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In this Christian Encounter Series biography, author Jonathan Rogers explores the life of Saint Patrick: slave, shepherd, and courageous missionary.
Patrick was born the son of privilege and position, but he was only a teenager when he was taken from his home in Roman Britain by marauders and sold into slavery in Ireland. Despite his terrible circumstances, young Patrick did not give way to despair. As he worked as a shepherd in the pastures of his new owner, he kindled the faith he’d inherited from his family and eventually escaped to freedom. Then, after returning home, he experienced a dream that changed everything: God wanted him to go back and take the Gospel to the country of his captors.
Patrick heeded the call. Both humble enough to minister to beggars and bold enough to confront kings, Patrick led the Irish through his brave and compassionate service into the Christian faith and baptized thousands. Separating the many myths from the facts, Jonathan Rogers weaves a wonder-filled tale of courage, barbarism, betrayal, and hope in God’s unceasing faithfulness. Countless miracles have been attributed to Saint Patrick, but perhaps one of the simplest and most amazing is that he won the hearts and souls of the same fierce and indomitable people who had enslaved him.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781418584252 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Christian Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2023 |
| Series: | Christian Encounters |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 548,842 |
| File size: | 644 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
SAINT PATRICK
By JONATHAN ROGERS
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2010 Jonathan RogersAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59555-305-8
Chapter One
THE BOY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
For more than three centuries, the Romans ruled Britain. The occupation began in AD 43, when the emperor Claudius, with a herd of war elephants, crossed the Channel from Gaul. Impressed by the emperor and his elephants-though no doubt more impressed by the forty thousand Roman troops who had already won decisive victories in the southeast corner of the island-the petty kings of Britain surrendered en masse. Claudius, according to the inscription on an arch erected in his honor, "was the first to bring barbarian nations beyond the ocean under Roman sway."
But by Patrick's time, Roman sway in Britain had itself begun to sway and to buckle beneath the constant pressure of surrounding tribes that refused to bow to the imperial yoke. Britain was the remotest extension of a badly over extended empire; by the latter half of the fourth century, Roman Britons-their Roman towns and villas dotting a largely un-Romanized landscape-would have been very conscious of the precariousness of their situation.
The Romans dealt with insurgencies from local warlords through much of their occupation of Britain, but AD 367 marked the beginning of troubles that would continue more or less uninterrupted until the Roman army left Britainaltogether. The "Barbarian Conspiracy"-a well-coordinated offensive by Picts, Scots, Saxons, and a tribe known as the Attacotti (who hailed from Ireland)-threw the Roman army into disarray. The barbarians pillaged and raped and murdered civilians throughout the island. Not only was the army unable to protect Roman citizens, but deserting soldiers also made matters worse by joining the raiders in their devastation.
The army managed to regain control a year or two later, sending the invaders back home. But the Barbarian Conspiracy was a sign of things to come. Besides the outside threats it represented, it also intensified political power struggles that would further destabilize the situation in Roman Britain.
Its distance from Rome made Britain a breeding ground for usurpers, who used the island as a launching pad for their personal ambitions. In 383, the usurper Magnus Maximus took a large portion of the British garrison to Gaul in a bid to defeat the unpopular emperor Gratian and solidify his own claim to the throne. Maximus's usurpation was successful, but it left Roman Britain more vulnerable than ever to attacks by neighboring tribes, who marauded throughout the island until the Roman general Stilicho drove them back across Hadrian's Wall-Roman Britain's border with the Picts and Scots-between 396 and 399. By 401, however, a legion from Hadrian's Wall was withdrawn from Britain to help deal with the Gothic tribes that were harassing Italy.
Indeed, the army's commitment to the defense of Britain rose and fell with the unstable situation on the Continent. On December 31, 406, tribes from eastern Europe-Vandals, Alans, and Sueves-crossed the frozen Rhine river and invaded Gaul, probably at Mainz, in modern-day Germany. This incursion, some four hundred miles distant from London, spelled the end for Roman Britain. Nervous about the westward sweep of the barbarians, British soldiers began electing their own emperors-three in a very short period of time. The first two didn't last more than a few months. The very soldiers who elected them put them to death when they didn't meet their expectations. The third, Constantine III, enjoyed more success than his predecessors because he did what the soldiers wanted him to do: in 407 he took most of the Roman army out of Britain to fight the barbarians in Gaul. They never came back.
In 410, the same year the Vandals sacked the city of Rome, the emperor Honorius "sent letters to the cities in Britain urging them to fend for themselves." In so doing, he was only making official that which had been true on the ground for years: the empire lacked both the resources and the will to protect its most far-flung (and perhaps most troublesome) province. As Michael E. Jones has pointed out, it is noteworthy "that the emperor directed his reply to the cities-presumably because no duly constituted Roman authority any longer existed in Britain." As one Roman historian put it, in 410 "Britain was forever removed from the Roman name." The Anglo-Saxon invasions began about the time Honorius washed his hands of Britain; a new era had begun in earnest.
Such was the world in which Patrick grew up. He was a good Roman-a Latin-speaking son of Roman wealth and Roman privilege-in a land from which the Roman Empire was receding, never to return. Patrick's Roman bona fides were impeccable. His given name was the Latin Patricius, which means "highborn," and indeed he was. His father, Calpurnius (sometimes spelled Calpornius), was a Roman aristocrat-a landowner, town councilor, and deacon in the Roman Catholic Church.
After more than three hundred years of Roman rule, imperial influence persisted long after the army left the island. Britain's wealth was still concentrated in the hands of aristocratic Roman landowners, who, it appears, still dominated many town councils. Even more important, the Roman Catholic Church did much to preserve Roman culture and collective memory after Rome's governmental and military functions had left the island. The Church, in many ways, became a surrogate for the vanished empire.
What exactly would it mean to be a Roman aristocrat in a "post-Roman" world? Surely whatever privileges Patrick's family enjoyed as members of a ruling class would have been tempered by a deep sense of loss. They had inherited a rich cultural heritage, but now it was slipping away. On every side their wealth and their physical safety were threatened. They lived, in short, in a world that hadn't kept its promises.
* * *
We cannot know Patrick's exact dates. He didn't mention his birth year in either of his extant writings-there was no reason to-but he may have been born as early as the 380s, and he may have died as late as the 490s. The fact that he identified his father as a decurion, that is, a Roman official, suggests that he was born toward the earlier end of this range. If he had been born, say, in the 420s, well into the "sub-Roman" era of British history, it seems less likely that his childhood milieu would have been as fully Romanized as he described it. On the other hand, monks who claimed to have known him personally were still alive well into the sixth century, which would suggest that he lived toward the end of the fifth century. Though unlikely, it is possible that he lived 100 years, from the 390s into the 490s. One tradition has him living to 120, matching the life span of Moses! In any case, by the time he was born in Britain, the order and discipline associated with the Roman rule had clearly broken down.
In the opening lines of his Confession, Patrick reported that he was from a settlement called Bannaventa Burniae, but no one knows for sure where that was. There was a Bannaventa in what is now Northamptonshire, right in the heart of England, but the distance between there and the western coast would have been awfully far for Irish raiders to travel for booty. They would have been away from their boats a long time-and would have had to pass up many more convenient opportunities. Surely, if it was susceptible to Irish pirates, Patrick's Bannaventa Burniae was in the western reaches of Britain. A map of the villas that archaeologists have identified in Britain shows a much higher concentration of villas along the Bristol Channel than anywhere else along Britain's west coast. That area, where the southern coast of Wales meets England, seems as good a guess as any for the location of Patrick's boyhood home. If Britain was the edge of the civilized world, that western coast would have been the edge of the edge. Just across the narrow western sea was Ireland, a land the Romans never ruled. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the western coast of Britain was easy pickings for Irish raiders and slave traders.
* * *
The legends describe Patrick as an extremely pious child. In one, the infant Patrick miraculously provides the holy water for his own baptism! A blind and oddly underprepared priest, realizing that he doesn't have any water on hand, takes baby Patrick's hand and makes the sign of the cross over the ground. A spring of water bubbles forth, the baptism goes forward, and the blind priest receives sight when he washes his face with the water. What's more, the priest discovers that he is literate at his first sight of letters: he reads the words of the baptismal service.
Other stories have the boy Patrick using drops of water to start a fire and burning chunks of ice for firewood in order to show his nurse "how possible are all things to them who believe." In another, when young Patrick discovers that a wolf has stolen a lamb that was under his watch, he prays and the wolf repents, bringing the lamb home the next day, unharmed (the story doesn't tell what the wolf and the lamb did together for a whole day).
In many cases, the legends of Patrick illustrate and give color to the few facts we know of the saint. These stories of juvenile piety, however, are among the legends that flatly contradict what Patrick himself wrote. "I did not, indeed, know the true God," he said of his sixteen-year-old self. Elsewhere he wrote, "I did not then believe in the living God, nor had I believed, since my infancy." This from a man whose father was a deacon and his grandfather a priest.
Perhaps we shouldn't make too much of that. It is not unusual, after all, for a teenage boy to reject the faith of his parents. On the other hand, it is possible that young Patrick didn't know the true God because neither his father the deacon nor his grandfather the priest knew the true God. These relatives may have taken positions of church leadership not out of religious ardor, but for more worldly reasons.
As mentioned previously, Patrick's father, Calpurnius, in addition to being a deacon, was also a decurion-a member of the town council. It was a position of privilege, available only to the aristocracy. But the position had a significant downside. Decurions were responsible for tax collection in the towns and villages where they served. Collections worked on a quota system: the government dictated to the decurion how much tax should be collected from his town. If there was any shortfall, the decurion was required to make up the difference out of his own pocket. The position, therefore, was a burdensome honor. Stressful and often expensive, it was also mandatory. A man appointed decurion couldn't get out of it; neither could his son, since, under Constantine the Great, the position became hereditary.
In the early- to mid-fourth century, however, Constantine created a loophole. Observing that many town councilors were also clergymen (both positions being drawn from the titled ranks), he exempted clergymen from decurion duty. Establishing Christianity as Rome's state religion was a big job; Constantine wanted the clergy to be able to focus on ecclesiastical matters. Not surprisingly, in the second half of the fourth century, there was a veritable epidemic of piety among decurions throughout the Empire. They joined the clergy in droves. To counteract this rush to ordination and to test the sincerity of the new town councilor-ordinands, a later reform required that any town councilor who joined the clergy would be required to sign over two-thirds of his estate to a relative.
Patrick didn't comment one way or another on his father's motives in becoming a deacon. Not that he would have: throughout his brief writings he was notably generous in his assessment of others. He didn't, in fact, mention his father's dual status-deacon and decurion-in the same document. He identified Calpurnius as a deacon in his Confession and as a decurion in his Epistle, which is to say, he never drew attention to a circumstance that might cause a reader to be suspicious of his father's sincerity. Nevertheless, a reader familiar with the decurions' history of joining the clergy for worldly reasons can hardly help wondering what motivated Calpurnius.
Calpurnius's sincerity isn't really the point of this discussion, though. We could spin whole theories about Patrick's spiritual development and his vision of the Church and the world as a result of being raised by a religious charlatan, but there is no historical warrant for it. My real aim is to show how enmeshed worldly power and religious power had become in the fourth- and fifth-century Roman Empire.
There was a time in Church history when Christianity was a faith of outsiders. It began with fishermen and shepherds, slaves and women-people who could put little hope in their earthly prospects. The apostle Paul was speaking literally when he told the church at Corinth, "Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things ... and the despised things-and the things that are not-to nullify the things that are" (1 Corinthians 1:26-28).
In the first century or two of the faith, there was little earthly reason to claim the name of Christ. There were plenty of earthly reasons not to-not the least being the lions in the Coliseum. Some children of Christian parents chose to embrace their parents' faith, and some chose not to. But it is hard to imagine such children making either choice casually.
By Patrick's time, however, it had been many long years since any Christian had been thrown to the lions. Christianity was the state religion, the status quo, in many cases a necessary step for social advancement. Especially in northern Europe, church leaders-bishops in particular-"tended to be drawn from the great territorial magnates who represented the old Roman administrative system."
In Britain, especially, the class significance of Christianity was completely flip-flopped from the early centuries. There were bishoprics in Britain, yet it appears that the great majority of Christians (and not just the priests and bishops) came from the landowning class. Archaeologists have been able to find very little evidence of Christianity among the working classes, especially in the countryside. Chi-Rhos (symbols formed from the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ) have been found on luxury items, such as silver spoons and jewelry that were owned by the wealthy, but other than a private chapel in a Roman villa in Kent, archaeologists have had little luck identifying buildings that are unequivocally churches. As E. A. Thompson has written, "Christianity (in so far as it existed) was an urban, and in the countryside an upper-class phenomenon, the religion of the landowners, in the last years of Roman Britain and in the following decades; and we should expect that those who were toiling in the fields were pagan almost to a man."
If young Patrick paid little attention to the faith espoused by his father and grandfather, perhaps it was because Christianity was just what people of his station in life did. Perhaps he took it for granted the way he might have taken his Romanness for granted; he was born into it. Indeed, as far as Patrick's credentials as a Roman noble go, his father's association with the Roman Catholic Church may have meant more than his association with the Roman civil authority. As Thomas Cahill points out, the one office that survived in western Europe from the classical world through the medieval world and beyond was the Catholic bishop. In many districts, he wrote, the bishops were the "sole authority left, the last vestige of Roman law and order."
Patrick's own journey toward the title of bishop would require that he first be cut off completely from the comparative stability represented by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. As a result, he would be a very different kind of bishop, one who would bring order to the chaos of Ireland, but not Roman order. That rupture in Patrick's life would come soon enough, in the form of Irish marauders crossing the western sea to snatch him away from the comfortable, privileged Roman life he enjoyed. Before those marauders swoop down, though, let us consider one last moment from that pre-Irish period of Patrick's life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SAINT PATRICK by JONATHAN ROGERS Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Rogers. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................ix1. The Boy at the End of the World....................1
2. "In the land of my captivity"....................15
3. A Long Journey Home....................31
4. "Walk again among us"....................45
5. "Among barbarous tribes"....................61
6. Coroticus....................75
7. "A witness to all nations"....................87
Epilogue....................101
Appendix A: St. Patrick's Writings The Confession....................103
Appendix B: St. Patrick's Writings The Letter....................125
Notes....................133
Acknowledgments....................141
About the Author....................143