The difference between Saint Patrick's Confessio and Muirchú's Life of Saint Patrick is truly shocking.
How it is possible, that in less than two hundred years Irish Christianity changes so much from the truthful, simple and Biblical world of the man whose name is Patrick to the murky religious waters of Muirchú where truth obviously has very little importance?
Reading Muirchú after the Confessio is at least for me a truly disgusting experience and makes me again to admire the skill of the Devil in spoiling the wheat fields of Christ.
Ireland is, of course, not the only place where there is such a slide down from Christianity emphasizing Truth to a form of religion enjoying all sorts of holy tales and entertaining legends people have invented to tell about the greatness of this Saint or that.
The life of Saint Martin of Tours by SS contains many wondrous things but the writer is very careful to tell only what he believes on the basis of his own examination and evaluation to be true. But after a few hundred years we meet such a growth of legendary stories that drown the voice of truth under them.
Only diligent analysis can extract truthful elements from ancient documents like Muirchú which otherwise is causing great damage to the memory of the real Saint Patrick.
I fully agree with Elizabeth Dawson who uses the books by Muirchú and Tírechán to study not so much Saint Patrick who lived almost two hundred years earlier but the importance of conversion to Christianity and what was associated with it in seventh century A.D. Ireland.
This is not, however, how Christians then and now understood holy legends and the damage to the cause of the Kingdom of Heaven can be considerable.
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