Visions of history, Irish and otherwise, ancient and modern, critically inflected through St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the National Roman Catholic Seminary of Ireland, are central to John Hume's intellectual formation. This can be dated back to his experiences as a seminarian at St Patrick's during the mid-1950s – particularly his schooling in history under Tomás Ó Fiaich – long before the ideological gestation suggested in the existing literature. There the emphases are on the wider evolution of nationalist politics in Northern Ireland during the mid-1960s, as opposed to Hume's early intellectual biography. Thus, a wider context to his influential thought is suggested, one supplied by a discourse on the concept of patriotism evolving amongst Ireland's Catholic intelligentsia during the 1950s, indicative of the modernization of Catholic thought on the island in the era preceding the convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Yet the article also situates Hume's once-progressive mode of nationalist ideology within a much older tradition of Catholic loyalism in Ireland. The conspicuously Platonic dimension of his thinking is likewise observed, facilitating a conceptually driven exploration of the relationship between Hume's vision of his native walled city of Derry, and of that larger partitioned entity, Northern Ireland.