St Patrick might not have been so lucky in today’s unforgiving Ireland
Not for a minute would this nation tolerate him, let alone welcome him. At best we’d ignore him. At worse, we’d hospitalise him or imprison him.
We have, for example, a conviction that anyone who went through abusive times as a child is likely, at the drop of a provocation, to turn strange in their adult years. Removing a child from his home and family by force, transporting him across national boundaries and isolating him on the side of a hill herding sheep or pigs, or whatever it was Patrick herded, has to have been gruesome abuse of a child.
If it happened in contemporary times, and was followed, long after his escape, by Patrick hearing those voices calling “Come, O Holy Youth and walk once more amongst us,” nobody would nod in admiration of the lad’s sense of mission.
Much more logical would be for the rest of us to assume that Patrick from Wales was suffering from an advanced case of Stockholm Syndrome.
That’s the pattern of behaviour first noted in 1973 when a bank robbery happened in that city, involving hostages and a six-day standoff between robbers and police, at the end of which the hostages demonstrated unexpected affection for and protection of the people who had threatened and imprisoned them. (One of the hostages even claimed to be engaged to one of the criminals.)
Stockholm Syndrome, widely studied since that bank robbery, seems to happen in response to a sequence of happenings. The first is that someone threatens your life and clearly has the capacity to take it, but doesn’t.
The second is that, while they’re deliberating, or apparently deliberating about the possibility or desirability of doing you in, they isolate you from friends, colleagues and family, so that you are dependent on them, not just for food, shelter and water, but for communication. This skews your emotions and your perception of the world. It is torture.
Unless the hostage is of outstanding mental robustness, it’s a matter of time before they find themselves beginning to share the perspective of their captor, to such an extent that the prisoner may eventually oppose those seeking to free him or her. That’s especially the case if the captor shows any kindness — even small kindness — to the prisoner. It’s not much of a stretch to figure that the boy Patrick, dragged away from his home town by pirates who demonstrably had the weapons with which to take his life, abandoned on the side of a hill in a strange country hundreds of miles from friends or family, might become dependent upon the man who held him hostage, especially if the man occasionally showed him a little kindness.
Stockholm Syndrome, were Patrick to be a present-day missionary, would be dealt with by psychotherapy. The voices calling him back to Ireland would be removed by medication.
In modern times, Patrick would be an abuse survivor, maintained just below the level of florid acting out, or acute personal misery by being regularly talked to and dosed. He was extremely lucky to have lived at a time when hearing voices was a symptom of an advanced relationship with the deity, and when it was accepted that God spoke directly to favoured individuals, giving them inescapable commands.
Were he to return to unforgiving modern Ireland, where clerics are mistrusted and where one wrongdoing — even if unintended — is taken as the definition of the entire individual, Patrick would never get over spearing that new convert.
The story is that a pagan, warming to Christianity as promulgated by Patrick, agreed to be baptised, and that the saint, in order to free up his hands to properly perform the sacrament, rammed the sharp end of his crozier into the ground so it would stand while he got on with the business. Unfortunately, he had unintentionally stuck the poor convert to the ground because the latter’s foot was in the way.
What is worrisome about the story is that it has the convert going through the ceremony without a whimper, because he took the exquisite pain as part of the deal. Which raises two questions. The first is how deep was the understanding of the Christian faith inculcated by Patrick if a newcomer figured the religion involved the kind of agonising rite of passage more characteristic of non-Christian, or “pagan” faiths. The second is how the poor devil survived the tetanus which, pre-antibiotics, was a near-certainty in such circumstances.
St Patrick made a considerable impact on the area where I live.
St Patrick’s Island, off north Dublin, holds the ruins of one of his earliest churches. It’s also part of the goat story, according to which the peripatetic preacher arrived in Wicklow, didn’t think much of it, and headed north, acquiring a goat along the way. When he arrived on the bleak and forbidding island now named after him, he was accompanied by the goat, of which he had become fond, presumably in the same way Tom Hanks got fond of the basketball in that movie where he was marooned on a desert island without human company. No matter which way you look at it, a goat has to be better company than a basketball, and warmer, too, if you live in pre-electric blanket times.
HOWEVER, when Patrick journeyed to Skerries, presumably to buy the equivalent of milk and a sliced pan, he left the goat behind him and when he came back with his supplies, the goat was gone.
Enraged, he leaped in two superhuman bounds, first to Colt Island, then to Red Island, and then in a third jump to land where he voiced his grievance to the people of Skerries. (He left his historic footprint, we hear, on Red Island, laying down perhaps the first indicator of his commitment to the tourist industry.) The people of Skerries seem not to have produced the goat, perhaps because it had already been consumed, but they were good and scared by its former owner, who called them the People of the Goat. Which, in modern times, would probably be libel.
The last thing he did was to banish the snakes for recondite reasons.
This interference with the ecological chain of life on this island would, today, be regarded as an environmental outrage. The EPA would regard snake-banishing as way more reprehensible than backyard burning. He’d be in clink before nightfall.
As it is, his memory is surrounded by so much green fluff, it’s easy to miss just what a phenomenal operator he was. He used local allegory and custom to make radically new ideas and new ideals understandable and unthreatening. He used what was concrete, immediate and familiar — the shamrock — to explicate the complex, infinite and unfamiliar. He reached a generation of Irish people wedded to one set of beliefs and converted them to another.
He was this country’s first great communicator.
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