Of the earthly origins of Saint Exuperantius nothing certain has been handed down; the traditions of Zurich place his life in the closing years of the third century and his death after the year 302. What the city has remembered for centuries is not his ancestry but his fidelity: he was, in the words of the old accounts, an exceedingly loyal servant and companion of Felix and Regula, and with them a soldier of the legendary Theban Legion, that Christian corps commanded by Saint Maurice.
According to the tradition, when the persecution of Christians raged under the emperors Diocletian and Maximian and the Theban Legion was cut down at Agaunum in the Valais, Felix and Regula fled northward with their servant Exuperantius. They followed the rivers until they came to the banks of the Limmat, at the Roman settlement of Turicum, the future Zurich. There, it is said, they were among the first to sow the word of God in that place. Their preaching did not remain hidden. They were seized, brought before the governor, and commanded to sacrifice to the gods of Rome. In the passion of Felix and Regula the answer given is remembered: "We are Christians and we worship Christ, the God who created us. We do not sacrifice to the gods, nor do we worship your gods. You have our bodies in your power, but our souls are not in your power, but only in God, who formed us." Exuperantius stood with them in that refusal, faithful to his masters and more faithful still to his Lord.
The three were condemned to death. Tradition points to a small island in the Limmat as the place of their execution, and to a stone there as the block on which they were beheaded. Over that stone the Wasserkirche was raised, and the surroundings of the venerated execution stone and the medieval grave site have been dated by archaeologists to the eleventh century, witness to a cult already long established.
Then, says the legend, God glorified His martyrs with a wonder. The three beheaded bodies rose, took up their own heads in their hands, and walked some forty ells up the riverbank; and Exuperantius, the servant, went before Felix and Regula, as a servant walks ahead of his lord. Where they chose to stop they knelt down, gave thanks, and laid themselves to rest. On that spot they were buried, and there in the ninth century the Grossmünster of Zurich was built and dedicated to them. Tradition adds that it was Charlemagne, whose horse knelt at the place where the martyrs had expired, who discovered their grave and founded the first church there; and that around the martyrs' resting place many blind and lame were healed, to the glory of God and the honour of the city's saints.
Exuperantius does not appear by name in the earliest surviving form of the legend, the early Carolingian passion of the Zurich saints preserved in Codex 225 of the Abbey Library of Saint Gall, written at the end of the eighth century, though that text speaks of companions of the two martyrs. His veneration as the third patron of Zurich becomes clearly visible from the thirteenth century. The first documentary mention of his name is dated 21 January 1257, when the Wasserkirche, at its incorporation into the Grossmünster chapter, was described as the place of martyrdom of Felix, Regula and Exuperantius. The chronicler Johannes Stumpf, writing in 1547–48, reports that Exuperantius had been a saint dear to the common people since the thirteenth century, though the Grossmünster long hesitated to admit him, until in 1264 a citizen bequeathed his lands to the chapter on condition that Exuperantius henceforth be received into the liturgy.
His place in the city's self-understanding wavered for a time. The earliest fragmentary city seal of 1225 shows three holy figures, but other seals of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries show only Felix and Regula; with the sixth seal of 1347/48, after the guild revolution, Exuperantius returned for good, and every later seal followed that model. Historians have read in this the affection of the ordinary townspeople for a saint the ecclesiastical elite doubted — a reminder that the poor and the humble often keep faith with a servant-saint when the learned pass him by. A skull reliquary of Exuperantius stood beside those of Felix and Regula in the treasury of the Grossmünster; when the treasury was cleared at the Reformation, on 2 October 1525, four precious head-reliquaries were handed over to the council, among them "S. Exuperantzen haupt."
Scholars have noted that Exuperius and Exuperantius are forms of the same name, and some have supposed that the Zurich martyr is one with Exuperius of Agaunum, companion of Saint Maurice. Yet the Church of Zurich has honoured him for eight centuries as the third of her patrons, and the Christian people are not wrong to love a saint whose whole glory is that he served, followed, and died with his masters for Christ. He is commemorated with Felix and Regula on 11 September.
May Saint Exuperantius, faithful servant and martyr, obtain for us the grace to be loyal in the small place God has given us, and to confess Christ today without fear before those who can touch only our bodies and never our souls.
