Robert Wagman

CHAPTER VI

Others do not use oil from the lamps to chase evils away, but [oil] which they themselves have blessed. The author of the Life of St. Theodorus Studitas [relates]:

Having sent over at once some oil which he had blessed, [Theodorus] ordered that the patient be anointed with it. I immediately set out to execute his order myself and anointed the girl’s body. As soon as she was anointed, the girl was healed and relieved of that burning fever.

Others use the water from the washing of the altars on the fifth great holiday, with which the faithful anoint themselves on the very day the washing takes place in the church. Typic. cap. 41:

When these [rites] have been completed, the Bishop stands before the sacred podium, holding the water from the washing of the altar, and anoints all the brethren.

Others, following a custom very similar to that of the ancient church, use as a most efficient remedy for ailments the water from the foot wash of the Twelve, which is celebrated that same day. See again Typicon, cap. 42:

When the prayers are over, they all anoint themselves with the footwash of the brethren.

On the power of holy water against demons and spells and various types of illness, see further in The Rites of the Catholic Church, 1, 21, 4 ff. by Jean Etienne Durant, and in [Jacob] Gretser’s book On Blessings. Others accept another healing remedy against evil which is used not only by Greeks, but by Romans too. When the Sacraments are completed after the rites of the Mass, and the chalice has been washed, they pour into the chalice the water which was left in the ewer, and wash it [again?]. Then they collect the water in the same ewer and bring it to children who are sick, and they care for their own health by drinking it. Appropriately and efficiently they call this apomyroma—as to say that this is the washwater from the true ointment, which is Christ. For the ancients, as attests Dionysius the Areopagite in Ecclesiastic Hierarchy 4, called Christ ‘Ointment’,

since he is like a plentiful well of sweet-smelling divine perceptions, disbursing according to holy proportions the most divine vapors into those minds which are aptest to perceive the forms of God. And the minds, enjoying the pleasure which they experience from these [vapors] and filled with divine perceptions, partake of spiritual nourishment by admitting sweet smelling morsels proportional to the divine participation in their intellectual faculties.

Nor is this any different from the custom of the priest’s handwashing after mass, which they say was once customary in the West. The abbot of Cassino Desiderius, who later became Pope Victor III, writes in his Dialogues that in the city of Lucca, the rumor spread that anybody could keep off fever, if they drank from the water which poured from the hands of the chief monk John, famous for his sanctity, when he washed them after Mass. Seized by fever, Pope Alexander also ordered that they secretly bring him some of that water and, upon drinking from it, immediately regained his former health. Leo of Ostia writes, in ch. 35 of his Chronicum, that the very same Pope Alexander, among other miracles performed before his death, healed a lame woman at Aquinum, by giving her to drink the water in which he had washed his hands after Mass. These indeed are some examples of that piety which still stands out in the Greek nation.

NOTES

Forthcoming