Archbishop of Crete

Andrew’s elevation from the diaconate of Hagia Sophia to the metropolitan see of Crete — consecrated Archbishop of Gortyna, the island’s capital, near the close of the seventh century — and the long pastorate, lasting until his death around 740, in which the hymnographer became a working bishop: builder, almsgiver, and shepherd of a frontier island in the age of the Arab raids.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

From Deacon to Archbishop

After years of service at Constantinople, Andrew was raised to the episcopate and sent to govern the church of Crete, with his seat at Gortyna (Gortys), the Roman and early-Byzantine capital of the island and the seat of its metropolitan (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4). His title in the Church’s memory is Archbishop of Crete, the chief hierarch of the whole island; in the older usage his see is named “Gortyna” or “Gortys,” and he is sometimes called “Andrew of Jerusalem” for his formation there, but it is as Andrew of Crete — Andreas Krētēs — that he is universally known.

The date of his consecration is given only approximately. [Disputed: the sources place his elevation to Crete between about 692 and 712; the OCA Life sets it in the reign of Justinian II (685–695, restored 705–711), which would give a consecration in the 690s, while others date it nearer the turn of the century; the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium dates his episcopate broadly to the period before the 712 synod, which he attended as bishop of Gortyna (OCA, Lives, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.).] What is certain is that by 712 he held the see, for it was as Archbishop of Crete that he was present at the Constantinopolitan synod of that year (see The Synod of 712). The episcopate therefore spanned roughly the first four decades of the eighth century — a long pastorate of some thirty to forty years.

The Dating Difficulty

The vagueness of the consecration date is not an accident of this collection’s caution but a real limit of the sources, and it is worth seeing why. The hagiographies were written to edify, not to keep a chancery’s records, and they are characteristically loose about chronology; the documentary sources for the Cretan church in this period are thin; and the disagreement over Andrew’s death-date (712, 726, or 740 — see Death on Lesbos) propagates backward into every other date of his life, since the length of his episcopate depends on when it ended. What the sources do fix is a single firm anchor: in 712 Andrew acted as bishop of Gortyna at the Constantinopolitan synod (see The Synod of 712), so the consecration must precede that year. Working back from the hagiographies’ placement of his elevation in the reign of Justinian II, a consecration somewhere in the 690s or the first decade of the 700s is the reasonable estimate, and “c. 692–712” captures the span of scholarly opinion without pretending to a precision the sources do not allow (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4).

This is the honest condition of much early-Byzantine biography: firm in outline, uncertain in its exact dates. The collection states the outline plainly and flags the dates where they are genuinely disputed, rather than manufacturing a false precision.

A Working Bishop

It is easy, given the fame of the Great Canon, to imagine Andrew as a poet who happened to hold a see. The reverse is closer to the truth: he was a diocesan bishop of a large and exposed island who happened also to be the age’s greatest hymnographer. The hagiographies and the local Cretan tradition remember him as an active pastor — a builder of churches, a founder and patron of charitable institutions (continuing on Crete the work of mercy he had administered at Constantinople), and a defender of his flock (OCA, Lives, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). The concrete texture of that pastorate — the building, the almsgiving, the defense of the island against the sea-raids of the period — is treated in its own place (see The Pastor of Crete).

Two features of the see shaped the man’s later work. First, Crete was a frontier. In the eighth century the island was an exposed Byzantine possession in a Mediterranean increasingly contested by Arab fleets; the great Andalusian-Arab conquest of Crete still lay a century off (it fell in the 820s), but the threat of raids was already a fact of a Cretan bishop’s life, and the safety of the island was part of Andrew’s charge (OCA, Lives, July 4). Second, Crete was rich in the inheritance of the apostolic age: it was the island to which St. Paul had sent Titus as bishop (Titus 1:5), and Andrew sat, in his own understanding, in a succession reaching back to the apostolic foundation of the Cretan church. The pastor of so ancient and so exposed a flock had every reason to make repentance, vigilance, and the mercy of God the burden of his preaching.

The Title and the Office

A word on the title is in order, because it is easily misunderstood. Andrew is universally called “Archbishop of Crete,” but in his own day the metropolitan of the island was styled bishop (or metropolitan) of Gortyna, the capital, exercising authority over the suffragan sees of the whole island; “Archbishop of Crete” is the way the later tradition names that same office (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “Gortyna,” “Crete”). The Cretan church belonged, in the administrative order of the period, to the great patriarchate whose jurisdiction over Illyricum and the southern Balkans and islands was then in flux between Rome and Constantinople — a detail that situates Andrew within the wider ecclesiastical politics of the early eighth century, though it did not define his pastoral work. What mattered for the people of Crete was simpler: Andrew was the chief shepherd of their island, the hierarch who ordained their priests, consecrated their churches, and answered for their souls.

The length of the office is itself significant. A pastorate of three or four decades meant that Andrew baptized, taught, and buried more than one generation of Cretans; the man was woven into the life of the island for the greater part of a lifetime. The hymns and homilies that have made him famous were not the productions of a passing celebrity but the lifelong work of the resident bishop of the place — composed, year by year, for the same congregation, across the turning of the same liturgical seasons.

“Andrew of Jerusalem”

A small but telling detail of his nomenclature deserves mention. Although he is universally remembered as “Andrew of Crete,” the older tradition — and a number of manuscript headings of his hymns and homilies — call him “Andrew of Jerusalem” (Andreas Hierosolymitēs), after the Holy City where he was formed and which he served before his episcopate (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”). The double naming captures the shape of his life: he was a man of Jerusalem made bishop of Crete, the Palestinian monk and Sabaite who carried the prayer of the Holy City to the cathedral of a Mediterranean island. Both names are true, and both point to the sources of his work — the one to the holy places and the desert that formed him, the other to the see he adorned and to which his relics would one day return (see Death on Lesbos).

The persistence of “Andrew of Jerusalem” in the headings of his hymns is also a reminder of how the early hymnographers were identified in the manuscripts — by the place of their formation or their see — and a small caution for the historian, since the same epithet must not be confused with other Jerusalem figures. For this collection the identification is secure: the bishop of Gortyna, author of the Great Canon, is the “Andrew of Jerusalem” of the hymn-headings and the “Andrew of Crete” of the calendar, one and the same man.

The Pastorate and the Poetry

The Cretan episcopate was the setting of Andrew’s mature liturgical production. It is most likely that the Great Canon itself was composed during these years, the fruit of an aging bishop’s prayer rather than of a young deacon’s exercise — though the work cannot be precisely dated and may have grown by accretion (see The Great Canon and Tradition and Scholarship). His festal canons and his homilies for the great feasts (see The Festal Canons and Idiomela and The Marian Homilies) likewise belong, in large part, to a bishop preaching to his own cathedral congregation at Gortyna across the cycle of the liturgical year. The poetry was pastoral work; the hymns were written to be sung by, and the sermons to be preached to, the people of Crete.

It was from this see, and on its business, that Andrew made the final journey to Constantinople from which he would not return alive — dying on the way home at Eresos on Lesbos (see Death on Lesbos). The episcopate that began near the dawn of the eighth century ended only with his life.

References

Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4. (Consecration to Gortyna/Crete under Justinian II; the active pastorate; charity and building; the final journey.)
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete.” (Bishop of Gortyna; the episcopate and the 712 synod; the dating.)
The Life of St Andrew of Crete and His Great Canon of Repentance. Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (The Cretan pastorate; the charitable works; the homilies and hymns.)
Scripture: Titus 1:5 (Paul’s commission of Titus to Crete), on the apostolic foundation of the Cretan church.