The Synod of 712

The hardest episode of the life, reported from the sources and not glossed over: in 712, under the usurping emperor Philippikos Bardanes, a synod met at Constantinople which repudiated the Sixth Ecumenical Council and reinstated Monothelitism — the heresy of a single will in Christ — and St. Andrew of Crete, Archbishop of Gortyna, was among the bishops who subscribed to it. This file sets out what happened, what is known and unknown of Andrew’s motive, and why the episode matters.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Background: Monothelitism and the Sixth Council

To understand the synod of 712 one must recall the controversy it tried to reopen. Monothelitism — from mono-thelēma, “one will” — was the seventh-century teaching that the incarnate Christ, though of two natures, had only one will (and one operation), the divine. Against it the Orthodox confessed that Christ has two natural wills, divine and human, united without confusion in His one Person — for if the Lord did not assume a human will, He did not heal it, and the human will is precisely what most needs salvation. The confessor of this Dyothelite faith was St. Maximus the Confessor, who suffered mutilation and exile for it (see St. Maximus the Confessor), and it was solemnly defined as the faith of the Church at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681), which anathematized Monothelitism and its leading proponents (on the Council, see the Ecumenical Councils).

The young Andrew had himself been present at that Council, sent from Jerusalem as an archdeacon in its delegation (see Damascus, Jerusalem, Constantinople). He knew the Orthodox definition not from books but as a participant in its making. This is the fact that gives the events of 712 their full weight.

Philippikos Bardanes and the Synod

In December 711 a soldier of Armenian origin named Bardanes seized the Byzantine throne, taking the imperial name Philippikos. Philippikos was a convinced Monothelite, and he set out to undo the settlement of 681: he had the portrait of the Sixth Council removed, struck its memory from the official record, and in 712 convened a synod at Constantinople which formally repudiated the Sixth Ecumenical Council and re-established Monothelitism as the imperial faith (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Philippikos,” “Andrew of Crete”; Bardanes, Wikipedia). The historians often call this assembly a conciliabulum — a pseudo-synod or false council — precisely because it abolished the decrees of a genuine Ecumenical Council under imperial pressure (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.).

Andrew of Crete, as Archbishop of Gortyna, was among the bishops who attended this synod and subscribed to its acts. He set his name, that is, to a document repudiating the very Council he had once helped to confess and reinstating the heresy that Maximus had died resisting (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; Andrew of Crete, Wikipedia; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). This is not a slander invented by enemies; it is reported in the standard reference works and acknowledged in the Orthodox hagiographical literature itself, which faces it as a real fall (Andrew of Crete: Life and Canon / “From Heresy to Holiness,” obitel-minsk.org). The Church that venerates Andrew does so with this episode on the record.

Philippikos and the Politics of Doctrine

The synod of 712 is a vivid instance of how, in the Byzantine world, imperial politics and Church doctrine were entangled. Philippikos did not reopen the Monothelite question out of theological conviction alone; the abolition of the Sixth Council was bound up with his seizure of power and his attempt to define his reign against the order he had overthrown. Having deposed and blinded Justinian II — under whom the Orthodox settlement and the Quinisext canons had been reaffirmed — Philippikos asserted his own legitimacy partly by undoing that settlement, removing the Council’s portrait, striking its memory from the imperial records, and convening a compliant synod to ratify the change (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Philippikos”; Bardanes, Wikipedia). The bishops who attended did so under the eye of a new and violent emperor who had just demonstrated what he would do to those who crossed him.

This is the context that bears on Andrew’s subscription. To refuse an emperor’s synod was no light thing; it could mean deposition, exile, or worse, as the careers of confessors from Maximus to the later iconodules attest. The pressure on a bishop summoned to Philippikos’s synod was real and grave. Naming this context is not to excuse the subscription — many did refuse, and the West refused entirely — but to understand the situation in which Andrew, and the others who bent, made their fateful choice. The entanglement of throne and altar made the synod of 712 a test not only of doctrine but of courage, and it was the test of courage that Andrew, in that moment, failed.

The Disputed Question: Why?

What the sources do not settle is Andrew’s motive, and here honesty requires naming the positions rather than choosing one.

[Disputed: the sources differ on why Andrew subscribed to the synod of 712. (1) The most common and most charitable reading — reflected in the later acceptance of Andrew’s return and in the hagiographies — is that he, like many of the bishops, acted under duress and imperial coercion from the usurper Philippikos, subscribing to save his see or his life rather than from conviction, and that the subscription was a lapse of courage, not of belief (the duress reading is implied by his swift return and by the Church’s later acceptance of him; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). (2) A more severe reading takes the subscription at face value as a genuine, if temporary, adherence to Monothelitism — a real fall into heresy, whatever its cause — and notes that the hagiographies themselves describe Andrew as having afterward felt “the darkness of spiritual downfall” and wept genuine tears of repentance, language that implies more than a merely formal lapse (obitel-minsk.org, “From Heresy to Holiness”). The sources do not allow certainty between coerced conformity and real conviction; the safest statement is that Andrew subscribed, that the subscription was a genuine breach with Orthodoxy whatever its inner cause, and that he himself afterward treated it as a fall to be wept over.]

What is not in dispute is that the subscription happened and that Andrew later repudiated it and returned to Orthodoxy when Philippikos fell — the subject of the next file (see Repentance and Rehabilitation).

What Was at Stake

The repudiation of 681 was not a quarrel over words. At issue was the integrity of Christ’s humanity and, with it, the reality of human salvation. If Christ has no human will, then He did not assume — and therefore did not heal — the very faculty by which human beings sin and turn from God; the human will, left unassumed, would be left unredeemed. The Dyothelite confession, that Christ willed humanly with a human will perfectly conformed to the divine, secured the principle St. Gregory the Theologian had stated against an earlier error: “that which is not assumed is not healed.” To re-establish Monothelitism, as the synod of 712 did, was therefore not a technical regression but a denial of something on which the healing of the human will — the very thing the Great Canon labors over — depends.

There is thus a deep and bitter irony in the episode, which the tradition has not failed to feel. The man who would write the Church’s supreme summons to the conversion of the human will — the Great Canon, with its relentless commands to the soul to rise, to turn, to choose God — had, in 712, set his name to a document denying that Christ possessed a human will at all. Whether Andrew grasped the contradiction at the time, the sources do not say; but the shape of his later work suggests a man who came to understand, in his own person, exactly how much hangs on the freedom and the healing of the human will.

Why the Episode Is Not Suppressed

It would be easy, and it has sometimes been the instinct of pious literature, to pass over 712 in silence or to mention it only to explain it away. This collection does not, for three reasons grounded in the repository’s method (METHODOLOGY §4).

First, it is true and attested: the episode stands in the standard scholarship (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium) and in the Orthodox hagiographies alike, and a reference work that hid it would be lying by omission.

Second, the Church canonized Andrew knowing it. His sanctity is not the sanctity of a man who never fell, but of a man who fell and rose — and to suppress the fall is to falsify the holiness, which is the holiness of repentance, not of innocence.

Third, and most movingly, the episode illuminates the Great Canon. The supreme hymn of repentance was written by a bishop who had himself, in the most public way a bishop can, denied the faith and then returned to it weeping. When the Great Canon cries “I alone have sinned” and “O my soul, why sleepest thou?”, it is not the rhetoric of a man to whom apostasy was unthinkable; it is, in part, the testimony of a man who had signed his name to heresy and had to find his way back. The fall of 712 and the Canon of repentance belong together (see Repentance and Rehabilitation and The Soul Addressing Itself).

How the Tradition Has Handled It

It is instructive to see how the Orthodox tradition itself has carried this episode, because its handling is a model of the honesty the repository’s method requires. The hagiographies do not deny the fall; the modern Orthodox accounts treat it openly under titles such as “From Heresy to Holiness,” presenting Andrew’s subscription as a real lapse and his repentance as a real return (obitel-minsk.org). The standard scholarly reference works record it plainly (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.). And the Church, in glorifying Andrew, has neither pretended the episode away nor allowed it to bar his sanctity. The tradition’s instinct, in other words, has been to tell the truth and to let the truth serve edification — to show that even a bishop who fell into heresy could repent and be restored and made holy.

This collection follows that instinct deliberately. To suppress the synod of 712 would be to break faith both with the sources and with the deeper truth the episode carries; to sensationalize it would be to turn a story of repentance into a story of scandal. The middle path — state the fact, name the disputed motive, report the return, and draw out its meaning — is the path the best of the tradition has already walked, and it is the path the repository’s methodology prescribes (METHODOLOGY §4; see Repentance and Rehabilitation).

References

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “Philippikos,” “Monotheletism.” (Andrew’s subscription to the 712 synod under Philippikos; the conciliabulum that abolished the Sixth Council; the dating.)
Andrew of Crete. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_of_Crete) — used to locate the 712 synod, the subscription, and the recantation “the following year”; cross-checked against the ODB and the hagiographies.
Bardanes / Philippikos Bardanes. Wikipedia — the usurper’s Monothelite policy and the convening of the 712 synod.
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 Orthodox hagiographical acknowledgment of the fall and the repentance; the “darkness of spiritual downfall” and the tears.
On the Sixth Council and the Dyothelite definition, see the repository entry The Ecumenical Councils.