One might have thought that St Patrick is ‘written out.’ I am delighted that this is not the case and equally delighted to have been invited by my friend of long standing, the Reverend Marcus Losack, to unveil his most recent work. Marcus is no new comer to St Patrick and he has devoted much of his ordained life to pilgrimage in Ireland and abroad. – DR Michael Jackson welcomes the publication of a new book on St Patrick –
We are the richer for this commitment. Marcus has chosen St Patrick’s Cathedral and its Deanery as the place where together we will launch this exicting new volume entitled: Rediscovering St Patrick.
For those with long memories, it is very fitting that the launch should be here.CCNA 200-120 latest
Marcus dedicates this book to John Victor Luce, sometime Professor of Classics in Trinity College Dublin, and incidentally one of my own teachers. John’s father AA Luce was Regius Professor of Divinity and a canon of this very cathedral. Such circularity of history is, I am sure you will agree, very benign. I should like to thank the dean of today, the Very Reverend Victor Stacey, for his generous hospitality in hosting the launch of this book in St Patrick’s Cathedral. The cathedral seeks to live out generous Anglicanism for all without distinction or discrimination, whether we live in Dublin or visit from anywhere across the inhabited world. The welcome is consistenty the same and the sense of pilgrimage and arrival in this beautiful medieval space is significant.
Losack nails the complex questions surrounding the geographical origins of Patrick and gives extensive scope to examining the whereabouts of that fascinating and mystical place, Bannavem Tiburniae. This leads him into theological issues, into the exploration of the sudden disappearance of Patrick from Irish ecclesiastical history on the grounds of Pelagian heresy. There is a certain combat and indeed violence deeply embedded in theology and I suggest there always will be. This, in turn, leads to an important exposition by the author of mapping and hagiography, to the effect that the ovelapping of both creates a human geography which is a reflection of the person who stands at the centre of it all. The need felt by Muirchu to have the Armagh version of Patrick rise like the sun and fill the sky comes from a change in the direction of the ecclesiastical wind and therefore the need to have Patrick come from Britian and not from Brittany; so runs the argument. The cult of Patrick ate all in front of it, at least as far south as Cashel – and then, having spent five years working in Cork, I like to think it hit the cult of Fin Barre and met its match! All of this is part of the richness which lies at the point where event and elucidation, history and myth, fact and fabrication meet and interact. This need not be a disappointment to a self–consciously secular society nor indeed is it a mark of the primitivism of early Christianity. We all need myth to cope with reality on a daiy basis.200-120
Mechanistic consumerism and totalitarian functionalism have made us slower to own up to it – that’s all.
Rome and Britian exerted even more sustined pressure on the Irish church north and south through the Synod of Birr in 697AD. A number of scholars suggest that, around this time, the sense of Patrick as the founder of Irish Christianity and the patron saint of all Ireland came to the fore as also did the desire to make Armagh the Metropolitical see. It is the beginning of the culture of green milk shakes McDonald’s style. Who said we don’t need myth? The streamlining of Irish Christianity to British and Roman norms did not, however, cease in the seventh century, as all of us here are well aware. To this day we remain twitchy about John Bull’s other island even though we have ever been both dependent on and uneasy about it and all it stands for in our version of ‘Irish history.’ We grapple, and indeed struggle, to this day with independence and obedience in spiritual things and I imagine we always shall. The genius and the irony of the seventh century settlement, showcased by the prioritizing of Patrick, was that such Romanization enabled the Irish church to retain a large degree of independence. This also offers explanation of the need to give Patrick a British geographical pedigree comprizing both origin and of honour. History, however, never stands still. The onset of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in 1640 AD brought out a desire to collect and preserve and edit as many lives of early Irish saints as possible before the iconoclasm. Let us never forget that Cromwell stabled horses in this cathedral. The work of John Colgan in moving fast resulted in irreplaceable manuscripts of Lives of Patrick being taken for safe keeping to Louvain. It is these documents which Losack examines with a combination of keenly forensic compassion and spiritually attuned antennae. They make up the spine of his thesis which is the quest for the origins of St Patrick. This involves the gyrations in geography which form the theological and ecclesiatical movements which Patrick endures as he fulfis the role of national saint – and everyone today in every part of the world wants a part of Patrick.
What follows in: Rediscovering Saint Patrick is a painstaking examination of manuscripts, of geographies, of families leading to a range of conclusions which add freshness and vitality to the well–worked subject of St Patrick. It leads to a most exciting conclusion to the effect that older history serves the needs of newer history and, in finding fresh prominence, gives itself a new purpose. I often say the following: Tradition is the church interpreting, not the church reminiscing. The person and the genius of Muirchu in Armagh are utterly pivotal, in that ingeniously, inventively, scrupulously and unscrupulously at the same time, he worked the vein of the ambiguity of the Brittanic geography of Patrick (Britanniis, in Patrick’s own words), whether this was Britain or Brittany. Losack is brought back inexorably to a chateau at Bonaban in Brittany as Bannavem Tiburniae and he argues for the need of an archaeological dig there in the hope that this will bring us back into the Roman Empire and even to the house of Patrick’s father Calpurnicus.
This book is both scholarly and suggestive. It holds doggedly to its theme that Brittany is the place to look for the origin and early life of Patrick. It clearly sets out the doctrinal and the ecclesiastical politics which frame the life of Patrick along with his tragedies and his betrayal by those whom he had expected to be able to trust. But let us never forget, it is the church we are talking about here. It futhermore shows us skilfully the ways in which the person of Patrick became the cult of Patrick as Armagh sought to establish itself as the definitive metropolitical see in Ireland. The spirit in which this book is written well reflects something which its author sets out on the final page of text: ‘St Patrick’s life epitomized the best of Christian discipleship, at a time when Christianity was still considered to be an adventure.’ (page 259) The corollary of this is what frightens me. Is Christianity today no longer an adventure? Have we become bogged down in internal trench warfare to the extent that we neither embrace nor engage with the world as our big picture? Have we lost touch with the need for fearless simplicity along with the commitment to return graciously to somewhere we have been badly treated and to redeem that place and those people with the love of God? Have we thrown to one side the invitation to serve at home and abroad in ways where altruism in fact gives us belonging and community as a new and a fuller identity? I hope not and in so many places I see signs of hope and hospitality.
St Patrick poses these questions to a weary church, all too often institutionalized to the point of atrophy and accidie. My hope would be that my friend Marcus Losack’s book might rekindle that sparkle in life as we live it in an Ireland which is, understandably and irreversibly, pulsating with economic problems but an Ireland which is crying out for the living out of the common good. That very phrase: the common good is itself a legacy of energy and citizenship from the Roman Empire which formed the backdrop of Patrick and the personal oddysey which is his Confessio. In this highly personal work, he was taking into the Dark Ages the exposure of literary autobiography first put ‘out there’ by St Augustine of Hippo without whom, in my opinion, St Patrick would not have been able to be the self–revealing human being he so clearly is.vcp-510 exam
Marcus has given flesh and blood to the history of this Patrick. We are deeply grateful and I wish to congratulate him on a job beautifully and freshly done.