Healings among Christians and Muslims

The feature for which St. Arsenios was most renowned in his own lifetime: a gift of healing prayer sought by Orthodox Christians and by the local Muslims alike, who came to him with the sick and the troubled and went away, the tradition holds, helped. Reported here strictly as St. Paisios’ Life and the Farasiot memory attest it (§3.5), soberly and without confessional polemic.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

The Reputation of a Healer

In the memory of the Farasiots, as St. Paisios gathered it, the most conspicuous thing about their old priest was that people came to him to be healed, and that they were healed (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on his renown as a healer). This is the datum around which his whole popular reputation formed. Sickness in a remote Anatolian village of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had few remedies; the priest who could pray effectively over the sick was, in the most literal sense, the physician of his people, and Arsenios is remembered as exactly that — not a folk-doctor with herbs and charms, which the tradition is careful to deny, but a priest who healed through prayer, through the sacraments and sacramentals of the Church, and through the reading of Scripture and the Psalter over those who came to him (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on the ecclesial and prayerful character of his healing; see Clairvoyance and the Gift of Prayer).

Per the repository methodology (§3.5), these healings are reported here as what the tradition attests, pinned to the source that transmits them — St. Paisios’ Life, itself compiled from the oral testimony of surviving Farasiots decades after the events. They are not certified as adjudicated fact, and the collection asserts no medical or historical verdict on any particular cure. What can be said with confidence is narrower and firmer: that his community remembered him as a healer, that this memory was vivid, specific, and shared, and that it was the principal ground of the veneration that eventually reached the whole Church (see Attestation and Tradition).

Sought by Christians and Muslims Alike

The most striking and most historically significant feature of these accounts is that the people who sought St. Arsenios’ healing prayer were not only Christians. The Life repeatedly records that the local Muslims brought their sick to him, asked his prayers, and revered him — that his reputation as a man of God crossed the confessional line that otherwise divided the two communities of Cappadocia (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on Muslims bringing their sick to him and seeking his prayers). In the tradition’s telling, Muslims too called him “Hadjiefendis,” and some are remembered as trusting his prayer above any other recourse (see Hadjiefendis of Farasa).

This detail deserves to be handled with care, in both directions. It is not evidence of a syncretism or a blurring of the faiths: Arsenios remained wholly and unambiguously an Orthodox priest, healing in the name of Christ and through the prayers of the Church, and the Muslims who came to him came to an Orthodox holy man, not to a shared cult. Nor is it to be read as a triumphalist proof of Christianity over Islam; the Life does not frame it as a contest, and neither does this collection (per METHODOLOGY §4). What it attests is a sociological and spiritual reality well documented across the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia: that the reputation of a genuine holy person could draw the reverence of ordinary people across confessional lines, who sought the help of God wherever they believed it could be found (on this shared world of holy men and cross-confessional veneration in Ottoman lands, see the general discussion in F. W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). The collection reports the fact soberly, as the tradition gives it, and draws no polemical conclusion from it.

The Character of the Cures

The Life records the kinds of things brought to Arsenios rather than a clinical catalogue: the sick of body, the mentally and spiritually afflicted, the barren seeking children, those tormented by evil spirits, and the ordinary troubles of village life (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on the range of afflictions brought to him). The consistent note is that he prayed, read the appointed Scriptures and Psalms, and sent people away in hope; and that he took no payment, refusing to make of his gift a livelihood (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on his refusal of payment for healing; see Hadjiefendis of Farasa). This refusal is part of the tradition’s case for his sanctity: the healer who enriches himself is suspect; the healer who will take nothing points beyond himself to God.

[Disputed: the details of specific miracles. The Life and the devotional tradition attach particular cures to particular persons and occasions; these individual accounts rest on oral Farasiot memory recorded a half-century later by a single (and devoted) biographer, and cannot be independently verified as to detail, date, or medical particulars. The collection reports the pattern — a widely and specifically remembered ministry of healing prayer, extending to Muslims as well as Christians — as firmly attested by the tradition, while flagging that any single miracle-story is transmitted at that same devotional remove (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti; see Attestation and Tradition).]

Why the Healings Matter

The healings are not incidental to St. Arsenios’ significance; they are, historically, its engine. It was as a healer that he was known and loved in Farasa; it was the memory of his healings that the refugees carried into exile and told to the boy who became St. Paisios; and it was that memory, ratified by continuing reports of his intercession after death, that carried him to glorification in 1986 (see Glorification 1986). The Church, in glorifying him, did not certify a medical dossier; it received and ratified the testimony of a people that, through this priest, the grace of God had been at work — the same logic by which the Church receives any wonderworking saint (cf. the treatment of ecclesial reception in St. Xenia: The Xenia Case). The next file turns from the healings to the wider gift of which they were one expression: his discernment, his answered prayer, and his lifelong use of the Psalter.

See Also

• Clairvoyance and the Gift of Prayer — the discernment and the use of the Psalter of which the healings were one fruit
• Hadjiefendis of Farasa — the ascetic priest who refused payment for his prayers
• Pastor of a Threatened Flock — the mixed Christian–Muslim world in which he was revered
• Attestation and Tradition — how the miracle accounts are weighed
• St. Xenia: The Xenia Case — the model for how the Church receives a wonderworker’s cult

References

• Elder Paisios the Athonite (Hieromonk Paisios). Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Holy Hesychasterion “Evangelist John the Theologian,” Greek 1st ed. 1975; English translation, Souroti. (The renown as a healer; the ecclesial and prayerful character of the cures; Muslims bringing their sick and seeking his prayers; the range of afflictions; the refusal of payment.)
• Hasluck, F. W. Christianity and Islam under the Sultans. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929. (The well-documented phenomenon of cross-confessional veneration of holy persons and shrines in Ottoman lands.)