The Name and the Cult

“Andreas Salos” — Andrew the Fool — and the striking asymmetry of his cult: a modest, even marginal, veneration in the Byzantine and later Greek world, set against an immense flowering in Slavic Orthodoxy carried almost entirely by the feast of the Protection that descends from his vision. The name, the epithet, and the two receptions are the subject of this file.

Tradition: Byzantine (Constantinopolitan); the cult chiefly Russian Orthodox

The Name and the Epithet

In the Greek tradition the saint is Ἀνδρέας ὁ Σαλός — Andreas ho Salos, “Andrew the Fool” — and it is by the epithet salos that he is distinguished from the many other saints named Andrew (Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Franklin, Oxford, 2006; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew Salos”). The word salos (σαλός) is the technical Byzantine term for the holy fool — the one who feigns madness or “foolishness” for Christ’s sake — and its attachment to Andrew’s name marks the whole of his identity: he is not Andrew who happened to be foolish, but Andrew the Fool, the fool-saint par excellence of the Greek tradition (on the term, Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, and Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool, Berkeley, 1996). In Slavonic he becomes Andrei (Андрей) Yurodivy — the yurodivy, the fool-for-Christ — the epithet that would later attach to Basil of Moscow, Xenia of Petersburg, and the whole Russian line (see The Fool Tradition After Andrew).

This is the first place where Andrew must be firmly distinguished from two other saints with whom he is easily confused: he is not St. Andrew of Crete, the eighth-century hymnographer of the Great Canon, and not St. Andrew the First-Called, the Apostle. The Fool of Constantinople is a distinct figure, known by his epithet and by the vision at Blachernae, and the disambiguation matters because the three are commemorated and depicted in wholly different ways.

A Byzantine Cult of Modest Scale

Given the later fame of the Protection, it is easy to assume that Andrew was a great saint in Byzantium. He was not, or not conspicuously so. In the Greek East his cult was real but modest: he is commemorated in the synaxaria, and his Life circulated widely as a text (see Andrew in Byzantium and Among the Slavs), but there is no evidence of a major shrine, no great church of Andrew Salos in the capital, and the Byzantine liturgical calendar did not raise the Blachernae vision into a feast of the first rank (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the limited Byzantine cult; on the feast’s marginality in the Greek calendar see The Pokrov Feast and Its Slavic Flowering). The paradox is sharp and worth stating plainly: the vision that would become a great feast for the Slavs occurred, according to the Life, at one of the most venerated Marian shrines of Constantinople — the Church of the Theotokos at Blachernae, where the Virgin’s robe and veil were kept — and yet the Byzantines themselves did not build a major feast around Andrew’s experience of it (on the Blachernae relics, see The Vision at Blachernae).

Andrew’s Byzantine importance lay less in a cult than in a text and its afterlife: the Life was popular reading, and above all its long apocalyptic section — the so-called Apocalypse of Andrew Salos — circulated as one of the influential vehicles of Byzantine end-times expectation (see The Eschatology and Visions; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andreas Salos, Apocalypse of”). He was, in Byzantium, a saint one read more than a saint before whose relics one prayed.

The Slavic Flowering

Among the Slavs the reception was of another order entirely. Here the Life was translated early and read intensely; the apocalyptic prophecies were absorbed into Slavic eschatological literature; and, decisively, the vision at Blachernae was made the basis of a great feast — the Protection, Russian Pokrov (Покров, “covering” or “veil”) — celebrated on 1 October, which became one of the most beloved feasts of the Russian church year (on the feast and its establishment, see The Pokrov Feast and Its Slavic Flowering; Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the Slavic reception). Through the Pokrov, Andrew’s name entered the deep structure of Russian piety: churches without number are dedicated to the Protection, the feast marks a turning-point of the agricultural and folk year, and the icon of the Protection — in which Andrew stands at the lower margin, pointing his disciple’s and the viewer’s eyes up to the Virgin’s outspread veil — became one of the most reproduced of all Russian images (see Andrew in Icon and Hymn).

There is a suggestive coincidence in this Slavic flowering that the sources note and that should be handled with care. The Life makes Andrew a Scythian — a northerner, a “barbarian” from beyond the empire, which later readers could and did associate with the Slavic lands (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the “Scythian” identification and its resonance for Slavic readers). Whether this contributed to the feast’s Slavic success, or is simply a coincidence retrospectively felt to be fitting, cannot be established; the Life’s “Scythian” is a literary datum, not an ethnographic one, and the claim of a special Slavic affinity should be reported as resonance, not as cause. What is certain is the outcome: a Byzantine fool became, through his vision, a pillar of Slavic devotion.

Two Receptions, One Figure

The name and the cult together yield the governing fact of Andrew’s afterlife: the same figure was received in two very different keys. In the Greek world he is a fool-saint known chiefly through a widely read but non-canonical-scale Life and its apocalypse, with a modest liturgical presence. In the Slavic world he is the seer of the Protection, his personal cult almost wholly absorbed into the greatness of the feast — so that many who keep the Pokrov with deep devotion could not say much about the fool at Blachernae whose vision it commemorates. This asymmetry is not a defect in the tradition but a fact about it, and it shapes everything downstream: the veneration of Andrew (Section 08) is really, for most of the Orthodox world, the veneration of the feast he saw. The following sections turn first to the text that carries him — the Life — and then to the folly, the vision, and the source-critical question that underlies them all.

References

Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Trans. Simon Franklin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (The term salos; the modest Byzantine cult; the “Scythian” identification; the Slavic reception.)
Krueger, Derek. Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. (The vocabulary and type of the salos on which Andrew’s Life draws.)
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. S.v. “Andrew Salos” and “Andreas Salos, Apocalypse of.” (The Greek cult; the circulation of the apocalyptic section.)
Nikephoros (attrib.). The Life of St Andrew the Fool. Ed. and trans. Lennart Rydén. 2 vols. Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 4. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1995. (The Scythian origin; the Blachernae vision underlying the feast.)