The Feast and the Blessing of the Sick

The liturgical commemoration of St. Panteleimon and the services in which the Church invokes him for the sick. His feast is kept on 27 July across the Orthodox world — Old Style 27 July falling on 9 August New Style for the Churches on the Julian calendar — the day after his teacher Hermolaos (26 July). This file sets out the hymnography of the feast (the troparion and kontakion that name him “the all-merciful,” the healer, and an intercessor for souls; the canon at matins), the healing services addressed to him (the paraklesis and the akathist sung for the sick), and above all the lesser blessing of waters (agiasmos), at which Panteleimon is named among the Holy Unmercenary Healers in the prayers for the recovery of the sick.

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

The Feast of 27 July

The commemoration of the Holy Great Martyr and Healer Panteleimon is fixed in the Byzantine liturgical calendar on 27 July, the date carried from the early synaxaria into the received service-books and kept across all the canonical Orthodox Churches to this day (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye, Brussels 1902, the notice under 27 July; Menaion for July, 27 July). This date is the bedrock liturgical fact of the cult: as the source-critical analysis shows, the bare commemoration of a Nicomedian martyr-healer on a fixed day is the firmest stratum in the whole dossier — older and surer than any element of the narrative built upon it (see The Historical Core; Pantoleon to Panteleimon). The feast is what the calendar preserves; the Passio supplies the story read at the feast.

The 27 July commemoration is universal among the Orthodox, but it falls on two different days of the secular (Gregorian) year depending on which calendar a given Church follows. The Churches that keep the Old (Julian) Calendar — among them the Russian Orthodox Church, the Serbian, the Georgian, the Jerusalem Patriarchate, and the monasteries of Mount Athos — observe 27 July Old Style, which in the present era corresponds to 9 August on the Gregorian (New Style) civil calendar. The Churches that keep the Revised Julian (New) Calendar for the fixed feasts — including the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Church of Greece, and most others — observe 27 July on the civil 27 July. The feast itself is the same liturgical day; only its placement against the secular calendar differs, and that difference is a function of the thirteen-day gap between the Julian and Gregorian reckonings, not of any disagreement about the saint (see The Great Feasts for the calendar question generally).

[Disputed: the date and its calendar variants. The Orthodox feast is universally 27 July (so the Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye 1902, and the Menaion for 27 July); on the Old Calendar this is 9 August New Style in the present era (the Julian–Gregorian gap being thirteen days for the years 1900–2099). The date of the saint’s death, conventionally c. 305, is a separate and contested matter — inferred from the persecution-setting of the Passio, not fixed by any contemporary document (the contested year is set out in The Historical Core). In the Latin West the saint, known as Pantaleon, was likewise commemorated on 27 July in the Tridentine Roman Calendar; his feast was reduced to a local and optional observance in the 1969 revision of the General Roman Calendar but remains on 27 July where it is kept. The coincidence of the Eastern and the older Western date on 27 July reflects the single ancient cult from which both traditions descend, not a later harmonization.]

His feast stands in the calendar immediately after that of the priest-martyr Hermolaos and his companions Hermippos and Hermocrates, commemorated on 26 July — the day before Panteleimon. In the Passio‘s narrative Hermolaos is the priest who catechizes and converts the young physician and is martyred shortly before him; the adjacency of the two feasts in the calendar is a witness to how the legend’s cast of secondary figures acquired commemorations of their own, the master kept on the eve of the disciple (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye 1902, 26 and 27 July; on Hermolaos and the conversion-narrative see Pantoleon to Panteleimon).

The Hymnography of the Feast

The office for 27 July in the Menaion confesses the saint in the Church’s own liturgical voice, and its hymns turn everywhere on the meaning of his name and on his healing. The hymnography does not narrate the Passio so much as distil its theology: the all-merciful physician who heals freely in Christ and intercedes for soul and body alike.

The apolytikion (troparion) of the feast hails him as “Holy Champion and Healer Panteleimon,” invoking him as one who, having been given grace to heal, is besought to intercede with the merciful God for the forgiveness of sins and the great mercy of our souls (Menaion, 27 July, apolytikion of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, fourth tone). The troparion’s logic is the logic of the name: the saint who is called Panteleimon, “the all-merciful,” is the one who asks of God the mercy of which his name is the sign — so that the hymn binds the bodily healing for which he is famous to the saving mercy for the soul, naming him intercessor for both (on the name and its theology see The Name Panteleimon).

The kontakion of the feast addresses him as an “imitator of the Merciful One” who has received from Christ the grace of healing, calling on him by the prayers of his intercession to heal our spiritual sicknesses and to repel the assaults of the enemy from those who cry to him for salvation (Menaion, 27 July, kontakion of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, fifth tone). Here too the hymn fixes on mercy as the heart of the matter: Panteleimon is praised not as a thaumaturge in the abstract but as the imitator of “the Merciful One,” Christ, whose mercy his name proclaims and whose free healing he extends. The kontakion’s pairing of bodily and spiritual healing — and its reach beyond the body to the warfare of the soul — is characteristic of the whole office, which never lets the healing of the flesh stand apart from the salvation of the person.

The canon at matins unfolds these themes across its odes. The Menaion’s canon for the feast celebrates the martyr’s contest and his unmercenary healing together, weaving the two confessions — that he poured out his blood as a witness and that he poured out healing without price — into a single praise, and naming him repeatedly as healer of the sick and intercessor before God (Menaion, 27 July, canon of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, with the stichera at “Lord, I have cried” and the praises). The office as a whole presents Panteleimon as the Church confesses every martyr-healer: the witness whose blood seals his confession and whose intercession the faithful invoke for soul and body — the firm liturgical confession of the saint, distinct from and prior to the narrative detail of the Passio read at the synaxarion (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye 1902, 27 July).

The Paraklesis and the Akathist: Services for the Sick

Beyond the fixed office of the feast, the saint is the object of two devotional services sung throughout the year on behalf of the sick: the paraklesis (the supplicatory canon) and the akathist.

The paraklesis to St. Panteleimon is a supplicatory canon of the common Byzantine type — modelled on the Small Paraklesis to the Theotokos — composed to be sung at the bedside of the sick or on their behalf, beseeching the saint’s intercession for the recovery of soul and body. Such supplicatory canons addressed to a particular saint are a standing instrument of Orthodox devotion: the faithful gather, or a priest is summoned, and the canon is sung with its refrains imploring the saint to “heal the sicknesses of soul and body” of those for whom prayer is made. The paraklesis to Panteleimon is among the most widely used of these services precisely because he is, across the Orthodox world, the healer first turned to in sickness (on the place of such healing-devotions in Orthodox piety, Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed. 2015, on the saints and their intercession; on the devotional cult of the healer see The Healer of the Orthodox World).

The akathist to St. Panteleimon is a hymn of the akathistos type — twelve paired kontakia and oikoi with the chairetismoi, the “Rejoice” salutations — praising the saint through the stations of his story as the Passio and the cult transmit it and ending in petition for healing and mercy. As a devotional composition the akathist belongs to the later growth of the cult rather than to its earliest stratum (the akathist as a form addressed to individual saints is a development well after the patristic period), and its narrative content is drawn from the developed Passio; it is reported here as what it is — a beloved devotional service of the living cult, not an early documentary witness (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the layering of the devotional elaborations is set out in Pantoleon to Panteleimon). Both the paraklesis and the akathist are sung today wherever the sick seek the saint’s help, and both express the same confession as the feast: that Panteleimon heals freely, in Christ’s name, the sicknesses of soul and body.

The Lesser Blessing of Waters and the Healing of the Sick

The most important place in which Panteleimon stands in the Church’s regular prayer is not a service addressed to him alone but the lesser blessing of waters — the lesser sanctification of water, the mikros agiasmos — the rite at which holy water is blessed for the healing and the comfort of the faithful, and in which Panteleimon is named, with the other Holy Unmercenaries, in the very prayers for the sick.

The lesser blessing of waters is distinct from the great blessing of waters of Theophany (6 January). The great blessing is bound to the feast of the Lord’s Baptism and is celebrated on that feast and its eve; the lesser blessing of waters may be served at any time and for any need — at the start of the month, on the feasts of certain saints (including 1 August, the Procession of the Cross), at the consecration of a place, and above all on behalf of the sick and the afflicted (The Great Book of Needs [Euchologion], the order of the lesser sanctification of water; on the two rites see The Great Feasts). It is a service the faithful request constantly: water is sanctified, the sick are sprinkled and given to drink of it, homes and the afflicted are blessed with it, and the prayer of the Church is made over it for the healing of body and soul.

What concerns Panteleimon directly is the content of the rite’s invocations. The order of the lesser blessing of waters, as it stands in the Euchologion and the Great Book of Needs, opens with the troparia that summon the saints whose intercession the rite invokes — and prominent among them are the Holy Unmercenaries (the Anargyroi), the saints who healed without payment, named in the troparion “Holy Unmercenaries and Wonderworkers, visit our infirmities; freely you have received, freely give unto us” (The Great Book of Needs [Euchologion], the lesser sanctification of water, the introductory troparia; the refrain echoes Matthew 10:8). In the litanies and prayers of the rite the Church beseeches God, through the prayers of the Theotokos, of the Cross, and of the holy unmercenary physicians, for the health and salvation of His servants. Panteleimon stands in this company by his very identity: he is the greatest and most-invoked of the Holy Unmercenaries, and where the Unmercenary Healers are named in the prayers of the lesser blessing of waters for the recovery of the sick, he is named among them (on the Anargyroi as a category, with Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, see The Unmercenaries as a Type).

This is the saint’s most characteristic liturgical place, and it is worth seeing exactly. The lesser blessing of waters is the rite the Orthodox faithful reach for in sickness; its prayers gather the healing saints; and at the head of those saints stand the Unmercenaries, who heal “freely, having freely received.” Panteleimon, whose name itself means “the all-merciful” and whose whole cult is the cult of free healing in Christ, is the very type of the saint the rite invokes — so that to ask the lesser blessing of waters for a sick person is, among other things, to invoke Panteleimon and his fellow Anargyroi for that person’s healing (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on the sacramental and intercessory texture of Orthodox devotion for the sick). The continuity is exact: the feast confesses him the all-merciful healer; the paraklesis and akathist beseech him by name; and the lesser blessing of waters sets him, with the other Unmercenaries, in the Church’s standing prayer for every sick person who asks for holy water. The hymnography and the rites all say the same thing the name says — mercy, and free healing in Christ.

The Western Commemoration: Pantaleon and the Fourteen Holy Helpers

The saint’s cult passed early and widely into the Latin West, where he is known as Pantaleon (the form derived from the older Pantoleon), and his Western veneration is a witness to the antiquity and reach of the single ancient cult (the breadth of the version-tradition as a mark of the cult’s early diffusion is treated in Pantoleon to Panteleimon). In the West Pantaleon was venerated as a patron of physicians and of the sick, and he was numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers (the Vierzehn Nothelfer) — the group of saints invoked together, especially in the late-medieval Rhineland and southern Germany, against particular afflictions and in time of plague; within that group Pantaleon was the helper invoked for consumption and as a patron of doctors. His Western feast was kept, as in the East, on 27 July in the Tridentine Roman Calendar; in the 1969 revision of the General Roman Calendar his commemoration was reduced to a local and optional observance, but where it is kept it remains on 27 July, the same day as the Orthodox feast — a shared inheritance from the one early cult of the Nicomedian martyr-healer (the historicity of that cult, apart from the legend, is the subject of The Historical Core; the Bollandist account of how such cults spread is Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd ed. 1933).

The Western development — the Nothelfer, the patronage of physicians, the blood-relic at Madrid said to liquefy on the feast — belongs to the later growth of a cult that was already ancient and already widely diffused when it reached the West, and it is reported here as a witness to the cult’s reach, not as independent corroboration of the Passio’s narrative (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the relic-claims are treated in The Relics and Their Dispersal). What the Eastern and Western commemorations hold in common is the firm thing: a Nicomedian martyr-healer, venerated from an early date, kept on 27 July, invoked for the sick — the cult that the calendars secure beneath the legend that the passiones supply.

References

The Menaion for the month of July, 27 July: the office of the Holy Great Martyr and Healer Panteleimon (the apolytikion in the fourth tone, “Holy Champion and Healer Panteleimon”; the kontakion in the fifth tone, “Imitator of the Merciful One”; the canon at matins and the stichera). (The Church’s liturgical confession of the saint as all-merciful healer and intercessor for soul and body.)
Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (Synaxarion of Constantinople). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The fixed commemoration under 27 July, and Hermolaos with his companions under 26 July.)
The Great Book of Needs (Euchologion / Trebnik), the order of the lesser sanctification of water (mikros agiasmos / lesser blessing of waters): the introductory troparia invoking the Holy Unmercenaries (“Holy Unmercenaries and Wonderworkers, visit our infirmities; freely you have received, freely give unto us,” echoing Matthew 10:8), and the litanies and prayers for the health and salvation of the sick. (The rite in which Panteleimon stands, with the other Anargyroi, in the Church’s standing prayer for the sick.)
The Paraklesis (Supplicatory Canon) to St. Panteleimon and the Akathist to St. Panteleimon — devotional services of the living cult, sung on behalf of the sick; their narrative content drawn from the developed Passio (BHG 1412z–1418) and reported as devotional composition under METHODOLOGY §3.5, not as early documentary witness.
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les origines du culte des martyrs. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933. (The antiquity and diffusion of the early cult of a Nicomedian martyr, and the dating of cults from the calendars — the warrant for treating the 27 July commemoration, East and West, as the firm core.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The place of the saints and of the healing services in Orthodox devotion; the intercession of the saints for soul and body.)