Deer Cry

The Deer Cry, better known in English as Saint Patrick's Breastplate, is a lorica, a protective prayer that names the forces invoked and the dangers guarded against, a recognised genre in early Irish and British Christianity.

Its structure is invocation by binding: the speaker binds to himself the strength of the Trinity, then the power of Christ's incarnation, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, then the virtues of angels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles and confessors, then the elements themselves, the sun, fire, lightning, wind, sea, earth and rock. It then lists what it defends against, and the list is specific: the snares of demons, the spells of women, smiths and druids.

The most quoted section is the sequence beginning Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, which has entered general devotional use well outside Ireland.

The attribution to Patrick is traditional and is not defensible on linguistic grounds. Patrick was a fifth-century Briton who wrote in Latin, and two Latin works of his survive, the Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus, whose style is plain and rather anxious. The Deer Cry is in Old Irish, and the language belongs to roughly the eighth century. It is preserved in the Liber Hymnorum with a preface supplying the legend: that Patrick and his companions sang it while passing an ambush and appeared to their attackers as deer, which is where the name comes from.

The hymn is regularly cited as evidence that Irish Christianity absorbed native pagan religion, and the invocation of sun, fire, wind and sea is what the claim rests on. The claim is worth handling carefully.

Against it: the lorica genre is not distinctively Irish, similar compositions exist in Latin, and invoking the created order as testimony to and instrument of God is thoroughly biblical, the Song of the Three Children in Daniel does exactly this, calling on sun and moon, winds, fire, frost and every element to bless the Lord, and it was a standard liturgical canticle. The hymn's elements are creatures, not powers, and the theology is orthodox.

Also against it: the hymn explicitly lists druids among the dangers it guards against, alongside demons. That is not a friendly absorption of native religion; it is a defensive posture toward it.

For it: the text does show an early Irish Christianity comfortable with a poetic register that later Latin Christianity found strange, and the genre's popularity in Ireland and Wales is real.

The wider claim, that a distinctively "Celtic Christianity", nature-loving and unlike Rome, existed as an alternative tradition, is a modern construction assembled largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and historians of early medieval Ireland have dismantled it in detail. The Irish church was Roman in doctrine and argued with Rome mainly about the date of Easter and the shape of tonsure.

The best-known English version, sung to two Irish tunes, is Cecil Frances Alexander's of 1889.