Roger Pearse

Any fool can publish a Latin text without a translation.  Few people will want to go through it, looking for problems.  But if you have to translate the text, that forces you to examine every word.  This in turn brings you immediately into contact with any problems in the text.

One of the miracle stories of St Nicholas is the “Golden Vessel”.  It exists in two versions, BHL 6172, and an epitome, BHL 6173.  I’ve already retrieved the text and translation of the latter, as it is extracted from Honorius Augustodunensis.  The story is as follows:

A powerful man living overseas makes a pilgrimage every year to Myra to the tomb of St Nicholas.  One year he commissions a well-known goldsmith to create a golden vessel, set with precious stones, as an offering to St Nicholas.  The result is a success!  In fact it’s so nice that the man feels that he’d like one too.  The goldsmith makes another, but it’s just not the same, so he hands back the raw materials to the man.  By this point the man has really become attached to the vessel, so he decides instead just to give the raw materials at the shrine.

When the time comes for his annual pilgrimage, he sets off in his ship.  But on the way he gets his son to bring him a drink in the vessel, just as the wind is getting up.  The son drops it, and it rolls overboard!  Grabbing at it in vain, the son tumbles after it.  The wind blows the ship away.  Disaster!  Rather depressed, the man rolls up at Myra, and makes his offering anyway, only for the altar to throw it back in his face!  St Nicholas isn’t amused.  So the man grovels, explains, and promises to give a much larger sum.  Then – ta-da! – the son rushes in, carrying the vessel.  St Nicholas grabbed him as he was drowning, and set him down outside Myra.  The man hands over the vessel, and “they all returned home rejoicing”, to face the credit card bill.

All this from the epitome, BHL 6173.  The story seems rather too like a cynical clerical invention, designed to extort money from the faithful, but no doubt God has already handed out spankings in and on the right quarters.

While working away on BHL 6172, however, I found myself wondering if I was doing the translation correctly.

Ille autem hoc audiens et in sua cupiditate permanens, decrevit illud aurum et gemmas pariter sancto Nicolao devehendum.

But he, on hearing this, and remaining in his cupidity, decreed that the gold and gems equally should be carried over to St. Nicholas.

The sense requires “instead”; but the word is literally “as well” or “also”.  Possibly one could wrestle it around to “in the same way”; and I do find this in the Oxford Latin Dictionary.

But I wondered whether it was simply an error in the manuscript.  The text was printed from a Namur manuscript by the Bollandists a century ago, as part of a catalogue – what excelllent chaps they were! – and has no critical value.

A quick look at the BHLms site showed 48 witnesses to this amusing story!  Many of them were manuscripts already known to me from my work on John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  Of course this is why I was working with these stories in the first place; to get a reference file together of this material, so that when using the manuscripts, I would know what I was looking at.

The oldest manuscript listed – that I have access to – was BNF lat. 5607, of the 11th century.  And on folio 83r, there’s the text, “Igitur operae pretium remur, ut ea quae nostris temporibus per eius gloriosa…”, although I see immediately that this reads “ut” where the Namur ms reads “si”.

Over the page, we find our sentence.

I.e.:

Ille autem hoc audiens, et in sua cupiditate permanens, decrevit illud aurum et gemmas pariter sancto Nicholao deferendas.

The last word is a different verb, but of very much the same sense – presented.  But “pariter” is still is.

I’m not going to trudge through any more mss, but it was worth a quick check.  So… I’ll just accept that “pariter” here means effectively “instead”.

In ordinary daily usage we hear the phrase “patron saint”.  Thus St George is the patron saint of England.  St Piran is today often called the patron saint of Cornwall, a usage that was unknown within my memory, other than to antiquarians.  St Gertrude of Nivelle is sometimes called the patron saint of cats, a usage that seems to be no older than the 20th century.  Churches have patron saints, and even “patronal dinners”.  Countries have them.  Databases have them, since Pope John Paul II designated Isidore of Seville as the patron saint of the internet.

But what does it mean?  Who are these people?  How do you get to become a patron saint?  And is it for life? – eternal life, that is?  Well, I have a few ideas, and of course I welcome correction.  But this is what seems to be the case, and how it works, whether or not we believe in it.

A patron saint is a saint who can be particularly applied to for intercession with God on behalf of a church, a city, a country, or a particular trade, or other matter.  He or she is a saint whom the person praying supposes to have a particular interest in that subject, and therefore may be particularly interested in it.  The saint may be particularly interested in prayers relating to that subject, and particularly interested in raising the matter with God himself.

The thinking behind this reflects the reality of most human societies.  You can, in theory, write a letter to the king, the emperor, the president.  But in practice such letters go nowhere, unless you are a person of influence.  The king is remote, inaccessible.  Less remote, more accessible, are members of his court: your congressman, member of parliament, etc.  He may know the emperor, or at least meet him regularly.  He may have a  special interest in certain subjects, which he can therefore plead effectively for.  The president may know that such a person cannot be ignored, at least not without adverse headlines.  At the same time the courtier will know that each request costs him political capital.  Something for something is the rule of human life.  This is true even today.  The process corresponds to reality.

But is it true?  Can those deceased in Christ respond?  The classic response to this, at least from the Catholic Encyclopedia, is that of St. Jerome, in Contra Vigilantium 6 (PL 23, col.344):

If the Apostles and Martyrs, while still in the body, can pray for others, at a time when they must still be anxious for themselves, how much more after their crowns, victories, and triumphs are won! One man, Moses, obtains from God pardon for six hundred thousand men in arms; and Stephen, the imitator of the Lord, and the first martyr in Christ, begs forgiveness for his persecutors; and shall their power be less after having begun to be with Christ? The Apostle Paul declares that two hundred three score and sixteen souls, sailing with him, were freely given him; and, after he is dissolved and has begun to be with Christ, shall he close his lips, and not be able to utter a word in behalf of those who throughout the whole world believed at his preaching of the Gospel? And shall the living dog Vigilantius be better than that dead lion?

Which is, of course, just speculation.  We do not actually know any of this.  But that’s not an area that I want to go into just yet.

So… you are a peasant, just like me.  Who do you pray to?  Well, you find a saint whom you have reason to suppose would take an interest.  The medieval legends of St Nicholas often associate him with the sea.  For a fisherman, he’s an obvious choice, the saint with whom to have a good chat about those wretched prevailing winds this season.   He’ll understand.  He spent a lot of time dealing with bad weather at sea.

Such prayer doesn’t require ecclesiastical or official approval.  You don’t have to go to an office, fill in a form, and be given permission to pray (other than, apparently, outside abortion clinics in London in 2023).  No, just pick your saint, and let fly!  If it works, tell your friends.  (A lot of saints’ lives emphasise how effective their saint is, when it comes to delivering the goods.)

You become a patron saint, in other words, because people want you to be, and pray to you as if you are.  It’s a habit that arises from popular devotion or interest.  That’s how St George becomes patron saint of England during the crusader period, when a military saint with hobnail boots is definitely required.  The people, and especially the king, treated him as such.

Of course fashion can change.  Saints can and do fall out of favour.   The status can transfer to another.

You can become the patron saint of a church through building it, in your life, and the fact being remembered.  Although if an abbey acquires your church later, it may dedicate it to someone else!  You’re more secure as the patron saint if the church also has your relics under the floor.  But it’s all down to popular interest.

Being a patron saint seems to be basically a folk custom, which still operates, as with St Gertrude for cats.  Some loose association is taken as a reason why that saint might listen particularly to prayers on that subject, and there you have it – a patron saint.

In Cornwall the villages and churches are often named after otherwise unknown saints, such as St Austell.  In the world of Celtic saints, a “saint” could be anybody who worked for the church, or – one suspects – had a particularly crisp chasuble.  Few of them are recognised by the Catholic Church at large.  In the Cornish Life of St Samson, we read of a “saint”, an abbot of Caldey island named Pirr, who dies after falling down a well while drunk.  The standard here for Celtic sainthood is very low indeed.

There are some risks associated with all this.  In any era of superstition, there are opportunities for conmen.  The Catholic church has always tried to regulate stuff to do with “holy men”, in order to protect the people from such sharks.  The church from at least the 1600s tried to avoid local, unknown, or non-existent, or disreputable saints, for fear of scandal.

Perhaps I can add a personal note here.  There are a couple of people, now gone from this world, whom I revered greatly in Christ, and have sometimes wished that I could consult.  I have at least once found myself tempted to speak to one of them in prayer.  I have resisted, for that way lies superstition; but the impulse is clearly human.

So how does it all work?  You pray to St Bloggis, St Bloggis has a word with God, and your prayer is granted, or not.  You express thanks to St Bloggis with a donation at his church.

But what if St Bloggis never actually existed?

I have never read anything about this, but it seems to me that this isn’t really a problem for the concept of patron saints.  All prayer is really directed to God.  The dead cannot actually do anything.  Behind all the pretty legends, it is God who is certainly listening.  And God is pretty tolerant of simple mistakes made by devout hearts.  He’s not a pedant.  There’s none of the pettiness of “wrongly addressed; return to sender”.

Let us imagine that the idea of praying to individual saints is valid.  Effectively each saint, then, is running a department of heaven.  Each department deals with certain subjects.  Is it beyond the wit of heaven to have a “lost prayer office”?  To designate someone to handle stuff addressed to non-existent saints, invented by human weakness, but sincerely intended?  Is it that difficult to have a “St George office”, which handles his correspondence?  Perhaps with a minor saint filling in as head of department, pro tem?  If I were God, which we may all thank Him that I am not, it would seem like a minor thing to arrange.  If saints are really just addresses, a filing system for heaven, surely we can cope with a few errors?  If pesky humans make up a saint, the subject of prayer still needs to be handled by the bureaucracy of heaven.  But of course it is better not to do this.

So I think we can be fairly relaxed about “patron saints”.  I don’t know that they correspond to any heavenly reality; but if they do, it’s fairly obvious how it would work.  It isn’t a church thing, but a popular thing.  Which is fine.  Because patron saints are still being invented.  It matters not.