The life of St. Patrick and his place in history

by J. B. Bury

LETTER OF PATRICK

But this letter has an interest for the biographer of Patrick beyond the details of the occurrence which evoked it. Beside, and distinct from, the wrathful indignation which animates his language, there is a strain of bitterness which had another motive. He is clearly afraid that his message will not be received with friendship or sympathy by the British Christians to whom it is sent. He complains expressly that his work in Ireland is regarded in Britain—in his own country—with envy and uncharitableness. “If my own do not know me—well, ‘a prophet has no honour in his own country.’ We do not belong, peradventure, to one sheepfold, nor have we one God for our father.” He refers to his own biography, to his birth as a Roman citizen, to his unselfish motives in undertaking the toil of a preacher of the Gospel in a barbarous land where he lives a stranger and exile; as if he had to justify himself against the envy and injustice of jealous detractors. “I am envied”; “some despise me.” This bitterness is a note of the letter, and almost suggests that in Patrick’s opinion the envy and dislike with which his successful work in Ireland was regarded in north Britain was partly responsible for the outrage itself.

There is no extant evidence to fix the date of this episode, but the dominance of the same bitter note in the other extant writing of Patrick, which was written in the author’s old age, makes it not improbable that the letter belongs to the later rather than to the earlier period of his labours in Ireland. To that other document, the Confession, we may now pass.

§ 2. The Confession

Men of action who help to change the face of the world by impressing upon it ideas which others have originated, have seldom the time, and seldom, unless they have received in their youth a literary training, the inclination, to record their work in writing. The great apostles of Europe illustrate this fact. None of them, from Wulfilas to Otto of Bamberg, has left a relation of his own apostolic labours. We are lucky if a disciple took thought for posterity by writing a brief narrative of his master’s acts. But in the case of the apostle of the Scots, as in the case of the apostles of the Slavs, no disciple wrote down what he could aver of his own certain knowledge. If Benignus, his pupil and successor, had done for Patrick what Auxentius did for Wulfilas, what Willibald did for Boniface, we should have certainty on many things where it is now only possible to note our ignorance. But although neither Patrick nor any of the other apostles who preached to Celt, German, or Slav wrote the story of his own life, some of them have left literary records which bear on their work. The most conspicuous example is the correspondence of our West-Saxon Boniface, the apostle of the Germans; but fortunately in Patrick’s case, too, circumstances occasionally forced him to write. The Confession is of far greater interest and value than the letter against Coroticus; for, though not an autobiography, it contains highly important autobiographical passages, to which reference has been made in the foregoing pages.

THE CONFESSION

This work was written in Patrick’s old age, at a time when he felt that death might not be very far off. “This,” he says, “is my confession before I die,” and accordingly the work is known as the Confession. This title, however, might easily convey a false idea. The writer has occasion to confess certain sins, he has occasion also to make a brief confession of the articles of his faith, but it is in neither of these senses that he calls the work as a whole his Confession. Neither his sins nor his theological creed are his main theme, but the wonderful ways of God in dealing with his own life. “I must not hide the gift of God”; this is what he “confesses”; this is the refrain which pervades the Confession and emphatically marks its purpose.

Of miracles, in the sense of violations of natural laws, the Confession says nothing; but his own strange life seemed to Patrick more marvellous than any miracle in that special meaning of the word. The Confession reveals vividly his intense wondering consciousness of the fact that it had fallen just to him, out of the multitude of all his fellows who might have seemed fitter for the task, to carry out a great work for the extension of the borders of Christendom. As he looked back on his past life, it seemed unutterably strange that the careless boy in the British town should have shone forth as a light to the Gentiles, and the ways by which this strange thing had been compassed made it seem more mysterious still. But what impressed him above all as a divine miracle was that he should have felt assured of success beforehand. What we, in a matter-of-fact way, might describe as a man’s overruling imperative desire, accompanied by a secret consciousness of his own capacity, to attempt a great and difficult task seemed to Patrick a direct revelation from one who had foreknowledge of the future—qui novit omnia etiam ante tempora secularia. The express motive of the Confession is to declare the wonderful dealings of God with himself, as a sort of repayment—retributio—or thanksgiving.[205]

PATRICK’S ILLITERACY