[Footnote 119: "Quaecunqne causa valde difficilis exorta fuerit atque ignota cun?tis Scotorum gentis jadicils, ad cathedram archiepiscopi Hibernensium, atque hujus antistitis examinationem recte referenda. Si vero in illa, cum suis sapientibus, facile sanari non poterit talis causa praedictae negotiationis, ad Sedem Apostolicam decrevimus esse mittendam; id est, ad Petri Apostoli cathedram, auctoritatem Romae urbis habentem." This canon of St. Patrick is contained in the "Book of Armagh," the antiquity of which is instanced in the text of the present paper. The canon is of a date early in the fifth century; and it would be difficult to show so early, so emphatic and so complete a recognition of the Papal authority in the ecclesiastical legislation of any other national church.]
It would throw a certain light upon the character of a saint whose works were so various and so full of vitality, if we could arrive at any solid conclusion as to the place of his nativity, the quality of his parentage, and the sources of his education. The theory most generally accepted, and which certainly has the greatest weight of authority in its favor, is that which assumes that St. Patrick was born in Scotland, at Dumbarton, on the Clyde—the son, as we may suppose, of a French or British official employed in the Roman service at that extreme outpost of their settlements in this island, where he would have spent his youth surrounded by a perpetual clangor of barbarous battle, amid clans of Picts and Celts swarming across the barriers of the Lowland. The opinion that St. Patrick was a Scotchman has the unanimous assent of all the antiquaries of Scotland; but I am not aware that any of them has succeeded in identifying any single locality named in the original documents with any place of sufficient antiquity in or near Dumbarton; nor could I, in the course of a careful examination of the district and the recognized authorities concerning its topography, arrive at any acceptable evidence on the subject. I have to add to the Scotch authorities and pleadings, however, all the best of the Irish. That St. Patrick was born in Scotland is the opinion of Colgan, [Footnote 120] a writer whose services to the history of the Irish Church cannot be excelled and have not been equalled. The opinion of Colgan has overborne almost every other authority which intervened between his time and the present. The Bollandists [Footnote 121] accepted it without hesitation; and I hasten to add to their great sanction that of the two most learned antiquaries of the latter days of Ireland, Dr. John O'Donovan and Professor Eugene O'Curry. They, I am aware, were also of Colgan's opinion; and so, I believe, are Dr. Reeves and Dr. Todd, whose views on most points of ecclesiastical antiquities connected with Ireland are entitled to be named with every respect.
[Footnote 120: Colganus, R. P. F. Joannes, "Triadis Thaumaturgae, sen Divorum Patricii, Columbae, et Brigidiaetrium Hiberniae Patronorum, Acta. " Lovanii, 1647.]
[Footnote 121: "Acta Sanctorum Martii" a Joanne Bollando, tom. il. Antverpiae, 1668.]
Still it is to be said, on the other hand, that the opinion that St. Patrick was born in France has always had a traditional establishment in Ireland. It is asserted in one of the oldest of his lives, that of St. Eleran, and indicated in another, that of Probus. Don Philip O'Sullivan Bearre [Footnote 122] is not the first nor the last of the more modern biographers of the saint who has held that he was of French birth, though of British blood. But before the time of Dr. Lanigan, the most acute, the [{746}] most conscientious, and perhaps the most generally learned of Irish historians, there appears to have been no really candid and scientific examination of the original documents and evidences. Irish scholars were too angrily engaged in the controversy of Scotia Major and Scotia Minor to be seriously regarded when they proposed to remove St. Patrick's birthplace from the neighborhood of Glasgow to the neighborhood of Nantes. Until Dr. Lanigan published his Ecclesiastical History, [Footnote 123] no one seems to have even attempted to identify he localities named in the various original documents which concern the saint. Dr. Lanigan came to the conclusion that he was born not at Dumbarton but in France, at or in the neighborhood of Boulogne-sur-Mer. I am able, I hope, to perfect the proof which Dr. Lanigan commenced, and which, if he had been enabled to follow it up by local research and by the light lately cast on the geography of Roman Gaul, would, I am sure, have come far more complete from his hands.
[Footnote 122: D. Philippi O'Sullevani Bearri Iberni, "Patritiana Decas. " Madrid, 1629.]
[Footnote 123: Lanigan, John, D.D. "An Ecclesiastical History of Ireland." Dublin, 1820.]
I hold, then, with Doctor Lanigan, and with a tradition which has long existed in Ireland, and also in France, that St. Patrick was born on the coast of Armoric Gaul; and that Roman in one sense by descent—by his education in a province where Roman civilization had long prevailed, where the Latin language was spoken, and the privileges of the empire fully possessed—Roman too by the possession of nobility, which he himself declares, and of which his name was a curious commemoration [Footnote 124]—Roman, in fine, in the connection of his family which he testifies with the Roman government and with the Church, St. Patrick was a Celt of Gaul by blood. The fact that the district between Boulogne and Amiens was at that time inhabited by a clan called Britanni has misled both those who supposed he must have been born in the island of Britain and those who held that, if born in France, he must have been born in that part of it which was subsequently called Brittany.
[Footnote 124: Gibbon says ("Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," v. vi.) "At this period the meanest subjects of the Roman empire assumed the illustrious name of Patricius, which by the conversion of Ireland has been communicated to a whole nation." It is supposed that the name was conferred on St. Patrick in consideration of his parting with his nobility for a motive of charity, as he mentions in his Epistle to Coroticus. But he was certainly not the first of the name. Patricius was also the name of St. Augustine's father, born fully a century before.]
The original documents which bear on the point are only two in number —the "Confession" of St. Patrick himself, and the hymn in his honor composed by his disciple St. Fiech. Of the antiquity of these documents we have evidence the most complete that can be conceived. Not merely does written history certify the record of their age—they have borne much more delicate tests. The hymn of St. Fiech is written in a dialect of Irish that is to the Irish of the Four Masters as the English of Chaucer is to the English of Lord Macaulay. The quotations of Scripture which are given in the "Confession" of St. Patrick are taken from the version according to the interpretation of the Septuagint, and not according to the recent version of St. Jerome, which had indeed been just executed in St. Patrick's time, but had not yet been publicly received. At the same time, the "Liber Armachanus," which contains the original copy of the "Confession," contains also St. Jerome's translation of the New Testament—thus curiously marking the fact that the date of the one document by a little preceded the date of the other. The manuscript itself has been subjected to a most curious and rigorous examination. The authentic signature of Brian, Imperator Hibernorum, commonly called Brian Boroimhe, on the occasion of his visit to Armagh, carries us back at a bound eight hundred years in its history; but the scholar who is expert in the hue of vellum and the style of the scribe, will tell us that the "Book of Armagh" was [{747}] evidently a book of venerable age even then. The Rev. Charles Graves, [Footnote 125] a fellow of the University of Dublin, and a scholar specially skilled in the study of the Irish manuscripts and hieroglyphs, published a paper some years ago in the "Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy" on the question of the age of the "Book of Amagh." That the version at present preserved in the library of Trinity College is a copy from a far older version he says there can be no doubt. The marginal notes of the scribe show that he found it difficult in many places to read the manuscript from which he was transcribing. But the same notes, the character of his writing, and a reference to the Irish primate of the time under whose authority the work was undertaken, leave no doubt that the transcript was executed by a scribe named Ferdomnach, during the primacy of Archbishop Torbach, at a date not later than the year of Our Lord 807.