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St. Patrick
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Unlike Britain, Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire. The un-subdued
Celts yielded not to Roman arms but to Roman letters and religion.
The free Celts traded with Roman Britain. Pottery, glass, wine and oil
were exchanged for the much sought after Irish wolf-hound as well as hides
and live cattle. Towards the end of the more than 400 years of Roman sway
in Britain, their garrisons were growing noticeably weaker to the Irish,
who started to simply take whatever they fancied with impunity. They took
plunder and slaves among whom was the young son of a provincial Roman
official destined to become St. Patrick the apostle of Ireland.
His
"Confessio"
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In his old age, Patrick wrote his "Confessio", which fortunately
an almost contemporary copy has
survived and is one of the oldest historical documents in Europe.
He tells
how his six years of hardship herding sheep for his Irish master changed
him, of how an angelic voice told him to escape and guided him to a
merchant vessel bound for Gaul with a cargo of wolf hounds. They made the
journey in three days and found Gaul a smoking desert at the hands of the
barbarian Germanic tribes who were ravaging the collapsing Roman empire
lands. They nearly died for want of food but Patrick eventually made his
way to his family in Britain.
While enjoying being reunited with his overjoyed family he heard the Irish
calling to him in his dreams, "the voice of the Irish as with one mouth".
He took this to be a command from God that he should go and convert the
pagan Irish. Leaving his family once again he went to the Continent to get
the necessary education to be ordained a priest and obtain a mission from
the Pope.
Patrick's
Mission to the Irish
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It took him many long years of rejection and perseverance,
studying at various monasteries in Europe, but he finally got his chance
when the bishop Palladius, sent by the Pope to Ireland, disappeared,
probably killed, within a year of landing there.
The Irish annals give the date of 432 AD for Patrick's arrival. There is
evidence of some few Christians in Ireland before Saint Patrick, but
tradition is overwhelming in attributing credit for the conversion of
Ireland to him. He seems to have been a rare combination of mystic and
able administrator.
Through him, in Ireland, Christianity, heretofore an
integral part of the Roman Empire, established itself, for the first time
anywhere, as a separate institution. Ireland thus provided Christianity
with a safe haven where it survived the fall of the Roman Empire.
How
the Irish re-evangelized Europe
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Pre-Patrician Ireland must have been a fertile ground for the absorption
of the rich Mediterranean literary culture, because, remarkably, Irish
scholars, like Columbanus, barely a century later, were leading Europe in
Latin and Greek learning.
Maybe because the Irish did not receive this great gift of Latin and Greek
literature from a conqueror, but from a mild mystic and their own
curiosity, they did something which no conquered people have done, they
used the new, superior literary culture to record their old oral
traditions and laws, of which they remained immensely proud. The two
separate worlds, Roman and Irish, benefited from each other.
The ancient
Celtic prodigious powers of memory and their splendid curvilinear abstract
art, quickly blossomed in the new culture and in only a few generations,
re-evangelized Europe with a stronger and richer Christianity. Celtic
Ireland, undisturbed by the mighty downfall of Rome, developed the rich
art and literature of its Golden Age.
© Pat Flannery 1995
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