St. Patick, a brief bio of info you probably didn't know

Amici, or, as one would write in Irish, A Chairde,

A few thoughts on St. Patrick's biography that you might not have known.

In these grim times, when world war, even nuclear war, threaten, it is good to remember that Patrick grew up in what today we would call a post-holocaust world.

Post-holocaust?

The secure, settled Roman imperial rule of Patrick's grandfathers' days was gone by the time he came along; gone, or going rapidly. Confusion reigned, barbarians advanced pillaging and burning and the last of the Roman armies were retreating or collapsing. Sometime around lifetime of Patrick's, the German mercenaries who served as Roman soldiers in the huge legionary fortress at York (Eboracum or Eburacum) in north-eastern Britain "turned native" and seized the place for themselves, and began seizing property from the British Celtic Roman citizens, enslaving them or chasing them westward. It would be like Meso-American "refugees" and "migrants" today seizing large portions of the U.S. And the same thing essentially happened when "the Muslims" seized the Iranian capital and Byzantine Syria, etc., from the Byzantine Eastern Romans. (These were Arab-speaking settlers who began to immigrate into the Persian and Roman empires after the 300s. By the early 600s they were numerous enough to be a force, indeed. The moniker "Muslim" and the religion "Islam" didn't appear until a century after the conquest!) Meanwhile, Irish raiders crashed upon the western coasts of Britannia, and some of them made settlements, one of which eventually grew into what we now know as Scotland.

This is a pattern modern government types are ignorant of, obviously.

Also, in relating his escape from Ireland, via a band of Irish pirates (just couldn't escape those guys!), Patrick tells how he and the pirates wandered through a desert for days and days and nearly starved to death. Nowhere in Western Europe at that time possessed such a territory. And this is the ONE occasion in his writing that scholars doubt him. Yet at least it strongly suggests how banged up and "burnt over" the British-Roman world was in the last days of Roman rule.

Birth

We don't know when Patrick was born.

Most historians, as far as I know, think he was born in the fifth century (400s), the single most obscure (and therefore fascinating) century in British history since the Romans landed (and began 'history', the written record). But early on? Mid-century? Late? We don't know.

His testaments

These are two documents we are very blessed and very lucky to have: The Confessio and The Letter to Coroticus. These documents ALL scholars believe Patrick himself wrote, AND in a form of Latin that he had spoken since childhood; i.e. he did not have very much formal schooling from Latin rhetors, so his Latin is "rustic" and obscure (in places, VERY obscure!) We have NO Latin like this in the entire corpus of Latin literature. So, Patrick is unique and outstanding on many levels!

His name

Yes, indeed. It said now that his original name was Maewyn (pronounced my-win) Succat. However, as the researcher of this piece goes to the trouble to explain, this is not true. We have NO primary sources – we have NO primary sources on Patrick at all except his own words – that indicate the saint's name was anything other than "Patrick". Later Irish commentators suggested other names he had, or that were applied to him by others. But with Saint Patrick, only his own words have any weight. He never claimed to out-magic the Druids, or fight with them. He never claimed any miracles of any sort, except that he had had a significant dream to return to Ireland, once he had escaped the place. That's it. His writing is full of praise of God and God's great deeds and graces He gave Patrick, as one would expect a saint to write. But he mentions no miracles.

Place of birth

We have no clue. The big island of Prydain (called 'Britannia" by the Romans), most probably. A much smaller possibility is Gaul. He almost certainly wasn't born in what is now Scotland, which once was a popularly held idea. But where, exactly? "Hundreds of thousands of words have been expended in in defence of one theory or another.... The question remains unsolved, and various theories still have their faithful supporters," wrote Brian de Breffny in my "In the Steps of St Patrick," (Thames and Hudson, 1982). St. Patrick himself wrote that he: "...Had for a father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement ('vicus') Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa ('villuva') nearby where I was taken captive." This is from The Confessio. In the Letter to Coroticus, he writes that his father held the administrative post of decurion, a member of the local senate, called an "ordo".

By the probable time Patrick was born, the decurion position had become hereditary. But just where was the villa? Patrick also indicates that the small villa had male and female slaves. So, how small was the villa, then, really? And how noble, or at least well-off and influential, stood his family? Was Patrick being modest? Truly humble? He's always truly humble. He never lies. No serious scholar thinks he lies or even embellishes. But maybe this small villa was just one of a number his father and grandfather had. One could read what the saint wrote that way. And note, as well, Patrick doesn't say he was born at Bannavem Taburniae, only that his grandfather had a small villa near to it that Patrick had the bad luck to be near when Irish pirates showed up. Was he managing this villa for his decurion father? Or just "hanging out"?

Trustworthy

One thing Patrician scholars insist on is that while we often can't really gather what Patrick is trying to say, we can trust what he says (except for the wandering for days through a desert with pirates after he escaped from slavery in Ireland, which remains an absolute mystery).

And that's it. Between what he wrote about specifically, what he chose to mention and to leave out, PLUS his obscure Latin, we are often clueless what he meant or where he was. One wit said that Patrick could hardly have told us less if he had not written at all! For example, look at his descriptions of where he came from. And read the Irish section of The Confessio. He describes no kingdoms, names no kings, and only mentions geography to say he was a slave herding pigs near "the western sea". But did he mean 'the western sea" from the perspective of a Briton, and thus meant the Irish Sea, or did he mean "the western sea" from an Irish perspective, and thus the mighty Atlantic? We've no clue.

Religious Life

I could write for hours about his description of the troubles he had with the Church hierarchy back in Britain, and the exceedingly sad troubles he had with Coroticus, a fellow Briton and "Roman". This raider, also "Caratauc", a Welsh form of the older Coroticus or Caratācos, which gave rise to the names Carys, Cerys, and the English Cedric, raided a baptismal celebration of Patrick's and killed some of the newly baptized, and enslaved (and raped) the others. Patrick was incensed and wrote the Letter to excoriate and damn Coroticus. 

One important aspect of this extraordinary man's religious mission abides in the fact that he is not only the first to write Latin as he spoke it in childhood, but he was also the first to take the Catholic faith outside the bounds of the Roman Empire at all! There was Wulfias, a Gothic Arian Christian who evangelized his fellow Goths outside of the empire, and a pope sent one Palladius to Ireland to tend to the already Catholic. But NO ONE thought of going outside the empire to a completely barbarian place and pagan people to evangelize them. The Faith spread among pagans osmosis-like, person to person. If I might coin a phrase, Patrick's innovation was truly "beyond the Pale"!

One final truth about his mission: Patrick left Britain as an adult to bring Christ through preaching and baptism to the Irish, yet he had endless abuse and hassle from the British bishops. So why all the mess? (Haha, what, was he using the Traditional Latin Mass!) Perhaps Patrick embarked on his mission without their permission. It was, after all, a true innovation. He might also have done so without even being ordained! If the latter is true, that would explain a great deal of his passionate defense in The Confessio.

But we'll never know. He describes an obscure snafu with a fellow cleric to whom he confessed, and who declared Patrick unfit to be ordained. But the details of that Patrick did not go into.

Death and Resurrection

From what we can tell today, when Patrick died, he was utterly forgotten for about a hundred years or so. Maybe a Biblical lifetime of 70s years. But then someone in Armagh in Ulster discovered his two testaments in an attic or a trunk somewhere. The Armagh clergy (Ireland was Christian by then, or about as Christian as it ever got) used Patrick's writings as a propaganda tool to insist they, the Armagh clergy, were the chief clerics in all Ireland, as their church was founded by this heroic saint, and their bishop (attached to the Armagh monastery complex) was the Primate of ALL IRELAND. 

It was from that point that Patrician histories and hagiographies proliferated, and the Patrick we all know, fighting the Druids and chasing the snakes out of Ireland, came to be. But none of that material – even were some of it to have a basis in truth – compares to Patrick's own incredible story. What a lonely life he led, lonely except for God's presence! What a cross he bore in trying to write, and elderly man remembering the Latin of his childhood as best he could and writing about his life and tragedies. And what a mission! He wrote that after his return to Ireland, he had been robbed, beaten, even enslaved again. But he kept on. And unique of all saints' writings that I've ever heard of, Patrick at one point mentioned the faith – and the great beauty! – of Irish women!

As the Englishman Thomas Hardy would one day (early 20th century) write, "Many things are too strange to believe; nothing is too strange to have happened."

That uniquely applies to St. Patrick, the Briton-Roman wayward aristocrat exile for Christ.

An Préachán