On the coast of Britain there were small fishing villages peopled by Britons who had earlier been conquered by the Romans. There Christianity had gained a foothold, but the Romans had not penetrated Scotland or crossed the narrow sea to Hibernia, an island we know as Ireland. Whether Christianity gained a foothold among any of those barbarous Picts or Celts there we do not know.
The Celts, whose numerous tribes trafficked back and forth in slaves and in animals such as swine, were a fearsome lot. Occasionally they would launch out in small, oblong, skin-covered boats on pirate raids, and make for the British coast. Arriving by stealth, they would slink into an inlet village, rob the homes of infants and children, and be half a mile out to sea before the parents could mount a response. Back in Hibernia, the children were sold as slaves.
The town of Bannevem was Succat’s (meaning “warlike”) birthplace. We think it was along the Severn River in southwestern Britain. He was born into a Christian family of old British stock. Both his father and his grandfather were ministers of the Gospel and held offices in the church.
There are two crude documents from Succat’s pen, his Confession, an autobiography in 25 chapters, and the Epistle to Coroticus. We know Succat by another name. The first sentence of his Confession reads:
I, Patrick, a sinner, the rudest and least of all the faithful, and most contemptible to very many, had for my father Calpornus, a deacon, the son of Potitus, a presbyter, who lived in the village of Bannevem of Tabernia; for he had a cottage in the neighborhood where I was captured. I was then about sixteen years old; but I was ignorant of the true God, and was led away into captivity to Hibernia.
From the information available, Succat was kidnapped and taken to Northern Ireland where he served a chieftain named Miliucc, herding swine. He wrote, “There the Lord opened the sense of my unbelief that I might at last remember my sins and be converted with all my heart to the Lord my God.” Alive the the things of God, the spirit of prayer and supplication flowed from him. “Frequently during the day I prayed; more and more the love and fear of God burned, and my faith and my spirit were strengthened, so that in one day I said as many as a hundred prayers, and nearly as many in the night.”
On his first attempt at escape he was captured, but trying a second time, he trekked to the southeast coast–perhaps 200 miles–where he was taken aboard a boat headed for Gaul. After a three-day voyage, they landed but found the country deserted and desolate. With his fellow sailors, he wandered for thirty-eight days, malnourished and desperate. Patrick won his fellow travelers to Christ after he had prayed that the men would have food; the prayer was scarcely ended when they heard wild boars approaching. Not just food, but the best food!
Tradition has it that in Gaul he encountered a monastic school where he studied the Word of God. There he had a vision of a man that he may have known, named Victoricus, carrying several letters. In the dream, he gave one to Patrick that began: “The voice of the Irish.” As he read it, it seemed he could audibly hear the voices of the people he had lived with as a slave, and they were pleading with him, “We beseech thee, child of God, come and walk again among us.”
Returning to Britain, he was reunited with his family and began making final preparations for his mission. Against his family’s wishes, he crossed into that land of romance, barbarism, and violence in 432 ad. Probably coming ashore in the Wicklow area, south of present-day Dublin, he returned to the north where he had served as a slave and began his work, which eventually spread into the west. These places had no previous contact with the Gospel. In the eight centuries that the Celts had ruled and ravaged that land, little had changed. The blood lust of their gods only took and never gave. There was little to comfort. As warfare was glamorized and in the process life was trivialized. Their warriors prepared for battle by going into an altered state, called a “warp-spasm” complete with convulsions, that sounds every bit like a demonic manifestation. As G. K. Chesterton put it:
For the great Gaels of Ireland,
Are the men that God made mad.
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
When you think of this savage audience, doesn’t the story of Patrick explaining the Trinity by using a three leaf shamrock have an innocent appeal? We know that story is only a bit of folklore, but it certainly is true that Patrick believed in the Triune God as revealed in Scripture, and he certainly taught it. The charm of the shamrock story is the gentleness and familiarity of the illustration. This would have been quite a contrast to the paganism of the chieftains and Druids. Their gods were not at all charming. They were alternately fiercely obscene or ruthlessly brutal. The fruit of such worship was seen in the rampant slave trade and ritual human sacrifice.
The natural mind thinks that tough talk and a brave front will win the day. But Patrick lived to prove Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:31, “And yet show I unto you a more excellent way.” He preached about a sacrifice that would free them from their ritual sacrifices. He preached a transcendent God who was also aware of all our activities, thoughts, and ways, a God who could be closer to them than their pantheistic gods. For Patrick, God was both holy and personal. There is an old hymn called Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, thought to be written by Patrick at the time of his contact with king Loigaire and his conflict with the magical influences of the witches and practitioners of the black arts. We find in its lyrics the basic doctrines of sound Christianity. If Patrick did not write it, he could well have thought it as he bound upon himself, like a breastplate,
The Word of God to give me speech,
The hand of God to protect me,
The way of God to go before me,
The shield of God to shelter me,
The army of God to defend me,
Against the snares of demons,
Against the temptations of vices,
Against the lusts of nature
Against every man who meditates injury to me,
Whether far or near,
With few or with many.
I have set around me all these powers,
Against every hostile savage power
Directed against my body and my soul,
Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against the black laws of pagandom,
Against the false laws of heresy,
Against the deceits of idolatry,
Against the spells of witches, and smiths, and druids,
Against all knowledge which blinds the soul of man.
Christ, protect me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wound,
That I may receive abundant reward.
On first contact with the high chieftain, Patrick and a couple traveling companions were taken captive, but after fourteen days released. The hymn fittingly ends,
Salvation is of the Lord,
Salvation is of Christ;
May Thy salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.
Several small kingdoms all paid their respects to the high king Loigaire. Patrick gained his trust. Though it does not appear that Loigaire believed the gospel, an important inroad was made, despite the animosity of the Druids.
His life half spent, Patrick was a hard-bitten man. As unafraid as he was harmless, he was the kind of warrior that the weary Celts needed to hear. The people gathered in the fields and Patrick preached Christ. Other chieftains did believe and the converts began to multiply. It is claimed that Patrick saw 300 congregations of believers established in Ulster and Connaught, and that by the before his death said that “thousands” of Celts had submitted to Christian baptism.
During these thirty or so years of labor, Patrick appealed to trusted Christian friends in Britain and Gaul, such as Iserninus, and Auxilius. They came over to help, and many of them stayed on. One indicator of Patrick’s phenomenal work is the absence of martyrdom stories among the early missionaries after him. His preaching had swept the opposition away, leaving a great change over the island.
This does not mean that Patrick was universally loved. British clergymen begrudged his missionary success, and Patrick was not overly impressed with their level of spirituality, either. We get a taste of this in the Epistle to Coroticus where Patrick pleads with and castigates a British chieftain (who may have been a nominal Christian) because his soldiers had sailed into Ulster, murdered some Irish converts, and captured young men and women to be used as slaves.
That letter showed Patrick’s rare compassion, in days when life was little valued. He loathed the Britons’ haughty view that Irish Celts were subhumans, and though he was born a Briton, he called himself an Irishman. Patrick more than knew the Irish; he became one of them. He could have revised the formula of another great evangelist, “To the Irish I became an Irishman.”
What shall we say about Patrick’s liking for monastic life? He founded monasteries, including the one at Armagh which became a launching site for missionary work in Europe for future generations. Patrick’s children in the faith were also enthusiastic builders and keepers of monasteries. There would eventually be 461 monasteries established across Ireland.
What were these monasteries? They were an all-purpose retreat center, Bible institute, university, publishing house, and bed-and-breakfast, all rolled into one. Patrick gets credit for introducing to the island the Roman alphabet and Latin literature. Ireland’s monasteries did not fall under the authority of Rome until after the takeover of Ireland in the 1170s under Henry II, king of England. For whatever reason, believers of every stripe were attracted to monastic life. Many monasteries on the continent of Europe were also totally independent of the Roman church.
Did the wave of Patrick’s staff frighten all the snakes (and frogs) into the ocean? We doubt it. Did he have a showdown with the Druid priestcraft, Elijah-like? Perhaps. Some such event occurred to account for the drastic change that swept the island. Was he a miracle worker? He never even alluded to healings. Did he fast for forty days and forty nights atop a mountain now called Croughpatrick? Whether he did or didn’t will probably go unnoticed by the pilgrims who annually fly in to walk barefoot up the thousand foot peak.
Everyone wants a piece of Patrick. The Baptists want him because he practiced immersion, while the Presbyterians claim him because he appointed presbyters, and is linked to Kilpatrick, Scotland (his traditional birthplace). Of course the Roman Catholics want his endorsement too. But the Patrick we know was not a denominational man. He never recognized the authority of Rome or its bishops, said nothing about purgatory or about confession to the priests as having anything to do with salvation, and he never venerated Mary. Patrick handled the Scriptures with reverence. He spoke of Scripture as intended by God for the free use of all Christians, and he never appealed to any other authority than the written Word. In his Confession there are no less than 35 quotations from the Bible. In fact, the weight of evidence is so strong that Patrick was not a Roman Catholic, that the Vatican has bumped him from the list of their official saints.
Their loss, our gain.
There was another man named Palladius who was commissioned by the Bishop of Rome to evangelize in the same area. His unremarkable career ended in death a year before Patrick came to Hibernia. There is no real evidence that Patrick was commissioned by any pope or that he ever visited Rome. In Philip Schaff’s words, “The Roman tradition that St. Patrick was sent by Pope Celestine is too late to have any claim upon our acceptance, and is set aside by the entire silence of St. Patrick himself in his genuine works. It arose from confounding Patrick with Palladius. The Roman mission of Palladius failed; the independent mission of Patrick succeeded. He is the true Apostle of Ireland, and has impressed his memory in indelible characters upon the Irish race at home and abroad.”
The four elements of success in his missionary labors in Ireland are: i) that at an early age he devoted himself to serve Christ; ii) that he was constantly in the spirit of prayer; iii) that he made use of the Word of God; iv) that he learned to stand alone.
Materials for this article taken from.:
P. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Eerdman
A. Miller, Miller’s Church History, Bible Truth Pub.
P. Gallico, The Steadfast Man, Doubleday