Slavery made Patrick a saint.

He didn't drive the snakes out of Ireland, and there is no way to know whether he used the three-leaf shamrock to teach the doctrine of the Trinity. But there is more solid history to Patrick's legend than to those of other holiday saints, such as Valentine and Nicholas.

Patrick, or Patricius, apparently came from a family of Romanized Britons; his father was a minor official and his grandfather a Roman Catholic priest.

Rome still nominally ruled Britain, but the empire was disintegrating and no longer offered security from barbarian raids. About 401 A.D., when Patrick was 16, Irish marauders took him from his home in southwestern England or Wales.

So the boy, who had apparently grown up in some comfort, became a shepherd slave in Antrim, in present-day Northern Ireland. He was the property of a regional chieftain named Miliucc.

Thought priests were fools

In his "Confession," Patrick recalls that he had never been religious. He did not believe in God, and he thought priests were fools. (Perhaps his grandfather was.) But on the Irish hillsides, with only hunger and cold for companionship, Patrick found a divine presence. The Irish were not Christians then, and worshiped pagan spirit deities. Patrick turned to the faith of his parents.

"Tending flocks was my daily work," he wrote, "and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of Him surrounded me more and more. In one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and after dark nearly as many again, even while I remained in the woods or on the mountain."

For six years Patrick prayed and tended his flock, and then one night in his sleep a voice came to him. "Your hungers are rewarded," it said. "You are going home. Look, your ship is ready."

There were no ships in landlocked Antrim, so Patrick set off for the coast and talked his way onto a boat carrying hounds for sale on the European continent.

Found Europe a desert

Upon landing in Europe, the merchants, sailors and runaway slave found only devastation -- a "desert," Patrick called it, that took two weeks to cross.

Thomas Cahill, in his book "How the Irish Saved Civilization," speculates that the trading party had encountered the ruin left behind by German barbarians, who crossed the frozen Rhine in 407 and invaded Roman Gaul.

The hungry sailors, eyeing the starving hounds, mocked Patrick's prattle of a provident God. "You say your God is great and all-powerful," they said, "so why can't you pray for us?" Patrick did, and at that moment a herd of pigs appeared, running toward them.

Eventually, Patrick made his way home to Britain, where he wrote that he was "welcomed as a son" by his anxious family. But though years passed, he was unable to settle down. He kept having visions of Ireland.

In one, a man he had known there, Victoricus, handed him a letter headed, "The Voice of the Irish" and he heard many voices crying, "We pray thee, holy youth, to come and walk again amongst us as before."

Eventually, Christ himself appeared to Patrick and pleaded with him. So Patrick left home a second time and entered a monastery in Gaul, where he underwent about 14 years of religious training and was ordained.

Consecrated as bishop, he returned to Ireland at age 47 in 432 -- 25 years after escaping slavery. He worked there, perhaps making one visit to Rome, until he died in 461.

Ireland in those days was truly beyond the civilized world -- an illiterate, Iron Age war culture, based on stock-raising and slave labor. Its gods were pagan spirits of fertility, battle and harvest, its priests druids.

But Irish mysticism already knew that the whole world is holy. Thus in slavery Patrick had first encountered God not as the lawgiver of a theology based on Greek and Roman learning, but as an overwhelming personal reality.

Transformed Irish culture

Roman Christianity, exemplified by Patrick's contemporary St. Augustine, sought to reconcile the sinfulness of man with the goodness of God; Patrick's was the religion of the goodness of creation.

Thus Cahill, for one, argues that when after a good deal of bloodshed civilized Rome formally adopted Christianity in 313, the religion changed more than the secular culture.

But Patrick's Christianity, hospitable as it was to native Irish spirituality -- not one person was martyred for faith during Ireland's Christianization -- succeeded in transforming Irish culture.

Within a generation or two, slavery and human sacrifice were ended, and the wars and raids of tribes and clans were greatly diminished.

But not all went smoothly for Patrick. Converting the island meant dealing with Ireland's many kings, or tribal chieftains, in a land with no cities or governing institutions.

Some kings would convert in the name of their followers and grant land to Patrick for the founding of churches. Others resisted.

Eventually, Patrick came into conflict with Loigaire, the paramount king whose seat was at Tara.

According to legend, Patrick challenged the royal authority by lighting a paschal fire on the eve of Easter, which happened also to be the occasion of a pagan festival during which no fire might be kindled until the royal fire was lighted. Loigaire never accepted the new faith, but he agreed to grant protection to the Christians.

Illuminated Dark Ages

With Christianity came literacy. Patrick himself was ill educated and used Latin awkwardly. But he founded monasteries that became centers of learning and trained new monks as the barbarian hordes overran Christian Europe.

Iona, Lindisfarne and many continental repositories of classical learning during the Dark Ages were founded by Irish monks -- the basis for Cahill's claim that the Irish saved civilization.

In England, Irish Christianity eventually came into conflict with stricter Roman traditions, and it took a synod presided over by a secular king to settle accounts.

Later scholars have written much about Irish mysticism and Roman legalism, but the issues at Whitby in 664 were how to calculate Easter and how monks should tonsure their heads.

The Irish favored a pagan-inspired ear-to-ear frontal shave with long hair behind, compared to the circular tonsure of the rest of Christendom.

On both issues the Northumbrian king ruled for the "Roman" party.

By then Patrick was long dead. And Ireland was liberated and at peace.

Pub Date: 3/17/99