”The difference between Patrick’s magic and the magic of the druids is that in Patrick’s world all beings and events come from the hand of a good God, who loves human beings and wishes them success.”

”With the Irish — even with the kings — he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.”

Whether or not you are Irish, or Roman Catholic, or even Christian, it might be argued that you in fact owe a lot to St. Patrick. Christians—of all varieties—should be especially grateful to him. While it is hard to tease fact from myth, it is clear that this giant of the faith was instrumental in converting the Celtic people of Ireland to Christianity.

These Christians in turn would be instrumental in planting centers of learning in continental Europe after the collapse of Rome.  This is an argument that was made in a delightful little book I read many years ago: Thomas Cahill’s How The Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor Books, 1995). His introduction summarizes his thesis:

”Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment—in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture—had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.”  

Not all will agree with the strongest form of this assertion (after all, some of the classic writings of antiquity may have survived the predations of barbarian hordes; furthermore some credit is probably owed also to Islamic scholars and the Byzantine empire). Nonetheless Irish monks clearly played a role that had been been overlooked and under-appreciated.

Today I tip my green plastic hat to the Irish, and to the man who in middle age returned as a missionary to a people that he could easily have despised for kidnapping him at age 16.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!