Saint Andrew the Archbishop of Crete
القدّيس أندراوس أساقفة كريت
Today is Independence Day in America. My feelings about this particular holiday are well-known to my readers, I’m sure. I’ve passed this day in commemoration of a half-Rus’, half-Qypchaq knyaz whom I embrace as a model for my children. I’ve passed this day in commemoration of the British monarchy as an institution. I’ve passed this day in commemoration of the Scriptural witness in defence of monarchy. That should give some idea to my readers of where my loyalties tend to lie. But today I don’t intend to puff out my chest in defiance. I don’t intend to use this holiday as an excuse even for my own pride, perversity and psychosexual dependence on a British past. I think it’s necessary to pass the national holiday in remembrance of another Saint Andrew, whom we also commemorate today on the Church calendar: one of the Orthodox Church’s greatest penitents, one who most truly took his own sins to heart and confessed them before God, comparing himself unfavourably to the very worst transgressors in Scripture. I am speaking, of course, of the eighth-century Archbishop Saint Andrew of Crete.
Saint Andrew, or Andreas, of Crete [L. Andreas Cretensis, Gk. Ἀνδρέας Κρήτης, Ar. ’Andrâws al-Kurîtî أندراوس الكريتي] was not a Cretan by his nativity, but instead a Damascene. He was born in that city, around the year 660, to two observant Orthodox Greco-Syrian parents, Geōrgios and Grēgoria. His parents were much grieved, and worried over him, because for the first seven years of his life he was incapable of speech. Despite this handicap, which no doctor could cure, his parents took him to church and prayed with him. At the age of seven he took the Holy Eucharist for the first time, and was wondrously delivered from his affliction; from that day on he was able to speak.
The young Andrew, perhaps because of his deliverance from muteness by the body and blood of Christ, became intensely interested in theological questions and desired to study the Holy Scriptures. At the age of fourteen he came to the realisation that what he desired was to be free of all earthly and self-interested desires. This being so, he asked his parents to take him to al-Quds and all the holy sites there, so that they might dedicate him to God. His parents did this for him, taking him to the Holy Edicule from which Christ our Lord rose from the dead, and there gave him to the Saviour he dearly loved.
At length he came to the holy house of Dayr Mâr Sâbâ in Palestine (what is now the West Bank), and asked to be admitted as a monk. His conduct among the Sâbâite monks was extraordinary, and he came to earn the admiration of his fellow monks: he was helpful and kind to all, quick to understand and ready to practise what he had learned. His hagiography states that he ‘led a strict and chaste life, he was meek and abstinent, such that all were amazed at his virtue and reasoning of mind’. But the young monk was not puffed up by this, but always inwardly filled with compunction, at all times aware of his idolatry, his unworthiness and sin in the sight of God, who beholds the heart.
It was not long before the Damascene youth came to the attention of the locum tenens Patriarch Theodore of Jerusalem, who was impressed by his comely quietude, and made him a reader in the Church and a secretary to the Patriarchal Office. At the age of twenty he was sent by the Patriarchal Office – locum tenens Patriarch Theodore having reposed in the Lord in the meantime – as part of the delegation from al-Quds to the Sixth Œcumenical Council.
At this council, illuminated by love of God and animated by the zeal for a correct understanding of God, Saint Andrew held forth at length against the monophysites and against the Maronites, who at that time were apparently already under the influence of monothelitism. Saint Andrew, like his Levantine contemporaries Saint Sophronios and Saint Theodore, held forth that Christ had both a divine will, and full agency as a human being, and that these wills coexisted in the same Person ‘without division, alteration, separation or confusion’. At this council, Saint Andrew spoke with clarity and force, out of his deep knowledge of doctrine and his deeper love for Christ. In so doing he apparently left a deep impression upon the Constantinopolitan clergy.
Andrew did not stay long in al-Quds upon his return from the Council. Instead he was summoned back to the great capital city of Eastern Rome, and was elevated to the office of archdeacon at the great Hagia Sophia. At the Hagia Sophia, the archdeacon became renowned for his generosity to the poor. In his management of the orphanage and of the hospice for the elderly attached to the great cathedral, Saint Andrew became known for allotting to orphans and the poor each a double measure of grain and meal. He also expanded the orphanage and hospital buildings because conditions were too crowded. During the first reign of Emperor Justinian II, the Emperor anointed the archdeacon as bishop of Gortyna in Crete.
In Gortyna Saint Andrew continued his attention to improving the material conditions of the poor people under his care. He instructed his priests to be like mirrors, reflecting the luminous grace of the Almighty. He visited the monasteries and ensured that they followed the proper discipline. He renovated old churches that had fallen into disuse, and he built new wayhouses, hospices, schools and homes for orphans. But it was in Gortyna that Saint Andrew’s talent for composing hymns became truly recognised. It was while he was still a young monk at Dayr Mâr Sâbâ that, inspired and humbled by the mercy shown to the sinful figures in the Hebrew Scriptures which he studied so intently, he wrote his Great Penitential Canon. The longest canon ever written, at 250 strophes, the Great Canon is a truly poignant work of confessional literature which is still used in the Orthodox Church during the first week of Great Lent – divided into four methynomy, one methonym is recited on each day from Clean Monday to Clean Thursday, and then again the Canon is read in its entirety on Great Canon Thursday during the fifth week of Lent.
In addition to the Great Penitential Canon, Saint Andrew of Crete is credited also with composing between 23 and 57 canons, although of these 14 may be ascribed to him with certainty. Among these are canons dedicated to the raising of Lazarus, to the conception of the Theotokos by Saint Anna, to the Holy Maccabean Martyrs (a favourite subject of the Antiochian homilists and hymnographers – again testifying to the lingering impact of the early Jewish Christian predilections of that city), and to Saint Ignatios of Antioch.
The Antiochian Church also convincingly attributes to him canons for the Nativity, for the Compline of Palm Sunday, for the first four days of Holy Week, and verses for the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple. As we can see, a great deal of the beauty of Orthodox hymnody in our Liturgical cycle is owing to the personal creative work of Saint Andrew.
Despite Saint Andrew’s invective at the Sixth Œcumenical Council against one particular hæretical Pope of Rome (to wit, Honorius), our separated Roman brothers and sisters nevertheless pay deep and correct honour to Saint Andrew, primarily on account of his devotional writings in praise of the Most Holy Theotokos on the great feast of her Nativity as well as on other occasions.
Although the feast-day of Saint Andrew of Crete is well-established as the fourth of July (that is, the seventeenth of July on the civil calendar in polities which follow the Old Calendar), and though we know that he reposed in Mytilēnē on the isle of Lesvos on his return to Crete from the capital, the actual date of Saint Andrew’s death is unclear. Some sources have it that he reposed in the Lord in 712—others, in 726. In general, Roman Catholic hagiographical sources appear to prefer the latter date.
Many hagiographies of Saint Andrew of Crete, including those on the OCA and the Antiochian Patriarchate websites, state that his remains were translated to Constantinople, and that they were venerated by the fourteenth-century pilgrim and devotional writer Stefan of Novgorod. However, this appears to be an error. It is the result of a historiographical confusion between the Damascene Saint Andrew of Crete whom we commemorate today, and his similarly-named near-contemporary Saint Andrew of Krisei, or ‘of the Crisis’ [Gk. Ἀνδρέας ό ἐν τῇ Κρίσει], an iconophile monk who was arrested, tortured and gruesomely executed by the iconoclast and anti-monastic Emperor Constantine V Koprōnymos on the seventeenth of October, 766 – the day of his commemoration. It is almost certainly this monastic martyr whom Stefan of Novgorod venerated during his visit to Constantinople, and called ‘Saint Andrew of Crete’. The Saint Andrew of Crete whom we venerate today, was interred near where he reposed, in the city of Eressos on the isle of Lesvos, where his shrine exists to this day.
It seems very fitting on a day which is locally consecrated to national pride, that the Orthodox Church in America would encourage us to venerate a humble Church Father, among whose many lasting contributions to our hymnody was a profoundly personal and soul-penetrating expression of contrition and repentance. As an individual, I clearly have much to repent of – including most notably the same sins of personal pride and perversity which Saint Andrew saw within himself. And as a nation we have much to repent of. Let us spare a prayer today for that great adoptive Cretan who would no doubt be the first to agree with and echo the prophetic indictment issued against him and his people in Saint Paul’s epistle to Apostle Titos, and ask him: Holy hierarch Andrew, God-inspired composer and orator of repentance and of the saints’ praises, entreat Christ our God to have mercy upon our unworthy souls!
Apolytikion of Saint Andrew of Crete, Tone 5:
Like the Prophet David,
You sang a new song
In the assembly of the righteous.
As an initiate of the Holy Spirit,
You thundered forth hymns of grace
And the word of righteousness for our salvation,
O Andrew, glory of the Fathers!
Church of Saint Andrew of Crete, Eressos, Greece
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