The Canon in Tradition and Scholarship

The afterlife of Andrew’s masterpiece: the unrivalled place the Great Canon holds in the Triodion and in Orthodox Lenten piety, the major translations that have carried it into the modern languages (Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, Ephrem Lash, Holy Transfiguration Monastery), and the scholarship — above all Derek Krueger’s study of the penitent self — that has illuminated how the Canon was composed, transmitted, and how it forms the one who prays it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Great Canon in the Triodion

The Great Canon’s place in the Orthodox tradition is, quite simply, central and unrivalled. It is the principal penitential text of the Lenten Triodion, the service-book of the pre-Lenten and Lenten weeks, and it occupies the two most intense moments of the fast — the Great Compline services of the first week and the entire reading on the Thursday of the fifth (see Its Place in Lent). No other single hymn holds so commanding a position in the Lenten services, and few texts in any liturgical tradition have been prayed so continuously, by so many, for so long: the Great Canon has been at the heart of the Byzantine Lent for more than a thousand years, from the consolidation of the Triodion through to the present day (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, introduction; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki).

The text itself has a history. The Canon as it is now sung is not, in every troparion, exactly as Andrew left it: the received liturgical form includes later additions — the troparia to St. Mary of Egypt and to St. Andrew himself — interwoven with Andrew’s own stanzas, and the manuscript and printed recensions vary slightly in their wording and in the precise count of troparia (see The Great Canon). The early history of the text, including its translation into Old Church Slavonic by the late ninth or early tenth century, has itself become a subject of scholarship, as the Canon was carried from Greek into the Slavic liturgical world along with the rest of the Triodion (studies of the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Great Canon, e.g., in the academic literature on the Slavonic Triodion; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki).

A Text That Grew

The Great Canon as the Church now sings it is best understood not as a fixed, single-authored poem but as a liturgical text with a history — a core composed by Andrew that the tradition received, used, and in places augmented over the centuries. Three layers can be distinguished. The first and largest is Andrew’s own: the great body of troparia, marching through Scripture from Adam to the Gospel, that constitutes the Canon proper. The second is the set of troparia addressed to St. Mary of Egypt, added so that the supreme example of repentance might accompany the supreme hymn of it, and bound up with the Canon’s use on the fifth Thursday alongside her Life. The third is the set of troparia addressed to St. Andrew himself, by which the later Church honored the author within his own work (Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki; see The Great Canon). These additions, together with the ordinary variations among manuscript and printed recensions, are why the troparion count is given as an approximation and why the precise wording differs slightly between editions.

None of this diminishes Andrew’s authorship; it is simply how liturgical texts live. A canon prayed by the whole Church for thirteen centuries is not a museum object but a living thing, and the Church has handled the Great Canon as she handles all her prayer — receiving it, treasuring it, and at points adorning it, while keeping its substance and its author’s name. The scholarly task of distinguishing the layers serves the Church’s understanding of her own prayer; it does not unsettle the Canon’s standing as the work of St. Andrew of Crete.

The Major Translations

The Great Canon has been translated many times into English and the other modern languages; three renderings have shaped its modern reception in English in particular:

Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, in The Lenten Triodion (Faber & Faber, 1978; repr. St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press) — the standard scholarly English translation of the whole Lenten service-book, including the Great Canon in both its first-week and fifth-Thursday forms; the version most cited in this collection.
Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), whose translation of the Great Canon (made available online at anastasis.org.uk) is among the most widely used in English-speaking parishes for its accuracy and singability.
Holy Transfiguration Monastery (HTM), Boston, whose liturgical English translation of the Great Canon (and of the Triodion texts generally) is in broad use in the English-speaking Orthodox world.

These translations, together with many parish and jurisdictional editions, have made the Canon accessible to Orthodox Christians praying in English, and have established it in the devotional life of the English-speaking Church.

The Scholarship

The Great Canon has also drawn serious modern scholarly attention, of which the most important strand concerns how the Canon forms the self of the one who prays it. The standard study is Derek Krueger’s Liturgical Subjects (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), which analyzes the Great Canon — alongside other Byzantine penitential hymnody — as a technology for constructing the “liturgical subject,” the repentant self produced by the act of singing the Canon’s first-person self-accusation; Krueger’s reading of the Canon’s biblical typology and its grammar of compunction is the indispensable modern account (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, esp. ch. 5; see The Soul Addressing Itself).

Andrew’s wider corpus has been served by other scholarship: Mary Cunningham’s Wider than Heaven (SVS Press, 2008) edited and translated his Marian Nativity homilies within the eighth-century corpus, and Brian Daley’s On the Dormition of Mary (SVS Press, 1998) translated his Dormition homilies (see The Marian Homilies); his homily on the Exaltation of the Cross has received a critical editio princeps (see The Festal Preaching). The standard reference orientation for Andrew’s life, dates, and corpus is the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, and his homilies remain accessible in their collected form in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 97.

The Canon Across the Languages

The transmission of the Great Canon is itself a small history of Orthodox expansion. Composed in Greek and consolidated within the Byzantine Triodion, it was carried, with the rest of the service-books, into every Church that received the Byzantine rite. The Old Church Slavonic translation, made as the Triodion was rendered for the newly converted Slavic Churches in the late ninth and early tenth century, became the form in which the Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and other Slavic Churches have prayed the Canon ever since — and the Velikiy Kanon and the Mariino stoyanie (the “Standing of St. Mary of Egypt”) are as central to the Slavic Lent as their Greek originals are to the Greek (studies of the Old Church Slavonic Triodion and the Great Canon; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki). In the modern period the Canon has been translated into the languages of the worldwide Orthodox diaspora — English above all, but also the other vernaculars — so that the prayer a Cretan bishop wrote in eighth-century Greek is now wept, each Lent, in the tongues of every continent.

The textual scholarship that accompanies this transmission is concerned, in part, with sorting Andrew’s original from the later accretions — the additional troparia, the verses to St. Mary of Egypt and to St. Andrew himself, the variations among recensions — a task that bears on questions from the original troparion count to the early history of the Slavonic version (see The Great Canon). But this critical work serves, rather than competes with, the Canon’s life: it aims to give the praying Church the soundest possible text of the prayer it has never stopped praying.

A Living Text

What no edition or study can quite capture is that the Great Canon is, before it is anything else, a living liturgical text — not a literary monument studied at a desk but a prayer sung, slowly and in the dim light of the Lenten evening, by congregations across the Orthodox world every year. Its scholarship and its translations exist to serve that life. The measure of Andrew’s achievement is not the bibliography that surrounds the Canon but the fact that, thirteen centuries after he wrote it, millions of Christians still take its words into their own mouths each Lent and weep for their sins in the language a repentant bishop of Crete gave them. That is the deepest reception of all (see Veneration).

References

The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978 (repr. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press) — the standard English Triodion, with the Great Canon.
The Great Canon, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), anastasis.org.uk — the widely used online English translation.
The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston — the HTM liturgical English translation.
Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, esp. ch. 5 — the standard study of the Great Canon and the penitent self.
Cunningham, Mary B. Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008; Daley, Brian E. On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998 — Andrew’s Marian homilies in translation.
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 97 (Andrew’s collected homilies).
Great Canon. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Great_Canon); studies of the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Great Canon and the Slavonic Triodion (academic literature) — for the textual history and the Slavic reception.