Repentance and Rehabilitation

The other half of the story: when the usurper Philippikos was overthrown in 713 and Orthodoxy was restored, Andrew repudiated the Monothelite synod and returned to the faith of the Sixth Council — a return the Church accepted, so that he died in communion and was numbered among the saints. This file treats the rehabilitation, the question of how readily the Church received him, and the way the fall and the return stand behind his great hymn of repentance.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Brief Monothelite Restoration

The reign of Philippikos Bardanes was one of the shortest and most turbulent of the period, and its brevity is part of why its Monothelite restoration left so little permanent mark. Philippikos seized the throne in December 711 by deposing and blinding Justinian II; he reigned barely nineteen months; and in June 713 he was himself seized, deposed, and blinded by his own troops, the throne passing to Anastasios II (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Philippikos,” “Anastasios II”; Bardanes, Wikipedia). His Monothelite policy — the abolition of the Sixth Council, the synod of 712, the imposition of the one-will doctrine — had time to be proclaimed but not to take root, and it collapsed with him. The Roman Church, for its part, had refused the Monothelite restoration outright; Pope Constantine declined to recognize Philippikos’s heretical acts, so that the West never received the synod of 712 at all. The episode was, in the long view, a brief imperial aberration, swept away within two years and condemned by the restored Orthodox order.

For the bishops who had bent under Philippikos, this brevity mattered. They had not lived for a generation under a settled heretical regime; they had yielded, for a matter of months, to a usurper whose policy the wider Church never accepted and who was gone almost before the ink was dry. When Orthodoxy was restored in 713, the path back was correspondingly short and clear.

The Fall of Philippikos and the Restoration of Orthodoxy

The Monothelite restoration of Philippikos Bardanes was short-lived. In 713, after a reign of less than two years, Philippikos was overthrown, blinded, and deposed; his successor, Anastasios II, at once restored Orthodoxy and the authority of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, undoing the synod of 712 (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Philippikos,” “Anastasios II”; Bardanes, Wikipedia). The whole episcopate that had bent under Philippikos was now free — and required — to return to the confession of two wills in Christ.

Andrew of Crete returned with them. He repudiated his subscription to the Monothelite synod and re-embraced the Orthodox faith of 681, the sources placing his recantation in 713, the year of the restoration (Andrew of Crete, Wikipedia; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.). He spent the remainder of his life — whether a dozen years or nearly three decades, depending on the disputed date of his death (see Death on Lesbos) — in the Orthodox communion, and he died a bishop in good standing, venerated thereafter as a saint.

How the Church Received Him

The ease of Andrew’s rehabilitation reflects a broader pastoral judgment of the early Church about bishops who had yielded under imperial coercion. [Disputed: the sources offer a charitable framing of the return — that the Church accepted Andrew’s subscription as having been given under the duress of the usurper rather than from settled conviction, and so received him back without lasting penalty when he repudiated it; the tradition associates this acceptance with the restored Orthodox authorities of 713 (Andrew of Crete, Wikipedia, which connects his welcome back to the acknowledgment that he had acted under compulsion). The precise canonical mechanics of his reconciliation are not preserved in detail, and the popular claim that a specific Pope or council formally “received” him should be treated with caution, since the sources are thin on the procedure; what is securely attested is that he returned to Orthodoxy in 713 and died in communion as a venerated bishop.] The general principle is well established in the Church’s handling of the “lapsed”: those who fell under persecution or coercion and then returned in repentance were, as a rule, received back, the gravity of their penance measured by the freedom of their fall. Andrew’s swift restoration fits this pattern.

What the hagiographies emphasize is not the canonical procedure but the interior reality of his repentance. The Orthodox accounts describe Andrew as having felt, after his fall, “the darkness of spiritual downfall” and as having “shed genuine tears of repentance” — language that presents his return not as a mere change of allegiance with the change of emperor, but as a true metanoia, a conversion of the heart (St. Andrew of Crete: Life and Canon / “From Heresy to Holiness,” obitel-minsk.org). Whether or not every detail of this interior portrait is recoverable history, it is the way the tradition has chosen to remember him: as a man who knew the bitterness of having denied the truth and wept his way back to it.

The Lapsed and Their Return: A Pattern in the Church

Andrew’s case is best understood within the Church’s long experience of the lapsed — those who, under pressure, fell from the confession of the faith and afterward sought to return. The pattern was set in the persecutions, when many Christians, threatened with death or ruin, offered sacrifice or surrendered the Scriptures, and then, when the danger passed, came back in repentance; the Church, after fierce debate, settled on a path of reconciliation through penance rather than permanent exclusion, the severity of the penance measured against the gravity and the freedom of the fall (on the canonical tradition of the lapsed, see the Church Fathers). The same logic governed the reception of those who, in the doctrinal crises, had subscribed under imperial coercion to a heretical formula and then returned: a fall under duress, repented and renounced, was treated as a wound to be healed, not a death to be mourned.

Andrew’s swift restoration fits this pattern exactly. The duress of a usurping emperor, the example of a whole episcopate that had bent and then returned, the genuineness of his repentance, and the manifest fruit of his later life all told in his favor; and the Church, judging as she had always judged the returning lapsed, received him. That a man so received could afterward be numbered among the saints is not an anomaly but a vindication of the Church’s whole understanding of repentance: sanctity is not the record of never having fallen, but the wholeness of a life turned, finally and entirely, toward God. Andrew is a saint not in spite of having fallen and risen, but, in a sense, as one who fell and rose — a living instance of the very gospel of repentance his Canon preaches.

The Fall Behind the Canon

It is here that the episode opens onto the heart of Andrew’s legacy. The Orthodox hagiographical tradition draws an explicit line between his fall and his masterpiece: having tasted apostasy and repentance in his own person, Andrew was able to make of his fall “universal spiritual guidance,” transmuting a private catastrophe into the Church’s common hymn of return (obitel-minsk.org, “From Heresy to Holiness”). The Great Canon’s relentless self-accusation, its refusal of every excuse, its cry that “I alone have sinned above all men,” reads differently once one knows that its author had himself, before all the Church, subscribed to heresy. The man who wrote “Whence shall I begin to lament the deeds of my wretched life?” had a wretched deed of his own to begin from (see The Soul Addressing Itself).

[Disputed: it should be said plainly that the sources do not date the composition of the Great Canon to the aftermath of 712, and the tradition does not claim that the Canon was written as a penance for the synod; the connection between the fall and the Canon is a theological and biographical resonance drawn by the hagiographers and by modern Orthodox reflection, not a documented sequence of cause and effect (the resonance is asserted in obitel-minsk.org, “From Heresy to Holiness,” and is widely repeated; it is offered here as such, not as established chronology).] What can be said with confidence is the deeper truth: the Church’s supreme poet of repentance was himself a penitent — not in the abstract, but concretely, having fallen and risen — and the authority of the Great Canon owes something to the fact that the man who summons every soul to weep for its sins had wept, in earnest, for his own.

A Holiness of Return

What the whole episode finally teaches is something central to the Orthodox understanding of sanctity: that holiness is not the same as a spotless record, and that the saints are not those who never fell but those who, having fallen, rose and kept rising. The Church’s calendar is full of penitents — the harlot who became the desert ascetic Mary of Egypt, the persecutor who became the Apostle Paul, the denier Peter who wept and was restored — and it numbers among its saints not a few who, like Andrew, lapsed under pressure and returned. Their sanctity is a holiness of return, and it is, if anything, more eloquent of the gospel than an unblemished innocence would be, because it shows the mercy of God doing its proper work upon real and damaged human material.

Andrew belongs squarely in this company, and his particular gift to the Church flows directly from it. He did not merely return to Orthodoxy; he made of the experience of falling and returning the Church’s supreme hymn of repentance, so that countless souls who have never subscribed to a heresy nonetheless learn, in his words, how to fall on their knees and rise. The man who failed the test of 712 became, through his repentance and through his Canon, one of the great teachers of how to fail and be restored. That is not a contradiction in his sanctity; it is the heart of it.

References

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “Philippikos,” “Anastasios II.” (The overthrow of Philippikos in 713; the restoration of Orthodoxy; Andrew’s death in communion as a saint.)
Andrew of Crete. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_of_Crete) — the recantation in 713 and the acceptance of his having acted under duress; cross-checked against the ODB and the hagiographies.
Bardanes / Philippikos Bardanes. Wikipedia — the fall of Philippikos in 713 and the restoration of Orthodoxy under Anastasios II.
St. Andrew of Crete: Life and Canon (“From Heresy to Holiness”); The Life of St Andrew of Crete and His Great Canon of Repentance. Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org — the interior portrait of repentance (“the darkness of spiritual downfall,” “genuine tears”) and the theological link drawn between the fall and the Great Canon.
On the Sixth Council to whose faith Andrew returned, see the repository entry The Ecumenical Councils.