Ss. Cosmæ et Damiani Martyrum — A Life, for their feast on the twenty-seventh day of September — III classis
Et omnis turba quærebat eum tangere: quia virtus de illo exibat, et sanabat omnes. “And all the multitude sought to touch him, for virtue went out from him, and healed all.” — Gospel of the Mass Sapientiam, Luke 6:19
I. What can be known, and what is only told
Every priest who has offered the Roman Mass has spoken their names. They stand in the Communicantes of the Canon, at the end of the list of martyrs, after John and Paul and before omnium Sanctorum tuorum; they are invoked in the Litany of the Saints; their basilica has stood in the Roman Forum for fourteen hundred years. Few saints are named more often in the liturgy of the Latin Church, and of few do we know less that a historian would sign his name to.
It is best to say this at the beginning, because the life of Cosmas and Damian is a lesson in how the Church handles such cases. The documentary core is small and solid: two Christian physicians, brothers, who practised their art without taking payment, suffered martyrdom at Aegeae in Cilicia in one of the last persecutions, and were buried at Cyrrhus in Syria, where their tomb became a place of healing known across the Christian world by the fifth century. Around that core grew a great deal of legend, so much that the Greek Church came to venerate not one pair of brothers but three — an Asian pair who died in peace, a Roman pair who were stoned, and an Arabian pair martyred in Cilicia — and keeps each on its own day. The Roman Church has always kept one pair and one day, and has chosen the Cilician account.
What follows distinguishes, as honestly as it can, between what is attested, what is strongly held by tradition, and what is simply told. The Church asks belief in none of the legends. She asks only that we honour two men who gave their skill for nothing and their lives for Christ, and she has asked it of every Catholic at every Mass for more than a thousand years.
II. Arabia, and the harbour of Aegeae
The tradition, which the Roman Martyrology follows, makes them brothers — twins, most accounts say — born in Arabia, which to a Roman of the third century meant the province east of the Jordan and the desert lands beyond it. They were educated in Syria in the science of medicine, which the Greek world had brought to a high degree of learning, and they settled to practise it in Aegeae, a prosperous seaport on the Gulf of Issus in Cilicia, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey.
They were, by every account, very good at it. And they would take no money for it.
This is the one fact about them that every tradition, Eastern and Western, preserves without variation, and it is the fact by which the Greeks named them: anargyroi, “the silverless,” the unmercenary physicians. They treated the rich and the poor alike and accepted from neither. They treated beasts as well as men. And they did so, the accounts are clear, not from indifference to money but as an act of religion: they had read in the Gospel the charge that Our Lord laid on the Twelve when He sent them to heal the sick — gratis accepistis, gratis date, “freely have you received, freely give” (Matt. 10:8) — and they took it as addressed to physicians.
It was also, in a pagan city, a form of preaching. A man who will not be paid must be asked why, and the answer they gave was the Name of Christ. The tradition credits them with many conversions made at the bedside, and it is easy to believe: the most persuasive argument for the Gospel in the third century was, as it is now, a Christian who behaved as though it were true.
III. The three eggs of Palladia
One story from the legend deserves to be told, not because it can be verified — it cannot, and it belongs to the Asian cycle of the Greek tradition rather than to the Roman account — but because it shows how seriously the brothers’ refusal of payment was taken by the Christians who remembered them.
A woman named Palladia, the story goes, had been healed by them of a long illness, and pressed on Damian a small gift of three eggs, in the name of the Holy Trinity. He refused. She begged him, adjuring him by God, and at last he took them, because he would not have her go away grieved. Cosmas, learning of it, was so troubled that his brother had broken their rule that he gave instructions that when he died he should not be buried beside Damian. Years later, when both were dead and the Christians were uncertain what to do, a camel — one of the beasts the brothers had healed — spoke with a human voice and told them that Damian had taken the gift not for gain but for charity, and that the two should lie together. And so they were buried in one tomb.
It is a tale, and has the shape of one. But it says two things that the plainer sources confirm: that the brothers’ gratuity was a matter of conscience and not of temperament, and that the Christians who told their story could not imagine them apart.
IV. Armabit creaturam: under Diocletian
When the great persecution came under Diocletian at the opening of the fourth century (some accounts place the martyrdom earlier, about the year 287), two Christian physicians of public reputation in a port city could hardly escape notice. They were arrested and brought before the governor of Cilicia, whom the Acts name Lysias, and ordered to sacrifice. They refused.
The Roman Martyrology, in its entry for the twenty-seventh of September, summarises what the Acts go on to relate: that after chains and prison, after being cast into the sea and into the fire, after crucifixion and stoning and arrows, all of which by the power of God they overcame, they were at last beheaded; and that with them are said to have suffered their three brothers, Anthimus, Leontius, and Euprepius.
The catalogue has the form common to the passions of this period, in which each torment fails in turn until the sword completes what the martyr has already offered, and historians are right to read it with caution. But the Church, in setting the Epistle of this Mass, has given us the key to reading it as she reads it. The lesson is from the fifth chapter of the Book of Wisdom:
“But the just shall live for evermore: and their reward is with the Lord, and the care of them with the most High. Therefore shall they receive a kingdom of glory, and a crown of beauty at the hand of the Lord: for with his right hand he will cover them, and with his holy arm he will defend them. And his zeal will take armour, and he will arm the creature for the revenge of his enemies.” (Wis. 5:16-18)
Et armabit creaturam ad ultionem inimicorum. The sea that would not drown them, the fire that would not burn them, the arrows that — the Acts say — turned back upon the archers: these are the creation taking the side of its Creator’s friends, as the Book of Wisdom promised it would. Whether or not every detail happened as told, the account is saying something true: that the world is not neutral ground, and that the men who had spent their lives restoring bodies to the order God made them for found that order ranged beside them at the end.
V. The tomb at Cyrrhus
Their bodies were carried to Cyrrhus, a city in the hills of northern Syria, and there the cult took root that would carry their names across the whole Church.
By the fifth century the tomb at Cyrrhus was known as a place where the sick were healed. St. Gregory of Tours, writing in Gaul in the late sixth century, records in his book on the glory of the martyrs that the sick who came to the brothers’ tomb and prayed there in faith were healed, and that the saints appeared to some of them in sleep to prescribe a remedy. The practice he describes — sleeping in the sanctuary in the hope of a healing visitation — was an old one in the ancient world, practised at the temples of Asclepius; the Christians of the East took it up at the shrines of the unmercenary saints, and it is a small instance of a large truth. The Church does not destroy the natural longing of man for healing. She tells him where it was always pointing.
In the sixth century the Emperor Justinian, gravely ill, attributed his recovery to their intercession. The historian Procopius records what followed: Justinian rebuilt and fortified Cyrrhus in their honour, and enlarged and adorned their church at Constantinople, the Kosmidion, which became one of the great pilgrimage shrines of the imperial city.
VI. In the Forum
The cult came early to Rome and entered deeply into it.
The Liber Pontificalis credits Pope Symmachus, at the beginning of the sixth century, with an oratory in their honour beside St. Mary Major. Then, between 526 and 530, Pope St. Felix IV did something that had never been done in Rome: he took two buildings of the pagan Forum — a hall of Vespasian’s Forum of Peace and the round vestibule beside it on the Sacred Way — obtained them from the Ostrogothic court, and consecrated them together as a church of Cosmas and Damian. It was the first Christian church in the Forum itself.
The apse mosaic he placed there survives, restored many times but still recognisably his. Christ stands above a sea of crimson and blue clouds, His hand raised; on either side the Apostles Peter and Paul lead forward the two physicians, who carry the crowns of their martyrdom toward Him; beside them stand St. Theodore and the Pope himself with a model of the church; beneath, the twelve sheep come out from Bethlehem and Jerusalem toward the Lamb. The Eastern healers are presented to the Lord of glory by the princes of the Roman Church. There could be no plainer image of how completely Rome had adopted them.
The basilica became one of the stations of the Roman Lent. On the Thursday of the third week, when Pope St. Gregory II in the eighth century gave Mass to the Lenten Thursdays, the station was set at Ss. Cosmas and Damian, and the Mass assigned to it still bears their mark. Its Introit — Salus populi ego sum, “I am the salvation of the people” — was plainly chosen for a church of physicians, since salus is both salvation and health. Its Collect was borrowed from the ancient Roman sacramentary’s Mass of their feast, and still speaks of their beata solemnitas in the middle of Lent. Anyone who has prayed the traditional Lenten Mass of that Thursday has kept their feast without knowing it.
And they entered the Canon. How and when the names in the Communicantes were fixed is a question the liturgical historians still debate; but by the time of St. Gregory the Great the list stood as it stands now, and Cosmas and Damian had been placed among the Roman martyrs whose intercession is asked at the heart of every Mass.
VII. The saints of the healing hand
The Middle Ages loved them, and loved them particularly as the patrons of those who heal.
Physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries took them for their own. The surgeons of Paris formed their confraternity under the title of Saint Côme, and for centuries the surgical college of Paris bore his name. In Florence, the Medici — whose very name means “physicians,” and whose great patriarch was christened Cosimo — made the brothers their household patrons, so that Cosmas and Damian stand in painting after painting of the Florentine Renaissance, most beautifully in the altarpiece Fra Angelico painted for the Medici at San Marco.
That altarpiece carries in its predella the most famous of all the legends told of them, which the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine spread through the whole of Europe. A sacristan of their church in Rome, the story runs, lay dying of a cancerous leg. As he slept in the church, the two saints came to him with ointments and instruments; they cut away the diseased limb and, taking the leg of a man who had died that day and been buried in the cemetery of St. Peter in Chains — a Moor, whose skin was dark — they joined it to the sacristan’s body and anointed the wound. He woke whole, with one leg white and one black. It is a legend, not a record; but it was painted a hundred times, and the painters understood what it meant. The healing of Christ does not merely patch what is broken. It gives a man what he could not have supplied for himself, taken from where he would never have looked.
VIII. Virtus de illo exibat
The Mass the Roman Missal assigns to their feast is the Mass Sapientiam of the Common of Many Martyrs — Sapientiam sanctorum narrent populi, et laudes eorum nuntiet ecclesia, “Let the people shew forth the wisdom of the saints, and the church declare their praise” (Ecclus. 44:15). But its Gospel seems to have been chosen for physicians.
St. Luke describes Our Lord coming down from the mountain where He had passed the night in prayer and chosen the Twelve, and standing in a plain amid a great multitude “from all Judea and Jerusalem, and the sea coast both of Tyre and Sidon, who were come to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases.” Et omnis turba quærebat eum tangere: quia virtus de illo exibat, et sanabat omnes — “And all the multitude sought to touch him, for virtue went out from him, and healed all” (Luke 6:17-19). Then, lifting up His eyes on His disciples, He began the Beatitudes: “Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
The order is instructive. First the healing, then the teaching; first the body touched, then the soul addressed. Cosmas and Damian practised medicine in exactly that order, and for exactly that reason. They healed because Christ healed, and they would not be paid because the power that went out from Him was not sold. Their skill was their own, gained by study; but they understood it as a gift, and they gave it in the manner in which the Giver gives. And the Gospel’s last words are the martyrs’ own portrait: “Blessed shall you be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. Be glad in that day and rejoice; for behold, your reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6:22-23).
IX. The feast in the calendar
The Roman Church has kept their feast on the twenty-seventh of September since the age of the ancient sacramentaries, and the traditional calendar keeps it there still, as a feast of the third class, in red vestments, with the Mass Sapientiam. In the reformed calendar of 1969 it was moved to the twenty-sixth, to leave the twenty-seventh to St. Vincent de Paul. The Byzantine Churches keep their three pairs of unmercenaries on the first of July, the seventeenth of October, and the first of November.
When the twenty-seventh falls on a Sunday, as it does this year, the Mass of the Sunday takes precedence and the martyrs are commemorated.
Their relics are claimed in many places — at their basilica in Rome, in the church of St. Michael at Munich, among the Poor Clares of the Descalzas Reales at Madrid, and elsewhere — as befits saints whose cult was carried by physicians and pilgrims into every corner of Christendom.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That a man’s work can be his gift to God. Cosmas and Damian were not called away from their profession to serve Christ; they served Him in it and by it. They did not stop being physicians in order to be saints. They became saints by being physicians in a particular way — without greed, without distinction of persons, and in the Name of Jesus. Most Christians are called to holiness exactly so, and the brothers show how far that road can go: to the altar of every church in the Latin world.
That what we have freely received we must freely give. Not every Christian can refuse all payment for his labour, and the Church has never required it; the labourer is worthy of his hire. But every Christian has received gifts — of skill, of knowledge, of time, of health — that he did not earn, and there is some portion of each that he is bound to give away. The anargyroi are the living commentary on gratis accepistis, gratis date. They ask us where in our own lives we have kept a price on what was given to us for nothing.
That those who heal the body are servants of the Healer of souls. The Fathers never tired of calling Christ the physician — St. Augustine returns to the image again and again: the humble Physician who came down to the sick man, and took the medicine Himself that the patient was afraid to drink. The unmercenary saints are that image made visible in the lives of men. They restored bodies in order to point to the One who restores the whole man, and at the end they gave up their own bodies for Him, confident that the just shall live for evermore, and that the Lord who covered them with His right hand would raise up what the sword had cut down.
Practice
Examine. What gift have I received freely — a skill, a trade, an education, a store of knowledge — that I have only ever given at a price? Where have I made the poor wait while I served those who could repay me?
Do. Give one act of your competence away this week, to someone who cannot return it: an hour of professional help, a skill taught, a repair made, a sick person visited. If you work in medicine or nursing, offer the day’s labour explicitly to God under the patronage of these two saints.
Pray. The Collect of the feast:
Præsta, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Cosmæ et Damiani natalitia colimus, a cunctis malis imminentibus, eorum intercessionibus, liberemur. Per Dominum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who keep the heavenly birthday of Thy holy Martyrs Cosmas and Damian may, by their intercession, be delivered from all evils that threaten us. Through our Lord.”
Devote. At the next Mass you attend, listen for their names in the Canon, and make a silent act of thanksgiving for every physician, nurse, and caregiver who has ever tended you. For the sick, offer the Sorrowful Mysteries, dwelling on the Fifth, where the Physician of souls takes the whole wound of the world into His own Body; or pray, simply, Sancti Cosma et Damiane, orate pro nobis over one who is ill.
If you wish to go deeper: the Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Roman Canon and the ancient list of martyrs in the Communicantes*, and the Lenten station at their basilica in the Forum. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the other healing saints — Luke the physician, Pantaleon, Camillus de Lellis — and the East-West Comparative thread treats the Byzantine unmercenaries and the three pairs of brothers of the Greek calendar.*
Sancti Cosma et Damiane, medici gratuiti et Martyres Christi, orate pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Roman Martyrology, 27 September; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), s.v. “Sts. Cosmas and Damian”; Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum*; Procopius,* De aedificiis*; the* Liber Pontificalis*; Jacobus de Voragine,* Legenda aurea*; and the historical literature on the basilica of Ss. Cosmas and Damian in the Roman Forum. Legendary material is identified as such in the text.*