The Life
Panteleimon was born about 284 in Nicomedia in Bithynia, in the heart of the eastern Roman Empire. His father Eustorgius was a wealthy pagan; his mother Euboula was a Christian who taught him the faith from childhood. She died when he was still young. His father then educated him as a pagan and apprenticed him to the imperial court physician Euphrosynus, who had been physician to several emperors. Panteleimon was a brilliant student. The emperor Maximian, seeing him at court, decided that he should become the imperial physician once his training was complete. But Panteleimon, walking in Nicomedia, met an old Christian priest named Hermolaus who had been hiding since the great massacre of 20,000 Christians in Nicomedia in 303. Hermolaus reminded him of his mother’s faith, taught him about Christ, and waited for the right moment. The moment came when Panteleimon found a child dying from a snakebite. He prayed in the name of Christ; the child was healed; the snake died. He was baptized that day. From then on he practiced medicine as a Christian, without charge, healing in the name of Jesus. The other court physicians grew jealous and denounced him to the emperor. He confessed Christ openly. After every torture failed to harm him, he was beheaded under an olive tree in 304. From the wound flowed milk instead of blood. The olive tree afterwards bore fruit.
Saint Euboula, the mother of Panteleimon, is herself a saint of the Orthodox Church, commemorated on March 30. She came from a Christian family in Nicomedia and married Eustorgius, a wealthy pagan senator. The marriage was likely arranged for political reasons by the families. Euboula did her best to raise her son as a Christian despite her husband’s opposition. She taught the young boy about Christ, about the saints, about the prayers, about the sign of the Cross. She told him about the great Christian community of Nicomedia and the persecutions they were facing. He absorbed all of this. But she died while he was still young, and her husband, freed from the obligation to tolerate her teaching, immediately began to undo her work. He sent the boy to a pagan school. He apprenticed him to a pagan physician. He took him to the imperial court where he could see the splendor and power of the pagan empire. Within a few years Panteleimon had largely forgotten his mother’s teaching, in any explicit way. But it had not really gone. It had merely been buried under the new layer of pagan formation. When the moment came for it to be reawakened, it was waiting underneath, ready to surface again.
In late 303, Diocletian had ordered the destruction of the great Christian church at Nicomedia and the massacre of the Christians who had taken refuge there. Twenty thousand Christians had died over a few days. A handful of priests had escaped and gone into hiding in the city. Among them was an old priest named Hermolaus, with two younger companions, Hermippus and Hermocrates. They lived secretly in a small house, celebrating the Liturgy in private and ministering to the surviving Christian community when they could. Hermolaus had a window that faced the street where Panteleimon walked daily on his way to and from the imperial court. The old priest noticed the young man, recognized signs of his mother’s formation in his bearing, and one day called out to him and invited him in. They began to talk. Panteleimon, having no idea that the man was a Christian priest, found him interesting. He came back. Over the course of many visits Hermolaus quietly began to reawaken the Christian instruction Euboula had begun. He talked about Christ as a physician, about the meaning of suffering, about the mercy of God. He waited for the moment when the young man would be ready to make an explicit decision. He did not push. He let the seed grow.
One day, walking in Nicomedia, Panteleimon came upon a young child lying dead in the street. Beside the child was a viper, the kind of poisonous snake that often killed quickly when it bit a small person. The child had clearly just been bitten. Panteleimon stopped. He had been thinking for weeks about what Hermolaus had been telling him about Christ as the great Physician. He had been hesitating, undecided, half-convinced but unwilling to take the final step. Now he looked at the dead child and made a decision. He said, out loud: Lord Jesus Christ, if You are truly the Physician of all the world, raise this child and kill the snake, and I will be Your servant for the rest of my life. He waited. Slowly the child opened his eyes and sat up, alive and well; the snake, by contrast, lay twisted and dead beside him. Panteleimon picked up the child and ran with him to Hermolaus. He told the priest what had happened. He asked for baptism that day. Hermolaus baptized him in the small chapel in the priest’s house. He gave him a new name: Panteleimon, the All-merciful, in place of the old name Pantoleon, the lion in everything. From that day forward he was a Christian. He would never look back.
After his baptism, Panteleimon began to practice medicine differently from the way the imperial physicians practiced it. He treated everyone, especially the poor, without charge. He did not consult the pagan gods or use pagan rituals. When he prayed for his patients he prayed in the name of Christ. The result was that many of his patients were healed who had not been healed by other physicians, and many of them, recognizing that something more than ordinary medicine was at work, asked about the God in whose name he was healing them and were converted to Christianity. The most famous early case was a blind man who came to him in despair, having been refused treatment by every other physician in the city. Panteleimon laid his hands on the man’s eyes, prayed in the name of Jesus Christ, and the man’s sight was restored immediately. The blind man recognized that his physical eyes had been opened by the same Lord who could open the eyes of his soul. He asked to be baptized. Panteleimon brought him to Hermolaus, who baptized him. Word of the healing spread. Other healings followed. The patients of the imperial physicians began to bring their cases to Panteleimon instead, and the imperial physicians grew jealous. They began to plot against him.
Eventually the imperial physicians went to Maximian and accused Panteleimon: he is healing in the name of Christ; he is converting many to Christianity; he is undermining the order of the empire. The emperor was angry but he liked Panteleimon and did not want to lose him. He summoned the young physician to the palace. He offered him a chance: deny Christ, sacrifice to the gods, and you can keep your place at court. Panteleimon refused. The emperor, perhaps thinking that a public demonstration would change the young man’s mind, arranged a kind of contest. A man who had been paralyzed for many years, whom no physician could heal, was brought into the imperial throne room. The pagan priests, some of whom were trained in medicine, prayed first to their gods over the paralytic. Nothing happened. The man remained paralyzed. Then Panteleimon stepped forward, prayed in the name of Jesus Christ, and commanded the paralytic to rise. The man rose up immediately, completely healed, and walked away. The emperor was visibly shaken. Several of his courtiers were converted on the spot. Maximian, instead of conceding, went into a rage. He ordered the healed man executed (lest he become a witness to Christianity), and he ordered Panteleimon arrested for the formal trial that would follow.
Maximian decided that Panteleimon should be tortured publicly in the most spectacular ways imaginable, partly to break him into recantation and partly to discourage other Christians by the demonstration. He was hung from a tree and his body raked with iron hooks. He was burned with torches. He was stretched on a wheel-shaped rack. He was thrown into a cauldron of boiling lead. He was tied to a heavy stone and thrown into the sea. He was sent into an arena to be devoured by wild beasts. None of these methods worked. The wounds healed. The fire did not burn. The lead became cool when he entered it. The stone untied itself. The wild beasts came up to him in the arena and licked his feet, and the spectators began to shout, Great is the God of the Christians! Maximian, completely at a loss, ordered the saint beheaded under an olive tree outside the city. The soldiers tied him to the tree. The saint stood in prayer. The first soldier brought down the sword — and the sword bent like wax against his neck. The second soldier tried again with the same result. The soldiers fell on their knees in fear, asking forgiveness. Panteleimon told them gently to stand up and complete what they had been commanded to do; if they failed they would themselves be killed. He gave the executioner permission to strike. This time the sword cut. From the wound flowed milk instead of blood. A voice from heaven called him by his new baptismal name to come into the Kingdom. The olive tree afterwards bore fruit; the same tree, propagated through cuttings, has continued to bear fruit at Mount Athos to the present day.
The Greek word Anargyroi means literally without silver, or unmercenary. The Orthodox Church gives this title to a small group of saints, mostly physicians, who refused to charge for their healing services. The most famous Anargyroi besides Panteleimon are the brothers Cosmas and Damian (commemorated on November 1 and several other dates), Cyrus and John (January 31), Sampson the Hospitable (June 27), Diomedes the Healer (August 16), and a number of others. They are usually depicted in icons holding a small medicine box and a long-handled spoon, similar to the spoon used to give Holy Communion. The visual parallel is deliberate: the medicine they give is an extension of the Body and Blood of Christ that the priest gives at the altar; both are medicines of immortality. The Church has consistently held that Christian medicine is fundamentally different from pagan or commercial medicine. The pagan physician charges what the patient can pay and treats the rich better than the poor. The Christian physician treats everyone equally and refuses to make money from suffering. The Anargyroi stand for this conviction. Saint Panteleimon is the most beloved among them.
The patristic tradition has always held that the saintly physician is finally an instrument of Christ Himself, who is the great Physician of soul and body. When Christ walked in Galilee He healed everywhere He went: lepers, paralytics, blind men, deaf men, the demonically possessed. He never charged anyone. He often combined the physical healing with forgiveness of sins. He explained the connection in the case of the paralytic let down through the roof: which is easier, to say your sins are forgiven, or to say arise and walk? both come from the same divine power and both are aspects of the same divine mercy. Saint Panteleimon stands in the same lineage. His healings are not finally his own healings but Christ’s healings working through him. He always prayed in the name of Christ before he healed; the prayer was not a magical formula but a real petition to the Lord whose healing he was making available to his patient. He understood the truth that he himself could not heal anyone; he was simply the instrument through which the healing came. The great Physician was Christ; he was a small physician who pointed people toward the great One.
After the saint’s death his relics were gathered by the local Christians and venerated. They were eventually divided and distributed widely. The most famous portion of relics is his skull, which has been preserved at Panachrantou Monastery on Mount Athos for centuries and which streams fragrant myrrh continuously, like the relics of Demetrius of Thessaloniki. Other major portions of his relics are at the Russian Saint Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos, in Constantinople, in Italy (especially at Ravello, where his blood is said to liquefy on his feast day each year), and in churches scattered across the entire Orthodox world. He has been a particular favorite of the Russian people: Prince Izyaslav of Kiev took Panteleimon as his baptismal name in the twelfth century and credited the saint with saving his life in battle in 1151. Two Russian naval victories over the Swedes — in 1714 near Hangö and in 1720 near Grengam — fell on his feast day and were credited to his intercession. He continues to be invoked daily by Orthodox Christians around the world for healing of body and soul, in hospitals, in homes, in churches, at the Sacrament of Holy Unction, and at the Blessing of the Waters. He is one of the most universally beloved of all the saints of the Orthodox Church.