Sometime before 1905, John Bagnell Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, and already one of the most distinguished historians of his time, turned his attentions to St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.
Bury’s historical focus was Classical Greece and Rome. In 1888 he had published A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene (AD395 to AD800 ), and he was at this time researching another study of this period.
The title of Bury’s The Life of St Patrick and His Place in History indicates his approach: “Perhaps the scope of this book will be best understood if I explain that the subject attracted my attention ... in the first place, as an appendix to the history of the Roman Empire; and, in the second place, as a notable episode in the series of conversions which spread over Northern Europe the religion which prevails today.” In other words, Bury, who described himself as an agnostic, approached Patrick and his career not from a religious perspective but as an historian aiming to establish what could be known about a figure, as he put it, “wrapt in obscurity”.
Some years earlier Professor JH Todd of Trinity College, Dublin, had written a life of St Patrick. While acknowledging Todd’s pioneering work, Bury criticised him for not being sufficiently critical of his sources, and writing “with an unmistakeable ecclesiastical bias”. Todd’s Patrick was a Protestant precursor and his church, an early version of the Church of Ireland. Bury, by contrast, “whose interest in the subject” was “purely intellectual”, concluded “that the Roman Catholic conception of St Patrick’s work is, generally, nearer to historical fact than the views of some anti-papal divines”.
As Bury noted, we are fortunate in having two documents dealing with Patrick’s life (c390-460 ) most historians conclude were written by him: The Letter to Coroticus and The Confession. Neither is what we would call an autobiography; the latter deals with only a specific episode – a raid on Ireland led by a Scottish king who carried off prisoners and valuables that Patrick demanded be handed back.
The Confession does contain important biographical details. Patrick was born close to the Welsh border to Calpurnius, a Roman citizen and a Christian deacon; at the age of 16 he was carried off in a raid and spent several years a captive in north-west Mayo before escaping to France. He lived for several years in the monastery at Lerins, off the coast of Cannes. Back home in Britain, where he was welcomed “as a son”, Patrick had his famous dream in which he was urged to bring the Gospel message to the Irish. And, though there were already some Christians in Ireland, it was Patrick who was to transform Ireland and bring it within the fold of the See of Rome.
Written, Bury suggests, towards the end of his life (“This is my confession before I die” ), the precious biographical information is almost incidental to the author’s main intention, which is to deal with the way in which God has shaped his life and given him the great task of bringing Christianity to the Irish. He admits he is not a learned man, that he undertook his mission against the wishes of his family, and that he has endured attacks from those who questioned his motives. He also tells us he always felt a stranger in Ireland – he writes he would love to visit his home again and France where he had many friends - and that it was only his obedience to God that led him to “return to that people from whom I had formerly escaped”.
Bury examines the sources and carefully sifts the legends for whatever truth they might contain, provides an historical context for Patrick’s work in Ireland, and weighs the evidence for his mission journeys throughout Ireland. His conclusions are carefully and judiciously given, and though since his book appeared the period and its sources have been even more critically investigated, rendering some of his conclusions doubtful, his study remains a valuable one.
For Bury, Patrick is notable for three things: “He organised the Christianity which already existed; he converted kingdoms which were still pagan, especially in the West; and he brought Ireland into connection with the Church of the Empire, and made it formally part of universal Christendom ... he made Christianity a living force in Ireland which could never be extinguished.”
As Thomas Charles-Edwards notes in his Foreword, it was the agnostic Bury’s version of Patrick that “came to be cherished by Catholic scholars”. It is an irony the son of the Rector of Clontibert would no doubt have appreciated.
Barnaby ffrench
