Patrick of Ireland

Sources: a saint in his own words

Patrick is one of the very few saints of the fifth century whom we can hear speaking for himself. Two genuine Latin writings of his survive: the Confessio (Confession), a spiritual apologia written near the end of his life to defend his mission and give glory to God for it, and the Epistola ad milites Corotici (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus), a letter of excommunication and protest against a British warlord who had slaughtered and enslaved Patrick's new converts. These two documents — unpolished, urgent, deeply personal, saturated in Scripture — are the bedrock of everything historical that can be said of him, and they are unusual in all of hagiography for letting us meet the man directly rather than through a later biographer. Everything else — the famous scenes of shamrock and serpent, of the Paschal fire and the contest with the druids — belongs to the later Lives, above all those of Muirchú and Tírechán (seventh century), which enshrine the developed legend and the claims of the church of Armagh, and which are treasured tradition rather than contemporary record. This entry keeps the two apart.

Origins and captivity

Patrick was born in Roman Britain, in the last generation of Roman rule, at a place he calls Bannaventa Berniae (its site unidentified). His father, Calpornius, was a deacon and a decurio (a town councillor and minor official); his grandfather Potitus was a priest. He was thus born into a Christian and clerical family of the Romano-British gentry — yet, as he confesses with candour, as a boy he "knew not the true God" and did not keep His commandments. When he was about sixteen, a raiding party from Ireland fell upon his home district, and Patrick, with thousands of others, was carried off across the sea and sold into slavery in Ireland.

For six years he served as a herdsman — the tradition sets his bondage at Slemish in the north (County Antrim), or in the west near the wood of Foclut — tending flocks in cold and hunger and solitude. It was there, he writes, that God "opened the understanding of my unbelief": alone on the mountain he turned to prayer, and "the love of God and His fear increased more and more, and faith grew, and the spirit was stirred, so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many in the night… and I felt no harm, nor was there any sloth in me." The slave-boy became, in his captivity, a man of ceaseless prayer.

Escape and the call back to Ireland

After six years a voice in the night told him, "Thou fastest well; soon thou shalt go to thy own country," and again, "Behold, thy ship is ready." Patrick fled his master, walked — he says — some two hundred miles to a coast he had never seen, and found a ship about to sail; after a hard passage and a period of wandering (the legend takes him through Gaul and its monasteries), he came home at last to his family in Britain, who welcomed their lost son and begged him never to leave them again.

But he was not to stay. In a vision of the night he saw a man, Victoricus, coming as it were from Ireland with countless letters, and he gave Patrick one of them; and as he read its opening words — "The Voice of the Irish" — he seemed to hear, in the same moment, the voices of those who dwelt by the wood of Foclut "near the western sea," and they cried out as with one mouth: "We beg thee, holy boy, to come and walk once more among us." He was pierced to the heart and could read no more; and this call — to go back, of his own will, to the land of his slavery, and give his life to the people who had enslaved him — became the governing act of his life. After long preparation and, he tells us, much opposition from his elders (who cast up against him a sin of his boyhood, once confessed), he was ordained and at length consecrated bishop and sent to Ireland.

The mission and the enlightenment of Ireland

Patrick's episcopate — the later tradition dates his coming to Ireland to about 432, the year after Palladius had been sent by Pope Celestine as "first bishop to the Irish believing in Christ" — was spent in the tireless work of an apostle among a wholly pagan people. He travelled the island baptising "many thousands," he writes; he ordained clergy everywhere for the new communities; he brought the sons of kings and the daughters of chieftains to Christ and to the monastic life; he confronted and converted local rulers; and he endured, by his own account, constant danger — bonds, the threat of death, twelve perils to his life, and the daily expectation of martyrdom — all of which he counted as nothing against the joy of seeing a heathen nation become "a people of the Lord and sons of God." He fixed his principal see at Armagh (Ard Macha), which became, and remains, the primatial see of Ireland. The later Lives adorn this ministry with its most famous scenes — the lighting of the Paschal fire on the hill of Slane in defiance of the high king at Tara, the contest with the druids, the teaching of the Holy Trinity by the three-leaved shamrock, the banishing of the serpents from Ireland — memorable images all, belonging to the seventh century and later, and cherished as legend.

His surviving Letter to Coroticus shows the pastor at white heat: when the soldiers of the British chieftain Coroticus raided the newly baptised, killing some and selling others into slavery among the Picts and apostate Scots, Patrick wrote to excommunicate the murderers and to demand the captives' return, pouring out his grief for "my sons and daughters," the neophytes "in their white baptismal garments, the oil still shining on their foreheads," now butchered or sold. It is one of the earliest Christian protests against slaving and the murder of the innocent, from a man who had himself been a slave.

Repose

Patrick spent his last years in Ireland and died, the tradition holds, on March 17 at Saul (Saball) in County Down — the site of his first church — and was buried near there, at Downpatrick, where his grave has been venerated ever since. The year is uncertain: the Irish annals give 461, but another strand of the same annals points to 493, and the discrepancy is bound up with the "two Patricks" problem below. His Confession closes not with any account of success but with an act of humility — that all he had done was God's gift, and that his one desire was to have been counted worthy, if God willed, even to lose his life for His name among that people.

Reception in the Orthodox Church

Patrick lived and died in the fifth century, five hundred years before the estrangement of East and West, a bishop of the one undivided Church in full communion with Rome, Constantinople, and all the ancient sees. On that ground the Orthodox Church receives him without reservation as one of her own fathers and enlighteners — a saint of the Western patriarchate of the age of the undivided Church, kept on his ancient day. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Orthodox mission returned to the British Isles, his veneration has been actively renewed: the ROCOR and other jurisdictions keep his feast, new offices have been composed, and he is honoured as the apostle of a whole nation. Where the calendars style him, many follow the Eastern pattern for such founding missionaries and call him "equal to the Apostles," as they call Nina of Georgia and Vladimir of Kiev; the OCA and most Western Orthodox usage style him simply "Enlightener of Ireland." This entry types him bishop and records the wider "equal to the Apostles" usage here in prose.