Paul the Physician of Corinth

Our Venerable Father Paul the Physician, of Corinth

Venerable · Wonderworker · d. at the age of seventy; year not transmitted

Paul, called the Physician, was a monk of Corinth who was tonsured in his youth and lived out his life in the monastic struggle. His memory rests on a single story of great beauty: a woman of the neighbourhood, having borne a child out of wedlock, laid the blame on him, and the elder — rather than defend himself — took the accusation and the infant alike upon himself with joy, until, his brethren reproaching him for a broken vow, he bade the newborn child name its own father before them all, and the infant spoke and pointed to a blacksmith of the town. For that patience under slander God gave him the gift of healing the sick, from which comes the surname the calendar keeps. He reposed in peace at the age of seventy, and the Church honours him on June 28.

The monk of Corinth

The synaxarion gives Paul no family, no century and no year of death: it names his city, Corinth, says that he received the monastic tonsure in his youth at one of the monasteries there, and that he was diligent in the ascetic life. Whether he had practised medicine in the world before his tonsure the notice does not say — the epithet ὁ ἰατρός, "the physician," is explained in the tradition not by a profession learnt but by a charism given, and the surviving Greek notice of his repose is a single line: Ὁ Ὅσιος Παῦλος ὁ ἰατρὸς ἐκοιμήθηκε μὲ εἰρήνη — "the venerable Paul the physician fell asleep in peace." Everything else the Church remembers of him is contained in one episode.

The slander, and the child that spoke

A woman of the place, having conceived and borne a child outside marriage and being pressed to name the father, named the monk Paul. The charge was of the gravest kind that can be brought against a monastic, and it was believed. Paul made no denial. He received the accusation with humility and even with joy, and he did more: he took the infant to himself and undertook to raise it, accepting in deed the paternity he was charged with in word — which is to say that he consented to be thought a fornicator and a breaker of his vows rather than shame the woman by contradicting her.

The reproaches of his brethren and of the townspeople grew until the elder brought the matter to an end in the only way that would not require him to accuse anyone. Taking the newborn child in his arms before the assembled people, he charged it, in the name of Christ, to say who its father was; and the infant, at an age when no child speaks, spoke, and named and pointed out a blacksmith of the town. The people, confounded, fell down before the elder and begged his forgiveness.

The story belongs to a well-attested type in monastic literature — the ascetic slandered with a child and vindicated by a miracle, of which the most famous instance is Macarius of Egypt in the Lausiac History, where the elder likewise refuses to defend himself and is cleared without his own doing. That the type recurs does not make the Corinthian instance less a part of the received tradition of this saint; it does mean that the notice preserves a pattern of holiness rather than a documented biography, and the entry says so plainly.

The gift of healings, and the repose

From that time, the notice continues, God gave Paul the grace to heal the sick, and it is for this that the calendar calls him the physician. The sequence the tradition draws is the point of the whole account: the gift of healing is not the reward of his asceticism as such but of his willingness to be thought guilty — the patience that would not purchase its own good name at another's cost. He lived to the age of seventy and reposed in peace.

Feast and commemoration

June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), on which the Greek Synaxaristes gives him as Ὁ Ὅσιος Παῦλος ὁ ἰατρός and the Slavonic books as "the venerable Paul the physician." He is kept without a proper service, at the proskomedia and in the commemorations of the day, which on June 28 is dominated by the translation of the relics of Cyrus and John — a fitting neighbour, since that feast too is a feast of physicians who healed by grace rather than by art.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

In thee, O Father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Paul, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

There is no fixed personal type for Paul of Corinth, and no early image of him is known. Where he is painted at all he is shown as the synaxarion describes him — an aged monk, grey-bearded, in the mantle and the schema, one hand raised in blessing or in prayer and the other holding a scroll — and the one element that could distinguish him is narrative rather than emblematic: the infant in his arms, the child he consented to be thought the father of, or the scene of the child speaking before the crowd. No pre-1900 icon of him has been identified for this collection.

Disputed questions

No date. Neither the Greek synaxarion nor the Slavonic books transmit a year, a reigning emperor, or a bishop by whom the saint might be placed. The frontmatter therefore omits century altogether and the entry indexes under unknown, in accordance with the repository's policy of not inventing a date where none is transmitted. Popular listings occasionally attach him to the sixth or seventh century, but this appears to be inference from the style of the anecdote rather than from any source.
Not to be confused with the many other monastic Pauls of the calendar — Paul of Thebes the first hermit (January 15), Paul of Latros (December 15), Paul the Simple (October 4), Paul of Obnora (January 10) — nor with the unmercenary physician-saints proper, whose title anargyros means a healer who took no fee; Paul of Corinth is not numbered among the anargyroi, and his epithet is descriptive rather than a rank.