Andrew in Byzantium and Among the Slavs

The diffusion of the Life: a text popular enough in Byzantium to survive in many manuscripts and to spawn an independently circulating apocalypse, but whose fullest reception came among the Slavs, where an early Slavonic translation carried both the Blachernae vision (into the Pokrov feast) and the apocalypse (into Slavic end-times literature). This file traces the manuscript afterlife behind the two very different receptions.

Tradition: Byzantine (Constantinopolitan); reception chiefly Russian Orthodox

A Popular Byzantine Text

Whatever the historical status of its hero, the Life of St Andrew the Fool was, as a text, a Byzantine success. It survives in a substantial number of Greek manuscripts — the basis of Rydén’s critical edition — a survival rate that marks it as popular devotional reading rather than an obscure or marginal work (Rydén, ed., The Life of St Andrew the Fool, 2 vols., Uppsala, 1995, on the manuscript tradition; Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Franklin, Oxford, 2006, on the Life’s popularity). Its length, its vivid urban scenes, its visions of the other world, and above all its apocalypse made it a book people wanted to read and copy. The apocalyptic section in particular took on a life of its own, circulating separately as the Apocalypse of Andrew Salos and feeding the broad stream of Byzantine end-times literature (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andreas Salos, Apocalypse of”; see The Eschatology and Visions).

Yet — as noted in The Name and the Cult — the Life‘s Byzantine popularity as reading was not matched by a great cult. Andrew was commemorated in the synaxaria and his book was loved, but the Greek world did not raise a major feast around him or the Blachernae vision; the Protection remained, in Byzantium, at most a minor observance (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the limited Byzantine cult and the feast’s Greek marginality). The Byzantine Andrew was a saint one read more than a saint one kept.

The Slavonic Translation and the Slavic Reception

The decisive turn came with the Slavs. The Life was translated into Church Slavonic — the reception is early, part of the great transfer of Byzantine religious literature to Rus’ and the South Slavs in the centuries after the conversion — and among the Slavs it was read with an intensity that outran its Greek reception (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the Slavonic translation and the Slavic reception of the Life). Two of the Life’s components found, in the Slavic world, a reception far greater than they had at home.

The Blachernae vision became the Pokrov. The vision of the Virgin’s veil, minor in the Byzantine calendar, became in Rus’ the basis of the great feast of the Protection on 1 October — traditionally established under Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky in the twelfth century — one of the most beloved feasts of the Russian church year (see The Pokrov Feast and Its Slavic Flowering). Through the Pokrov, the Life’s central vision entered the deep structure of Russian devotion.

The apocalypse fed Slavic eschatology. The Apocalypse of Andrew Salos was likewise translated and absorbed into the Slavic apocalyptic tradition, where expectation of the end had a long and vivid life (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006; see The Eschatology and Visions). The fool’s prophecy of the last days became part of the Slavic religious imagination of history’s close.

The result is the asymmetry that defines Andrew’s afterlife: a Byzantine text whose two greatest exports — a Marian feast and an apocalypse — both flowered most fully not in the empire that produced it but in the Slavic lands that received it.

Why the Reception Diverged

Why the Life struck such deeper roots among the Slavs than among the Greeks is not fully answerable, but several factors are usually noted, and they are best held together. The Slavic churches received Byzantine literature as a treasured inheritance and read it with the fervor of relatively new converts; the image of the Virgin’s covering answered a deep Russian need for the Mother of God as protectress of the land, served in parallel by the great Marian icons; the folk associations of the 1 October date bound the feast to the rhythm of the northern year; and the Life‘s making of Andrew a “Scythian” — a northerner — offered later Slavic readers a felt kinship (though this last is resonance, not cause; see The Name and the Cult). Above all, the Slavic world developed its own flourishing tradition of holy folly — the yurodivye of Novgorod, Pskov, and Moscow — for which Andrew’s Life was a founding model, so that the text was read not as a foreign curiosity but as the charter of a living native vocation (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the Russian yurodivy tradition; see The Fool Tradition After Andrew).

The Diffusion and the Source Problem

The manuscript afterlife also bears, obliquely, on the source-critical question. The wide diffusion of the Life and the independent circulation of its apocalypse show a text valued and transmitted as edifying literature and prophecy — copied for what it taught and for the feast and expectation it fed, not preserved as an archival record of a documented man. This is consistent with the reading, prevailing among specialists, that the Life is a literary and devotional work rather than a biography (see Methodology). The very thing that made the Life travel — its richness as story, vision, and prophecy — is what makes it a doubtful witness to history; and its Slavic flowering, the greatest fact of its reception, rests on the feast and the doctrine, which stand independent of the fool’s historicity. The diffusion, that is, is the diffusion of a book and the feast it seeded, and it is on that firm ground — not on a recoverable biography — that Andrew’s real place in Orthodox history stands.

See Also

References

  • Rydén, Lennart, ed. and trans. The Life of St Andrew the Fool. 2 vols. Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 4. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1995. (The Greek manuscript tradition; the basis of the text’s diffusion.)
  • Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Trans. Simon Franklin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (The Life’s Byzantine popularity and limited cult; the Slavonic translation; the Slavic reception; the Russian yurodivy tradition.)
  • 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 independent circulation of the apocalypse; the cult.)