The Witness of His Generation

Andrew set among his contemporaries — John of Damascus, Kosmas of Maiouma, Germanus of Constantinople — as one of the last great figures of the undivided pre-iconoclast Church and the Palestinian-Byzantine flowering of the early eighth century: a generation that gathered the inheritance of the Fathers into the hymns, homilies, and devotion that would carry the faith through the coming storm and define the Orthodox services ever after.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A Remarkable Generation

Andrew of Crete did not stand alone. He belonged to one of the most fruitful single generations in the history of the Eastern Church — the cluster of saints, mostly formed in the Palestinian monasteries and serving the great sees of the Christian East, active in the late seventh and early eighth century, who together gave the Byzantine rite much of its enduring shape. Alongside Andrew stood:

St. John of Damascus (d. c. 750), the Sabaite monk who systematized the kanon, composed the Paschal Canon, compiled the Octoechos, wrote the great defenses of the holy icons, and summed the patristic faith in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (see St. John of Damascus);
St. Kosmas of Maiouma (Kosmas the Melodist, d. c. 752/760), John’s foster-brother and fellow hymnographer of the great feasts;
St. Germanus of Constantinople (Patriarch c. 715–730), the first great opponent of imperial iconoclasm, deposed by Leo III for defending the images, and himself a notable preacher on the Mother of God.

(Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “John of Damascus,” “Kosmas of Maiouma,” “Germanos I.”) Andrew was the eldest of this company, the senior figure whose Great Canon and festal hymnody were already established when the others did their work (see The Kanon Form). His generation is the hinge on which the Byzantine liturgical tradition turns: behind them lie the Fathers and the older hymnody of Romanos and the kontakion; ahead lies the iconoclast crisis and, beyond it, the settled medieval rite their canons and homilies had largely built.

The End of the Patristic Age

There is a real sense in which Andrew’s generation marks the close of the patristic age and the beginning of what came after. The classical age of the Greek Fathers — the age of the great Trinitarian and Christological controversies, of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, of Cyril and Maximus, of the first six Ecumenical Councils — reached its term with the Sixth Council of 681, which settled the last of the Christological questions. After it, the Church’s task changed character: less the forging of new dogmatic definitions and more the consolidation, transmission, and defense of an inheritance now substantially complete. Andrew’s generation stands precisely at that turn. John of Damascus’s Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is the great monument of consolidation — the patristic inheritance summed and ordered; the iconodule writings are the great monument of defense; and the hymnody of Andrew, John, and Kosmas is the inheritance turned into prayer, the doctrine of the Fathers poured into the canons the Church would sing forever after (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Patristics,” “John of Damascus”; see The Church Fathers).

This is why these figures are often called the last of the Fathers, or the bridge from the Fathers to the Byzantine middle ages. They received a finished house and made it habitable: they furnished the Church with the hymns it would pray, the summaries it would teach, the defenses it would need. Andrew’s Great Canon is a perfect emblem of the moment — a work that contains no new doctrine, that invents nothing, but that gathers the whole of Scripture and the whole patristic theology of repentance into a single great prayer for the use of every coming generation. The age of definition was ending; the age of transmission, in which Andrew was a master, had begun.

Gathering the Inheritance

What this generation chiefly did was to gather and transmit. They stood at the end of the patristic age proper — the great age of the Ecumenical Councils, which closed (for the Christological controversies) with the Sixth Council of 681 that Andrew had attended — and their task was less to break new dogmatic ground than to gather the inheritance of the Fathers into forms the Church could carry forward: into the hymns sung at every Matins, the homilies read on every feast, the summary of doctrine, the defense of the practices the iconoclasts would soon attack (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v.; on the patristic background, see The Church Fathers). Andrew’s particular share in that gathering was the kanon and the festal homily — he poured the Scripture and the theology of the Fathers into the nine-ode hymn and the festal sermon, and through these forms the inheritance passed into the daily prayer of the Church.

The Palestinian Crucible

It is no accident that so much of this generation was formed in the monasteries of Palestine, and the fact tells us something about the shape of the age. By the late seventh century Palestine and Syria had passed under Arab rule, and the great Christian centers of the East — Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria — were now outside the political bounds of the Byzantine Empire, living as Christian communities under a non-Christian government. Paradoxically, this gave the Palestinian monasteries a certain independence and made them reservoirs of theological and liturgical creativity: the Lavra of St. Sabbas (Mar Saba) in the Judean desert, in particular, was the formative home of both Andrew and John of Damascus (and of Kosmas), and its liturgical practice — the “Sabaite” typikon — would come to shape the services of the whole Orthodox world (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Sabas, Monastery of St.,” “John of Damascus,” “Andrew of Crete”; see Damascus, Jerusalem, Constantinople).

The men of this generation thus carried a double inheritance: the deep ascetic and liturgical tradition of Palestinian monasticism, and the theological tradition of the Greek Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils. Some of them — Andrew, Germanus — moved into the great sees of the Byzantine world and served the imperial Church; others — John, Kosmas — remained monks under Arab rule. Together, from these two settings, they produced the hymns, homilies, and theology that the Byzantine Church would carry forward. The geography is part of the story: much of what is most characteristically “Byzantine” in the later Orthodox services was in fact forged in the desert monasteries of an Arab-ruled Palestine, by men like Andrew of Crete.

Andrew the Senior

Within this remarkable company Andrew holds a particular position as the senior figure, the eldest of the great hymnographers and the one whose work was already established when the others came to maturity. Born around 650, he was perhaps a generation older than John of Damascus (born around 675–680) and Kosmas, and his Great Canon and earliest festal canons belong to the foundation on which the slightly younger men built (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “John of Damascus”; see The Kanon Form). This seniority is part of why the tradition, listing the developers of the kanon, names Andrew first: not because the form was his sole invention — it was not — but because he was the eldest of the masters who brought it to its flowering, the one who had already shown what the multi-ode hymn could do when John and Kosmas took it up.

There is a further difference of role within the generation. John of Damascus and Germanus of Constantinople became, in their different ways, combatants in the controversies of the age — John the great theologian and apologist of the icons, Germanus the patriarch who resisted Leo III to the point of deposition. Andrew, dying around 740 and never drawn into the iconoclast battle, was rather a witness and a builder — one whose contribution was the hymns and homilies that furnished the Church’s prayer and embodied its faith, rather than the treatises and the resistance that defended it under attack. Both kinds of service belong to the one generation, and both were needed; Andrew’s was the quieter and, in the long liturgical life of the Church, the more pervasive.

The Witness That Outlasted the Storm

The deep significance of this generation is that its work outlasted the iconoclast crisis and carried the faith across it. When iconoclasm broke, much of what the Church possessed to set against it was the work of Andrew’s contemporaries — John of Damascus’s defenses of the icons, Germanus’s resistance, and, underlying both, the rich incarnational devotion to Christ, His Mother, and the saints that the whole generation had embodied in its hymns and homilies (see Before the Iconoclast Storm). Andrew himself did not live to fight that battle, but his work was part of the inheritance being defended: the Great Canon, the festal canons, and the Marian homilies are monuments of exactly the piety the iconoclasts called into question and the Seventh Council vindicated. In this sense Andrew is a witness of his generation in the strong sense — one whose testimony, given in hymn and sermon before the controversy began, helped to establish what the controversy was about and what, in the end, the Church confessed.

That the same generation could produce both the supreme hymn of repentance (Andrew’s Great Canon) and the supreme defense of the holy image (John’s Apologies) is no accident: both flow from the one conviction that the invisible God became visible, weepable-over, depictable flesh in Jesus Christ — the conviction that makes both the icon and the penitent’s tears possible. Andrew belongs, with his contemporaries, to the generation that fixed that conviction in the forms the Orthodox Church has prayed ever since.

References

Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “John of Damascus,” “Kosmas of Maiouma,” “Germanos I.” (The generation of early-eighth-century Palestinian-Byzantine hymnographers and theologians; Andrew’s seniority.)
Cunningham, Mary B. Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008 — the homilists of Andrew’s generation (Andrew, Germanus, John of Damascus) and their shared Marian theology.
On the patristic inheritance and the Ecumenical Councils that frame this generation, see the repository entries The Church Fathers and The Ecumenical Councils.