In the movie Gone With the Wind, Scarlet is thrilled when the soldiers leave Atlanta until Rhett tells her that as the soldiers leave the city, so will the façade of law and order. As soon as Rhett says this, someone smashes a window. The looting begins.
England encountered similar problems when the Romans left in 407 A.D. Rome pulled in its remote armies because the barbarians were at the gates at home. In 410 AD, Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome. St. Patrick's mission in Ireland began ten years after this. The Vandals sacked Rome again in 455, and the Roman Empire ended in 476 A.D. It was the beginning of the Dark Ages. Imagine leaving that quickly darkening Old World to venture to an island of savage pagans who had once enslaved him.
This was the world in which Patrick let his light shine, a pagan land where the chieftains had never heard of Christ. From his years as a slave in their foreign land, Patrick understood their culture and how to reach them. His less-than-formal education served him well; he had the common touch and used it.
How do you teach pagans about the Trinity if they have never heard of it? The pagans probably asked Patrick how he could say he worshipped one God and then talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Tradition tells us that Patrick used a shamrock to explain the answer. The shamrock was a single plant with three leaves, just as the Trinity is three persons in one God. While the shamrock leaves shared a stem, the Trinity shares one divine nature. No single part of the Trinity came first, and none was more important than the others because they share that divine nature.
The Druids knew shamrocks. Patrick used an example they could understand to teach a complicated lesson. He followed Paul's admonition in 1 Corinthians 9:19-22: "For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more . . . I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some."
Patrick's most important contribution came with the preservation of the Bible. As Rome's empire disintegrated, so did their learned culture. Patrick and his converts were light in the wilderness. They founded monasteries with scriptoriums.
The printing press hadn't been invented, and the Bible had to be copied by hand. But before it could be copied, the paper had to be made. Parchment was made by soaking animal skins in chemical solutions — repeatedly — and painstakingly stretching, scraping, drying, and smoothing the skin. Once the parchment was ready, the monks cut, folded, and sewed it together into books. Ink pens weren't available — the pens and the ink had to be made too.
Then, a letter at a time, a monk would write, in Latin, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Jerome had only completed the Vulgate translation of the Bible in 404 AD. Other languages besides Latin were in flux — the language of a village could change if a different tribe of Saxons or Vikings conquered it. English did not yet exist. Only a Bible written in Latin would be readable to the next generation.
In the scriptorium, each letter was written by hand, first forming words, then sentences, and finally the complete Word of God. It might take a monk, who worked quickly for eight hours daily, six months to make a single copy of the Bible. They weren't copying mere words but the Word of God and would give their utmost for His Highest.
Their work was a labor of love. Artists — illuminators — decorated the manuscripts with beautiful, vivid designs of color that sometimes included gold leaf. Those artists, who so carefully copied the Bible and other books, passed their craft to other generations who continued their work. The violence of the Dark Ages and the gates of hell did not prevail to destroy the Word of God. Eventually, towards the end of the Middle Ages, missionaries from Ireland went to Europe to minister to its needs!
The Book of Kells, one of the most beautifully illuminated manuscripts in the world, was created in the 800's and is still admired today. It is a Latin text of the Gospels and is on display in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. On St. Patrick's Day, Trinity does not charge admission for people to visit the library where they can see the Book of Kells.
Patrick's story is incredible — a funny thing happened on the way to the Emerald Isle. The young man who cares little for education and less for God is captured, enslaved, and freed. He struggled as a student and was embarrassed at his bad Latin translations. But God prepared him and guided him to preach to the ends of a Celtic island and convert its clans. The bad student planted the seeds that saved the Bible in the Dark Ages. But Patrick's own summation of his life, in his Confession, is humble:
"I pray God that he gives me perseverance, and that he will deign that I should be a faithful witness for his sake right up to the time of my passing . . . But I entreat those who believe in and fear God, whoever deigns to examine or receive this document composed by the obviously unlearned sinner Patrick in Ireland, that nobody shall ever ascribe to my ignorance any trivial thing that I achieved or may have expounded that was pleasing to God, but accept and truly believe that it would have been the gift of God. And this is my confession before I die."
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning" (James 1:17).
