St Patrick’s Purgatory: Theology and History in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Abstract

Patrick’s purgatory in Lough Derg, Donegal, is one of the great medieval pilgrimage sites. On the extreme edge of Europe, it physically embodied the theological idea of purgatory, offering pilgrims a this-worldly encounter with its horrors. Despite Protestant efforts to destroy it, it survived the Reformation and posed a classic challenge for Protestant and Roman Catholic historians. For the latter, it exemplified the continuity of Catholicism in Ireland from Patrick to the present, a living embodiment of the unchanging loyalty of the Irish people to their national saint. For Protestant historians, it was, like purgatory, a twelfth-century invention, revealing both the medieval corruption of the Roman Catholic Church as it added non-scriptural embellishments to the Christian faith, and the superstition of Irish Catholicism. The interaction, and tension, between theological belief and historical objectivity was to prove a persistent challenge for both sides, right down to the twentieth century.

St Patrick’s purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, is one of the great Irish pilgrimage sites. First coming to prominence in the twelfth century, it gained a Europe-wide reputation, and, despite Protestant efforts to destroy it, survived the Reformation and continues to attract pilgrims to the present day. ¹ Its history is a classic example of the competing religious and scholarly imperatives of Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars. For Roman Catholics, it offered an example of the continuity of the Catholic tradition in Ireland from Patrick to the present, a living embodiment of the unswerving loyalty of the Irish people to their national saint despite hardship and persecution. For Protestants, it was, like purgatory, a twelfth-century invention, revealing the medieval corruption of the Catholic Church as it added non-scriptural embellishments to the original purity of the Christian faith.

The first we hear of Patrick’s purgatory is in the later-twelfth century. Henry of Saltrey, a Cistercian monk in England, records a story he had heard about an Irish knight, Owein, or Owen. ² Owen had gone to visit a cave in Ireland, where he experienced the horrors and agonies of purgatory, but, thanks to his faith in Christ, he had, after gaining a glimpse of the gates of paradise itself, emerged unscathed and cleansed of his sins. ³ Henry also provided a backstory for the origin of the Irish purgatory: Christ had appeared to St Patrick and led him to a cave, promising that anyone who entered it and stayed for a day and night truly penitent would be purged of the sins of his whole life. He then recounts how Patrick built a church on that spot and made the Augustinian canons its guardians. Giraldus Cambrensis, who visited Ireland in the later-twelfth century, confirms in his Topographia that the purgatory was in Lough Derg in the remote north-west of Ireland. ⁴

With its echoes of both pagan and Christian tales of descents into the underworld, and the crucial promise of freeing oneself from the consequences of sin and avoiding purgatory after death, Henry’s account proved to be immensely appealing. ⁵ The fame of St Patrick’s purgatory spread rapidly across Europe, attracting pilgrims from as far away as Hungary, with retellings, not to mention embellishments, in English, Anglo-Norman, French, Catalan and Italian. The thirteenth-century English Benedictine cartographer, Matthew of Paris, knew of it; Ranulph Higden described it in his world history, the Polychronicon; it even entered into that standard preachers’ vade mecum, the Legenda Aurea; and it became a part of mainstream European literature, mentioned by Shakespeare, Rabelais and Ariosto, as well as the subject of a play by the seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist, Calderon. ⁶ The very idea that an entrance to purgatory could be located in the most marginal part of the most western country of the known world had, of course, an instinctive appeal – it represented a ‘pilgrimage to the edge’ poised between this world and the next. ⁷ The idea that you entered the underworld through a cave was equally resonant for those versed in classical literature. St Patrick’s purgatory became, for much of the later Middle Ages, the ultimate destination for European pilgrims, the longest possible journey for the greatest possible reward. Indeed, as St Patrick himself had put it in his Confession, to travel to Ireland was to go to ‘the furthest land, where there was no one beyond’. ⁸

The sixteenth-century Reformation, however, problematized the question of purgatory. Put simply, Protestant denial of its existence stimulated determined Catholic defence. The Protestant rejection was, of course, part of the very beginnings of the Reformation. Luther’s attack on indulgences eventually led him to the conclusion that purgatory was unbiblical, thus separating the living from the dead, spiritually and physically. ⁹ It was also part of a wider Protestant suspicion of ‘Popish superstition’, the nexus of Catholic belief centred on shrines, pilgrimages, saints and relics, which saw miracles as proof of God’s continuing validation of their church as the true church. Protestants rejected the idea that miracles still occurred: they had ceased with the end of the apostolic era. ¹⁰ They were, as a result, instinctively critical of Catholic saints’ lives with their extraordinary wonders and marvels. ¹¹

The Protestant distrust of purgatory also slotted neatly into the Reformation approach to ecclesiastical history. The template for Protestant church history was laid down by Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75) and the Magdeburg Centuriators in Germany. ¹² Convinced that the early church was pure and biblical, they explored the ways in which the papal church had corrupted that purity by adding false beliefs and abuses. ¹³ Their overarching apocalyptic framework linked the growth in abuses to the rise of Antichrist, who had been unleashed in the papacy around the year 1000, after which the Roman church had begun to introduce unbiblical ideas and practices such as transubstantiation, indulgences, prayer for the dead and, of course, purgatory. This Protestant interest in change over time was facilitated by their appropriation of the tools of humanist scholarship with its desire to return ad fontes and its use of historical-critical methodology to expose forgeries and later additions. In short, Protestant scholars developed a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ as they sought to distinguish between early-pure and later-corrupt doctrines and practices. ¹⁴

The Roman Catholic response to Protestant history was provided by the Italian oratorian, Caesare Baronio (1538–1607), in his massive Annales Ecclesiastici, covering the first twelve centuries of the church. ¹⁵ If Protestant religious history was about change, Baronio was most definitely concerned with continuity. The popes had faithfully handed on the word of Christ, contained, as the Council of Trent stipulated, both in the scriptures and in tradition, which was little changed from that of the early church. ¹⁶ Against the hermeneutic of suspicion, Baronio offered the ‘hermeneutic of trust’. The church, as the eternal defender of orthodoxy, could be relied upon to preserve the Christian truth down the ages against the threats of heretics, whether in the sixth or the sixteenth century. ¹⁷

This determination to trace continuity over time greatly stimulated Roman Catholic scholarship, and indeed some of the best history of this period comes from Jean Bolland (1596–1665) and his fellow Flemish Jesuit hagiographers – the Bollandists – who sought to use source criticism to sort out the true from the false in the complex mass of medieval saints’ lives and miracles. ¹⁸ In the case of Protestant scholars, theological imperatives tended to drive them towards historical questioning. For those on the other side of the religious divide, however, such reappraisals were a source of tension: the Bollandists sailed perilously close to the Index and the Spanish Inquisition when they questioned the historical basis of popular piety, or the Carmelites’ claim to be the oldest religious order, founded by Elijah. ¹⁹ The reluctance to allow for change or development, the prioritizing of theology and faith over history, the timeless, unchanging nature of Christian truth as it were, created obvious problems for Roman Catholic historians who wished to explore change and development, right down to the twentieth century. ²⁰

These battles were fought at length across the various sixteenth-century European national reformations, as writers such as Jean Crespin (1520–72) in France and John Foxe (c.1516–87) in England applied Protestant methodology to the history of their churches, and were in turn responded to by Catholic scholars. ²¹ However, the slow pace of reform in Ireland, and the constant warfare and instability of the sixteenth century – one account of late-sixteenth century Ireland is aptly entitled The Age of Atrocity – together with political weakness, ethnic and cultural divisions, and the lack of a university or printing press, limited the possibility of intellectual debate. ²² As a result, in Ireland, formal conformity to the established church was not slowly transformed into commitment to Protestantism; rather, it was replaced, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, with a firm adherence to Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Irish pilgrimages to Lough Derg continued uninterrupted during the sixteenth century. Indeed, for the last three decades of that century, the see in which the purgatory was located, Clogher, was outside the influence of the Dublin government and left unfilled by the crown. ²³

It was not until the early decades of the seventeenth century that Irish Protestantism was in a position to challenge Roman Catholic theology and piety, as the power of the established church and state was extended to every county and diocese in Ireland (including Clogher). The foundation of Trinity College Dublin in 1592 provided the church with a Protestant seminary, which set about Hibernicizing European anti-Catholicism. ²⁴ The first Protestant writer to raise the issue of St Patrick’s purgatory was the Welsh-English historian, Meredith Hanmer, writing around 1600, who took up the suggestion, originally made by Higden in his Polychronicon, that the Patrick associated with the purgatory might not have been the saint, but a later abbot of the monastery there who, Hanmer surmised, ‘was given to superstition’. ²⁵ But the figure who laid down what would become the standard Irish Protestant theological and historical objections to purgatory in general, and Lough Derg in particular, was the leading scholar in the early seventeenth-century Church of Ireland, James Ussher (1581–1656), who, after serving as Professor of Theology at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1607, became bishop of Meath in 1621 and, in 1625, was made archbishop of Armagh. ²⁶

Ussher’s 1624 Answer to a challenge made by a Jesuit in Ireland was a response to an Irish Jesuit, William Malone (1586–1656), who had challenged Protestants:

Your doctors and masters grant that the Church of Rome, for four or five hundred years after Christ, did hold the true religion. First, then I would fain know, what Bishop of Rome did first alter that religion … ? In what pope his days was the true religion overthrown in Rome? ²⁷

In other words, this was an Irish version of the more famous dispute between John Jewel and Thomas Harding which had laid down the template for Protestant-Catholic controversy in Elizabethan England. ²⁸ The result was a lengthy treatise, with separate chapters on different Roman Catholic ‘inventions’: the real presence and transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, the invocation of saints, image-worship and purgatory.

Ussher’s primary objection to purgatory was that it was unscriptural:

For extinguishing the imaginary flames of Popish purgatory, we need not go far to fetch water: seeing the whole current of God’s word runneth mainly upon this, that ‘the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin’ … And if we need the assistance of the ancient fathers in this business: behold they be here ready, with full buckets in their hands. ²⁹

Having cited the patristic authorities supporting the binary fate after death of heaven or hell, he then went on to explore when the idea of an intermediary purgatory arose, beginning with the late sixth-century pope, Gregory I, and tracing its development through to St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. ³⁰ Since Ussher was especially concerned with when these doctrines and practices developed over time, he sought ‘both to understand the times wherein the authors lived, and likewise what books be truly or falsely ascribed to each of them’. He thus appended to the book a ‘chronological catalogue’ dating when his authors wrote. ³¹

All this was, of course, standard European reformed historical theology. More innovative was the way in which Ussher applied this to Ireland, in his Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish. This first appeared in 1622 as an addendum to an anti-Catholic work by an Irish judge, and was enlarged for its second edition in 1631. ³² Here, Ussher sought to show that the early Irish church created by Patrick – the ‘island of saints and scholars’ – was pure and uncorrupted and, indeed, largely free from direction from Rome. Antichrist’s rise to power in the papacy after the millennium was linked by Ussher to the subsequent extension of papal authority to Ireland during the early twelfth century, as pallia were for the first time sent from Rome as marks of authority for Irish bishops. ³³ Into this tale of papal corruption and deceit – what he termed ‘the time of Satan’s loosing’ – he slotted the ‘invention’ of St Patrick’s purgatory. ³⁴

Ussher’s treatment was relatively brief: he explained that the first reference he had been able to find to the link between Lough Derg and Patrick was Henry of Saltrey’s late-twelfth-century account. None of the reliably early Patrician sources made any mention of the saint founding Lough Derg; nor did Patrick himself ever mention purgatory. In other words, just as the idea of purgatory was a late innovation, so too was its link to Patrick. Rather than believing tales of visions and dreams, Ussher suggested that all one needed to do was to make a visit to Lough Derg, go into the cave, and see for oneself that there was no physical evidence for an entry to purgatory. ³⁵

There were a number of early-seventeenth-century Roman Catholic responses to Protestant attacks on St Patrick’s purgatory. ³⁶ The most comprehensive was a long account published in Thomas Messingham’s pioneering work of hagiography, his 1624 Florilegium. ³⁷ The Florilegium contained a series of saints’ lives, mostly from previously printed editions, including those of Brigid, Columba and Patrick. ³⁸ It was part of the wider resurgence of interest in Irish saints in the early seventeenth century that culminated in the massive Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae of John Colgan, which appeared at Louvain in 1645. ³⁹ Messingham clearly saw these saintly vitae as having both a pastoral and polemical purpose: they gave life to Scripture, providing the faithful with examples of heroism, virtue and piety, which they could follow in their everyday lives. He also stressed their importance in an Irish context, where Protestants openly rejected purgatory, penance and praying to saints. Miracles, clear evidence of God’s power and glory, provided a source of strength and resilience for the Irish people at risk of being seduced by heretical preachers. More than that, the fact that the Irish church was blessed with so many saints with such a rich heritage of miracles was further proof of the rectitude of Roman Catholicism. ⁴⁰

The Patrician text which Messingham chose to edit – the vita written around the end of the twelfth century by the Cistercian monk Jocelin of Furness – fitted his purpose precisely. It was syncretic, bringing together a wide range of sources relating to the saint, early and late, and it unapologetically celebrated all the miracles associated with him. ⁴¹ Immediately following Jocelin’s life, Messingham added a further twenty-four page account of St Patrick’s purgatory. This was mainly the work of the leading resident Roman Catholic Irish prelate, David Rothe (1573–1650), the bishop of Ossory, a noted writer on Irish religious history. ⁴² Though he had never himself visited the shrine, Rothe collected contemporary accounts and combined them with the relations of medieval visitors to give a detailed description of the workings of the pilgrimage. ⁴³

More importantly from our point of view, he also brought together three different kinds of authority to support his firm contention that the purgatory had been founded by St Patrick himself. First, he cited a number of historical sources, ranging from Henry of Saltrey and Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, through to Jacobus de Voragine (c.1160/70–1240), Caesarius of Heisterbach (c.1180–c.1249), Matthew of Paris (1200–59), Ranulph Higden (c.1280–1364), Denis the Carthusian (1402–71), Boninus Mombritius (1424–c.1500), and Joannes Camers (1447–1546), down to Franciscus Maurolycus, who died in 1575. ⁴⁴ Rothe dealt with the suggestion made by Higden that there were two Patricks, and that it was the second, Abbot Patrick, who had founded the purgatory, by showing that early writers had also called the saint by the title abbot, and that this had led to the confusion. ⁴⁵ The obvious difficulty here was the lack of pre-twelfth-century support: his only earlier reference, which Rothe somewhat tentatively proposed, as it would pre-date St Patrick, came from the fourth-century pagan poet, Claudian, who recounted that Ulysses in his wanderings was washed up on a shore in Gaul, where ‘is heard the mournful weeping of the spirits of the dead as they flit by with faint sound of wings’. ⁴⁶ Another source of authority for Rothe was the church’s worship: he cited liturgical references celebrating St Patrick as the founder of the purgatory which appear in early printed breviaries and ancient manuscripts. Though vague about dating, he was confident of their authority, and deeply averse to the Protestant hermeneutic of suspicion: ‘Who would dare to complain of a custom so accepted, so ancient, so well-proven, which is the most repeated, the most celebrated in sermons and in the hearts of the faithful; unless he was greedy for new things, and a despiser of both antiquity and piety?’ ⁴⁷

Rothe gave pride of place not to history or liturgy, but to tradition. The primary basis for the identification of the purgatory with Patrick was ‘its constant and consistent reception by every age, and the memory of people throughout this whole nation. For it is not without reason that everyone says this, especially when it is agreed almost without contradiction by pious, learned and wise men.’ ⁴⁸ Similarly, Messingham, in his prefatory note to the discussion of the purgatory, drove home the key Roman Catholic theological point. He quoted the ending of St John’s Gospel: ‘There are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were all written down, I think even the world itself would not be able to contain the books that would be written.’ ⁴⁹ This, he argued, blew out of the water the rejection by the ‘Philistine Luther and his heterodox camp’ of apostolic and church traditions as ‘human invention’. ⁵⁰

Religious arguments in the early modern period were not just intellectual. As government power extended to the whole country, reformed theological scepticism was backed by Protestant state power. In 1632, during a period when the Irish government was following a firmly anti-Catholic policy, the Protestant bishop of Clogher, James Spottiswood, along with the sheriffs of Donegal and Fermanagh, was ordered by the Lords Justices in Dublin to suppress the ‘abusive and superstitious … ceremonies, pilgrimages, and offerings’ that took place on the island. Spottiswood, together with twenty armed men, rowed out to the island in Lough Derg and destroyed the cave, reporting that it was ‘a poor beggarly hole, made with some stones, laid together with mens hands without any great art: and after covered with earth, such as husbandmen make to keep a few hogs from the rain.’ ⁵¹ As so often with official efforts to impose conformity in Ireland, Roman Catholic resilience ensured that the effect was only temporary, and the pilgrimage subsequently resumed. ⁵²

Fifteen years later, Henry Jones (1605–82) renewed the scholarly assault, publishing a lengthy response to Rothe. ⁵³ Ussher’s nephew and his pupil at Trinity, Jones used his access to his uncle’s library to research the history of the shrine. ⁵⁴ By the 1640s, he was one of the leading Irish resident Protestant churchmen, helping to bring together the depositions produced in the wake of the 1641 rebellion and frame the rising as part of an international antichristian Roman Catholic conspiracy. ⁵⁵ His treatment of the purgatory was much more extensive than Ussher’s relatively brief mention in the Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed. Like Rothe, he gave a detailed description of its location and the practices of the pilgrims there, but with, of course, a sceptical Protestant tone. ⁵⁶

Jones went on to explore the purgatory’s history, using the medieval pilgrims’ stories to expose inconsistencies in the accounts of the shrine and its access to purgatory, and hammering home the basic point that there was no reliable reference to St Patrick’s having founded it before the later twelfth century: no author ‘for more than 700 years after S. Patrick, doth write one word of this purgatory’. ⁵⁷ He then made four additional points. First, he dismissed Rothe’s reliance upon tradition, which he saw as a means of ‘imposing for undeniable verities, matters doubtful and most uncertain’. ⁵⁸ Stories about the lake and the purgatory, and its association with Patrick, were mere ‘fables’, undocumented and unprovable folk tales. ⁵⁹ Second, he argued for a purely psychological explanation for the visions and vivid experiences of the pilgrims. They were a product of their lengthy fast, ‘causing a crazed brain … to make fancies real’. ⁶⁰ Third, it was manipulated by the Roman Catholic Church to exploit lay superstition, and ‘a mere imposture and fraud’. ⁶¹ And finally, like Ussher, he emphasized the cave’s this-worldly ordinariness: water, grass, rock, and no entrance to purgatory. ⁶²

Jones’s determined reductionism and Rothe’s robust defence of Roman Catholic piety reflected not only their contrasting theological approaches to purgatory, but also their differing hermeneutics, for Jones’s suspicion and Rothe’s trust used exactly the same sources to produce startlingly different conclusions. As we have noted, this tension between humanist source criticism and piety was not solely a product of the sectarian divide; it was also evident within the Roman Catholic camp. It was thus significant when, in 1668, the Bollandists, embarking on their apparently endless journey through the saints’ calendar, reached 17 March and tackled Ireland’s national saint. Jean Bolland, laying down his basic hagiographical principles in 1643, had expressed some doubts about the propensity of the Irish vitae to exaggerate, warning that they were ‘clearly full of marvels, interwoven with almost unbelievable miracles’. ⁶³ Though aware of the importance of tradition, Bolland also insisted that sources had to be judged in terms of historical accuracy and the authors’ closeness to the events being recorded. Quoting St Augustine, he observed: ‘History sometimes lies, but tradition much more frequently.’ ⁶⁴ In particular, he made a distinction between apostolic traditions which, though passed down orally, were faithfully preserved within the church, and popular traditions, handed down by the people. The latter must not, he warned, be equated with the former, for rather than truthfully relaying what had happened, they tended, over time, to get more and more unreliable, especially ‘in the case of wild and ignorant people’. ⁶⁵ Bolland was dismissive of the allegation that his meticulous scholarship would aid Protestant heretics who scoffed at Roman Catholic superstition: ‘We do not write for them.’ He did, however, align his efforts with those reformed scholars on the other side of the Reformation divide who are ‘lovers of antiquity, and nearer to the kingdom of God’, such as William Camden and Gerard Vossius, and also Ussher. ⁶⁶

These critical principles were applied to St Patrick in 1668 by two Bollandist scholars, Daniel Papebroch (1628–1714) and Godfrey Henschen (1601–81). ⁶⁷ They took a cautiously sceptical approach to his miracles, lamenting the ‘easy credulity’ of those who wrote them down and wishing, anachronistically, that those authors could have had the benefit of first reading Bolland’s guiding principles of hagiography. ⁶⁸ As part of their treatment of Patrick’s life, they also provided a five-page study of his purgatory. ⁶⁹ When introducing the shrine, though they related the story that it had been divinely revealed to St Patrick as a way to win over the stiff-necked Irish, they noted that this was according to the tradition of the inhabitants, rather than to any historical record. They then moved on to the chief historical source, the story of Owen, as told by Henry of Saltrey. This they accepted as authentic. But they neatly sidestepped the theologically difficult question of the reality of his experience in an earthly purgatory, by stressing that his account was based on a vision. One had, they suggested, to distinguish between seeing things with physical eyes, oculis corporeis, and seeing them through our imagination, as in this case. While accepting that visions could be inspired by evil spirits, in the case of Owen’s account, they argued that it was possible to see from the effect – his repentance of his sins – that it was genuine. ⁷⁰ In other words, we have left behind the medieval purgatory and are already on the way to the Counter-Reformation and modern reconstruction of Lough Derg as a penitential pilgrimage, a spiritual or devotional exercise, rather than a this-worldly physical entrance into purgatory. ⁷¹

Though their knowledge of Irish history was limited, the Bollandists’ approach to their sources was clearly more analytical and sceptical than that of Rothe. Take the liturgical evidence for Patrick’s connection with the purgatory. Where Rothe simply gathered together all the evidence he could find and asserted that the fact that it was included in the liturgy confirmed its truth, for the Bollandists, ‘the insertion of a legend in the breviary, or the missal, or the martyrology, was not a reason for inferring that their historical content was accurate … Documents are to be valued according to their sources.’ ⁷² That said, the Bollandists were still deeply respectful of tradition. Thus, after raising the issue of the two Patricks, and noting Ussher’s point that the earliest biographies make no mention of this important matter, they nevertheless opted to follow ‘the tradition of the Irish’ and come down on the side of the saint as the founder of the purgatory. ⁷³ Similarly, they chose to explain away the anachronism of Patrick’s handing over the site to the Augustinians by arguing that the name of the order was often projected back onto an earlier foundation that had later become Augustinian. ⁷⁴

The argument between the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches over St Patrick’s purgatory thus neatly reflects their hermeneutical assumptions. On the Roman Catholic side, the value accorded to tradition, the irrepressible power of demotic piety, and the acceptance of the consensus of Roman Catholic churchmen, all pointed to continuity between St Patrick as founder of the purgatory and the first historical accounts which appear in the twelfth century. On the Protestant side, the distrust of tradition, a more critical attitude towards sources and their dating, and an awareness of anachronism, led them towards an historical scepticism and reductionism which was perfectly in tune with their theological suspicion of Roman Catholic ‘superstition’.

For Protestants, there was here, then, a coincidence between their theological principles and their historical judgement. It is as if they were led to question the Catholic sources, and subject them to close historical analysis by the theological need to prove them wrong. The result is some pioneering history, which, especially when one detaches the historical analysis from its apocalyptic structure, comes to conclusions which are in line with modern historians: Ussher anticipated by precisely 350 years the conclusion of Jacques Le Goff, that purgatory as a single place in which souls were purged was a late-twelfth-century invention. ⁷⁵

It may therefore be no coincidence that the Protestant seventeenth-century historian whose approach to Patrick was the least sectarian and the most ‘modern’, was that decidedly unapocalyptic scholar, James Ware (1594–1666). ⁷⁶ It was he who chose to publish in 1658 Patrick’s Confession and his letter to Coroticus, the only two works which are now thought to be by the saint. ⁷⁷ Ware’s 1654 account of the purgatory was for the most part straightforward and neutral, providing a description of the pilgrimage and a valuable map of the island, and avoiding the polemics and mockery of Jones. ⁷⁸ He was also open to the idea that the purgatory had a pre-twelfth-century existence. He noted the presence of an early saint, Dobheóg, with a monastery in Lough Derg. The discoverer of the purgatory could thus be either St Patrick himself or the ninth-century Abbot Patrick. The only hints of scepticism come when Ware refers to the grounds of the papal suppression in 1497 as being because it was essentially spurious – ‘utpote supposititium’ – and when he remarks briefly: ‘Wonders beyond belief are told about this cave’. ⁷⁹

On the Roman Catholic side, on the other hand, there was a tension between historical method and orthodox belief, evident in the work of the Bollandists as they trod the difficult path between their strict historical criteria and the instinctive reverence for the sacred past which was such a feature of Catholic popular piety. The actual practice of the pilgrimage in the seventeenth century is not easy to trace, so it is difficult to be ascertain the extent to which the new Counter-Reformation emphasis upon internal spirituality reshaped the experience of pilgrims to the lake, and brought the marginal medieval pilgrimage back into the European Catholic mainstream. ⁸⁰ Roman Catholic determination to stick with medieval legends about Patrician origins could only have been reinforced by the mockery of Protestant controversialists such as Jones, and by the exercise of state power to proscribe attendance and destroy the shrine.

Let us draw these threads together. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation unleashed a torrent of ecclesiastical history writing, which greatly enlarged knowledge of the church’s past, subjecting it to critical investigation using the tools of humanist scholarship. But history was part of a broader intellectual enterprise. In particular, it was closely linked to theology which provided an overarching framework for the work of historians: presentist apocalyptic and the corruption of early purity on the Protestant side; and a theology which insisted on the authority of tradition and the unchanging verities of the faith on the Roman Catholic side. What we have here, of course, is that universal combination which is the fate of humanities scholars in every era: the interpenetration of their subjective assumptions and objective research. The hermeneutics which were a part of Reformation and Counter-Reformation history writing thus both helped and hindered interpretation. That tension remained, on both sides, right down to the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

The locally-born parish priest, Daniel O’Connor, in the standard and much-reprinted late-nineteenth-century account of the pilgrimage, like Rothe, simply accepted all the medieval accounts as true and castigated those who rejected the authority of tradition. ⁸¹ In the entry for the purgatory in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913, the Roman Catholic scholar William Henry Grattan Flood claimed that: ‘St. Patrick’s connection with the purgatory which bears his name is not only a constant tradition, but is supported by historical evidence, and admitted by the Bollandists.’ ⁸² The great Jesuit medievalist, Aubrey Gwynn, recognized in 1944 the absence of historical sources linking it to Patrick prior to the twelfth century, but opted instead to trust the authority of local tradition. ⁸³ Indeed, as late as 1970, Gwynn, in the entry for the Augustinian monastery on Saints’ Island in Lough Derg, stated that it was originally founded by St Patrick or St Dabheóg, and quoted Grattan Flood as an authoritative source. ⁸⁴ On the other side, Irish Protestant evangelicals continued well into the twentieth century to denounce the pilgrimage as ‘Catholic superstition’ without any real connection to the Irish national saint. ⁸⁵

It is by now abundantly apparent that this ‘pilgrimage to the edge’ posed, in concrete form, a standing challenge for religious historians: how to deal with the complicated interpenetration of fact, story, vision, memory and myth. To modern post-Enlightenment scholars, instinctively empiricist, one of the purposes of their discipline is to distinguish between history and myth. To those attuned to more postmodern sensibilities, the binary division is, of course, itself a myth. For the believing Christian scholar, moreover, there is the additional tension between historical reductionism and belief in miracles. ⁸⁶ Whichever approach one takes, sorting out what the sources may be telling us and how they might be misleading us is a complex process, dealing as it does with issues of belief and faith, judgement and discernment, credence and credulity, memory and forgetting.

But sort out we must. In this process of discrimination, a broader comparative context might help. The trajectory of historical argument about the Lough Derg purgatory over the centuries can be seen as a subset of the wider interpretative journey taken by Patrician studies. Ussher, Colgan, Messingham and Rothe all struggled to make sense of the records associated with Ireland’s patron saint. Though they were even prepared to set aside religious differences in order to cooperate in tracking down manuscripts and essential texts, they still found it very difficult to sort out early from late sources, and to distinguish between the genuine writings of Patrick and subsequent works attributed to him. ⁸⁷ Generally speaking, they tended to conflate sources from across the centuries, resulting in complicated, syncretic lives of Patrick which mixed fact, legend and hagiography, often to suit sectarian polemic. It was not until the nineteenth century that the study of Patrick began to be put on a firm footing, and a progressive process of winnowing down began, led by Protestant scholars such as James Henthorn Todd and William Reeves, and Roman Catholic writers adhering to Bollandist principles, such as John Lanigan and Hippolyte Delehaye. ⁸⁸ This process culminated – to cut a long story short – in the seminal and decisive 1962 article by Daniel A. Binchy, ‘Patrick and his Biographers’. ⁸⁹ Binchy rigorously distinguished between the two sources Patrick wrote himself – the Confession and the letter to Coroticus – and those which were a product of subsequent centuries, too far removed from Patrick to be reliable. The sources claiming that Patrick founded the purgatory fall into this second category: later and of little value.

It is possible to construct a plausible but unprovable pre-history for a shrine or religious centre in Lough Derg before the first appearance of St Patrick’s purgatory in the historical record in the twelfth century. There was an earlier monastic settlement in the lake, linked to the local saint, Dobheóg, whose possible association with a shrine may have later ‘made way’ for the more famous Patrick at the instigation of the Augustinian canons when they arrived in the twelfth century. ⁹⁰ Nor is it clear that purgatory in Ireland was a purely twelfth-century invention: despite the nominalism of Ussher and Le Goff, Irish interest in a purgatory-like concept with an earthly location can be found as early as the eighth century. ⁹¹

None of this brings the purgatory in Lough Derg back to St Patrick. It remains firmly anchored in the twelfth century, just when the remote Irish church was opening itself to European religious orders and new theological ideas. ⁹² Attempts to trace the purgatory’s earlier origins only lead us away from the realm of history into the more shadowy borderlands of legend and belief, and the complex interplay between historical fact and religious faith. As with the story of Patrician studies, so too with St Patrick’s purgatory in Lough Derg: history and hagiography, history and piety, indeed history and theology, can be uneasy bedfellows.