The Book of Letters of Saint Patrick The Bishop

"Saint Patrick lived more or less in the fifth century; he may have been born in the fourth. None of his dates are certain, and in fact, there are few unassailable truths in our knowledge of his life. The most extraordinary fact about him is that there are two genuine documents by him; these are really remarkable, because they are the only documents to have survived at all from that century in Ireland. The classicist D R Howlett’s edition of The Letters is an erudite and detailed analysis, but they are nonetheless totally perplexing, because they tell us almost nothing we want or expect to hear, and everything they do tell us leaves us with more unanswerable questions than we had in the first place. It seems, from what he himself wrote, that Patrick had infuriated the Romano-British authorities who had sent him to Ireland, and that they tried very hard to get rid of him, in the first instance by accusing him of blasphemy, heresy, pagan practices, misappropriation of church funds and disobeying orders. I suspect they intended to defrock him, and when their accusations did not work they resorted to a second plan of attack, and sent a force of soldiers to smash up a ceremony at which he was giving an entire tribe in the far north of Ireland the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and communion, thus turning them into Christians. The Romano-British troops descended on the tribal capital, killed many of the tribesmen, took their wives and gold for themselves, and sold the survivors as slaves to a pagan tribe in Scotland. It would be hard to imagine a more definite statement of establishment disapproval than that, and it’s tragically apt that Irish Christianity should start with the same sort of internecine warfare as it has gone on enjoying ever since. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes but Saint Patrick’s cultural iconography gives us a heroic figure, a protector, a rebel and an idealist, an educated man with a strong creed and a flair for the dramatic. Does he play a less or more important role, culturally, because the tales of his life are open to interpretation? His legend embodies the grey area between actuality and allegory that takes over where history has holes."