Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia

Origins and early life

Cosmas and Damian were brothers, born in Asia Minor — the Slavic-received tradition names their homeland Mesopotamia, whence the usual English epithet, while the Greek and the OCA say more broadly "of Asia Minor." Their father, a pagan, died while they were small children, and the whole of their Christian formation was the work of their mother, Theodota, a widow of deep piety. By her own example and by reading the holy books to them, she raised her sons in purity and the fear of God, and they grew into righteous and virtuous men.

Ministry as unmercenaries

Trained in the physician's art, the brothers received besides their learned skill the charism of healing from the Holy Spirit, so that they cured diseases of body and of soul by the power of prayer where medicine could not reach — and, the tradition insists, they healed animals as well as men. Above all they would take no fee. Holding to the Lord's command, "Freely ye have received, freely give" (Matthew 10:8), they asked of those they cured only faith in Christ, in whose name the cures were worked; and it is from this practice that the Church came to call them and their like anargyroi, "the silverless," the unmercenaries. Their fame as unmercenary physicians spread through all the surrounding country.

The three eggs and Damian's oath

The most famous episode of their lives turns on the very strictness of their vow. The brothers were once called to a woman named Palladia, gravely ill and abandoned by every other physician as beyond cure. Through their prayer the Lord healed her, and she rose from her bed in perfect health, glorifying God. Wishing to make some small return, Palladia came secretly to Damian and pressed on him three eggs, saying, "Receive this little gift in the name of the Holy and Life-giving Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." At the naming of the Holy Trinity Damian dared not refuse, and took them. But when Cosmas learned of it he was grieved to the heart, believing his brother had broken their common vow of poverty; and on his deathbed he gave orders that Damian should not be buried beside him. When Damian too reposed, shortly after, the faithful were at a loss where to lay him. The doubt was resolved by a miracle: a camel which the saints had once healed of its wildness spoke with a human voice, declaring that they should not hesitate to lay Damian beside his brother, for he had not taken the eggs as payment but out of reverence for the Name of God. So the brothers were buried together, at Thereman in Mesopotamia.

Repose and relics

The pair reposed in peace — the single feature that most sharply distinguishes them from the two later pairs of their name, both of whom were martyred. Their holy relics were laid together at Thereman (Thereme), and the church built over them became a centre of healing to which the sick resorted for centuries.

Miracles and later cultus

Many miracles were worked at their shrine after their repose, of which the best known is that of the wife of Malchus. This man, dwelling near the church of Cosmas and Damian at Thereman and obliged to go on a long journey, commended his wife to the heavenly protection of the two brothers before he left. The devil, taking the form of one of Malchus's friends, came to the woman claiming that her husband had sent for her, and led her out to a lonely place to murder her; but at her cry of faith two fierce-looking men appeared, the demon fled and fell from a cliff, and the two led her safely home. Asked their names, they answered, "We are the servants of Christ, Cosmas and Damian," and vanished. From this and like wonders the brothers came to be venerated as guardians of the sanctity and inviolability of Christian marriage and as givers of concord to married life — a devotion that spread widely, and from ancient times took deep root in Russia, where innumerable churches, and whole villages, bear the joined names Kosmodemyansk and Kosmo-Damianovsky.

The three pairs of Cosmas and Damian

The Byzantine calendar venerates three distinct pairs of unmercenary brother-physicians named Cosmas and Damian, and the oldest and most persistent identity-problem in the whole company of the unmercenaries is the confusion among them. The received Greek and Slavic tradition distinguishes:

1. Of Asia Minor / Mesopotamia — November 1: the pair of this entry, sons of Theodota, who healed freely and reposed in peace; their relics at Thereman.
2. Of Rome — July 1: Roman physicians who healed under Carinus (c. 284) and were stoned to death on a mountain, the tradition says, by an envious former teacher.
3. Of Arabia — October 17: Cosmas and Damian of Arabia, Arab brothers beheaded in Cilicia under the governor Lysias, together with their three brothers Leontius, Anthimus and Eutropius.

The Western church, by contrast, has always known a single pair (feast September 26 in the current Roman books). Hagiographical scholarship since the Bollandists has generally held that one original pair of saints, whose cult radiated from a great shrine at Cyrrhus in Syria, was tripled in the Byzantine tradition by three divergent recensions of their legend — a peaceful-repose account (this pair), a Roman martyrdom, and a Cilician martyrdom — each of which then acquired its own feast, biography and iconographic tradition. This pair, the one that reposed in peace, is widely taken to preserve the oldest and most authentic memory. The Church's calendars, however, commemorate three pairs, each with its own day and hymnography, and this collection follows the calendars: one file per commemorated pair, with this note recorded in each. Wikidata (Q76486) and most Western reference works merge all three into a single entity; that identifier is recorded on the Arabia entry with a caution and is not claimed here.