The Pastor of Crete

The working bishop behind the hymnographer: Andrew’s decades as Archbishop of Crete were filled with the ordinary, unglamorous labors of a diocesan shepherd on a vulnerable frontier island — building and adorning churches, founding and sustaining works of charity, and (the tradition holds) helping to defend his flock and his island against the Arab sea-raids of the early eighth century.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Crete in the Eighth Century

Some background on the island clarifies the world Andrew governed. Eighth-century Crete was a Byzantine province, Greek-speaking and thoroughly Christian, its life organized around the metropolitan see of Gortyna and a network of suffragan bishoprics across the island. It was prosperous and populous, but it was also exposed: lying on the sea-routes of the eastern Mediterranean, it stood in the path of the Arab fleets that, through the seventh and eighth centuries, raided the Byzantine islands and coasts. The great catastrophe — the conquest of the whole island by Andalusian Arab adventurers, who made it the base of the emirate of Crete — still lay a century in the future (the conquest is dated to the 820s), but the threat of raids, captivity, and devastation was a present fact of Cretan life in Andrew’s day (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Crete,” “Gortyna”). A bishop of Crete in the early eighth century shepherded a flock that lived with the sea at its door and danger upon the sea.

This frontier condition shaped the texture of the pastorate. The works of charity took on the urgency of relief in a hard and threatened place; the building of churches was the strengthening of a Christian people’s life against the day of trial; and the bishop’s role as a focus of his people’s courage and prayer was no abstraction. Andrew governed not a tranquil backwater but an exposed Christian island in a contested sea — and the steadiness and mercy that mark his pastorate are the more striking for the precariousness of the world in which he exercised them.

The Bishop, Not Only the Poet

The fame of the Great Canon can make it easy to forget that Andrew spent some thirty to forty years as the chief pastor of a real and demanding diocese. Crete in the early eighth century was a large, populous, and exposed Byzantine island, and its archbishop, seated at Gortyna, carried the whole weight of its ecclesiastical life: the ordination and oversight of its clergy, the care of its churches, the relief of its poor, the teaching and discipline of its people, and the safeguarding of an apostolic see (see Archbishop of Crete). The hagiographies remember him not as a recluse but as an active and beloved bishop, “a true luminary of the Church,” whose pastoral labors were as much a part of his sanctity as his hymns (OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org).

Building and Adorning

The tradition credits Andrew with the building and adornment of churches on Crete, the concrete work of a bishop who provides his people with the places and beauty of worship (OCA, Lives, July 4). The detail is consistent with everything else known of him: the master of the festal hymn, who filled the services with poetry, would naturally also have cared for the houses in which those services were sung. The pastor who taught his people the mysteries in the words of his canons and homilies (see The Festal Preaching) gave them, too, the churches in which to celebrate them.

The Works of Mercy

Most characteristically, Andrew is remembered as a founder and sustainer of charity. At Constantinople he had administered the great orphanage and the home for the poor and aged attached to Hagia Sophia (see Damascus, Jerusalem, Constantinople); on Crete he continued the same work of philanthropia, establishing or supporting institutions for the relief of the poor, the sick, the orphaned, and the destitute (OCA, Lives, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). This is not incidental to his legacy. The theology of mercy runs straight through the Great Canon, which ends every spasm of self-accusation with the cry for God’s mercy and holds up the merciful of Scripture as the soul’s hope; and the bishop who preached and sang that mercy practised it in the founding of poorhouses and orphanages. In Andrew, the poet of the eleēson me — “have mercy on me” — was himself a dispenser of mercy to the bodies of the poor.

The Defense of the Island

The hagiographical tradition also remembers Andrew as a defender of Crete in a time of danger. The eighth-century Mediterranean was contested by Arab fleets, and Crete, an exposed island, was subject to the threat and reality of sea-raids long before its outright conquest by Andalusian Arabs in the 820s (OCA, Lives, July 4). The Lives hold that Andrew, as the leading figure of the island, was involved in its defense — encouraging and strengthening his people, and (in the language of hagiography) interceding for the island’s deliverance — so that his pastorate had, alongside its building and charity, the cast of a wartime episcopate, the bishop standing with his flock under threat (OCA, Lives, July 4; The Life of St Andrew of Crete, obitel-minsk.org). [Disputed: the details of Andrew’s role in the defense of Crete against the Arabs are given by the hagiographies rather than by independent documentary sources, and should be received as the tradition’s memory of a wartime bishop (per METHODOLOGY §3.5) rather than as a precisely datable military history (OCA, Lives, July 4).]

The Apostolic Inheritance

Andrew governed a church with an unusually direct claim on the apostolic age. Crete was the island to which the Apostle Paul had sent Titus as its first bishop, charging him to “set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city” (Titus 1:5) — so that the see Andrew held understood itself to stand in a succession reaching back to Paul’s own delegate, and St. Titus was venerated as the founder of the Cretan church and is honored as its patron to this day (Titus 1:5; OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Crete”). To sit on the throne of Gortyna was, in Andrew’s understanding, to inherit and to guard an apostolic foundation. This consciousness suited the man. The poet of the Great Canon, whose whole work is a summons back to the faith and the repentance of the Scriptures, was also the steward of a church that traced itself to the apostolic preaching — and the burden of both was the same: to keep a people faithful to what they had received.

The apostolic inheritance also sharpened the stakes of the pastorate’s dangers. An ancient and venerable Christian island, exposed to raids and (within a century of Andrew’s death) to outright conquest, was a flock under threat, and its bishop’s care necessarily included the defense of a Christian community whose roots ran back to Paul. The building, the charity, and the defense were not three separate activities but one pastorate: the guarding and nourishing of an apostolic people in a dangerous age.

Mercy as the Form of His Theology

The deepest unity of Andrew’s pastorate lies in the place of mercy (eleos) in it, for mercy is the hinge on which both his charity and his hymnody turn. The refrain of the Great Canon is eleēson me — “have mercy on me” — repeated after troparion upon troparion; the whole Canon is a plea for the mercy of God upon a soul that has no other hope. And the same word, in its active sense, names the works of the bishop who fed the poor and housed the orphan: eleēmosynē, almsgiving, is mercy made tangible. In Andrew the prayer for mercy and the practice of mercy are one thing seen from two sides. The bishop who taught his people to cry “have mercy on me” to God also showed them mercy with his own hands, knowing — as the Lord taught — that the merciful obtain mercy (Matthew 5:7) and that what is done to the least is done to Christ (Matthew 25:40).

This is why the pastorate and the poetry cannot finally be separated. The Great Canon is not the leisure-work of a man whose real life lay elsewhere; it is the prayer of the same heart that founded the poorhouses, the distillation into verse of a life organized around the mercy of God toward sinners and the mercy of Christians toward the poor. The poet of eleēson me and the founder of orphanages are one man, and his theology of mercy is written as much in the institutions he built as in the troparia he composed.

A Whole Pastorate

Taken together — the churches built, the poor fed, the orphans housed, the island defended, the feasts preached and sung — Andrew’s Cretan years present a complete and integrated pastorate, in which the hymnography was one labor among many and all of them flowed from the same source. The man was not a poet who held a see as a sinecure; he was a hard-working bishop whose poetry was part of his pastoral care. It was in the midst of this pastorate, and on its business, that he set out for Constantinople a final time — the journey from which he would not return (see Death on Lesbos).

References

Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4. (The active Cretan pastorate; building of churches; works of charity; the defense of the island against raids; “a true luminary of the Church.”)
The Life of St Andrew of Crete and His Great Canon of Repentance. Saint Elisabeth Convent, obitel-minsk.org. (The charitable works and the pastoral labors on Crete.)
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete,” “Crete.” (The see of Gortyna; the eighth-century situation of the island.)