Hello, my friend. I'm so glad you're here.
Last time, we sat together with Michael Scot --- that strange, brilliant translator, half-feared as a wizard, who carried Aristotle's ideas across languages and into new hands. I do love that one. It stays with me.
Today, I want to tell you about someone I knew myself. Not a name that fills history books the way some others do --- but I remember him. I remember his voice, low and kind, and the particular quiet of the forest where he chose to live.
His name was Gall. An Irish monk, though even that much is argued about. A hermit, a teacher, and --- I promise you this part is true --- a man who once made peace with a bear.
Come. Let me tell you how a single small fire, kept burning in the woods, became something much larger than anyone standing beside it could have guessed.
Picture it with me.
A forest south of a great cold lake --- the one they'd later call Constance --- thick with fir and beech, quiet in the way only old forests are quiet. It's evening. The light is going soft and blue between the trees.
Gall is alone, crouched by a small fire he's built with his own hands. He's not young anymore, though this is still early in his story --- years before the community, before the cell became anything at all. Just him, the cold creeping in at his back, and the fire doing what fire does: making a small circle of the world feel safe.
Then he hears it. Something moving through the brush, heavier than a deer, closer than he'd like.
A bear. Full-grown, drawn out of the trees by the smell of food, maybe, or simply by the warmth. It comes toward him fast --- the way a threat comes, not the way a curiosity does.
I want you to sit with that moment. No walls. No neighbors. Just a man, a fire, and a bear closing the distance between them.
Gall doesn't run. I don't know if he could have, even if he'd wanted to. Instead --- and don't tell the historians, but I love him a little for this --- he speaks to it. Firmly. Like you'd speak to someone who'd wandered somewhere they shouldn't be.
And the bear stops.
It's a strange thing, watching fear go out of a creature's shoulders. The bear stands there a moment, uncertain. And then, the story that is told, it does something stranger still. It turns, gathers an armful of firewood from the forest floor, and carries it back to the fire. As if to say: I'll stay, if you'll let me. I'll help keep this alive.
For the rest of Gall's days, people said that bear stayed near him. I can't promise you every detail of that is true. Memory, even mine, softens at the edges over centuries. But I can tell you this: the shape of that story is exactly right. Gall spent his whole life making peace with wildness, and asking wild, unlikely things to help him keep a small flame going.
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Let me place him for you properly.
Gall was born somewhere around the year 550 --- though even that word, "somewhere," is doing a lot of work. His own biographers couldn't agree on where he came from. The story told for centuries has him Irish by birth, one of the countless sons of that green, learning-hungry island who crossed the sea to serve God on the continent. But I've heard other whispers too --- that his people came instead from the borderlands between Lorraine and Alemannia, and that Ireland only entered his story later, through the men he studied among. I won't pretend to settle it for you. Even I don't remember everything with perfect clarity, six hundred years being what it is to memory. What I do know is this: whichever soil first held him, it was Irish learning that shaped him.
As a young man, Gall went to study at Bangor Abbey, on the coast of what's now Northern Ireland. I want you to understand what Bangor was in that century --- not a quiet backwater, but one of the great lamps of Christian learning in all of Europe. Scholars came from distant kingdoms to sit in its halls. Manuscripts were copied there by candlelight, Latin and scripture and the old learning all held carefully together, at a time when much of the continent it would later serve was still finding its footing after Rome's long unraveling.
It was at Bangor that Gall met a man named Columbanus --- restless, brilliant, utterly convinced that his calling lay across the sea, on the mainland, among people who had never heard the gospel preached in their own hills. Around the year 589, Columbanus gathered twelve companions and set out from Ireland. Gall was one of them.
Twelve companions. I bet you didn't know that part --- that Gall wasn't the whole story, but one thread in a small, deliberate company, each of them carrying what Bangor had given them: discipline, letters, the habit of prayer married to the habit of work. They crossed to Gaul and settled first at Luxeuil, deep in the forested Vosges, where they built a monastery and a community that would, in time, ripple outward across the continent in ways none of them could have predicted.
I watched them arrive. Young men, tired from travel, uncertain of the language and the land around them --- but certain, all of them, of why they'd come. That certainty is the thread I want you to hold onto. Because everything that follows --- the exile, the illness, the forest, the bear, the small cell that became something enormous --- all of it starts here, with twelve men and one abbot who believed learning and faith were worth carrying to a place that had neither.
Peace never lasts as long as we want it to.
By 610, trouble had found Luxeuil. Columbanus had never been a man to soften his words for powerful ears, and he'd angered the wrong people --- nobles and bishops who wanted a quieter, more accommodating kind of holiness than the one he preached. He was exiled. Forced out, along with the community he'd built, sent back toward the coast to be shipped home to Ireland like something inconvenient being returned.
Gall went with him. Of course he did. But the ship that was meant to carry them away got turned back by storms, and Columbanus, refusing to simply go home defeated, decided instead to press further into the continent --- north and east, up along the Rhine, toward Alemannia, a land that hadn't yet heard much of what he had to say.
I remember that river journey. Cold water, gray sky, a small company of exhausted, devoted men in a boat, none of them entirely sure where they were going, only that they were going together. They reached a town called Bregenz, on the shore of a great lake, and for a time, it seemed like a new beginning.
Then, in 612, it wasn't.
Columbanus decided to travel on again --- south this time, over the mountains into Italy, chasing yet another chance to build something lasting. And Gall --- Gall was ill. Truly ill, not the kind of thing you push through by will alone. He couldn't travel. So he did the hardest thing a devoted companion can do: he let his teacher go on without him.
I want you to picture that parting. No grand farewell. Just a sick man on a riverbank at a place called Arbon, watching the boat carrying his whole community, his whole reason for leaving Ireland in the first place, grow small and then disappear around a bend. He didn't know if he'd ever see Columbanus again. He didn't. Columbanus died a few years later in Italy, and Gall would spend the rest of his long life on this side of the mountains.
I won't pretend that moment didn't cost him something. Grief doesn't ask permission, even from holy men.
But here's the part I love, the part I think about often when I remember Gall's face. He didn't collapse into that grief and stay there. Once he'd recovered his strength, he didn't chase after Columbanus, and he didn't turn back toward Ireland either. He went instead into the forest southwest of that same lake, near the source of a small river called the Steinach --- the very woods where, not long after, a bear would learn to trust him --- and he built a cell. Just a simple shelter, at first. A place to pray, to work, to be quiet.
He wasn't alone for long. Others came --- men drawn by his reputation, or simply by word passed traveler to traveler that there was a holy man living rightly in the woods near Arbon. Gall took them in. He taught them the same discipline Bangor had taught him, and Luxeuil had sharpened in him: prayer bound to labor, labor bound to learning. Soon there were cells enough for twelve monks, instructed carefully, one at a time, by a man who had lost his teacher but never lost what his teacher had given him.
Twelve, again --- the same number that had once left Ireland with Columbanus. I don't think that number was an accident, and I don't think Gall thought so either.
Word spreads, even in a forest.
Gall became known, in those years, as a powerful preacher --- the kind of voice that made people walk a long way to stand and listen. But preaching was only part of what he gave the people of that land. The Alemannian people living near his hermitage were, by and large, people of the spoken word only. Their traditions lived in memory, passed voice to voice, the way most traditions did in that age. Gall did something quieter than preaching, and I'd argue something just as important: he taught them to read.
I remember sitting at the edge of that clearing, watching him with a handful of local men and women, patient in a way that surprised even people who thought they already knew him. He wasn't teaching them Latin for its own sake, or scripture for its own sake. He was giving them a tool --- the ability to hold onto something themselves, instead of depending entirely on someone else's memory to carry it forward for them. That's no small gift. I've watched empires fall because too few people could read what was written down to warn them.
His reputation grew large enough that when the See of Constance lost its bishop, the clergy gathered to choose a successor were unanimous. They wanted Gall. Here was a man everyone trusted, everyone respected --- surely he belonged at the head of a proper church, with proper rank.
He said no.
He argued --- rightly, by the customs of the time --- that electing an outsider, a foreigner to that see, went against church law. But I was there, and I promise you, it wasn't only law that stopped him. He simply didn't want the office. Didn't want the robes, the politics, the endless cares of governing other men's souls from a seat of authority.
Years later, in 625, it happened again. Luxeuil itself --- the monastery Columbanus had founded, the place Gall had once called home --- lost its abbot. The monks sent for Gall. Come back, they said. Lead us.
He was an old man by then. And again, he said no. He would not leave his solitude, would not take up any office that pulled him back into the cares of the world he'd spent decades quietly stepping away from.
I want you to notice what he chose, twice, over power and prestige: a small forest, a handful of monks, and the patient work of teaching people to hold their own histories in their own hands. It didn't look like much, next to a bishop's seat or an abbot's chair. But smallness, kept faithfully, has a way of outlasting thrones.
I think about the shape of Gall's life often --- how much of it looks, from a distance, like refusal. No to Constance. No to Luxeuil. No to nearly every chance he had to become something grander than a man teaching letters by a small river in the woods.
But I don't see refusal when I look back on him. I see someone who already knew what he'd been given, and what he owed it.
Gall didn't build his cell from nothing. He carried Bangor's discipline in him --- that marriage of prayer and labor and learning he'd absorbed as a young man on Irish soil. He carried Columbanus's stubbornness too, that refusal to let holiness be softened into something comfortable. None of what Gall did in that forest was purely his own invention. It was inheritance, put to work.
And here's what I find myself turning over, all these centuries later: Gall himself never saw a library. He built a hermit's cell, a handful of shelters, a small collection of books kept close for worship and teaching. That's all. He couldn't have imagined what it would become.
But for several decades after he died, his disciples stayed together in the cell he'd built, following the rule he'd taught them --- prayer bound to work, work bound to reading. In 719, a monk named Otmar took that small, faithful community and built it into something larger: the Abbey of St. Gall. Its scriptorium grew famous, and generations of monks bent over vellum there, copying not only scripture but the old learning too --- grammar, poetry, history, ideas that might otherwise have simply vanished, the way so much else from that age did vanish, to fire or war or plain neglect.
I want to linger on this part, and you might ask, "why has Harmonia included an obscure monk in History's arrow podcast?" The Abbey Library of Saint Gallen is not a ruin. It is not a memory, or a handful of scraps pieced together by guesswork. It still stands, in the same city, and it still holds tens of thousands of pages that monks copied by hand over more than a thousand years --- some of the oldest surviving manuscripts in all of Europe, kept safe through plagues and wars and the slow hunger of time that swallows almost everything else. Scholars walk into that hall today, this very year, and read words a hermit's small community first thought worth saving. Of everything I've watched survive from that age, that library is one of the things I'm proudest to have seen endure.
Gall didn't build a library. He built a cell, and taught a handful of people to read, and refused every chance to be something more important than that. The Library of Saint Gallen was what direction looks like, seen from far enough away. He couldn't have seen it. I can, and now you can too.
So I'll leave you with this, my friend.
You probably won't ever refuse a bishop's seat. You may never have the chance to say no to that kind of power. But I wonder if you've ever built something small and quiet, without knowing what it might become. A habit. A skill passed to someone younger than you. A little collection of things --- words, songs, recipes, photographs --- kept safe simply because you thought they mattered.
You don't have to know where it's going. Gall didn't. He just kept the fire lit, and taught the next hands how to read what the flames revealed.
What's the small thing you're tending right now, without knowing its shape yet?
Next time, I want to tell you about a man named Hugo Grotius --- a Dutch scholar, centuries after Gall, who spent time imprisoned for his beliefs. I won't tell you how he escaped. I'll only say this: it involved a chest of books, and it's one of my favorite stories of all the ones I carry.
For now, though, let's stay a little longer with Gall. A forest. A fire. A bear who chose to stay. A cell that became an abbey, and an abbey that became a library holding a thousand years of pages, still standing, still read. I don't think he ever needed to know how far that small flame would travel. He just kept it burning, and taught others to do the same.
This podcast is sponsored by Steinach Forest Fire Starters™.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.