The Healer of the Orthodox World

Across the whole Orthodox world — Greek, Russian, Balkan, and Middle Eastern — St. Panteleimon is among the foremost saints to whom the faithful turn in sickness, the healer-martyr invoked at the sickbed and in the services of supplication. This file sets out the living cult of the healer: the supplicatory services that name him — the paraklesis (supplicatory canon) and the akathist to St Panteleimon, the blessing of the sick, and his invocation in the lesser blessing of waters among the Holy Unmercenaries; the icon-type that fixes his identity in the Church’s sight — the young, beardless physician holding a medicine-box and a spoon or lancet, the iconographic marker of the healer-saint; and his immense popularity, the churches and chapels that bear his name across East and West, and his standing in the Latin West (as Pantaleon) among the Fourteen Holy Helpers. Throughout it keeps devotional warmth while staying sober: the cult is described as the Church lives it, the saint’s intercession reported as the faithful invoke it and the services pray it, without converting devotion into demonstration.

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

The Saint the Sick Turn To

If there is one thing the whole Orthodox world knows of St. Panteleimon, it is that he heals. Of the several saints to whom the faithful turn in illness, he is among the very first named — one of the four or five most-invoked healers in Orthodox piety, his icon hanging in countless sickrooms and his name sung wherever the sick are prayed for. This is true across every quarter of the Orthodox world: among the Greeks, who keep his feast with particular solemnity and dedicate to him churches and chapels without number; among the Russians, for whom he is one of the best-loved saints of all and whose greatest monastery on Mount Athos bears his name (see The Rossikon on Mount Athos); among the peoples of the Balkans; and in the Orthodox Middle East. The reason the cult took this universal form is fixed in the saint’s very name and identity. He is Panteleimon, “the all-merciful,” and mercy in the Orthodox register is above all the compassion of God reaching the suffering body; and he is an Anargyros, one of the Holy Unmercenaries who heal “freely, having freely received” (Matthew 10:8), so that to invoke him is to ask for healing as a gift and not as a purchase (on the name and the unmercenary identity, see The Name Panteleimon; Healing Without Payment). The healer-saint par excellence, he is the one the Church puts on the lips of the sick.

It must be said plainly, as the discipline of this collection requires, that the historical residue beneath this immense cult is small — an early-attested martyr-healer of Nicomedia named Pantoleon, his developed biography descending from a legendary Passio (see The Unmercenaries as a Type). But the cult of the healer is a fact of the Church’s life regardless of the thinness of the documentary record beneath it: the services that invoke him, the icons that depict him, and the churches that bear his name are the present and observable form of a devotion that has been continuous for many centuries. This file describes that living cult — what the Church prays, paints, and builds in his honour — reporting the saint’s healing intercession as the services pray it and the faithful invoke it, and not as a demonstrated effect (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Services of Supplication: Paraklesis and Akathist

The Orthodox Church does not merely commemorate its healing saints; it supplicates them, in fixed services of intercession that the faithful may serve or have served in time of need. For St. Panteleimon, as for the Mother of God and the most-invoked saints, the Church possesses a body of such supplicatory services, of which two forms are central: the paraklesis and the akathist.

The paraklesis (Greek paraklēsis, “supplication,” “consolation”) is the supplicatory canon — the service, built around a canon of nine odes addressed to the saint with the refrain “St Panteleimon, intercede for us” (or “pray to God for us”), interwoven with troparia, the Theotokion, and the petitions of the sick — that is sung when intercession is sought, classically at the bedside of the ill or in the church on his behalf (the paraklesis / supplicatory canon to St Panteleimon, in the devotional service-books and the Menaion tradition for 27 July; the supplicatory-canon form is that of the standard paraklesis of the Horologion). The paraklesis is the ordinary instrument of the cult of the healer: where a member of the faithful is sick, the Church’s response is, characteristically, to serve the supplicatory canon to the unmercenary martyr, asking his prayers for the body’s healing and the soul’s salvation together.

The akathist (Greek akathistos, “[the hymn sung] not sitting,” i.e. standing) to St Panteleimon is the more elaborate and exalted of the two — a long hymn of praise and petition in the classic akathist form: thirteen kontakia and twelve oikoi, the oikoi studded with chains of chairetismoi, the “Rejoice…” salutations that hail the saint under his many titles, and the whole sealed by the repeated refrain (the akathist to St Panteleimon, in the Greek, Slavonic, and English devotional tradition; the akathist form follows that of the original Akathist to the Theotokos). In the akathist the saint is hailed precisely as the healer and the all-merciful: as the physician who heals freely in the name of Christ, the consolation of the sick, the deliverer of those in pain, the swift helper of those who call upon him. The akathist is sung in his honour on his feast and in time of sickness, and it is among the most widely used of the akathists to the saints across the Russian and Greek worlds. Together the paraklesis and the akathist are the principal verbal forms of the cult — the words the Church gives the faithful to put their need into, the appointed channels through which the all-merciful healer is invoked.

The Blessing of the Sick and the Lesser Blessing of Waters

Beyond the supplicatory services proper to him, Panteleimon is woven into the Church’s general offices for the sick and for healing, and pre-eminently into the lesser blessing of the waters (the hagiasmos, the sanctification of water performed at need throughout the year, distinct from the great blessing at Theophany). In the office of the lesser blessing of waters, the Church invokes, among the saints whose prayers it asks over the water, the Holy Unmercenaries — the company of free-healing saints to whom Panteleimon belongs — beseeching their intercession that the water be sanctified and become a means of healing of soul and body (the invocation of the Holy Unmercenaries in the office of the lesser blessing of waters, Lesser Sanctification of Water in the Great Book of Needs / Euchologion; on Panteleimon’s place among the Unmercenaries so invoked, see Healing Without Payment). The blessed water is then used in the blessing of the sick — sprinkled, drunk, applied — so that the unmercenary healers, Panteleimon among them, are present in the Church’s most common rite of bodily healing.

His name is likewise invoked in the Mystery of Holy Unction (Euchelaion), the sacrament of anointing the sick, and in the various prayers “for the sick” of the Euchologion, where the healing saints are named in the petitions; and on his feast, where churches keep the custom, oil or water blessed in his honour is given to the faithful for the sick (the invocation of the healing saints in the offices for the sick; the customary blessing of oil/water on the feast). The point to be held is that Panteleimon’s cult is not confined to his own proper services but reaches into the standing rites by which the Orthodox Church prays over every sick person: he is one of the saints the Church reaches for whenever it asks God for healing. And here the methodology’s caution applies in its gentlest and most proper form — the Church prays for healing through his intercession; it does not guarantee it. The services are petitions, not mechanisms; they ask, in the unmercenary register, for a gift that remains God’s to give, and they subordinate, always, the health of the body to the salvation of the soul (on that ordering, see Healing Without Payment).

The Icon-Type: The Young Physician with the Medicine-Box

The cult of the healer has its visual form, and the iconography of St. Panteleimon is among the most immediately recognisable in the Orthodox tradition, fixed by a small set of stable markers that proclaim him a healer at a glance. The saint is depicted as a young man, beardless — youthful, even boyish, his face smooth, his hair a cap of short dark curls — which both reflects the tradition of his early death and distinguishes him at once from the bearded elders and warrior-saints (on the conventions of Byzantine saintly portraiture, by which age, dress, and attribute fix a saint’s identity, see Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition, 2003, for the iconographic method, though Panteleimon belongs to the physician- rather than the warrior-type). He is robed not in armour nor in monastic black but in the dress of his calling, and in his hands he bears the unmistakable attributes of the physician-saint.

These attributes are the iconographic signature of the healer. In one hand — characteristically the left — Panteleimon holds a small medicine-box or casket: a little chest of remedies, the narthēkion of the ancient physician, shown as a small rectangular or rounded box, sometimes with a hinged lid, in which the cures are kept. In the other hand — characteristically the right — he holds a slender instrument, variously read as a spoon (for administering or compounding the remedy) or a lancet/probe (the surgeon’s small instrument), poised as if to take a medicine from the box (the medicine-box and the spoon/lancet are the standard attributes of Panteleimon in the iconographic tradition; on attribute as the fixer of a saint’s identity in Byzantine iconography, Walter 2003). Together the box of remedies and the instrument declare the figure to be a physician — and not a physician of the worldly art only, for the box and lancet are held in the same hands that work cures “in the name of Christ,” so that the attributes proclaim the unmercenary healer, the one whose medicine is the mercy of Christ. The young beardless face above the medicine-box is, for the Orthodox eye, simply the face of the healer-saint; the icon is a sermon on the cult, and its message is healing.

This stable type makes Panteleimon one of the most readily identified of all the saints in an Orthodox church, and it travels with the cult: the same young physician with his box and lancet is met in Greek, Russian, Balkan, and Antiochian iconography, on church walls and in the sickroom, on pilgrims’ icons and reliquary-covers, a single recognisable image carrying the devotion across every Orthodox land.

Popularity, Dedications, and the Name in East and West

The measure of a cult is partly in its sheer extent, and Panteleimon’s is vast. He is among the most popular of all the saints across the Orthodox world, and the popularity is written into the map: churches, chapels, and monasteries dedicated to him are found in great number throughout Greece, Russia, the Balkans, Cyprus, and the Orthodox East, and his name — Panteleimon, in Slavonic Panteleimon/Pantelei, in Greek Pantelis as a common given name — is borne by countless Orthodox Christians, who keep his feast as their name-day. The greatest single monument of his cult is the Rossikon on Mount Athos, the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon, the chief house of Russian Athonite monasticism, which bears his name and holds his head (see The Rossikon on Mount Athos). The feast of 27 July is kept across the Orthodox world with the healing-services described above, and in many places with the blessing of the sick and the distribution of blessed oil or water (on the feast and its observance, see Feast and the Blessing of the Sick).

The cult is not confined to the East. In the Latin West the saint is venerated as Pantaleon, and there too he is a patron of physicians and the sick — most notably as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (German Vierzehn Nothelfer), the company of auxiliary saints whose collective cult flourished in the German and central-European lands especially after the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, when the faithful sought the intercession of a band of “helpers” against plague, sudden death, and bodily affliction (on Pantaleon among the Fourteen Holy Helpers and his Western patronage of physicians, the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Pantaleon,” and the tradition of the Vierzehn Nothelfer; the great shrine of the Fourteen Holy Helpers is the Basilica of Vierzehnheiligen in Franconia). Within that company Pantaleon holds the place of the patron of physicians (and, in some reckonings, of midwives), the Western counterpart of his Eastern standing as the unmercenary healer — so that, East and West, under the names Panteleimon and Pantaleon, the same martyr-physician of Nicomedia is invoked by the sick, and the cult of the healer spans the divided Christendom that his relics, likewise, were dispersed across (on the dispersal of the relics East and West, see The Relics and Their Dispersal).

The Healer in the Church’s Life

What holds the foregoing together is a single fact about Orthodox devotion: the Church does not approach sickness as a merely medical problem but as an occasion of prayer, and in that prayer it reaches for its healers — and Panteleimon foremost among them. The paraklesis and the akathist give the sick words to pray; the blessing of waters and the offices for the sick set him among the saints invoked over every ailing body; the icon-type fixes his healing identity before the eyes of the faithful; the churches and name-days carry his memory through ordinary life; and the great monastery on Athos anchors the cult at the centre of the Orthodox world. The devotional warmth of all this is real and is to be honoured: the all-merciful martyr is genuinely beloved as the friend of the sick, and the faithful turn to him with a confidence centuries deep.

The sobriety the methodology asks does not chill that warmth but only keeps it honest. The cult is described here as the Church lives it — the services as they pray, the icons as they depict, the devotion as it invokes — and the saint’s healing intercession is reported as the faithful seek it and the Church beseeches it, in the unmercenary register that asks for healing as God’s free gift and orders the body’s health to the soul’s. What is not claimed is that the cult constitutes a proof, or that the intercession operates as a guaranteed cause; those are not the Church’s claims to make, and they are not made here (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4). The honest and warm statement is the one the services themselves make: that the Orthodox world has, for many centuries, turned in its sickness to the all-merciful healer of Nicomedia, asked his prayers, and loved him as the swift helper of the suffering — and that this turning, this asking, and this love are the living cult of the healer of the Orthodox world.

References

Menaion, 27 July. (The hymnography of the Great Martyr and Healer Panteleimon — troparion, kontakion, the canon and stichera — hailing him as the all-merciful physician who heals freely in the name of Christ; the proper setting of the supplicatory and festal services.)
The Paraklesis (supplicatory canon) to St Panteleimon, in the devotional service-books and the Menaion/Horologion tradition. (The supplicatory-canon form — the canon of nine odes with the intercessory refrain — used at the bedside of the sick and in the church; following the standard paraklesis structure of the Great Horologion.)
The Akathist to St Panteleimon, in the Greek, Slavonic, and English devotional tradition. (The akathist form — thirteen kontakia and twelve oikoi with the chains of chairetismoi — hailing the saint as healer, all-merciful, and swift helper of the sick; following the form of the original Akathist to the Theotokos.)
The Great Book of Needs (Euchologion / Trebnik): the Office of the Lesser Sanctification of Water and the prayers and Mystery of Holy Unction for the sick. (The invocation of the Holy Unmercenaries — Panteleimon among them — in the lesser blessing of waters and the offices for the sick.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The method of Byzantine saintly iconography — age, dress, and attribute as the fixers of a saint’s identity — applied here to Panteleimon’s physician-type, the medicine-box and the spoon/lancet.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les origines du culte des martyrs. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933. (The thin early history beneath a vast cult, and the method for reading a saint’s devotion from its liturgical and material forms.)
Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Pantaleon” (Charles G. Herbermann et al., eds., New York, 1907–1912), and the tradition of the Vierzehn Nothelfer (Fourteen Holy Helpers). (Pantaleon’s Western veneration as patron of physicians and his place among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, whose shrine is the Basilica of Vierzehnheiligen in Franconia; used to locate the Western tradition, not as terminal authority, per METHODOLOGY §2.3.)
Scripture: Matthew 10:8 (“freely you have received, freely give”), the charter of the unmercenary healing the cult invokes.