Page 69 - Demo

Chapter two 69
ability to be seen in the texts, because Patrick is also credited with the gathering together and purifying of the laws of ancient Ireland, thereby leaving to posterity a mighty legal tome in ive volumes called the Seanchus Mór-The Great Immemorial Custom. It is told that he devoted upwards of three years to this notable work, persuading the lawgivers to place before him all the ancient laws, and to codify them, purging them, it is claimed, according to Christian principles.
Helping him with this great work was a council of nine: three kings, three bards, three ollamhs or scholars, and it is recounted how they got a poet ‘to throw a thread of poetry around them’, this means, in other words, that the old laws were written in verse for the pur- pose of memorising them more easily, and because they could then be passed on unaltered.
It was once said that Patrick ‘turned the Irish from a race of cruel conquerors, whose galleys were feared on all the coasts of Britain and Gaul, into a race whose enthusiasm was for missionary labour, Latin learning, and contemplative life.’ Patrick’s achieved this because his policy throughout was to openly approach kings and chieftains and with honesty explain his mission, and by such true explanations, eventually secure their adhesion to Christianity.
Having declared that the Druids “were remarkable for their learning and ingenuity,” Patrick’s attitude towards the so called pagan practices of the Irish was always character- ized by tact and toleration, an attitude which made the conversion of the members of the tribal communities only a matter of time. We should also remember that the Patrician priests, monks and bishops were mostly recruited from the ranks of the pagan druids, or from among a pagan people who would otherwise have joined their ranks, and added to this is the fact that the early appearance of abbesses also suggests that women too could hold druidical positions.
As a result, many characteristics of older pagan Irish divinities were subsumed into this new Christian religion, which, in turn, as one chronicler put it, ‘helped to give Irish Christi- anity a more humane cast than that of the sin-obsessed Anglo-Saxons.’
It is probably true to say that this was Patrick’s very own version or blueprint of the complex, though simple social framework of fellowship, which he based on the teachings he had learned in Nantes, Lerins, and Auxere and coupled with his exposure to and knowledge of Celtic/pagan customs.
As a result, the manner in which his followers, both male and female, lived out their lives was a constant reminder to all that the true implements needed by a society to genuinely structure itself, ‘the core of life’ as some say, were idelity, generosity and courage and not