Splendour of Fire, Speed of Lightning

A meander around St Patrick

Saint Patrick of Ireland, by Aidan Hart.

I am away this week, and have not had the time to put together a Sunday Pilgrimage entry for you. Apologies: I promise that we will return to our wanderings through Christian England next week.

Instead, since tomorrow is St Patrick’s Day, here is an article I wrote here three years ago, about Ireland’s patron saint and his continuing presence in this land. Some of you may appreciate reading it again - and new readers, for the first time.

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Today is St Patrick’s Day. It’s a national holiday here in Ireland, during which there is a lot of drinking and parading and the wearing of green leprechaun hats. I’m too old for that sort of thing, and the leprechaun hats don’t suit me anyway. Instead, this morning I was in church listening to two Irish friends singing an old hymn about the saint they learned at school, in harmony with a Romanian nun. It’s an experience I recommend. This evening, I’ve been sitting by the fire reading about St Patrick. Now I want to write something impulsive about the saint. I think he has something still to say to us.

I’m not Irish, I know: but then, neither was he.

In fact, Patrick - Patricius to his friends - was British like me, and like me he grew up in a time of imperial decline, though he had no idea how quickly the empire of which he was a subject would collapse, and all its assumptions drain away. Patricius was a British subject of imperial Rome, born around the year 400 into a middle class family, and trained for comfort and success. All of that went out of the window when, at the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish slave traders and sold to a petty king named Miliucc, who sent him out to the hills to work as a lone shepherd.

Frightened, lonely and confused, a child in an alien land with no help, family or friends, Patrick did what a lot of people do under similar circumstances: despite being a self-declared atheist, he started praying.

The most entrancing and readable account of Patrick’s life I’ve come across is in Thomas Cahill’s excellent book How The Irish Saved Civilisation. Here he explains the end result of Patrick’s time alone in the hills, with only sheep and God for company:

Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become - a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any rigid separation between this world and the next. On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in sleep his first otherworld experience. A mysterious voice said to him: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home.”

Patrick did indeed get back to his family in Britain, but nothing was the same. He had met God, and they didn’t understand him any more. Patrick took himself to Gaul for a theological education, and after being made a Bishop, he was sent to spread the Christian message to the pagan kings of Ireland, as the first Christian missionary since St Paul, 400 years before.

Patrick’s time in Ireland, in Cahill’s telling, was transformative, and not just for this country. He converted the warring tribal kings to the Christian faith, and thousands of their people too, and he did it not with force (one former slave versus a nation of battle-hardened warrior kings would not have been a fair contest) but with love. ‘His love for his adopted people shines through his writings’, writes Cahill. Indeed, Patrick, after a while, went native. When he travelled back to Britain later in life to plead for some of his converts who had been taken in slavery by British pirates, his former countrymen no longer trusted him as one of their own.

Patrick’s greatest achievement in Ireland, in his lifetime at least, may have been the abolition of slavery, a cause about which he was understandably passionate, and for which he made a radical Christian case. Cahill calls him ‘the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery’:

He worries constantly for his people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror of slavery was never lost on him: “But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most - and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorising they must endure. the Lord gives grace to his handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone.” Patrick has become an Irishman, a man who can give far more credibility to a woman’s strength and fortitude than could any classically educated man.

During his lifetime, Patrick was unknown outside Ireland. He lived around the time of St Augustine, the great influencer of the Christian West, but his understanding of his faith, suggests Cahill, was quite different:

Patrick’s emotional grasp of Christian truth may have been greater than Augustine’s. Augustine looked into his own heart and found there the inexpressible anguish of each individual, which enabled him to articulate a theory of sin that has no equal - the dark side of Christianity. Patrick prayed, made peace with God, and then looked not only into his own heart but into the hearts of others. What he saw convinced him of the bright side - that even slave traders can turn into liberators, even murderers can act as peacemakers, even barbarians can take their place among the nobility of heaven.

What made Patrick this way? Ireland. There is something special, something unique, about Irish spirituality, and especially about the early centuries of the Christian faith here. During the first five centuries of Irish Christianity, over 200 saints emerged from this tiny island. For comparison, the next ten centuries produced just three.

The shape that Christianity took in Ireland is not the same shape it took amongst civilised Roman Christians like Augustine. It was not the shape of which Popes approved. It was wilder in some strange way: embedded in the land and emerging from it in a shape that was in no way a betrayal of its teachings, but was in no way either a mirror of the civilised, imperial centre.

Irish Christianity today - despite its centuries of centralisation by a Rome that still behaves like an empire, despite its great diminishment, despite its scandals and collapses - despite all of this, away from the centre, out in the mountains and the fields, it still lives. I feel it every time I go out. Anyone can. It lives on Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s holy mountain, up which people still walk barefoot every year on the same day:

It lives in the wells in remote fields, and in the ruined chapels and blasted skelligs, and on the holy islands with broken towers, abandoned for centuries by people but perhaps not by the Spirit:

It lives in the the caves that saints once slept in, around which some power still hovers:

It lives in the land. It is waiting for something. I don’t know what.

But it is patient. It is patient like Patricius was. He left us an island whose monks, as Cahill demonstrates, took into themselves, copied and kept alive all of classical and Christian learning in the face of barbarian fires. He left us a leafy, wet, strange and magical Christianity, entwined with the spirit of this Atlantic island.

And he left us a hymn, a song which to me speaks of the mystic, green spirit of true Irish - and British - Christianity still. St Patrick’s Breastplate, they call it; or sometimes The Deer’s Cry. It is a prayer, an incantation, a chant, a spell. Sixteen centuries later - well, it is still quite something. Try speaking it aloud to yourself, and then see what power swirls around you.

I arise today 
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.