Roy Flechner, Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History
of Ireland’s Patron Saint. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Reviewed by Máire Johnson (mjohns38@emporia.edu)
As suggested by his title, Roy Flechner here revisits the
career and context of Ireland’s most well-known saint, Patrick. As a focus of
spiritual devotion, popular embrace, and academic fascination, Patrick has been
analyzed by hagiologists, historians, Latinists, theologians, biblical
scholars, and Christian devotees alike—and this list accounts for only a
fraction of those who have dissected Patrick’s life and legend over the last
century or so. Given this enormous amount of attention, it is pleasantly
surprising when a study can add something novel to the conversation, and on
this Flechner’s work delivers. He repeats the work of others in the service of
explaining the complex and lengthy field of scholarship to date, and then he
suggests potential new and genuinely original paths to tread. He explicitly
writes for both an academic and for a popular audience (xvi–xvii), laying out
his study in approachable prose while also providing a sufficient evidentiary
footprint—primary sources cited in chapter endnotes, an annotated bibliography
of relevant secondary works—for researchers (and others) to follow. Like many
prior assessments of Saint Patrick, Flechner closely attends to the only two
extant texts the saint himself left to us, his apologetic Confession and his
polemic Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, to which he adds the commentary of
some of Patrick’s contemporaries about Britain and Ireland and, where possible,
the archaeology of both islands during the saint’s era. Flechner then goes
further, however, and offers a fresh perspective on this data by including
Roman law and Roman rhetoric. Flechner is quite open that his interpretations
and suggestions have provoked controversy (xvi), but he asserts that it is
essential to assess not only the portrait of Patrick from all available
evidence but also the critical ambiguities within Patrick’s own testimony to
obtain the clearest and most dimensional understanding of the man, his context,
and his impact on Ireland’s conversion to Christianity (xvi, 1–2).
Flechner explains the nature and challenges of the evidence
in his introductory chapter (1–28). He notes that Saint Patrick’s two surviving
works were each composed for specific purposes and directed at specific
audiences; to argue his points effectively, therefore, Patrick combined
classical Latin and late antique Christian exegetical traditions in a
rhetorical framework well in keeping with his own likely education and with the
intellectual milieu of his day. Flechner observes that, as the son of an elite
Romano-British citizen, Patrick probably learned the rhetorical technique of
argumentum, by which a point could be presented without necessarily having all
details of that point be strictly accurate. The saint’s compositional style
would also have woven together the factual and allegorical, as evidenced by
frequent biblical allusion, with the likely result that neither Patrick’s
Confession nor his Letter can be taken as straightforward, thoroughly correct
reports (25). Given that Patrick wrote to convince his readers of the
righteousness of his own stance—on one hand defending himself in his Confession
against accusations of corruption and insubordination (among other things)
leveled at him by his British ecclesiastical colleagues, and on the other
condemning a group of warriors for their unrepentant enslavement of Patrick’s
flock in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus—Flechner’s point deserves
consideration. It is not that the saint was dishonest, Flechner argues, but
rather that his rhetorical approach and his promotion of a higher Christian
goal meant that his two texts need to be assessed with a greater eye to the
allegorical layers than has generally been the standard. Use of that wider
perspective, Flechner observes, also can detangle the “internal ambiguities” of
Patrick’s accounts and further flesh out his portrait (xvi).
In Chapter One (29–60), Flechner assesses the sociopolitical
context of the fourth- and fifth-century Britain within which Patrick was born
and came of age. The saint testifies that his father was a decurion who owned a
villa and a fair number of slaves, which Flechner points out would have been
accompanied by the expectation that he serve on the local town council (curia);
these details all suggest that Roman law and administration held sway for
some—if not all—of Patrick’s childhood, and that the saint was, at the very
least, born at some point before Rome officially withdrew its involvement from
Britain in 410. Patrick’s comment that his father took clerical orders further
indicates that Christianity was reasonably widespread; it also raises the
possibility that he may have entered the clergy to evade the more onerous
obligations of his decurionate, particularly the requirement that he make up
shortfalls in the tax collection from his own resources. This form of debt
flight, Flechner highlights, was a rising challenge of the later Roman Empire.
Once his father became a cleric, which the saint recounts occurred when he
himself was fifteen years old, Patrick himself would have been expected to
assume both his father’s office as decurion and its associated seat on the town
council very shortly thereafter. Flechner uses this data along with Patrick’s
admission that he sold his nobility, and that the charges he later faced from
his ecclesiastical superiors involved an offense he committed at age fifteen,
to suggest that Saint Patrick’s captivity narrative may be allegorical. It is
possible, Flechner speculates, that the sixteen-year-old saint was not abducted
as a slave, but rather that he fled to Ireland to escape the official burdens
he inherited from his father. If true, this could explain why the saint felt it
so necessary in his Confession to prove to his superiors that his first sojourn
in Ireland was entirely against his will. Flechner acknowledges that some of
these possibilities cannot be corroborated, but he also asserts that Saint
Patrick’s own words, his “inconsistencies”, “chance mentions”, and admissions
of his controversial status in the eyes of his British contemporaries, together
provide enough clues to plausibly support Flechner’s proposed reconstruction of
the saint’s life and actions (58).
Chapter Two (61–93) then discusses Ireland’s sociopolitical
structures in the first through fourth centuries and considers the island’s
importance to and connections with Britain and the Roman Empire both before and
during Patrick’s era. Flechner relies on the saint’s admittedly scanty
mentions, on Iron Age archaeology for both islands, and on Roman descriptions
of Ireland to reconstruct a rough outline of the Irish society, economy, and
culture Patrick would have encountered. The Ireland that emerges is rural,
agrarian, and inhabited by a kin-based society whose warrior elites created and
maintained their status through rituals of gift exchange. This society was not
ruled by Rome, though Ireland did trade with and raid Roman Britain, including
the seizure and sale of slaves. Flechner acknowledges that this picture, too,
is incomplete and not always free of controversy, but argues that it offers at
least a sense of the context Patrick had to navigate. As a brief aside, Chapter
Two also includes the only typographical error this reviewer observed: on page
90, line 28, the sentence would make much greater sense if “continence” were
replaced by “countenance.”
Flechner delves into Saint Patrick’s account of his first
arrival in Ireland as a captive in Chapter Three (94–118), a narrative
primarily preserved in the saint’s Confession. Flechner points out inconsistencies,
ambiguities, and biblical allusions throughout the story, and argues that
Patrick not only had a vested interest in convincing his ecclesiastical
colleagues that his initial journey to Ireland was not undertaken by his
choice, and that his escape was therefore an act of bravery, but also that his
later mission to Ireland fulfilled a biblical model of conversion. A fleeing
slave, however, would have been extremely unlikely to successfully travel from
one side of Ireland to the other without facing recapture or death, and there
is no clear explanation of how, upon his return to Britain, the saint so easily
re-entered his prior elite life years after he supposedly had been taken.
Flechner notes that if Patrick was or was believed to have been abducted, Roman
law would have permitted him, as an escaped captive, to regain both his
property and his free status; the saint also could have used that claim to
counter his superiors’ charges either that he fled to Ireland for personal
profit or that he tried to avoid prosecution for his undefined teenaged
misdeed—the sin which, as noted in Chapter One, may have been Patrick’s attempt
to outrun his decurial obligations. Flechner asserts that the combination of
legal references and scriptural allusion in the saint’s captivity narrative, to
say nothing of the narrative’s centrality to his entire self-portrait and
identity, strongly suggest that Patrick intended the story to be understood
both literally and allegorically. Though Flechner acknowledges that neither
Patrick’s narrative nor Flechner’s proposed interpretations of that narrative
can be proven from the extant evidence, he also reiterates that a critical
approach should not reject out of hand the possibility that the saint described
that first Irish journey as an abduction into slavery to justify his own
actions, preserve his status at home, and protect himself from the charges
later laid against him for misdeeds in both Britain and Ireland.
Because so much of Saint Patrick’s story and tradition are
concerned with the introduction of Christianity to the Irish, Flechner devotes
Chapter Four (119–153) to trying to reconstitute the pre-Christian religion
Patrick would have encountered. He first dismantles the evidence other scholars
have used to argue for the existence of a universal “Celtic religion” shared
across continental and insular Western Europe, and then looks to Roman
descriptions of Britain and Ireland, together with the occasional hints Patrick
himself provides and whatever scanty bits can be gleaned from Iron Age British
and Irish archaeology—with the caveat that much of current interpretation of
the archaeological data rests heavily upon much later medieval writings all
produced by Christian authors in a predominantly Christian milieu—to try to
reformulate Iron Age Irish paganism. Flechner is able to extract a few details,
such as an adherence to polytheism, a likely solar focus, and the practice of
votive offerings at ritual centers and watery locales, but on the whole he
finds it essentially “impossible” to really piece together anything like a
solid portrait either of pre-Christian insular religion or of the changes that
Christianity wrought in its traditions. In the end, he writes, early Ireland’s
conversion may best be encapsulated in the archaeological evidence that pagan
ritual sites were reused for generations, even for centuries, following the
arrival of the new faith. To Flechner, these data embody the “delicate and
prolonged negotiations” of a lengthy and often complex transition from one
religion to the next (152).
In Chapter Five (154–181), Flechner once again focuses on
the words and deeds of Saint Patrick himself rather than on his context, and
analyzes both Patrick’s missionary activities and the ecclesiastical structures
that he established. Flechner highlights how the saint’s Confession and Letter
suggest that Patrick not only considered his mission the fulfillment of a
divine command but also that his labor was critical for ushering in the End of
Days. Patrick is scarce with details about his conversion methods, however, and
he likely exaggerates at least some of his successes. Flechner notes that
Patrick’s inability to ordain bishops or archbishops indicates that the
ecclesiastical hierarchy in conversion-era Ireland was rather incomplete. That
the saint focused his work on elite sons and daughters may further suggest a
top-down conversion strategy that would have given Christianity a toehold in
Irish society while Ireland’s rulers could preserve their status and
sovereignty by remaining pagan. Flechner offers evidence that receipt of
payment for performing ordinations or baptisms was not unusual in Late
Antiquity; that Patrick explicitly insists upon his refusal of jewelry or other
moveable valuables, therefore, does not preclude the possibility that he may
have accepted parcels of land that he then used for ecclesiastical foundations.
Where Patrick’s Confession offers glimpses of Patrick’s baptismal creed,
however, his Letter describes his abducted converts as catechumens but does not
shed light on the nature of the catechumenate itself. The saint’s accounts also
say nothing about any other contemporary missions to Ireland—even the
papally-dispatched work of Palladius attested in other sources of the day—nor
does Patrick write much about pagan sites, the building of churches, the
existence of other saints or their cults, or the veneration of relics, all
elements that become extraordinarily prominent in Patrick’s medieval
hagiography.
Flechner examines Patrick’s image in those later works in Chapter
Six (183–217). He observes, as have other scholars, how medieval hagiographers
often deployed the elements missing from Patrick’s reports, such as relic
veneration, in the service of property and primatial claims in the seventh
century and thereafter. This portrait of Patrick thus fleshes out the somewhat
terse historical figure of Late Antiquity with the miracles, interactions with
other saints, and many additional details so familiar to the saint’s legend.
Over the course of the Irish Middle Ages, Flechner observes, the Patrician
dossier continually accreted more and more components to it, especially as
Patrick’s cult expanded outside of Ireland into Britain, Brittany, Gaul, and
well beyond. It is thus in these medieval texts that Saint Patrick truly
becomes Ireland’s premier saint.
Fletcher concludes his study with an epilogue (218–225) in
which he brings the transmission of Patrick’s legend and veneration up to the
twenty-first century. Flechner especially focuses on how the saint’s cult was
at first restricted and then claimed by both Catholics and Protestants from the
sixteenth century forward; while Catholics promoted Patrick to advance the
Irish church and, eventually, an independent Irish nation, Protestants—with the
noted exception of the oppressive legislation in force from 1695 to
1822—asserted that Patrick’s presumed distance from papal orthodoxy was proof
that Ireland’s church had always looked away from Rome. Today, Flechner
observes, Patrick’s popularity not only persists but encompasses both spiritual
and secular concerns, contributing significantly to “the shaping of identities”
both personal and national (233). Flechner ultimately reiterates that the
reconstruction of Saint Patrick’s historical and religious contexts is critical
for a more complete understanding not only of Patrick’s activities but also of
the motivations for and intended audiences of his written works. This type of
reconstruction, he argues, can resolve apparent inconsistencies in the saint’s
narrative, such as his identity either as a missionary who also owned (and
perhaps sold) slaves, or as a man whose youth may have been radically different
from the devotional, faith-centered adult he became. Flechner concludes that a
critical and objective assessment in which fact provides the foundations for
plausible educated speculation can, within reason, “humanize a personality who
is too often mystified by the distance of time and reverential deference”
(234).
There is little question that Flechner’s approach provokes
controversy, as he himself notes (xvi). Those whose spiritual devotion for
Saint Patrick is formulated upon a deeply beloved portrait of him, for example,
might find it difficult to consider the suggestion that Patrick could have
claimed an experience of abduction to sidestep accusations that he fled
inherited governmental obligations, or that he could feasibly have maintained
his financial resources as a missionary in Ireland by selling his family’s
estate slaves. Flechner’s forays into speculation, moreover, could prompt some
scholars to raise their eyebrows solely because they are educated imaginings.
Yet Flechner’s work is consistently informed by the evidence of Saint Patrick’s
own historical, social, and religious milieu without much reliance on his later
medieval hagiography, in and of itself a departure from much of the Patrician
field of study. As a result, even Flechner’s guesswork is grounded in
reasonable interpretations both of the extant data and of potential
relationships for which the data is, as yet, incomplete, missing, or unknown.
Flechner could have easily engaged in much wider flights of imagination, but he
does not; instead, he emphasizes a critical and objective approach and
encourages his audience to follow suit. In Saint Patrick Retold, Flechner does
suggest some original possibilities about a saint who has been studied from a
seemingly infinite number of angles. At the very least, the ideas he proposes
herein should fuel new and fruitful directions for the Patrician debate.
Máire Johnson
Emporia State University
