The Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos (Deubner 30; Rupprecht 37) recount how *Kosmas and Damianos (brothers, physician martyrs of Syria, S00385) in their church in Constantinople healed a man from an abscess in his hips by conducting surgery on his wound, after the man had prayed before an image at the entrance to the shrine, representing Christ, *Mary (Mother of Christ, 00033) and Kosmas and Damianos. Written in Greek in Constantinople; assembled as a collection between the 6th and 10th centuries.
E08458
Literary - Hagiographical - Collections of miracles
Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos (BHG 385-391), 30 (Deubner), 37 (Rupprecht)
Summary:
A man of high birth suffered terribly and for many years from an abscess in his hips. The physicians who attempted many treatments and surgeries on him, eventually gave up and said that no human hand would be able to cure him. Since many people advised him to go to the church of saints Kosmas and Damianos, he was considering following this suggestion. Then the saints appeared to him in a dream (καθ’ ὕπνον) and told him to come to their shrine and obtain healing. He went to the shrine and spent there a long time, but received no visitation (ἐπίσκεψις).
One day, he exited the church and stopped in the external narthex before an image which was placed under the left portico. The image represented Christ with Mary, the saints Kosmas and Damianos, and a certain high official Leontios. The man began praying and begging the saints for a cure and returned to the place where he had slept. At night, he saw (in a dream) Kosmas and Damian who were accompanied by Mary. The saints pointed out the sick man to her and asked her to heal him. When Mary withdrew, they took the man and carried him to the adjacent hostel (ξενών) and placed him in the clinic (ἰατρεῖον) of the hostel and began preparing to operate on him. Since the man thought they were his physicians who wanted to operate on him again, he tried to prevent them from that. As he kept resisting, Kosmas bound his legs onto the railings of the repository of drugs, and started the surgery by making an incision into the affected part as thick as two fingers. When the saints stopped cleaning the wound, they bandaged it without covering it. The man insisted that they should apply some honey on the wound but they rebuked him for instructing them how to treat him. Then they took him back to the place where he slept in their shrine.
When the man awoke, he saw the bandages but nothing covering the wound. Some days later, the Saturday night vigil (τῆς παννυχίδος τῷ σαββάτῳ) was being enacted, and at the sixth hour of the night, the salve (κηρωτή) was distributed among the people. The man was hesitating to use it because he was worried about his wound. Around the ninth hour, he fell asleep and saw the saints who brought him a cloth soaked with the salve and put it on his wound, having removed the bandages. The salve caused him terrible pain in the wound but also caused all the toxic substances to evacuate from his entire body through it. He was completely healed. The saints told him to remain at the shrine for six years more, which he carefully observed. Afterwards, he asked the saints if it was determined by heaven that he should fall into such a severe illness and live with it for so many years, because of his great sins, which they confirmed. The man later settled in the vicinity of the shrine and has been living there up to this day.
Text: Deubner 1907
Summary: J. Doroszewska
This miracle is Miracle 37 in the Egyptian collection of the Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos published by Rupprecht, with one significant difference: the Egyptian version makes no mention of the image of Mary with the two saints (and its patron Leontios), though (as in the Deubner version) Mary appears in the man's dream, flanked by Kosmas and Damianos.
Cult building - independent (church)
Use of ImagesPraying before an image
Public display of an image
Descriptions of images of saints
Non Liturgical ActivityVisiting graves and shrines
Incubation
Vigils
MiraclesMiracle after death
Healing diseases and disabilities
Apparition, vision, dream, revelation
RelicsContact relic - wax
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesPhysicians
Aristocrats
Source
The Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos are recorded in several distinct manuscript assemblages of miracle-stories involving the two saints in their Constantinopolitan church, situated on the shore of the Golden Horn near the district of Blachernae, outside the city wall (in the modern Istanbul district of Eyüp). According to tradition (Patria of Constantinople 3.126), the church was built by Paulinus, a fellow student of the emperor Theodosius II (r. 408-450), but it is uncertain whether this is true. There was a famous monastery attached to the church, called the Kosmidion.Kosmas and Damianos, who were known as the Holy Anargyroi (the physician-saints 'who charge no fees’), were the most favoured saintly healers of the entire Empire.
The known Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos are published in two separate, but overlapping, publications:
Ludwig Deubner's collection and edition:
The 48 miracle-stories collected by Deubner are preserved in several manuscripts, none of which contains all 48. They were collected together into a single volume, and given a single numbering-system by Deubner, who distinguished six groups of miracles (plus one extra miracle), assembled over a long period of time. Five of these groups are anonymous, whereas the sixth was compiled by a certain Maximos the Deacon.
The groups are as follows:
1. Mir. 1 – 10 (BHG 385-386) – an essentially homogeneous group with a simple prologue.
2. Mir. 11 – 20 (BHG 387) – a more elaborate collection without a prologue but with a brief introduction to each miracle; it was attached by its redactor to the previous collection.
3. Mir. 21 – 26 (BHG 388) – a collection preceded by a preface and addressed to a certain Florentios.
4. Mir. 27 – 32 (BHG 389) – a collection without a prologue.
5. Mir. 33 – 38 (BHG 390) – a collection with a prologue in which its author states that he dares to add some miracles of the saints to those that already exist.
6. Mir. 39 – 47 (BHG 391) – a collection by Maximos the Deacon, probably a monk of the monastery at the Kosmidion; Mir. 39 and 40 are provided with short prologues.
7. Mir. 48 – a single miracle not to be found elsewhere, that was added by Deubner. This miracle was accomplished by Kosmas and Damianos while alive, so more properly would belong in a Life.
Collections 1, 2 and 3 (with Miracles 1 - 26) can be dated to before the end of the 6th century, because Sophronius of Jerusalem, closing his account of Miracle 30 (E07359) of his Miracles of Kyros and Ioannes (Cyrus and John), which he composed at the beginning of the 7th century, refers to a written account of the Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos, with enough detail to show that he specifically knew Kosmas and Damianos Miracles 2 and 24.
Collections 4 and 5 are certainly 10th-century or earlier, because they are preserved in a manuscript of that date. They contain no obvious clues that allow us to date them with more precision.
Collection 6 is from the 14th century. Its author Maximos dates miracles 40-47 to after the end of Latin rule. In mir. 40 he mentions the name Akropolites, referring to a member of this prominent Byzantine family from Constantinople. The man referred to was likely Constantine Akropolites, a famous hagiographer and statesman of the 14th century (born mid-13th c., died in or before May 1324), who served as megas logothetes (a high official) in 1294-1321; he was a son of another famous civil official, the teacher and historian George Akropolites, who also held the office of megas logothetes (Efthymiadis 1999: 209). Being certainly much later than the AD 700 cut-off date for evidence in our database, we have not made entries for Collection 6.
The miracles narratives are rendered in highly rhetorical Greek. Most of the miracles were effected through the practice of incubation. The patients are usually simple people who suffer from various diseases. Their names are rarely provided, which raises suspicions that the narratives were originally composed in a different milieu and were later appropriated and adapted to the needs of the new environment.
(J. Doroszewska)
The Egyptian Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos:
In 1907, the year Deubner published his collection, an eleventh-century Greek codex was discovered in the ruins of a monastery at Edfu in Upper Egypt, and then acquired by the British Museum (now BL Add MS 37534), with 34 miracles of Kosmas and Damianos, prefaced by a Life of the saints. The codex is incomplete: two leaves are missing from the beginning, and one or two quires from the end. It is nevertheless significant, particularly because it transmits 14 miracles (13 of these set in the saints' church at Constantinople) not contained in the collections published by Deubner.
The miracles follow a quite different order from the collections in Deubner’s edition, and no one collection there predominates here. No duplicated miracles are exact replicas, and some exhibit significant narrative and ideological divergences. Some, e.g. Miracles 25 and 37, lack prosopographical detail in comparison to the Deubner equivalents, but others, e.g. Miracles 22 and 23, are more fulsome. The original miracles described by Maximos the Deacon in the fourteenth century (Deubner’s Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos 39-47, which are not in the CSLA database) are, as we might expect, wholly absent.
All of the shrine-miracles seem to be set in Constantinople, which, among the unique miracles, is explicitly stated in Miracles 17, 18, and 20. In Miracle 18 the saints even appear to a patient at their shrine at Cyrrhus in Syria, and advise him to come instead to Constantinople. This perhaps suggests a rivalry between the saints’ shrines, but also a late-antique origin for the tale, when a choice, and travel, between the different centres was more conceivable than later. Indeed among the same unique miracles, Miracle 10 seems to have been composed in or soon after the reign of Justinian, since its subject is Stephanos the Sophist, the famed geographer and author of the Ethnika, dedicated to that emperor; another Miracle 15, involves the miraculous appearance of the saints from an icon, which would suggest a date after the mid-sixth century. Notable is a distinct miaphysite bias – thus the subject of the unique Miracle 19 is a Nestorian heretic made to confess one nature of Christ; while in the duplicated Miracle 21, Deubner’s Arian is instead a dyophysite.
It has sometimes therefore been claimed that the Egyptian miracles, which are written in a much simpler and less ornate style than those assembled by Deubner, represent a primitive, anti-Chalcedonian stage of the cult, but this seems doubtful. Rather we might think of an Egyptian reception of a Constantinopolitan collection or collections, with certain elements reworked to fit the local confession. When this reception occurred is uncertain, the terminus ante quem being the date of the codex. Whatever the original date of assemblage, the copying of a Greek text in Upper Egypt as late as the eleventh century is in itself remarkable.
(P. Booth)
Bibliography
Editions:Deubner, L. (ed.), Kosmas und Damian. Texte und Einleitung (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1907).
Rupprecht, E. (ed.) Cosmae et Damiani sanctorum medicorum vita et miracula e codice Londinensi (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1935).
Translation:
Festugière, A.-J. (trans.), Collections grecques de miracles: Sainte Thecle, saints Côme et Damien, saints Cyr et Jean (extraits), saint Georges (Paris: Picard, 1971).
Further reading:
Booth, P., "Orthodox and Heretic in the Early Byzantine Cult(s) of Saints Cosmas and Damian," in P. Sarris et al. An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 114-128.
Booth, P., "Between texts and shrines in the Greek cult of saints (5th-7th centuries)," in V. Déroche, B. Ward-Perkins and Robert Wiśniewski, Culte des saints et litterature hagiographique: Accords et desaccords (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2020), 23-38.
Constantinou, S., “Healing Dreams in Early Byzantine Miracle Collections,” in Oberhelman 2013, 189-98.
Csepregi, I., "Mysteries for the Uninitiated: the Role and Symbolism of the Eucharist in Miraculous Dream Healing," in I. Perczel et al. (eds), The Eucharist in Theology and Philosophy: Issues of Doctrinal History in East and West from the Patristic Age to the Reformation (Leuven University Press: Leuven, 2006) 97–130.
Csepregi, I., “Who is Behind Incubation Stories? The Hagiographers of Byzantine Dream-Healing Miracles,” in Oberhelman 2013, 161-87.
Déroche, V., “’Tout d'un coup’: l'epiphanie masquée dans les recueils de miracles de l' Antiquite tardive, ” in Dōron Rodopoikilon. Studies in Honour of Jan Olof Rosenquist, ed. D. Searby, E. Balicka-Witakovska, J. Heldt (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis : Uppsala, 2012), 147-57.
Deubner, L., De incubatione capita quattuor (Leipzig : Teubner, 1900).
Dierkens, A. (ed.), Apparitions et miracles (Brussels: Universite Bruxelles, 1991).
Efthymiadis, S., “Greek Byzantine Collections of Miracles: A Chronological and Bibliographical Survey,” Symbolae Osloenses 74 (1999), 195-211.
Efthymiadis, S., “Collections of Miracles (Fifth–Fifteenth Centuries),” in S. Efthymiadis (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, II: Genres and Contexts (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 102-42.
Halkin, F., "Publications récentes de textes hagiographiques grecs," Analecta Bollandiana 53 (1935), 374-81, at 376-7 [review of Rupprecht (1935)]
Mango, C., “On the Cult of Saints Cosmas and Damian at Constantinople,” in Θυμίαμα Στη Μνήμν Της Λασκαρίνας Μπούρα, I (Athens 1994), 189-92.
Miller, T.S., “Hospital Dreams in Byzantium,” in Oberhelman 2013, 199-215.
Oberhelman, S.M. (ed.), Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece. From Antiquity to the Present (Farnham and Burlington: Routledge, 2013).
Talbot, A.-M., “Pilgrimage to Healing Shrines: the Evidence of Miracle Accounts,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002), 153-73.
Toul, Ch.I., “Τα Ίάματα τών 'Αγίων Αναργύρων, ” Επετηρίς Εταιρείας Βυζαντινών Σπουδών 42 (1976-1976), 253-75.
van Esbroeck, M., “La diffusion orientale de la légende de sts. Cosme et Damien,” in Hagiographie, Culture et Sociétés (IVe-XIIe siècles). Actes du Colloque organisé Nanterre et Paris 2-5 mai 1979, Etudes augistiniennes (Paris 1981), 61-7.
Wittmann, A., Kosmas und Damian, Kultausbreitung und Volksdevation (Berlin-Bielefeld-Munich 1967).
Julia Doroszewska
16.05.2023
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00033 | Mary, Mother of Christ | Μαρία | Certain | S00385 | Kosmas and Damianos, brothers, physician martyrs of Syria | Κοσμᾶς και Δαμιανός | Certain |
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