- Era
- Fifth century; his dates cannot be fixed with confidence
- Region
- Roman Britain and Ireland
- Category
- Bishop, missionary, and former slave
- Feast
- March 17
Jump to The Only Two Things He Wrote Sixteen, and Taken The Confession Is a Defence The Letter About the Slaves Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us
The Only Two Things He Wrote
Patrick is among the most famous saints in the world, and one of the least accurately known.
Two documents survive that scholars accept as his own: the Confessio, a defence of his ministry written near the end of his life, and a Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. Everything else attached to his name — the snakes, the shamrock, the forty days on the mountain — comes from later writers. The snakes appear first in a Life composed in the late twelfth century, seven hundred years after him. The shamrock explaining the Trinity is first written down in 1726.
None of that is scandalous. Legends grow around people who are loved. It becomes a problem only when the invented details are presented as history and the real man disappears behind them.
Even his dates are unsettled. The traditional span of roughly 385 to 461 comes from later annals; other scholars argue for a death around 493; at least one has held that none of the recorded dates can be trusted. The Church keeps his feast on March 17 without pretending the chronology is secure.
Sixteen, and Taken
What Patrick tells us about himself is specific.
His father Calpornius was a deacon and a town councillor. His grandfather Potitus was a priest. The family was Roman, Christian, and comfortable. Patrick says plainly that he did not care: he knew the faith the way a bored child knows a family business.
Raiders took him from Britain at about sixteen and sold him in Ireland. He spent six years there as a slave, tending sheep. He writes that in that cold and hunger he began to pray — many times in a day, then in the night, then constantly — and that the faith he had ignored became the only thing he had.
He escaped after a voice in a dream told him a ship was ready. He walked roughly two hundred miles to the coast. The crew refused him. He prayed; they called him back and took him aboard.
He got home. His family begged him never to leave again.
Then he dreamt of a man carrying letters from Ireland, and heard the voices of people he had lived among asking him to come and walk once more among them. He went back to the country that had enslaved him, and stayed.
The Confession Is a Defence
The Confessio is not a memoir written from a comfortable old age. It is an answer to charges.
Thirty years after his ordination, Patrick’s superiors in Britain raised something against him — a sin he had confessed, when he was about fifteen, to a close friend. The friend had defended him privately at the time, then later made the disclosure public in a way that damaged him. Patrick never tells us what the sin was, and it is not our business to guess.
What he does is answer. He writes as Patricius peccator, rusticissimus — Patrick, a sinner, a most unrefined countryman — and apologises repeatedly for his poor Latin, since his education ended the day he was taken. He is defending the legitimacy of a mission run by a man his colleagues at home regarded as an uneducated embarrassment.
It is worth noticing what he does not claim. He does not say he found Ireland pagan and left it Christian. Prosper of Aquitaine records that in 431 Pope Celestine sent a bishop named Palladius to the Irish believing in Christ — meaning there were already Christians in Ireland before Patrick’s mission. Patrick is not the sole apostle of a nation. He is one bishop, working hard, who happened to leave writing behind.
The Letter About the Slaves
The second document is the sharper one.
Coroticus was a Christian warlord in Britain. His soldiers raided a group of Patrick’s converts — people baptised so recently that the chrism was still on their foreheads — killed some, and sold the rest into slavery among pagans.
Patrick wrote to the soldiers and excommunicated them. He instructed Christians not to eat with them or accept their gifts until they repented and freed the captives. He called them fellow-citizens not of the holy Romans but of demons.
A former slave, using the only authority he had, on behalf of people who had none. There is no comparable document from the period. It is the most morally serious thing anyone left us from fifth-century Britain, and it is almost entirely absent from how the man is celebrated.
Why the Church Remembers Him
Patrick is remembered as a bishop and a missionary, not as a monk — he never describes himself in monastic terms, whatever later tradition added.
His holiness is legible in the two things he wrote: a man who could not stop apologising for his own inadequacy, and who nonetheless would not let a warlord traffic his people without consequence. He does not claim visions of grandeur. He claims that God found him in a field where he was somebody’s property, and did not leave him there.
What His Life Asks of Us
He asks the awkward question first: would we go back? Patrick returned to the place of his captivity, to the people who had bought and sold him, and spent his life there. Forgiveness in his case was not a feeling. It was an address.
He also asks what our authority is for. Patrick had almost none — a contested reputation, bad Latin, a suspicious hierarchy at home. He spent what little he had on people being sold. Most of us have more than he did.
And he asks us to want the true thing more than the pleasant one. The parade is enjoyable, and the shamrock is harmless. But the man underneath is better than the legend, and he is available to anyone willing to read eight pages he wrote himself.
Holy Father Patrick, pray to Christ our God that we may return where we are sent, spend our strength on those who have none, and hold to the truth more dearly than to what flatters us.
A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.
- St Patrick, *Confession* and *Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus*, Royal Irish Academy critical edition with parallel Latin
- Saint Patrick, Bishop of Armagh and Enlightener of Ireland — Orthodox Church in America
- Prosper of Aquitaine, Chronicle, entry for the year 431, on the mission of Palladius
- David Dumville, Saint Patrick, A.D. 493–1993, on the chronological problem
The same Gospel, a week at a time
The saints spent their lives inside these passages. Words for the Narrow Way takes one saying of Christ and gives it seven days — the passage in full, what the Greek is doing, how the Fathers read it, and one practice to carry through the week.