Let's write about Saint Patrick's writings

This blog could probably be a Saint Patrick's Day posting, but maybe I will reblog it on March 17, in 2025. 

Saint Patrick statue located on the campus of the historic Saint Patrick's Church in Newcastle, Maine

This echo section is from a book review's perspective about the growth of Christianity, published by Peter Brown, who critiques Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, a book by Peter Heather. This book is a new history of Christianity, following its transformation over a thousand years from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity.

(I became a little confused about the two "Peters". Peter Brown wrote the review and Peter Heather published the book being reviewed.) The full review is published in The New York Review, May 2024, edition and on line on line here.

In his book, Heather writes a scholarly history about the growth of Christianity, beginning with the battlefield conversion of Constantine, in 312 A.D., at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, where he fought against Western Emperor Maxentius to take his place on the throne. When he was victorious in this battle, he credited the Christian god with his victory.  Writing his review of Heather's book, Peter Brown admits to reading Christendom from cover to cover, but felt like the historical detail upstaged the roots of spiritual Christianity.  

I was impressed by how Peter Brown highlighted the contribution Saint Patrick made to preserving Christianity and supporting the growth of the faith in Ireland and, by extention, to Briton. 

Saint. Patrick of Ireland is one of the world's most popular saints. Apostle of Ireland, born at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in Scotland, in the year 387; died at Saul, Downpatrick, Ireland, 17 March, 461.

Here is what Peter Brown added, about writings by Saint Patrick, to what Peter Heather apparantly forgot to report in Christendom:

"Equally transformative was a figure who has been wrapped for centuries in a veil of false familiarity: Saint Patrick, long known as the Apostle of the Irish. Patricius (as he was called) was a Romanized Briton whose father was a civic worthy and slaveholding landowner. He suddenly springs out at us—as if caught, for a moment, by a vivid flash of lightning—in the ink-black darkness of Britain in the last days of Roman rule, from which few written sources survive. We meet him first in Christendom around 400, as “the last individual known to have been educated by a professional [Latin] grammarian.” His chances of further education in the Roman manner were brutally cut short. Caught in a raid by Irish slave traders, he ended up in the far west of Ireland, in what is now County Mayo, looking out across the immense Atlantic. For all he knew, he had reached the very end of the world. He escaped his master—his account is the only record in ancient literature of the adventures of a runaway slave. Returning to what remained of his kin and country, he shocked them all (good late Romans in their last days) by announcing his intention to return to Ireland and live among the “barbarians” as a Christian preacher. He seems to have succeeded.

"Everything we know about Patricius (except from notoriously unreliable later legends) comes from two documents written in his own hand, perhaps in the 450s: his Confession (not a confession of sin so much as a declaration of his God-given right to act as a bishop in Ireland) and his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus (a swinging rebuke to a fellow Briton and warlord whose slave-raiding expedition in Ireland had swept up newly baptized Irish Christians—possibly during a mass baptismal ceremony—to sell to the heathen Picts of southwestern Scotland). Given the near-total absence of written evidence from Ireland and Britain at this time (and the tantalizing quality of the archaeology of the period, which seems to show unexpected continuities with the Roman past in some regions and complete breakdown in others), Patricius’s Confession and Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus are priceless documents. But perhaps their main significance is that they bear, as it were, an Irish postmark: they were written Hiberione (in Ireland). They are the first extensive works of Latin literature to be composed beyond the frontiers of Rome, in a “barbarian” land. Patricius had achieved his goal: a church of the Irish alone (though partly ministered to by a British clergy), most probably situated in the west of the island.

"How had he done it? We still do not know. Patrician scholarship is littered with hypothetical scenarios.

"What we do know, from Patricius’s repeated (indeed, insistent) presentation of himself in both the Confession and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, adds a missing dimension to Heather’s Christendom. Patricius saw himself, and expected others to see him, as a man “filled with the spirit” in an ancient tradition that reached back to the visionary experiences of Saint Paul. He identified himself so completely with Paul that it is often hard to decide whether he is speaking of the unruly Ireland of his own times or of the riotous cities of Asia Minor in the early days of the Roman Empire as described in the Acts of the Apostles.

"What we know of Patricius from his writings is, in fact, the story of Patricius and the Holy Ghost. It is a dramatic tale. Even when he was a teenager in captivity, the Spirit would “come to the boil” as he prayed a hundred prayers a day. The heat from his devotions shielded him from the cold of a rainswept Irish winter. He was not alone in receiving physical protection from faith: in the late 400s Saint Severinus—like Patricius a wandering stranger—walked barefoot across the frozen Danube. As late as 1958 the distinguished scholar of Sufism Annemarie Schimmel traveled across Anatolia in the depths of winter with a mystic in the act of composing a hymn: “The inner heat of the singing…warmed up the car to such an extent that the windows became fogged.”

"Patricius’s visions continued after his return to Britain and his second journey to Ireland. They have a surreal intensity about them:

"And again I saw Him praying within myself,
And I was as if inside my body,
And I heard over me, that is, over the interior man,
And there He was praying vigorously with groans
and amidst these things I was stupefied and I kept thinking
Who He might be who was praying in me
But at the very end of the prayer thus He spoke out that he was the Holy Spirit.

"It is the language of Saint Paul—“The Spirit helps the weaknesses of our prayer…and intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26)—turned into a gripping picture of the mind.

"Such visions were never random events. Every appearance was a call to action. Each validated a stage in Patricius’s creation of an indigenous church. To envision a church in Western Europe in the 450s, beyond the reach of Rome, was as adventurous a leap across ancient frontiers of the mind—a moving forward of the horizons—as the translation work of his faraway contemporary Mesrop Mashtots.

"Altogether, in Patricius’s Confession and Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus we dig down to find, surprisingly close to the surface, the extensive groundwater of belief in the workings of the spirit lying beneath so many Christian endeavors that defied the prudential calculus of those whose aggregate behavior is so well studied in Heather’s book. There is room in the history of Christendom both for those who “were probably still there…primarily for the beer) as reported by Peter Heather, and for those who were “filled with new wine” (Acts 2:13), with unpredictable results, such as still amaze and delight the historian of every aspect of the triumph of a religion"."

Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, and Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. (June 2024)

Maine Writer-  Many thanks to Peter Brown for reading Peter Heather's historical Christianity from cover to cover! 😀😇📕