Through Belloc’s Eyes: Saint Patrick’s Person and Presence

Slightly more than a century ago, four years before World War I began, and six years before the Easter Rising in Dublin, Hilaire Belloc published an essay on Saint Patrick of Ireland in one of his collections of varied essays, entitled First and Last (1910).This compact six-page essay—containing important concepts and vivid personal experiences—was published five years after J.B. Bury, the Protestant Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, had published his own learned 400-page book on Saint Patrick (d.461), which was entitled The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History (1905).

What Belloc will draw us to consider about the abiding Presence of a Person—in this case a Saint of Robustness and Heroic Vitality—may mean even more to us when we recall Boethius’ classic four-word definition of Person (“Persona”): “the individual substance of rational nature” (“naturae rationabilis individua substantia”).

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