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St Patrick

c. 389–c. 461

 

Everywhere the Irish are to be found, they have taken the name of Ireland's patron saint with them.  All over the world, schools, churches, and streets in towns and cities are dedicated to St Patrick.  Paddy is everywhere the nickname of Irishmen.

      His influence over Ireland was of the first importance.  To the ancient civilization of a country which had never been part of the Roman Empire, he added the Christian culture common to Europe.  Yet the irony of the matter is that St Patrick, for all that, was not born in Ireland.

      Who he was and where he came from are still matters of mystery.  He himself tells us in his Confession, which is really a defence of his life and actions written as an old man, that he was a native of Roman Britain, born in Bannavem Taberniae, and that his father was a deacon of the church called Calpurnius.  Where Bannavem Taberniae may have been is not known, though some think it was in the Clyde region of Scotland, others that it was far to the south, perhaps in Somerset.  (St Patrick's name is associated with Glastonbury, where is he even said to be buried.)

      His grandfather had been a priest, and his father was not only a deacon, but also a town councillor, all of which suggests a prosperous background and comfortable childhood.  At the age of sixteen he was captured by Irish pirates and carried into slavery in Ulster, the northern province of Ireland.  For six years he herded sheep and swine on the slopes of Slemish Mountain for a local chief.

      In his lonely exile he turned to the faith of his fathers, and prayed for release.  After six years, at the age of twenty-two, he escaped and made his way home, leaving Ireland by a boat from somewhere on the south coast.  However, he had been marked by his experience.  He relates (again in The Confession) that he heard the voices of the Irish, calling him to be among them again.  He took this as a personal mission, which he set out to fulfil.

      It seems clear that there were already Christians in Ireland at this time, for there had been a great deal of contact between Roman Britain and Ireland (perhaps even invasion and settlement).  Moreover, there had been earlier missions, one by a priest called Palladius, sent by the pope in 431.  But this was all in southern Ireland.  After training for the priesthood both in Britain and the Continent, Patrick found that his superiors were reluctant to let him go to Ireland.  However, Patrick returned to the north, where he had been held captive, and began his personal missionary journeys from a place called Saul, in County Down.  Though his name is linked with Armagh, where he had his chief church, he is said to be buried in Downpatrick, also in County Down.

      Many legends surround his name.  One of the most important tells of how he lit the special Paschal fire on the Hill of Slane in direct disobedience of the rule that no fire could be lit on that day before the Druids lit the fire of the High King of Ireland in their own pagan ceremonies.  The legend of his encounter with the High King of Ireland at Tara on the Paschal feast took on almost mythical importance.  Its meaning for later centuries was that the civil state was inferior to the church.

      As there were no real towns in Ireland, Patrick introduced a form of church rule by basing bishops in little monasteries, as was common in the Near East.  After Patrick's death, the church in Ireland developed its own peculiar Celtic features, such as the importance of the monasteries and the lesser role of bishops.  It also held Easter on a different date from Rome and used a different form of priestly tonsure.  But the church was always in union with Rome, and the country, once Christianized, retained the new religion, mingling it with aspects of the old Celtic culture.

      Many points about St Patrick's life and career are disputed.  It has even been claimed that there were two different men of the same name.  But these are the quarrels of scholars.  Patrick reveals himself in his own writing as an unlearned, straightforward man, but a man with a mission.  It is not the details of his life that have impressed Irish people over the centuries, but his vivid personality as the apostle of Ireland.

      Among the leading figures of the fifth century, he is almost alone in having left us writing in his own hand, in which he speaks for himself.  His voice can still be heard in The Confession, which includes a moving defence of his life against accusations of early sin, and his Letter to Coroticus, a British chief who had kidnapped some Irish Christians.  In the account of his life, he lays great emphasis on his lack of learning and his own unworthiness, but claims that through the grace God had granted him, he was able to achieve what might have seemed impossible.

      It is this voice that still exerts great influence.  Many of his characteristics - courage, perseverance, resistance to false authority, a love of nature, a direct appeal to individuals - are still those of the Irish as a whole.  To this day the religious outlook of the Irish people affects their ideas about many things.  Unhappily, the religion which Patrick brought later led to divisions which are still to be healed.

      St Patrick's Day, 17th March, is a day of celebration in Irish communities worldwide.  It had always been a Catholic feast day, but the first celebration outside the confines of the church was held in Boston in 1737 by the Charitable Irish Society, which was founded that year.  In 1784, in New York, the Friendly Sons of St Patrick followed the lead of Boston.  This New York society was a joint venture of Catholic and Presbyterian Irish, and the first president of the organization was a Presbyterian.  It was not until 1852 that a fully organized parade such as the one today was held in New York City.  By this time the middle-class Presbyterians had begun to develop an idea of themselves as Scotch Irish to distinguish their group from the Catholic working-class Irish, and the parade became a vehicle for an outpouring of Irish nationalist Catholic feeling.  St Patrick's Day began to play a special role in the complicated politics of major American cities from this day on (to the extent that it now includes members of the Irish-American gay community - a contentious addition to the festival).  The idea of a full-scale civic celebration was imported from America back to Ireland, where St Patrick's Day only became a public holiday in 1903.

      The saint's name is associated with two of the world's great places of religious pilgrimage: Croagh Patrick in Mayo, which is climbed by believers every year on the last Sunday in July, and St Patrick's Purgatory in Donegal, a place of vision and penance, which has enjoyed fame since the Middle Ages and may have inspired Dante in the writing of the Inferno.

      To St Patrick is ascribed the first use of the shamrock to illustrate the Christian dogma of the Holy Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But over the centuries the little plant became the symbol of Ireland and all things Irish, thanks largely to its legendary association with St Patrick.