| #### 5. ST. PATRICK AND THE CONVERSION OF THE IRISH |

| #### #### The century in which the central government in the West collapsed, and whose close saw barbarian kings ruling in all the old provinces, was not the most favourable time for propaganda and expansion. Western Catholicism might be thought fortunate, if, amid the new chaos, it contrived to hold what it had already gained. In two respects, however, it did more than this. It converted the Irish and it produced the Benedictine rule, thereby preparing all-unconsciously two of the chief instruments for the future Catholicising of the Western peoples and for the restoration of letters and thought when, after a century yet more barbarian than the fifth, they seemed about to perish entirely from continental Europe. #### The agent of the conversion of the Irish was St. Patrick-about whose life we know so much and so little. He was born, where exactly no one knows and all the authorities dispute, somewhere in Britain towards the close of the fourth century. Maximus, the commander of the legions in Britain, had lately crossed with them to the continent to dispute successfully with Gratian the sovereignty of the West, and, more recently still, he had in his turn been defeated and destroyed by Theodosius (388). These were years in which Britain was increasingly the objective of pirate raids from the coasts of Germany and from Ireland, and in one such raid Patrick, a lad of sixteen, was captured by the Irish and sold into slavery. In Ireland he remained for six years, a slave shepherding his master's sheep, and in the long nights of vigil discovering the joys of union with God in prayer. In a vision or dream he was bidden to make his escape, and after an adventurous journey across the whole length of the country, and a sea voyage on a pirate ship, he came to south-western Gaul-then in the throes of the struggle between contending Roman armies. The interval of eighteen years between this escape and the saint's return to Ireland in 432, as a bishop commissioned to preach the faith, he employed in preparation for the work to which already he knew himself divinely called. In Italy, or in Gaul, he embraced the monastic life and, like many another, wandered from one centre to another always seeking yet better teaching. Amongst other places Lerins, then in the glory of its first beginnings under St. Honoratus, almost certainly knew him, and Marmoutier too where the memory of St. Martin, dead only twenty years before, was still fresh. Later, for a long time, Patrick lived at Auxerre. It was here that he was ordained deacon and here, under its famous bishop, St. Germanus, he made his studies and perfected his ascetical equipment. He was still at Auxerre when the great moment of his life came and he was chosen-the first nominee Palladius having seemingly died unexpectedly-to lead this new venture "to the Scots who believed in Christ." [ ] #### That there were already Catholics in Ireland before St. Patrick's mission is certain, possibly even scattered groups of them, the fruit of commercial relations with the already evangelised Britain and Gaul. They were, however, so few as to be historically unimportant. Irish Catholicism, henceforth an astonishingly permanent feature of the life of the universal church, undoubtedly has St. Patrick for its founder. And the foundation was his personal work. [ ] For the next thirty years the saint unceasingly toured the country -- preaching and instructing, establishing centres and ordaining from his converts bishops to rule them. From the beginning the new conquest was markedly monastic in its inclinations. The number of those of both sexes among the first converts who sought to follow the apostle in the perfection of his own monastic life moved his deepest admiration. In this willingness of the first neophytes to embrace a life of ordered austerity, there lay dormant a force which, in the next century, was to revolutionise the new ecclesiastical organisation and produce a most singular anomaly in Church government. #### There was in Ireland nothing of that urban organisation of life which characterised the empire in which Patrick was born. There were no cities in which to place his numerous bishops. The seat of the primitive see was a kind of clerical village, founded for the purpose, where dwelt together bishop and clergy, catechists, monks and nuns, a centre of administration and of further propaganda. The distance between such settlements and monasteries of the Eastern type is not very great. In a country already enthusiastic for the life of perfection under a vow of obedience, and in an age of monastic propaganda, that distance was soon bridged. It was from Britain that the first impetus came of that new development, which, sixty years after St. Patrick's death (461), began to sweep all before it and transform the Irish Church. Here, in the dark century which followed the Roman abandonment of the province, the church was organised on strongly monastic lines and the personage to whom the new prestige of monk over cleric, of abbot over bishop, owed its being was, apparently, the British monk St. Gildas. Once this new influence had crossed the Irish Sea with the British-trained Irish monks like St. Enda and St. Finian of Clonard, the clerical settlements became monasteries and their abbots the first ecclesiastical personages of the country. The see is now lost to view behind the monastery. Jurisdiction is no longer confined to bishops, nor even to bishops who are also abbots. It comes, in the course of the sixth century, to be exercised by abbots who are not bishops at all. The line of bishops continues, but, while the government is in the hands of an abbot in priest's orders, the bishop -- one of the monks, chosen for consecration by his abbot -- confines himself to the ritual and sacramental functions proper to his order. All the great names henceforward are abbots and if, at the same time, the abbot is a bishop, it is as the abbot that he is celebrated. Even the metropolitan see fixed by St. Patrick at Armagh ceased to function as such, and the all-conquering prestige of monasticism is witnessed by descriptions of the pope as the Abbot of Rome and, even, of the devil as the Abbot of Hell. #### For a hundred years after St. Patrick's death his work steadily developed, and then, the country converted and the church " monasticised," the zeal and asceticism of the Irish monks began to look overseas for new objectives. So there began that astonishing missionary odyssey of the race that is still with us. Upon Britain and Gaul and Germany and Italy they poured out, taking with them much of their own peculiar spirituality, and, through their own stark asceticism, scaring into repentance the decadent Catholics of the now barbarised Roman provinces. #### The earliest influences in Irish Monasticism were, it seems agreed, Egyptian, passing to Ireland through such Western centres as Lerins. Obedience to a superior, publicly vowed for life in an explicit formula, is the foundation on which it rests. The earliest rule that has survived -- in the modern sense of a code of regulations -- is that of St. Mochuta (637). The most famous of all, that of St. Columbanus, drawn up for continental monks, reflects Irish conditions and is inspired by the Irish spirit. The-monasteries were of the utmost simplicity, collections of tiny huts of wood or stone with one or more oratories, a kitchen, and a common refectory; the whole enclosed by a wall. There were convents too for women, the oldest known of which is St. Brigid's (450-525) famous foundation at Kildare. The novices were recruited almost exclusively from the higher and middle classes. Monastic life as these Irish founders conceived it, and as their disciples practised it, was a life of continuous, incredible severity -- the " white martyrdom," it was called, in contradistinction to the more suddenly ended "red" martyrdom of persecution. The standard for all was not merely high but heroic: in Irish Monasticism there was no place for mediocrity. Obedience, of course, was absolute, nor could the monk own. There was an absolute avoidance of the other sex, and generally no communication at all with one's family. Prayer, manual work and study filled the monk's day. Prayer, the recitation day by day of the psalter interspersed with readings from Holy Scripture and the Fathers; and prayer, too, as a penance -- with peculiarities that were to mark the Irish and their converts throughout Europe, with endless prostrations and genuflections, and the Endurance of the "crossfigel," prayer, that is to say, with the hands stretched in the form of a cross: prayer too with the pray-er immersed in icy water. Manual work might be agricultural, and it took in all the crafts and the arts necessary to provide for the community's needs. Mass was celebrated, with much diversity of rite, on all Sundays and feasts, and the monks communicated. #### Almost every day the monk fasted. His one meal he took about three in the afternoon, vegetables, eggs and fish. Meat he never ate. For drink there was milk, whey and a beer that is likened to whey, and water. To drink nothing but water was a special asceticism, and for the practice of it tradition honoured St. David of Wales as "the Waterman." Silence held the monastery all day. On the rare feast-days there was a milder regime. The tale of the rule's austerity ends with the mention that it allowed as little sleep as was necessary. Breaches against the rule were punished by corporal punishment liberally administered. The monk who broke the silence received six strokes, for leaving the monastery without the abbot's blessing twelve strokes, for needless gossiping conversation fifty, for speaking to a woman a hundred. This particular austerity was all the more shocking in a country where flogging had no place in the civil law. The sick of course were exempted from these rigours and tenderly cared for. The dead were buried with special office and mass for three days-suffrages repeated annually at the anniversary of their death. For the repose of their souls the brethren offered prayers and fasts and alms. By the year 600 there was a certain uniformity of observance along these lines, and we can speak of Irish Monasticism as a definite recognisable force. #### The monks also studied. "To the Irish mind an illiterate monk was a contradiction in terms. [ ] The summit and crown of their learning was the knowledge of Holy Scripture. It was for this that, in the conning centuries, students were to cross to Ireland in their thousands. All other study was, originally, ancillary to this. The Gospels, the epistles of St. Paul and the Psalms -- these, above all, were the objects of this devoted meditation. The monks learned the text by heart and gave themselves lovingly to the commentaries -- allegorical, in the fashion of the time. It is impossible to exaggerate their familiarity with the Bible. Its imagery, its histories, passed into the common treasury of the writers; and in one saint's life after another the re-appearance of the biblical stories in a new dress witnesses to the lore in which the hagiographers were steeped. #### But the Latin bible which they studied was written in a foreign tongue. Western Catholicism was, for the first time, faced with the problem of converting a people to whom its own language was unknown. Whence in these Irish schools a preliminary course of Latin studies, the essential grammar alone at first and with it the Fathers. Then, inevitably, with the study of those last great products of the ancient-classical culture something, little by little, of that culture itself, the Latin poets and orators, the Hellenistic mathematicians and natural philosophers. The accident that for the study of Sacred Scripture -- the aliment without which no monk could live -- the Irish monk must learn the classic Latin language, and learn it, necessarily, in the masterpieces, made the Irish monk something of a cultured scholar at a time when, in the monasteries of the Latin culture itself, such scholarship was frowned on as worldly, and the masterpieces banned. #### The accident had thereby another important effect. It did much to preserve for the later centuries a knowledge of the Latin language that was scientific, for it was taught and learnt in Ireland as a dead language, carefully and, if at times pedantically, correctly -- where, universally, throughout the continent, its purity was suffering violence from the tongues of the new Barbarian kings. In the religious homes of this remote isle the light still painfully burned from which, a little later, the continental church was to be re-illumined. The old native Irish culture was at first most carefully shunned as a Pagan thing. Then, as the new faith showed itself unquestionably victorious, this, too, began to influence the monks, and from the end of the sixth century a certain fusion is evident and a mixed Biblical-Classical-National culture is in process of formation. A system of orthography was devised and now, for the first time, the ancient Irish language began to be written with letters. ####  |