SAINT ANDREW OF CRETE

Saint Andrew of Crete is the only one of the Church Fathers and great theologians of antiquity who became a truly popular Orthodox saint. The reason for this is the Great Penitential Canon, which is read during Lent. This text is a kind of quintessence of the ascetic reading of the entire Bible by Orthodoxy and an example of the deepest integral genuine stunning repentance. Was this huge text, consisting of 250 penitential hymns, an autobiographical work, or was Saint Andrew simply “trying on” the role of a sinner. Can we, in our postmodern context, proclaim here the “death of the author”?

1 Saint Andrew of Crete was a bishop, liturgical poet, theologian and preacher. In the Orthodox Church, he is best known as the author of the Great Canon of Repentance, which is read and sung during the Lenten service. Thanks to this text, Andrew’s personality in the minds of believers became completely identified with the penitential lines. At the same time, Saint Andrew lived a long life, his biography is very interesting and well documented. The memory of Saint Andrew is celebrated on July 17.

2 Andrew was born around 660 in Damascus and died in 740 on the island of Mytilene. At that time, Damascus was ruled by the Caliph Ali, whom the Islamic tradition calls rightly guided, and the Shiite tradition within Islam considers one of its founding persons. Eighty years passed, Andrew’s entire life, and Emperor Leo II the Isaurian (717-741), who started iconoclasm in Byzantium ruled in Constantinople.

3 The attentive eye cannot fail to notice that, if this chronology is correct, Andrew was born a year before the tragic end of Ali and died a year before the death of Emperor Leo. With the death of Ali, the era of the “rightly guided caliphs” of Islam (630-661) ended, and under Leo, the advance of the Arab armies, whose siege the emperor repelled before the walls of Constantinople, was halted.

4 Quite early, already at the age of 15, that is, around 675, Andrew settled in the monastery at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. According to the canons of the Church, 14 years was already considered the age of majority for men. And in general, people at that time lived very short lives. If in our time such a beginning would be considered a step towards a bishop’s “career”, then, according to the canons of the Ancient Church, monasticism and episcopacy were different paths. Therefore, bishops from among the monastics were rather an exception.

5 Monasticism in its original understanding was devoid of any sacramentality. In other words, it was not perceived as a sacrament. In the understanding of the Ancient Church, monasticism is pure ad hoc (Latin: “here and now”). Sacrament is objectivity. It is irreversible. Thus, baptism and ordination cannot be taken away, and the Eucharist cannot return to the state of ordinary bread and wine. Monasticism is subjective. It is reversible. Even if monasticism cannot be deprived or taken away, it can be lost and renounced through sex, money and power. A monk can de facto become the most ordinary person, even if he or others do not notice it. In Byzantium, monks who renounced their faith were subject to arrest and forced to return to their monasteries. This was not due to theology, but to the fact that, according to the laws of the time, they were considered dead. The ancient fathers were afraid of losing their monastic essence. They feared it like fire. The fear of this loss permeates the Great Canon. Written by Andrew much later, it is characterized by both bitter and joyful monastic experience.

6 In 680, an ecclesiastical synod was held in Constantinople, which later went down in history as the Sixth Ecumenical Council, also known as the Third Council of Constantinople. At this council, the Church condemned the heresy of Monothelitism. Monothelitism asserted that Jesus Christ, was devoid of human will. According to the logic of the Council Fathers, this teaching of the Monothelites meant that Jesus, the Godman, did not have a genuine human will and therefore the will and did not participate in the process of redemption and was not healed. At the time of the Council, Andrew was still too young. However, the theme of the sickness and healing of the human will, would become one of the important elements of the Great Canon.

7 Since Jerusalem was located within the territory of the Caliphate, the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne of Jerusalem, Theodore I (668-692), did not participate in the council of 680. In 685, he sent Andrew, who had then become his secretary, as a delegation to Constantinople to confirm the agreement of the See of Jerusalem with the decrees of the Ecumenical Council. Andrew remained in the capital, where he was appointed deacon at Hagia Sophia.

8 Like our own, Andrew’s time was the “last apocalyptic time.” As a result of the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, which took place after the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451), and the simultaneous fanaticism of the Council’s opponents and the repressive policy of Constantinople against dissenters, Eastern Orthodoxy split into two equally large parts from 519 in Syria and from 537 in Egypt. The centers of these parts were, respectively, Alexandria and Constantinople. These were two equally large Churches, with parallel hierarchies, which literally cursed each other. At the same time, Islam appeared. By the beginning of the eighth century, Arab armies conquered the entire Christian East, the Roman Africa and the Pyrenees, in 674–678 they were already standing at the walls of Constantinople. In his canon, Andrew will often ask the Theotokos God to save the “Great City.”

9 Andrew was a deacon until his appointment as bishop of the Cretan city of Gortyn, about fifty kilometers from Heraklion, in 692. Nearly twenty years had passed. A new ruler, Philippicus (711-713), came to power in Constantinople following a rebellion and was proclaimed emperor. He reinstated the heresy of Monothelitism and, to make it the official confession of the empire and condemn the previous ecumenical council, he convened a new council, which took place in 712. Andrew of Crete participated and signed this heretic abjuration. The great Fathers of the Church, martyrs for the Orthodox faith, Maximus the Confessor (580-662) and Martin of Rome (598-655), did not live long enough to witness these events. Both were killed by Monothelite rulers. Considering their example, such a recantation constituted a great apostasy and, after all they had said and written against the Monothelitism, seemed simply unthinkable.

10 The new emperor whom Andrei was so afraid of, was constantly drunk. Soon he was deposed and blinded. Andrew of Crete deeply repented of his past decision, as he attests in the poem he wrote. The sadness caused by renunciation of God runs through the lines of the Great Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete like an invisible thread of Ariadne. For the Bishop of Crete, an island famous for its intertwining history and mythology, the devil was the real Minotaur and heresies were a labyrinth. “A labyrinth of questions” - as the great theologian and bishop, apologist of the teachings of St. Augustine, Bishop Cornelius Jansenius (1585-1638) once called the thinkers and theologians of the Modern Era. The concept of a labyrinth of meaninglessness and hopelessness will become a key figure of thought in postmodernism.

11 Emperor Leo III the Isaurian has often been demonized by Orthodox historians. But much suggests that he was a man of sincere religiosity. He also sought the cause of the Byzantines’ constant defeats in religion. In 717-718, the second siege of Constantinople by the Arabs continued. Emperor Leo III concluded an alliance with the Bulgarians. He himself was a great military leader. With considerable effort, the city was defended. The victory of this founder of the Isaurian dynasty halted Arab expansion into Asia Minor and Eastern Europe. In 726, Leo III started embarking on the path of iconoclasm. After all, the Muslims, who were constantly winning military victories at that time, were also “iconoclasts,” that is, those who did not accept human religious images. Soon after, Leo III truly began to win victories. This chronological coincidence between the plan to abolish the use of images and the beginning of military successes was a major test for the Church at that time. After all, the Byzantines believed that God was on the side of the Orthodox in battles, if the latter preserved their faith. The Mother of God herself was perceived by them not as the Sorrowful Mother of the Redeemer, a rather Western view, but as a military leader! The opening words of the kontakion of the Akathist Hymn - “O Champion General, we your faithfull inscribe to you the prize of victory” - are proof of this. Thus, Leo saw in his new policy of iconoclasm a way of thanking God for the salvation of the city. Iconoclasm continued in two phases, from 730 to 842. During the iconoclasm in Byzantium many icon-worshippers were killed, Monasteries were ruined, and church artwork was destroyed and burned on a large scale. This was the most brutal and enormous religious fratricide in Orthodox history. Some will mention the “Russian Schism” of the 17th century, but this event was not global.

12 Shortly before his death, Andrew of Crete went to Constantinople. As if to atone for his guilt for the Monothelite renunciation, he preached against the iconoclasts. In 730, together with Patriarch Germanus (+730), Andrew refused to sign the iconoclastic Edict. For his preaching against the emperor’s policy, he was deposed, expulsed, and died in exile.

13 Saint Andrew of Crete has entered the memory of the Church as the “Writer of the Canons.” The Great Penitential Canon is only one of his countless works. Many, but not all, of these are used in worship. This is a truly inexhaustible legacy. Andrew possessed a great poetic gift. Liturgical scholarship recognizes Andrew of Crete not only as an important representative, but also the founder of the liturgical genre of canons. Historically, the canon supplanted the kontakion genre that preceded it. Today, a kontakion is simply a short text expressing the essence of the feast. In the era before Saint Andrew, the kontakion was a type of laudatory liturgical text, extensive, and extremely complex, both technically and philologically.

14 The pinnacle of the kontakion genre is considered to be the work of Romanus the Melodist (485–556). Syrian by birth, originally from Homs, he revealed himself poetically in Constantinople. Even the ruins of the supposed church where Romanus had his famous vision, where he received from God the gift of speech and song, where he celebrated and performed his masterpieces, have been preserved. In celebrating the memory of Saint Andrew of Crete, the Church also remembers his ancient competitor. Almost nothing of the great and remarkable poetic legacy of Saint Romanus the Melodist is used in modern Orthodox worship. But the texts themselves have been partially preserved. In essence, it turns out that in creating his canons, including the Great Canon of Repentance, Saint Andrew took the path of simplification, unwittingly and probably unknowingly, forever excluding his “liturgical competitor.”

15 Unlike the lives of many famous saints, there is little legendary in the life of Saint Andrew that has come down to us. His biography is consequent and plausible. Devoid of the inventions, it is historical, and therefore precious. The biography of the poet of heavenly things is instructively prosaic.

16 “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.” In the Greek original of the Creed, the word “Creator” literally means “Poet.” Reading the Great Canon, the Church cries out: “Holy Father Andrew, pray to God for us.” Andrew was a bishop, preacher and poet. His life tells us that he could not speak until he was seven years old. Something similar happened to Saint Romanus the Melodist. The gift of singing came to Romanus through a vision in which, like the prophets, he received a bitter scroll from above. Andrew was instructed to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ. After this, he, a previously mute child, began to speak. Thus, in Andrew’s tragic and beautiful liturgical works, communion became the birth of poetry in honor of the One God - the Poet of Heaven and Earth, glorified in the saints who both erred and repented.