The Marian Homilies

Andrew the preacher of the Mother of God: his homilies on the Nativity and the Dormition of the Theotokos, preserved in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 97, are among the earliest fully developed Byzantine sermons on these feasts — landmark texts in the history of Marian preaching, now available in the translations of Mary Cunningham and Brian Daley, and a major witness to the veneration of the Theotokos on the eve of the iconoclast age.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A Founder of Marian Preaching

Andrew of Crete holds a significant place in the history of Christian preaching on the Mother of God. His festal homilies on the feasts of the Theotokos — composed in the late seventh and early eighth century, the period in which these feasts were taking their settled place in the Byzantine calendar — are among the earliest substantial, fully developed sermons the tradition possesses for these days, and they helped to fix the themes and the rhetoric of Marian preaching for the centuries that followed (Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God, 2008, introduction). The feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos (September 8), in particular, is attested as an established celebration by the early eighth century precisely in and through homilies such as Andrew’s, which are key evidence for the feast’s early history (Cunningham, Wider than Heaven; the homilies in Patrologia Graeca 97).

These sermons matter not only for their content but for their date. Andrew preached on the eve of the iconoclast controversy (see Before the Iconoclast Storm), and his Marian homilies are a window onto the developed Marian piety of the pre-iconoclast Church — the veneration of the Virgin, the celebration of her feasts, and the theology of her holiness — as it stood before the controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries forced these matters into explicit definition.

The Feasts Coming of Age

It is important to grasp how early Andrew’s Marian preaching is in the history of these feasts. The two great feasts of the Mother of God on which he preached — her Nativity (September 8) and her Dormition (August 15) — were, in the later seventh and early eighth century, still relatively young as universal Byzantine celebrations, acquiring in just this period the fixed dates, the liturgical content, and the theological depth they would carry thereafter. Homilies such as Andrew’s are not merely evidence that the feasts existed; they are part of how the feasts acquired their meaning, supplying the theological reflection that gave the bare commemoration its content (Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, introduction; on the Dormition, Brian E. Daley, On the Dormition of Mary, introduction). To preach on the Nativity of the Theotokos around the year 700 was to be a shaper of the feast, not merely a celebrant of an established one.

This early date also means that Andrew’s homilies are precious historical witnesses for scholars reconstructing the development of Byzantine Marian piety. Where the documentary record for these feasts is thin, the homilies of Andrew, Germanus of Constantinople, and John of Damascus are among the principal texts, and their editing and translation by Cunningham and Daley made a body of foundational evidence available to modern study. Andrew stands, in this history, among the very first whose Marian preaching survives in developed form.

The Homilies on the Nativity of the Theotokos

Andrew composed a set of homilies — traditionally numbered four — on the Nativity of the Mother of God, preserved in Patrologia Graeca 97, columns 805–881 (PG 97:805–881; trans. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven). In them he celebrates the birth of the Virgin to Joachim and Anna as the dawn of salvation: the beginning of the reversal of Eve’s fall, the appearing of the one through whom the Word would take flesh. The preaching is rich in the typological imagery of Byzantine Mariology — the Virgin as the bridge, the gate, the throne, the unhewn mountain, the living ark — and it draws the whole expectation of the Old Testament toward the child now born of the once-barren Anna. These homilies, with those of his contemporaries Germanus of Constantinople and John of Damascus, form the core of the eighth-century Marian homiletic corpus that Cunningham edited and translated (Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, with the texts and study).

The Imagery of the Virgin

What gives Andrew’s Marian homilies their distinctive richness is the cascade of types and titles he heaps upon the Mother of God, drawn from across the Old Testament and read as prefigurations of her. She is the living ark that bore not the tablets of the Law but the Lawgiver; the gate through which the Lord alone passed; the fleece of Gideon on which the dew of heaven descended; the bush that burned and was not consumed; the throne and the temple and the bridal chamber of the King. This typological imagery, which Andrew shares with his contemporaries and helps to consolidate, is not mere ornament: each figure makes a theological claim about how the infinite God could be contained in a creature without diminishing either His divinity or her integrity (Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, on the imagery of the eighth-century Marian homilists). The Virgin is “wider than the heavens” because she held the One whom the heavens cannot contain — the very phrase that names the genre Cunningham’s collection takes for its title.

This imagery passes directly between Andrew’s preaching and his hymnody, and from both into the settled Marian devotion of the Orthodox Church, where these same titles still fill the hymns sung at the feasts of the Theotokos. Andrew stands near the source of that great river of Marian imagery, helping to gather the Old Testament figures into the praise of the Mother of God that the Church has sung ever since.

The Homilies on the Dormition

Andrew also preached a cycle of homilies — traditionally three — on the Dormition (Koimēsis) of the Theotokos, the feast of the Virgin’s falling-asleep and translation (August 15), preserved in Patrologia Graeca 97, columns 1045–1109 (PG 97:1045–1109; trans. Brian E. Daley, On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies, 1998). These are among the foundational texts of the Byzantine theology of the Dormition: they contemplate the Virgin’s death not as a defeat but as a passage, the falling-asleep of the one who bore Life, gathered by her Son and translated in glory. Andrew’s Dormition homilies, alongside those of Germanus and John of Damascus, are the early-eighth-century witnesses on which Daley’s standard collection of patristic Dormition preaching is built, and they are a principal source for the developed Byzantine understanding of the feast (Daley, On the Dormition of Mary, with the texts and introduction).

The Place in the History of Mariology

The historical importance of these homilies is hard to overstate. The later seventh and the eighth centuries were the period in which the feasts of the Theotokos acquired their settled liturgical and theological content, and Andrew’s sermons are among the principal documents of that development. The feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos (September 8) is attested as an established celebration precisely by homilies like his, which presuppose the feast and elaborate its meaning; the feast of the Dormition (August 15) likewise took on its rich theology of the Virgin’s death and translation in this period, and Andrew’s homilies are foundational witnesses to it (Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, introduction; Brian E. Daley, On the Dormition of Mary, introduction). When Cunningham and Daley assembled the standard modern collections of early Byzantine Marian and Dormition preaching, Andrew’s homilies stood, with those of Germanus of Constantinople and John of Damascus, at the very center of the corpus.

The homilies draw on the apocryphal and traditional material about the Virgin’s parents and her death — the Protevangelium of James lies behind much of the Nativity preaching, and the Dormition traditions behind the August homilies — but they transform that narrative material into high theological reflection on the Incarnation: the Virgin is celebrated not for her own sake in isolation but as the one through whom the Word took flesh, the living temple in whom the uncontainable was contained. Andrew’s Mariology is, in this sense, always Christology — a meditation on the Incarnation refracted through the one who made it possible (Cunningham, Wider than Heaven).

Hymn and Homily Together

The Marian homilies are the prose counterpart to Andrew’s Marian hymnody (see The Festal Canons and Idiomela): the same bishop who wrote canons for the feasts of the Theotokos preached these sermons on the same days, and the themes pass back and forth between the sung canon and the spoken homily. Together they show Andrew as one of the great early shapers of Byzantine devotion to the Mother of God — a devotion that the iconoclast crisis would soon test and that the Seventh Council and the triumph of the icons would vindicate (see Andrew and the Image). That this same hymnographer of the Virgin was also the poet of the Great Canon is fitting: the Canon itself turns, at the close of every ode, to the Theotokos as the refuge of the penitent (see The Great Canon).

References

Andrew of Crete, Homilies on the Nativity of the Theotokos (PG 97:805–881) and Homilies on the Dormition of the Theotokos (PG 97:1045–1109). J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 97.
Cunningham, Mary B. Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics Series 35), 2008 — translation and study of Andrew’s Nativity homilies and the eighth-century Marian homiletic corpus; key evidence for the early feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos.
Daley, Brian E. On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998 — translation of Andrew’s Dormition homilies and the early patristic Dormition preaching.
Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4 — on Andrew’s preaching and the feasts of the Theotokos.