The Unmercenaries as a Type

The Holy Unmercenaries — the Anargyroi, the “silverless” healing saints — are a recognised category of Orthodox sanctity, and St. Panteleimon belongs to it. This file sets out the membership of the type (Cosmas and Damian, in the three pairs the tradition distinguishes; Cyrus and John of Egypt, the great incubation-healers of Menouthis; Panteleimon and his teacher Hermolaos; Sampson the Hospitable, Diomedes, Thalleleos, Tryphon, and others), the theology of free healing that defines it (“freely you have received, freely give,” Matthew 10:8; healing “in the name of Jesus Christ,” Acts 3:6; the body healed for the soul’s sake), the Christianisation of the pagan incubation-cure as the Anargyroi displaced Asklepios at shrines such as Menouthis and Constantinople, and the icon-type and liturgical grouping by which the Church holds them together — setting Panteleimon firmly in this type.

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

A Recognised Category of Sanctity

Orthodox tradition does not venerate its healing saints as an undifferentiated crowd of wonderworkers but recognises among them a distinct and named class: the Holy Unmercenaries, in Greek the Anargyroi (ἀνάργυροι, singular anargyros) — from an- (“without”) and argyros (“silver,” and by extension “money”), the “silverless ones” who heal without taking payment. The Slavonic books render the title bessrebreniki; English renders it “Unmercenaries” or “Holy Unmercenary Physicians” (on the title and the type, Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905; the several feasts of the Unmercenaries in the Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye, Brussels, 1902). The term is exact and constitutive: it does not say merely that these saints were generous but that the refusal of the fee is the visible form of their healing — to be an Anargyros is to have made the not-taking of money the sign of the cure’s true source (see Healing Without Payment).

The category is sharply bounded and not large. Its charter members are the physician-brothers Cosmas and Damian; alongside them stand Cyrus and John of Egypt, the great healing pair of the shrine at Menouthis; Panteleimon and, with him, his teacher and fellow-martyr the priest Hermolaos; and a handful of others whom the synaxaria and the liturgical books gather under the same title — Sampson the Hospitable, Diomedes, Thalleleos, Tryphon, and Mokios among them (on the roster, Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902, at the several feasts; Delehaye 1905). The Church commemorates them severally on their own days and also gathers them collectively, hymning “the holy Unmercenaries and wonderworkers” as a single choir — a liturgical recognition that they form a type and not merely a list. Panteleimon’s place in the type is secured not by primacy on the original roster (he does not head it) but by the immense devotional weight his cult came to carry: in much of the Orthodox world he became the Unmercenary Healer, the one whose name is sung in the lesser blessing of waters and whose icon hangs in the sickroom (The Healer of the Orthodox World).

The Members of the Type

Cosmas and Damian

The charter Unmercenaries are the physician-brothers Cosmas and Damian, healers who took no fee and worked their cures in the name of Christ — the very pattern the title names. Their cult is ancient and immensely widespread, attested across the East and the West and anchored in major shrines, above all the basilica and healing-church at Constantinople (the Kosmidion) and the celebrated Roman church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in the Forum (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905; Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902, at 1 July and 17 October). A substantial collection of their posthumous wonders — the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian — survives as one of the principal documents of Byzantine incubation-healing, recording cures granted to the sick who slept in their shrine, and is a central witness to the whole Anargyroi phenomenon (the Miracula of Cosmas and Damian, ed. Deubner, Kosmas und Damian, 1907; on these miracles as evidence for incubation, see the literature gathered in Csepregi and Burnett, eds., Ritual Healing, 2012).

The tradition’s own difficulty about Cosmas and Damian is itself a methodological lesson, and it is set out below as a structured note: the synaxaria distinguish three pairs of saints bearing these names — the Asian, the Roman, and the Arabian — kept on different days, and whether these are three genuinely distinct pairs or doublets of a single original pair is a real and unresolved question in the source-critical literature.

[Disputed: the three pairs named Cosmas and Damian. The Byzantine liturgical tradition commemorates not one but three pairs of holy Unmercenaries called Cosmas and Damian, on three separate days: (1) the Asian pair, sons of the Christian Theodota, who reposed in peace (kept 1 November in the Byzantine calendar); (2) the Roman pair, said to have been martyred under envious rivalry (kept 1 July); and (3) the Arabian pair, martyred under Diocletian in Cilicia (kept 17 October) — so the Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (ed. Delehaye, Brussels, 1902), which carries the three distinct commemorations. Whether these are three historically distinct pairs or doublets of one original pair, multiplied as the cult spread and local traditions diverged, is unresolved: the recurrence of a single name-pair, a single profession, and a single unmercenary charism across three “lives” with differing deaths is exactly the kind of multiplication Delehaye identifies as a regular mechanism of hagiographic legend, by which one cult generates several commemorations (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905, on the doubling and multiplication of saints; Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd ed., 1933). The tradition itself transmits the three pairs as distinct and keeps all three feasts; critical scholarship treats the relation as genuinely uncertain and very possibly a case of one pair refracted into three. This compendium reports the three commemorations as the synaxaria give them and names the doublet-question rather than resolving it.]

Cyrus and John

Beside Cosmas and Damian stand Cyrus and John (Greek Kyros kai Ioannes), the great Unmercenary healers of Egypt. Cyrus was remembered as a physician of Alexandria who healed freely in Christ’s name and withdrew to the ascetic life, joined by the soldier John; both were martyred under Diocletian (commemorated 31 January; Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902). Their abiding significance for the Anargyroi type is the shrine at Menouthis, near Canopus east of Alexandria, where their relics were translated and where one of the most important Christian incubation-cults of late antiquity grew up. The shrine is documented with unusual richness because Sophronius of Jerusalem — later Patriarch — composed in the early seventh century the Miracles of Cyrus and John (the Miracula Cyri et Iohannis), a large collection of cures granted to the sick who came to sleep at the shrine and received healing in dreams (Sophronius of Jerusalem, Miracula Cyri et Iohannis; on the collection and the shrine as a primary witness to incubation-healing, Talbot, “Healing Shrines in Late Byzantine Constantinople,” 2001, and the literature in Csepregi and Burnett, eds., Ritual Healing, 2012). Cyrus and John are thus the type’s clearest documented instance of the incubation-cure, and the Menouthis shrine the clearest documented instance of a healing saint displacing a pagan one — for it was raised, the tradition holds, precisely to draw the sick away from a nearby cult of Isis.

Panteleimon and Hermolaos

Within this company stands Panteleimon, the physician-martyr of Nicomedia, and with him his teacher Hermolaos, the priest who catechised and converted him and who was himself martyred (commemorated 26 July, the day before Panteleimon’s own feast; Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902). The Passio makes Panteleimon an Unmercenary in the full sense — a trained physician who, after his conversion, heals freely and in Christ’s name rather than for a fee, and whose very gratuity provokes the envy that destroys him (BHG 1412z–1418; see Healing Without Payment). In the developed cult Panteleimon came to overshadow much of the rest of the roster, becoming for many the representative Unmercenary; but the type is older and larger than his pre-eminence within it, and reading him as one Anargyros among several — rather than as a solitary great healer — restores his proper theological setting.

Others of the Type

The synaxaria and the liturgical books gather further saints under the same title. Sampson the Hospitable (Greek Xenodochos), a physician of Constantinople who founded a famous hospital and healed the poor without charge, is venerated as an Unmercenary (commemorated 27 June). Diomedes, a physician-martyr of Tarsus; Thalleleos, a young physician-martyr; Tryphon of Campsada, invoked against pests and sickness; and Mokios are likewise numbered among the healers who take no fee (on these commemorations, Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902). The roster is not perfectly fixed at its edges — different books and regions include slightly different names — but its core and its principle are stable: these are the saints whose healing is marked by the refusal of payment, and the Church groups them as one kind.

The Theology of Free Healing

What binds these saints into a single category is not merely a shared profession but a shared theology, rooted in two scriptural texts. The first is the dominical command to the Twelve: “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 is 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 (Matthew 10:8; on the verse as the charter of unmercenary medicine, Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital, 2005). To this is joined a second text supplying the manner of the cure: at the Beautiful Gate, Peter says to the lame man, “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 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, and “in the name of Jesus Christ” is the assertion that the power is Christ’s name and not the healer’s art.

From these texts follows the type’s distinctive understanding of what a healing is for. The Unmercenary heals the body, but the body’s health is not the final aim; it is in the service of the soul’s. Healing in Christ’s name is a sign of the Kingdom — the same sign by which the Lord’s own cures disclosed that the Kingdom of God had come near — and the cure is therefore never a transaction complete in itself but a pointer beyond the restored body to its Giver. This is the inner reason the healing must be free: a cure sold for money is finished when the fee is paid and the health received, owing nothing further; a cure given freely in Christ’s name is unfinished as a mere transaction, asking of the healed not a fee but faith (on healing as a sign and the subordination of bodily to spiritual health, Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital, 2005; and see Healing Without Payment). The body is healed for the soul’s sake; the gratuity of the cure is the visible form of that ordering. The Unmercenaries are, in this sense, a standing theology in act — a class of saints whose lives state, without a word of argument, that health is God’s free gift and that medicine in Christ’s name is an instrument of the Kingdom rather than an article of commerce (a conviction that remains a live critique within Orthodox medical ethics; see Bioethics and Contemporary Questions).

Incubation-Healing and the Christianisation of the Cure

The Anargyroi did not arise in a religious vacuum but in a Mediterranean world that already possessed a powerful tradition of temple-healing — above all the cult of Asklepios, the pagan god of medicine, at whose temples the sick practised enkoimēsis (Greek) or incubatio (Latin): they slept in the sacred precinct, expecting the god to appear in a dream and prescribe or effect a cure. This incubation-cure was one of antiquity’s most entrenched religious institutions, and the Christian healing saints did not abolish it so much as inherit and transform it. The faithful came to sleep in the shrines of the Anargyroi exactly as they had slept in the precincts of Asklepios, and there received, in dreams, healing now granted not by the god of the temple but by the saints in the name of Christ — the same ritual form filled with a new content (on the Christian incubation-cure and its relation to the pagan enkoimēsis, Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905, and the studies gathered in Csepregi and Burnett, eds., Ritual Healing, 2012; Talbot, “Healing Shrines in Late Byzantine Constantinople,” 2001).

The great incubation-shrines of the healing saints are the documented sites of this Christianisation. At Menouthis near Alexandria, the cult of Cyrus and John was established, the tradition holds, precisely to displace a nearby cult of Isis, and the Miracles of Sophronius record the sick sleeping at the martyrs’ shrine and receiving cures in dreams in the old incubation pattern (Sophronius, Miracula Cyri et Iohannis; Talbot 2001). At Constantinople, the shrines of Cosmas and Damian (the Kosmidion) and of other healing saints became major incubation-centres, and the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian document the same practice of healing-sleep in the capital (the Miracula of Cosmas and Damian, ed. Deubner, 1907; on the Constantinopolitan healing-shrines and the persistence of incubation into the late Byzantine period, Talbot 2001). The displacement of Asklepios by the Anargyroi is thus not a modern reconstruction but a process the sources themselves attest: the same need brought to the same kind of place in the same ritual form, with the healing now sought from the silverless saints in Christ’s name. The incubation-cure, baptised, became one of the chief vehicles of the Unmercenaries’ cult.

The Icon-Type and the Liturgical Grouping

The Church’s recognition of the Anargyroi as a single type is visible in both her art and her services. In iconography the Unmercenaries form a recognisable group, conventionally depicted as physicians — often vested in the dress of their calling and holding the instruments and the medicine-box of the healer’s art (and frequently a martyr’s cross) — so that the image itself declares the office. Cosmas and Damian are characteristically shown as a pair holding their physician’s cases; Panteleimon is shown as a beardless young man bearing a small medicine-box and a spoon or lancet, the implements of the free healer (on the iconography of the healing saints, the standard Byzantine-art studies of the warrior- and healer-saint types). The shared visual vocabulary — the medicine-box, the instruments, the physician’s bearing — is the icon’s way of saying that these saints belong together as one kind.

The grouping is liturgical as well as visual. The Church keeps each Unmercenary on his own day but also invokes them collectively as a choir of healers — “the holy Unmercenaries and wonderworkers” — in the services for the sick and in the lesser blessing of waters, where Panteleimon and Hermolaos, Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John are named together among those whose intercession is sought for healing (the Menaion and the prayers of the lesser blessing of waters; Synaxarium Eccl. Cpl., ed. Delehaye 1902, for the several feasts). To pray the blessing of the waters is thus already to confess the Anargyroi as a type: they are summoned as a company, a recognised order of free healers ranged before God on behalf of the sick.

Set in this company, Panteleimon is read truly — not as a solitary great wonderworker but as the most-invoked member of an ancient category, sharing its scriptural charter (Matthew 10:8; Acts 3:6), its theology of free healing for the soul’s sake, its inheritance of the baptised incubation-cure, and its place in the icon-screen and the healing-services of the Church. He is the Unmercenary Healer of much of the Orthodox world precisely because the type to which he belongs is one of the Church’s enduring ways of saying that healing is the free gift of God in Christ.

References

Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (Synaxarion of Constantinople). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The several feasts of the Unmercenaries: Cosmas and Damian at 1 July, 17 October, and 1 November in the Byzantine calendar; Cyrus and John at 31 January; Hermolaos at 26 July; Panteleimon at 27 July; Sampson, Diomedes, Thalleleos, Tryphon, Mokios on their days.)
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. (The Anargyroi type; the doubling and multiplication of saints; the Christianisation of the incubation-cure.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les origines du culte des martyrs. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933. (The mechanisms by which one cult generates several commemorations; the dating of cults from the calendars.)
Sophronius of Jerusalem. Miracula Cyri et Iohannis (The Miracles of SS. Cyrus and John). (The early-seventh-century collection of incubation-cures at the Menouthis shrine; a primary witness to Christian incubation-healing.)
Miracula SS. Cosmae et Damiani (The Miracles of SS. Cosmas and Damian). Ed. Ludwig Deubner, Kosmas und Damian: Texte und Einleitung. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907. (The collection of cures at the Kosmidion and other shrines; a primary witness to Byzantine incubation.)
Talbot, Alice-Mary. “Healing Shrines in Late Byzantine Constantinople.” In Women and Religious Life in Byzantium. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. (The Constantinopolitan healing-shrines and the persistence of incubation; Menouthis and the displacement of pagan cults.)
Csepregi, Ildikó, and Charles Burnett, eds. Ritual Healing: Magic, Ritual and Medical Therapy from Antiquity until the Early Modern Period. Florence: SISMEL — Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2012. (Studies on incubation and the Anargyroi; the relation of the Christian healing-cult to the pagan enkoimēsis.)
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. (Panteleimon as the trained physician who heals freely and in Christ’s name; the conversion by Hermolaos.)
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 theology of free Christian healthcare; healing as a sign and the subordination of bodily to spiritual health.)
Menaion and the Lesser Blessing of Waters. (The collective invocation of the holy Unmercenaries as a choir of healers in the services for the sick.)
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”).