Panteleimon the Healer

Origins and early life: Nicomedia, the two households

Panteleimon was born about the year 275 at Nicomedia in Bithynia — the eastern capital of the empire under Diocletian, and therefore the very theatre of the Great Persecution. His father Eustorgius was a man of rank and of the old religion, whose house was full of idols; his mother Eubula was a Christian, and the tradition holds her memory on March 30. The boy was given the name Pantoleon, "in all things a lion" — a warrior's name, a father's ambition.

Eubula began to teach her son the faith; she died while he was still a child, and the Christian thread in the household was cut. Eustorgius, left in charge, sent the boy to the pagan schools and then apprenticed him to Euphrosynus, the most famous physician of Nicomedia. Pantoleon was gifted, and quickly outstripped his fellows. Euphrosynus presented him at court; the emperor Maximian, who kept his household at Nicomedia, was taken with him and marked him out for the post of imperial physician when his training should be finished.

Two educations were therefore laid on him, and the Passion is careful to name both: the mother's, buried but not dead, and the master's, which gave him the skill that would become the instrument of the other. The kathisma of his office puts it exactly — he loved his mother's piety, and set right, by piety, the impiety of his father.

Hermolaus, the dead child and the snake

At that time three priests were living in hiding in Nicomedia — Hermolaus, Hermippus and Hermocrates, survivors of the burning of the church and the massacre of the Christians of the city (the Twenty Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia, kept on December 28). Their refuge stood on the road that Pantoleon walked between the physician's house and his own; Hermolaus, watching the young man pass day after day, called him in and spoke to him about Christ. The talk became a habit, and the habit a catechesis: Pantoleon came to the old priest daily, and Hermolaus taught him that the physician's art, which Pantoleon knew, was a shadow of a greater healing, and that the Physician of souls and bodies is one.

The decision was made by a sign in the street. Walking home, Pantoleon came upon the body of a child lying dead of the bite of a great snake, the serpent still coiled beside it. He stopped, and made a bargain with the God he had not yet confessed: if the Lord Jesus Christ would raise the child and kill the serpent, he would believe and be baptised. He prayed; the child rose alive, and the snake lay dead. He went to Hermolaus and was baptised, and received the name by which the Church knows him — Panteleimon, the all-merciful, in place of the lion's name his father had given him. The Church has never let the two names go: the hymns play on them constantly, and the tradition observes that a man who is a lion in everything and merciful to all is the exact description of a martyr who is also a physician.

The blind man, and the conversion of Eustorgius

He set out to win his father. Eustorgius was not persuaded by argument; he was persuaded by sight. A blind man, who had spent his substance on physicians and been made worse by them, came to Panteleimon; the saint refused the fee, laid his hand on the man's eyes and called on the name of Jesus Christ, and the man saw. Eustorgius, who was present, believed on the spot, and was baptised by Hermolaus together with the man whose sight had been restored. The blind man is himself numbered among the saints of this day: he confessed Christ publicly under interrogation, refused to say that the cure had come from the pagan gods, and was beheaded — the first-fruits of Panteleimon's healing and the first of the converts his martyrdom would make. The later Greek and Slavonic lists give him the name Celidonius, taken over from the Western tradition of the man born blind in the ninth chapter of St John; the older synaxarion leaves him unnamed.

Eustorgius died soon after, a Christian. Panteleimon inherited a great house and a great fortune, freed the slaves of the household, and gave the whole of it away. From that day he practised medicine without fee — this is the technical sense of the Greek anargyros, "silverless" — attending the poor, the crippled and the abandoned, and going into the prisons to dress the wounds of the confessors held there. What is peculiar to his dossier, and what the hymns insist on, is that he kept the science: he did not abandon medicine for prayer, but practised the one within the other, so that the Church could hold him up as the model of the Christian physician. Nicomedia noticed. Patients deserted the other doctors of the city and went to the young man who took nothing.

Denunciation, trial, and the paralytic

Envy did the rest. His fellow-physicians laid an information before Maximian: Panteleimon was a Christian, and was healing the imprisoned confessors. The emperor, who had meant to make him his own doctor, sent for him and offered him the easy way out — a sacrifice, a grain of incense, and the charge would be dropped.

Panteleimon confessed himself a Christian and proposed instead a trial by result. Let a sick man be brought whom no physician could help; let the pagan priests call on their gods over him, and let Panteleimon call on Christ. A man paralysed for many years was carried in. The priests of the idols, who were skilled in medicine as well as in sacrifice, invoked their gods over him at length and nothing happened; Panteleimon named the name of Jesus Christ and took him by the hand, and the man stood up and walked. It was a demonstration in the emperor's own presence, and it settled nothing, because Maximian had the healed man executed on the spot and handed Panteleimon over to the torturers.

The cycle of tortures

The Passion runs him through the whole repertory of the Nicomedian tribunal, and at every stage the Lord appears to him — in the form of the priest Hermolaus, the account says — and he is preserved:

• hung on a tree and torn with iron hooks, and burned in the wounds with torches;
• stretched on the wheel, which broke;
• cast into a cauldron of molten lead, which cooled;
• thrown into the sea with a stone about his neck, and brought back to the shore;
• exposed in the circus to wild beasts, which came up and licked his feet, so that the crowd began to shout "Great is the God of the Christians!" — and Maximian ordered the soldiers to cut down whoever shouted it.

At this point Hermolaus, Hermippus and Hermocrates were arrested and beheaded; their memory is kept on the day before his own (July 26), so that in the Menaion the teacher goes to his death one day ahead of the disciple, and the two feasts read as a single account divided in two.

The olive tree

Maximian gave up and ordered the beheading. They led Panteleimon out of the city and bound him to an olive tree. He prayed; a soldier struck him, and the blade went soft as wax against his neck and left no wound. The soldiers threw down their swords, fell at his feet and refused to go on. Panteleimon told them to obey the order — that if they did not, they would have no part with him in the age to come. They kissed him, weeping, and did it; and a Voice was heard from heaven calling him by his new name and summoning him to the Kingdom.

At the stroke, the tradition says, milk flowed from the wound instead of blood, and the dry olive tree to which he was bound broke into leaf and bore fruit in that hour. Many of those standing by believed. His body was thrown on a fire and was not consumed; Christians took it up and buried it. Three of his servants — Laurence, Bassus and Probus — had followed him to the place, heard the Voice, and wrote down what they had seen: the Passion of Panteleimon claims them as its eyewitnesses, and this is the ordinary claim of the genre rather than a verifiable one. The year is given as 305, at the end of Maximian's reign.

Relics and shrines

The head of the great martyr is the most famous of his relics: it is kept at the Monastery of St Panteleimon on Mount Athos — the Russian house, the Rossikon, which takes its name from him and whose brotherhood has carried his cult through the Slavic world. Blood and myrrh from his shrines have been reported for centuries, and portions of the relics were dispersed very widely and very early; his name is attached to churches, hospitals and healing springs across the whole Orthodox oikoumene, and beyond it, for the Latin West keeps the same saint on the same day as St Pantaleon, one of its Fourteen Holy Helpers, and the city of Ravello in Campania keeps a phial of his blood which is reported to liquefy on his feast.

Veneration

The veneration is not local and never was. In the East he is one of the three or four saints whose name every Orthodox Christian knows without being taught it, because it is read aloud over them when they are ill: Panteleimon is named in the Mystery of Holy Unction, in the Great Blessing of the Waters and in the prayers for the sick, alongside the Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian and Cyrus and John. In Russia the cult is attested from the twelfth century — Prince Izyaslav Mstislavich, Panteleimon in baptism, carried the saint's image on his helmet and ascribed his survival at the battle of 1151 to him — and two naval victories over the Swedes, in 1714 and 1720, fell on his feast and fixed him in the Russian imperial calendar as a protector of soldiers.

That double patronage — soldiers and the sick — is not an accident of history but the working out of his two names. Pantoleon, the lion, gives the soldier; Panteleimon, the all-merciful, gives the physician; and the tradition observes drily that the two go together, since it is soldiers above all who need doctors. Modern Greek and Slavic usage adds to this the patronage of physicians and of hospitals as such.