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Do I like St Patrick? His biographer reveals all

Patrick was a hard man to get to know, hiding his true self behind rhetorical genious

We may have to part with some familiar stories about Patrick, which have endeared him to generations of readers and listeners, but we will gain glimpses of another, historical Patrick, deserving of our respect. Image: Diodore Rahoult, Italy 1886 / Getty Images

Roy Flechner
Tue Mar 17 2020 - 05:47

A couple of months after I finished writing a biography on St Patrick for Princeton University Press, I received an unexpected call from a recording producer. She explained that she had been hired by my publisher to oversee the recording of an audiobook and that she had a few technical questions to ask. We spoke for a while and before we concluded our conversation she had a final, more personal question.

She wanted to know whether, in the course of writing the biography, I had grown fond of St Patrick. I told her that, funnily enough, I had never been asked that before. “Give me a few seconds to think about this,” I said as I gathered my thoughts and pondered the question: do I like St Patrick?

There is nothing unusual about a biographer growing fond of her or his subject. In the course of researching and writing, biographers would spend so much time with their subjects and become so intimate with their lives that very often they come to identify more deeply with them. This is a pretty common reflex for a biographer and it is, I suppose, even to be expected. Identifying with the protagonist can be an edifying experience or it can be something to guard against. It all depends on who the protagonist is. And what if it is St Patrick?

When I eventually replied to the producer, I said that, no, I did not grow fond of St Patrick. It isn’t that I found him intrinsically objectionable; for all I know he might have been a terrific guy and I might have loved to have him over for dinner.

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Rather, my inability to identify with Patrick stems from the fact that for every inch of his personality that he reveals, he then hides a mile. He is simply a difficult historical figure to get to know. Admittedly, he does impart some biographical detail of the trivial, yet precious kind, like the name of his home town in Britain, the names of his father and grandfather, their clerical occupation, and so on.

However, other matters, which are of more consequence, are mentioned only in passing and, frustratingly, are not developed. Patrick tells us that he was implicated in controversies, that he was condemned by his elders in Britain, that he was convicted in a trial, and that he was betrayed by a friend to whom he confessed a boyhood sin.

These were undoubtedly well-known issues that dogged his reputation and that he was not able to pass over in silence. But he doesn’t flesh them out with detail and they remain clad in a veil of mystery.

The vagueness with which Patrick chose to write about these matters bears testimony to the agony of someone who is – at one and the same time – eager to tell his story in all frankness but is inhibited by being too self-conscious about the manner in which his image will be framed for posterity. One can sympathise with his predicament, but it is difficult to either like or dislike someone who keeps his cards so close to his chest.

Nevertheless, there is one important quality of his that I did come to appreciate deeply, which is his rhetorical ingenuity. It is precisely this quality that enabled him to retain the ambiguity of being – at once – both known and unknown, both righteous and flawed.

Much of what my biography does is to provide a commentary on this rhetorical ingenuity and the extent to which it contributed to his image-building. Patrick was a master of narrative, of prose composition, of apologetic rhetoric, and of using biblical allusion and metaphor effectively and elegantly.

Patrick is, of course, remembered for other achievements, with which the book deals at length, and in particular his missionary work and the odds that he had had to fight against before he could establish his status as an independent leader. In the book I try to rise to the challenge that Patrick himself set to his readers, namely the challenge of reaching beyond the plain meaning of the words and recovering something of the story that he left untold.

In attempting to interpret Patrick within his historical context I occasionally had to speculate about the relationship between events from his own life and events from the history of contemporary Britain and Ireland. In the book I say clearly when I speculate, and I do this as a precaution against falling into the same trap as some of my predecessors, whose unqualified speculations were the undoing of the biographies that they wrote.

However, in fairness, it must be acknowledged that any radical departure from the popular image of Patrick as the righteous apostle to the Irish runs the risk of being dismissed as fatuous, and this risk applies to some of the hypotheses which I advance in Saint Patrick Retold. No biography of the great man is immune from such criticism. Indeed, certain hypotheses that I offered have already made headlines worldwide when they were first published in article form in 2011. Some accepted them, other did not.

When the front page of The Irish Times reported on my work on March 2012, the headline read: Was St Patrick of the tall tales a tax exile and a spin doctor? Although the headline somewhat simplifies the argument, the question mark with which it ends is nevertheless reassuring because it signals the opening of a debate rather than its conclusion.

Just as Patrick is inviting his readers to read more deeply into his text, I too am inviting my readers to have a conversation about my own. The book therefore takes the form of a probing inquiry that leaves room for others to join the discussion.

As I say in the preface to Saint Patrick Retold, the book does not attempt to promote an agenda, nor was it written in order to provoke. Rather, it challenges the reader to contemplate different images of Patrick that emerge from different kinds of available evidence but also from the internal ambiguities of individual sources.

The book shows Patrick as he is depicted in his own words, Patrick as inferred from the circumstances of his immediate historical contexts, Patrick as a figure of veneration whose saintly image developed in different ways over a millennium and a half, and Patrick as a figure who, by his own account, was regarded as controversial by some of his contemporaries.

In reconciling these different facets we may have to part with some of the familiar stories about Patrick, which have endeared him to generations of readers and listeners, but we will gain glimpses of another, historical Patrick, deserving of our respect.
Roy Flechner, associate professor at University College Dublin, is author of Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint (Princeton University Press, 2019)