Further reflections on St. Patrick, the real Sanctus Patricius

Amici, a Chairde,

A friend has been doing some research on the century Sanctus Patricius lived in, the 380s to 480s. An amazing century, altogether. A sort of highly significant nexus point in the history of the Church.

Just some "Patrician" thoughts:

Were Patricius born about 385, as some think and as was traditionally believed, that major player in the Western Church, St. Augustine, was in his 30s and St. Ambrose, who would be St. Augustine's spiritual master, served as bishop of Milan, and so forth and so on. For instance, had Patricius been born about 385, Saint John Chrysostom would have died when the future saint Patricius was in his early 20s, i.e., languishing in slavery in Ireland.

• The only certain things we know about Patricius is from what he, himself, wrote.

But speculation on his story has been vexed by a certain Palladius, a Roman who served as a bishop (apparently) sent by the pope of that day (Celestine, pope from 422 to 432 and concurrent to the General Council of Ephesus, held 431) to "go to the believers in Christ in Ireland." These would have been slaves and a few converts the slaves or free traders had made.

• This mysterious Palladius arrived in 431 A.D. Apparently. And what did he achieve?
  
• We're not certain. Modern scholars generally seem to think he predated Patricius.
• And a good few of them vexedly insist that Patricius' story was crossed with, or even woven out of entirely, the Palladius story. 
• Vague memories and a few churches in southeastern Ireland founded by Palladius, in other words, were mixed up by propagandists for Armagh (in the north) to embellish the Patricius legend.
• Because why? Because we have an actual historical document referencing (kinda, sorta) Palladius and his mission.
  

I do not hesitate to write that this is pure surmise. We've no clue whether this mixing occurred. Palladius, remember, was active in southeastern Ireland. Patricius has always been associated – since the beginning of the legend-making about him – with northeastern Ireland, the ancient areas associated with Ulster, famous for Conchobar mac Nessa (his mother was Nessa, married to Ulster's king, Fergus MacRoigh), who lived in the days of and the fantastic Queen Mebd (Maeve) and Cú Chulainn himself, of the immortal Red Branch Knights of Ireland's immortal national Iliad, the Táin Bó Cuailnge. All these heroes probably flourished from just before Our Lord's time to the second century A.D., but we really don't know; archaeology strongly indicates Armagh itself and nearby Emain Macha were ancient Iron Age ceremonial sites of great import, as was Tara of the Kings, down in east-central Ireland.

• In my youth, I wandered around and over Emain Macha, having walked out to the cattle pastures from Armagh town: it was impressive then, impossibly romantic, quietly dreaming under the grazing bovines, a sort of Irish Troy or Mycenae. One's imagination could run as wild as the wind. From its summit, you could see grass-covered mounds suggesting vast defensive rings and ditches, and you could easily imagine Cú Chulainn playing hurling outside the battlements. Alas, the last time I went, it was a quasi-Disneyland like fiasco. A "heritage center". Ugh!
  
• So it is no wonder the legends associate Patricius with these places, but nowhere much further south or west.

A bit of historical reflection

• Now, clearly, had Patricius indeed been born about 385ish, his traditional date of birth, that was 43 years before Palladius showed up. (Palladius's dates are more or less certain.)
  
• Palladius apparently had some role (maybe, possibly) in urging Germanus of Auxerre to go to Britain to combat Pelagianism about 429. 
• (The Celtic Briton Pelagius, who was certainly from cloudy Britannia, endured ceaseless use and abuse by the African sun-baked passionate Berber urbanite St. Augustine; you see, Pelagius had taught a self-help Christian grace because obviously, the times were desperate in his home island and people had to physically defend their hearths and homes from diabolical Barbarians; they needed a theology to match!)
  
• St. Germanus, who is perhaps a little bit associated with Palladius, visited Britain post the provinces final exist from Roman in order to fight against Pelagianism. St. G was born about 378. So he would have been an exact contemporary of the traditional Patricius. In his tour of post-Roman Britain, he composed a travelogue, and his description of ruined Britannia is haunting. (And sort of like descriptions of current-day Chicago or Seattle.)

But apparently most modern scholars, despite the traditional birth date for Patricius, insist Patricius came to Ireland AFTER Palladius. The idea is that Palladius set the stage, starting churches in southeast Ireland (Leinster, Cúige Laighin) before returning to the empire. For example, this author is discussing minutiae arguments by famous scholars arguing Patrician issues. He writes, as a given fact:

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.

Wait a minute. This is absurd. The famous meeting of Patricius and the Ard-Rí Loegaire at Tara of the Kings is indeed legend, precisely so, meaning it was created (perhaps from some truth, but how can we possibly know?) later in the 5th or 6th centuries. I repeat what I think responsible scholars assert, that the ONLY sure and certain Patrician material we have remains purely what the saint himself wrote. Everything else is suspect. He himself writes nothing of this confrontation stuff. He had a rough time, he wrote, and was re-enslaved, but nothing like the legends.

• Significantly, Patricius claims NO MIRACLES of any sort. Remember that. And his description of things happening in Ireland stands far, far too vague for any inner-Hibernian dating at all, and only his mention of his father and grandfather's political-ecclesiastical standing in Britain (or Gaul?) indicates that Britannia's imperial diocesan (political, not ecclesiastical) organization stood still intact, as clearly did the villa culture of late Roman Britain that Patricius had been raised in.
  
• Remember, his family had a "small villa" nearby the vicius (smallish town) his father was associated with, but did that mean that they only had this one small villa, or was it a small villa belonging to a larger group?
  
• (BTW, the fact his grandfather was a Christian priest might suggest something significant: it might hint that the grandfather had been something of a grandee, at least a decurion (senator class of Roman town senates: ordo), so perhaps Grandpa was a true "man of status and position". But these grandees, you see, in order to escape their onerous public responsibilities (and financial fees), often took holy orders as a way to "retire" from public duties!)

All these sorts of things we can (kinda-sorta) infer directly from what he wrote. But otherwise, we don't know that any of the legendary material has any truth at all. Probably some of it does, but how can we know now?

Other than that, I can only point out that in the year 367 A.D., the British Romano-Celts saw an overwhelming – and coordinated – assault by assorted Barbarians: Saxons on the east coast, and remember the Germanic mercenaries in the Roman Army, Picts from the north, Scoti (Irish) from the west, and Attacotti (no one knows who these guys were). Roman Britain never really recovered. But archaeological evidence of Mediterranean trade in Cornwall indicates trade routes remained functioning for another century or so, into King Arthur's era. (470ish; see this article for more on Arthur.)

Where and When?

Patricius would have been born – probably most likely – in coastal areas of Britain south of what is now Scotland; i.e. Cumberland on the west coast or inland, or maybe on southward around what is now Wales, to Cornwall. We're that uncertain. But when, exactly? Late 300s? Early 400s? If he was born in 385, that lay just 18 years after the Great Assault on Prydain of 367. Let me present a shocking thought. He may have been born earlier, too, just as well, earlier enough to have been carried off in the Great Assault. We can't be certain of much regarding Patricius, as I keep saying, yet from what he does write, he seems to say he personally saw thousands of captives awaiting transportation to Ireland and slavery. That would match the Great Assault, An tIonsaí Mór of 367. Perhaps it matched a later raid, as well, or perhaps the stricken, horrified youth counted too many fellow victims of the raid. But it certainly does seem to describe what one would have seen as the Great Assault developed.

General timeline of late Roman Britain:

305 The Picts and 'Scots' (i.e. the Irish) begin attacks Roman Britannia on the northern border and along the western coasts.

306 The legions of Constantine the Great, an officer who came to Britannia to defeat the Barbarians (think of the initial battle scene in the movie Gladiator) declared their general Emperor at York; Constantine goes on to win entire empire, East as well as West; issues the Edict of Milan in 313, which gives legal recognition to Christians (something we Christians need more and more today!)

314 British Catholic bishops from London and York attend the Council of Arles.

359 Several British Catholic bishops attend the Council of Rimini.

367 The Picts and 'Scots' raids culminate in the 367 Great Assault catastrophe.

401-410 The Romans "withdraw" from Britain. This is complicated, actually: Roman armies kept leaving Britain throughout the 300s to support one or another contestant for Western Emperor auditions). By 410, few remained, except Germanic mercenaries in military forts in east Britain. After that first decade of the Fifth Century, Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, possibly Swedes and certainly Germans of every description unload their Mark III Tigers onto the beaches and roll over the Celtic Britons to begin extensive settlement and repopulation (sort of like the U.S. border with Mexico, come to think of it!). Believe me, if they weren't shouting "Seig Heil!" as they conquered, they were thinking it.)

500s-600s Any self-respecting Welsh historian can name the years when the Barbarians took famous cities, for example, Aquae Sulis (Bath) fell to the West Saxons in 577. Eventually, advance Panzer units reached the Severn Estuary, cutting what remained of Roman Britain in half. (Cumbria, to the north of Wales, and one of the perhaps more likely candidates for Patricius' birth, remained an independent Celtic kingdom Cumbria (or Rheged) until the 620s, when the Northumbrian English king Edwin took the Isle of Man, and by the later 600s, all of Cumbria was gone. How long the Welsh language survived there is anyone's guess.  

Population replacement is population extinction. Something we need to relearn today.

Bottom line, St. Patrick, the Historical Patricius, remains ever elusive. In his two quasi-autobiographical documents, he actually, truly, speaks for himself. He mirrors St. Augustine in that, except that Patricius wrote little (that has survived) and Augustine wrote enough to fill an entire Alexandrian Library annex! Also, of course, St. Augustine was probably the finest prose stylist who ever wrote in Latin, whereas Patricius struggled to express himself even halfway clearly.

In any event, no one else can speak for him. Isn't that intriguing? And significant. Astounding, actually? It is fitting, too, I think. So unlike the schmaltzy later legends, utterly unlike the modern-day "St. Patrick's Day" drunk fest. Reaching out from the darkest century of the Dark Ages, Sanctus Patricius is a lone voice, and a vibrant, intense voice, for the Christian Faith. "A beacon all alone in the dark" as was said of Babylon 5. That is his significance. Certainly, trying to "date" anything about him from the hagiographies and "histories" of the later 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries is an exercise for an academic crowd adrift on a slow-running tide with far too much time on their hands.

An Préachán