Saint Gall

Saint Gall, also known as Gallus, was an Irish monk and missionary of the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The principal medieval lives present him as a disciple of Saint Columbanus and one of the traditional twelve companions who left Ireland for the Continent. He is associated with the monastery of Bangor, where Columbanus had been formed under Saint Comgall, and he shared in the Columbanian mission that established Luxeuil in Burgundy. When Columbanus was driven from Burgundy around 610, Gall accompanied him eastward. After a stay at Bregenz on Lake Constance, Columbanus went on into Italy and founded Bobbio, while Gall remained in Alamannia. The early sources explain his remaining variously by illness or by a parting of ways with his master. Historians generally treat an Irish origin and a real connection with the Columbanian circle as plausible, while regarding much of the narrative detail in the vitae as later hagiographic elaboration.

According to those lives, Gall settled as a hermit in a wooded valley near the Steinach, a stream flowing toward the Lake of Constance in what is now northeastern Switzerland. There he built a cell and an oratory and lived in austerity, preaching among the Alamanni and opposing remaining pagan cults. The best-known episode of the legend recounts that a bear fetched firewood at his command; the bear became the emblem of the saint and of the later abbey. He is said to have refused the see of Constance when it was offered to him, proposing instead a local cleric named John. These stories cannot be confirmed independently, but they fixed his medieval image as a hermit-missionary rather than as the founder-abbot of a large community in his own lifetime. He followed the Irish monastic and Columbanian tradition, not the Benedictine Rule, which was introduced at the site only in the following century.

Tradition places his death at Arbon (Arbor Felix) on the southern shore of Lake Constance, where he had gone in old age and fallen ill; his body was then carried back to his cell for burial. The year is uncertain and is given in later sources around the middle of the seventh century, often as 640 or 646. His feast has long been kept on 16 October. The hermitage became a place of burial and pilgrimage. In the eighth century Abbot Otmar organized a regular monastery on the site and introduced the Benedictine Rule. That house, the Abbey of Saint Gall, grew into one of the foremost monastic and intellectual centres of the Carolingian age, renowned for its library and scriptorium. The medieval town and the Swiss canton of St. Gallen take their name from the saint.

Gall’s cult was established in Alemannic and Swiss territories well before the age of papal canonization; he belongs to the saints recognized by local and episcopal veneration (pre-congregation). He is honoured as patron of the city and canton of St. Gallen and, in popular devotion, of birds, geese, and poultry. Modern scholarship distinguishes a likely historical core—an Irish ascetic of the Columbanian mission who lived as a hermit in the Steinach valley in the early seventh century—from the legendary accretions of the eighth- and ninth-century lives, including the reworkings by Wetti and Walahfrid Strabo of Reichenau.