Saintcast: The Real St. Patrick

0:00They're the legends of Patrick about the snakes and the fires and the shamrops and all of that, which are great, and then there's the real story of Patrick, which is so much more human. Hello, I'm Dina Christian of OSV News, and you're listening to a special edition of our OSV newscast. It's March 17th, the feast of Saint Patrick, the beloved 5th century saint who's known as the Apostle of Ireland. This day is celebrated across the world by millions, and for as many reasons as there are revelers, whether it's faith, culture, or just plain fun. But who was the real saint Patrick? To find out more, I spoke with Philip Freeman, a scholar of Celtic and classical studies at Pepperdine University. Freeman is the author of St. Patrick of Ireland, a biography, and he gave me a glimpse into Patrick's world and into what we can learn of this holy man through the autobiography he left behind, a document known as the Confessio.

1:01Let's take a listen to what Freeman had to say about the real saint Patrick. Just to start with, if you had to clear up some popular misconceptions about Patrick, what would they be? Well, the first one is that he wasn't Irish, at least not by birth. He was born at the tail end of the Roman Empire in Britain across the Irish Sea. He was kidnapped as a teenager, taken to Ireland, served about six or seven years in slavery, and then escaped, and then ultimately went back as a missionary to the same people who had enslaved him. And I was reading in the Confessio, he kind of indicates that he grew up, I guess, in the like a Romanized Christian British household, but that he wasn't super like, he didn't give you impression that he was super religious, is that correct? He was not, he was actually, he says he was an atheist.

2:01He was raised, I mean, he was raised in the church, his grandfather was his priest, his father was a beacon, but he himself said he just rejected it all as a child, he went through the motions and all of that, but then when he went to Ireland as he was 16 or 17 years old, then in that terrible situation, he found himself, he rediscovered his faith. Well, and those who kidnapped him were just brigands, independent brigands from Ireland? Yeah, yeah, they were just, you know, they were just slave traders. It was a, sadly, a very common thing in the ancient world, and a lot of times in the world. And so they went over to Ireland and they just kidnapped a bunch of people who they thought would be summable and brought them, I'm sorry, went over to Britain and brought them back to Ireland. Man. And tell us a little bit about Ireland at the time, because that's a whole other can of worms with how that kind of Celtic heritage got revisited by the Victorians and layered with a lot of stuff.

3:02What was the reality of what Patrick's Ireland, the Ireland, he experienced? What was that reality? Well, Ireland was not ever part of the Roman Empire. It was just about the only part of Europe that never was. So the legions were never there, there were never any cities in Ireland at this time. So Patrick is, you know, he's living sometime around, you know, who knows exactly 430, something like that. You know, that's the traditional date that he went over in the 430s, which is probably accurate. And so he's over in Ireland, Ireland has no hiking, even though that's sort of a later story. It's made up of at least 100 independent, very fiercely antagonistic tribes who are always fighting each other and it has slavery as everybody else did in the ancient world. It was very much an agricultural society, but also a very warlike society. Wow.

4:02So it must have been an extraordinarily difficult place to live at the time, I would think. Yeah, it was. And for Patrick, he talks about, you know, what he did there was he took care of sheep. That was his main job. And, you know, slavery in any time in place is just awful, but in Ireland, I think he probably was especially awful because, say in the Roman Empire, you could at least work hard and save up a little bit of extra money and buy your freedom. In Ireland, that was absolutely forbidden. You were slave for life until you died. Oh my goodness. How did he get out of it? How did he get back to Britain? Well, he says that he had a dream and kind of like Joseph in the book of Genesis or other people in the Bible, he had to dream and in this dream God said, Patrick, get the time to go. And at first, he didn't believe it. He just went back to sleep, but then he had another dream. And it said, Patrick, you know, here's a place you need to go, so you need to get on the ship. And so he ran away. He's like Harriet Tubman, running away from slavery, and he goes down, he gets on the

5:08ship, talks his way on board, and eventually ends up back in Britain, where his parents are, his parents had given him up for dead, but he is back, he's back home again. And when does he, because I'm looking at the text of the confession now, but when does he decide, does he go to, because I had always heard that he had gone to Spain for his clerical training? Does he first go to Spain and then have a dream to go back to Ireland? What's the timeline there? Well, it's funny. We don't really know as a short answer. There are stories that he went to Spain, there are stories he went to France and studied with bishops there. In him, it's very possible, but it's also just as possible to me more likely that he studied with bishops in Britain, in London, or in New York, or they had plenty of places, and that would have been the standard way to become a priest and to be ordained was to study with the local bishop, the household of the local bishop.

6:10There didn't have like seminaries exactly back then, so, but he may have gone, and we don't know how long he was gone from Ireland, it was certainly enough time to go through clerical training, it'd be ordained, so, and you know, and the number of years we can guess. Wow. That's incredible. So he has this dream to go back, it's something like, come back, my boy, right? Yeah, yeah, come back, holy boy, let's go. And he doesn't want to go back. That's the last place he wants to go, but he feels a call. These parents were just must have been out of their minds, upset with him, if they were still alive, but he heads back to Ireland, and he is there for the rest of his life, and which is, you know, until he is an old man, and as far as we know, he dies there. Wow. Incredible. And what do we know about his ministry in, as you said, this very fractured landscape,

7:13where tribal loyalties, fierce fighting takes place, no protection of, you know, broader rights under the Roman Empire at that point, you can't really leverage everything. It's kind of like each area, I guess, would be a law unto itself. Yeah, it was. Yeah. How does he, how does he proceed with his ministry through this area? Where does he start? Well, what he does is the first thing he actually does is very smartly, very cleverly, he goes to a local king and he brings some gifts. He came from a wealthy family, so presumably he brought some, I don't know what with him, but you present the local king with the gifts, and you say, sir, may I stay here in work in your tribal area? And so the king says, yes, and so that's how he starts, and he's up probably in the northern part of Ireland, and he's just works a year by year, tried by tribe, working his way across preaching, ministering to the people who are already Christians. There's quite a large population of people who have been kidnapped from Britain who were

8:17already Christians, and were slaves in Ireland, especially women. And so he, he both breaches the gospel to people who are not Christians, but also ministers and does pastoral care for the people who are. And it's just a slow process. He says he runs into trouble all the time. He gets beaten, kidnapped again for a little while, it's just, it's really rough. It was not an easy ministry at all. Yeah. And in what languages he's operating? So obviously he's been in Ireland before. What would he have spoken at home? He would have spoken, well, at home in Britain he would have spoken both Latin, you know, Latin was spoken by everybody who would have learned that. But also British, which is a Celtic language, which is basically what turns into Welsh, the language that's still spoken in the Western part of Britain. So he was trilingual, he knew Latin, he knew British, and then of course he learned Irish

9:17in Ireland. Wow. And so he came back with this ministry, was some knowledge of Irish, and he was able to minister to people. And was the language consistent throughout all of these warring tribes, did they put the same language? Yeah. It would have been pretty much the same. And that's what made Patrick, I think, so effective, is because he knew the language, but he knew the culture intimately, and he had been, he'd lived there. There were other bishops, there were other missionaries to Ireland, even before Patrick and the South, but they, it was very much a foreign land to them, for Patrick, he, he knew it well. Wow. What, talk about some of what we know about what those values were, and again, I understand that, you know, a lot of Irish, you know, that early history there, it wasn't written down, and that's the big thing with the, you know, the kind of remaking of the Druids and all by the Victorians, is that they've kind of created this in their own image, and people are like, well, we didn't have the written records to prove that. So we'll see up against there. I mean, how did they look at the world? What was their cosmology? Well, they were, like the Greeks in Romans, they had a polytheistic society.

10:23They believed in many, many gods, gods of different hills and streams and places, but also greater gods, gods like Lugus, who was the great craftsman god, and so it was, it truly was a great deal, like Rome was, or Greece was back before Christianity. So they had to society, they had priests called Druids, who were quite real, and we know something about the Druids of the whole Celtic world, ancient Celtic world, because Julius Caesar writes about them, other authors write about them, so we have, you know, pretty good idea of what they did and what they were like, and they seem to have been the same in Ireland, they supervise sacrifices, they were judges, things like that. And suddenly it was, you know, again, very much a warrior aristocracy, and then, you know, say, to 5% of the people were warriors, and 95% were farmers, you know, that's kind of

11:28a guess of the numbers, but probably about right. Yeah. And then that brings me to the legend of the snakes, you know, growing up, I was always taught an Irish Catholic family, Patrick Druid, the snakes out of Ireland, what, what, and then I heard, well, that was representational, there weren't any snakes in the first place. So let's clarify the snakes, what was going on there? Yeah, there were never snakes in Ireland. I mean, maybe back before the ice ages, who knows, but if you go to the Museum of Natural History in Dublin and they have, every Irish animal there, they don't have any snakes, need you to consult those snakes, because there were never any there. So the story of driving snakes out, that's not in Patrick's letters at all, those are later stories told, but it is representations, ever since the book of Genesis, things have been seen as evil. So he drives, it's representational, it's symbolic, he drives evil out of Ireland. Sure. And then there's another, and I understand that this is documented to be of his own writing,

12:31that beautiful prayer often referred to as St. Patrick's breastplate, the Laura Cun. Tell us what we know about that text as well, because if I recall correctly, the story to that one is that Patrick was out and about, and there was a king who was most displeased with him, and so we prayed for protection and was turned into, you know, concealed as a deer by the Lord, he and his party, is this what do we know about this? Well, it's a wonderful story, I don't know that I don't think it's true, but the Laura Cun is a breastplate, literally Laura Cun means breastplate in Latin. And so this prayer, which actually could have been written by Patrick, or maybe not, but at least it's very soon after his death, if he didn't write it, but I think you well could have been him. It was a time of prayer that was known about the Christian world at Patrick's time, where Paul talks about somewhere, I forget what letter, putting on the armor of God and the breastplate and all of this, so Patrick is building on that.

13:33So the beautiful old Irish prayer about Christ be above me, below me, beside me, beneath me, all of that, it's a morning prayer, it's a prayer to rise up and to be armoured symbolically for facing the world that day. Amen. It is a beautiful prayer, I've often recited it, and I should get back to reciting it because my mornings have been a little bumpy lately, so thank you for the reminder. You know, turning now to the Confessio, which is just such a beautiful text, and again, it's singular because most Catholics tend to think of Augustine's Confessions, plural, but this is the singular. When did he write this, and then what would be your top takeaways from this beautiful text? Well, he wrote it as an old man, and I mean what impresses me about the Patrick's Confessio is, you know, after you read Augustine's Confessions, which is just a wonderful, amazing book, but it's a very much a polished, literary story, a Patrick's or a story is much more

14:39informal, much more revealing, I think of his of his, he suffered very much from anxiety, from depression, from self-doubt, he just opens himself up, unlike anybody else I know from the whole classical world, and talks about his failures, talks about his successes, talks about his faith, really, for, you know, just his faith in God, but also in about his doubts in God, and you know, he says, you know, it's been really hard, but I have kept going, and it's just a wonderful, very human prayer, there's nothing supernatural, I mean the Confessios like a prayer, I think, supernatural about it, and he doesn't work miracles in it, it's just a man who is deeply devoted to the gospel, who works very, very hard to spread it, with mixed success for many years.

15:40Yeah, and he does mention that there's a time in the Confessio where he was accused by fellow brothers, there's a difficult passage, they're talk about that, what is he referencing? But what happens is that he is sort of underneath the bishops of Britain, I mean the bishops of Britain sent him officially to Ireland and ordained him as a bishop, and sometime later in his ministry, he gets in trouble, not so much for anything he did, but he has a friend in Britain who told some secret that Pat, something that Patrick did before he even became a Christian, before he was kidnapped, and this comes out and gets him in trouble, I don't, we don't know what he did, it would be a way it could have been, but Patrick admits that he did it, but he says, you know, it was at the time of my life when I didn't even believe in God, it was a young teenager for that matter, but anyway, it would, reaching between the lines, I think the British bishops are

16:46upset with Patrick because he is jealous, they're jealous of him, because of his success, I think that's part of it, he's working in a way that is totally unlike what they do, you know, this offering gifts to kings, they don't understand that sort of tribal organization in ways that Patrick had to work, so it's really hard to understand exactly what the charges were against Patrick, but it was, I guess you might say financial mismanagement, or just you're not being subordinate or not being too independent, I guess also. Right, and we also have that wonderful episode, don't we, of him lighting the fires on the hill in defiance of King, is that talk about that, and what is that actually what happened, or is that another legend? That's another legend, it comes from a guy named Miracle, a priest who wrote about 200 years afterwards, and again, it's a wonderful story, they're the legends of Patrick about the snakes and the fires and the

17:49shamrocks and all of that, which are great, and then there's the real story of Patrick, which is so much more human, but I think it's good to know the story, it's the later fictional stories, but it's so much more interesting to me to read and just learn about the life of a real man. I would agree, and if you had to sum up St. Patrick's spirituality, how would you do that? I would say he was very much devoted, Orthodox, Catholic, Christian who struggled mightily to fulfill his mission to preach the gospel in Ireland. He was a man full of failures, full of doubts, but ultimately a man of great faith.

18:57I'm Gina Christian, and in the language of my Irish ancestors, Slán, Agasbánáct de laath. Thanks so much for listening, goodbye, and God's blessing to you.