Damascus, Jerusalem, Constantinople

The formation of St. Andrew across the three great cities of his early-Byzantine world: birth at Damascus of Christian parents and the hagiographical tradition that he was mute until the age of seven and was loosed of his tongue at the reception of Holy Communion; the youth who at fourteen took the monastic habit at the Lavra of St. Sabbas and served the Patriarchate of Jerusalem from the Holy Sepulchre; the deacon sent to the Sixth Ecumenical Council; and the years at Constantinople as archdeacon of Hagia Sophia and director of the city’s great orphanage and home for the poor and aged.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Three Cities

The life of Andrew of Crete is a journey through the three poles of the early-Byzantine Christian world. He was born at Damascus, the ancient Syrian capital where, a generation later, John of Damascus would be born into the same Christian-Arab milieu; he was formed as a monk in Jerusalem, at the Holy City’s monasteries and at the Patriarchate that guarded the holy places; and he came to maturity in the imperial capital, Constantinople, before being sent out to govern the church of Crete (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org], Lives of the Saints, July 4). His was the world of the Umayyad caliphate, of a Palestine and Syria newly under Arab rule yet still densely Christian, and of a Byzantine Empire that had just survived the Monothelite controversy and had not yet entered the iconoclast one. He was, geographically and theologically, a bridge figure.

The dates of that life are not fixed. The standard reference works place his birth about 650 and his death about 740 [Disputed: the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and most modern scholarship give birth c. 650 and death c. 740; some Greek and older sources give the birth c. 660 and the death variously as 712, 726, or 740 — the OCA Life notes “712 or 726,” while the tradition surrounding the tomb at Eresos commemorates a death in 740 (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; OCA, Lives, July 4; John Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete in Eressos of Lesvos,” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2018)]. A birth around 650 and a death around 740 gives a life of roughly ninety years, the span the tomb-tradition and the kanon-history together favor, and it is adopted as the working frame of this collection.

Damascus and the Muteness Tradition

The hagiographies agree that Andrew was born at Damascus of devout Christian parents named, in the Greek Synaxaria, George and Gregoria (OCA, Lives, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). To this birth the tradition attaches its most striking detail: that the child Andrew was mute from birth and remained unable to speak until the age of seven, when, having received the Holy Mysteries — the Body and Blood of Christ — he was suddenly loosed of his tongue and began to speak (OCA, Lives, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete and His Great Canon of Repentance, obitel-minsk.org).

This account is hagiographical and is reported here as what the Life attests, not as adjudicated historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). [Disputed: the muteness-until-seven and healing-at-Communion narrative is universal in the hagiographies (OCA, Lives, July 4; Greek Synaxaria) but is not corroborated by any contemporary documentary source; it belongs to the genre of the saint’s Life and should be received as such.] Yet even as tradition it is theologically resonant, and the Church has not failed to notice the fitness of it: the man whose first human word was given to him at the Chalice would become the Church’s supreme poet of repentance, and the gift of speech received at the Eucharist would be poured out, across a long life, in the language of the kanon. The tradition makes the Great Canon, in a sense, the overflow of a mouth first opened by Communion.

The Lavra of St. Sabbas and the Holy Sepulchre

At about the age of fourteen Andrew came to Jerusalem and took up the monastic life, the Lives placing his entry at the Lavra of St. Sabbas the Sanctified (Mar Saba) in the Judean desert, the great Palestinian monastery that was also, a little later, the spiritual home of John of Damascus (OCA, Lives, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.). There he was noted early for asceticism, obedience, and a quick intelligence, and he was drawn into the service of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, attached to the Church of the Anastasis — the Holy Sepulchre — where he served as a notary and writing-clerk (Greek Synaxaria; OCA, Lives, July 4). The detail matters for what follows: Andrew’s whole early career was bound to the holy places themselves, to the very ground of the Lord’s death and resurrection, a formation that left its mark on the Paschal and penitential intensity of his later hymns.

The Sabaite Formation

The choice of the Lavra of St. Sabbas as the place of Andrew’s monastic beginning — if the hagiographical tradition is right to name it — situates him in one of the most consequential spiritual environments of the age. Mar Saba, founded in the late fifth century by St. Sabbas the Sanctified in the gorge of the Kidron below Jerusalem, was by the seventh century a great center of Palestinian monasticism, renowned both for the severity of its asceticism and for the richness of its liturgical and theological life. Its typikon — the Sabaite ordering of the services — would in time shape the worship of the entire Orthodox world, and its walls would shelter, in Andrew’s own century, St. John of Damascus and St. Kosmas of Maiouma (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Sabas, Monastery of St.”; see The Witness of His Generation).

To be formed in this milieu was to be steeped in the biblical and liturgical culture out of which the kanon would grow: the long psalmody and the singing of the biblical canticles at the night office, the ascetic literature of the desert fathers, the discipline of compunction and tears. Everything that would later mark Andrew’s hymnody — its saturation in Scripture, its penitential intensity, its rooting in the nine biblical odes — has a natural home in the Sabaite and Palestinian monastic world of his youth. The Great Canon is, in a real sense, the desert’s prayer of repentance raised to its highest pitch by a man who had drunk it in as a young monk.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–681)

Because of his learning and trustworthiness, the young deacon was chosen to carry the Jerusalem church’s mind to the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681), convened by the Emperor Constantine IV to settle the Monothelite controversy and to confess that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations, divine and human, in His one Person (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; on the Council itself, see the Ecumenical Councils). The patriarchal throne of Jerusalem was then vacant or under a locum tenens (the sources name Theodore, the representative of the Jerusalem see), and Andrew was sent as an archdeacon among the Jerusalem delegation (OCA, Lives, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.).

This is a fact of the first importance for understanding the tragedy of 712. The young Andrew was personally present at the council that condemned Monothelitism and vindicated the Dyothelite confession for which St. Maximus the Confessor had suffered. He knew the Orthodox dogma not at second hand but as a participant in its conciliar definition. When, three decades later, he set his name to a synod that repudiated exactly this council (see The Synod of 712), he was repudiating something he had himself helped to confess. The gravity of the later episode is measured by the clarity of this early one.

The World of His Formation

To understand Andrew it helps to picture the world these three cities composed in his lifetime. He was born into the Umayyad caliphate, which by mid-century ruled Syria, Palestine, and Egypt; Damascus, his birthplace, was the very capital of that empire. The great Christian populations of the East now lived under Arab Muslim rule — a momentous change, and yet, for the texture of daily Christian life, less of a rupture than one might expect: the monasteries continued, the patriarchates functioned, the holy places were kept, and the Greek theological and liturgical tradition went on. It was precisely in this Arab-ruled Christian East, and above all in the Palestinian monasteries, that the hymnographic flowering of Andrew’s generation took place (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Umayyads,” “Palestine,” “John of Damascus”; see The Witness of His Generation).

Constantinople, by contrast, was the seat of the Christian Roman Empire — diminished by the seventh-century losses but still the imperial capital, still crowned by Hagia Sophia, still the center of the cathedral rite and of imperial-ecclesiastical politics. To pass, as Andrew did, from a Palestinian monastery under the caliph to the cathedral of the emperor’s city was to cross from one pole of the Christian world to the other. The man who would write the Church’s most interior, penitential hymn was formed at the meeting-point of these worlds — desert and capital, Arab East and Byzantine center, the holy places and the Great Church — and something of that breadth marks his work, which gathers the whole inheritance of Scripture and the Fathers into the prayer of a single soul.

Constantinople: Archdeacon and Director of Charities

After the Council, Andrew was retained in Constantinople. He was made a deacon — in time archdeacon — of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, the cathedral of the capital, and was entrusted with the administration of two of the city’s great philanthropic institutions: the orphanage (the famous Orphanotropheion) and the home for the poor and the aged, the ptōchotropheion or gērokomeion attached to it (OCA, Lives, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). The detail is not decorative. The man remembered as the poet of penitence and as a master of hymnody was, for years, a working administrator of mercy — the keeper of orphans and of the destitute old — and the practical theology of philanthropia, of charity as the form love takes, runs through his preaching and would later define his episcopate on Crete (see The Pastor of Crete).

It was in these Constantinopolitan years, in the service of the cathedral rite of Hagia Sophia and amid the city’s flourishing liturgical culture, that Andrew’s hymnographic gift was first exercised on a large scale; the Great Church was the natural home for the developing kanon (see The Kanon Form). From this diaconate at Hagia Sophia he would be raised, near the close of the seventh century, to the episcopate, and sent to govern the church of Crete (see Archbishop of Crete).

See Also

References

  • Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4. (Birth at Damascus; muteness until seven and healing at Communion; Lavra of St. Sabbas at fourteen; notary of the Jerusalem Patriarchate; archdeacon at the Sixth Council; archdeacon of Hagia Sophia; director of the orphanage and poorhouse; death “712 or 726.”)
  • The Life of St Andrew of Crete and His Great Canon of Repentance; St. Andrew of Crete: Life and Canon (“From Heresy to Holiness”). Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (Christian parents; muteness tradition; Jerusalem and Constantinople service; the 712 episode and repentance.)
  • Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete.” (Born c. 650 Damascus; monk in Jerusalem; deacon and orphanotrophos at Constantinople; bishop of Gortyna; the 712 synod; died c. 740; the corpus of canons and homilies.)
  • Sanidopoulos, John. “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete in Eressos of Lesvos.” johnsanidopoulos.com, July 2018. (The death at Eresos; the disputed dates 712/726/740; the tomb and relics.)
  • On the Sixth Ecumenical Council and the Monothelite controversy, see the repository entry The Ecumenical Councils.