Justified True Belief

(●) A British boy sold into Irish slavery who went back as a bishop to the people who had taken him, and left the only personal voice that reaches us from fifth-century Ireland. + Almost everything the world knows about Patrick is later than Patrick. He did not drive the snakes out of Ireland; there were never any snakes in Ireland to drive. He did not teach the Trinity from a shamrock; that story turns up in print for the first time in 1726. He did not light a fire on the hill of Slane in defiance of a high king, or best a company of druids in a contest of miracles. Those are the gift of a seventh-century biographer and the centuries that followed him, and they have buried the man they were meant to honour. What Patrick actually left is two short letters in rough Latin, written by an old man who kept apologising for his bad grammar. One, which he called his Confession, is a defence of his life, addressed to churchmen back in Britain who had decided he was a fraud. The other, the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, is a furious open letter to the soldiers of a Christian warlord who had raided his converts. Between them they run to about the length of a magazine article, and they are the earliest surviving writing from Ireland, among the earliest that survives from the hand of any Briton, and the only first-person account the ancient world has left of a Christian mission carried out beyond the frontier of the Roman Empire. Nothing else like them exists from that century. His dates are another matter, and they are worth being honest about at the start. Not one ancient source records the year he was born; the figure at the front of his name is worked backwards from the year of his death on the assumption that he reached old age, which he says he did. The year of his death is recorded twice, which is where the trouble starts. The Irish annals, the year-by-year chronicles that monastic houses kept and copied into one another for centuries, enter his death once around 461 and again at 493, thirty-two years apart, and scholars have spent a century arguing about which entry belongs to him, or whether the two belong to two different men. The familiar 432 for his arrival in Ireland is annalists’ arithmetic rather than anybody’s memory. So every date in the chapters below is a convention that historians use to keep the story in order, and not one of them is a record. Where a date matters to the argument, the reason for it is given.

(●) c. 385 AD: Born in Roman Britain into a family of clergy, and by his own account he believed none of it. + He opens his own book with his family. "My father was Calpurnius, a deacon, one of the sons of Potitus, a presbyter, who belonged to the village of Banavem Taberniae. Now he had a small farm hard by, where I was taken captive." A deacon and a presbyter, which is to say an ordained assistant and a priest: two generations of clergy in the house, and in a century when the rule of celibacy for parish clergy in the West was still an aspiration rather than a fact, nobody found that odd enough to explain. In the letter to Coroticus he adds one more detail about his father, and it is a detail about money: Calpurnius was a decurio, a town councillor. Decurions were the local gentry of the Roman world, the men a city council drafted to collect its taxes and to make up any shortfall out of their own pockets. It was a position of rank that people by then spent a good deal of effort trying to get out of. So the boy had land, standing, and a church on both sides of the family, and none of it took. He says so twice and without softening it. "I knew not the true God." And later, remembering himself at about fifteen: "I did not believe in the living God, nor had I since my infancy." Nobody knows where Banavem Taberniae was. The name occurs in Patrick and nowhere else, the manuscripts spell it several ways, and proposals have been made from the Severn estuary to the Solway Firth and the Roman wall. Somewhere in western Britain, near enough to the sea for Irish ships to reach it, is as far as the evidence goes. The year is a further guess. Working back from a death in the early 460s, with his own statement that he was about sixteen when he was taken and that he wrote the Confession as an old man, puts his birth somewhere in the 380s, and c. 385 is the figure usually printed.

(●) c. 401 AD: Irish raiders took him at about sixteen and sold him to herd flocks. + The raid came off the sea, and it was not a raid on Patrick. "I was then about sixteen years of age," he writes, and he went into captivity "with many thousands of persons." Whole households went: in the letter to Coroticus he mentions, in passing and without self-pity, the menservants and maidservants of his father’s house, of whom the same raiders made havoc. Britain in those years was a province whose garrison was thinning out, and the Irish, whom Latin writers of the time call the Scotti (the name travelled to Scotland later, with Irish settlers), were taking what the thinning garrison could no longer hold. For six years he herded animals for a master he never names, in a place he never names. Muirchú, writing more than two hundred years afterwards, sets the captivity at Slemish in County Antrim, and Tírechán puts it elsewhere; both are guesses, and Patrick’s own text says only that he prayed in the woods and on the mountain. What he does describe, in the one long passage of the Confession that anybody quotes for pleasure, is weather: the frost before dawn, the rain, the snow, and a boy getting up in all three to pray a hundred times before the day began and nearly as many after dark. There is a hard sentence in his account of the raid that a modern reader is likely to trip over. He says the captives were carried off "according to our deserts, because we departed away from God, and kept not his commandments." He is not excusing the slavers; the whole of his later life was spent undoing what men like them did. He is reading his own nation’s disaster the way the Old Testament prophets read Israel’s, as a judgment that the sufferers had a share in earning, and he includes himself in it first.

(●) c. 407 AD: A voice in his sleep sent him two hundred miles to a ship, and he walked out of slavery. + "Lo, thy ship is ready." That is all he was told, and he had no idea where the ship was. "And it was not near at hand, but was distant perhaps two hundred miles. And I had never been there, nor did I know any one there." An escaped slave crossing two hundred miles of a country he had entered in a hold, among people whose law had no place for him, is the sort of thing that ends badly; he says only that nothing alarmed him until he reached the ship. The shipmaster took one look and refused him. Patrick turned back toward the hut where he was lodging, praying as he went, and before the prayer was finished one of the crew was shouting down the road after him to come quickly. What he says next is the most surprising line in the escape: the sailors told him to make friends with them in any way he wished, and he refused the pagan token that would have sealed it, "because of the fear of God," and sailed with them anyway hoping some of them might come to Christ. He was perhaps twenty-two, he had nothing, and he was still setting terms. Then the voyage turns strange, and it is the one stretch of his life that Patrick tells as a story. Three days at sea brought them to land. What followed was twenty-eight days on foot through empty country with the food gone, the crew starving, and the shipmaster rounding on the one man in the company who had claimed to have a God: "How is this, O Christian? thou sayest that thy God is great and almighty; wherefore then canst thou not pray for us, for we are in danger of starvation?" Patrick told them to turn to God and ask. A herd of pigs came down the road. The men ate, the dogs ate, and the crew rendered hearty thanks to God. Two refusals sit inside that rescue, and they are the same refusal twice. Someone offered him wild honey with the words "This is offered in sacrifice," and he would not touch it, the same refusal he had already made over the sailors’ pagan token before they put to sea, except that this time he was starving. Then, on one of those nights, something fell on him in his sleep like a huge rock, so that he could not move a limb, and he shouted a name until the sun came up and the weight went off him. The name was Helias. It is the prophet Elijah, and it is also the Greek word for the sun, and which of the two he had in mind, pinned in the dark and half awake, he never says. Years later, preaching to a people who worshipped the sun, he would take some trouble to keep the two apart (T3). Afterwards he was taken again, briefly, and held sixty nights. Then, at last, Britain, and a family who received him as a son and begged him never to go anywhere again.

(●) c. 420s AD: A letter read in a dream, headed "The Voice of the Irish," called him back to the country that had enslaved him. + He was home, safe, and wanted. Then he dreamed of a man named Victoricus coming from Ireland with letters past counting, who handed him one, and he read the opening words: "The Voice of the Irish." While he was reading he thought he heard them, all together, from the wood of Foclut beside the western sea: "We beseech thee, holy youth, to come and walk among us once more." He writes that he was so broken in heart he could not read on, and woke up. Nothing happened quickly after that. His schooling had stopped at sixteen and he knew it, and he spent the rest of his life embarrassed about his Latin: he calls himself unlearned again and again, and explains that his own speech had to be translated into a tongue that was not his. Somewhere in those years he was ordained deacon, and later, over real opposition, made a bishop. "Not a few of my elders" tried to stop him, and he reports what they said behind his back with no malice at all, because he thought they meant it kindly: "Why does this fellow thrust himself into danger amongst hostile people who know not God?" They were not wrong about the danger.

(●) c. 430s AD: He crossed as a bishop, baptized thousands, and ordained Irish clergy to carry it on without him. + One firm date stands in this stretch of the story, and it does not belong to Patrick. Prosper of Aquitaine, a contemporary chronicler in Gaul, records under the year 431 that Pope Celestine ordained Palladius and sent him "as first bishop to the Irish believing in Christ." Two things follow from that single sentence. There were already Christians in Ireland in 431, before Patrick or Palladius set foot there, so no missionary is the first. And Patrick, who tells us a great deal about himself, never mentions Palladius, never mentions Celestine, and never claims a commission from Rome; in the letter to Coroticus he says simply, "I confess that I am a bishop, appointed by God, in Ireland." The famous 432 for Patrick’s arrival was produced by later Irish annalists, who set his mission to begin the year after the one fixed date they had, and it is arithmetic rather than memory. Of the crossing itself he says nothing at all, which is the first thing to get used to about him. He never describes a journey, a landing, a first convert or a first church. What he gives instead is a set of totals and a method. The totals: many thousands baptized, whom he calls his brethren and his sons; clergy ordained everywhere, for a people he describes as newly come to belief. The method is the part that mattered after he was gone. Those ordinations happened on the spot, everywhere he went, and the one priest he describes anywhere is a man he says he had taught from infancy. He never states outright that his clergy were Irishmen rather than imports from Britain, but what he describes is a church built to go on growing when the man who planted it was dead. He also went further out, by his own account, than anyone had gone before him. He describes travelling for his converts’ sake "through many perils, even to outlying regions beyond which no man dwelt, and where never had any one come to baptize, or ordain clergy, or confirm the people." A modern reader should hear that as a working itinerary rather than a flourish. Ireland in the fifth century had no towns, no roads in the Roman sense, and no single authority; it had something like a hundred and fifty small kingdoms, and a foreign bishop moving between them was at the mercy of whichever king he had last paid. He counts twelve separate perils in which he says his life was endangered, adds that there were many plots besides which he cannot find words for, and describes the ordinary state of his mind in a sentence that is hard to read quickly: every day he expected slaughter, or to be cheated, or to be made a slave again.

(●) c. 440s AD: His own elders put him on trial over a sin he had committed at about fifteen. + Thirty years earlier, before he was even a deacon, a young Patrick had been carrying something heavy. "Because of anxiety, with sorrowful mind, I disclosed to my dearest friend things that I had done in my youth one day, nay, in one hour." He thinks he was about fifteen when he did it. He never says what it was, and nobody since has found out, though the guesses have been running for fifteen hundred years. Thirty years on, the British clergy produced it against him. They had heard it from his dearest friend. And the detail that makes the passage hurt to read is that the same man had told Patrick to his face, "Lo, thou art to be raised to the rank of bishop," and had defended him in his absence before the quarrel began. What Patrick cannot work out is how it occurred to the same man "afterwards to put me to shame publicly before every one, good and bad." This is the wound the Confession was written to answer, and knowing that changes how the whole document reads. It is not a memoir. It is a defence, composed in old age for a church across the water that had decided an unlettered bishop out at the edge of the world was probably an opportunist and possibly a liar, and every boast in it about thousands baptized is there because his right to baptize them was under question. What he does with the men who accused him is the measure of him: "I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge as sin."

(●) c. 450s AD: British raiders butchered his newly baptized, and he wrote them out of the church. + They came the day after a baptism. In the old rite the newly baptized were clothed in white and anointed with scented oil on the forehead, and they wore the white for the week that followed; Patrick says the oil was still fragrant on their foreheads when the swords came down. Some were killed on the spot. The rest were carried off to be sold, and the buyers he names are the Picts, whom he calls apostates, a word that means they had once been Christian. The raiders were not pagans. They were the soldiers of Coroticus, a British Christian king, most probably the Ceretic who ruled at Alt Clut, the rock of Dumbarton on the Clyde, in what is now Scotland. Patrick first tried the quiet route: he sent a priest he had taught from childhood, with clergy in company, carrying a letter and a request that some of the plunder and some of the baptized captives be given back. "They jeered at them." So he wrote the second letter, the one that survives, and he wrote it to be read aloud in public and in Coroticus’ own hearing. It declares the raiders cut off from the church: no Christian is to pay them court, to take food or drink with them, or to accept their alms, until they do sore penance and set the captives free. He knew exactly how thin his authority was, an unlettered foreigner disciplining a king’s war band across the sea, and he used it anyway. Nothing else of the kind survives from the century: a bishop excommunicating Christian slave raiders by name, on behalf of slaves, having been one himself.

(●) c. 461 AD: He died in Ireland, and the annals enter his death twice, thirty-two years apart. + He had wanted to go home. He says so, and then says why he will not: he longed to see Britain and his kindred again, and to get as far as Gaul to see the brethren there, and he stayed because he judged that leaving would count against him. "And this is my confession before I die." Where he died, and when, nobody wrote down at the time. The tradition that buries him at Downpatrick is centuries later, and the feast on 17 March is attested in the Irish calendars of saints from about 800, which fix the day and say nothing about the year. The trouble is the Irish annals, which record his death twice, and a man dies once. The earlier of the two comes in a pair of notices a few years apart: at 457 they bury Patrick the elder, which is the sort of label a compiler reaches for when he knows of more than one man by the name, and at 461 they note only that here some record the repose of Patrick. The later entry, at 492 or 493, is for Patrick the arch-apostle of the Irish, dead at a hundred and twenty. Thirty-two years lie between them, and every reconstruction of his life is really a decision about what to do with that gap. Three answers have had their turn. J. B. Bury took the earlier pair, 432 to 461, and generations of handbooks followed him. Then, in 1942, T. F. O’Rahilly drew the conclusion the wording invites and proposed two Patricks: Palladius, renamed in Irish memory, dying about 461, and the Briton who wrote the Confession dying about thirty years later. James Carney argued instead for one man, with the later dates, roughly 457 to 493. Recent work has tended to pull the whole career later into the fifth century, and there is still no settled answer. None of that argument touches the two letters, and the letters are the ground worth standing on. They were written by a Briton whose education stopped early, about a mission in a country outside the empire where a British warlord could still raid at will. They also carry a clock inside them, because a man quotes the Bible he happens to own. Patrick’s Old Testament comes from the Old Latin, the patchwork of older Latin translations that western churches had been reading for well over two hundred years, while his Gospel text shows that Jerome’s newer version, the Vulgate, made in Rome generations before and still spreading from church to church, had already reached his desk. That is a fifth-century document whichever decade it belongs to, and it is the one thing in the whole Patrick question that nobody disputes.

What He Taught

(T1) God found him in slavery, and a boy who had never prayed came out of it praying a hundred times a day. + People are usually converted by something: a book, a preacher, an argument, a friend who would not drop the subject. Patrick had none of those. He had sheep, weather, and six years. That is the whole of his account, and he tells it without dressing it up. He grew up around clergy and did not believe; he was stolen, and out in the open country the belief arrived. "And there the Lord opened the understanding of my unbelief." He puts it more plainly still a few lines on, with the only image in his writing that anyone remembers: "before I was afflicted I was like a stone lying in the deep mire; and he that is mighty came, and in his mercy lifted me up." A stone in mud does not climb out. It is lifted, or it stays. Notice what he does not say, because it would be easy to say and he does not. He never calls the raid a good thing. He never tells the reader that his captivity was a blessing in disguise, or that God arranged for a boy to be sold so that a nation could be saved. He says he deserved chastening, that God used the years, and that the men who took him were doing evil; and when raiders of the same trade came for his own converts forty years later he called them citizens of demons and cut them off from the church. Both halves are in the same short book, and he never tries to reconcile them, which is the mark of a man reporting rather than theorising.

(Q) "And before daybreak I used to be roused to prayer, in snow, in frost, in rain; and I felt no hurt; nor was there any sluggishness in me, as I now see, because then the spirit was fervent within me." + Source: Patrick, Confession 16 (White’s translation). He is describing his years as a slave, and the sentence just before this one is where the hundred prayers a day come from. Forty years later, writing as a bishop, he looks back at that boy with something like envy (T1).

(T2) The gospel is owed to the people at the far end of the map, and the map ended in Ireland. + Think of a map with a road network drawn on it and a hard line at the edge of the paper. Everything inside the line has milestones, magistrates, tax collectors, and bishops; it also has roads, which is how the church had spread for four hundred years, following the traffic. Ireland was outside the line. No legion had ever crossed to it, no Roman town was built on it, and Latin was not spoken there. When Patrick says he went to "outlying regions beyond which no man dwelt, and where never had any one come to baptize," he means it geographically, and he is the first Christian we can read who went out past the edge on purpose and wrote down why. The why is a set of texts he quotes so often that you can watch him reasoning with them. He quotes the command to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19–20). He quotes the promise that the gospel will be proclaimed in the whole world "as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14). He quotes the word to the servant, "I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth" (Acts 13:47), and he takes "the ends of the earth" as an address rather than a figure of speech. If all nations means all nations, then somebody has to go to the one at the end, and there was nobody else offering. What came of it he reports with obvious delight and no attempt at a total: thousands baptized, clergy ordained in places that had never seen a cleric, and the children of Irish chieftains becoming monks and nuns against their fathers’ wishes. He singles out one young noblewoman he had baptized who came back a few days later to say that an angel had told her to become a virgin of Christ, which meant a life vowed to celibacy and prayer instead of the marriage her family would have arranged, and who took up that life six days after, and in the same breath he turns to the enslaved women among his converts, who he says suffer most and are threatened for their faith. He had been property himself. He knew who was paying the highest price.

(Q) "And accordingly, as we see, this has been so fulfilled. Behold, we are witnesses that the Gospel has been preached to the limit beyond which no man dwells." + Source: Patrick, Confession 34 (White’s translation). He has just quoted the promise that the gospel would be preached to all nations before the end, and he is claiming, from the western coast of Ireland, that he has personally reached the far end of the list (T2). The confidence in that sentence is also the mistake: he had taken the edge of the known world for the edge of the world.

(T3) The God he carried to Ireland is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he says so before he says anything else. + Four short paragraphs into a book about his own life, Patrick stops the story and recites a creed. It is a strange thing to do in a memoir and a natural thing to do in a defence: he is a bishop under suspicion, and the first question about any bishop is what he believes. What he recites is what the church of the fourth century called the rule of faith, the short summary of Christian belief that a convert learned before baptism and a teacher was measured against. Patrick’s version has the Father unbegotten and without beginning; the Son who "always existed with the Father before the creation of the world," made man, risen, coming to judge; and the Holy Spirit poured out, making believers children of God and joint heirs with Christ. He closes it by confessing all three as one God. He had said the same thing in one phrase a few pages later: he means to define doctrine "according to the rule of faith, in the Trinity." Two things stand out in how he says it, and the first is what is missing. He is writing more than a century after the Council of Nicaea, the gathering of bishops in 325 that had to settle how the church would speak about the Son. Out of that council came a Greek watchword, homoousios, "of one substance with the Father," a single word that had gone on to split the eastern church in two. Patrick uses none of that vocabulary. His creed is built out of Scripture instead, phrase by phrase, and it lands exactly where the council landed. Whether he had ever heard of the quarrel, nobody can say. What is clear is that he did not need the council’s word to confess what the council was defending. The second is that none of this was an academic exercise for him. He was preaching in a country where the sun was worshipped, and one of the closing paragraphs of the Confession turns on exactly that: the sun we see rises every day by God’s command and will one day stop, and those who worship it come to grief, while Christ the true Sun will never perish. A doctrine of God was the first thing his converts needed, and it was the first thing he gave them.

(Q) "Because there is no other God, nor was there ever any in times past, nor shall there be hereafter, except God the Father unbegotten, without beginning, from whom all things take their beginning ... and his Son Jesus Christ, whom we affirm verily to have always existed with the Father before the creation of the world." + Source: Patrick, Confession 4 (White’s translation); the omitted words are a phrase on God as holder of all things, which White glosses "Almighty". The paragraph runs on through the Son’s incarnation, resurrection and return, and the gift of the Spirit, and ends: "whom we confess and adore as one God in the Trinity of the Holy Name" (T3).

(T4) A baptized Christian is not plunder, and the raider who sells one is no fellow citizen but a citizen of demons. + Slavery was not an argument in the fifth century. It was furniture. Every society around the Irish Sea had slaves, the law of the empire assumed them, and raiding for them was an ordinary way for a coastal king to fund a war band. Patrick had been the cargo, and he says so without embarrassment in the same letter: born free, son of a councillor, and he sold his rank, "in short, I am a slave in Christ to a foreign nation." What he does in the letter to Coroticus is not a treatise, and a modern reader is likely to want one. You might think that a man who had been sold himself, and who now held a bishop’s authority, would use it to condemn the owning of human beings outright. He never does. Somebody else in that century did: Gregory of Nyssa preached against slavery as such in the 370s, and his sermon reaches further in principle than anything Patrick wrote. Patrick is doing something else, and it is the thing bishops are for. He takes the one instrument he has, which is the church’s table, and he shuts it. Excommunication in its plain sense is exclusion from communion: the raiders may not receive the bread and wine, and Christians may not eat with them, drink with them, or take their charity, until they repent and give the captives back. He calls Coroticus by name and his men by their trade, tells them they have handed over the members of Christ to a brothel, and asks what hope in God a man like that imagines he has. He is standing on ground the New Testament had already marked out. The list of the lawless in 1 Timothy 1:9–10 puts enslavers in company with murderers, liars and perjurers, and Paul had sent a runaway slave back to his owner as "no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). What is new in Patrick is not the principle but the act: a named raid, a named king, a formal sentence, and a bishop with almost no standing spending what little he had on people nobody else was going to speak for.

(Q) "I do not say to my fellow-citizens or to the fellow-citizens of the holy Romans, but to those who are fellow-citizens of demons because of their evil deeds. Behaving like enemies, they are dead while they live, allies of the Scots and apostate Picts, as though wishing to gorge themselves with blood, the blood of innocent Christians, whom I in countless numbers begot to God and confirmed in Christ." + Source: Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 2 (White’s translation). The opening of the letter, naming its recipients. To call a Christian king’s soldiers citizens of demons rather than citizens of Rome is to strip them of the two identities they would have claimed, and he does it in the second sentence (T4). "Begot" is Paul’s word for converts he had brought to faith: "I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (1 Corinthians 4:15).

(T5) The man who baptized thousands would not take a penny from any of them. + Devout women used to bring him small gifts, and sometimes they would take off their own ornaments and lay them on the altar. He gave them back. He notes, with what reads like genuine regret, that this offended the women, and then explains himself: he would not give anybody outside the church the smallest excuse to say that the foreign holy man was in it for the jewellery. He keeps a ledger in public, and the entries are specific. Did he ever take so much as half a scruple, the smallest weight of money the Roman world reckoned in, from the thousands he baptized? Tell him, and he will pay it back. Did he ever charge one of the clergy he ordained the price of his own shoe? Let it be said against him and he will repay more. Money moved the other way, all of it. He made presents to local kings, and paid wages to their sons, who travelled with him as an escort, because a stranger crossing a frontier between one Irish kingdom and the next needed protection he could not provide for himself. He reckons he paid out to the local judges "not less than the price of fifteen men," fifteen slaves, the going rate for a human being used as a unit of currency. It did not always work: he was seized with his companions, robbed of everything, and kept in irons for a fortnight, expecting to be killed. There is a small, sharp irony in all of this, and he never points it out. Patrick paid, in the coin of enslaved people, for the freedom to go on telling enslaved people that they belonged to God.

(Q) "Or when the Lord ordained clergy everywhere by means of my mediocrity, and I imparted my service to them for nothing, if I demanded from one of them even the price of my shoe; tell it against me and I shall restore you more." + Source: Patrick, Confession 50 (White’s translation). The challenge is borrowed from Samuel, who stood before Israel at the end of his life and dared anyone to name an ox he had taken (1 Samuel 12:3). Patrick is answering the charge that he had gone to Ireland to get rich (T5).

(Q) "But judge ye, and let it be most truly believed that it was the gift of God. And this is my confession before I die." + Source: Patrick, Confession 62 (White’s translation), the last words of the book. He has spent sixty-two short paragraphs insisting that he is unlearned, unworthy and out of his depth, and he ends by asking his readers to conclude the one thing that follows from all of it: whatever was accomplished in Ireland, he did not supply it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His two letters hang on eight manuscripts in all, and one broken thread would have left only the legends. + Set beside his contemporaries, Patrick is a poor writer, and he is the first to say so. Augustine was finishing the City of God at about the time Patrick was learning his letters over again; Jerome had the best Latin of the age; Leo of Rome wrote prose that is still quoted for its shape. Patrick apologises. He calls himself unlearned, rustic, a man whose speech had to be translated out of his own tongue, and a reader who knows the period can hear the interrupted schooling in every sentence. That awkwardness is exactly why the letters are worth what they are worth. Nobody polished them, nobody wrote them for a library, and a forger imitating a saint would never have produced them. They preserve a fifth-century Bible caught in mid-change, an Old Testament in the Old Latin version that Jerome’s new translation was in the middle of displacing, and a Gospel text showing that Jerome’s revision had reached Patrick’s desk. They preserve a Britain still calling itself Roman and a Britain whose Christian kings raided for slaves. And they preserve, uniquely, what a missionary outside the empire actually thought he was doing, in his own first person, with the self-doubt left in. They survived by a thread. Eight manuscripts carry the Confession: the Book of Armagh and seven later copies scattered between France and England, at Paris, Rouen, Arras, London, Salisbury and Oxford. The oldest is the Book of Armagh, copied at Armagh in 807 by a scribe named Ferdomnach for Torbach, the abbot, and its text of the Confession is abridged; the letter to Coroticus is not in it at all, and the oldest surviving copy of the letter is a tenth-century book now in Paris. One line of transmission failing, and the apostle of Ireland would be a figure known entirely from legends.

(†) The church he worked in became, within two generations, a church that sent missionaries instead of receiving them. + The turn is the surprising part. Christianity had always travelled along Roman roads and settled in Roman towns, and the usual pattern for a newly converted people on the far side of a frontier was to receive clergy from inside the empire for a long time. Ireland did the opposite, and quickly. By the sixth century it had monastic schools of its own at Clonard and Bangor, and what came out of them did not stay home. In 563 Columba crossed to Iona, a small island off the western coast of Scotland, and from there began the conversion of the Picts and of the Irish of Dalriada. Around 590 Columbanus left Bangor for Gaul with twelve companions, founded Luxeuil, quarrelled with Frankish kings and with Rome about the date of Easter, and died far south of all of it at Bobbio in the Apennines. In 635 Aidan came from Iona to Lindisfarne at the invitation of a Northumbrian king, so that the north of England was evangelised out of an Irish monastery. And along the way, in monastery writing rooms at the edge of the world, Irish scribes copied Latin literature that had nowhere else to be copied. How much of that belongs to Patrick is a fair question, and the honest answer is: some of it, and not all of it. He was not the only missionary, as he would have been the first to insist. Palladius was sent in 431, and the annals have three more bishops, Secundinus, Auxilius and Iserninus, sent to Ireland in 439. There were Christians in Ireland before any of them. The monastic pattern that made the Irish church what it became took shape after his lifetime, and its founders were not his pupils. What is certainly his is the decision, the argument for it, and the record. He reasoned from the Great Commission, the risen Christ’s closing order to his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations (T2), down to one particular people outside the empire, and then he went; he ordained clergy locally rather than importing them, which is what let the thing keep growing when he was gone; and he wrote it down, so that later Irish Christians who wanted to know who they were had a document to start from. The popular claim that Irish monks single-handedly saved Western civilisation goes well past the evidence. That a people converted at the edge of the world turned around inside a century and went back across it as missionaries is not an overstatement. It happened.

(†) Armagh made him a national founder, and the seventh-century Lives gave him the miracles he never claimed. + For two hundred years after his death almost nothing about Patrick was written. Then, in the 670s and 680s, two churchmen took him up at once. Tírechán compiled a survey of churches across the midlands and the north that claimed Patrick as founder. Muirchú wrote a Life, and it is Muirchú who gave the world the Patrick it knows: the paschal fire, the fire a bishop kindles on the eve of Easter, lit on the hill of Slane in the teeth of a royal ban, the high king Lóegaire at Tara watching a flame he had forbidden, the contest with the king’s druids, the miracles. It is splendid storytelling. It is also two centuries after the fact and none of it is in Patrick, who records not one miracle of his own. Both men were writing for Armagh, and Armagh had an interest. Bound with them in the Book of Armagh is a short document called the Liber Angeli, the Book of the Angel, in which an angel grants Armagh authority over all the churches of Ireland on the ground that it is Patrick’s own see, the church where a bishop has his seat and from which he governs the churches around it. Patrick never names Armagh. He never names any see at all, never mentions Rome, and describes himself simply as a bishop in Ireland appointed by God. A national apostle with a single founding church was useful to the seventh century in a way it had not been to the fifth, and the Lives supplied him. The rest arrived later and more cheerfully. The snakes are first driven out by Jocelin of Furness around 1185; Ireland has had no snakes since the last ice age, which the medieval reader did not know and the modern one usually does. The shamrock reaches print in 1726, when the botanist Caleb Threlkeld records it as a current tradition. The lorica known as the Deer’s Cry, with its "Christ with me, Christ before me," is a genuinely ancient Irish poem. A lorica is a prayer named after a piece of armour: the word is the Latin for the breastplate a soldier buckled on, and the prayer asks God to be that around the man who prays it. The Deer’s Cry is a fine one, and the language of it puts it centuries after Patrick; the version most people can sing is Cecil Frances Alexander’s verse rendering of 1889. None of it is his. All of it is evidence of how much the church of a small island wanted a founder it could see.

(†) Where his own record is open to question: the weight he put on dreams, and the ending he thought had arrived. + The ledger has another column, and Patrick’s own writings supply it. Two entries, and neither is the one a modern reader expects. He is not harsh, not grasping, and not a self-promoter; the charges he actually has to answer come from inside his own pages. - He steered his life by dreams. Nearly every turn in the story is decided by something heard in sleep, or by what he calls the answer of God, a voice that speaks and settles the matter. "Lo, thy ship is ready" sent him across Ireland. The letter headed "The Voice of the Irish" sent him back. On the night his elders rejected him he was consoled by a vision, and he reports it to his accusers as though it were evidence, which for him it was. The category is biblical: Paul saw a man of Macedonia in the night and set out for Macedonia at once (Acts 16:9–10). But Scripture puts a rule beside the category. "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1), and Paul’s own instruction to a church that valued prophecy was to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21). Patrick does test his, after a fashion; every vision he reports is described in the words of Scripture, and none of them ever tells him to do anything the Bible does not already command. Christians have differed ever since about how much traffic of this kind is healthy, and he sits at the far end of the range where the traffic is heavy. - He thought the end had come, because he had run out of land. His reasoning is easy to follow and it is wrong at one joint. The Lord said the gospel would be preached to all nations and then the end would come. Ireland is the last nation, because past the western sea there is nothing. Therefore the promise is fulfilled, and these are the last days. The second step is the trouble: Patrick took the edge of the known world for the edge of the world, and a continent he had never heard of was going about its business while he wrote. The wider caution is the Lord’s own, given to the disciples when they asked this exact question: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts 1:7; compare Mark 13:32). What was right in it survived the error. He worked as though there were no time left, which is what he had in fact been told to do.