The Feast of Patrick – "Patron Saint” of Ireland?

Today is the feast of Saint Patrick; we celebrate the ascendance of a Romano-Brit (a British man of Roman heritage), who lived (if he lived at all) sometime between the fourth and fifth centuries of the common era (CE).

Patrick is one of Ireland’s “patron saints,” but not the Patron Saint, and he was not Irish; he was a Britain of the patrician class, from a romanized family of rank and privilege…so his hagiography goes. 

Patrick (Patricius) is credited with converting the people of Erin to faith in the Universal and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ; in so doing he separated the Celtic people from their Gaelic traditions, and subordinated them to the Catholic Church in Rome, thereby winning with the Word what could not be accomplished with the sword and spear, fire and blood (though there was plenty of killing to be done, and Patrick was up for it); for all his grim deeds and treachery, he was named a Saint of the Church by popular acclaim.

Patrick has never been canonized, or even beatified, therefore he is not officially a saint of the Catholic Church; though he is recognized in the annals of the Saints of the Church of England… I hope that all my Irish-American kinfolk appreciate that sad irony…it is worthy of a song, a beer and bump or two.

The popular narrative of Patrick’s life tells us that he was a humble man, a rare quality for those of rank. History also credits Patrick with concocting the top-down missionary strategy for spreading the faith and the influence of the Church, demonstrating that by converting chieftains first the people would follow; proceeding from Patrick’s success in Ireland this became the model for missionary work throughout the rest of Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

As much as Patrick was a missionary, he was also a politician of great skill. He spread the faith, established churches and earned the rank of apostle by careful control of his narrative…if you believe it.

History tells us that his mother was a relative of saint Martin of Tours, the Patron Saint of Soldiers, otherwise known as saint Martin of the Sword, whose hagiography was written by pope saint Gregory the Great, who was a great writer of hagiographical fiction, and propagandist for the Church at the beginning of the medieval period…his writing was popular, fantastical and highly influential.  

History also tells us that Martin’s hagiography though connected to a real person, real place and real time, is nevertheless mostly fiction; as a piece of propaganda his story gave license for Christians to serve under arms, it provided a permission structure and as such it brought the Roman legions into the arms of the Mother Church.

Patrick was said to have had a “heroic piety,” praying day and night in the mountains and forest; he prayed through the rain, he prayed through storms of snow and ice…if this were true he should be the patron saint of postal workers, but then again…all hagiographies woven with lies and there is something lovely and chivalric in the notion that piety, all by itself, is presented as heroic..

History tells us that Patrick spent six years as a captive and servant to the Druid Milchu in Dalriada, a Celtic Chieftain, where as a captive, he mastered the language of the common folk and learned all their stories.

If you appreciate history, and you assume that Patrick’s myth has a historical core, you will know that it is much more likely that he fled his home to wander abroad in order to escape the duties that were expected of him as the son of a nobleman. Such departures were common in his time, they were referred by contemporary chroniclers and the historians who follow them as, the “flight of the curiales,” based on this you may conclude that Patrick was not held in captivity, but that he was merely a young man on the lamb…so to speak. Perhaps he pretended to his family that he was being held hostage, while in reality he was a guest who was taught the language and given a repository of stories during his stay…he may have been working as a translator and scribe in exchange for the hospitality he received, he may have paid cash. He may have been there, with or without his parent’s consent. It was considered safer to send your sons abroad to study than it was to send them to work as administers in the collapsing Roman government, and the Druids were well known as great teachers and oral historians.

The story of Patrick’s escape from servitude (if it was in fact an escape), and the journey that followed are his own account (theoretically). He cast the entire experience in dramatic, even biblical terms, which served both to cover up his crime of abnegation and to establish his fame when he returned home.

Patrick tells us that he escaped from Milchu, then fled to the mainland of Europe where he entered the priesthood and became a missionary. On his return to Ireland, the first place he went was to Dalriada where he had lived in Milchu’s house. After some period of conflict with his former captor (patron or client) and the affectation of some miracles on Patrick’s part, Milchu is said to have immolated himself in order to make way for the upstart Patrick. The story that Patrick tells is that Milchu threw himself on a fire consisting of the collected scrolls and mysteries of his people…and died.

Something here does not add-up, and it may be best to look at this whole sequence of events in metaphorical terms in which the narrative concerns the ritual destruction of the Celtic people in favor of the ascending Romano-British invaders, depicted in metaphor as Milchu offering himself as a human sacrifice at the foundation of the Church in Ireland…this is how it went:

After Milchu’s death by fire, on Easter Sunday, 433 a conflict of will ensues between Patrick and the Celtic arch-druid Lochru; this encounter has been mythologized, translated into a battle between supernatural and divine forces, they read like the contests between Moses and the Egyptians or Elijah and priests of Baal. Patrick’s encounter with Lochru ends with Patrick magically hurling Lochru into the air, before dashing the druid’s onto a sharp rock, breaking him into pieces, another ritual murder at the foundation of the Church in Ireland, another human sacrifice to be sure; a second corner stone laid…there is no other way to read it, Patrick came, he saw and he conquered, it was a good old-fashioned Roman slaughter.

It should be noted the Saint Columbanus, the Patron Saint of Poetry was the most significant representative of the Irish Catholic Church after the Dark Ages. He lived and wrote and sent missionaries from Ireland to Continental Europe where they built Churches and founded religious communities. Saint Columbanus (otherwise known as Columba or Colmcille), who together with Saint Bridget are the true Patron Saints of Ireland and the Irish people, makes no mention of Saint Patrick in his writing, not once, not anywhere; on the contrary Columbanus tells us that the Church in Ireland was founded by a man named Palladius.

We may say with confidence that the entire legend of saint Patrick is little more than a myth designed to subordinate the Irish heart to a British nobleman of Roman descent.

Therefore, be mindful when you celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. The entire holiday is a ruse with as much validity as the good luck kisses tourists plaster on the piss-soaked stone at Blarney!

…it would make a good movie, T.C. you should make it

 

 

Sid Gateaux, Big Sugar, Peoples History, Zen Syndicate, Essay, Reflection, Holiday, Saint, Mythology, St. Patrick

Thomas Aquinas – Patron Saint of Philosophy, Angelic Doctor of the Church

When I finally made it to university, I went to a school named for Thomas Aquinas in Saint Paul, Minnesota; like him, I studied philosophy, theology and the corpus of classics as well.

The University of St. Thomas was a grand place; it felt like a university, with its stately aedificia, stout buildings made from massive blacks of blonde-sandstone quarried from the bluffs along the Mississippi.

The moment I passed through the arches, walking into the quadracento, I felt that I had arrived at the place of dreams. Though I am proud to be an alum, my actually experience of the institution was rather hum-drum, and yet when I look back, I can see that my time at St. Thomas was reasonably well spent; my studies adequately prepared me for advanced studies elsewhere (though barely); I continued my research in theology, in the history and philosophy of religion, when I had graduated, and my focus narrowed to the field of Christian studies called soteriology. My work to this point is not as exhaustive as our patron’s achievement with his Summa Theologica, which remains a unique accomplishment in the history of Western thought…though it is ongoing.

The Summa, it should be noted, is more important for the mode of thinking that Aquinas  transmitted his ideas in, than for the conclusions he presented in its pages, because he allowed his revolutionary mind to be constrained by a careful, cautious and conservative approach to theology, which had the result of making him a defender of the  Church’s many errors, rather than there reformer…reform would come as a result of his work, though it would be centuries in the making.

St. Thomas successfully bridged the gap between the ancient philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al, and the proto-renaissance period of Western Europe, re-discovering the use of intellectual tools such as formal logic and discursive reasoning, which came to him from the Jewish scholar Maimonides, and the Muslim scholar Averroes; he re-employed them in a way that allowed Europeans to leave the Dark Ages, clearing a path for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason that followed.

Saint Thomas Aquinas died on March 7^th, 1274. In 1969 the Catholic Church moved the day we celebrate his feast from March 7^th to January 28^th, therefore we celebrate his sainthood today.

Thomas Aquinas was Italian by birth and a member of the Dominican order by choice; he is counted among a group of theologians known as the “scholastics,” whose influence marks the beginning of the University era in Europe, a movement that was spearheaded by religious orders such as Aquinas’s own Dominicans…he was famous in his day.

Thomas died while making a pilgrimage along the Appian Way. Death took him at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, and the monks there, fully cognizant of his fame and knowing that he would become a saint of great renown, (in the spirit of the age) they coveted the relics of his body.

After his death, his hosts boiled his carcass down to the bones and then polished those to preserve them in good order. They kept all the water from the cauldron they had dissolved his body in, for distribution in the relic-and-indulgence trade. For years the Cistercians refused to turn his remains over to his Dominican brothers, parceling out his bones and the water they had recovered, bit by bit and keeping his skull until the very end.

The University of Saint Thomas, has a vial of that water in its collection of sacred artifacts…a silly business, really, and beneath the dignity of the intellectual giant that Aquinas was known to be.

On his death bed it is reported that Thomas gave those attending him an estimation of the value of his own contribution to the doctrine and dogma of the church, of which he said: everything is straw…it is only straw.

There is a prayer that he wrote, it is carved into a column of the main entrance to the school grounds at the University in St. Paul, the same arches that I walked through my first day on campus (and many more times after that); it is two stories below the offices of the Philosophy Department (which I belonged to), I recited that prayer aloud with classmates every day that I was there.

It is a prayer that I carry with me still, as if it were written in my heart:

Grant, o' merciful God: that I may ardently desire, prudently examine, truthfully acknowledge and perfectly accomplish what is pleasing to thee for the sake of your name

In the year 2026 CE, seven hundred and fifty-two years after the death of St. Thomas, the world has become lost in another kind of dark ages, which is odd and sadly ironic because the current tide of anti-rational, anti-intellectual sentiment that has taken its grip on us has been seeded through the prevalence of digital media platforms that are in themselves a function of our mastery of light as a means of communication…there is some irony here.

We now find ourselves living in a milieu that disdains the truth, science and knowledge, in a way that undermines the roll of reason in public discourse.

It is saddening.

In Western Europe the so-called dark ages are considered to have begun around the year 500 CE, with the reign of the emperor Justinian who insisted that there be a homogenous culture throughout the empire. He demanded that all Roman citizens become Christian or leave; at which point tens of thousands of artisans, merchants, traders and teachers did just that…they left.

The Justinian expulsions took place roughly seven hundred and fifty years after the golden age of the philosophers, and roughly seven hundred and fifty years before St. Thomas wrote his Summa.

Let me be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything inherently ominous in the pattern of years I have articulated, the numbers themselves are arbitrary and it would be unreasonable to suppose otherwise. However, we would be wise to acknowledge the trend, the descent into darkness has a cycle of its own, as doe the return of the light. We have fallen into this before and we are susceptible to do so again…this is what it means to be human, and by coincidence roughly 750 years have passed since the Summa was penned, putting us at the apex of the cycle and marking the beginning of the nadir’s long approach; we are teetering on the brink of disaster right now.

The overall fragility of our situation, our sitz im leben (setting in life), brings to mind the saint’s final words…it is all straw, he said, nothing but straw.

Everything we have built since Thomas Aquinas paved the way for the enlightenment, including our own liberal-democracy, as well as the acknowledgement of and acquiescence to the universality of human rights…like straw, it could all blow away with the wind, or burn up in a flash.

Reason save us!