The Lorica Question

The single most famous “theological” text bearing Patrick’s name is not one of his two genuine writings, and on linguistic grounds it cannot be his. The Lorica or “Breastplate” — Old Irish Faeth Fiada — is the work of an anonymous author writing around the eighth century, some three hundred years after Patrick lived. It is, even so, a genuine and beautiful monument of the early Irish church; the honest task, under METHODOLOGY §4, is to hold both facts at once without polemic.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Celtic) / Orthodox reception

A Cherished Prayer and a Source-Critical Fact

Few prayers in the Western tradition are so beloved as the “Breastplate of St Patrick.” In its popular English form — “I bind unto myself today / the strong Name of the Trinity” — it is sung in cathedrals and parish churches every March, and it is, by any measure, a great poem of the Christian life: an armoring of the soul in the Holy Trinity, the powers of heaven, and the presence of Christ. The cherished tradition is that Patrick himself composed it, that it rose from his lips as he walked into danger in pagan Ireland. The source-critical fact is otherwise, and it is not in serious doubt: the prayer dates from roughly the eighth century, and its attribution to the fifth-century apostle of Ireland is untenable.

This file states that fact plainly and then does the harder thing — it refuses to let the fact diminish the prayer. The Confessio and the Epistola ad milites Corotici are the only two writings we have from Patrick’s own hand (see The Two Authentic Writings); the Lorica is not among them, and to read it as a window onto Patrick’s personal theology would be a methodological error of exactly the kind this collection exists to avoid. But to dismiss it on that account would be a second error. The prayer is not a forgery; it is a real and venerable expression of the faith of the Irish church a few generations after Patrick, and it deserves to be honored as precisely that.

The Genre: A Lorica

The text belongs to a recognizable early-medieval genre, the lorica — Latin for “breastplate” or “body-armor,” after Ephesians 6 and the imagery of putting on the armor of God. A lorica is a protective prayer that “binds” the one who prays in the names and powers of God, the angelic hosts, the saints, and the elements of creation, raising a defensive enclosure against every visible and invisible danger. Several such prayers survive from the Insular Celtic world; the Lorica of Gildas and the Lorica of Laidcenn are others of the type. Colgan, who first printed the Patrician text in Latin, accordingly titled it the Lorica Patricii — “the Breastplate of Patrick” (Colgan, Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae, Louvain, 1647). The genre-name fixes the prayer’s character: it is not a creed or a meditation but an apotropaic invocation, a spoken armor.

Faeth Fiada: “The Deer’s Cry”

In the Irish manuscript that preserves it, the prayer carries the Old Irish title Faeth Fiada. The phrase was etymologized in the Middle Irish period as “the Deer’s Cry,” and was attached to a legend — found in the later Lives, not in any contemporary source — that Patrick and his companions, ambushed on the road to Tara, were made by God to appear to their attackers as a doe and her fawns and so passed through unharmed (the episode belongs to the hagiographic tradition treated in The Later Hagiography). That picturesque reading is almost certainly secondary. Modern philologists judge faeth fiada far more likely to mean something like a “spell of concealment” — a cry or charm that hides the one who utters it — which fits the lorica genre exactly and owes nothing to the deer legend (“Saint Patrick’s Breastplate,” with discussion of the title in the standard reference literature). The “Deer’s Cry” is thus a charming later gloss laid over an older and plainer meaning, and it is itself part of the legendary accretion rather than evidence about the prayer’s origin.

The Dating: Old Irish of c. 700–800

The decisive evidence is linguistic, and it is the heart of the matter. The language of the prayer is Old Irish of roughly the eighth century (c. 700–800), not the Latin or the proto-Irish of Patrick’s own fifth-century horizon. Scholars who have examined its grammar and vocabulary cannot trace the text back any earlier than about the eighth century; on these grounds it is dated to the early eighth century and regarded as the work of an anonymous author of that period, not of Patrick (“Saint Patrick’s Breastplate”; and see the source-critical handling in O’Loughlin, Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works, London: Triangle/SPCK, 1999, which insists on separating the genuine fifth-century writings from the later devotional tradition). Some three centuries separate the prayer’s language from the man to whom it is ascribed. Whether some lost earlier kernel underlies it is unknowable; what is knowable is that the text we have is an eighth-century composition, and that settles the question of authorship.

This is the single most important sentence in the file: the Lorica is an eighth-century prayer, and Patrick did not write it. Everything else here is commentary on how to hold that fact gracefully.

The Manuscript Witness: The Liber Hymnorum

The prayer is preserved chiefly in the Liber Hymnorum, the Irish “Book of Hymns,” a collection surviving in two Dublin manuscripts of the eleventh century. It appears there, in fuller form, with the title Faeth Fiada; a more fragmentary version is embedded in the ninth-to-tenth-century Vita Tripartita Sancti Patricii, the “Tripartite Life” (“Saint Patrick’s Breastplate”). The chronology of the artifacts must be kept straight. The manuscript witness is eleventh-century; the composition is eighth-century on linguistic grounds; and Patrick is fifth-century. The prayer reaches us, in other words, through layers each of which is centuries removed from the saint — exactly the pattern that governs the whole Patrician dossier (see the table of dated artifacts in The Two Authentic Writings).

The Attribution Dispute

The ascription to Patrick is traditional, ancient, and devotionally entrenched — and it is also, as we have seen, philologically impossible in any strict sense. The history of the attribution is itself instructive. When John Colgan printed the prayer in 1647, he did not simply repeat the Patrician ascription; he assigned the text instead to St. Evin (Irish Éimhín), the supposed author of the Tripartite Life, in which a form of the prayer appears (Colgan, Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae, 1647). So even the early modern editor who gave the prayer its Latin title declined to make Patrick its author. Modern linguistics removes both attributions from the realm of the fifth century: neither Patrick nor any contemporary of his can have written Old Irish of c. 700, and the safest description of the author is simply “anonymous, eighth century.”

[Disputed: The authorship of the Lorica / Faeth Fiada. Pious tradition ascribes it to St. Patrick himself (5th c.); John Colgan, in his Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae (Louvain, 1647), ascribed it instead to St. Evin / Éimhín, the reputed author of the Tripartite Life; modern linguists, finding the text to be Old Irish of c. 700–800, hold that it cannot be traced earlier than the eighth century and regard it as the work of an anonymous eighth-century author. This collection follows the linguistic verdict: the prayer is a genuine early-Irish lorica of roughly the eighth century and is not a composition of Patrick. See “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” in the standard reference literature; O’Loughlin, Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works (1999).]

The Popular Hymn: Cecil Frances Alexander, 1889

There is a further remove still between the famous English hymn and any fifth-century original. The words most people know — “I bind unto myself today / the strong Name of the Trinity” — are not a translation in the strict sense but a verse paraphrase made in 1889 by Cecil Frances Alexander, the Anglo-Irish hymn-writer also responsible for “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.” Her rendering was set to two traditional Irish melodies, the tune called “St. Patrick” (often known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”) for the body of the hymn and “Deirdre” (sometimes given as “Gartan”) for the great Trinitarian stanza (“I bind unto myself today…”) (“Saint Patrick’s Breastplate”; Hymnology Archive, “Patrick’s Hymn”). The text sung today is therefore a Victorian devotional poem built upon an eighth-century Irish prayer that was itself ascribed, anachronistically, to a fifth-century saint. Each layer is genuine and worthy on its own terms; none of them is Patrick’s own voice.

§4 Balance: Honoring Both Facts

The discipline of METHODOLOGY §4 is to distinguish the cherished tradition from the source-critical fact without letting either erase the other, and the Lorica is a near-perfect test case. The fact is firm: the prayer is not Patrick’s, and reading his personal theology out of it would be unsound. But the prayer is no less real for being later. It is a theologically rich and unmistakably Irish text — it binds the one who prays in the Trinity (“the Three in One and One in Three”), in the saving acts of Christ from incarnation to ascension, in the love of cherubim and the prayers of patriarchs and the deeds of righteous men, in the powers of the created world, and, most memorably, in the encompassing presence of Christ: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me.” That is a genuine monument of the spirituality of the early Irish church, beloved and venerable as such, and the Orthodox reception of the Celtic saints rightly cherishes it.

What it is not is a fifth-century document. For Patrick’s own Trinitarian faith — and it is, strikingly, every bit as Trinitarian — the reader must go not to the Lorica but to the near-creedal confession of the Triune God that Patrick himself set down in Confessio 4, treated in the companion file The Trinitarian Confession. The remarkable thing is that the two converge in spirit even across three centuries: the historical Patrick and the anonymous eighth-century poet both pray to one God in Trinity, in the same biblical idiom of the undivided Church. The Lorica is best understood as the later flowering of the same faith Patrick planted — not his words, but, recognizably, his religion.

References

“Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” / Faeth Fiada (the Lorica). Primary manuscript witness: the Liber Hymnorum (Irish Book of Hymns), 11th c., in two Dublin manuscripts; a fragmentary version in the Vita Tripartita Sancti Patricii, 9th–10th c. The text is dated on linguistic grounds (Old Irish of c. 700–800) to the early 8th century and regarded as the work of an anonymous author. (Standard reference and philological discussion of title, date, and attribution.)
Colgan, John. Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae. Louvain, 1647. (First Latin printing under the title Lorica Patricii; ascribes the prayer to St. Evin / Éimhín rather than to Patrick.)
O’Loughlin, Thomas. Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works. London: Triangle/SPCK, 1999. (On the discipline of separating the two genuine fifth-century writings from the later Irish devotional tradition.)
Alexander, Cecil Frances. “I Bind Unto Myself Today” (St Patrick’s Breastplate). 1889 verse paraphrase, set to the traditional Irish tunes “St. Patrick” and “Deirdre.” (The familiar English hymn — a Victorian rendering, a further remove from any fifth-century original.)
Patrick. Confessio, §4 (the near-creedal confession of the Trinity). Latin text and English translation at the Royal Irish Academy’s St Patrick’s Confessio hypertext archive (confessio.ie). (Patrick’s own, genuine Trinitarian faith — see the companion file.)