LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Freely you have received, freely give.

Matthew 10:8

Sts. Cosmas & Damian

Saints Cosmas and Damian were brothers and physicians in Rome, and the Church remembers them by a title that is really a refusal: the Unmercenaries, in Greek the Anargyroi, the moneyless ones. They had been trained in medicine and were good at it, and they treated everyone who came, the poor as readily as the rich, asking nothing in return but that the healed believe in Christ. In a world where a doctor's skill went to the highest bidder, two physicians who healed for free were preaching with their hands, and many who came to be cured of their bodies left having found something for their souls.

There is more than one pair of holy brothers named Cosmas and Damian, which is why the Church keeps three separate commemorations through the year; the two honored on July 1 are the brothers of Rome, who lived in the third century and were put to death for their faith around the year 284, under the emperors Carinus and Numerian. An old and striking tradition holds that they were killed not by the state but by envy: their own former teacher, unable to bear that his pupils had surpassed him, led them into the hills and stoned them.

Their refusal of payment was not a quirk of temperament but a confession. The grace of healing had come to them without cost, and they gave it the same way, taking literally the command Christ gave the apostles: freely you have received, freely give. The Church gathered them, with a handful of other physician-saints, into the company of the Holy Unmercenaries, and invokes them still for the healing of body and soul, especially over the sick.

In the icon the two brothers stand side by side, alike as the twins of tradition, each holding the small box of medicines and the slender instruments of their craft. They are not painted as warriors or as scholars but as working doctors, because that is exactly what made them holy. A physician who serves the poor and asks for nothing is already an image of Christ the Physician, who heals without price, and the brothers spent their lives, and at last their deaths, making that likeness visible.