The Festal Canons and Idiomela

Beyond the Great Canon, the wider hymnographic output of St. Andrew: canons for the great feasts of the Lord and the Theotokos, for Holy Week and the saints, together with idiomela and stichera that still stand in the service books — a corpus that the tradition reckoned vast, and that secured Andrew’s name among the founding hymnographers of the Byzantine rite even apart from his masterpiece.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A Large and Partly Uncertain Corpus

The Great Canon is so famous that it can eclipse the fact that Andrew was a prolific hymnographer across the whole liturgical year. The tradition credits him with a great quantity of liturgical poetry — canons, triodia (three-ode canons), idiomela, and stichera — for the feasts of the Lord, the feasts of the Mother of God, the days of Holy Week, and the commemorations of the saints (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”). The hagiographies and older accounts speak of him composing canons “for all the Twelve Great Feasts” and for Holy Week and Pascha, and of his surpassing even later hymnographers in sheer volume of melody and verse (OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4).

The exact extent of the authentic corpus is, however, not fully settled by modern scholarship. [Disputed: the number of canons securely attributable to Andrew is given by scholars as on the order of a dozen or more — roughly fourteen canons are commonly accepted as genuine, alongside more than a hundred heirmoi and many shorter pieces — but the manuscript tradition attributes a larger and partly overlapping body of hymns to him, and the attribution of individual canons and stichera is in places uncertain (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; the manuscript and editorial situation is surveyed in the hymnographic handbooks).] As with all the early hymnographers, “Andrew of Crete” in a manuscript heading is sometimes a genuine ascription and sometimes the gathering of later material under a famous name; the safe statement is that a substantial body of festal hymnody is his, even where the edges of the corpus are blurred.

The Festal Canons

Among the works most consistently credited to Andrew are canons for the great feasts and for the special days of the calendar. The tradition names, in particular:

canons and hymns for the Nativity of Christ and the feasts of the Lord;
hymnody for Holy Week and the days of the Lord’s Passion, the season to which Andrew’s penitential genius was especially suited;
canons for the feasts of the Theotokos — the sung counterpart to his celebrated Marian homilies (see The Marian Homilies);
canons and stichera for the commemorations of the saints, including hymns that still stand in the Menaia.

(Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; OCA, Lives, July 4.) These festal canons share the structural genius of the Great Canon — the nine odes anchored in the biblical canticles (see The Kanon Form) — but turned to celebration rather than to penitence: the same machinery of scriptural typology that, in the Great Canon, accuses the soul, here unfolds the meaning of a feast, showing how the events of Christ’s life or the glories of the Mother of God were prefigured throughout the Scriptures.

The Triodia

A particular form associated with Andrew, and one that gives his great Lenten work its very name, is the triodion in the strict sense — a short canon of only three odes (hence tri-ōdion) rather than the full nine, composed for the weekdays of Great Lent. The Triodion, the service-book of the Lenten season, takes its name from these three-ode canons that fill its weekday services; and Andrew, as one of the founding hymnographers of the Lenten cycle, contributed to this body of penitential weekday hymnody (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Triodion,” “Andrew of Crete”). The connection is fitting: the man whose Great Canon is the summit of the Triodion also helped to build the humbler weekday scaffolding of the same book. His penitential genius was not confined to the one famous canon but ran through the ordinary days of the fast as well.

The Idiomela and Stichera

Besides the canons, Andrew composed many idiomela and stichera — the shorter, free-standing hymn-stanzas sung at Vespers and Matins between the psalm verses. An idiomelon (ἰδιόμελον) is a sticheron with its own proper melody, not modeled on another hymn; these were prized as the more artful and individual compositions, and several attributed to Andrew remain in liturgical use (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Sticheron,” “Idiomelon,” “Andrew of Crete”). Through these shorter pieces Andrew’s voice is woven into the daily and festal services far beyond the few days of the year when the Great Canon is sung.

The Problem of Attribution

A word is needed about why the extent of Andrew’s hymnographic corpus is uncertain, since the same difficulty attends all the early hymnographers. Byzantine liturgical books grew by accretion across centuries, and the hymns within them were copied, recopied, abridged, expanded, and re-ascribed by generations of scribes and editors. A heading reading “of Andrew” (or “of Andrew of Crete,” or merely “of Andrew of Jerusalem”) in a tenth- or twelfth-century manuscript may preserve a genuine eighth-century ascription, or may reflect a later editor’s guess, or may have gathered under a famous name material by lesser or anonymous hands (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Hymnography,” “Andrew of Crete”). Modern hymnographic scholarship therefore distinguishes a core of canons securely attributable to Andrew from a wider penumbra of works ascribed to him with varying confidence. This is not a peculiar embarrassment of Andrew’s corpus; it is the normal condition of early Byzantine liturgical poetry, and it is the reason this collection speaks of “a substantial body” of festal hymnody rather than offering a precise catalogue (per METHODOLOGY §2.3, the contested extent is named as a topic, not papered over).

What is not in doubt is that Andrew was, by the testimony of the tradition and the manuscripts together, one of the most prolific and influential hymnographers of his age — a judgment that does not depend on settling the attribution of any single doubtful canon.

Hymnody as Theology

Andrew’s vast output is a reminder of a truth central to Orthodox Christianity: that in the Eastern Church, hymnody is theology, and the bulk of the faithful have always learned their doctrine less from treatises than from the hymns they sing. The canons, stichera, and idiomela of the service-books are not devotional decoration around a doctrinal core; they are, in large measure, the way the dogma of the Church is taught, prayed, and impressed upon the people. A congregation that sings, on the feast of the Theotokos, that she is the one who bore the uncontainable God, or, at Pascha, that Christ has trampled death by death, is being catechized in the Incarnation and the Resurrection through the very act of worship (on the principle, see the liturgy as theology; the Divine Liturgy).

Andrew, as one of the architects of this sung theology, was therefore a teacher of the faith on the largest possible scale — not through the few who read learned books, but through the many who sang his hymns. The Great Canon teaches the doctrine of repentance and the unity of the two Testaments; the festal canons teach the mysteries of Christ and His Mother; and all of it enters the people not as information to be studied but as prayer to be uttered. To measure Andrew’s influence one must count not the readers of a treatise but the centuries of congregations who have learned to repent, and to confess Christ, in the words he gave them.

The Hymnographer of His Generation

Taken together, the festal canons, triodia, idiomela, and stichera establish Andrew not as the author of a single great poem but as one of the architects of the Byzantine service-books. He stands at the head of the generation — with John of Damascus and Kosmas of Maiouma just behind him (see The Kanon Form) — that filled the Orthodox liturgical year with the kanon, and his work, alongside theirs, is the reason that the Octoechos, the Menaia, and the Triodion took the shape they still hold. The Great Canon is the summit of that achievement, but it rests on a broad base of festal hymnody, much of it still sung, that is Andrew’s quieter and more pervasive legacy.

The Quiet and the Famous Legacy

There is a useful distinction to be drawn between Andrew’s famous legacy and his quiet one. The famous legacy is the Great Canon — heard at a few intense moments of the year, named and known, the thing for which “Andrew of Crete” is a household name in the Orthodox world. The quiet legacy is the broad, diffuse body of festal canons, triodia, stichera, and idiomela that is woven, often without attribution in the worshipper’s mind, into the ordinary fabric of the services across the year. Most Orthodox Christians who have sung Andrew’s festal hymnody have done so without knowing it was his; the hymns have simply been the hymns of the feast, anonymous in the experience of prayer though authored in fact.

Both legacies are real, and the quiet one is in its way the larger. The Great Canon is sung on a handful of days; the festal hymnody and the weekday triodia recur through the whole turning year. To have shaped the Triodion and the festal books, even in part, is to have shaped the daily and seasonal prayer of the Church far beyond the famous Canon’s reach. Andrew’s name is carried by the Great Canon; his influence is carried, more pervasively and more silently, by the body of hymnody that surrounds it.

References

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “Kanon,” “Sticheron,” “Idiomelon.” (The corpus of canons, triodia, idiomela, and stichera; the disputed extent of the authentic œuvre; roughly fourteen accepted canons and over a hundred heirmoi.)
Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4. (Canons for the Great Feasts and Holy Week; the scale of his hymnody.)
The hymnographic handbooks and the Triodion, Menaion, and Octoechos service-books, in which Andrew’s canons and stichera are preserved (cited generally, since the corpus circulates across many books and recensions).