Learn about St. Patrick’s incredible journey from unbelieving slave to ardent Christian missionary to his former captors in Ireland in this church history heroes class.
These are only preliminary, unedited outlines and may differ from Andy’s final message.
The purpose of these studies is to inspire us to courageous sacrificial actions to make progress in the Two Journeys—the internal journey of holiness, and the external journey of evangelism and missions—by learning the stories of our heroic brothers and sisters in the past:
Hebrews 13:7 Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
Hebrews 12:1-2 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. 2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith…
I. The Flickering Flame of Civilization
A. Skellig Michael
As we begin our study today, I want to bring you across fifteen centuries to a slender pinnacle of rock, eighteen miles west of the coast of Ireland. It is regularly buffeted by storms and pounded continually by the cold northern Atlantic surf. It is shaped like a pyramid and has twin peaks that jut upward 700 feet toward the usually overcast skies. Its sides are extremely steep, with dramatic rocky cliffs that overlook the Atlantic waves. It is called Skellig Michael… Michael, named for the archangel, and Skellig an old Gaelic word meaning “splinter of stone.”
It is hard to believe that, according to historian Kenneth Clark, all of western civilization and western Christianity clung “by the skin of its teeth” to places like Skellig Michael in the sixth century. For in this austere place there was a monastery of tenacious monks who diligently copied the texts of all the classical libraries of the collapsed Roman empire, preserving them for posterity from the depredations and destructions of the hordes of barbarians who had overwhelmed Rome at the last and were burning anything they didn’t consider of any value. Scrolls with writing on them meant very little to the Vandals and Goths and Visigoths and Huns. As they swept through the streets of Rome, the so-called eternal city, they scooped up gold and silver and marble and other valuable materials… but the scrolls of Latin and Greek texts were quickly consigned to the flames of ignorant destruction. This was the beginning of the so-called dark ages.
But according to Clark and fellow historian Thomas Cahill, it was the Irish that saved civilization… a hitherto untold story of how obscure Irish monks played a heroic role in preserving classical learning from the fall of Rome to the rise of Medieval Europe.
It was only “by the skin of our teeth” as Clark said that the flickering ember of classical learning in the West was not entirely snuffed out. And these obscure Irish monks were the heroes of that rescue.
Cahill celebrated this rescue with these words:
“What was about to be lost in the century of barbarian invasions was literature—the content of classical education. Had the destruction been complete—had every library been disassembled and every book burned—we might have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all of classical history, Demosthenes and Cicero and all of classical oratory, Plato and Aristotle and all of Greek philosophy, and Plotinus and Porphyry and all the subsequent commentary. We would have lost the taste and smell of a whole civilization. Twelve centuries of lyric beauty, aching tragedy, intellectual inquiry, scholarship, sophistry, and love of Wisdom—the acme of ancient civilized discourse—would all have gone down the drain of history.” [Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilzation, 58]
What is “civilization?” According to Kenneth Clark, it goes beyond the day-to-day struggle of survival, and the night-to-night struggle against terror. It develops the qualities of thought and feeling and art so they might approach as closely as possible the ideal of perfection—reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium… through myths, dance and song, through systems of philosophy, and through the order man has imposed on the visible world.”
These Irish monks, living simple and austere lives on the wind-swept buffeted crags of Skellig Michael and other remote locations around Ireland, as they diligently bent over their manuscripts and copied them, were keeping alive that glowing coal of human civilization rescued from the now-destroyed libraries of Rome. And though they were ardent Christians, they seemed not to care whether what they were copying was Christian or pagan… it was learning, and it must be preserved!
It is interesting to think about and debate how valuable the classical literature of pagan Greece and Rome has been… this classical learning was not done in the name of Christ or informed by the Judeo-Christian heritage at all… it falls in the realm of what we call COMMON GRACE; God giving to pagans amazingly helpful insights in science and math and literature and music and art that enriched our lives
But far more valuable is the role these Irish monks played in copying the scriptures and setting up missionary monasteries burning with passion for the spread of the gospel across the British Isles and northern Europe. This is an amazing story of God’s providence.
And the key human figure is someone Irish people celebrate every March 17th on St. Paddy’s day… St. Patrick… a hero of the church.
Today, we are going to study his life, and the courageous and loving missionary work he did to win the Irish to the gospel. In our next study, we will focus on the Irish monasteries under Columba that spread the gospel in the century that followed.
II. The Story of Patricius, The Slave-Boy Who Returned a Missionary
A. The Fall of Rome; The Rise of Barbarian Lawlessness
As we saw with Augustine, the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410 was earth-shaking… Jerome in his cave in the Middle East thought it was the end of the world. As more and more barbarian tribes contributed to the ultimate fall and destruction of the Western Roman Empire, Augustine wrote his timeless defense of a Christian view of history, The City of God… arguing that the City of Man (represented by human empires like Rome) would rise and fall and rise and fall, but the City of God would be built step by step by the gospel.
Augustine died in the year 430 as 80,000 barbarians called Vandals were ready to sack his own city of Hippo in North Africa. But even while he died, God was preparing another servant to play a key role in the preservation of the scriptures and the advance of the gospel.
Between the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and the death of the last western Roman emperor in 476, the Empire became more and more unstable. And a world in chaos is not a world in which books were copied by hand and read and studied. People in such a chaotic world did not have the leisure to become well educated. Rising terror and lawlessness were the order of the day. The borders of the Empire were contracting. Armies of the Goths and then of the Huns were driving westward over the Danube River and marching up and down the Italian peninsula, causing panic and leaving desolation in their wake. Libraries in particular were wiped out entirely.
Rome entirely withdrew from the British Isles, leaving those lands to be raided and plundered and terrorized by German Angles and Saxons.
One of the worst parts of that era was the wholesale enslavement of previously free Roman men and women. Slavery was lucrative business… individuals would be plundered by some band, then ransomed by another group, only to be forced to slave for that second group. [Cahill, 36-37]
One group that regularly took part in these slave raids were the Celts of Ireland… a wild, pagan band who were excellent sailors and fierce warriors.
Cahill describes a typical raid: “Just before dawn, a small war party would move its stealthy little skin-covered sailing crafts into a little cove, approach an isolated farmhouse with silent strides, grab some sleeping children, and be halfway back to Ireland before anyone knew what had happened.” [Cahill, 37]
But the Irish also moved in large war parties as well. Somewhere around the year 401, a great fleet of black Irish sailboats swept up the western coast of Britain, moved probably into the Severn estuary, and seized many thousands of captives and returned with them to the slave markets of Ireland. One of those seized was a 16 year old boy named Patricius… the man we know today as St. Patrick.
At that point, he was just a Romanized British native… not English, for the English were Angles who would later come from Germany. But Patricius was a Romanized native of Britain. Amazingly, the patron saint of Ireland was not Irish at all, but British!
The information we have for Patrick’s life comes mostly from his own Confession (like Augustine’s Confession… a written document describing his story). Patrick tells us that his father, Calpurnius, was a Roman tax collector, and that his grandfather Potius had been a Catholic priest. So Patrick was being groomed to be a middle-class Roman Briton, preparing by classical education for a mildly prosperous life.
He had no interest in following in his father’s footsteps as a tax collector, and the Catholic religion of his grandfather sat pretty lightly on him. He was not an especially pious young man when he was kidnapped into slavery.
His captors took him to Ireland, to a place called Antrim, where he was made an enslaved shepherd-boy. He was owned by a Druid tribal chieftain named Miliuc. As he tended the sheep day and night, in all kinds of Irish weather, through the seasons of the year, God was doing a profound work in his soul:
Patrick said “I was chastened exceedingly and humbled in truth by hunger and nakedness every day.”
B. Pagan Ireland
1. The land of the Irish at that point was wild and utterly pagan
2. It was rent by feuding and warring small clans, like 20th century Mafiosi in Sicily
3. The Celts were sexually immoral, violent, continually at strife and warfare with each other; they were deeply spiritual, believing in gods and goddesses and magic spells and human sacrifice
C. Patrick’s Life as a Shepherd-Slave
1. Patrick’s life as a shepherd-slave was miserable
2. His Irish overlord did not care for his well-being or survival except to serve the function as a shepherd
3. As he cared for the sheep, he was bitterly isolated, spending months alone in the hills
4. Since he was so isolated, it took him a long time to learn the language and customs of his captors
5. He was continually hungry and continually naked… stripped all human dignity; the constant gnaw in his belly and the harsh burn of the weather on his skin ripped at his mind and depressed his heart
6. But there was one consolation… his isolation out in the hills gave him abundant time to pray, and to become acquainted with the God of his Christian father and grandfather
Patrick: “Tending flocks was my daily work, and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of him surrounded me more and more, and faith grew and the Spirit was roused within me so that in one day I would say as many as one hundred prayers, and after dark, nearly as many again, even while I remained in the woods or on the mountain. I would wake and pray before daybreak—through snow, frost, rain—nor was there any sluggishness in me (such as I experience nowadays) because then the Spirit within me was ardent.” [Cahill, 102]
7. Patrick endured six years of this harsh isolation, and by the end of it, he had been transformed from a careless immature boy to effectively an ardent visionary man of God… a visionary for whom there was very little separation between this world and the heavenly one
8. Finally the time came for his escape… on the last night he would spend as Miliuc’s slave, he received in his sleep his first other-worldly experience
9. A mysterious voice spoke to him: “Your hungers are rewarded; you are going home!” Patrick sat up, startled by the voice. Then the voice continued: “Behold, your ship is ready!”
D. Patrick’s Escape from Slavery
1. Miliuc’s farm was inland, nowhere near the sea… but Patrick set out, having no idea where he was going
2. He walked over two hundred miles through territory he had never seen before in his life; yet he was never stopped or followed or asked any questions which a runaway slave like him would have had a hard time answering
3. Finally he reached a southeastern inlet… Thomas Cahill thinks it was near Wexford… as he walked toward his destiny, his faith that he was being led and protected by Almighty God must have grown to a huge degree… for it seems almost impossible that a fugitive slave like him could have made such progress without God’s help
4. Patrick wrote “I came in God’s strength and had nothing to fear.”
5. Patrick went down to the dock where some sailors were loading a cargo of Irish hounds for sale on the European continent; Patrick approached the captain who eyed him suspiciously
6. Somehow, Patrick had money for the passage (we have no idea where he got that!)… but the captain cut him off and said he was wasting his time, that he would never be sailing with them
7. Patrick was in great danger at this point… it would be almost impossible for him in a port town like that not to be recognized as a fugitive slave… and if the captain would not take him, he was lost
8. Patrick wrote: “Hearing the captain’s response, I left them to go to a hut where I was staying and on the way, I began to pray. Before I had even finished my prayer, I heard one of the sailors shouting after me: ‘Come quickly, they’re calling you!’ And right away I returned to them, and they said ‘Come aboard… we’ll take you on trust.’ [Cahill, 103]
9. They sailed for the continent and it took three days to get there; we don’t know exactly where the ship landed, but when they disembarked and journeyed inland, they found only a deserted land with nothing to eat, though they walked through it for two weeks
10. Modern scholars struggle lining Patrick’s account up with the Europe we know now, but it may have been the year 407, when German barbarian hordes were ravaging lands everywhere and leaving nothing in their wake
11. Patrick and all the men were very close to starving to death, some of them collapsing half-dead by the side of the road
E. The Miraculous Pigs
1. At this point the captain taunted this religious young men, “What about it, Christian? You say that your god is great and all-powerful, so why can’t you pray for us? We’re starving to death, and there’s little chance of us seeing a living soul!”
2. Patrick’s faith fills him at this key juncture. He says to the captain and the men, “From the bottom of my heart, turn trustingly to the Lord my God, for nothing is impossible to him! And today he will send you food for your journey until you are filled, for he has an abundance everywhere!”
3. Patrick’s sincere faith truly moved the sailors. They bowed their heads in prayer with him for God to provide food.
4. Suddenly they heard the sound of a stampede. They all raised their heads and saw a large herd of pigs rushing straight for them on the road. Pigs… their favorite meat! A direct answer to prayer!
F. The Return Home… and His Visionary Calling
1. After that amazing occurrence, it took Patrick another few years to get home
2. At last, however, Patricius made it back to his family in Britain
3. He is welcomed as a lost son returning home, and his parents beg him never to leave them again
4. But all these experiences have profoundly changed him… he is not the teenager he was; he has been hardened into a strong man by his years of suffering, and he has a deep and profound faith in God
5. Soon after returning home, he has a powerful dream or vision during the night. He sees a man he knew in Ireland—a man named Victoricus—holding countless letters. He selects one and hands it over to Patrick, who reads the heading on the letter… it says “The Voice of the Irish”
6. At that moment in the vision, he hears the voice of a multitude of people crying out to him. He is beside a forest near the Western Sea (what we know today as the Irish Sea that separates Britain from Ireland)… these people cry with one voice: “We beg you to come and walk with us once more!” It is Patrick’s “Macedonian call” like the Apostle Paul experienced
Acts 16:9-10 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.
7. Patrick felt “stabbed in the heart” by this vision and the plaintive and desperate call of the Irish people to come back
8. No matter how much he tried, Patrick could not push the vision or its meaning from his mind
9. He started to have more visions… including Christ himself speaking from within his heart: “He who gave his life for you, he it is who is speaking within you.”
10. As Thomas Cahill put it at this amazing moment in redemptive history: “Patricius, the escaped slave, is about to be drafted once more—as Saint Patrick, apostle to the Irish nation.” [Cahill, 106]
11. It is an amazing moment in redemptive history because Patrick may well be the first missionary to a truly wild and barbarian people. Paul went on three missionary journeys, but it was always within the Greco-Roman world… a world he knew very well. That is in no way to minimize it, for he suffered more than any other missionary in history… but he was fluent in Greek and was a Roman citizen… this was his culture… and everywhere he went, there we already Jewish synagogues
12. Patrick on the other hand, ventured into a land characterized by an utterly wild, dark, violent pagan people; it was not his culture; rather they had been his captors
G. Academic Training
1. But in order to prepare for this mission, Patrick had to make up for lost time academically
2. Because of his capture at age sixteen, he was hopelessly behind in his schooling
3. He followed the visions and inner voice to a monastery in Gaul (probably the island monastery of Lerins offshore from modern-day Cannes)
4. There he endured the rigors of academic training, studying in order to be ordained as a deacon
5. After finishing his training, he is ultimately ordained… not just as a deacon but as a priest and a bishop
6. Cahill says he is the first missionary bishop
Patrick spoke of this commitment later in his life: “The gospel has been preached to the point beyond which there is no one” (meaning nothing but the ocean). And Patrick at the moment he set out for Ireland was fully aware of the great dangers that would face him: “Every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved—whatever may come my way. But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promise of heaven. For I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.”
Timeline:
Patrick born in 385; kidnapped/enslaved in 401; escaped in 407; ordained in 430; returned to Ireland in 432 at the age of 47; died on March 17, 461
H. Patrick’s Love for the Irish People
1. Patrick’s love for the Irish people shines out of his writings about them
2. He describes them as the individuals he knew them to be, and seems to delight in their attributes
3. He worries constantly for the welfare of the people… both spiritually and physically
4. He is noteworthy in his abhorrence of slavery… and he speaks up for the slaves whom he led to faith in Christ, especially women
“But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most—and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to follow Christ, to do so anyway, and do it with a backbone.” [Cahill, 109]
I. Ireland Transformed by the Gospel
1. How did Patrick win these wild pagans to faith in Christ?
2. Well, in his last years he could look out over an Ireland radically transformed by his patient and wise proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ
3. According to tradition, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland
4. He associated bishoprics with local kingships… not so much to curry favor with them and use their power and money; actually Cahill argues that he did it more to keep an eye on their tyrannies and depredations, because they were all powerful raiders and rustlers and kidnappers
5. The Ireland he won to Christ had no population centers of any kind… they were just scattered and isolated farmsteads
6. He was amazingly successful in his evangelistic preaching… he hated slavery with a passion and Cahill argues he was the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery itself, not merely the excesses of it (p. 114); within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a complete halt
7. Other forms of violence, like murder and intertribal warfare decreased greatly
8. He established monasteries and convents throughout Ireland, training those in them to shine with the light of Christ and display the virtues of lifelong faithfulness, courage and generosity
9. He showed them that the sword was not the only way to set up and run a society
10. He powerfully preached against British slave traders… petty kings who did the same thing to the Irish that the Irish marauders had done to Patrick… these petty kings along the western coastline of Britain rushed to fill the power vacuum by the collapse of the Roman Empire and the absence of the Roman legions… they began to carve out new territories for themselves and to plunder each other and the neighboring Irish countryside
11. Some of these British kings, while claiming to be Christians, were actually stealing Patrick’s converts by the thousands and enslaving them
12. Patrick violently protested, sending a delegation of priests to the court of one of these kings, Coroticus, with the hopes of ransoming or releasing the captives, but the delegation was laughed to scorn
13. So Patrick wrote an open letter to all British Christians in an attempt to put pressure on Coroticus… it is filled with the passion Patrick has for his flock of Irish Christians:
“Ravening wolves eating up the people of the Lord as if they were bread! I beseech you earnestly, it is not right to pay court to such men nor to take food or drink in their company, nor is it right to accept their alms, until they by doing strict penance with shedding tears make amends before God and free the servants of God and the baptized handmaidens of Christ for whom he died…. This is a crime so horrible and unspeakable!”
Almost certainly Patrick’s passion comes from his memories of his life as a slave
14. Possibly the British Christians did not recognize the Irish Christians as their brothers and sisters in Christ
Patrick writes: “In sadness and grief shall I cry aloud! O most lovely and loving brothers and sons whom I have begotten in Christ (I cannot number them)… what shall I do for you? I am not worthy to come to the aid of either God or men. The wickedness of the wicked has prevailed against us. We are become as it were strangers. Can it be that they do not believe we have received one baptism or that we have one God and Father? Is it a shameful thing in their eyes that we have been born in Ireland?!” [Cahill, 112]
AMAZING! He so identifies with the Irish Christians that he includes himself with them as those who were “born in Ireland”
1 Corinthians 9:21-22 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law … so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.
15. Cahill writes that the British Christians did not recognize the Irish Christians either as full-fledged Christians or even as human beings, because they were not Romans… they had never been under Rome’s laws or language or culture
16. By this time in the Roman Empire, post Constantine… it was almost like being Roman = being Christian and vice versa!
17. Patrick’s fiery letters earned him the wrath of some of the powerful British clergy… but his greatness cannot be denied
18. His love for his Irish converts who were being so abused and stolen and murdered was so powerful
“O most dear ones… I can see you, beginning the journey to the land where there is no night nor sorrow nor death … You shall reign with the apostles and prophets and martyrs. You shall seize the everlasting kingdoms, as he himself promised when he said ‘They shall come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”
19. Unlike Augustine, Patrick did not wallow in the inner recesses of his own sin nature and brood over it; he had a very bright, optimistic view of the grace of God—that even slave traders can turn into liberators, and even murderers can act as peacemakers, and even barbarians can take their place among the nobility of heaven [Cahill, 115]
20. Patrick, in his wonder-working prayer for food in the deserted land, and in his visionary leading, connected well with the spirituality of former druids and Celtic mystics
21. The legends that surround him are impossible to authenticate… the most famous was that he drove all the snakes out of Ireland… also that he used a shamrock to explain the Trinity
J. St. Patrick’s Breastplate
1. A famous prayer, ascribed to him… but it cannot be proven
According to tradition, St. Patrick wrote it in 433 A.D. for divine protection before successfully converting the Irish King Leoghaire and his subjects from paganism to Christianity.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.
I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.
I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
I arise today, through
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.
I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
K. The Last Thirty Years of Patrick’s Ministry
1. Served his warrior children with all the passion he could muster
2. Taught them to take all the energy and passion they had used to kill and enslave one another and seize one another’s kingdoms to seize the everlasting heavenly kingdom instead
3. He worked a staggering miracle of change in Ireland by the simple preaching of the gospel and a consistent pattern of love and courage and wisdom
4. He was fearless of them, bold in telling them the truth, obviously wrapped up entirely in their welfare
5. He understood their souls… their spirituality… and transformed it from animistic druidism and Celtic myths to biblical truths and teaching
6. He gave them hope that the gospel could transform their darkened hearts
7. The God of Creation is welcomed in every aspect of their beautiful land and the details of creation
8. While the evils of paganism were driven away by the superior spirituality of true Christianity
Cahill: “And that’s how the Irish became Christians.”
Next time… “How the Irish then saved civilization…” and even more importantly, protected the scriptures and spread the gospel boldly to pagan Britain and Europe.
