This book is a real effort to distinguish between the problems and perspectives of the hagiographer on the one hand and the historian on the other. Thomas O’Loughlin’s book tries to get the best value from both.
254 pp. Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. To purchase this book online go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Part 1
Part 2
Bibliography
Index of Scriptural Citations
General Index
CHAPTER ONE
MAN, MYTH AND HISTORY
Where to start?
Starting at ‘the very beginning’ is, according to the song, ‘a very good place to start’. The problem for the historian is that it is much harder to know what and when is ‘the very beginning’ of something. For more than a millennium the very beginning of the story of Patrick – and the story of the coming of Christianity to Ireland – was held to have occurred between AD 431 and 461. Patrick was believed to have arrived in 432, to have converted, with his few trusty companions, more or less the whole island, and to have died in 461. So the place to start was the fifth century and then work forwards from that point until whatever date was chosen as the end of the particular story. For those who started with Patrick’s ‘arrival’ in 432, a popular ending point was 795 when the first Viking raid occurred; between those dates was the `Golden Age’ of ‘the Island of Saints and Scholars’ This approach started to disappear from historical textbooks from the early 1960s, but it is still used in many popular accounts of ‘the Celtic Saints’, and in a number that claim to be more than ‘popular’.
Another possible starting point is the seventh century, when the documents that provide most of the legends about Patrick were written, including the ‘life’ of the saint by Muirchú and other writings in which Patrick is central, such as the Book of the Angel or the Collection made by Tirechán (1). It might seem strange to start with the seventh century rather than with the man from the closing period of Roman rule in Britain, but there is much to recommend this. First of all, most of the information that is associated with Patrick is not about a bishop working on the periphery of the Roman Empire, but about a saint who is seen as an `intercessor’, a ‘patron’, and an ‘apostle’. These are not just interchangeable titles that can be used for Patrick, but very distinct roles that Christians bestowed on those who were dead yet revered in their memory, liturgy and private devotion as ‘saints’: while every saint is assumed to be an intercessor, only some are approached as patrons, and very few indeed are venerated as `apostles’. Thus, most of what we say about Patrick – and, more importantly, the framework within which any facts relating to him are viewed – belongs to the cult of the saint. Such a cult of a saint always involves far more than what most people in the early twenty-first century would associate with the term ‘history’ or `biography’. The materials of a saint’s cult (by which I mean ancient documents, tombs, relics, customs, traditions about where he visited, and when her/his feast day falls) relate to the memory of the saint as perceived by a community of religious faith, who see not just the person someone in the fifth century might have met, but the significance of the person within a story of salvation of which they themselves are part. So the miracles of a saint, both while the saint was alive and after death, are far more important for someone writing documents relating to the cult than questions of accurate dates, the places visited, and who the saint met and why. In short, there is little in common between a writer of saints’ lives (a hagiographer) and a modern historian. However, the two professions are easily confused in that both write accounts of the life of someone in the past. In very broad terms the difference can be put like this: the historian is interested in what happened then, and from her modern vantage point seeing what were the most significant aspects of that past time; the hagiographer is looking at the saint’s importance right now – at the time the hagiographer is writing – and is only interested in the past in so far as it explains why the holy person is so significant to his community. Alas, ignoring the difference in perspectives between a medieval hagiographer and modern historian has bedevilled much that has been written about Patrick (2). The interesting thing is that between Patrick’s time (whenever that was, but it was most probably in the fifth century) and the seventh century there is almost no mention of Patrick! Therefore, one could say that the story of Saint Patrick begins in the seventh century, and everything before that is just the historical prologue.
A third possible starting point is to attempt to draw a clear line between material that can be placed in close proximity to Patrick the bishop and material that belongs to his cult as a saint, which is mainly the seventh-century writings just mentioned. This too, at first sight, seems a good strategy. Patrick did leave us two writings, one is a letter to the soldiers of a Christian brigand named Coroticus, the other is an apology for his own ministry in Ireland and is now known as his ‘Confession’. Because these are the very words of the man, they seem to get behind the wall of miraculous stories and the accretions of cult. In addition, we can add a few details relating to fifth-century Ireland that come from elsewhere (a couple of snippets from Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390–c. 463) and Pope Leo the Great (d. 461)), and use whatever help the archaeologists can offer, and try to construct a plausible scenario for the missionary from Roman Britain while avoiding statements not ‘well based’ in ‘sources’, hyperbole, the fanciful, and the downright daft. This approach would seem to offer the possibility of bringing us to ‘the man behind the legends, ‘the true Patrick’, or to ‘the real Patrick’.
This starting point seems both attractive and simple and, at present, it is by far the favourite approach among both academic and popular writers. Among popular presentations, for example, there have been at least half a dozen television documentaries about Patrick in recent years, and the ‘real Patrick’ offers a new slant on the man who lies behind the festivities of ‘St Patrick’s Day’. One can use the ‘shock angle’ in such a programme that the archetypal ‘Irishman’ came from Britain (true, but only as a geographical fact) or even England (wrong, and anachronous) and that he never used a shamrock or threatened a snake. For academics it is attractive as it accords with a basic rule of historical evidence: ‘use contemporary sources for each period, and do not use later interpretations as a basis for earlier times.’ Moreover, for both academics and popular writers, given that it is part of our culture that we are suspicious of the miraculous and make a fundamental distinction between ‘an historical event’ and ‘a miracle, it suggests that we can get to a set of ‘facts’ (over which there would be little dispute), which could then be subtracted from the overall story/memory/cult. We would then have ‘the man’ (somehow equivalent to ‘the truth’) and ‘the myth’ (somehow equivalent to propaganda, ‘the fanciful, and falsehood) in watertight compartments, and would be free to choose between them. We would have the reality as found in the fifth-century documents – and from which a ‘real man of faith’ might emerge’ – and everything else would ‘just belong to the background to a big party on March 17; after all, we have great fun with ‘Santa Claus’ without worrying about St Nicholas of Myra.
Unfortunately, this approach presents as many difficulties as attractions. First, the fifth-century evidence is not only sparse, but comes bristling with historical problems: where do we place Patrick’s writings in time, relative to our few sure dates; how do we interpret his references to people and places; do we assess what he tells us narrowly (information on one bishop working in Ireland) or as broadly in line with the seventh-century accounts (that he was the key player in converting the Irish); and what value can we lay on autobiographical material?
Second, ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’: historical ‘facts’ are always a perception and an abstraction, and the historian brings not only her/his prejudices to a topic, but a whole world of understandings and assumptions which give significance to the remnants that have survived over time. Each culture and each generation writes history anew, and while there is progress in the unearthing of discrete nuggets of information (for example, one might discover a new manuscript that allows one to provide a better text of what Patrick wrote, or an archaeologist might find a hoard of coins that can throw light on commerce at the time between islands of Britain and Ireland), since each generation comes with different questions and assumptions, each generation starts afresh and produces their ‘real Patrick’.
Third, while we might be very clear on the distinction between facts (alias ‘historical events’) and religious interpretations (alias ‘miracles’), that was not a distinction shared by many prior to the eighteenth century. Patrick’s writings contain numerous miracles: the miracle of finding a place on the boat to escape from slavery in Ireland, miraculous food in a desert, and an angelic voice calling him to Ireland as a preacher, to mention but a few. So is the angel calling Patrick back to Ireland a ‘fact’ – it is contained in a contemporary source: his own Confessio – or is it something we can discount? We might get around this by saying that it is a fact that Patrick thought it was a fact; consequently, it is a fact about his mentality and how he saw the world. But that response merely reinforces the assertion that the past is foreign, and reminds us that to study Patrick we have to be prepared to enter a world where religious questions and a religious perception of the universe were central. Not to take account of that religious dimension as a fundamental aspect of every source (whether fifth-century or later) connected with Patrick, is to denature the material, and reduce the study to what we have predetermined as ‘the real’.
Lastly, the assumption that we can draw a line dividing the fifth-century material from all else supposes that people (apart from historians working on fifth-century Irish history) would still be interested in Patrick quite apart from the later legend which has ensured his fame and generated our interest.
So if there is no obvious starting point, where do we start? I suspect the place to start is with a study of how memory works within communities as they hand on their traditions from generation to generation: if we can appreciate that process we might have a perspective on both the legends and the significance that has been given to Patrick. This requires that we begin by looking at what we expect from history, and the very different expectations of those who made Patrick famous, gave value to his writings so that they were preserved, and produced the interest that is still with us. Only when we can distinguish between the problems and perspectives of the hagiographer, on the one hand, and the historian, on the other, can we begin to approach Patrick.
Hagiography and history
The notion of ‘hagiography’, meaning writing intended to praise a saint or demonstrate her/his sanctity (from Greek hagios: a holy man/saint; grapho: I write), does not sit well with us. In a review of a book about a dead religious leader I recently saw the claim that ‘it is not written as hagiography’ being used as a term of praise for the book and its author; hagiography is a genre we neither respect nor value. Our experience of heroes and ‘saints’ is too bitter for us not to be suspicious of any work that praises someone and holds them up for our imitation. Any work that dishes out praise, and sets out deliberately to extol someone and make us admire her/him is seen by us as a ‘whitewash’, propaganda or simply an attempt to con us. Heroes have failed us and the following of heroes has led whole countries astray. We want to know our people ‘warts and all’. Moreover, hero-creators and personality-myth-makers are those who have promoted some of the greatest monsters of modern times. To suggest that Muirchú was to Patrick what Goebbels was to Hitler is to put Muirchú, and all like him, into the category of liars. Indeed, one of the tasks that fall to historians is to expose myths that the propagandists may have spread abroad. In the immediate aftermath of an event or person there are the praises or the denunciations of the media and then, in the longer term, the historians present a balanced view showing the good points and the bad points and, hopefully, presenting an assessment of the impact of a person or a movement, showing both surpluses and deficits. The historian with the benefit of hindsight is to be the final arbiter and we do not expect anyone to be wholly good or beyond criticism.
The hagiographer works in a very different milieu; for him (I cannot think of a single woman hagiographer from the Middle Ages) the question of his subject’s perfection is already beyond doubt – the person is a saint in heaven, enjoying the fullness of the vision of God, right now. So dwelling on imperfections is simply silly: the saint is at that exact point of perfection/happiness that every human desires. There may be a dark legacy in the saint’s life on earth – indeed the murkier the better – but that is now past for the saint has repented, possibly done penance, and converted to a new way of life. So the saint is a model in his/her present state of what Christians want to become, and in turning from a former sinful life, the saint is a model of what Christians should be doing. The new, reformed, penitent life sets the earlier/former life at nought. We have a splendid example of this standard pattern in hagiography in Muirchú’s Vita Patricii, in the story of Macc Cuill –who changes from being a murderer to being a monastic bishop and saint: the audience are intended to marvel at the new saintly bishop rather than ask whether ex-murderers should be given positions of responsibility in the Church (4).
To appreciate this difference in viewing saints we must note a fundamental difference between how people today (including most Christians) view religion (even when they take part in it as active believers), and how Christians in the early Middle Ages viewed religion. In the early Middle Ages to be a Christian was not seen primarily in terms of personal conviction regarding a set of beliefs, but about being part of a society, a group, and a tradition – this was expressed by saying that one ‘belonged’ to the Church. This was a body, in effect Christ’s body, scattered over every part of the earth and over every generation, and it would only become wholly visible and complete at a moment beyond history when ‘Christ’ would be ‘all and in all’ (Col. 3:11). Salvation consisted in being fully part of this interconnected network, which, through its union with Christ its head, was able to stand in the presence of the Father. Salvation was being part of the group, and being on one’s own was tantamount to being lost. It was with that notion in people’s heads that the phrase ‘there is no salvation outside the church’ (extra ecclesia nulla salus) was coined. Put another way, a man or woman was not saved as an individual in a series of private contracts between God and individuals, but rather it was the body of Christ that was saved, and the individual had to seek to belong within that group. Sin cut one off from the group, penance restored one to being fully within the group, and conversion was the decision to join the group, which was seen as literally joining Christ or being ‘grafted into Christ’ It was in this way that they read the verse: ‘Apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). Christ was the whole tree and individuals were branches or limbs. The language of Christianity was corporate – talking of bodies at every turn: the Church was the body of Christ; Jesus the Lord was the head; head and body made up the whole Christ (Christus totus); individuals were limbs, branches, members of the body; the Eucharist was the body of Christ – and so in it they participated and shared in the body, they prayed for the whole body’s health and the body prayed for the individuals which made it up.
To convert an individual was to make sure that she or he was no longer a loner outside the body or poorly connected to the body; to convert a group was to graft a new interconnected group (a family or a tribe) into the final body that would exist at the Last Judgement when all else would have passed away. In short, to become a Christian was not spoken of in terms of a lifestyle decision, but in terms of joining fully in the whole sweep of history, for at the ‘eschaton’ (the ‘final shakedown’ of the whole of creation) only those who were within Christ would survive and have that happiness they desired. It was as part of this view of history that Augustine wrote the opening lines of his Confessiones: ‘You have made us, O Lord, for yourself, and our heart is unsettled until it rests in you.’ And, it was within this view of history that Patrick worked in Ireland, and Muirchú later created the story of the island’s conversion.
This community of Christians believed its full identity would not be known until the end of time, but it was bonded together now in a whole variety of ways which gave it its self-image, its beliefs, and its agenda for activity. The group began to exist long before Christ, but was given its perfect form when Jesus gathered his disciples and set it on its path through his death and resurrection. Since that time it had gained new members in each generation, preserved its memory through its books (5) and interacted not only with God but with all its deceased members through the liturgy. The liturgy brought the assembled group not only into the presence of Christ, but through him into the presence of the whole court of heaven: the saints of the time before Christ brought into heaven on the first Holy Saturday; the saints of the time of Jesus (the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, the apostles); all the saints since then; and all the choirs of angels, for it was with this group that they sang out ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord’ at their Eucharists. This whole transhistorical community acted as one: the Christians on earth asked for help and offered praise; those in heaven (the saints) interceded, protected, and intervened with their acts of power; those en route from earth to heaven sought to hasten along with help from both sides; while the Lord looked on his people as parts of his own body. Recalling the saints, expressing their identity, all their worship, and their final destiny as a Church were intertwined realities. The hagiographer, through fostering the links between the visible church community around him and the larger Christian community of the saints and angels, was supplying an important service to his own community. He helped it appreciate ‘the rock from which they were hewn’ (Isa. 51:1), recalled those in whom they could glory, and reminded them where their destiny lay by showing them proven examples of how to get to that destination. From this perspective, a saint’s life that did not show how the saint-members of the Church intervened right now in the lives of the not-yet-saint-members would be of little worth to those people. Put another way, a saint’s life must record the saint’s miracles in relation to those who look to him or her as a saint. This is what we see well exemplified in the lives of Patrick: he is the one in heaven who has been given a special care of those members of the whole Church who are Irish: he is their intercessor, their patron, and will look after them now and at the end – hence it behoves the Irish not to forget him!
Lastly, most Christians today look to saints as examples of moral behaviour and right living. This is a view of sanctity that first came to prominence at the Reformation, when many Christians rejected the notion of a cult of the saints or the notion that they had intercessory power. However, the saints were held to be models of how to lead a good Christian life and, as such, a saint’s memory was godliness: teaching through example. So a holy Christian might be worth recalling as a model of what discipleship means or costs, but without any hint that you might ask them to help you. So today many Christians look back, rightly in my opinion, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) as a teacher, an example of discipleship and a reminder in his own death of the demands that a decision to follow Christ might make. And, following from that theme, I have heard people call him ‘a modern saint’ That is fine in terms of contemporary Christianity, where even the Catholic Church has modified its manner of presenting the value of saints: ‘Father … you give the Church this feast in honour of Saint X; you inspire us by his holy life, instruct us by his preaching, and give us your protection in answer to his prayers’ (6). However, we must not project this image of a saint as model Christian backwards to the early Middle Ages. One way to note the difference is to ask whether someone who has praised Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King (1929-1968) has ever thought of adding ‘pray for us’ after their names in what is the simplest of prayers to a saint – usually the answer is a look of bafflement. Equally, many Christians still pray to St Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) to help find lost keys, but would they promise to build a roadside statue to him or offer 20 kilograms of wax candles at his tomb – typical medieval promises of one member of the Church to another? Or would someone who held up Martin Luther King – who after all has a secular feast day in the United States (7) – as an example of peaceful protest want to present him as someone looking after him or her from heaven? In reality, these are two very different notions of what ‘saint’ means, and we must recall this when we read earlier material relating to saints. Muirchú rejoices that Patrick can destroy the army of the High King and can bring death upon those who oppose his work in Ireland, but this is a statement about Patrick’s power and it is irrelevant that the stories are blood-curdling. Today, if we heard that a nineteenth-century missionary to a group with an organised military force, for example the Zulus, had begun his missionary work by slaughtering their army, we would stand aghast that such an act could be carried out in the name of religion, the missionary’s memory would be pilloried, and the notion that he might become the hero of that people would be viewed as a sick joke. Yet, this is exactly the sort of tale that is central to the whole Patrick cult.
However, before we dismiss all those who fostered the memory of Patrick in the early Middle Ages (and without their interest we would know nothing about Patrick) as bigots, zealots, primitives, or religious tyrants, we should not forget that their examples came from the fate of Pharaoh’s chariot army in Exodus 14 and 15; the fate of the prophets of Baal at the hands of Elijah in 1 Kings 18; and the fate of Ananias and Sapphira before Peter in Acts 5; and indeed many Christians still sing the Song of Moses (Exod. 15), which thanks God for drowning the Egyptians, as part of their celebration of Christ’s resurrection at the Easter Vigil.
In writing about Patrick, Muirchú saw himself in continuity with these biblical writers and sought to cast Patrick as a contemporary version of those biblical characters. Indeed, ultimately the hagiographers saw themselves doing for their subjects, who were members of Christ, what the evangelists did for Jesus to show he was the Christ. The evangelist John concluded his gospel by saying that he had ‘written’ the book ‘that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name’ (20:31), and so we make a distinction between the genre of gospel writing and the genre of biography. The hagiographer echoes John’s words: he wrote that people might believe that someone was a saint and so might be moved to link their own life with that of the saint through entering into that saint’s cult. Hagiographers lived in a different world from ours, and even for contemporary Christians, to enter that world requires a leap of imagination and sympathy with religious difference. This stress on the gulf of understanding that separates us from the past is itself part of our very modernity: for most of Christian history it was the continuity with the past that was stressed. Each culture and period imagined their society as having the same understanding as that of earlier Christians: hence the message of the Gospel related directly to their situation, the events of the gospels were pictured as occurring in their landscape and fashions, and they attributed to the earlier period their own beliefs and hang-ups. So, for example, Muirchú imagined that the situation and events of the Book of Daniel and the situation at the court of the Irish High King at Tara were virtually the same apart from the obvious difference in date, location and language. Alternatively, some modern Christians live in a situation where miracles are viewed as childish superstitions and so, to preserve continuity with the desired past, the milieu of Jesus, Jesus is reconstructed without any hint of the miraculous. One myth of continuity makes a seventh-century Irishman into an ancient Babylonian (8), while the other makes a first-century Jew from Palestine into a twenty-first-century social reformer (9). In short, continuity is the lifeblood of a community, and so it is a central plank in the worldview of a hagiographer, but it is dangerous for the historian, and problematic in a culture that notes its differences from the past.
Saints, heroes, relics
While we must not try to disguise the differences between our worlds and those of the past, we should also note that there are continuities, and while the cult of saints may mean less within the Christian churches, the human dynamics that are at play in saints’ cults seem to be as active as ever. These human dynamics do seem to form a real continuity with the past and serve to remind us that with some imaginative sympathy we can enter into a foreign world, and at the very least experience it through a cultural translation.
Many of the same cultural phenomena that in the past were linked to the cult of saints can be found today in the interest we take in ‘celebrities’ – ‘people’, as someone remarked, ‘who are famous for being famous.’ The devotion given to some pop singers – often referred to using religious terms such as ‘pop idol’ or ‘pop icon’ – or internationally famous football players is a modern secular form of saint’s cult. The simplest proof of this is that marketers know that these cult images are financially valuable and so place images of these idols where they can influence our behaviour in terms of our use of money, not with reference to either making music or playing sport. A famous footballer can ‘sponsor’ any product and many of us are moved to buy it: it is as if he becomes the product’s patron saint and each advert hoarding showing him with the product is another wayside shrine to his excellence, goodness or prowess in the eyes of his devotees. Equally, the cult of relics is alive and well, as witness the desire for ‘celebrity memorabilia’. The seriousness of this cult, and its organisation, can be gauged by the amounts of money people are prepared to spend on these relics (or as Jesus is reported as saying in Matt. 6:21: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’), the involvement of famous auction houses in the trade, and the coverage such sales attract in the media. The musical instrument of a pop icon, the dress of a celebrity worn on a particular occasion, or some other personal item will fetch the highest price (equivalent to the older Roman Catholic category of first-class relic: that which belongs properly to the saint), while signed pictures or autographs are next in order of value (a second-class relic: that which was associated with the saint), while programmes from a famous concert or event have least monetary value (third-class relics: material objects which have touched higher relics). Material objects bring us close to our heroes! Other human instincts also seem to be still at work when fans gather to hear or see their hero ‘live’ when they could more comfortably (and more economically) see an event on TV or listen to a recording: there is just no substitute for ‘being there’. The sentiment that one must go to the place and be there with the group and be in the very presence of the hero is something that any medieval pilgrim to a saint’s shrine would have understood. The modern pop concert or great sports tournament functions in a very similar way to the feast-day gatherings at the special cult centres of medieval saints. Moreover, this pilgrimage instinct even survives the live experience of the heroes’ presence: the houses where the Beatles grew up in Liverpool and the home of Elvis Presley are still attracting devotees.
Devotion to the saints was a group phenomenon and so attaching oneself to the group was a primary task: to become part of the group was seen as attaching one’s self to the saint and thus sharing in his/her glory. The same instinct can be seen today in the followers of football clubs, where the club and its fortunes on the field become part of a person’s identity: they wear the colours, gather the memorabilia, travel together to the sacred moments of the cult, and seek to move ever closer to the club through their demonstrations of loyalty. In the early Middle Ages the highest form of such loyalty was the desire to be with that saint at the final Day of Resurrection – literally to rest with him in his place so as to rise with him. It is for this reason that sites connected with saints in Ireland are still cluttered up as graveyards: to be buried in a monastery is a definitive statement of attachment to that place made holy by the saint. For that reason Adomnán can tell a story of St Columba telling a monk he must move to another monastery because he foresees that he should be buried elsewhere. However, even this has a modern parallel: several football clubs have scattered the ashes of famous deceased players or a manager on the pitch, while some supporters express the opinion that this would be their preferred ‘resting place’ if only they too could persuade the club to scatter their ashes at the sacred centre of their cult. I know that only a tiny proportion of supporters go that far in their desire for proximity to their heroes but, equally, only a tiny proportion of early medieval Christians engaged in subterfuge to get their grave that bit closer to the bones of the saint. The instincts of both groups of followers seem to be the same.
As we read a medieval hagiographer we must keep in mind that his religious landscape is as different from ours as his physical landscape is. But we should also note the opposite phenomenon. A medieval writer will tell of massive outpourings of grief at the moment the saint dies – now recall the crowds and the flowers at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997 and the shrine erected as her tomb. When we read of wayside shrines and markers to those who died alongside the road – note the flowers that are left, often renewed for years after the event, where there has been a fatal road accident – and when we read of the desire for relics and to touch the ‘very spot’ of some wonder – then let’s not forget that fulfilling people’s desires to get to specific famous spots is a key aspect of the tourist industry and most of those who go there will carry a special relic-collector to link them to that spot: a camera.
The ‘dossier’ of a saint
So in looking back at someone whom Christians have venerated as a ‘saint’ we do not encounter historical artefacts together with the interpretations of earlier historians (as we might if we were to pursue the life and times of an early Irish king), but something far more complex. We find the strands of historical fact intermingled with the cult as it evolved over time, all set within the larger parameters of how that society and period perceived its universe religiously and adapted the Christian traditions about saints. This whole complex of surviving bits and pieces has been given a label by the Bollandists – a group of Jesuits in Belgium who have become the specialists in matters relating to hagiography – and they call it the ‘dossier of a saint’. The starting point in any cult is precisely that: a cult. This means that in the immediate surroundings of a Christian there is a belief that the person is saintly and that, almost from the moment of death, the person is now a saint. In times before modern communications, and leaving aside spectacular exceptions where people (usually bishops) already had a widespread reputation while alive (for example, Ambrose of Milan (c. 339-397) or Augustine of Hippo (354-430)), such cults were usually very local affairs indeed. Indeed, if one went through the many thousands of people whom the churches have venerated over the centuries, the vast majority are only known in a particular locality, perhaps one church building dedicated to them and, probably now long forgotten, a tradition that her/his feast falls on a certain day. Today, even that building has often been re-dedicated to a more famous or more recent saint and all that survives is a place name that indicates that once there may have been a cult there.
One can drive through Ireland and find places whose name is in the form ‘Kil + a personal name’, where there is no other record of such a saint. Likewise in Wales one can find place names beginning with ‘Llan’, or in France with ‘St’, where no other trace of a cult survives. In many cases this is the last scrap of evidence of a local cult but one that did not grow to establish itself deeply in the larger memory of Christians. Historians of saints frequently quote the line from Sirach 44:7-8 that the saints ‘were’ those ‘honoured in their generations, and were the pride of their times … [who] have left behind a name, so that others declare their praise’; and in fact that is often all we have: a name. A cult may begin with just a few people who notice a ‘sweet smell of flowers’ in the room immediately after someone’s death and interpret this as ‘the odour of sanctity’ (14) – and in that local community a cult is born. It may be strengthened if soon after that a child recovers from illness and their recovery is attributed to the new saint’s care and to their intercession for the community they belonged to while on earth, and so their gravesite becomes a place of local devotion. And, as anniversaries of death are always recalled within families, so that annual moment is now recalled as a feast of that saint and it becomes the focus point of the cult in time as the tomb/grave is in physical location. These three items – a name, a burial site, a feast day – form the bedrock of every dossier. Moreover, when one thumbs through any martyrology (15) one finds that for many, if not most, saints from the time before AD 1000 that is all we know.
A small local cult may gradually develop and spread, it may disappear altogether, or it may remain local but by chance obtain a mention in a martyrology and so be recalled elsewhere but without becoming a great centre of attraction (16). However, when we look at the cults that really did take off and become widely known, we notice that one factor is pre-eminent: the saint is adopted by an organised ecclesiastical community that can record and promote the saint, serve the cult centre with all its liturgical needs, and invest energy in the cult as part of their own identity. A layman or laywoman may die with a reputation for holiness and be venerated in their community or parish for generations without anyone outside that area learning of the cult, but things would be very different if that person had been the founder of a monastery of monks or nuns or the first bishop in a region. In the latter situations there is a group who look back to the saint as their origin or ‘father’ or ‘mother in faith’ and they have within the structures of the monastery or of the clergy all that it takes not only to preserve the memory in detail, but also to elaborate that memory and spread it abroad. Wherever those monks or clergy go they will take the cult with them and will see it as their own badge of identity. Someone may ask who they are, and their reply is that they are the monks, the spiritual children, of that saint, and so it is important to them that that saint is as widely known as possible. In this process, the formally written life of the saint – what is usually referred to in scholarship as `the vita‘ – is a key element, and hence it is (or they are – because a successful cult will generate a succession of vitae) a key part of the dossier. The written story fixes the memory of the saint so, while bits will be added to that memory, it becomes more difficult for stories relating to the saint or his/her miracles to fall out of memory. Once a saint has a vita, he/she has tacitly moved into a higher category of saint – saints that can be read about – and therefore there is an implicit understanding that these saints have more power than lesser-known saints. Any cult that has generated a vita can now spread more easily, for the memory can be transferred from place to place in book form. On the feast day there is now material to be read – hence our word ‘legend’ from legendum, that which is there to be read about the power, that is the miracles, of a saint. And there is a way of generating new stories about the saint, for the material in vitae seems to have had general popular attraction. Today we find this last point hard to credit, but keep in mind that a vita provided exciting stories within their world in a manner similar to the way science fiction tales fit within our worldview. In the late 1960s, Star Trek provided as comprehensive a view about its creators’ ideal society as a vita did in the early Middle Ages – and in both times these projecting-texts had those who simply enjoyed them.
From the insular world we have no better example of this process than with St Columba (c. 521-9 June 597) who founded the monastery of Iona. He left a community of monks behind him who drew their identity as a group from him and spread his fame with every new monastery they founded. His memory was preserved formally in the tales they told about him, and by the mid-seventh century they had compiled a vita for him. Although this vita does not survive, it was one of the sources that Adomnán drew upon when he wrote his Vita Columbae towards the end of the eighth century, and in that vita we are told how his fame had spread. Many areas of what is now Scotland are presented by Adomnán as being under Columba’s protection – so that even in distant Rome his name and cult were known (17). This example of the spread of a cult also draws attention to other aspects of a saint’s dossier. First, a successful cult is always growing by a process of gradual accretion – a moving saint’s cult does gather moss. Second, once a cult is set in motion it becomes more complex, in that the basic story of the saint is elaborated by standard elements from the larger Christian memory of what a saint should be. So Columba is presented using many features of sanctity that are the common possession of many cults: the figure of the saint is elaborated by seeing in his life imitations of Christ, as well as imitations of the great figures of the Old Testament, the apostles, and the already famous saints of the tradition such as Antony of Egypt (251?-356), Martin of Tours (d. 397), or Gregory the Great (c. 540-604). Thirdly, the saint has a definable territory, his lands, where his memory is known, where there are churches or monasteries dedicated to him and the people in those areas see themselves under his special care, or as having placed themselves under his protection.
Once we see the cult of a saint in this way, we realise that it is not something static, but a dynamic process in the life of a particular community interacting over time with new members of that community and with the larger community of Christians elsewhere. Moreover, it allows us to appreciate that the most fundamental rule of evidence in the study of any saint’s dossier is this: what a dossier contains tells us primarily about how that saint was perceived at the time that element entered the dossier, and it may have little to tell us about the actual life of the man or woman who after death became a saint. Thus Adomnán’s Vita Columbae is primarily about how Adomnán and his community saw Columba and their own life and work as Christians, but we cannot – in the absence of earlier independent evidence – assume that it tells us anything about the man who died on 9 June 597. So in a great many cases where we have only a name, a cult-site or tomb, a feast day, and a later vita, all we can say about the historical person is that they were a Christian who died in a certain place on a certain day – we may not know the year – and that at a later time (i.e. when the vita was written) they were sufficiently significant to merit a written vita: not one item in that vita can be taken on its own as providing information about the life and times of its subject. This limitation flies in the face of the human desire for details about those in whom we are interested and is a lesson that few were prepared to take on board with regard to Patrick until the 1960s (18). However, it is with this fundamental rule before our eyes that we can now set out to find Patrick: we will seek to use the various strands of evidence separated by time, allowing to each moment only that which can be dated to that time and assuming that we cannot use later fame as a basis for earlier understandings. So, for example, if it is only in the later seventh century that we find Patrick being presented as the patron of the whole island of Ireland – and so someone significant for the whole island – we cannot assume that at any time before that picture of Patrick was presented by Muirchú, Patrick had such a significance for the whole island.
Signs and wonders
Before turning to Patrick, there are two other topics to reflect upon: first, how do we approach the issue of the miraculous, which is found scattered in all the evidence we shall be examining; and second, if the world of the Christians in early Ireland is so different from our own, why bother to look at it?
Faced with an account of a miracle most modern western-educated people are all too likely to dismiss the whole event as evidence of the hold of superstition/stupidity on previous generations, the woeful lack of a proper understanding of either how nature works or how to analyse statistically unlikely outcomes, or simple frauds practised on an intellectually encumbered population by a literate self-organised elite as part of their process of domination. The prevalence of such attitudes goes some way towards explaining why so little study has been devoted to date on the world-view contained in early medieval miracles. The temptation is to question the evidence as if our structures for understanding the universe are absolute, and every other way of assembling a meaningful universe is inferior. This has been the western approach to the past and to other cultures since the eighteenth century, yet even a brief encounter with contemporary non-western cultures will show that human beings can, and do, organise the world very differently. So when we read of a miracle our question should not be ‘Did it happen?’ – let us assume that if a modern western academic were transported back to that moment in the past, they would not see anything that they would explain in terms of a miracle – but ‘What does that story tell us about how those people imagined the world?’ As such, the miracle stories are among the most important evidence we have if our aim is to understand the mentality of those who lived in a culture very different from ours.
So how were miracles seen in the early Middle Ages? First, let us dispose of the most common mistake found in works on the period, where Roman Catholic writers take over their modern canonical definition of a miracle as used by officers of their church in ‘declaring’ a miracle for a saint’s canonisation or identifying a location as a pilgrimage shrine, namely that a miracle is a departure from the expected course of events which cannot be explained by scientists according to their knowledge and so can be attributed to the intervention of a supernatural power. The problem with such an approach is that it assumes a far more rigid understanding of the ‘laws of nature’ than anyone had prior to the rise of modern science. It also seeks to preserve a separation between two orders of existence (the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’: where the higher can intervene in the lower but not vice versa) that was unknown in the early Middle Ages, which only began to appear in formal theology in the thirteenth century, and which has still not established itself in popular Catholic culture in many parts of the world.
The early Christian world was one in which God was both beginning and end, expressed in the scriptural shorthand Alpha and Omega (20), and presided over the whole creation in an act of sustaining it in being, governing it and caring for it. But crucially, between the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of the creation took a step into the background and allowed a whole series of forces to be at work. In this act of ‘stepping back’ God has established the domain of the creation’s freedom, and while he is not constantly fiddling with the creation to bring about his will, he is aware of all that is happening in it and can ‘hear’ its cries. Note the image they used of hearing, where they imagined someone hearing a cry in the distance, while the image of seeing was too active because it meant the decision to look at the creation. Within the created realm all the various capabilities that God has given to creatures are at work and encountering one another. So stones fall to earth, water flows and plants grow, while the stars run in their circular courses and the moon and sun keep regular station to do their appointed tasks as lanterns and clocks (21). Spiritual beings both faithful and fallen set about good and bad tasks: a wicked angel was at work in the Garden of Eden (22) and a good angel was at work in the Garden of Gethsemane (23). When you set out to travel a road you might meet a good man, by chance, or fall among robbers (24). You or anyone you meet might be tempted by a demon or helped by your guarding angel, and you had to be aware of your needs constantly. It seemed easier to acquiesce in evil than to do good (25), you needed protection from disease and illness, and you knew that famine, mishap and other dangers stalked your steps: in all these situations you needed special strength, assistance and care, which could only come from above. In this universe prayer was a definitely positive act on the part of humans and a necessary turning towards the good. Prayer was a calling out to God that he would listen to human requests and turn his face towards his needy creatures, and so dispose and govern the creation that those needs were answered. And, as a part of this process of asking God to step into the foreground and act within his creation, the Christians forming the Church on Earth could also call on the saints and the angels to lend their voices, their intercession, to the cry of need – it is the willingness and ability of saints to assist in this cry for help that constitutes their miraculous power, their special skill, their virtus, and this power to intercede was seen as related to their position within the court of heaven, and their special relationship with the community making the appeal.
One can still see this view of the creation in the language of Christian prayer, especially in the liturgies of those Christians, e.g. the Roman Catholic Church, which still use prayers today that come from the period before the sixteenth century. Thus, Catholics today still use the phrases ‘Lord hear us, Lord graciously hear us’ (Domine audi nos, Domine exaudi nos), and ‘beseech’ God to visit, heal and protect them. One of the final prayers of the present Night Office is still the ancient collect Visita quaesumus, which captures in a few lines that whole concept: ‘Visit this house, we pray you, Lord: drive far away from it all the snares of the enemy. May your holy angels stay here and guard us in peace, and let your blessing be always upon us’ (26).
To read of the miraculous in a medieval text is to encounter a different paradigm of science from that which we tend to use, and to enter a different spiritual world from that in which most modern Europeans live, be they Christian believers or not.
Before leaving the topic of the miraculous we should note one other point: theologians of the period devoted quite a lot of attention to the different ways in which God acted within his creation (a good example from the insular region would be Adomnán who adapted many ideas from Gregory the Great) (27). Hence, where we have just one category of ‘miracle’, they had many well-differentiated categories of actions/divine aid/care/intervention. However, for now, it is sufficient to mention just the two broadest categories: one can be labelled a miraculum, and the other a signum – although, unfortunately, not every early medieval writer was consistent in this usage. Miracula were those special acts of divine care, for which every Christian prayed, that occurred in the course of everyday life and came either directly from God, or through the action or intercession of the angels and saints. We can view them as unexpected help in the normal crises of life and they relate to the sort of happening that we would put down to ‘good luck.’ So, for instance, a child falls in the river – and the prior expectation is that sometimes this leads to the child being rescued and sometimes to drowning – but on this occasion, just when all seemed lost, the child fetched up onto a rock and was rescued. The onlookers noted that they had called out `O Mother of God’ when they saw this, and then the unexpected solution is seen as one more Marian miracle. Events usually take their course for better or worse, but the help of God may, unexpectedly, come to a situation and resolve it in a way that those involved find both good and wonderful.
Signa are far more spectacular, far more rare, and have a very different purpose within the whole divine plan than miracula. These are occasions when God, on his own initiative, intervenes with mighty gracious acts (magnalia Dei), not to help in a normal problem of life but to advance the whole of the kingdom. The interventions in the life of Israel were seen as the perfect examples of this: dividing the Red Sea and rescuing his people, establishing the truth of his prophet before the priests of Baal (29), and speaking through his prophets. The coming of the Christ and his wonders also fell into this category; and the form of those wonders, for instance the ‘first sign’ at Cana or the feedings (30), were seen to reveal the inner dynamic of Christ’s care for the Church. The structure of these signa were part and parcel of the way that the Father acted in the life of the Church, so any great movement within the life of the Church on Earth was capable of being expressed within these terms – and that expression was not an act of falsification of the evidence, but a case of understanding the whole inner dynamic of what was going on. We will see a splendid example of this in Muirchú’s Vita Patricii, where Muirchú knows that a new people have been added to the Church and brought within the whole sweep of salvation history, and so he expresses the event of conversion within the framework of the miracle of the first Easter Vigil on Irish soil – for conversion is, for him, the work of God. Just as on the first Pascha the work of God led the Israelites out of darkened idolatrous Egypt into freedom under Moses, so God on another Pascha led the Irish out of a darkened idolatrous Ireland into freedom under Patrick. Signa were the stories within which theologians explained, in shorthand, the inner structures of God’s relationship with his Church, and these structures were ‘great mysteries’ (31).
Looking backwards
This chapter has tried to point out some of the problems and pitfalls in trying to find a fifth-century Roman from Britain called Patrick, who is venerated by Christians as a saint. It has stressed some of the difficulties in that process and how foreign that world is from that in which we live. So before looking any further it is worth asking why we should bother to search through this material. The answer can be sought on three different levels, depending on one’s starting point in the quest.
First, for anyone working on the history of Ireland or of the Latin west in late antiquity, there is no choice but to study Patrick for his writings, which constitute our earliest historical evidence produced on the island of Ireland. And, given that Ireland begins to have written materials for its history with the coming of Christianity, the materials relating to Patrick must be studied as the earliest stratum of documentary evidence. Equally, the later writings dedicated to Saint Patrick are important sources for the time of their composition and, given that they have played a crucial role in constructing Irish identity, no historian of Irish culture can afford to ignore them.
The reasons why it is worthwhile for Christians to look back on this material are more complex. Clearly, many branches of Christianity consider it part of their agenda to look backwards to their tradition and it is claimed that this process provides alignment and inspiration for them. However, if we leave aside doctrine-based claims for the value of studying the past, there are still two very good reasons for examining earlier generations of Christian believers. Firstly, looking to the past provides us with a genetic understanding of our present: this is where we have come from, this is how we have changed, and these are the factors that have changed us or influenced us. In a historical/traditional religion – and this is what Christianity is, whether it is acknowledged to be so or not, a fact illustrated every time a Christian begins to read the ancient text handed down to them as a ‘Bible’ – not to reflect on that past, that process of transmission of the ideas believed today, is to make absolute the present as the one and only valid form of the religion and to see what is taken as the present position as perfection. Plato said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, the Christian could say that ‘the unexamined tradition is not worth inheriting.’
Secondly, a study of how Christianity in the past was different and how its beliefs have evolved and adapted to cultures can give contemporary Christians a perspective on their believing, and show that the Christian message is far broader, indeed richer, in its dimensions than any one of its expressions within a particular period or culture. The past will have insights worth taking up afresh and warnings of dead-ends to be avoided. Within a traditional religion, innovation usually occurs through prophetic critique, and the variety of Christian experience – much of which is in the distant past – is one of the great resources for such critique. Christianity is, as Karl Rahner (1904-1984) once remarked, always remembering and always forgetting. Indeed, it is in the tension between the present situation and the experience of the churches back to the time of Jesus, that it moves forward with confidence into new situations. If ‘variety is the spice of life’, then the variety of ways in which Christians have imagined their world in the past is one of the great sources of renewing life within the churches.
Lastly, encountering cultures – whether contemporary or in the past – very different from our own, with the consequent demands of making the effort to learn a new cultural language and idiom, expands our minds and humbles our certainties. In a time when we hear of the ‘clash of cultures’ on the one hand, while seeing the effect of globalisation on the other, it is a valuable insight to see just how recent, in the history we see as ‘our own’, many of our cherished assumptions are. The worlds in which we live are human constructions, and it is a form of blind imperialism to think that our world is the only one in which purpose, meaning or happiness can be found.
NOTES
