A Life, for his commemoration on the first day of September — Feria, cum commemoratione S. Aegidii Abbatis et Ss. Duodecim Fratrum Martyrum
Iustum deduxit Dominus per vias rectas, et ostendit illi regnum Dei. “The Lord conducted the just through the right ways, and shewed him the kingdom of God.” — Wisdom 10:10, from the Introit Os iusti of the Common of Abbots
I. What can be known, and what is told
There are saints whose lives the historian can reconstruct from their own letters, and saints whose lives survive only in the memory of the Church. St. Giles belongs entirely to the second kind. No contemporary wrote of him. The single Life that carries his story was composed at the abbey that bears his name, in the tenth century, some two hundred years after his death, and it was written not to record a biography but to defend a shrine. The Bollandists, who examined it with their usual patience, judged it to be of no historical value. That judgment stands.
And yet the man was real. A monastery existed on the marshy ground between the Rhône and the sea by the ninth century, and its monks were already calling the place after its founder. His name stands in the Roman Martyrology on this day. Pilgrims came to his tomb in numbers second only, in all of France, to those who went to Tours; and from his tomb they went on to Compostela. More than a hundred and sixty churches in England alone are dedicated to him. He is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the only abbot among them and the only one who did not die a martyr. A cult of that size and that age is not built on nothing.
What follows, therefore, is told in two voices. The first is the voice of the tradition, which the Church has received, read at Matins, and never repudiated. The second is the quieter voice of what can be affirmed, which is little, but firm. The reader is asked to hold both, as the Church herself does.
II. The tradition: a Greek in Provence
He was born, the Life says, at Athens, of royal or at least noble blood, in the middle of the seventh century. His parents were Christian, and he was given a good education in the letters of his country. When they died he distributed his inheritance to the poor, and, finding that his alms and his miracles had made him famous in a city where he wished only to be hidden, he took ship for the West.
He landed at Marseilles. He went first, the tradition relates, to Arles, and stayed two years with St. Caesarius — a detail that cannot be right, since Caesarius had been dead for a century, and a warning of the kind of narrative we are dealing with. From Arles he withdrew into the forests near the mouth of the Rhône, in what was then the wild border country of the Visigothic province of Septimania, and there he found a cave beside a spring and lived as a hermit, alone with God.
Here the story that every medieval child knew begins. He had for companion a hind, which came to him daily and nourished him with her milk. One day the king of the region — the Life names him Flavius, and later tellers Wamba, the Visigothic king who reigned in the 670s — was hunting in the forest with his court, and his hounds started the hind. She fled to the hermit and took refuge at his feet. The huntsmen, following, loosed an arrow into the thicket, and when they broke through they found the animal unharmed, sheltered by an old man in a rough habit, and the arrow in the old man’s hand — or, in the more common form, in his body; he was lamed by it, and would not have it healed, keeping the wound as a discipline all his life.
The king, ashamed, asked who he was and what he wanted. He asked for nothing. The king came again, and again, and at last persuaded him to accept the foundation of a monastery on the spot, of which he became abbot and gave the Rule — the Benedictine Rule, the tradition says, though this too is probably a later assumption. He governed it in humility for many years and died there, on the first of September, in the first or second decade of the eighth century.
To this the Life adds one more episode, the most famous and the least possible. A great king — the Life calls him Charles, and every later hearer understood Charlemagne — came to the abbot to confess, but could not bring himself to name one sin. While Giles said Mass for him an angel laid on the altar a scroll on which the unconfessed sin was written, with the assurance that it was forgiven at the saint’s intercession, provided the king repented. The king did. Charlemagne was born some thirty years after Giles died. If the story has any root at all it may reach back to Charles Martel, who campaigned in Septimania in the 730s; but the scene as told is a legenda, a thing to be read, and it was read, at his altars, for six hundred years, as an image of the mercy that hides nothing from God and is not thereby cast out.
III. What is firm
Set the Life aside, and what remains is this.
An abbey called after St. Giles stood at the Rhône delta by the ninth century, on a site the Roman tradition already knew as Vallis Flaviana — the Flavian valley — which is very likely where the name of the king in the legend came from. The founder was remembered as an abbot named Aegidius, and his tomb was in the church. The monks claimed for their house a direct dependence on the Roman See, and its documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries show it fighting to maintain that exemption against the bishops of Nîmes — which is the practical purpose the Life was written to serve. His name entered the martyrologies of the ninth and tenth centuries, and from them the Roman Martyrology, which commemorates him on this day: In Gallia, sancti Aegidii abbatis, with the story of the king and the hind compressed into a clause.
That is the whole of the documentary foundation. The Church asks no more of him than that he was a holy abbot who lived and died in the odour of sanctity in the south of Gaul, and that God has worked wonders at his tomb.
IV. The abbey and the road
Whatever the man was, the shrine became one of the four great pilgrimages of medieval Christendom, ranked with Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela. Saint-Gilles-du-Gard stood at the head of the Via Tolosana, the southernmost of the four roads across France to Santiago, and the pilgrim who set out from the Rhône to walk to Galicia began by kneeling at his tomb. The twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Guide in the Codex Calixtinus devotes a long passage to him — the miracles at his shrine, the golden reliquary, the crowds — and says, in a sentence that catches the medieval mind exactly, that no one who calls upon him in need has ever gone unheard.
Kings and popes came. Urban II consecrated the altar of the new church in 1096, on the way to preaching the Crusade at Clermont’s aftermath through the south. The great west front, with its three portals and its Roman-looking friezes of the Passion, was built through the twelfth century and is one of the glories of Provençal Romanesque. The counts of Toulouse were its protectors and Raymond IV, who took the cross in 1096, styled himself Count of Saint-Gilles. Pierre de Castelnau, the Cistercian legate whose murder in 1208 began the Albigensian Crusade, was killed on the road a few miles away, and it was on the steps of this church, the next year, that Raymond VI did public penance, stripped to the waist and scourged, before the assembled legates.
Then the wars of religion undid it. The Huguenots held Saint-Gilles for a generation, gutted the church, and dispersed the relics. Part of the body, the tradition holds, had already been carried to Toulouse and laid in the basilica of Saint-Sernin, and there a portion still rests; part was hidden and recovered at Saint-Gilles in the nineteenth century, and is again venerated in the crypt.
V. The saint of the poor and the lame
The devotion outran the shrine. Because of the arrow he became the patron of cripples and of all who cannot walk; because of the forest, of hermits; because of the hind, of nursing mothers; because he asked nothing from a king, of beggars. The lepers and the lame took him for their own, and the churches called after him in England were very often set outside the walls, where such people were kept: St. Giles Cripplegate in London, St. Giles-in-the-Fields, St. Giles at Norwich and at Oxford. Edinburgh’s high kirk bears his name, and the city’s guild of hammermen — smiths, farriers, cutlers — had him for patron, since the arrow that lamed him was a thing of iron.
And so he came into the company of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the Vierzehn Nothelfer, whose cult spread from the Rhineland in the time of the Black Death: fourteen saints invoked together against the diseases and terrors that fell on men without warning. Thirteen of them are martyrs. The fourteenth is an old lame hermit who lived on a deer’s milk and asked to keep his wound. The people who put him there knew what they were doing. Against plague, panic and sudden death they set, alongside the witnesses in blood, one witness to the long slow patience of the cloister, and they invoked him in particular against madness, against nocturnal fear, and for a good confession.
That last is the thread that runs through everything. The king who could not speak his sin; the pilgrim on the road who came to unburden himself before the long walk; the leper outside the wall with nothing left to hide. Giles is the saint of the confession that is hard to make, and the legenda of the angel’s scroll — historically impossible, spiritually exact — is the Church’s way of saying that what a man cannot bring himself to say aloud, God already knows and is waiting to forgive.
VI. His place in the calendar
In the Missale Romanum of 1962 the first of September is a feria, and St. Giles is commemorated, together with the Twelve Holy Brothers, martyrs of Benevento. He has no proper Mass; the Collect is taken from the Common of Abbots. In earlier editions of the Missal he was kept as a simple feast, and in many diocesan calendars of France, England and Germany his day was of higher rank. The reformed calendar of 1969 does not retain him in the General Calendar; he remains in the Martyrology.
VII. What the life teaches
That the Church can honour a saint without knowing his history. Everything the Life asserts may be legend, and the cult is nevertheless sound, because the object of the cult is not a biography but a man who is with God, and the evidence for that was given at his tomb. The historian’s scruple and the pilgrim’s confidence do not contradict each other; they answer different questions. We are permitted, and even instructed, to love the hind and the arrow while knowing exactly what they are.
That the hermit is not useless. He asked for nothing, founded nothing by his own design, and fled every fame that came to him — and Christendom built one of its four great roads to his door. The world’s assessment of what is worth doing is not the last word, and a life spent in a cave beside a spring may turn out to have been, in the only accounting that matters, the axis of a province.
That a wound kept for God’s sake is not a defeat. He would not be healed. The tradition does not present this as morbid; it presents it as a man who had been given, in the form of a hunter’s mistake, a small share of the Cross, and did not want to give it back. The lame and the leprous understood this before the theologians did.
Practice
Examine. Is there a sin you have never quite named in confession — not concealed, perhaps, but softened, generalized, slipped past? The king in the legend was forgiven when he confessed. Ask St. Giles for the grace to say the thing plainly.
Do. Find the person outside the wall — the one your parish, your family, or your own habits keep at a distance because their need is unsightly or slow — and do one thing for them this week that costs you something.
Pray. The Collect of the commemoration, from the Common of Abbots:
Intercessio nos, quaesumus, Domine, beati Aegidii Abbatis commendet: ut, quod nostris meritis non valemus, eius patrocinio assequamur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
“May the intercession of blessed Giles, Abbot, commend us to Thee, we beseech Thee, O Lord: that what we cannot obtain by our own merits, we may obtain by his patronage. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”
Devote. The Fifth Joyful Mystery, the Finding in the Temple — the mystery of what is lost and sought and found — said for someone who has not been to confession in a long time.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the Fourteen Holy Helpers, and with the hermit-founders of Gaul — Martin, Honoratus, Caesarius — in whose company Giles belongs. The Church History path treats the great pilgrimage roads and the abbey’s part in the Albigensian crisis. The Spiritual Practices path takes up the examination of conscience and the making of a good confession.
Sancte Aegidi, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Roman Martyrology, 1 September; the Vita sancti Aegidii (BHL 93) as edited in Analecta Bollandiana 8 (1889), with the Bollandist assessment of its historical value; the Acta Sanctorum for September, tome I; the Pilgrim’s Guide of the Codex Calixtinus*, book I; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Giles”; the* New Catholic Encyclopedia*; and standard histories of the abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard. The chronology of the legend is given as the tradition gives it, with its impossibilities noted in the text rather than silently corrected.*