Even supposing the Ogam alphabet to have been used in pre-Christian times, though it may have been employed by ollavs and poets to perpetuate tribal names and genealogies, still it was much too cumbrous and clumsy an invention to produce anything deserving the name of real literature. It is, so far as we know, only with the coming of Patrick that Ireland may be said to have become, properly speaking, a literary country. The churches and monasteries established by him soon became so many nuclei of learning, and from the end of the fifth century a knowledge of letters seems to have entirely permeated the island. So suddenly does this appear to have taken place, and so rapidly does Ireland seem to have produced a flourishing literature of laws, poems, and sagas, that it is very hard to believe that the inhabitants had not, before his coming, arrived at a high state of indigenous culture. This aspect of the case has been recently strongly put by Dr. Sigerson. "I assert," said he, speaking of the early Brehon laws, at the revision of which in a Christian sense St. Patrick is said to have assisted, "that, speaking biologically, such laws could not[Pg 134] emanate from any race whose brains have not been subject to the quickening influence of education for many generations."[1]
The usual date assigned for St. Patrick's landing in Ireland in the character of a missionary is 432, and his work among the Irish is said to have lasted for sixty years, during which time he broke down the idol Crom Cruach, burnt the books of the druids at Tara, ordained numerous missionaries and bishops, and succeeded in winning over to Christianity a great number of the chiefs and sub-kings, who were in their turn followed by their tribesmen.
St. Patrick did not work alone, nor did he come to Ireland as a solitary pioneer of a new religion; he was accompanied, as we learn from his life in the Book of Armagh, by a multitude of bishops, priests, deacons, readers, and others,[2] who had crossed over along with him for the service. Several were his own blood relations, one was his sister's son. Many likely youths whom he met on his missionary travels he converted to Christianity, taught to read, tonsured, and afterwards ordained. These new priests thus appointed worked in all directions, establishing churches and getting together congregations from amongst the neighbouring heathen. Unable to give proper attention to the teaching of the youths whom he elected as his helpers, so long as he himself was engaged in journeying through Ireland from point to point, he, after about twenty years of peripatetic teaching, established at Armagh about the year 450 the first Christian school ever founded in Ireland, the progenitor of that long line of colleges which made Ireland famous throughout Europe, and to which, two hundred years later, her Anglo-Saxon neighbours flocked in thousands.[3]
[Pg 135]
The equipments of these newly-made priests was of the scantiest. Each, as he was sent forth, received an alphabet-of-the-faith or elementary-explanation of the Christian doctrine, frequently written by Patrick himself, a "Liber ordinis," or "Mass Book," a written form for the administration of the sacraments, a psaltery, and, if it could be spared, a copy of the Gospels.[4] A good-sized retinue followed Patrick in all his journeyings, ready to supply with their own hands all things necessary for the new churches established by the saint, as well as to minister to his own wants. He travelled with his episcopal coadjutor, his psalm-singer, his assistant priest, his judge—originally a Brehon by profession, whom he found most useful in adjudicating on disputed questions—a personal champion to protect him from sudden attack and to carry him through floods and other obstacles, an attendant on himself, a bellringer, a cook, a brewer, a chaplain at the table, two waiters, and others who provided food and accommodation for himself and his household. He had in his company three smiths, three artificers, and three ladies who embroidered. His smiths and artificers made altars, book-covers, bells, and helped to erect his wooden churches; the ladies, one of them his own sister, made vestments and altar linens.[5]
St. Patrick was essentially a man of work and not of letters, and yet it so happens that he is the earliest Irish writer of whom we can say with confidence that what is ascribed to him is really his. And here it is as well to say something about the genuineness of St. Patrick's personality and the authenticity of his writings, for the opinion started by Ledwich has gone abroad, and has somehow become prevalent, that St. Patrick's personality is nearly as nebulous as that of King Arthur or of Finn mac Cúmhail, and at the best is made up of a number of little Patricks lumped into one great one. That[Pg 136] there was more than one Patrick[6] is certain,[7] and that the great Saint Patrick who wrote the "Confession" may have got credit in the early Latin and later Irish lives for the acts of others, is perfectly possible, but that most of the essential features of his life are true, is beyond all doubt, and we have a manuscript 1091 years old, apparently copied from his own handwriting, and containing his own confession and apologia.
How this exquisite manuscript, consisting of 216 vellum leaves, written in double columns, has happily been preserved to us, we shall not lose time in inquiring; but how its exact date has been ascertained through what Dr. Reeves has characterised as "one of the most elegant and recondite demonstrations[Pg 137] which any learned society has on record, is worth mentioning." The Rev. Charles Graves, the present Bishop of Limerick, made a thorough examination of the whole codex when, after many vicissitudes and hair-breadth escapes from destruction, it had been temporarily deposited in the Royal Irish Academy. Knowing, as O'Curry pointed out, that it was the custom for Irish scribes to sign their own names, with usually some particulars about their writing, at the end of each piece they copied, he made a careful search and discovered that this had actually been done in the Book of Armagh, and in no less than eight places, but that on every spot where it occurred it had been erased for some apparently inscrutable reason, with the greatest pains. In the last place but one,[Pg 138] however, where the colophon occurred, the process of erasure had been less thorough than in the others, and after long consideration, and treatment of the erasure with gallic acid and spirits of wine, Dr. Graves discovered that the words so carefully rubbed out were Pro Ferdomnacho ores, "Pray for Ferdomnach." Turning to the other places, he found that the erased words in at least one other place were evidently the same. This settled the name of the scribe; he was Ferdomnach. The next step was to search the "Four Masters," who record the existence of two scribes of that name who died at Armagh, one in 726 and the other in 844. One of these it must have been who wrote the Book of Armagh,—but which? This also Dr. Graves discovered, with the greatest ingenuity. At the foot of Fols. 52-6 he was, with extreme difficulty, able to decipher the words ... ach hunc ... e dictante ... ach herede Patricii scripsit. From these stray syllables he surmised that Ferdomnach had written the book at the bidding of some Archbishop of Armagh whose name ended in ach. For this the Psalter of Cashel, Leabhar Breac, and "Four Masters," were consulted, and it was found that one Archbishop Senaach died in 609; it could not then have been by his commands the book was written by the first Ferdomnach; then came, after a long interval, Faoindealach, who died in 794, Connmach, who died in 806, and Torbach, who held the primacy for one year after him. On examining the hiatus it was found that the letter which preceded the fragment ach could not have been either an l or an m, but might have been a b, thus putting out of the question the names of Connmach and Faoindealach. Besides the vacant space before the ach was just sufficient to admit of the letters Tor, but not Conn, much less Faoindea. The conclusion was obvious: the passage ran, Ferdomnach hunc librum e dictante Torbach herede Patricii scripsit, "Ferdomnach wrote this book at the dictation (or command) of Torbach, Patrick's heir (successor)." Torbach, as we have[Pg 139] seen, became Archbishop in 806 and died in 807. The date was in this way recovered.[8]
I have been thus particular in tracing the steps by which the age of this manuscript came to light, because it contains the earliest piece of certain Irish literature we have, the "Confession of St. Patrick." Now the usually accepted date of St. Patrick's death, as given in the Annals of Ulster, is 492, about three hundred years before that, and Ferdomnach, the scribe, after copying it, added these words: "Huc usque volumen quod patricius manu conscripsit sua. Septimadecima martii die translatus est patricius ad c?los," i.e., "thus far the volume which Patrick wrote with his own hand. On the seventeenth day of March was Patrick translated to the heavens." It would appear highly probable from this that Ferdomnach actually copied from St. Patrick's autograph,[9] which had become so defaced or faded during the three previous centuries, that the scribe has written in many places incertus liber hic, "the book is uncertain here," or else put a note[10] of[Pg 140] interrogation to indicate that he was not sure whether he had copied the text correctly. It will be seen from this that there was not the slightest trace of any concealment on the part of the scribe as to who he himself was, or what he was copying; there was no attempt to antedate his own writing, or to suggest that his copy was an original. But long after the scribe's generation had passed away and the origin of his work been forgotten, the volume which at first had been regarded only as a fine transcript of early documents, became known as "Canon Phádraig," or Patrick's Testament, and popular opinion, relying on the colophon "thus far the book which Patrick wrote with his own hand," set down the work as the saint's autograph. The belief that the volume was St. Patrick's own autograph of course enhanced enormously its value, and with it the dignity of its possessors, and the unscrupulous plan was resolved on of erasing the signature of the actual scribe. The veneration of the public was thus secured by interested persons at the cost of truth, and the deception probably lasted so long as the possession of such a volume brought with it either credit or dignity. This same volume[11] has another interest attaching to it, so that we cannot but felicitate ourselves that out of the wreck of so many thousands of volumes, it has been spared to us—it was brought to Brian Boru, when in the year 1004 he went upon his royal progress through Ireland, the first man of the race of Eber who had attained the proud position of monarch or Ard-righ for many centuries, and he, by the hand of his secretary, made an entry which may still be seen to-day, confirming the primacy of Armagh, and re-granting to it[Pg 141] the episcopal supremacy of Ireland which it had always enjoyed.[12]
It is now time to glance at St. Patrick's "Confession," as it is usually called, though in reality it is much more of the nature of an apologia pro vita sua. The evidence in favour of its authenticity is overwhelming, and is accepted by such cautious scholars as Stokes,[13] Todd, and Reeves, no first-rate critic, with perhaps one exception, having so far as I know ever ventured to question its genuineness. It is impossible to assign any motive for a forgery, and casual references to Decuriones, Slave-traffic, and to the "Brittani?," or Britains, bear testimony to its antiquity. Again, the Latin in which it is written is barbarous in the extreme, the periods are rude, sometimes ungrammatical, often nearly unintelligible. He begins by telling us that his object in writing this confession in his old age was to defend himself from the charge of presumptuousness in undertaking the work he tried to perform amongst the Irish. He tells us that he had many toils and perils to surmount, and much to endure while engaged upon it. He never received one farthing for all his preaching and teaching. The people indeed were generous, and offered many gifts, and cast precious things upon the altar, but he would not receive them lest he might afford the unrighteous an occasion to cavil. He was still encompassed about with dangers, but he heeded them not, looking to the success which had attended his efforts, how "the sons of the Scots and the[Pg 142] daughters of their princes became monks and virgins of Christ," and "the number of holy widows and of continent maidens was countless." It would be tedious were he to recount even a portion of what he had gone through. Twelve times had his life been endangered, but God had rescued him, and brought him safe from all plots and ambuscades and rewarded him for leaving his parents, and friends, and country, heeding neither their prayers nor their tears, that he might preach the gospel in Ireland. He appeals to all he had converted, and to all who knew him, to say whether he had not refused all gifts—nay, it was he himself who gave the gifts, to the kings and to their sons, and oftentimes was he robbed and plundered of everything, and once had he been bound in fetters of iron for fourteen days until God had delivered him, and even still while writing this confession he was living in poverty and misery, expecting death or slavery, or other evil. He prays earnestly for one thing only, that he may persevere, and not lose the people whom God has given to him at the very extremity of the world.
Unhappily this "Confession" is a most unsatisfying composition, for it omits to mention almost everything of most interest relating to the saint himself and to his mission. What floods of light might it have thrown upon a score of vexed questions, how it might have set at rest for ever theories on druidism, kingship, social life, his own birthplace, his mission from Rome,[14] his captors. Even of himself he tells us next to nothing, except that his father's name was Calpornus,[15] the son of[Pg 143] Potitus, the son of Odissus, a priest, and that he dwelt in the vicus or township of Benaven Taberni?; he had also a small villa not far off, where he tells us he was made captive at the age of about sixteen years. Because his Christian training was bad, and he was not obedient to the priests when they admonished him to seek for salvation, therefore God punished him, and brought him into captivity in a strange land at the end of the world. When he was brought to Ireland he tells us that his daily task was to feed cattle, and then the love of God entered into his heart, and he used to rise before the sun and pray in the woods and mountains, in the rain, the hail, and the snow. Then there came to him one night a voice in his sleep saying to him "Your ship is ready," and he departed and went for two hundred miles, until he reached a port where he knew no one. This was after six years' captivity. The master of the ship would not take him on board, but afterwards he relented just as Patrick was about to return to the cottage where he had got lodging. He succeeded at last in reaching the home of his parents in Britannis [i.e., in some part of Britain, including Scotland], and his parents besought him, now that he had returned from so many perils, to remain with them always. But the angel Victor came in the guise of a man from Ireland, and gave him a letter, in which the voice of the Irish called him away, and the voices of those who dwelt near the wood of Focluth called him to walk amongst them, and the spirit of God, too, urged him to return.[16]
[Pg 144]
He says nothing of his training, or his ordination, or his long sojourn in Gaul, or of St. Germanus, with whom he studied according to the "Lives," but he alludes incidentally to his wish to see his parents and his native Britain, and to revisit the brethren in Gaul, and to see the face of God's saints there; but though he desired all this, he would not leave his beloved converts, but would spend the rest of his life amongst them.[17]
From this brief résumé of the celebrated "Confession" it will be seen that it is the perfervid outpouring of a zealous early Christian, anxious only to clear himself from the charges of worldliness or carelessness, and absolutely devoid of those appeals to general interest which we meet with in most of such memoirs, but there is a vein of warm piety running through the whole, and an abundance of scriptural quotations—all, of course, from the ante-Hieronymian or pre-Vulgate version, another proof of antiquity—which has caused it to be remarked that a forger might, perhaps, write equally bad Latin, but could hardly "forge the spirit that breathes in the language which is the manifest outpourings of a heart like unto the heart of St. Paul."[18]
There are two other pieces of literature assigned to St. Patrick, as well as the "Confession"; these are the "Epistle to Coroticus" in Latin, and the "Deer's Cry" in Irish. The[Pg 145] Epistle is not found in the Book of Armagh, but it is found in other MSS. as old as the tenth or eleventh century, and bears such close resemblance in style and language to the "Confession," whole phrases actually occurring in both, that it also has generally been regarded as genuine.[19] There is some doubt as to who Coroticus was, but he seems to have been a semi-Christian king of Dumbarton who, along with some Scots, i.e., Irish, and the Southern Picts who had fallen away from Christianity, raided the eastern shores of Ireland and carried off a number of St. Patrick's newly-converted Christians, leaving the white garments of the neophytes stained with blood, and hurrying into captivity numbers upon whose foreheads the holy oil of confirmation was still glistening. The first letter was to ask Coroticus to restore the captives, and when this request was derided the next was sent, excommunicating him and all his aiders and abettors, calling upon all Christians neither to eat nor drink in their company until they had made expiation for their crimes. Patrick himself had, he here explains, preached the gospel to the Irish nation for the sake of God, though they had made him a captive and destroyed the men-servants and maids of his father's house. He had been born a freedman and a noble, the son of a decurio or prefect, but he had sold his nobility for others and regretted it not. His lament over the loss of his converts is touching: "Oh! my most beautiful and most loving brothers and children whom in countless numbers I have begotten in Christ, what shall I do for you? Am I so unworthy before God and men that I cannot help you? Is it a crime to have been born in Ireland?[20] And have we not the same God as they have? I sorrow for you, yet I rejoice, for if ye are taken from the world ye are believers through me, and are gone to Paradise."
[Pg 146]
The "Cry of the Deer," or "Lorica," as it is also called, is in Irish. The saint is said to have made it when on his way to visit King Laoghaire [Leary] at Tara, and the assassins who had been planted by the king to slay him and his companions thought as he chanted this hymn that it was a herd of deer that passed them by, and thus they escaped. The metre of the original is a kind of unrhymed or half-rhymed rhapsody, called in Irish a Rosg, and is perfectly unadorned. The language, however, though very old, has of course been modified in the process of transcription. Patrick calls upon the Trinity to protect him that day at Tara, and to bind to him the power of the elements.
I bind me to-day[21]
God's might to direct me,
God's power to protect me,
God's wisdom for learning,
God's eye for discerning,
God's ear for my hearing,
God's word for my clearing,
God's hand for my cover,
God's path to pass over,
God's buckler to guard me,
God's army to ward me,
Against snares of the devils,
Against vices, temptations,
[Pg 147]Against wrong inclinations,
Against men who plot evils
To hurt me anew,
Anear or afar with many or few.
* * * * *
Christ near, Christ here,
Christ be with me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ be o'er me,
Christ before me,
Christ in the left and the right,
Christ hither and thither,
Christ in the sight,
Of each eye that shall seek me,[22] etc.
In the Book of Armagh, in the last chapter of Tirechan's life, St. Patrick is declared to be entitled to four honours in every church and monastery of the island. One of these honours was that the hymn written by St. Seachnall, his nephew, in praise of himself, was to be sung in the churches during the days when his festival was being celebrated, and another was that "his Irish canticle" was to be always sung,[23] apparently all the year through, in the liturgy, but perhaps only during the week of his festival. The Irish canticle is evidently[Pg 148] this "Lorica," which was, as we see from this notice in the Book of Armagh, believed to be his in the seventh century, and it has been sung under that belief from that day almost to our own.[24]
The other hymn, the singing of which at his festival is alluded to as one of St. Patrick's "honours," was composed by Seachnall [Shaughnal],[25] a nephew of St. Patrick's, in laudation of the saint himself. It is a very interesting piece of rough latinity, and is generally regarded as genuine. The occasion of its composition deserves to be told, for it casts a ray of light on the prudential and self-restrained side of St. Patrick's character, which no doubt contributed largely to his success when working in the midst of his wavering converts. Seachnall said that Patrick's preaching would be perfect if he only insisted a little more on the necessity of giving, for then more property and land would be at the disposal of the Church for pious uses. This remark of his nephew was repeated to St. Patrick, who was very much annoyed at it, and said beautifully, that "for the sake of charity he forbore to preach charity," and intimated that the holy men who should come after him might benefit by the offerings of the faithful which he had left untouched. Then Seachnall, grieved at having thus pained his uncle, and anxious to win his regard again,[Pg 149] composed a poem of twenty-two stanzas each beginning with a different letter, with four lines of fifteen syllables in each verse.[26] When he had done this he asked permission of Patrick to recite to him a poem which he had composed in praise of a holy man, and when Patrick said that he would gladly hear the praises of any of God's household, the poet adroitly suppressing Patrick's name which occurs in the first verse, recited it for him. Patrick was pleased, but interupted the poet at one stanza when he said that the subject of his laudations was maximus in regno c?lorum,[27] "the greatest in the kingdom of heaven," asking how could that be said of any[Pg 150] man. Maximus, ingeniously replied Seachnall, does not here mean "greatest," but only "very great." He then disclosed to his uncle that he himself was the object of the poem, and asked—like all bards—for the reward for it, whereupon Patrick promised that to all who recited the hymn piously morning and evening, God in His mercy might give the glory of heaven. "I am content with that award," said the poet, "but as the hymn is long and difficult to be remembered I wish you would obtain the same reward for whosoever recites even a part of it." Whereupon St. Patrick promised that the recitation of the last three verses would be sufficient, and his nephew was satisfied, having proved himself the first poet of Christian Ireland, and having obtained such a reward for his verses as neither bard nor ollav had ever obtained before him. It was probably this same Seachnall who was the author of the much finer hymn of eleven verses which used to be sung in the old Irish churches at communion—
"Sancti venite
Christi corpus sumite,
Sanctum bibentes
Quo redempti sanguinem.
Salvati Christi
Corpore et sanguine,
A quo refecti
Laudes dicamus Deo.
Hoc Sacramento
Corporis et sanguinis
Omnes exuti
Ab inferni faucibus," etc.
The legend in the Leabhar Breac has it that this hymn was first chanted during the holy communion by the angels in his church, on the reconciliation between himself and Saint Patrick, whence the origin of chanting it during the communion service.
The Book of Armagh contains the two earliest lives of the national saint that we have, probably the two earliest[Pg 151] biographies of any size ever composed in Ireland. They are written in rude Latin, with a good deal of Irish place-names and Irish words intermixed, the first by one Muirchu Maccu Machteni,[28] who tells us that he wrote at the instigation of Aed, bishop of Sletty, who, as we know from the "Four Masters," died about 698, and the second by Tirechan, who says he received his knowledge of the saint from the lips and writings of Bishop Ultan,[29] his tutor, who died in 656, and who, supposing him to have been seventy or eighty years old at the time of his death, must have been born only eighty or ninety years after the death of St. Patrick himself. Both of these writers appear to have had older memoirs to draw on, for Muirchu says that many had before them endeavoured to write the history of St. Patrick from what their fathers and those who were ministers of the Word from the beginning had told them, though none had ever succeeded in............