St Patrick: What We Actually Know About a Pre-Schism Saint

Every March 17 the world puts on green for St Patrick, and most of what it celebrates has little to do with him. The snakes, the shamrock, the druids defeated at Tara and the famous "Breastplate" prayer all belong to the story that grew up around him over the following thousand years. Behind that story stands a real man who left two short Latin writings, and they are among the most personal Christian documents to survive from the fifth century.

Orthodox Christians have their own reason to care. Patrick lived and died centuries before the schism between East and West, in the one undivided Church, and the Orthodox Church venerates him as Bishop of Armagh and Enlightener of Ireland. This article sorts what Patrick tells us himself from what later writers added, explains why his dates are uncertain, and asks why an Orthodox Christian can honor a saint whom Catholics and many Protestants also claim.

In brief

Only two writings are accepted as Patrick's own: the Confessio, a defense and thanksgiving written late in life, and the Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus. From them we learn that he was a Briton, son of a deacon and grandson of a priest, captured at about sixteen and enslaved in Ireland, where he turned to God in prayer while tending sheep. After six years he escaped, returned home, and later, after a vision of "the voice of the Irish," went back to Ireland as a bishop. He baptized many, saw sons and daughters of chiefs become monks and virgins, refused gifts, faced accusations from senior churchmen, and denounced a British warlord whose men killed and enslaved his new converts. Irish annals give 432 for his arrival and several years for his death. The earliest Lives, written in the late seventh century, mix his career with that of Palladius, the bishop sent to the Irish in 431. The snakes are first recorded in the twelfth century, the shamrock in the seventeenth, and the "Breastplate" is generally dated on linguistic grounds to around the early eighth century.

Thesis: The Patrick of the Confessio, a humble former slave who returned to the people who had enslaved him, is better attested and more worthy of veneration than the Patrick of legend, and as a saint of the undivided Church he belongs to the Orthodox Church, which keeps whole the faith he confessed.

The two writings

Patrick wrote in Latin, and he is painfully aware of it: unlike those who never had to change their way of speaking, he says, "my speech and words have been translated into a foreign language." He closes the Confessio as "Patrick, a sinner without learning," writing "in Ireland," and calls it "my confession before I die."¹ The Letter opens: "I declare that I, Patrick, – an unlearned sinner indeed – have been established a bishop in Ireland."²

The texts survive in eight manuscripts, the oldest in the Book of Armagh, copied in 807 and now in Trinity College, Dublin. The standard Latin edition is Ludwig Bieler's. This article quotes the English translation by Fr Pádraig McCarthy published by the Royal Irish Academy's online Confessio project.³ The encyclopedia entry by Dorothy Africa sums up the consensus: "Most of what is known about the man comes from these two pieces."⁴ {{very-strong: The Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus are the only writings generally accepted as St Patrick's own, and they are the main source for his life.}}

Patrick in his own words

Family and captivity

The Confessio begins: "My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers." His father Calpornius was a deacon and his grandfather Potitus a priest, near a place called Bannavem Taburniae; no one knows where it was. "I was about sixteen at the time," he says of his capture. "At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others."¹ In the Letter he adds that his father was a decurion, a member of a town council, so that he was "born free."²

In Ireland he tended sheep. "More and more the love of God increased," he writes, "so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same."¹ One night he heard a voice: "Look – your ship is ready." It was "a good two hundred miles away." He left the master he had served "for six years," reached the coast, and after a refusal and a prayer was taken on board by pagan sailors.¹

The call

Back with his family in Britain, who begged him never to leave again, he had the vision that shaped his life. A man named Victoricus came "as it were from Ireland with so many letters they could not be counted." Patrick read the beginning of one, "the voice of the Irish people," and seemed to hear the people "beside the wood of Voclut, near the western sea" calling: "We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us."¹ He does not say how many years passed, where he trained, or who made him a bishop. Africa notes that he "does not say where or by whom he was made one," nor name his associates.⁴

The mission

His picture of his work is modest and specific. People who had served "idols and unclean things" have become "the people of the Lord," and "the sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ!" He tells of a noble Irish woman who chose consecrated virginity six days after her baptism, and of slave women who held to that life "even when it is forbidden."¹ When converts laid ornaments on the altar he gave them back, so that unbelievers would have no reason "for speaking against me."¹

The Confessio is also a defense. "Some superiors of mine," he says, brought up against him, "after thirty years," a sin he had confessed to a close friend before he was a deacon, something done "in one hour" when he was perhaps fifteen. The betrayal hurt him deeply, and he prays, in the words of St Stephen, that God "not hold this sin against them."¹ Africa describes the work as "a self-defense of Patrick's own missionary career, apparently submitted to an ecclesiastical body of some kind."⁴

The Letter to Coroticus

The Letter is angrier. Soldiers of a British ruler named Coroticus had raided Patrick's flock: "The newly baptised and anointed were dressed in white robes; the anointing was still to be seen clearly on their foreheads when they were cruelly slain." When Patrick sent a priest to ask for the captives back, "they scoffed at them." He contrasts them with "the Christians of Roman Gaul," who send men "with so many thousands in money to buy back the baptised who have been taken prisoner," while these soldiers "kill them, and sell them."² Who Coroticus was is uncertain: David Kelly notes that some scholars identify him with a ruler of Strathclyde, supported by a chapter heading in Muirchú's Life, and others with a Welsh ruler named Ceretic.⁵ Kelly also observes that Patrick "is the only person that we know of from the fifth century who survived the ordeal of slavery and lived to tell his story."⁵

His faith

In section 4 of the Confessio Patrick sets out a rule of faith. There is "no other God ... except God the Father," the one "not begotten," and "his son, Jesus Christ," who "was begotten in an indescribable way before every beginning," "became a human being; and, having overcome death, was welcomed to the heavens to the Father." God "has generously poured on us the Holy Spirit," and "this is the one we acknowledge and adore – one God in a trinity of the sacred name."¹ It is the faith of Nicaea in a missionary's words. It says nothing about the procession of the Holy Spirit, a question that had not yet divided East and West.

When did Patrick live?

Here honesty requires a short answer: we do not know exactly. The Confessio gives no dates. The first fixed point concerns someone else. The chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine records, under 431, that Pope Celestine sent Palladius to the Irish as their first bishop; the Annals of Ulster copy the notice: "Palladius, having been consecrated by Celestine, bishop of the city of Rome, is sent to Ireland ... as first bishop to the Irish so that they might believe in Christ."⁶ Prosper's Latin says Palladius was sent to the Irish "believing in Christ," so there were Christians in Ireland before Patrick's mission, and Patrick was not the first bishop there.

The same annals then say, under 432: "Patrick arrived in Ireland." For his death they give several choices. Under 457: "Repose of the elder Patrick, as some books state." Under 461: "Here some record the repose of Patrick." Under 492: "The Irish state here that Patrick the Archbishop died." Under 493: Patrick "rested ... in the 120th year of his age."⁶ Orthodox calendars differ as well: the OCA's life gives his death as March 17, 461, "some say 492," while the 2017 list of the Russian Church gives 451.⁷ {{debated: St Patrick arrived in Ireland in 432 and died in 461 or 493.}} Africa writes that he "is presumed to have lived and worked in Ireland from the middle to the latter part of the fifth century, though some scholars have argued for both earlier and later dates," and that most scholars regard the career in the early Lives "as an amalgam drawn from the careers of Patrick, the shadowy Palladius mentioned by Prosper, and perhaps other members of their missions."⁴

The Patrick of legend

Muirchú and the Lives

The first Lives of Patrick were written in Ireland in the late seventh century, "nearly two hundred years after Patrick's time," by Muirchú and by Tírechán.⁴ Muirchú adds much that Patrick never says. Patrick sets out for Rome but stays with "the great lord Germanus," bishop of Auxerre, "as Paul sat at the feet of Gamaliel." He kindles the Easter fire on the night of a pagan feast at Tara, when no fire was to be lit before the king's, confronts King Loíguire and defeats his druids by miracles.⁸ Africa notes that these Lives were "highly colored by the political environment of their authors' own time," when the church of Armagh was asserting itself as the seat of Patrick's cult and leader of the Irish Church, and that the Tripartite Life, probably composed in the tenth century, pressed the claim further.⁴ Later still, in 1185, Jocelin of Furness wrote a Life for the Anglo-Norman lord John de Courcy, and Jocelin's version was widely circulated in Europe.⁴

Some of these details may preserve real memories, and Orthodox Lives draw on them; the OCA's life has him study under St Germanus at Auxerre.⁷ None can be checked against Patrick's own words.

The snakes

Ireland has no native snakes, and that was noticed long before anyone credited Patrick. The Venerable Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, says of Ireland: "No reptiles are found there, and no snake can live there; for, though often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die."⁹ Bede credits the island's air and says nothing of a saint. The art historian Rachel Moss writes that "the claim that Saint Patrick had banished all of the snakes and venomous creatures from Ireland was recorded in the twelfth century by Giraldus Kambrensis, and in Jocelin of Furness' Life of the Saint," though the tradition appears to have been established a little earlier.¹⁰ {{strong: The story that Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland is first recorded in the twelfth century, centuries after his death.}}

The shamrock

The shamrock as a teaching aid for the Trinity is later still. Moss finds the earliest known image of Patrick holding a shamrock on Dublin halfpennies of about 1674 to 1675, and writes: "there was no historical basis for the association of the Saint with the plant." By 1681 an English visitor described ordinary people wearing shamrocks on St Patrick's Day.¹⁰ It should be said plainly that Orthodox sources are not immune: the OCA's life repeats that Patrick "used the shamrock to illustrate the doctrine of the Holy Trinity," while also noting that many regard the snake story "as having no historical basis."⁷

The "Breastplate"

The prayer known as St Patrick's Breastplate or Lorica ("I bind unto myself today") is beloved in English hymnody. It is written in Old Irish, not in Patrick's Latin, and it is preserved in the eleventh-century Irish Liber Hymnorum, which credits it to Patrick and tells how he sang it when King Loíguire laid an ambush, and in fragments in the Tripartite Life. Scholars date the text on linguistic grounds to around the early eighth century.¹¹ The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, following D. A. Binchy's 1966 study, says that "its ascription to St. Patrick is impossible on linguistic grounds."¹² The OCA's life says only that the Breastplate "is also attributed" to him.⁷ It remains a fine prayer of the Irish Church that grew from his mission.

What can we actually verify?

(a) Contemporary or near-contemporary documentary evidence

Patrick's own Confessio and Letter, written by him in the fifth century, are the only contemporary evidence. They establish his British origin, clerical family, capture at about sixteen, six years' slavery, escape, call through a dream, work as a bishop in Ireland, the accusation against him, and the raid by Coroticus's soldiers. Prosper's notice of Palladius in 431 is contemporary but concerns Palladius.

(b) Later hagiographical tradition

The dates 432 and 461 or 493, the training under Germanus at Auxerre, the Easter fire at Tara, the founding of Armagh, the death and burial at Saul or Downpatrick, the snakes, the shamrock and the Breastplate all come from sources written between about two hundred and twelve hundred years after his death. Some may preserve real memory; none can be checked.

(c) Reported miracles

Patrick himself reports a voice in a dream and answers to prayer during his escape, as testimony of God's providence. Muirchú and the later Lives add many wonders, especially against druids and kings; these are received as the Church's memory, not as documented events.

Why the Orthodox Church venerates Patrick

Patrick lived in the fifth century, when the Church of Rome and the Churches of the East were in communion, and the Orthodox Church has never treated Western saints of that era as foreign. In March 2017 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church formally added Patrick and other pre-schism Western saints to its calendar. Its commission's criteria included "their unblemished confession of the Orthodox faith" and "their present veneration in foreign dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church and other Local Churches"; Patrick is listed as "bishop of Armagh, and enlightener of Ireland," commemorated on March 17 (March 30 on the civil calendar for churches that keep the Julian reckoning).¹³ The Orthodox Church in America already kept his memory; its troparion sings: "Holy Bishop Patrick, / faithful shepherd of Christ's royal flock, / you filled Ireland with the radiance of the Gospel: / The mighty strength of the Trinity!"¹⁴

What Orthodox Christians recognize in the Confessio is familiar: a bishop who baptizes and anoints, encourages monks and consecrated virgins, prays without ceasing, confesses the Trinity, and attributes everything to grace. Whatever little he did, he writes at the end, "it was a gift of God."¹ On how the Church recognizes saints, see How Does Someone Become a Saint in the Orthodox Church? Another Western saint honored in both East and West is Gregory the Great.

Objections and replies

"Patrick was a Roman Catholic missionary sent by the pope."

Patrick never says who sent him, and he never mentions the pope. The bishop known to have been sent by Rome was Palladius, in 431. In the Letter he denies that the raiders are "fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome," implying that he and his converts are, and he plainly saw himself as part of the one Catholic Church of the Roman world.² That was the undivided Church, whose faith the Orthodox Church still keeps. Catholics rightly honor him, but nothing in his writings supports papal supremacy or the later Roman doctrines that divided West from East six centuries after him.

"Patrick founded an independent Celtic church, closer to Protestantism than to Rome."

His own words point the other way. He was a bishop, son of a deacon and grandson of a priest. He baptized and anointed his converts, welcomed monks and virgins, and spoke of "the altar."¹ Irish Christianity later developed customs of its own, but the Church of the Confessio is sacramental, episcopal and ascetic, as the Church was everywhere in the fifth century.

What we can say confidently

• Patrick was a Briton from a clerical family, captured at about sixteen and enslaved in Ireland for six years.
• He escaped, returned to Britain, and later went back to Ireland as a bishop, believing himself called in a vision.
• He wrote the Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus; the oldest manuscript copy dates from 807.
• Palladius was sent to the Irish as their first bishop in 431, so Christianity reached Ireland before Patrick's mission.
• The snake story is first recorded in the twelfth century, the shamrock association in the seventeenth.
• The Russian Orthodox Church formally added him to its calendar in 2017, and the OCA keeps his feast on March 17.

What remains disputed

• The years of his mission and death; the annals offer 432 for his arrival and 457, 461, 492 and 493 for his death.
• How much of the early Lives describes Patrick, how much Palladius or others.
• Where Bannavem Taburniae was, and who Coroticus was.
• The exact date of the Breastplate, though Patrick's authorship is generally rejected.

Conclusion

The Patrick of the Confessio is a man who went back to the country of his captors because he heard them calling him, and who spent his life there knowing that some of his own superiors doubted him. He wanted no gifts and no credit. "Thanks be to God," he writes of the Irish who called him in his dream, "after many years the Lord granted them what they were calling for."¹ The legends have their charm, and the Church keeps them as part of her memory, but the man who wrote those words needs no snakes or shamrocks. Orthodox Christians can ask his prayers as a bishop of the undivided Church, and learn from him that mission begins with forgiving those who have wronged us.

Notes

1. Patrick, Confessio 1, 4, 16-18, 23, 26-27, 41-42, 49, 62, trans. Pádraig McCarthy, St Patrick's Confessio HyperStack (Royal Irish Academy), https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/confessio_english.
2. Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 1-3, 10, 14, trans. Pádraig McCarthy, https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/epistola_english.
3. McCarthy, "Notes on the Translation," appended to the Confessio translation (eight manuscripts; Book of Armagh, 807), same URL; manuscript list and Bieler edition, https://www.confessio.ie/more.
4. Dorothy Africa, "Saint Patrick, Problem of," Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture (2004), https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/saint-patrick-problem.
5. David Kelly, "St Patrick's Writings: Confessio and Epistola," St Patrick's Confessio HyperStack, https://www.confessio.ie/more/article_kelly.
6. Annals of Ulster, entries U431.1, U432.1, U457.2, U461.2, U492.1, U493.4, trans. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill (1983), CELT, University College Cork, https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T100001A.html. Prosper's entry for 431 (ad Scotum in Christum credentes) is quoted in Patrick Francis Moran, "St. Palladius," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (1911), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11424a.htm.
7. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, March 17, "Saint Patrick, Bishop of Armagh, Enlightener of Ireland," https://www.oca.org/saints/all-lives/2026/03/17.
8. Muirchú, Life of St Patrick I.6-8 and chapter headings I.13-21, trans. Ludwig Bieler, St Patrick's Confessio HyperStack, https://www.confessio.ie/more/muirchu_english.
9. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation 1.1, Internet Medieval Sourcebook (translation probably L. C. Jane's of 1903), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/bede-book1.asp.
10. Rachel Moss, "The Staff, the Snake and the Shamrock: St Patrick in Art," St Patrick's Confessio HyperStack, https://www.confessio.ie/more/article_moss.
11. "Saint Patrick's Breastplate," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Breastplate (citing the editions of Stokes 1888 and Bernard and Atkinson 1898). Used as a secondary summary.
12. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. rev. (2005), as quoted by Steve Perisho, "The Breastplate or Lorica of St. Patrick (Fáeth Fiada)," Liber locorum communium (blog), 21 March 2014, https://liberlocorumcommunium.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-breastplate-or-lorica-of-st-patrick.html, which also names D. A. Binchy, "The date of the so-called 'Hymn of Patrick'," Ériu 20 (1966), as the study behind the claim. The dictionary itself was not consulted.
13. "St. Patrick of Ireland and other Western saints officially added to Russian Orthodox Church calendar," OrthoChristian.com, 10 March 2017, https://orthochristian.com/101734.html.
14. Orthodox Church in America, Troparia and Kontakia, March 17, https://www.oca.org/saints/troparia/2026/03/17.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Patrick. Confessio and Epistola ad milites Corotici. Latin ed. Ludwig Bieler (1950/1966); English trans. Pádraig McCarthy. St Patrick's Confessio HyperStack, Royal Irish Academy, confessio.ie.
• Muirchú. Life of St Patrick. Ed. and trans. Ludwig Bieler. confessio.ie.
• The Annals of Ulster. Ed. and trans. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. CELT, University College Cork.
• Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Orthodox Church in America. Lives of the Saints and Troparia, March 17. oca.org.
• OrthoChristian.com. "St. Patrick of Ireland and other Western saints officially added to Russian Orthodox Church calendar." 10 March 2017.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Africa, Dorothy. "Saint Patrick, Problem of." In Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture. 2004. encyclopedia.com.
• Kelly, David. "St Patrick's Writings: Confessio and Epistola." confessio.ie.
• Moss, Rachel. "The Staff, the Snake and the Shamrock: St Patrick in Art." confessio.ie.
• "Saint Patrick's Breastplate." Wikipedia (secondary summary of the Old Irish editions).
• Perisho, Steve. "The Breastplate or Lorica of St. Patrick (Fáeth Fiada)." Liber locorum communium (blog), 2014 (quoting the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).