The Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos (Rupprecht 18) recount how *Kosmas and Damianos (brothers, physician martyrs of Syria, S00385) in their church in Constantinople cured two men of an influx of the eyes, telling one of them to borrow money and eat chicken, and telling the other to leave their shrine at Cyrrhus, to travel to Constantinople, and to pay money to the first man. Written in Greek, probably in Constantinople, between the 6th c. and the 11th c.; preserved in an Egyptian manuscript of the 11th c.
Evidence ID
E08535
Type of Evidence
Literary - Hagiographical - Collections of miracles
Miracles of Kosmas and Damianos 18 (Rupprecht)
A poor man Thomas came to the shrine of the ‘most wise doctors’ Kosmas and Damianos’ with an influx of the eyes. The saints appeared to him and advised him, in order to be healed, to borrow 20 nomismata from a certain person in order to purchase and eat some chickens (ὄρνεις). The pair then appeared to the same person and asked him to lend Thomas the money. Thomas then received the 20 nomismata and issued a receipt with the saints as guarantors, but when he bought and ate the chickens he remained blind. The saints then reappeared and once again advised borrowing 20 nomismata to buy and eat chickens, but the prescription was again ineffective. The same thing then happened for a third time, and Thomas cursed the saints for burdening him with debt. Meanwhile, another Thomas with the same disease had made recourse to the saints’ shrine at Cyrrhus, in Syria, but the saints appeared to him and told him that he could not obtain a cure there, but had to go their shrine at Blachernae, and there give another Thomas 120 nomismata, and both obtain a cure. The Syrian Thomas then gave his namesake the money, and stays with him overnight in the shrine. The saints then appeared to the Thomas who had received the nomismata, and tell him to give thanks. When he awoke and did so, but a certain attendant grabbed him by the face, accusing him of avarice. Thomas then cried out and the darkness passed from his eyes; the other Thomas likewise was scared by the cry, and also cured.
Text: Rupprecht 1935.
Summary: P. Booth.
This story is absent from the Deubner collection of miracles.
Cult PlacesIncubation
MiraclesMiracle after death
Protagonists in Cult and Narratives
Cult building - independent (church)
Non Liturgical ActivityIncubation
Visiting graves and shrines
MiraclesMiracle after death
Healing diseases and disabilities
Apparition, vision, dream, revelation
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesOther lay individuals/ people
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)
Discussion
As discussed above, this is a very interesting story that suggests a degree of rivalry between different shrines of Kosmas and Damianos, in this case between the Kosmidion of Constantinople and their shrine at Cyrrhus in northern Syria.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).
Record Created By
Philip Booth
Date of Entry
12/04/2024
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00385 | Kosmas and Damianos, brothers, physician martyrs of Syria | Certain |
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