In honour of St Patrick

He did not expel snakes from Ireland: the snakelessness of Ireland had been noted by the Roman geographer Solinus in the third century. He did not compose that wonderful hymn known as “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” : its language postdates him by about three centuries. He did not drive a chariot three times over his sister Lupait to punish her unchastity: the allegation that he did first appears in a life of Patrick which is a farrago of legend put together about 400 years after his death. He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the persons of the Trinity for his converts: true, he might have done: but it is not until the seventeenth century that we are told that he did...

Patrick linked his vocation to the missionary imperatives of the Bible... Patrick’s originality was that no one within western Christendom had thought such thoughts as these before, had ever previously been possessed by such convictions. As far as our evidence goes, he was the first person in Christian history to take the scriptural injunctions literally; to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. Patrick crossed that threshold upon which... we left Augustine and Prosper hesitating.

Quote: Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, 80, 86.