Saint Andrew of Crete (660-740)

Like many Fathers, Andrew bears several names, each marking a stage of his life. Tradition first calls him Andrew of Jerusalem (ho Hierosolymítēs), because it was in the Holy City that he became a monk and was formed^[7]. Then Andrew of Crete (ho Krḗtēs), after the Church of which he was archbishop and where he completed his work. And finally Andrew the melodist (ho Mélōdós), “the cantor” — a title that says the essential: above all, Andrew was a poet of the liturgy.

These surnames distinguish him from his namesakes — foremost among them the apostle Andrew, brother of Peter. The Andrew discussed here is no first-century apostle: he is a man of the seventh and eighth centuries, a contemporary of the great Greek theologians of the end of the patristic age, and one of the last links in that golden chain running from the Desert Fathers to Saint John Damascene.

Damascus, an Arab Christian family

Andrew was born about 660 in Damascus, then recently come under Muslim rule, into an Arab Christian family^[8][9]. This detail is not incidental. Seventh-century Syria was a land where Greek, Syriac and Arab Christianity coexisted under the nascent caliphate; from this same crucible would emerge, a generation later, John Damascene, also a Damascene and likewise the son of a Christian family serving the administration. Andrew belonged to that Eastern Christian elite which, under Islam, kept the faith and supplied the Byzantine Church with some of its greatest minds.

The muteness healed by the Eucharist

A hagiographical tradition, handed down by the Byzantine menologia, reports that Andrew was born mute and remained so until the age of seven: he recovered his speech on the day he received Holy Communion for the first time^[10]. The Eastern Church sees in this the foretelling of his vocation: the man who would become one of the Church’s greatest cantors received his voice from the very Body of Christ. Its spiritual meaning is clear: Andrew’s speech was entirely a Eucharistic gift — and it is no surprise that his whole life was spent returning it to God in canticles.

Monk at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

At about fourteen or fifteen years of age, Andrew left Damascus for Jerusalem and entered as a monk the monastery attached to the church of the Holy Sepulchre^[11][12]. Some sources connect him with the famous lavra of Saint Sabbas, the great monastic hearth of the Judean desert^[13]; the ancient notices diverge, but all agree on the setting: monastic Palestine, the direct heir of the Desert Fathers, at the very moment it was producing its last great doctors.

Young, learned and fervent, Andrew was formed there in asceticism, Scripture and psalmody. It was there, in the prayer of the monks of the Holy Land, that he acquired the intimate knowledge of the Psalms and the biblical canticles that would later irrigate his entire poetic work. He was soon noticed: he became secretary, or notary, of the patriarchal see of Jerusalem.

The embassy of 685 and the Sixth Ecumenical Council

The event that changed the course of his life was a diplomatic mission. In 685, Theodore, Patriarch of Jerusalem, sent him to Constantinople to congratulate Emperor Constantine IV (“Pogonatus”) and to convey the adherence of the Church of Jerusalem to the decrees of the Sixth Ecumenical Council — the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681)^[14][15].

That council had just condemned Monothelitism, the heresy denying that in Jesus Christ there is a true human will alongside his divine will. It was the crowning of the doctrinal combat waged, at the cost of his life, by Saint Maximus the Confessor. The young Andrew of Jerusalem thus entered history at the very moment when the Church solemnly sealed the faith of the two wills of Christ — the same faith he would betray for an instant, then confess anew, twenty-seven years later.

Deacon of Hagia Sophia, servant of orphans and the elderly

His mission accomplished, Andrew remained in Constantinople. Ordained deacon of the basilica of Hagia Sophia, he was entrusted, under Emperor Leontius (about 695–698), with the administration of the orphanage of the capital, then of a hospice for the elderly^[16][17]. The future poet of tears thus began by serving, for years on end, the littlest ones: children without families and old people without strength.

This passage through concrete charity is no decorative detail of his biography. It sheds light on his whole spirituality: the man who would sing God’s mercy toward the sinner had first exercised it, with his own hands, toward the poor of his city. The compunction he would teach was never disembodied; it had the flesh of the works of mercy.

Metropolitan of Gortyna, in Crete

Toward the end of the seventh century or the very beginning of the eighth, Andrew was elected metropolitan — archbishop — of Gortyna, the ecclesiastical capital of Crete^[18][19]. Gortyna was then an important city, seat of the primate of the island, endowed with a great basilica dedicated to Saint Titus, the disciple of Saint Paul appointed first bishop of Crete^[20].

As pastor, builder and preacher, Andrew governed his Church for decades. Tradition credits him with building churches and charitable institutions, and above all with an intense activity of preaching: most of his homilies date from this period. It was also at Gortyna that he composed, in all likelihood, the bulk of his hymnographic work, including the Great Canon.

The fall of 712 and the return to orthodoxy

Then came the most painful — and most instructive — trial of his life. In 711, the usurper Philippicus Bardanes seized the throne of Byzantium and set about restoring the Monothelitism condemned thirty years earlier. He convened in 712 a conciliabule which abolished the decrees of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. Andrew, Metropolitan of Gortyna, took part in it and subscribed to it^[21][22].

It must be said without evasion: this was a fall. The pastor who had entered history by carrying to Constantinople Jerusalem’s adherence to the council of 681 had just, under imperial pressure, subscribed to the Monothelitism condemned by that same council. Andrew had, that day, his fall — as Peter had his.

But the story does not end with the fall. When Philippicus was overthrown in June 713 and orthodoxy restored, Andrew confessed his error and returned to the full communion of the Church^[23][24]. Tradition even reports that he afterwards composed hymns to repair his fault. Far from erasing this embarrassing passage, the Church preserved it: for it reveals the truth of the man and the depth of his penance.

“Where shall I begin to weep for the actions of my wretched life? What beginning shall I make, O Christ, for my present lamentation?” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Great Canon, first troparion^[25]

This opening cry of the Great Canon takes on, in the light of 712, a deeply moving resonance. Andrew does not speak of sin from the outside, as a moralist: he weeps over his own “wretched actions”. The greatest chant of penance in the Christian East may have been written, or taken up again, by a man who knew exactly what it is to fall and to rise again.

Death at Lesbos, on 4 July

Andrew died on 4 July, about 740 — the proposed dates range from 712 to 740 (712, 720, 726 or 740 according to the notices), without the sources allowing a decision^{[26][27][28][29]}. He died at Eresos (today Skala Eresou), on the island of Lesbos, while returning from Constantinople to his Crete^[30][31]. According to one tradition, this last journey to the capital was connected with his resistance to the first iconoclast measures of Emperor Leo III, who promulgated in 726 a first edict ordering the destruction of images and then, after the revolt of 727, a still severer edict in 730^[32]; Andrew would thus have died, in a sense, on the road of fidelity.

His relics were afterwards transferred to Constantinople: the Russian pilgrim Stephen of Novgorod testifies to having venerated them there about 1349^[33]. The Church celebrates his memory on the very day of his death, 4 July.

From kontakion to canon

To measure what the East owes to Andrew, one must understand a quiet but immense liturgical revolution. Before him, the great genre of Byzantine liturgical poetry was the kontakion — a long sung homily, in successive stanzas all modelled on the same melody, of which Saint Ephrem the Syrian in the East and Romanos the Melodist in Constantinople had been the masters.

Andrew introduced — or at least fixed and imposed — a new genre: the canon (kanṓn, “rule”)^[45][46]. Where the kontakion unfolded a continuous narrative, the canon is an architecture: a series of distinct odes, each with its own melody (the heirmos), grafted onto the biblical canticles of the Old and New Testaments. The form thus espouses Scripture itself.

“He is credited with the invention — or at least the introduction into Greek liturgical services — of the canon, a new form of hymnody.” — after the Catholic Encyclopedia, article “St. Andrew of Crete”^[47]

The nine odes and the biblical canticles

The classical canon comprises nine odes, corresponding to the nine great biblical canticles already sung in the office by tradition: the canticle of Moses after the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 15), that of Moses in Deuteronomy (Dt 32), the canticle of Hannah (1 Samuel 2), those of Habakkuk, Isaiah and Jonah, that of the three young men in the furnace (Daniel 3), and finally the Magnificat of the Virgin and the Benedictus of Zechariah (Luke 1)^[48].

Each ode opens with a heirmos, a model stanza setting the tone and metre, then chains several troparia on the same pattern. Andrew’s invention is therefore, at bottom, profoundly biblical: he does not lay poetry over prayer; he makes the whole of sacred history the weft of praise. It is this structure, perfected after him by John Damascene and the Studite school, that would become the backbone of the Byzantine office.

A cathedral of tears in 250 troparia

Among the many canons composed by Andrew, one alone eclipsed all the others: the Great Canon (in Greek Mégas Kanṓn). Its scope is unique: about 250 troparia spread over the nine odes — a length such that, says the Catholic Encyclopedia, it has “passed into a proverb with the Greeks”^[49][50]. No other canon approaches this scale; it is a veritable verbal cathedral raised for a single object: penance.

The Great Canon is no festal hymn. It is a long sung examination of conscience, a descent of the soul into itself, in which each troparion brings the sinner back to his own misery and to God’s mercy. The spirituality animating it is that of compunction — the penthos of which Saint John Climacus, his almost exact contemporary, made the heart of The Ladder of Divine Ascent: the gift of tears that purifies the heart and, in the same movement, consoles it.

The soul’s dialogue with itself

The spiritual originality of the Great Canon lies in its form: it is not first a prayer addressed to God, but a dialogue of the soul with itself. Andrew addresses himself, wakes himself, scolds himself, begs himself to return to God before it is too late. The “I” of the poem is universal: every believer who sings it makes it his own.

“Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Great Canon, refrain repeated after each troparion^[51]

This refrain, taken up after each of the two hundred and fifty troparia, accompanied by prostrations, gives the Great Canon its haunting rhythm of supplication. The body itself prays: one prostrates, rises, prostrates again, like the soul that falls and stands up again. The form exactly espouses the content — penance is not a feeling, it is a movement of the whole being.

The whole Bible summoned for penance

The most striking device of the Great Canon is its penitential re-reading of all Scripture. Andrew reviews the great figures of the Old and New Testaments — not to tell their history, but to behold himself in them. Before each figure, the soul compares itself: have I sinned like Adam? killed my brother like Cain? or have I risen again like David, been converted like the Samaritan woman, saved at the last hour like the good thief?

“I have rivalled in transgression Adam the first-formed, and I have seen myself stripped of God, of the eternal kingdom and of its delights, because of my sins.” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Great Canon, ode 1^[52]

Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, Jonah, then the publican, the prodigal son, the sinful woman, the good thief: the whole gallery of sacred history files past, summoned as a mirror. Condensed into a single poem, it is the Catholic conviction that all Scripture speaks of me and of my salvation. Andrew does not quote the Bible: he plunges into it and plunges us into it.

“My soul, O my soul, arise! Why do you sleep? The end draws near, and you will be troubled. Watch, then, that Christ God, who is everywhere present and fills all things, may spare you.” — kontakion (tone 6) sung during the office of the Great Canon^[53]

When is the Great Canon sung?

The Great Canon holds a unique place in the Byzantine liturgical year, entirely concentrated on Great Lent, the season of penance before Easter^[54][55]:

The Thursday of the fifth week even bears a name: the “Station of Saint Mary of Egypt”. At that precise moment of Lent, when weariness threatens and the fast weighs heavy, the Eastern Church offers this long chant to rekindle fervour — just as, in the same Lent, it offers Saint John Climacus on the fourth Sunday. The two great masters of compunction thus answer one another at the heart of the ascent to Easter.

Why the Great Canon still speaks

The Great Canon has not aged, because the condition it describes has not changed. It takes the sinner as he is — distracted, drowsy, forgetful — and shakes him: “My soul, O my soul, arise!” It refuses both despair and false peace. No despair, for mercy is always offered; no false peace, for sin is real and the end draws near.

It is also a summit of biblical prayer: by parading the whole of sacred history as a mirror of the soul, Andrew teaches a way of reading Scripture that is neither erudite nor sentimental, but existential. To read the Bible is to recognise oneself in it. In this, the Great Canon is the exact liturgical counterpart of what the Desert Fathers practised in silence: the ruminatio of the Word until it becomes examination of conscience and prayer.

Some forty surviving homilies

Andrew was not only a poet: he was a preacher of the first rank. Tradition attributes to him some fifty prose works, including forty or so authentic or probable homilies^[56]. Many celebrate the great feasts of Christ and the Virgin; others explicitly defend the cult of the holy images, at the dawn of the iconoclast crisis.

His Marian homilies rank among the oldest and most beautiful of all Greek patristics. They are a precious source for the history of Marian dogma: in them are found, in germ, the intuitions the Church would develop centuries later concerning Mary’s singular holiness. Andrew is thus one of the witnesses of that Eastern Marian faith documented in the articles on the Marian dogmas.

The Nativity of Mary, dawn of salvation

His famous homily for the Nativity of the Virgin is a cosmic chant of joy. In it Andrew sees Mary’s birth as the beginning of salvation, the bridge between the Old and New Testaments, the dawn announcing the great Day. The tone is jubilant, almost liturgical in its scansion of “Today”.

“Let all creation sing and dance, let it contribute its best to the joy of this day. Let heaven and earth form today a single assembly.” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Homily for the Nativity of the Virgin Mary^[57]

“Today is raised up the created sanctuary in which the Creator of the universe will dwell; and a creature, by this wholly new disposition, is prepared to offer the Creator a sacred dwelling.” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Homily for the Nativity of the Virgin Mary^[58]

Mary, the “created sanctuary” in which the Uncreated will dwell: the formula sums up the whole theology of the Incarnation. Andrew articulates the birth of the Virgin with the central mystery of the faith — God made man to divinise man.

“In this lies the essence of Christ’s benefits; here the mystery is manifested, nature is renewed: God became man and the assumed man is divinised.” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Homily for the Nativity of the Virgin Mary^[59]

This last sentence is one of the finest patristic statements of divinisation (theōsis), that heart of Greek soteriology: the Word became man so that man might become God by grace. Here Andrew joins the great tradition of Athanasius and of Maximus the Confessor.

The homilies on the Dormition

Andrew also left three homilies for the Dormition of the Virgin^[60], among the oldest great liturgical testimonies of this feast in the East. In them he celebrates Mary’s passage from earth to heaven, her glorification beside her Son, and her spiritual motherhood over the Church. These texts, like those of his younger contemporary John Damascene, rank among the patristic foundations of the belief later defined as dogma in the Assumption of the Mother of God.

Compunction, sister of mercy

Andrew’s whole spirituality holds in a single word: compunction, the penthos that is no sterile sadness but a turning of the heart. Far from locking the soul in guilt, Andrew’s penance always issues into mercy: one weeps for one’s sins because one believes in forgiveness. The very refrain of the Great Canon — “Have mercy on me, O God” — is an act of faith in God’s goodness as much as an admission of fault.

That is why Andrew is, with John Climacus and Ephrem the Syrian, one of the three great masters of the spirituality of tears in the Christian East. All three understood that the gift of tears is a visitation of God, and that the contrite heart is not a crushed heart, but a heart made tender, ready to love.

The defender of the holy images

Andrew’s last years coincide with the beginning of the first iconoclast crisis, unleashed by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian about 726–730^[61]. Several of his homilies defend the legitimate cult of the holy images^[62], in the line that would triumph at the Second Council of Nicaea (787) — the seventh ecumenical council, which solemnly restored the veneration of icons as distinct from the adoration due to God alone^[63] — and which John Damascene would develop magisterially. The tradition that his last journey to Constantinople was linked to this resistance makes him, in his own way, a forerunner of the confessors of the icon — foremost among them his younger successor Saint Theodore the Studite.

The feast of 4 July

The Church commemorates Saint Andrew of Crete on 4 July, the day of his death: his name stands in the Roman Martyrology on that date^[64], and the Byzantine calendars honour him as “Andrew of Crete, the melodist”, one of the greatest cantors of the Church^[65][66]. He did not receive the formal title of Doctor of the Church, reserved to a restricted circle, but his spiritual authority in the East is immense.

The Roman Martyrology, on 4 July, commemorates Saint Andrew of Crete, bishop of Gortyna, at Eresos on the island of Lesbos — praised for the singular art of his prayers, hymns and canticles, and for his exaltation of the Virgin Mother of God^[67].

⚠️ Not to be confused. On 17 October, the Byzantine calendar honours another saint of the same name, Andrew of Crete called en Krisei, a monk martyred at Constantinople in 766 or 767, by order of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V Copronymus, for publicly denouncing the persecution of the images^[68]. This iconodule martyr is not the hymnographer archbishop of Gortyna treated in this article.

The relics and the memory

Transferred to Constantinople, Andrew’s relics were venerated there for centuries, as the pilgrim Stephen of Novgorod attests in the fourteenth century^[69]. His name has remained attached, throughout the Orthodox world, to the Great Canon: to sing “the canon of Saint Andrew” is, each Lent, a spiritual experience that millions of the faithful still renew today.

A master for the East — and beyond

Andrew’s influence reaches far beyond his Crete. By inventing the canon, he gave the East the hymnographic form that would structure its offices to this day; by composing the Great Canon, he bequeathed to Christendom one of its greatest texts of penance. His generation — that of John Damascene, of Germanus of Constantinople, of John Climacus — is the last great flowering of the Greek patristic age. Andrew of Crete is one of its jewels: a bishop who knew how to fall and to rise again, and who made his own penance a chant for all.

Andrew speaks to our time first through his truth about sin and forgiveness. In an age that hesitates between denying fault and paralysing guilt, he teaches the right way: acknowledge one’s sin without despairing, because God’s mercy is greater than any fault. The Great Canon is, in this sense, a school of hope for whoever is discouraged by relapses.

Next, through his way of praying the Bible. By parading the whole of sacred history as a mirror of the soul, he shows that Scripture is not a book of the past, but a word that concerns me, here and now. Learning to recognise oneself in Adam, David or the good thief is learning to read Scripture as a Christian.

Finally, through the example of his reconciled life. Andrew is no stainless saint: he subscribed to Monothelitism in 712, under duress, before retracting and confessing the faith anew. His holiness is not that of the man who never fell, but of the one who rose again — and who turned his fall into a chant. That is perhaps the most consoling lesson of his entire legacy.

“O Most Clement, receive me through penance, restore me through knowledge, lest I become the prey of the Enemy; O Saviour, have mercy on me.” — Saint Andrew of Crete, Great Canon^[70]

• Saint John Climacus (579–649) — the author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Andrew’s contemporary and a master of the same compunction (penthos); he too is read at the heart of the Byzantine Great Lent.
• Saint John Damascene (675–749) — the other great Damascene, who perfected the canon and defended the holy images: Andrew’s junior and the last of the Greek Fathers.
• Saint Maximus the Confessor (579–662) — the theologian of the two wills of Christ, whose combat against Monothelitism sheds light on Andrew’s fall and recovery in 712.
• Saint Ephrem the Syrian (306–373) — the “harp of the Spirit”, another great liturgical poet and master of the tears of penance.
• Saint Theodore the Studite (759–826) — the great confessor of the icons and monastic reformer, heir of the iconodule combat Andrew foresaw.
• The Desert Fathers — the monastic tradition of compunction and biblical prayer of which Andrew is one of the heirs.
• The Marian dogmas — the Church’s definitions concerning the Virgin, of which Andrew’s Marian homilies are one of the ancient patristic witnesses.