The Healing Miracles

The cures and signs reported at the Vyshgorod tomb of Boris and Gleb — the lame walking, the blind seeing, a boy’s withered limb restored, prisoners loosed from their chains, wonders of fire, and a pillar of fire and candles seen burning over the grave — as the Skazanie‘s appended miracle collection (the Skazanie o chudesakh) and Nestor’s Chtenie narrate them. This file frames the whole genre: in the hagiography the miracles are not decoration but argument, the evidence by which the texts establish that the brothers are holy and that their cult must be recognized. Every wonder is reported here as what the Skazanie and Chtenie attest, pinned to those texts, and not certified as historical fact.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)

The Miracles as the Argument of the Cult

Before any single cure is described, the shape of the genre must be grasped, because it governs how the wonders are to be read. The early veneration of Boris and Gleb faced a difficulty that the later tradition resolved by the miracles. The brothers had not died confessing Christ before a pagan persecutor in the manner of the early martyrs; they had been killed by a fellow Christian prince in a dynastic quarrel, and their claim to sanctity rested on the more delicate ground of voluntary, Christ-like non-resistance (see A New Category of Sanctity). In that situation the wonders at the grave do decisive work. They are, in the logic of the texts, the visible proof that God has glorified the brothers — the sign that vindicates a form of holiness which the manner of their deaths alone could not establish beyond doubt (Lenhoff 1989, on the function of the miracle collection in legitimating the cult; Fedotov 1946, on the role of the wonders in the passion-bearer model).

This is why the Skazanie carries an appended miracle collection, the Skazanie o chudesakh (“Account of the Miracles”), which the manuscript tradition transmits with the passion narrative; and why Nestor’s Chtenie likewise devotes a substantial closing portion to the posthumous wonders (Hollingsworth 1992, translating both the Skazanie‘s miracle collection and the Chtenie; on the textual relationship, see The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie). The collection is not a neutral chronicle of cures. It is structured to make a case: the wonders multiply, they grow in publicity, and they culminate in the building of churches and the official translations of the relics, so that the narrative of miracle and the narrative of the cult’s recognition are one and the same story (Lenhoff 1989). The honest reader therefore receives the miracle collection in a double aspect — as the texts the Church preserved, and as the very document by which the cult argued for itself. The wonders below are reported throughout as the claims of the Skazanie and the Chtenie, per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, and not as events the present account independently affirms.

The First Signs over the Grave

In the tradition’s ordering, the wonders begin not with a cure but with light. The Skazanie‘s miracle collection reports that after Gleb’s body — left, in the telling, unburied in the wilderness near Smolensk — was at last recovered and brought to lie beside Boris at Vyshgorod, signs began to appear over the place where the bodies rested. Passers-by and the inhabitants of Vyshgorod, the collection says, saw at times a pillar of fire standing over the grave, and at times candles burning there, and heard the singing of angelic voices; merchants, hunters, and herdsmen travelling by night reported the light (the Skazanie‘s miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992; the motif is treated also in connection with the shrine in Vyshgorod). The function of the motif within the narrative is plain: the fire and candles are the heavenly testimony that the unmarked grave holds holy bodies, and it is this testimony — reported, again, as the collection’s own claim — that first draws attention to the brothers and prompts the clergy of Vyshgorod to take notice of the place (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946).

The pillar-of-fire and the burning candles seen over the grave belong to a wider hagiographic vocabulary of light as the sign of hidden sanctity, and the texts use them precisely as a summons: the wonder announces that the bodies must be honored and a church built (Lenhoff 1989, on the light-signs as the cult’s founding wonders). The Skazanie presents the building of the first church at Vyshgorod over the relics as the direct response to these signs — the wonders create the obligation, and the shrine is the answer to it (the Skazanie’s miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992; see The Formation of the Cult). The account attaches the signs to named witnesses and ordinary travellers, lending the report the texture of testimony; but it remains the testimony of the collection, transmitted within a document composed to advance the cult it describes.

The Lame Man and the Restoration of Limbs

From the signs of light the collection turns to cures, and the first of these is, characteristically, a healing of the body that the saints’ own bodies are said to effect. The Skazanie‘s miracle collection reports the cure of a lame man — in the tradition’s telling, a servant or man of the Vyshgorod region who could not walk, whose legs were withered or crippled — who came or was brought to the grave of the brothers and, after praying there, was made whole and walked (the Skazanie’s miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992). The narrative pattern is the standard one of the shrine-miracle: the sufferer approaches the holy place, calls on the saints, and is restored; the cure is public, witnessed, and becomes itself a further proof drawing others to the tomb (Lenhoff 1989, on the accretive structure of the collection).

Alongside the lame man the collection and the Chtenie report the restoration of damaged limbs more generally, including the healing of a boy with a withered or shrunken limb (a hand or arm dried up and useless), made sound again at the brothers’ shrine (the Skazanie‘s miracle collection and Nestor’s Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Nestor, whose Chtenie is the more consciously “Byzantine” and rhetorically polished of the two treatments, gathers such cures into a deliberate demonstration that the brothers stand in the line of the wonder-working saints of the universal Church, their tomb a source of healing like the shrines of the great martyrs (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on Nestor’s assimilation of the brothers to the Byzantine martyr-type). Whether any particular cure is reported by the Skazanie’s collection, by the Chtenie, or by both, the texts agree in the essential claim: the relics of Boris and Gleb heal, and the healing of withered and useless limbs is the demonstration of it. That claim is reported here as theirs.

The cure of the blind belongs to the same demonstrative core of the collection, and it carries a particular weight, for the restoration of sight is among the most charged of the gospel signs. The Skazanie‘s miracle collection reports a blind man who came to the grave of the brothers and, having prayed and touched or venerated the place, received his sight (the Skazanie‘s miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992). In the hagiographic grammar of the collection the opening of the blind man’s eyes is more than one cure among others: it aligns the brothers’ wonders with the works of Christ Himself, who gave sight to the blind, and so makes the implicit argument that the power at the tomb is the power of God acting through His glorified servants (Fedotov 1946, on the Christ-conformity of the passion-bearers extended into their posthumous signs). The collection does not present the cure as the saints’ own power but as God’s power exercised at their relics and in answer to invocation of them — a distinction the texts maintain and which the cult itself maintained (Hollingsworth 1992; on the theology of veneration, see The Formation of the Cult).

The accumulation of such cures — the lame walking, the withered limb restored, the blind seeing — is not accidental in its selection. These are the canonical signs of the gospel and of the lives of the saints, and by reporting them at the Vyshgorod tomb the collection places Boris and Gleb visibly within the company of the Church’s wonderworkers (Lenhoff 1989). The modern reader notes both the theological coherence of the selection and the fact that it is a selection, made by a hagiographer whose purpose was to establish exactly the sanctity the cures are made to prove. The wonders are the collection’s testimony, reported as such.

Prisoners Freed and the Loosing of Chains

A distinct class of wonder in the collection concerns not the body’s sickness but its captivity. The Skazanie‘s miracle collection reports the freeing of prisoners — men held in bonds or in confinement who called upon Boris and Gleb and were delivered, their chains loosed or their prison opened (the Skazanie‘s miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992). The motif of the saint who looses the captive is ancient and widespread in the hagiography of the eastern and western Church alike, and its appearance in the Boris-and-Gleb collection serves to widen the brothers’ patronage beyond the healing of disease to the deliverance of the oppressed and the imprisoned — a patronage suited to princely saints, whose protection was sought in the world of power and not only in the world of the body (Fedotov 1946; Lenhoff 1989, on the social range of the cult’s clientele).

This widening matters for the development of the cult. A shrine known only for cures of the sick draws the sick; a shrine whose saints also free prisoners and answer the petitions of those in trouble draws a broader devotion and binds the brothers more closely to the concerns of the princely and civic order around Vyshgorod and Kiev (Lenhoff 1989). The freeing of prisoners is thus, in the collection’s structure, a bridge between the healing miracles proper and the later, more political dimension of the brothers’ patronage — their role as protectors of princes and of the land, which the tradition would develop most strikingly in the battlefield visions of a later age (see The Martyrs as Protectors). The deliverance of captives is reported, as all these wonders are, as the claim of the Skazanie’s collection.

Wonders of Fire

Fire recurs in the collection not only as the founding sign over the grave but as an instrument of warning and of vindication, and the texts report several wonders in which fire figures. Beyond the pillar of fire and the candles seen burning over the holy bodies, the tradition surrounding the Vyshgorod shrine includes fire-related wonders bound up with the church built over the relics and with the honoring or dishonoring of the place — fires that threaten and are stayed, or that mark the holiness of the site (the Skazanie’s miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992; on the shrine and its churches, see Iconography and Churches). In the hagiographic idiom, fire is a double sign: it is the light of heaven testifying to the relics, and it is the threat from which the saints protect those who honor them.

The collection’s interest in fire is of a piece with its interest in light. Both belong to the texts’ effort to render the invisible holiness of the unresisting brothers visible — to show, in flame and radiance and the burning of candles where no candles were lit, that the grave at Vyshgorod is a place of power (Lenhoff 1989, on the visual and luminous register of the founding wonders). And again the discipline of this section applies without exception: these are the wonders the Skazanie’s collection narrates, reported as its testimony and pinned to it, not historical occurrences the present account asserts (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

How the Miracles Build the Cult

The decisive point about the healing miracles is structural, and it returns to where this file began. In the Skazanie and the Chtenie the wonders are arranged so that each enlarges the cult: the signs of fire reveal the holy bodies; the first cures draw the sick and the troubled; the growing fame compels the clergy and then the princes to honor the place; a church is built over the relics; and the wonders, multiplying still, supply the warrant for the formal translations of the relics and the recognition of the feast (the Skazanie‘s miracle collection and Nestor’s Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Lenhoff 1989, on the miracle collection as the charter of the cult). The miracle narrative and the cult narrative advance together because, in the hagiographer’s design, the miracles are the cult’s justification. The Russian Primary Chronicle‘s notice of the solemn translation of the relics in 1072, when the brothers’ bodies were moved into a new church at Vyshgorod in the presence of the princes and the metropolitan, stands at the end of this trajectory as the public, ecclesial ratification of what the wonders had been claiming all along (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; on the translations, see Vyshgorod).

This is why the genre cannot be set aside as a pious appendix. To remove the miracle collection from the Boris-and-Gleb dossier would be to remove the very thing by which the early Church of Rus’ knew, and argued, that the murdered princes were saints. The wonders are central — and they are reported by texts composed within and for the cult they vindicate. Holding both truths at once is the whole discipline of this section: the healings are not certified here as facts of history, nor dismissed as mere invention, but reported faithfully as what the Skazanie‘s miracle collection and Nestor’s Chtenie attest, pinned to those texts in the translation of Hollingsworth (1992), in keeping with METHODOLOGY.md §3.5. The question of how late, and how embellished, the several strata of the collection may be — and what that implies for the growth of the legend — is taken up directly in its own place (see Dating and Embellishment).

References

Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and its appended miracle collection, the Skazanie o chudesakh; Nestor’s Chtenie and its account of the posthumous wonders — the pillar of fire and candles over the grave, the lame man, the blind man, the boy with the withered limb, the freed prisoners, the wonders of fire.)
Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The translation of the relics at Vyshgorod, s.a. 1072.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The miracle collection as the charter and argument of the cult; its accretive structure; the social range of the wonders.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The role of the wonders in the passion-bearer model; Nestor’s assimilation of the brothers to the Byzantine martyr-type.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The cult of Boris and Gleb in its eleventh- and twelfth-century setting.)