Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
but embraced a whole range of issues both practical and theological.68 Within their narratives, those authors instructed supplicants in various aspects of a cult’s existence, including the most immediate and mundane of demands—not chattering at night, in one memorable tale.69 Here, however, we first focus on one particular concern of all such authors: that is, the provision of appropriate attitudes to Hippocratic medicine. Over time the authors of saints’ miracles became increasingly hostile to secular medicine, but the Miracles of Cyrus and John, while punctuated by intermittent assaults on secular physicians, in fact partakes of a long-established (and orthodox) Christian tradition that attempted not to suppress but rather to include Hippocratic medicine within Christian narratives.70 Sophronius’s complex but careful integration of that medicine reveals him as the most thoughtful of all miracle authors, and at the same time presents his text not as a simple hagiographical narrative but rather, in the words of Christoph von Schönborn, as “a sort of ‘implicit catechism.’”71
Where in earlier collections of healing-saint miracles the failure of doctors to cure a disease is presented as a matter of fact rather than an occasion for comment,72 Sophronius’s Miracles of Cyrus and John is punctuated by (sometimes savage) indictments of secular physicians. The theme is established in the preface and continues unabated to the final, autobiographical notice in which Sophronius describes his own miraculous cure.73 As in the earlier miracle collections, such criticism is often directed at perceived abuses on the part of physicians. Thus in the opening miracle a patient’s doctors, though unable to diagnose the disease, “nevertheless investigated it thoroughly in their desire to be paid, so that they might procure the payment of all payments in silver and a glory better than their credit.”74 In Miracles 32, again, certain doctors “practiced their art upon [the patient], knowing that he would not prevail or banish the illness but nevertheless deceiving the poor man in hope of payments.”75 This critique of medical avarice continues throughout the collection, but most damning, perhaps, is Miracles 69. Sophronius describes how a patient who becomes blind was “no longer able to be a bother to the doctors, not only since he learned that he would no longer see but because he ran out of money with which to service them.”76 In contrast Saints Cyrus and John are anarguroi, “the silverless ones.”77
Sophronius often expounds also upon the uselessness of medical procedures. Confronted with the failure of doctors to relieve a patient in Miracles 19, for example, he says, “Thus [the doctors] show [the disease’s] natural perversity, which no fine-powdered or efficacious remedy, no green-anointed plaster, no antidote ascribed to Philo, nor any other natural aid, either unmixed or made from the combination of different elements, has been able to calm up to this very day.”78 The same is repeated at Miracles 23: “But the doctors could offer no help to Gennadius, even though they used many unguents, various scourings, bloodletting, purges, and all their other aids.”79 Sophronius reserves his most venomous assault, however, for those most celebrated of ancient medical authorities, Hippocrates and Galen. In Miracles 13 (a case of leprosy) Sophronius tells us that “here Hippocrates, Galen, and nature’s bastard brother Democritus were of course useless, and with them those who take pride in their words and offer us their names in place of grand remedies.”80 And again Miracles 19: “But the doctors, and their founders Hippocrates and Galen, clever pride of their profession, are not ashamed to proclaim [that profession] inferior, and not only refuse to wage war on the cancerous disease but even crown it the victor.”81 Throughout the collection, a doctor’s consultation of Hippocrates and Galen, and the application of their recommendations, often prove futile.82
While antagonism toward the medical profession thus pervades Sophronius’s collection, it can nevertheless be mitigated by contextualization. It should be noted from the outset that the Miracles of Cyrus and John makes no attempt to oppose or to obfuscate rational causes of disease, for Sophronius readily recognizes the natural derivation of most somatic disorders. Thus in Miracles 15, elephantiasis is described as “an inhuman disease, which of all the bodily illnesses is the greatest and most bitter.”83 In Miracles 58, a rich and noble man falls into “a difficult illness, for the properties of nature do not spare such men, even if they think they are different from their fellow man because of the aforementioned advantages.”84 And, again, in Miracles 64, a mute is said to suffer from a “congenital illness, not one derived from some other disease over time but produced in him from birth itself.”85 This recognition of natural etiology allows also for the recognition of Hippocratic medicine. Thus in a discussion on dropsy Sophronius states that doctors “are not able to provide any benefit, neither great nor small, to anyone who falls into this condition, nor to bestow any reassurance from their profession, which they do in the case of nearly all other illnesses, healing some perfectly.86 Furthermore, whereas certain (perhaps most) doctors are corrupt charlatans, others nevertheless provide genuine relief. For example, Sophronius describes one Theodore, “a doctor, and of good standing in terms of his profession, and because of this very famous. But through magic he became immobile, and not knowing the cause of his disease, he hurried to heal himself, doing those things that he thought would cure him and that when he had applied had helped those suffering not from magic but from a slackness of the limbs.”87
As the final example makes evident, however, not all diseases are of natural derivation. Some are induced through magic or through demons, and others still are the product of the subject’s spiritual condition.88 The Miracles of Cyrus and John, in fact, sets out an explicit etiological system that distinguishes diseases derived from nature and those derived from sin. The crucial passage concerns a patient suffering from a disease of the testicles:89
But [the patient] was perhaps ashamed at such an illness, and wanted to keep his infirmity hidden; but we have been commanded to feel shame not at the diseases of the body but rather those of the soul. . . . And the Lord said that those sent into eternal shame were not those weighted down by bodily diseases, for he himself has borne our infirmities and our illness [cf. Is. 53:4; Matt. 8:17], but rather those who are sick in the soul and the doers of evil. For some illnesses are involuntary, those of the body and known in relation to the body. Others are voluntary and products of our will [gnomēs hēmeteras kuēmata], those that damage the beauty of the autonomous and intelligent soul [psuchēs autexousiou kai noeras to kallos].
Sophronius thus makes a critical distinction between (unwilled) somatic disease as the product of nature and (willed) psychological disease as the product of sin.90 Thus in the first miracle Sophronius describes how an arrogant young man, Ammonius, was afflicted with scrofula. However, “when [the saints] saw that the young man was proud and carried away toward arrogance in the conceit that comes from wealth, they cured the swelling of his soul before they put an end to the inflammations on his bodily neck.”91 In this particular instance, Ammonius’s psychological sickness (arrogance) is not connected with his physical disease (scrofula), for their remedies are separate.92 Often, however, the two are presented as interdependent, for certain (somatic) diseases are said to be the direct product of divine chastisement for (psychological) sin.93
In all such instances (demons, magic, sin) the consequent diseases lie beyond the competence of Hippocratic medicine. Thus in Miracles 63 when a patient is afflicted by a demon (itself induced through magic), Sophronius offers the typical statement that “The affliction was beyond their [the doctors’] art, for the disease was curable by God alone and his divine healers, those to whom he has bestowed whatever abilities they wish.”94 The saints, however, are able to alleviate all diseases: they are hoi sōmatōn kai psuchōn iatroi, “the doctors of bodies and souls,” “skilled in divine medicine, and not in what makes Hippocrates, Galen, and Democritus its founders—for these men speak from the earth.”95 That superior competence, furthermore, includes those natural infirmities that are nonetheless incurable by man, so that while in certain cases the competences of Hippocratic and divine medicine overlap, that of the former is in the final analysis a mere subset of the all-encompassing power of the saints.96
The careful integration of Hippocratic medicine within Sophronius’s scheme makes further aspects of the Miracles of Cyrus and John less