The writings of Patrick do not enable us to delineate his character, but they reveal unmistakably a strong personality and a spiritual nature. The man who wrote the Confession and the Letter had strength of will, energy in action, resolution without over-confidence, and the capacity for resisting pressure from without. It might be inferred, too, that he was affectionate and sensitive; subtle analysis might disclose other traits. But it is probable that few readers will escape the impression that he possessed besides enthusiasm the practical qualities most essential for carrying through the task which he undertook in the belief that he had been divinely inspired to fulfil it. A rueful consciousness of the deficiencies of his education weighed upon him throughout his career; we can feel this in his almost wearisome insistence upon his rusticitas. Nor has he exaggerated the defects of his culture; he writes in the style of an ill-educated man. His Latin is as “rustic” as the Greek of St. Mark and St. Matthew. He was a homo unius libri; but with that book, the Christian Scriptures, he was extraordinarily familiar. His writings are crowded with Scriptural sentences and phrases, most of them probably quoted from memory.
§ 3. Patrick’s Death and Burial (A.D. 461)
HIS DEATH
It would appear that some years before his death Patrick resigned his position as head of the church of Armagh, and was succeeded by his disciple Benignus.[217] If this is so, it seems probable that he retired to Dalaradia, and spent the last three or four years of his life at Saul, in the Island-plain. Here he may possibly have written his Confession; here he certainly died. His death is encircled with legends which reflect the rival interests of Armagh and Downpatrick, but attest the fact that he died and was buried at the barn of Dichu. It was a disappointment to Armagh not to possess his body, and it was a stimulating motive for mythopoeic ingenuity to explain how this came to pass.
When the day of his death drew nigh, an angel came and warned him. Forthwith he made preparations, and started for Armagh, which he loved above all places. But as he went, a thorn-bush burst into flame on the wayside and was not consumed. And an angel spoke—not Victor, the angel who was accustomed to visit Patrick, but another sent by Victor—and turned him back, bidding him return to Saul, and granting him four petitions, as a consolation for the disappointment. Of these petitions two are significant. One was that the jurisdiction of his church should remain in Armagh; the other that the posterity of Dichu should not die out. The first represents the interests of Armagh; the second clearly originated in the Island-plain.
Patrick obeyed the command of the angel, who also predicted that his death would “set a boundary against night.” The rite of the Eucharist was administered to him at Saul by Bishop Tassach of Raholp, and at Saul he died[218] and was buried. After his death there was no night for twelve days, and folk said that for a whole year the nights were less dark than usually. And other wonders were recorded. Men told how angels kept watch over his body and diffused, as they travelled back to heaven, sweet odours as of wine and honey.
BURIAL LEGENDS
But miracles of this kind were not the only legends which gathered round the passing of the saint whom Armagh and Ulidia were alike eager to appropriate. The old strife between the kingdom of Ulidia and the kingdom of Orior[219] blazed up anew, in story, over Patrick’s grave. The men of Orior advanced into the island-plain, and blood would have been shed on the southern banks of Lake Strangford if a Divine interposition had not stirred the waves of the bay, which by a sudden inundation dispersed the hosts and prevented a battle.[220] This was before the burial; but after the coveted body had been entombed, the men of Orior came again, resolved to snatch it from the grave.[221] Finding a waggon drawn by two oxen, they imagined the body was inside, and drove off, to discover, when they were near Armagh, that no body was there. They had been the victims of an illusion, designed, like the rising of the waters, to prevent the shedding of blood.
From these two myths an inference of a negative kind can be drawn with certainty. It is plain that, whatever controversy may have arisen concerning the burial of Patrick, there was no armed conflict. For the common motive of both legends is to account for the circumstance that the event did not lead to a war between the two peoples. But it would not be equally legitimate to draw the positive inference that the stories preserve the memory of a dispute, though not with arms, on the occasion of the saint’s death. They point undoubtedly to a controversy and dispute, but this controversy and dispute may have arisen in subsequent years. The story of the angel’s appearance reflects a conciliation between the claims of Saul and the claims of Armagh, and the two legends of the frustrated attempts of the men of Orior embody the same motive of peace and concord. Armagh had to acquiesce in the fact that Saul possessed Patrick’s body; Saul acquiesced in the assertion that it was Patrick’s own wish to lie at Armagh.