic began; in
other words, it would not have been possible for
an annalistic tradition to arise that treated
Loegaire's first year as Patrick's first. There
is, on the other hand, no reason at all to doubt
that the notice of Patrick's probatio at
the hands of Pope Leo was known, since the reigns
of the Pope (who died in 461) and of Loegaire
overlapped. If there was a notice that the
Pope carried out the probatio in his
second year, this might have been disregarded
until its import became clear, or else be held to
have taken place before Patrick went to Ireland.
As a superhero fan, the process of
thought involved is thoroughly familiar to me;
the trouble is that the world of fandom is
so alien to the average academic that I do not
feel sure that my arguments will be even
understood, let alone accepted. The point
with such interpretative activity is that it
depends on a shared willingness, across a whole
social group, to commit ourselves to the totally
serious treatment of fictional characters. Similar
social groups have sprung about science fiction
serials such as Star Wars and especially Star
Trek - "Trekkies" are among the
best-known sub-cultures in the English-speaking
world - as well as around fictional detectives,
especially Sherlock Holmes; and L.Frank
Baums Oz books. But even those
historians who have played intellectual games
about this sort of characters will probably not
have thought of connecting them to the
intellectual activities of Irish monks 1400 years
ago; it took the arrogant confidence of a John
Morris - used, for once, in the service of light
- to brazenly challenge the consensus, with
arguments with most of which I agree.
The mischief was made when the
very first Irish annals were written. Annalistic
apparently reached Ireland some time between 550
and 580. From then on, historical writing
was one long tangle with continuity - dates,
characters, who was where at which time, who was
whose son, relative, pupil, who had which office
at which date. By this time, however,
Patrick had been dead for over a century. The
annalists had to reckon his date from their own
time by working backwards across the
hard-to-assess dates of bishops, abbots and kings
(in the course of this period, the Irish church
had also undergone a genuine social revolution,
moving from a traditional model ruled by bishops
to a quite new one based on abbots and
monasteries), and they got it wrong.
They had a date for Loegaire, as is inevitable
for a king whose predecessors, colleagues and
successors were known; and no date for Palladius
and Patrick. Therefore Patricks death
was dated in 493, working forwards from
Loegaire's Feis Temro, because the legend
placed Patricks first activity there (even though few writers
dared to imagine that Loegaire himself had been
converted); and all the searchers of
chronological correspondences and inventors of
illustrious encounters for their ancestors had
based their inventions on that date. The
machine of what we might call "Patrician fandom"
swang into motion: every lay and ecclesiastical
person of any importance in the late 400s and
early 500s was brought into contact with Patrick,
to be baptized or consecrated or cursed or killed
or at least argued with. (Compare this with
the immense amounts of crossovers suffered by the
more popular superheroes - Spider-Man, Superman,
the Batman, the X-Men!)
Then, at some point before 683AD,
a thunderbolt hit the Irish church. Somebody
visited Rome, or came from Rome, and brought an
unarguably correct document: the annals of
Prosper, a contemporary of St.Patrick - from
which it was clear that Palladius had reached
Ireland not in the 450s, as everyone thought, but
in 431. The Irish knew that Patrick had
succeeded Palladius. There was no way out
of it: either the date of Patrick's death was
wrong, or he had lived much longer than
missionary bishops in precarious circumstances
usually live, and than he himself expected to
live (Confession 59).
The Irish reaction to this continuity
dilemma is also familiar to a comics fan: faced
with the existence of dozens of stories dating
Patrick to the 460s-490s, and with a certain and
unarguable date of 432, they assigned him an
implausibly long life. Not only would this
discovery destabilize too many dynastic and
ecclesiastical interests, but it is also the case
that the inner cohesion and coherence of the
witnesses, that so impressed Professor Byrne,
also struck his remote ancestors. They
could not give it up, lock stock and barrel, in
favour of merely re-dating the Apostle of Ireland
to an earlier period in which there were almost
no witnesses to his activity. And yet
Prosper was there. So the Saint was given
that famous life-span of his, that was supposed
to be 120 years, but which no Annal quite managed
to make fit, so that he was supposed to have
lived disparate but equally unlikely periods from
106 to 147 years; just like Captain America, the
Sub-Mariner and the Fantastic Four all turn out
to be impossibly long-lived.
There was, after all, one
illustrious precedent whose 120-year life-span
was a matter of firm belief for any Irish monk
steeped in the Old Testament: Moses. And
please notice that the equation of Patrick with
Moses has little or nothing to do with the actual
historical role of either man; as late as 830,
Nennius has trouble explaining it, and his four
reasons to equate Patrick and Moses (Historia
Brittonum 55) savour of excuse. A later reader
quite rightly wrote on the side of a Nennian
manuscript that hic, ut mihi videtur,
contradicet sibimet ipsi, "here, it
seems to me, he contradicts himself"; only
to introduce even more contradictory and
implausible so-called reasons! As late as the
twelfth century, when this gloss was added,
people were desperate for a reason, any reason,
for Patrick to be like Moses.
Some very early documents testify
to a different and far more apt equation: in both
the early chapters of Muirchu and the Hymn of
Secundinus - attributed to one of Patrick's own
followers - Patrick was compared to St.Paul, the
Apostle of the Gentiles. Muirchu compares
Patrick learning divine law at St.Germanus' feet
to St.Paul studying with Gamaliel, and the Hymn -
which never mentions Moses - compares his
apostolate ad gentes, to the pagan tribes,
to that of St.Paul (line 27). But that
comparison, which comes natural to the author of
the Hymn, is completely gone, except for the
comparison with Gamaliel, by the time the first
Lives come to be written. In other words,
there must have been a compelling reason to
connect Patrick and Moses: a reason so compelling
that it completely conquered the Irish learned
class - and that had nothing to do with any
actual parallel between two legends which are
not, by any sensible standard, comparable. It
is hard to see any other reason for this, than
the discovery that Palladius had reached Ireland
in 431.
Muirchu, who wrote about 683AD,
shows clear signs of the earlier chronology.
Almost the first thing Patrick does in Ireland is
to head for Tara, light a Paschal fire, and
challenge the druids of King Loegaire. In
real life, we are virtually certain that he did
nothing of the kind. But we know that
Loegaire did not become king of Tara until about
454. Muirchu, however, accepts 432 as the
date of the Saint's arrival, thus assigning him
over 20 years doing nothing - even the
establishment of Armagh takes place afterwards.
(It is quite possible that Armagh had nothing
directly to do with Patrick at all; Muirchu's
story of his death and burial has a feel of
finding sacred excuses for the Saint not to be
buried in "the land which he loved above
all", Armagh, but in Downpatrick.)
Carney was right in that this
consistent set of dates certainly tells us
something about the way the annalistic dating
system was set up in Ireland, and in his emphasis
on the secular, royal, bardic aspects of the
traditions that went into its making. But
unless we assume that the pagan Irish bards
started taking notice of the activities of
Patrick and his followers from their beginning,
what they said about Patrick centuries after the
event is evidence of nothing; and we know that no
intellectual class was more conservative than the
Irish poets. Their subject was the kings,
whom they praised no differently in the
fourteenth century than their ancestors had
praised them in the tenth or in the sixth. To
take notice of a new phenomenon, and one, at
that, which probably had its roots among
British-born slaves, foreigners and other
un-royal and unnoticeable persons, would be
against their every instinct. Patrick
cannot have met many kings, and meeting him
cannot have counted as an epochal event in their
lives unless any of them was converted; and while
he speaks of sons of kings who were his friends,
and a king's daughter who was baptized and took
vows, Patrick mentions no royal converts.
Now, what do we conclude from all
this? We conclude that even as early as
Muirchu and Tirechan, no valid joined-up
historical account of Patrick's missionary years
existed. Nothing is easier than to
demonstrate than that Muirchu's account of
Patrick's confrontation with Loegaire - that is,
most of what he has to say about him - must be
unhistorical. So is, without the shadow of
a doubt, the story of his failed encounter with
his former master Miliucc. So are the
stories of Coroticus, of the Ox's Neck, of the
miser of Mag Innis, of the overlooked cross
(which I am sure must have been invented by a
later ecclesiastic, to excuse himself for just
such a ritual fault); and while those of the
storm and the lost horses, of Macuil first bishop
of Man, of St.Monesan, of Daire, and of St.
Benignus may have some relation to genuine
history, it is impossible to have any faith
either in the stories as Muirchu tells them, or
in the claims they make.
From the moment Patrick lands in
Ireland, we lose track of him. Nothing is
more telling than the way that Coroticus' raid -
which was, so far as we can judge, one of the
most dramatic moments of Patrick's life - was so
forgotten that one of Muirchu's sources had to
manufacture a legend, making Coroticus, a
Christian Roman citizen, into a pagan! Therefore
any statement made in annalistic or other sources
about the people he met and who followed him is
to be regarded as proving nothing, since they are
tainted by the immense pressure of legend; and it
does not matter how many late-fifth- and
early-sixth-century characters he is supposed to
have met, if we cannot prove his date from any
sources but these.
Let us be clear about this: the
dating structure identified by James Carney is,
as a whole, the product of later political and
proprietary interests. There is no date in
it that can be rescued. Even if any of the
people mentioned in it happened to have
historically met the Saint, we could never know
it, because the whole confection, whatever
historical data may have gone into it, is a
complex of legends designed to show the Christian
nature of all the institutions they involve.
Carney has supplied us, not with a list of
possible historical contacts of the Saint, but
with an elaborate legend, fascinating for what it
tells us about later Ireland, but of no value to
the study of the historical Patrick.
Conversely, pieces of tradition
may have existed autonomously outside the
biographical mainstream. It is not a
decisive argument against any item, that it only
entered a particular tradition at a late date,
unless it can be shown that it had no independent
existence before it was added to that tradition.
In the case of Patrick and Palladius, what can be
shown is that the opposite is the case: that, in
spite of the existence of a fertile and active
mainstream tradition that made Patrick light his
first fire at Loegaire's Feis Temro, a
number of stubborn data existed which could not
be reconciled, and which played merry Hell with
it. One has to read Dumville's chapter on
Patrick's death-date to realize what a
brain-boiling tangle centuries of successive
layers of monastic speculation have made of the
accounts, historical and legendary, of Patrick's
mission. For instance: in the World
Chronology prefaced to the Annals of
Innisfallen, Loegaire's accession to the
throne is antedated by over 30 years, to 429;
this is evidently another attempt to harmonize
Prosper's date with the legend of Patrick's
confrontation with the King and his druids -
doomed, in view of the solidity of the
genealogical material, which demanded that
Loegaire be dated to the 450s-460s.
What it proves is that the
difficulty dominated the minds of the annalists;
which can only mean that they knew both
the succession of Patrick from Palladius and
his presence at Loegaire's Feis Temro as
fundamental facts. One group of dates
attaches the Mosaic life-span to the 461 death
date and makes Patrick be born in the 340s; this
shows that the 461 date, in spite of being
excluded from the "Chronicle of
Ireland", had a claim strong enough to force
a revision even after Patrick's Mosaic life-span
had become a standard part of the lore. Likewise,
"the text-historical evidence makes it very
unlikely that there is any direct connection
[between the various entries dating Patrick's
death at 457 or 461]; rather, they attest to
continuing access to sources that asserted such a
date for Patrick's death" (underline
mine).
This assertion is not as decisive
as it sounds, since it refers to material datable
to the eighth, ninth, tenth centuries; still, it
proves the continued existence of a source of
information outside the legendary mainstream and
incompatible with it, and yet prestigious enough
to force revision upon revision. And as it
is the Carney set of dates which must be regarded
as legendary from top to bottom, it is to this
other set of dates and facts that we must turn -
except where, as with the 340s birth-date, they
have suffered secondary contamination from the
"Carney" dating scheme.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright � 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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