Before the Iconoclast Storm

Andrew’s chronological place on the very eve of the iconoclast crisis: he died around 740, a few years before the Emperor Leo III’s open assault on the icons and a generation before the Council of Hieria (754) — so that his hymns and homilies, especially those on the Mother of God, breathe the settled veneration of the holy image and the saints as it stood before the controversy forced the question into the open.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

On the Eve of the Crisis

The dates of Andrew’s life set him just before one of the great convulsions of Byzantine Christianity. Iconoclasm — the imperial campaign against the making and veneration of holy images — is conventionally dated to the reign of Emperor Leo III the Isaurian, who began to move against the icons around 726–730, and it hardened into official doctrine at the iconoclast Council of Hieria in 754, before being overturned at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) and finally at the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 (on these councils, see the Ecumenical Councils). Andrew of Crete died about 740 [Disputed: birth c. 650, death c. 740 per the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and the tomb-tradition at Eresos; some sources give an earlier death (712 or 726), which would place him still further before the crisis (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018)]. On the latest reckoning, he lived to see the opening of the iconoclast troubles but died before the controversy reached its full doctrinal pitch; on the earlier reckonings he died before it began at all. Either way, he belongs to the pre-iconoclast Church — and his work is therefore a witness to what that Church believed about images and the saints before the question was forced.

What Iconoclasm Was

To see Andrew’s significance as a witness, one must be clear about what iconoclasm claimed. The iconoclasts — “image-breakers” — held that the making and veneration of icons of Christ and the saints was a form of idolatry, forbidden by the commandment against graven images; that to depict Christ was either to confine His uncircumscribable divinity or to divide His person; and that the true and only permissible “images” of Christ were the Eucharist and the moral imitation of the saints. The campaign, backed by imperial power from Leo III and pressed hardest under his son Constantine V, removed and destroyed icons, persecuted their defenders (especially the monks), and was given doctrinal form at the Council of Hieria in 754 (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Iconoclasm”; on the councils, see the Ecumenical Councils).

The Orthodox answer, worked out by John of Damascus and others and defined at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787), rested on the Incarnation: because the invisible God truly became visible flesh in Christ, He can be depicted, and the honor paid to the image passes to its prototype; the veneration (proskynēsis) given to icons is not the worship (latreia) due to God alone, but the relative honor proper to what represents Him (Seventh Council, 787, Definition; see the Ecumenical Councils). Andrew did not live to take part in this defense, but — as the next sections show — the incarnational theology on which it rests, and the devotion it was framed to protect, are already fully present in his work.

The Veneration Implicit in His Work

Andrew nowhere writes a treatise defending the icons, for in his lifetime no such defense was yet needed; the great iconodule apologetics belong to the generation just after him (above all to John of Damascus). But the piety that iconoclasm would attack is everywhere present in Andrew’s hymns and homilies, presupposed rather than argued. His Marian homilies (see The Marian Homilies) celebrate the Mother of God in language drenched in the imagery of figure and representation — the Virgin as the living ark, the gate, the throne — and they assume a Church that keeps her feasts, honors her, and depicts her; this is the very devotion to the Theotokos and her image that the iconoclasts would seek to curb. His homily on the Exaltation of the Cross (see The Festal Preaching) venerates the wood of the Cross as the bearer of salvation — a veneration of a material, depictable object of exactly the kind iconoclasm called into question.

The whole logic of Andrew’s theology, moreover, is incarnational in the way the later defense of the icons would be. The icons were defended, at Nicaea II, on the ground that because the invisible God truly became visible flesh in Christ, He can be depicted; the image rests on the reality of the Incarnation. Andrew’s hymnody and preaching are saturated in that same conviction — the Word made flesh, born of the Virgin, crucified and risen in a real body — and so the theology that would later justify the image is already, implicitly, his (Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, on the incarnational theology of the eighth-century Marian homilists; see The Witness of His Generation).

Images, Relics, and the Holy Places

It helps to be concrete about what “the veneration the iconoclasts attacked” amounted to, and to see how much of it is simply assumed in Andrew’s world. The pre-iconoclast Church venerated the holy images of Christ, the Theotokos, and the saints; it honored the relics of the martyrs and the saints, kept in churches and carried in procession; it reverenced the Cross and the instruments of the Passion; and it treasured the holy places of Palestine, the very ground sanctified by the Lord’s life, death, and resurrection. Every one of these is woven into Andrew’s biography and works. He was formed at the Holy Sepulchre itself, serving the church built over the empty tomb (see Damascus, Jerusalem, Constantinople); he preached the veneration of the Cross on the feast of its Exaltation (see The Festal Preaching); his own relics would become objects of veneration after his death (see Veneration); and his Marian homilies assume a Church that honors the Mother of God and depicts her. The whole texture of holiness that iconoclasm would call into question — material, located, depictable, touchable — is simply the air Andrew breathes.

This is why his witness matters. The iconoclasts would later claim that the veneration of images was a corruption, a late importing of idolatry into a purer earlier Church. The works of Andrew — and of his whole generation — are part of the evidence to the contrary: they show that, in the decades before the controversy, the veneration of images, relics, the Cross, and the saints was already the settled, unquestioned practice of the Church, presupposed in its most solemn preaching and prayer. The iconodules of the next generation did not invent this devotion; they defended what Andrew’s generation had taken for granted.

The Incarnational Logic

The deepest link between Andrew and the later defense of the icons is not any particular sentence he wrote but the incarnational logic that pervades all his work. The whole Orthodox case for the image, as it would be argued by John of Damascus and defined at Nicaea II, rests on a single principle: that in Christ the invisible God became truly visible, circumscribable, depictable flesh, and that to deny the possibility of His image is, in the end, to deny the reality of His Incarnation. The icon is, on this view, a confession of the Incarnation in wood and paint (Seventh Council, 787, Definition; see the Ecumenical Councils).

This exact conviction — that God has truly entered the visible, material, human world — is the pulse of Andrew’s hymnody and preaching. The Great Canon’s Gospel odes contemplate a Christ who was born of a real Virgin, who wept real tears, who suffered in a real body, and who rose; the Marian homilies celebrate the One who took flesh of the Theotokos; the homily on the Cross venerates a material instrument of salvation. Andrew never had to argue that this incarnational reality justifies the holy image, because in his day no one denied it. But the premise of the later argument is everywhere his premise, and so his work stands as evidence that the theology which would defend the icons was not an eighth-century novelty but the settled faith of the pre-iconoclast Church — the faith Andrew sang.

A Witness, Not a Combatant

It is important to be precise about Andrew’s relation to iconoclasm, since pious tradition sometimes enrolls every pre-iconoclast saint as a conscious champion of the icons. Andrew was not a combatant in the iconoclast controversy — he died too early to take a side in the developed dispute, and no anti-iconoclast writing of his is attested. What he is, rather, is a witness to the consensus the controversy disrupted: his works show, with great richness, the devotion to the Mother of God, the saints, the Cross, and the holy places that the pre-iconoclast Church took for granted, and which the iconodule fathers, a generation later, would defend as the immemorial faith. Andrew did not argue for that faith; he embodied it, and his embodiment is part of the evidence that the veneration the iconoclasts attacked was no novelty but the settled piety of the Church (see The Witness of His Generation).

References

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “Iconoclasm,” “Leo III.” (Andrew’s dates; the chronology of iconoclasm from c. 726 and Hieria 754.)
Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4 — the dates and the pre-iconoclast setting.
Cunningham, Mary B. Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008 — the incarnational theology of the eighth-century Marian homilists and its relation to the veneration of the image.
Sanidopoulos, John. “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete in Eressos of Lesvos.” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2018 — the death c. 740.
On the iconoclast councils and Nicaea II, see the repository entry The Ecumenical Councils.