How The Irish Saved Civilisation

Saint Patrick (Pádraig) is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Church of Ireland, a part of the Anglican Communion, and also in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where he is regarded as “equal-to-the-apostles” and as the “Enlightener of Ireland.”

The "sons of Patrick"

There is much written about Saint Patrick and many studies. The most readable and engaging account, if somewhat romanticised, is Thomas Cahill’s book, “How The Irish Saved Civilisation”. 

He writes:

Ireland played the central role in maintaining European culture when the dark ages settled on Europe in the fifth century. As Rome was sacked by Visigoths and its empire collapsed, Ireland became “the isle of saints and scholars” that enabled the classical and religious heritage to be saved. Irish monks preserved the faith by building Holy shrines, copied the manuscripts of both pagan and Christian writers, including Homer and Aristotle, and preserved these while libraries on the continent were lost forever. 

Saint Patrick baptised thousands of the Irish, bringing them into the Christian Faith, and built numerous churches across the country, notably in Armagh, which is still the chief diocese in Ireland today. Thanks to Patrick, Christianity was the dominant religion in Ireland for nearly 1,500 years, training hundreds of thousands of priests, friars, monks, and missionaries.

It was those priests, friars, monks, and missionaries, the “sons of St. Patrick”, who would prove crucial in saving Western civilisation. When the Roman Empire fell, Europe descended into chaos. Barbarian hordes rampaged across the continent, resulting in the “dark ages” when the great light of Christianity and the lesser light of Rome were nearly extinguished. It was the Irish who lovingly preserved the flickering candle of Christianity when that of Rome was stamped out.

Irish monks had studied writing and art, mastering both, in order to copy Scripture and, partly due to the location of the wet, windy island and partly due to the defences devised by the Irish themselves, were long able to withstand the ravages of the barbarians and maintain the knowledge - both the practical and the sacred - that they had learned. This knowledge was then spread to mainland Europe by Irish missionaries.

Reading and writing, sacred art, history, and even written records of Scripture were largely preserved by the Irish and “reintroduced” to the rest of Europe in the wake of Rome’s collapse. From the fall of Rome to the apex of the medieval ages, it was the “sons of St. Patrick” who reintroduced Western civilisation to the West.

The Life of Saint Patrick

Two works survive which are accepted as having been written by Saint Patrick. These are The Confessio' and the The Epistola. 

Patrick was British and grew up in a time of Roman imperial decline; a subject of imperial Rome, born around the year 400 into a middle-class family and raised for comfort and success. According to his Confessio, Patrick's father, Calpurnius, was a senator and tax collector, and also a deacon. His grandfather, Potitus, was a priest. Patrick states he was not an active believer in his youth, and considered himself in that period to be "idle and callow."

According to the Confessio, at the age of sixteen he was captured by a group of Irish pirates who took him to Ireland where he was sold to King Miliucc, who sent him out to the hills to work as a lone shepherd. Frightened, lonely, and confused, a child in an alien land with no help, family or friends, Patrick, started praying. 

Thomas Cahill writes:

Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become - a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any rigid separation between this world and the next. On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in sleep his first otherworld experience. A mysterious voice said to him: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home.”

Patrick writes in his Confessio  that the time he spent in captivity was critical to his spiritual development. He explains that the Lord had mercy on his youth and ignorance, and afforded him the opportunity to grow in his faith through prayer:

It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith. Even though it came about late, I recognised my failings. So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance. He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil. He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.

Patrick's account of his escape from slavery and return home to Britain is recounted in his Epistola. Fleeing his master, he travelled to a port two hundred miles away, where he found a ship and persuaded the captain to take him. After three days' sailing, they landed in Britain, and all left the ship, walking for twenty-eight days in a "wilderness" and becoming faint from hunger. After Patrick prayed for sustenance, urging his company to put their faith in God, they encountered a herd of wild boar. After various adventures, he arrived home to his family, now in his early twenties, where he continued to study Christianity.

Patrick tells of a vision a few years after returning home:

I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: "The Voice of the Irish". As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of  Focclut - which is beside the western sea - and they cried out, as with one voice: "We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us."

Patrick took himself off to Gaul for a theological education, was ordained a bishop, and acting on his vision, returned to Ireland as a missionary to spread the Christian message to the pagan kings and people of Ireland.

Patrick’s time in Ireland was transformative. He converted the warring tribal kings to the Christian faith, and thousands of their people too, and he did it not with force but with love.

Patrick writes:

Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God. The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ!

Patrick’s greatest temporal achievement in Ireland in his lifetime may have been the abolition of slavery, a cause about which he was understandably passionate and for which he made a radical Christian case. 

Cahill writes:

[He was] the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery.

He worries constantly for his people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror of slavery was never lost on him: “But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most - and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorising they must endure. the Lord gives grace to his handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone.” Patrick has become an Irishman, a man who can give far more credibility to a woman’s strength and fortitude than could any classically educated man.

During his lifetime, Patrick was unknown outside Ireland. He lived around the time of St Augustine, the great influencer of the Christian West, but his understanding of his faith, suggests Cahill, was quite different:

Patrick’s emotional grasp of Christian truth may have been greater than Augustine’s. Augustine looked into his own heart and found there the inexpressible anguish of each individual, which enabled him to articulate a theory of sin that has no equal - the dark side of Christianity. Patrick prayed, made peace with God, and then looked not only into his own heart but into the hearts of others. What he saw convinced him of the bright side - that even slave traders can turn into liberators, even murderers can act as peacemakers, even barbarians can take their place among the nobility of heaven.

Despite what Cahill writes, Patrick did not overlook this “dark side”. He writes in his Epistola about Coroticus, a slave trader:

He is far from the love of God, who betrays Christians into the hands of Scots and Picts. Greedy wolves have devoured the flock of the Lord, which was flourishing in Ireland under the very best of care …

Who among the holy people would not be horrified to take pleasure or to enjoy a banquet with such people? They have filled their homes with what they stole from dead Christians; they live on what they plundered. These wretched people don't realise that they offer deadly poison as food to their friends and children. It is just like Eve, who did not understand that it was really death that she offered her man. This is how it is with those who do evil: they work for death as an everlasting punishment.

The Christians of Roman Gaul have the custom of sending holy and chosen men to the Franks and to other pagan peoples with so many thousands in money to buy back the baptised who have been taken prisoner. You, on the other hand, kill them, and sell them to foreign peoples who have no knowledge of God. You hand over the members of Christ as it were to a brothel. What hope have you in God? Who approves of what you do, or who ever speaks words of praise? God will be the judge, for it is written: ‘Not only the doers of evil, but also those who go along with it, are to be condemned’

Legends of Ireland

As a child, growing up with regular trips to grandparents in Éire, my favourite memories are of the tales spoken around the open hearth of Patrick's fight with demons, slaying devils, confrontations with pagan warriors and with the child-sacrificing Druids.  

Ireland has countless myths and legends that have fascinated and thrilled generations of children and scholars. These myths and legends play a major role in the establishment of her culture with constant and impermeable ties to the 'Ancients of Ireland', to warriors, gods, goddesses and Druids, and to the Christian faith, and all are part of the folklore that gives Ireland its unique and powerful culture and ties its people to their homeland.

Legend credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by showing them the shamrock, a three-leafed plant, using it to illustrate the Christian teaching of three persons in one God. The reason a four-leaf shamrock/clover is considered such great fortune is Patrick's teaching that if you found one it symbolised your intimate union with the Godhead. In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number. The Irish had many triple deities, a fact that aided Patrick in his evangelisation. Previously, the shamrock represented the regenerative powers of nature, and was here recast, inculturated, in a Christian context.

Patrick is credited with banishing snakes from the island of Ireland. One Lent, Patrick decided to fast for forty days on top of a mountain in County Mayo, now ‘Mount Croagh Patrick’. 

From the moment he got there, he was harassed by crows. So many crows, in fact, that they blotted out the sky and the sounds of the world. The crows were demons, but Patrick kept on praying and ringing a bell. At some point, an angel showed up and said because of Patrick’s faithfulness his prayer would be answered. The Irish would be Christians until Judgment Day. As Patrick descended the mountain, snakes seeking to strike him appeared and he chased them into the sea. Another version is that on the peak of Mount Croagh, Patrick fought a flock of black demons and he banished them into the hollow of ‘Lugnademon’ ("hollow of the demons"). Yet another version has him being tormented by a demonic female serpent named 'Caorthannach'. Patrick is said to have banished the serpent into ‘Lough Na Corra’ below the mountain, a hollow from which the lake burst forth. 

During his evangelical travels, Saint Patrick used an ash wood walking staff. As he was attempting to convert the native Irish to Christian beliefs, the staff he was leaning on took root and started to grow into a living tree.

A good number of the legends around Saint Patrick concern his epic ongoing fifth-century battle against the Druids, who had their own pantheon of gods and offered human sacrifices. Ireland had an annual pagan festival at the beginning of Spring that began with the Irish High King lighting a fire at the ‘Hill of Slane’ that would then be used to light all other fires. But on one occasion, Saint Patrick showed up and lit his own fire before the Druid ceremony started. 

When the Druid priests tried to put it out, they could not do so. It was so big that they informed their king they were afraid it might consume the whole world. The king acknowledged the power of Patrick's God was stronger than his and he supported his mission to convert the Irish. 

With this Christian fire, Patrick issued a statement loud and clear: the Feast of Beltane was to be replaced by Easter, the holiest feast of Christianity. The custom of a Paschal fire preceding the Easter Vigil Mass remained such an beloved tradition among the Irish monasteries that, in following centuries, Pope Zachary approved the practice for Christians across the globe.

The most famous Irish warrior to grace Irish history books is Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the leader of the ancient warriors of Ireland - the Fianna. His son, Oisín, and Niamh, an otherworldly princess from the Land of the Eternal Youth, fall in love. The pair elope to the princess’s magical homeland, but eventually Oisín grows homesick and embarks on a journey to visit his loved ones in Ireland. Once he gets there, however, he realises that the three years which had passed in the fairy world have numbered a devastating 300 in reality.

Oisín who has journeyed back to Ireland with his nephew, Caílte mac Rónáin, meet with the newly-arrived Patrick. Together, Oisín, Caílte, and Patrick travel the length and breadth of Ireland, exchanging lessons and allegories. The two pagans teach Patrick the name of every new location they pass through, explaining to him its history and cultural significance. Most of the conversations that the three men share involve the importance of successfully melding the old ways of pre-Christian Ireland with the new morals and values brought in by missionaries like Patrick.

This is an excellent example of the way in which pagan Ireland was presented by Christian scribes as having “handed off” the reigns of the country to the new, monotheistic way of worship, rather than having been beaten down by force. The missionary Patrick quickly understood the extent to which pre-Christian myth was entrenched in the native people. For thousands of years, the people of ancient Ireland had devoted themselves in body and mind to an entire pantheon of gods and god-like figures, teaching their children and making sense of their world through the stories associated with them. This was a cultural framework that could not be wiped away, cast off as though it had never existed. It needed patient and sensitive handling.

Saint Patrick and his monks transcribed all these wondrous tales of Ireland and contrasted them to the more peaceful, yet equally heroic, non-sensual, life of service offered by the example of Christ. 

A much later legend, and one frequently shared on this day, tells of Patrick visiting an inn and chiding the innkeeper for being ungenerous with her guests. Patrick tells her that a demon is hiding in her cellar and being fattened by her dishonesty. He says that the only way to get rid of the demon is by mending her ways. Sometime later, Patrick revisits the inn to find that the innkeeper is now serving her guests cups of whiskey filled to the brim. He praises her generosity and brings her to the cellar, where they find the demon withering away. It then flees in a flash of flame, and Patrick decrees that people should have a drink of whiskey on his feast day in memory of this. Hence the origin of "drowning the shamrock" on Saint Patrick's Day.

There are many hagiographies of Patrick's intervention against the Druids shared in: A Real “Wizard’s Duel”: St. Patrick and the Druids Of particular interest is his riding Ireland of dominion to the demonic god 'Crom Cruach' ("twisted heap of bodies"). The main place of fearful adulation of this idol was on the hill of 'Magh Slécht (“hill of slaughter”). Another of its names, 'Crom Dubh' (“crouching darkness”). What made the worship of 'Crom Cruach' exceptionally heinous was the fact that the demon feed on the blood of mankind, chiefly the blood of children. In return, 'Crom' promised bountiful harvests and healthy livestock, An ancient poem records: “For him ingloriously they slew their hapless firstborn with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood round Cromm Cruaich.” 

The article concludes:

Patrick’s contests have not been historically verified but few inquiries, however sceptical, deny that they ever took place. Accurate or not, the event remains noteworthy because the incantations of the servants of darkness were always foiled by the prayers of this prince of the Church. 

Saint Patrick’s Breastplate – The Deer’s Cry

Saint Patrick left an island whose monks who took it upon themselves to preserve the faith and to copy and keep alive Ireland's myths, and also works of classical and Christian learning, He also left a famous hymn; a chant which speaks of the mystic spirit of Irish Christianity. 

It is said it originated when Patrick and a companion were on their way to preach at the ‘Hill of Tara,' the holiest of holy places for the Druids. About to be attacked, Patrick drew on the power of God and this transformed him and his companion into wild deer and they successfully eluded their antagonists. Patrick went on to duel with the dark powers of the high priest of the Druids, defeat him and be granted permission by the king to spread the Christian faith. 

I arise today 
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.