Healing Without Payment

The defining mark of St. Panteleimon in Orthodox devotion is that he is an Anargyros — one of the “silverless” Holy Unmercenaries who take no money for their cures. This file sets out the scriptural root of the unmercenary ideal (“freely you have received, freely give,” Matthew 10:8; healing “in the name of Jesus Christ,” Acts 3:6), the Passio‘s portrait of the converted Pantoleon healing the sick freely and in Christ’s name rather than by the medical art or for a fee, the social and theological conflict this sets up with the paid physicians of Greco-Roman Nicomedia, and the way that conflict becomes — in the narrative — the engine of envy that drives his denunciation. Throughout, the early fact of a venerated healer is held apart from the developed-layer episodes of the Passio.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Unmercenary Healer)

The Word Anargyroi

The category to which the Church assigns Panteleimon is named by a Greek privative compound: anargyros (ἀνάργυρος), plural anargyroi — from an- (“without”) and argyros (“silver,” and by extension “silver coin, money”). The word means, literally, “silverless” or “moneyless”; as a title of a class of saints it means those who heal without taking payment (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905, on the healing saints and their type; Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye 1902, under the several feasts of the Unmercenaries). The Orthodox liturgical books render the title into Slavonic as bessrebreniki and into English variously as “Unmercenaries,” “the Holy Unmercenary Physicians,” or “the Silverless Ones.” It is a precise term: it does not say merely that these saints were generous, but that the refusal of the fee is constitutive of what they are. To be an Anargyros is to have made the not-taking of money the visible form of one’s healing.

The class so named is not large but it is sharply defined. Its charter members are the physician-brothers Cosmas and Damian — themselves subdivided in the tradition into more than one pair (the Asian, the Roman, and the Arabian) — together with Cyrus and John of Egypt, the great healing pair of the shrine at Menouthis near Alexandria, and a handful of others: Sampson the Hospitable, Diomedes, Mokios, Thalleleos, Tryphon, and, pre-eminently in the later cult, Panteleimon (on the roster of the Anargyroi, Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902, at 1 July and 17 October for Cosmas and Damian and 31 January for Cyrus and John; Delehaye 1905). Panteleimon’s place among them is secured not by his standing at the head of the original list — he does not — but by the immense devotional weight his cult came to carry: in the developed tradition he becomes, for much of the Orthodox world, the Unmercenary Healer, the one whose name is sung in the lesser blessing of waters and whose icon hangs in the sickroom. This file treats the ideal that makes him one of them and the practice the Passio ascribes to him; the category as such, and its other members, are handled at The Unmercenaries as a Type.

“Freely You Have Received, Freely Give”

The theological root of the unmercenary practice is a single dominical command. Sending out the Twelve, the Lord charges them: “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). The Greek is terse and antithetical — dōrean elabete, dōrean dote — and it makes the giving of healing a function of the gift already received: because the power to heal was itself a free grace and not a purchased commodity, it cannot honestly be sold. The Anargyroi are the saints who took this verse not as counsel but as command, and who read it as governing the whole economy of Christian healing: the cure is God’s gift passing through the healer’s hands, and to set a price on it would be to claim as one’s own property what is only held in trust (Matthew 10:8; on the verse as the charter of unmercenary medicine, Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital, 2005, on the theology of free Christian healthcare).

To this is joined a second text, which supplies the manner of the cure. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter meets the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple and says: “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk” (Acts 3:6). The two halves of Peter’s sentence are exactly the two halves of the unmercenary ideal. “Silver and gold I do not have” is the refusal of the fee — the anargyros posture in the very words; “in the name of Jesus Christ … rise up and walk” is the assertion that the healing power is Christ’s name and not the healer’s skill. The Unmercenary heals as Peter heals: emptyhanded of money, and invoking not an art but a Name (Acts 3:6; cf. Acts 3:16, where Peter insists “His name … has made this man strong”). The whole Anargyros tradition can be read as a meditation on these two verses laid side by side — Matthew 10:8 forbidding the price, Acts 3:6 supplying the means.

The Church’s hymnography for Panteleimon draws on exactly this register. The Menaion for 27 July hails him as the “all-merciful” physician who “freely” pours out cures and heals “in the name of Christ,” joining the title of mercy to the unmercenary act (Menaion, 27 July, troparion and kontakion of the Great Martyr Panteleimon; the troparion names him “physician and healer” who intercedes that souls be saved). The liturgical portrait is consistent with the Passio’s: the saint heals freely, and the freedom of the healing is itself part of the praise.

The Passio’s Portrait of the Free Healer

According to the Greek Passio (BHG 1412z–1418) and its tenth-century Metaphrastic rewriting, the youth Pantoleon, son of the pagan Eustorgius and the Christian Euboule, was apprenticed to the celebrated Nicomedian physician Euphrosynos and was already accomplished in the medical art when he was catechized and brought to Christ by the priest Hermolaos (see Conversion by Hermolaos and The Pagan Youth and the Physician). The hinge of the conversion narrative is itself a healing: the Passio relates that Pantoleon came upon a child lying dead from the bite of a viper and, putting Hermolaos’ instruction to the test, called upon the name of Christ over the body — whereupon the child rose and the serpent burst asunder. This, the Passio reports, is what sealed his faith; he saw that the Name accomplished what the art could not (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418, the episode of the dead child and the viper, reported here as the narrative’s own claim per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

From that point the Passio portrays the new Christian as a healer of a new kind. He continues to practise, but his cures are now worked in the name of Christ and without payment. The narrative is explicit that he takes no fee: he heals the blind, the paralysed, the demon-possessed, and the chronically sick freely, asking nothing, and where his teachers and rivals dispensed medicine for money he dispenses the mercy of Christ for nothing (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; the free healings and the cures worked “in the name of Christ”). The change is not merely commercial but theological. The Passio makes the point that Pantoleon’s cures succeed precisely where the medical art alone had failed — the blind man whom the physicians could not help, the cases written off as incurable — and it attributes the success not to a superior technique but to the Name invoked over the patient (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). In the narrative’s own logic, the free healing and the healing-in-Christ are one act: he can give freely because what he gives is not his own skill but God’s mercy, and he heals in the Name because the Name, not the art, is the power.

A celebrated episode in the Passio dramatizes the contrast directly. The healing of the blind man — whom Pantoleon cures by invoking Christ after the paid physicians had taken the man’s money and failed — opens the eyes of the patient twice over: he receives his bodily sight and, with it, faith in Christ, and is baptized (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418, the healing of the blind man; in the developed narrative the cured man’s confession of Christ contributes to the saint’s later exposure). The Passio uses the episode to set the two medicines side by side: the physicians who took the fee and left the man blind, and the Unmercenary who took nothing and gave him sight. The point is unmistakable — the free cure is the true cure, and its freedom is the sign of its source.

Health of Body, Health of Soul

The unmercenary act carries within it an ordering of goods that is fundamental to the whole tradition. The Unmercenary heals the body, but the body’s health is not the final aim; it is subordinate to, and in the service of, the soul’s. The Passio‘s healings are, almost without exception, also conversions: the dead child’s parents, the blind man, the crowds who witness the cures — the bodily healing opens into faith, and the restored body becomes the occasion of a saved soul (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). This is the inner reason the healing must be free. A cure sold for money is a transaction complete in itself; the patient pays, receives his health, and owes nothing further. A cure given freely in the name of Christ is unfinished as a mere transaction — it points beyond the restored body to the Giver, and asks of the healed not a fee but faith. The refusal of payment is thus not only an ethic of generosity; it is an evangelical strategy, a way of healing that leaves the patient indebted not to the physician but to Christ (on healing as evangelism and the subordination of bodily to spiritual health in late-antique Christian medicine, Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital, 2005; cf. the dominical pattern in which Christ’s cures are signs that disclose the Kingdom).

This ordering also governs how the tradition reads the failure of healing and the fact of death. The Unmercenary who heals freely is himself, in the end, not spared but martyred; the body he restored in others is in his own case given up. The Passio makes the saint’s own death the supreme instance of the principle that the soul’s good outranks the body’s: he who gave bodily health to many freely lays down his own body for Christ, and the milk that the Passio says flowed from his severed neck and the olive tree that bore fruit where his blood fell are read by the tradition as signs that the true healing — the healing unto eternal life — is accomplished precisely in the surrender of the mortal body (the martyrdom and its signs are treated at Denounced Before Maximian and, for the reading of the healer-martyr, Reading the Martyr-Healer).

Fee-Taking Medicine and the Engine of Envy

The unmercenary practice did not arise in a vacuum but against a specific social reality: the paid medicine of the Greco-Roman world. Physicians in the cities of the later Empire were professionals who charged for their services; medicine was a learned art, often hereditary or taught for fees, and a successful physician in a great city such as Nicomedia — Diocletian’s eastern capital — could expect both income and standing (on the economy and social standing of Greco-Roman and late-antique medicine, against which Christian free healing defined itself, Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital, 2005). Into this world the Passio sets a young physician of evident skill who suddenly begins to heal for nothing and to succeed where the fee-takers fail. The narrative consequence is as much economic as it is religious: Pantoleon draws the sick away from the established physicians, and with the patients goes the income and the prestige.

The Passio makes this rivalry the proximate cause of the saint’s destruction. It is the jealous physicians of Nicomedia — his former colleagues and competitors, whose practice he has undercut by healing freely — who mark the cause of their losses, who trace the new physician’s success to the Name he invokes, and who denounce him to the emperor Maximian as a Christian (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418, the denunciation by the envious physicians; see Denounced Before Maximian). The structure is theologically pointed. The same freedom of healing that is the saint’s glory is, in the eyes of the paid physicians, an intolerable threat; the gift given for nothing exposes the medicine sold for a price, and the exposed respond not by imitation but by denunciation. In the Passio’s telling, the unmercenary ideal and the martyrdom are causally linked: it is because he healed without payment, drawing the people and provoking the envy of those he undercut, that he is brought before the tribunal. The free healing is the road to the cross.

This narrative pattern — the holy healer whose very gratuity provokes the deadly envy of the established practitioners — is a recurring shape in the Anargyroi legends and should be recognized as such. It articulates, in story, the conviction that the gospel’s free healing is intrinsically at odds with a medicine organized around the fee, and that the world’s response to a grace it cannot purchase is hostility. Whether the specific denunciation-by-physicians is historical or is a topos of the genre is a question for the source-critical files (see Pantoleon to Panteleimon and Reading the Martyr-Healer); as a theological statement it is exact, and it is the reason the Church remembers Panteleimon as a healer and a martyr in one breath.

What Is Early and What Is Developed

A discipline proper to this collection must be applied to the foregoing. The portrait of the free-healing physician, with its named episodes — the raised child and the burst viper, the blind man cured after the paid physicians failed, the denunciation by the envious — is the Passio‘s narrative, a developed martyr-legend of the high-Byzantine type, and is reported above as the source’s own claims, not as documented history (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

[Disputed: What is securely early is that Panteleimon was venerated as a HEALER from the early cult — an early-attested martyr of Nicomedia named Pantoleon, kept liturgically by the sixth century and ranked among the healing saints in the synaxaria (Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902; Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905; cf. Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd ed. 1933, on dating a cult from its liturgical commemoration). What is developed-layer is the specific Passio narrative of free healing — the named miracle-episodes (the viper-bitten child, the blind man), the explicit not-taking of fees, and the denunciation by the envious physicians — which belong to the elaborated martyr-act (BHG 1412z–1418) and its Metaphrastic rewriting, and are pinned to that text rather than asserted as fact. The unmercenary identity is thus theologically central and liturgically ancient, while the circumstantial episodes that dramatize it are the work of the legend; Delehaye's method (1905) is precisely to honour the early cult of the healer without certifying the developed Passio's scenes.]

Held in this discipline, the unmercenary ideal loses none of its force. That the Church venerated, from early times, a martyred healer of Nicomedia, and that it has consistently understood the meaning of such a healer through Matthew 10:8 and Acts 3:6 — the price refused, the Name invoked — is the secure and central thing. The Passio‘s scenes are the tradition’s way of showing what that meaning looks like in flesh and act; they are to be read as the legend’s vivid exposition of an ancient and genuine devotion, not as the documentary basis of it.

References

The Greek Passio of St. Panteleimon (Passio Panteleemonis), BHG 1412z–1418. Catalogued in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 3rd ed., ed. François Halkin. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The conversion-healing of the viper-bitten child; the free cures worked “in the name of Christ”; the healing of the blind man; the denunciation by the envious physicians. The miracle-episodes are reported as the Passio’s own narrative per METHODOLOGY §3.5.)
Symeon Metaphrastes. Vita et passio S. Panteleemonis (10th c.). In Patrologia Graeca 115, where verified; and the Menologion tradition. (The polished rewriting that fixed the free-healing narrative for later Orthodoxy.)
Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (Synaxarion of Constantinople). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The commemoration of Panteleimon at 27 July; the feasts of the Unmercenaries — Cosmas and Damian at 1 July and 17 October, Cyrus and John at 31 January.)
Menaion, 27 July. (The hymnography of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, naming him “all-merciful” healer who pours out cures freely and heals in the name of Christ; troparion and kontakion.)
Scripture: Matthew 10:8 (“freely you have received, freely give,” dōrean elabete, dōrean dote); Acts 3:6 (“Silver and gold I do not have … in the name of Jesus Christ … rise up and walk”); Acts 3:16.
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes hagiographiques. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1905. Eng. The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater. New York: Fordham University Press, 1962. (Method for reading a martyr-legend; the healing saints and the Anargyroi type.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les origines du culte des martyrs. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933. (Dating a cult from its earliest liturgical commemoration.)
Crislip, Andrew T. From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. (The economy and social standing of Greco-Roman medicine; the theology of free Christian healthcare and the subordination of bodily to spiritual health; healing as evangelism.)