Saint Patrick - Slave Saviour

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, albeit a little late, I am excited to have discovered a book titled, “How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill.  My Mom, a Latin teacher, recommended it to me on Sunday (the actual St. Patrick’s Day) while I was describing my Spring Break project: start a blog to chronicle my investigation into the History of Religion, all Religions, and connect it to our present day world.  What better place to start, than with Christianity, the religion I was raised with, and St. Patrick on his Saint Day celebration! 

I wasn’t exactly surprised to find that the story of St. Patrick, as outlined in this book, has no substantial relationship to the revelry I was reading about on Facebook.  Ironically, we celebrate a very quiet man, who brought peace and piety to a Nation, by riotously engaging in raucous acts.  While the Celtic ancestors of the Irish were known for this type of behavior, Patrick was credited with softening it.  In fact, he wasn’t even Irish, but rather a Roman citizen kidnapped from his community in England.  The 15 year old Patrick was sold to an Irish feudal Lord, Miliucc, in 401 AD.  At this moment in history, according to Cahill, Ireland, “was an illiterate, aristocratic, seminomadic, Iron Age warrior culture, its wealth based on animal husbandry and slavery.”  Patrick  was thus forced by his brutish captors to work as a shepherd in the damp and chilly hills of Antrim, where he suffered daily from exposure and intense hunger pangs. 

The life that Patrick entered as a slave was, doubtlessly, a scary and lonely existence.   Roman soldiers of the time were recordedly horrified by the Irish Celts’ custom of rushing naked and screaming into battle.  Patrick came from civilization, where he attended school and spoke Latin.  Now he roamed the rural Irish landscape alone and rare encounters with others, with whom he could not communicate, must have been terrifying.  With no one else to turn to, he survived his six years of slavery by praying to God.  Finally, in a dream, God told him that a ship waited for him.  Patrick woke up and walked 200 miles to the seaside, where he miraculously boarded a ship for England, without scrutiny.   

After a short reunion with his parents, who begged him never to leave home again, he heard the voice of God for a second time in a dream.  This time, it called him back to Ireland, to evangelize the very people who had enslaved him.  He thus set off to be ordained in a Monastery off the Mediterranean coast of France and returned to Ireland, where he served as history’s first Catholic missionary, aside from the Apostles.  The greatest miracle is that Patrick’s call to evangelize Ireland came at the exact moment of the largest Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire (407 AD),  the one that would, ultimately, lead to its fall.   And most remarkably, Patrick’s legacy is a love of learning and bookmaking that allowed the Irish monastic scribes to preserve the Classical texts of Continental Europe.   Eventually the heirs to this legacy, for example the Irish monk Columbanus, would found new Monasteries in the countries that would become France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, replacing the ones that were plundered and destroyed by the Barbarians.  As the Germanic tribes tore through the Roman civilization, instilling the New World Order of the Middle Ages, libraries burned and history was stamped out.  Paradoxically, the remoteness that kept Ireland from being civilized by the Romans, allowed it to preserve that same civilization by creating a safe haven from the Barbarians as well.

Patrick’s years of solitary prayer transformed him into a visionary able to see past man’s base nature to our capacity for goodness.  Men have been conquering and enslaving one another since the beginning of time.  In the fourth century B.C., the Celts swept into Ireland and wrested it from a tribe of skilled craftsmen, the Tuatha de Danaan.  Though these people were taller than the Celts, they are the people who originated the myth of the Irish little people or leprachauns.  Cahill attributes this to, “Irish guilt over their exploitation of more artful aboriginies.”  Similarly, the Romans, in turn conquer the Celts and Gauls of continental Europe in 52 BC and depict them as inferior in their sculptures and artwork.  Again, roughly 400 years later, in the story of Patrick, his terrifying enslavers are the ones who become the literate, book-making saviours of the ancient Greek and Latin texts that would haveotherwise  been lost forever in the Barbarian takeover of the Roman Empire.  Yet today, we Americans stereotype the Irish as a bunch of rowdy drunks.

My sweet and energetic four year old son, Henry, has been fascinated this week by his teachers’ tales of Leprauchans.  After the Preschoolers go home for the day, these leprechauns have been invading the classroom and leaving little messes and tiny green footprints as proof of their culpability.  Henry spent Monday night constructing a trap to catch the tiny culprits with the help of his engineer Dad.  Tuesday morning, as I washed out my coffee cup, Henry showed me how he had put all of his shiniest lego pieces and Playmobil Pirate treasure inside of it, explaining that these would surely entice the leprachauns into the trap.  “And you know what I will do when I catch a Leprachaun Mommy?” he asks.  Before I can inquire, he blurts, “He will have to make jewelry for you and Daddy!”  “But Henry,” I feign distress, “that would make the Leprachaun a slave!”  Not troubled in the least, he quickly replies, “Well, he’ll have to make jewelry for my friends’Mommies and Daddies, too.”  It is typical for mankind to want to bend others to do their will. This is made easier if we can perceive some inferiority in the other.  But we should aspire to overcome prejudice and work together.  That is when the miracles will happen.