Gallus of the Steinach

The city of St. Gallen in northeastern Switzerland carries a bear on its coat of arms, a black bear reared up on a field of gold, and so does the canton around it. The animal has stood there for centuries, in stone over doorways and on official seals, and it wears a golden collar. Trace it back and it does not come from a battle or a noble house. It comes from a story about a hermit in the woods who is said to have told a wild bear to bring him firewood, and paid it in bread.

The monk who would not go to Italy

Gallus belongs to the great Irish missionary movement that spread across the Continent in the sixth and seventh centuries, the wandering monks the sources call peregrini. The tradition makes him a companion of Columbanus, the formidable Irish abbot who founded Luxeuil in the Vosges and later Bobbio in Italy. Around 610 the two of them, with a small band of monks, moved east into Alemannia, the Germanic country along the upper Rhine and Lake Constance, to preach.

The preaching did not go gently. At Tuggen, on the upper end of Lake Zürich, the monks met people who had no interest in the new god. Our old gods sent us the rain, they said, and we will not leave them, and they laid offerings before their idols. Gallus answered with fire. He burned their shrine and threw the offerings into the lake, and the townspeople, who did not take the destruction of their gods as a favor, came after the monks to kill them. Gallus and the others fled for their lives. It is worth holding onto that scene, because the saint the arms remember is a man who tamed a bear, and the saint the record actually shows first is a man whose zeal for one god put a torch to another’s house and nearly got him murdered for it.

The band regrouped near Lake Constance, and there the partnership itself broke. Around 612, when Columbanus decided to cross the Alps to Italy, Gallus stayed behind. The Lives written two centuries later say the master excommunicated his disciple for disobedience, and one version has Gallus laid low by a fever that kept him from the road. Modern historians read it more plainly, as a monk who simply refused to go on. Whatever the reason, the older man left to found Bobbio, and the younger one, still weak with fever, went to Arbon on the lakeshore, where a priest named Willimar took him in and nursed him back with two of his clerics, Magnoald and Theodor.

His origin is less settled than the tradition pretends. The Irish story is old and strong, but the romanist Gerold Hilty argued on linguistic grounds that Gallus came from the bilingual Vosges-Alsace borderland, and the historian Max Schär offered a compromise of Irish blood and an Alsatian upbringing. The birthplace is genuinely open. What is not in doubt is where he ended up.

The bear and the bread

When his strength came back, Gallus asked a deacon named Hiltibod, a fisher and fowler who knew the wild country, to lead him to a place remote enough to live out his life alone. They climbed up along the river Steinach, into forest the Life describes as full of bears and wolves and boars, until Gallus caught his foot in the undergrowth and fell. He took it for a sign. Here is my rest forever, he said, here I will dwell, for I have chosen it. He made a cross out of a hazel branch and hung on it the little reliquary he carried at his neck, which held a scrap of the Virgin’s veil and bones of Saint Desiderius of Vienne and Saint Mauritius of the Theban Legion. That was the founding of the place. There was no charter and no stone, only a fallen man and a hazel cross with a relic hung in the branches.

The famous scene comes that night, by the fire. A bear came out of the dark to the edge of the light and began to eat the scraps of their meal. Instead of driving it off, Gallus spoke to it, and told it to put a log on the fire. The bear did, and the saint broke a loaf and gave it the bread, and ordered it to keep to the far hills and harm neither man nor beast. Hiltibod, watching, said that now he knew the Lord was with him, since even the wild things of the desert obeyed him. Walahfrid Strabo, writing the fullest Life in the 830s, tells it as a small miracle of a holy man’s power over the wild, the kind of animal-taming episode that clings to hermit saints, the desert fathers and their lions, the forest ascetics and their wolves.

The wild did not give up the valley without a fight, and here the older world shows through the Christian one. As Hiltibod fished at the waterfall, the Life says, demons appeared to him in the shape of women, pelting him with stones and wailing that the stranger had driven them out and left them no rest among men or in the wilderness. Voices carried down from the mountains and asked whether Gallus was still there or had gone. As hagiography it is the saint besieged by devils. It also reads as the memory of the valley’s own spirits, the powers of a pagan landscape, protesting the man who had come to evict them.

The valley kept the bear. When a monastery rose on the spot, and then a town, and then a canton, the animal from the firelight went up on the arms and stayed.

The saint who kept saying no

The one time Gallus left his valley for the affairs of the powerful, it was for an exorcism. Duke Gunzo’s daughter Fridiburga, betrothed to the Frankish prince Sigibert, son of King Theuderich II, had fallen into a state the Life calls possession: thirty days without food, mute and foaming, so violent that four strong men could not hold her. Two bishops the prince sent could do nothing, and the demon in her spoke, saying that none of them could move it, that only Gallus could, the same Gallus who had already driven it from Tuggen and from Bregenz. Gallus went, reluctantly, and prayed over her, and the Life says the spirit came out of her mouth in the shape of an ugly raven and was gone. The girl was healed.

Gunzo, grateful, offered him the bishopric of Constance, which had just fallen vacant. Gallus refused it. There was a plain obstacle behind the humility: back when Columbanus excommunicated him, the master had forbidden him to say Mass for as long as Columbanus lived, and a bishop who cannot say Mass is no bishop. So Gallus put forward one of his own students, a monk named John, and it was John who was consecrated bishop of Constance, around 615. At the ceremony Gallus preached the long consecration sermon himself, in Latin, while John stood beside him and rendered it into German line by line for the crowd. When someone urged him to keep a fine silver cup a duke had given him rather than hand it to the poor, he answered in the words of Peter, that silver and gold he had none. He later refused the abbacy of Luxeuil, his old master’s own chair, in the same way.

He died around the year 646 at Arbon, on the shore of Lake Constance, an old man who had held no title grander than hermit. The reversal came after him. About 719 the Alemannic priest Otmar built a monastery over the site of the cell, and the Abbey of Saint Gallen grew from it into one of the intellectual capitals of the early medieval West. Its scriptorium copied and preserved classical and Christian texts through the centuries when much of that inheritance came close to vanishing, and its library, the Stiftsbibliothek, still stands as a World Heritage Site, its baroque hall lined with books above the ground where a man once fed a bear.

In the compendium

Gallus is a study in how a life gets smoothed into an emblem. The record shows a temple-burner who started a riot and a hermit who argued with the spirits of a wild valley and cast a raven out of a princess. What the arms kept was the bear, the gentlest image in the whole story, the moment the man made a truce with the wild instead of setting it on fire. His nearest neighbor in this wing is Avramije the Recluse, the other saint of the sealed cell, though where Avramije walled himself in against the world, Gallus opened his fire to a beast. The animal at his feet is the older layer showing through the Christian one, and it is why a bear from a hermit’s night still guards a Swiss city on its shield.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Vita vetustissima sancti Galli (oldest Life, late 7th century, surviving in fragments)
• Wetti of Reichenau, Vita sancti Galli (c. 816-824)
• Walahfrid Strabo, Vita sancti Galli (c. 833-834), the fullest and most widely copied Life
• Das Leben und Wirken des heiligen Gallus (19th-century Life retelling the medieval Vitae, from p. 163 of the collected volume)
• Max Schär, Gallus. Der Heilige in seiner Zeit (Basel, 2011)
• Heraldic record of the arms of the city and canton of St. Gallen (golden collar and claws granted by Emperor Friedrich III, 1475) and of neighbouring Appenzell (the 1579 calendar incident)