It has been suggested that the words in commemoratione laborum refer to some lost work of Patrick. Such an assumption is quite unnecessary. The words admit of two other explanations. (1) I formerly suggested[247] that in the Liber apud Ultanum the phrase commemoratio laborum occurred in reference to the autobiographical details in the Confession, and that Tírechán, not knowing the Confession at first hand, thought that all the biographical facts furnished by his source were derived from Patrick’s own account. But (2) I now think that the words ut ipse ... laborum, “as he said himself in describing his labours,” merely refer to the utterance preserved in the Dicta Patricii, and that the first Dictum was the source of the compiler of the Liber apud Ultanum.
I think we may go a step farther, and attempt to answer the question, How did the Dicta Patricii get into the copy of Tírechán’s Memoir? It seems not unlikely that they were preserved in the very Liber apud Ultanum which Tírechán used. One would judge from Tírechán’s extracts that it contained miscellaneous entries about Patrick’s life, and it may well have contained the Dicta Patricii. If so, we can easily understand that they might have been copied at Ardbraccan from the Ardbraccan book into a MS. of Tírechán—possibly by Tírechán himself.
It is obvious that these dicta could in no case be correctly described as a work of Patrick. So far as they were genuine utterances they must have been remembered, and handed down, or put on paper, by one of his disciples. The second dictum is certainly Patrician, for it occurs in the Letter against Coroticus (379₂₂, Deo gratias: creduli baptizati de seculo recessistis ad paradisum). It may be said that it was simply transcribed from this context. But this assumption is in the highest degree improbable. If any one conceived the idea of making a collection of dicta, why should he have included only this particular excerpt?[248] It seems far more likely that these words were a favourite phrase of Patrick, and that he made use of his favourite phrase in the Letter.
The first dictum is, I have no doubt, genuine also. It is not at all the sort of thing that any one would think of inventing; there was no motive. And perhaps readers of the Confession and Letter will not think me fanciful if I detect a Patrician ring in the words timorem Dei habui ducem itineris mei.[249]
The third saying presents more difficulty. The genuineness of the first two does not establish any strong presumption in favour of the third; because if any one desired to father the introduction of a liturgical practice on Patrick, nothing would have been more natural than to attach it to the two genuine dicta. (In any case, we should be inclined to reject the second part of the dictum, which repeats the first; the expression omnis aeclessia quae sequitur me suggests a period when Patrician were strongly contrasted with non-Patrician communities.) The question turns on the date of the introduction of the Kyrie eleison into the liturgy. We know that it was not introduced into Gaul till not long before the Council of Vaison in 529. Its use is enacted by the third canon of this Council, where it is stated that the custom of saying the Kyrie had been already introduced (est intromissa) tam in sede apostolica quam etiam per totas orientales atque Italiae provincias. This shows that if Patrick introduced it, he got it not from Gaul but from Rome.[250] Now M. Duchesne observes (Origines du culte chrétien, 3rd ed. p. 165, note 2) that the Council seems to regard the chant as having been recently introduced in Rome and Italy. “Recently” is vague, but the inference cannot be pressed, since the same phrase est intromissa embraces the Eastern Churches, where the Kyrie was in use before the end of the fourth century. The question of the introduction of the Kyrie in the west has been discussed by Mr. Edmund Bishop, in two papers in the Downside Review (December 1899, March 1900), to which Mr. Brightman kindly called my attention. His general conclusion is that “it spread to the west through Italy, its introduction into Italy falling in the fifth century at the earliest; probably in the second half rather than in the first.” The truth is that there is no evidence what the Roman divine service was, in its details, in the fifth century; and therefore it is possible to hold that the dictum of Patrick may be genuine, and a testimony that the Kyrie was used at Rome in the first half of that century.
But while we admit this possibility, we can hardly build upon it. It must be acknowledged that the expression aeclessia Scotorum immo Romanorum suggests seventh or eighth century. If it is Patrician, Romanorum ought to mean the Church of the Roman Empire. For it is very difficult to conceive Patrick associating the Irish Church with Rome as opposed to Gaul and the rest of western Christendom. But in this context Romanorum (and Romani) supplies the ground for using the Kyrie, and would therefore logically stand in contradistinction to Gaul and other parts of the Empire where the Kyrie was not in use.
Again, the tenor of this dictum is in marked contrast to the other two. It is not an emotional expression of Patrick’s experience, but an ecclesiastical injunction. The Deo gratias at the end is out of place.
On the whole I am strongly disposed to think that the third dictum is spurious and was added, perhaps, after A.D. 700, to the two genuine dicta.
I may refer in this connexion to the important discussion of the Stowe Missal by Dr. B. MacCarthy in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 1886, vol. xxvii. 135 sqq., a paper which seems to have entirely escaped the notice of M. Duchesne. His general conclusion is that the mass, which is the oldest part of the MS.—and which he separates as Bₐ—is as old as the first half of the fifth century (pp. 164-5), and he considers it to be the mass introduced by Patrick. He dates the transcription to the seventh century (after A.D. 628).