St Patrick Was an Outsider Professor Binchy did us a real service by reminding us in a recent essay that all we really know about St. Patrick is what we find in his writings: the rest is tradition, and a very vague tradition at that. But what do we learn from his writings? The “Confession” is a defence of himself against enemies who said he was an ignorant man, and was in Ireland only for what he could get out of it. Admitting his lack of education, he argues that he was acting under some sort of inspiration from Heaven. Like St. Joan, whom he resembles in other ways, he heard voices, and one might say of him as Shaw said about St. Joan, that his voices usually advised him to do what he was going to do anyhow. His second work is a letter addressed to the British Christian chief, Coroticus and his soldiers, who had killed or carried off a great number of young people whom Patrick had just baptised. Worst Written If I were reviewing these letters as the work of a new author I should have to say that they are the worst written works ever produced by a natural writer. ‘Written’ they probably were not. It is more likely that they were dictated, and, which is worse, dictated in one language and recorded in another. If the translator’s education was superior to the saint’s, it is scarcely surprising that some churchmen thought he was not a fit person to lead an important mission. The “Confession” is disorderly beyond belief. It has two place names, three personal names (none of which can be satisfactorily identified) and no dates at all. No wonder Patrician, scholars are, as Professor Binchy describes them, a _genus irritabile_. Patrick’s writings would irritate anybody. An Outsider And yet, a man who can begin the story of his life with “I am Patrick, a most ignorant sinner, and least of all the faithful, and the most despised by many” is a writer to his finger-tips. There he walks straight off the page at us, with a chip on his shoulder about his own lack of education, full of human resentment against those who criticised it, passionate, warm-hearted and full of contradictory impulses. We know everything about Patrick except the facts. Patrick was a saint all right, a great saint, but certainly no angel. An angel would never have made so many enemies. With the inner knowledge of a churchman describing another, Dr. Philbin sums him up admirably as an “Outsider;” a natural leader who thrust himself forward and had no manners, and who, when he was rebuked or thwarted, brooded on imaginary sufferings when his real ones would have kept most of us brooding for a lifetime. But what made him an outsider? He was not one to begin with. He came of a good family and was proud of it. His father, Calpurnius, was a deacon, and his grandfather, Potitus, a priest. They were only nominal Christians, Patrick himself had no religious training, and the curiously knowledgeable references to Mithraism in the “Confession” suggest that, like other Roman officials in Britain, his family belonged to this cult. When he converted Ireland, he was only returning a compliment because Ireland had done as much for him. When he was about sixteen he was captured by Irish raiders, brought back with many others in the same plight and sold as-a slave, apparently to someone in Mayo. Slavery Those years of slavery, of “daily hunger and nakedness” as he describes them, made a profound impression on his imagination. When as a grown man he composed the “Confession” he was still haunted by the fear of being re-enslaved, and when Coroticus took off shiploads of Christian boys and girls he broke into that wild cry of anguish we hear all through the “Epistle.” It is characteristic of that unscholarly man, uninterested in general ideas, that it never seems to have crossed his mind, that slavery might be wrong in itself. Apparently he saw nothing wrong in it. His own family had owned slaves. It is the personal note in the “Epistle” that gives it its power to move us; the realisation that Patrick is writing directly from his own experience when he imagines the fate of Christian boys and girls in Pagan households, exposed to every sort of infamy, “casting the members of Christ into a house of prostitution” as he says bitterly. Above all, he was thinking of the girls whose degradation he must have so often witnessed. Even in the “Confession” he was saying “the slave women have the worst lot of all.” These thousands of British Christian slaves clearly formed the nucleus of early Irish Christianity, and it must have been in some such tragic little group that Patrick discovered his own Christianity. But it was on the mountains in loneliness that he heard his voices, the voices that were to make him an outsider even among his own people. Extraordinary The first time he records them is when a voice said to him “It is good that you fast. You will soon be going to your own country.” The second time it said “Your ship is ready,” and mentioned a port at the other side of Ireland, two hundred miles away where he had never been and where he knew no one. This is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the “Confession” and if Patrick were not so obviously truthful about other matters, one would say he was romancing. To begin with, he had means for the journey, and one cannot help wondering where a slave boy got them. The journey must have taken weeks, and at any time he could have been killed by wolves, robbed and murdered, or arrested and sold again as a slave, and this at a time when there must have been ships putting in regularly along the west coast. Was it that little Christian community by the wood of Fochlut that found the Roman currency to send him abroad to study for the priesthood, and was it through their efforts that he was passed from community to community under cover of darkness along some sort of underground. Patrick, of course, doesn’t tell us. He was concerned only with the miracle, not with how the miracle was achleved. He Prayed Even more maddenng is the episode that follows. The ship was leaving on the day he arrived at the little port and the Captain refused to take him. As he was returning to the hut where he had apparently hidden until the moment for departure came he prayed, and then a voice shouted “Hurry-up! Those men are calling you.” The crew had changed their minds, but Patrick doesn’t tell us why. Once more, he is merely anxious to prove to us that his Voice had not lied to him, but we long to forget about the voices and see what changes they have produced to Patrick himself. Changes there certainly were, and I find myself trying to write the scene as Patrick should have written it, to imagine his pleas and arguments as he warned these tough men that the Voice had prophesied he would go with them and even if they tried to leave without him, the Voice would see they had to return. Personality Everything depended on their decision, not merely his safety but his sanity, perhaps even his salvation. If the ship sailed without him, then his voices had lied, and Patrick and his voices were already completely fused. I wonder what discussion the sailors had as the young man went back up the shore. Sailors are superstitious, true; but something in Patrick’s words, something in his manner had impressed them. The boy who had shivered and starved on a Mayo hillside had subdued a group of rough dangerous men by sheer force of personality, and having done that, there was nothing he could not achieve. As that vessel took the water, the Apostle of Ireland was born. And deep in himself he must have known it. Whether or not he had made some boyish promise to return to that little community in Mayo, he must always have cherished the thought of returning. There is some extraordinary emotion in the passage where he describes the dream he had after his return to his family. Victoricus, the Irishman, handed him a letter headed “The Voice of the Irish” and immediately he heard the voices from the wood of Fochlut, crying “We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again amongst us” and his heart was pierced and he could read no further. A Vision From the half comic half tragic account he gives of his rejection as leader of the Irish mission, it is clear that this dream of return was always in his subconscious mind. He was rejected because his dearest friend had repeated in public the story of a boyish sin that Patrick had told him of. Patrick was overwhelmed with misery and shame. Then he had a vision in which a voice spoke critically of his false friend, and we may be perfectly sure that Patrick reported the incident as he must have reported the voice’s prophecy to the sailors; he was never one to hide his mystical experiences. And as with the sailors, he had his way. A man who could talk down a ship’s pagan crew could hardly fail to impress a group of bishops whatever their doubts about his education. And even though he describes himself as exhausted by it all before he set out for Ireland, he must have known that he had found the key to his whole life from the moment when Irish raiders butchered his innocent household before his eyes, the reason for his slavery and escape, his vocation and his dreams. The man and the task were face to face at last. Sunday Independent, 1963-03-17