St. Patrick

To say anything about St Patrick is risky. Most of what we know about him is legend or tradition. St Patrick is open season; even scholarly experts are frequently in blatant and vitriolic conflict with each other; there is almost an Irishness with which scholars downgrade each other’s opinions.

I am only here because of purported links I have with our patron Saint. I was brought up in a small village less than 15 kilometers from where he is buried. I went to high school in the town where he is buried and which is named after him, Downpatrick – Fort of Patrick. The bus which took me to school in Downpatrick dropped me at the old railway station, now demolished, which was less than 100 meters from St. Patrick’s Grave, if you then chose to climb the hill at the back as a shortcut. There is now a nice bank of flowers and shrubs along a paved path leading directly from the car park which replaced the railway station to St Patrick’s Grave. The de la Salle high school, called St. Patrick’s Grammar school, where I studied is less than two kilometers from where Patrick is supposed to have said his first Mass in Ireland, in Saul, on a hill overlooking the River Quoile which flows into Strangford Lough where he is said to have first landed as a missionary bishop. My sister Eithne, her husband and children live in Antrim town which is about sixteen kilometers from Slemish which is traditionally the place where Patrick was a slave for many years. So this seems to qualify me for some mystical link with Patrick, as well as my birth being the day after his feast and my second baptismal name being Patrick. In the few days, six actually, that I had to think of something to say on Patrick I will share with you the benefits of my limited reading, reflection and research – the 3 R’s.

Data on Patrick is hard to come by. Most of it comes from his Confession and even that is hard to figure out. His birthplace called Bannavem Taburniae cannot really be found today. It is placed variously anywhere from the river Clyde to the river Severn; that is the western seaboard of Britain closest to Ireland. His father was Calpornius, a deacon and his grandfather, Potitus was a priest. The family seems to have been well-off, “... (my father) he had a estate nearby...” This is all the family biography we get in the opening chapter of Patrick’s Confession. However, this same work, while not too concerned with accurate historical or geographical data such as names of people or places, tells us much about Patrick.

Written in crude but effective Latin, it shows Patrick’s deep familiarity with Scripture, that he knew Scripture well. In his two writings, his Letter Excommunicating Coroticus and his Confession, if you take Dan Conneely’s pagination, they only amount to 18 pages in all, (4½ for the Letter and 13½ pages for the Confession) yet they contain over 70 biblical references.

Patrick was probably a monk; if not a monk he certainly was familiar with the monastic life and as an old man writing, yearns to visit once again the monastic places in Gaul where he seems to have spent some time just before being ordained – C 32: C 43: He became a reluctant bishop who ordained priests to conduct the necessary pastoral tasks of preaching and administering the sacraments C38, 50. Yet he encouraged a free form of monasticism centering on virginity for both men and women – C40-43; probably individual ascetics and not communities. C49: Letter 12, 19.

He was a man whose theology and spirituality was thoroughly Trinitarian and we don’t need the story of the shamrock to show this. His Confession is replete with numerous references to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
He was an ascetic by the call of God who desired martyrdom – C59. He was a man dedicated to constant prayer; “...in one day I would prays as many as a hundred times a day, and in the night nearly as often...” (C16, 18, 34, 46). He was a man of deep mystical experiences and his Confession records seven dream-visions or dream experiences. Like St Joseph he received messages in dream form.
His first disciples were women.

There is one aspect of Patrick’s life that I’d like to look at which was formative for everything he later did; this was his time as a slave – from this much else flows. Luther has been called the first “existential theologian” but I think Patrick was the first real existential theologian. His theology was limited as we can glean from his statements about his lack of education. However, I think his real theology was learned during those desert years as a slave and all his other book-learning and life were shaped by this. It was as a slave that he discovered God; he had no one else to turn to and this soon turned into a Christ-experience – C20. We are all familiar with the Lorica or Breastplate of St. Patrick. The arguments for saying it is not by St Patrick are balanced by those saying it is by St Patrick. But it reflects much of Patrick’s thought and is not only Christ-centered with its great stanza conclusion, “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, etc.” but it is also a prayer of deep cosmic spirituality. Later when Patrick had done some theological studies he identified his experience as a slave with the suffering Christ; from now on his life, spirituality and theological reflection would be Christological but identified with the Christ who suffered unto death on the Cross and with the Christ who was poor.

The harshness of his slave experience, I think, would lead to Patrick’s own deep personal asceticism shown in his legendary asceticism and connection with such places as Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg. It is Lough Derg I think that is the only true place of pilgrimage in the Catholic world today, all the other so-called pilgrimages are just tourist junkets. This asceticism arising out of the slave experience would influence Celtic Spirituality and Irish religious practices, an influence right down to recent times, shown in the life of such figures as Matt Talbot and Fr. Willie Doyle. The slave experience would also explain his encouragement of the monastic life, but it was a monasticism of a particular kind.
Today there is really only one type of monasticism, one experience of the monastic life. However, the monasticism we have today was not the monasticism of Patrick’s time, nor even for years after his death. In the early Church there were many different types and strands of monasticism. The monastic movement is Egyptian in origin. If it had a founder it is attributed to St. Anthony, but brought to public attention by St Athanasius who was turned out of his diocese by an Arian establishment. Athanasius entrusted himself to a group of unwashed hermits living in the remote parts of the Nile Valley. He gave these holy hippies respectability by writing a life of St Anthony. This life was translated into Latin by Bishop Evagrius and had a remarkable effect especially in Gaul which by the end of the fourth century had produced its own St Anthony in the person of St Martin.

Monasticism in Gaul was an intermingling of influences from the East, from Africa, from Spain, from Celtic lands and from different currents rising in Gaul itself. Until the sixth century experts talk about Old Gallic monasticism; this type of monasticism was in three main centers, Marmoutier, Lerins, and Agaune. St Martin of Tours is credited with introducing monasticism to Marmoutier. Even though he was a bishop Martin lived apart from the city in a monastery where monks and clerics prayed and worked together. Martin died in 397 but his type of monasticism spread. From Marmoutier in the west it spread to Lerins (an island off present-day Cannes) in the south east of Gaul, where it mingled with the monasticism established there by Honoratus and Caprasius around 410 after they returned from the East, the East in those days meaning Asia Minor (modern Turkey, Iraq, Syria) and Egypt. Tradition has it Patrick stayed here in Lerins, so it is this style of monasticism that he knew. Now Martin’s spirituality was ‘apocalyptic and it cut across the lines of the civitates.’ – it was un-Roman.
The civitates had always been the center of romanitas, the location of schools, baths, markets, assemblies and meeting places where the best people exhibited their claim to be the yuppies of the day in fashion and the movers and shakers in the world of political power. Naturally with the advent of the Christian empire, the better civitates acquired bishops, chairs, basilicas. This kind of Christian élite was in many ways visibly the heir to the Roman establishment and the willing guardian of classical values.

The monks were frequent critics of romanitas, the classical values and lifestyle of Rome. They cared nothing for the classical tradition, and their reaction to city life was to flee it. They stood uncompromisingly for the superiority of country life and country pursuits. Further, contrary to the present understand of what a monk is, monks in this period were basically lay people: even though some of them became bishops, and in the case of Patrick, a reluctant bishop. It was to this very un-Roman, and certainly in Rome at any rate, very unpopular tradition that the man who changed the status of monks adhered, Pope St Gregory the Great. He used his position to give monasticism a respectability and direction that it had hitherto lacked and in so doing established monasticism as we more or less know it today; Gregory institutionalized it and clericalized it. He did this by promoting the life and writing of a previously unknown monk called Benedict. Many church history books, perhaps the majority, credit the establishment of Western monasticism to Ss Basil, Augustine and Benedict.

There was much in oriental monasticism that was repugnant to the disciplined and practical ethos of the Roman tradition, and Augustine, a true Roman, was very critical of long-haired, ascetics and wandering monks whom he felt exploited popular superstitions. For Augustine the ideal of the common life of the primitive church should be the ideal of the monk rather than the intense asceticism of the monks of the desert. The ideal of St. Basil was similar. For him the social nature of man and the Christian doctrine of the common life of the Mystical Body prove that the life of a community is necessary to perfection and therefore superior in principle to the solitary asceticism of the hermit. The Rule of St. Benedict marks the final assimilation of the monastic institution by the Roman spirit and the tradition of the Western Church.

To make things clear we need to give a time-line; St. Anthony lived from 251-356; Basil from c. 330-379; Augustine 354-430, Patrick c. 390-461; Benedict, c. 480-550 and Pope Gregory c. 540-604. Patrick’s life-span was in the middle of this time-line and certainly his academic and priestly formation would be before the modern received traditional of the influences of Augustine, and Basil could have taken much hold; Patrick’s formation was certainly before Benedict and Gregory came on the scene. So monasticism as we know it did not exist in Patrick’s time and of the many types of monasticism it was the eastern type going back to Anthony that he was probably most familiar with. It was a country existence based on the solitary, celibate life in a hermitage or cell with periodic coming together for liturgy and other special occasions, the rest of the time being spent in prayer, fasting and penance. In fact the original meaning of the word monk, the Greek word monachos is ‘the single one’ or the one who adopts ‘singleness’. Moreover, it was a protest movement, a radical rejection of romanitas, the dominant culture of the day. Further, eastern monasticism was a lay movement.

Whether he was a monk or not, it is this solitary, celibate, prayer-filled penitential existence that Patrick set up in Ireland and his foundations were of women and men together with frequently a woman in charge. No doubt Patrick saw this monastic style of life based on the country as most suited to Irish culture which had no cities or towns. Later St Columban would have this same insight as the best way for ordering the Christian world instead of the city-based diocese which was the Roman model. What Patrick set up was the white martyrdom so beloved of later Celtic spirituality. But it provided Patrick with the means to be more Christlike.

It also provided Patrick with the way to identify with Christ the poor man – C55. For Patrick, poverty was important, but it was not just material poverty, but the poverty of the Beatitudes. It is this poverty that frees a person to make a full commitment to the Gospel, with joy and hope. It would seem that for Patrick being emptied of all material needs and even a sense of security leads to greater trust and confidence in God. To quote C55 “As the prophet says: ‘Cast you care upon God, and he will sustain you’” Poverty was and still is a problem for religious. Many might claim material poverty, but that is doubtful with all the big houses etc: Institutional poverty is impossible. Further, religious have a deep sense of security for they know they are going to get three square meals a day and their other needs within limits will be looked after. It is the people in the world who experience the insecurity that Patrick hints at; a man struggling to make a living, sick and worried about perhaps dying and leaving his wife and family uncared for; or a family wondering where their next meal is coming from, or worried about not being able to pay needed bills etc. That is the insecurity that poverty brings and that following Christ in the Beatitudes demands; we ignore the import of this by saying they are only Evangelical Counsels. I think this is watering down Christ’s message. Do we ever examine our conscience on the Beatitudes? In Matthew’s Gospel the Beatitudes are telling us what to do; yet we spend confession after confession examining the negatives, all those Commandments, except 3, 4, which are telling us what not to do. We rarely examine our failings in what Christ tells us to do. Patrick, as a result of the insecurity of his being a slave, emphasizes this poverty of the Beatitudes. No one else will do so again till St Francis of Assisi; later even Francis’ followers won’t. What is our own attitude to this poverty which Patrick even required of his converts?

Patrick’s experience as a slave leads him to be critical of the institution of slavery. In a sense this is what the Letter Excommunicating Coroticus is about. His voice is the first in the history of the Church, if not in all human history, to condemn slavery. Today we talk of structural sin – Patrick saw it and experienced it as a slave. Furthermore, he was especially scathing of the enslavement of women seeing women in a way no Roman ever had. He says “But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most-and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace to his handmaids; and tough they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone” (C42). As a slave he was an outsider and so as an adult Christian he will identify with people of a race that are totally outsiders, the Irish. Patrick became the first missionary bishop in history and he is the first to work outside the Roman Empire; in other words, to go outside civilization. (Palladius was sent to the Romanized Irish converts and those Roman citizens living in enclaves on the east coast of Ireland) Paul the Apostle worked within the confines of the Roman Empire; if Thomas every got to India it was to a civilization that had many links with Rome and was respected. But the Irish! They were really at the end of the earth; had never felt Rome’s benevolent rule, therefore could not be civilized and possibly were not even human; they were the great unwashed, anarchic and wild. But it is to them the Patrick goes in response to one of his dream-experiences. Patrick knows this and points out that he had preached to the ends of the earth. He says, “the Gospel has been preached to the point beyond which there is no one.” All that was left was the ocean, how much more to the end can you get? he seems to ask. In his writings he complains of being a foreigner in a foreign land and yet he is aware he is no longer accepted in his own culture. This is a common complaint with all people who live for long periods in transcultural situations. Yet Patrick suddenly says “Is it a shameful thing.. That we have been born in Ireland?” This is Patrick’s Damian the Leper identification; the famous incident where Damian after many years on Molokai begins Mass one morning by saying, “We lepers...” Patrick has become Irish; he is identifying with the outsider. Can we say this about ourselves and our own work?

In conclusion, the identification of Patrick with Christ on Calvary ends with the hope in the Easter experience. In C59 he says “...Because without any doubt we shall rise on that day in the glory of the Sun; that is to say, in the glory of Christ Jesus our Redeemer, as sons of the living God and fellow heirs with Christ and destined to be conformed to His image: because it is from Him, and through Him, and in Him that we are to reign.”
 
John Brannigan
Homily given at the Mass in honor of St Patrick
St Columban’s, Singalong, Manila

Monday 20 March, 2000