'Paddy' with a D, Dammit

Come for the pedantry, stay for the revisionist history!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, friends. Seeing as I am presently where the banshees live (and they do live well), let’s have a short chat about old Patrick. We can talk about The New Disorder next week; it certainly isn’t going anywhere. The first two discussions of it are here and here.

First, I will indulge myself in a respectful reminder that it’s ‘St. Paddy’, not ‘St. Patty’. Saint Patricia’s Day is August 25. Readers who followed my social media have tolerated this bit of annual pedantry for years and will be overjoyed (how confident are we in this analysis? - ed.) to see it return on this substack.

This is the Grange Stone Circle near Lough Gur in Co. Limerick. Patrick would have hated it.

A few notes on Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, about whom we know a surprising amount for a figure from the Dark Ages - a term, it transpires, that refers not to prevailing conditions of life but to the dearth of surviving records from the time. It should say something about the paucity of materials from the era that documents about Patrick’s life - including some by his own hand - endured long enough to be recorded as history but we still don’t know for sure in what century he was born. The traditional informed guess has been the fifth century ACE, but new scholarship places him and his work as early as the fourth. 

In any case, Patrick wasn’t Irish. He came from a family of Romanized Celts somewhere on the island of Britain (guesses range from southern Wales to Scotland), and Irish reavers took him from his home as a slave when he was a teenager. This was undoubtedly a nasty shock to young Patrick but the raid itself is hardly a surprise; the Irish of the period were aggressive slavers, and well into the Medieval period, enslaved people were a basic unit of currency on the island. Three enslaved girls would get you a fine milk cow.

Young Patrick was set to tending animals, and this time of trial, he later wrote, gave him the chance to commune with God and to ‘convert’ to Christianity (which, given that his father was a Christian deacon, we can reasonably assume to mean ‘commit’ rather than switch over). The short version of what follows is that Patrick escaped after six years of slavery, returned to his family, and entered the clergy, whereupon he returned to Ireland as a missionary.

It’s an incredible story, and a fair few of Patrick’s contemporaries found it so in the literal sense. Some time after his consecration into the church and his ascent to a bishopric, a number of his fellow Britons accused him of financial impropriety and of achieving his position with personal gain rather than the glorification of God in mind. They publicly doubted that he was ever enslaved.

There’s an at-least existent chance that Patrick’s entire story up until his return to Ireland as a missionary is bullshit. At the very least, the story of his escape, as he tells it, includes some moments that are almost certainly the work of an author gilding the lily. 

What is self-evident is that he was a spectacularly successful missionary, establishing a permanent foothold for Christianity in Ireland. His decision, in particular, to decline the gifts and patronage of one of Ireland’s many kings was both a dangerous decision and a wise one. It meant that he, and his mission, existed without protection in what could be a violent and hostile land, and Patrick appears to have been taken prisoner for months at a time on several occasions. But it also meant that the church - though it would certainly become involved in the politics of Ireland - could make a reasonable claim to an authority higher and more permanent than that conferred by the support of any king, a claim permanently validated in the 11th century when Brian mac Cennedig, arguably the only true High King of Ireland, acknowledged the independent authority of the church with a substantial gift of gold.

Patrick wasn’t even primarily responsible for the Christianization of Ireland; that honor belongs to Columcille, an Irish missionary of the 6th century who founded a truly bewildering number of churches, monasteries, and missions throughout Ireland, as well as Scotland and farther afield.

And, of course, Patrick didn’t rid the island of snakes. It never had them. The snakes in that story, driven from the island in terror, represent the practitioners of the pre-Christian faith, which rather puts a different spin on that particular children’s fable.

There’s an argument that Patrick was simply one in a long line of Christian clerics who made it their life’s work to tell other people that they were worshiping the wrong thing and impose, through manipulation at best and violence at worst (although not, apparently, in Patrick’s case), the word of their particular god upon the so-called heathens. 

There’s also an argument that the Irish monastic system that began, however humbly, with Patrick’s mission validates the entire exercise, haven as it was for the preservation and promulgation of ancient and new scholarship at a time when much of continental Europe had regressed from the philosophical and mathematical and logic advances of the Hellenic and Roman periods (though this risks trivializing the enormous and essential contribution of the Muslim Caliphate, whose scholars carried the torch for intellectual pursuit during much of the Dark Ages and Medieval period).

But Patrick, I think, has evolved beyond an account of the actual man’s life’s work. He’s a bit like Santa Claus, in a sense - his canonization immediately made him a figure as much of legend as fact, and his life beyond that has caused him to become a symbol of something with only the barest relation to his religious significance and effectively nothing to do with his actual life. 

The Feast Day of St. Patrick - founded by the church on the supposed day of his death, which, if true, is coincidentally wonderfully close to the Spring Equinox, a day of pre-Christian pagan festivals; decent of the man to keel over at such a convenient time, really - now is of course a celebration of Irishness in general. At one point the celebration was a defiant act by a people whose language, culture, and faith were the subject of punishment and attempted extermination. Now largely stripped of its Christian meaning, St. Patrick’s Day is simply a good time of fellowship and music and eating and drinking, closer to the pagan festivals of an earlier era than the rituals of the faith of the man it notionally honors. This feels appropriate, somehow.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day, friends.