Veneration

The cult of St. Andrew of Crete: his commemoration on July 4 across the Orthodox world, the honoring of his relics at Eresos on Lesbos and (by translation) on his own island of Crete, and the universal reverence that flows less from biographical legend than from the unrivalled place his Great Canon holds in the prayer of every Orthodox Christian who keeps the Great Fast.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Sung Rather Than Narrated

The veneration of St. Andrew is a clear instance of a wider truth about how the Orthodox Church remembers her hymnographer-saints. For many of the most beloved figures of the Church’s prayer — Romanos the Melodist, John of Damascus, Kosmas of Maiouma, and Andrew of Crete among them — the cult rests not on a dramatic Life full of miracles, nor on a great pilgrimage shrine, but on the continued presence of their words in the mouth of the Church. These saints are venerated as the voices in which the Church still prays: to sing the Paschal Canon is to keep the memory of John of Damascus; to pray the Great Canon is to keep the memory of Andrew of Crete. Their sanctity is sung rather than narrated, carried not in story but in liturgy (see The Witness of His Generation).

This gives Andrew’s veneration a peculiar intimacy and reach. A Christian may never have read a line of his Life and yet may have wept, year after year, in the words of his Canon — and in doing so has venerated him more deeply than any reading of a biography could achieve. The saint is honored not from a distance, as a hero of the past, but from within, as the one who lends the worshipper his own words for repentance. To pray the Great Canon is, in a real sense, to commune with its author in the act of repentance he made possible.

The Feast of July 4

St. Andrew of Crete is commemorated throughout the Orthodox Church on July 4 (OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 4; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; Greek Synaxaria). On that day the services honor him as “Andrew, Archbishop of Crete,” hierarch and hymnographer, and the hymns for his feast praise above all his gift of compunction and his Great Canon — the saint is celebrated, fittingly, in the very form he perfected. (He is to be distinguished from other saints of the same name, notably the martyr St. Andrew of Crete commemorated on October 17, “the man of God” of the iconoclast era — a different person.)

The fixing of the July 4 date and the local celebration at Eresos on Lesbos, where he died, were reaffirmed in the modern period: when a chapel and a larger church were built at Skala Eresou in 1938, the metropolis established July 4 as the annual feast there, at the site of his tomb (Sanidopoulos, “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete,” 2018; see Death on Lesbos).

The Relics

Andrew’s body was buried at Eresos on Lesbos, behind the altar of the early-Christian basilica that bears his name, and his relics rested there for many centuries (Sanidopoulos, 2018). Their later history runs along two channels. By the local Lesbian tradition, in the nineteenth century Cretans translated the greater part of his relics back to Crete, his own see, so that the saint at last “returned” to the island he had shepherded, leaving portions behind at the Lesbian monasteries of Ypsilou and Leimonos (Sanidopoulos, 2018). Other accounts speak of relics translated to Constantinople in the Byzantine period (OCA, Lives, July 4). [Disputed: the precise history of Andrew’s relics is recorded differently in the sources — the Lesbian-Cretan tradition has the bulk of the relics moved to Crete in the nineteenth century with portions remaining at Ypsilou and Leimonos (Sanidopoulos, 2018), while the OCA Life mentions a translation to Constantinople; the accounts are not fully reconciled, and the safest statement is that his relics were honored at Eresos and partly dispersed by translation to Crete and elsewhere.] What is clear is that the tomb at Eresos and the relics at the Lesbian monasteries remain objects of veneration and places of pilgrimage to this day.

Distinguishing the Saints Named Andrew

A practical point of identification is worth making, since the calendar carries more than one St. Andrew and they are easily confused. The subject of this collection is Andrew of Crete the hymnographer, archbishop and confessor, commemorated July 4. He is to be distinguished from at least two others. First, St. Andrew of Crete the Martyr (also “Andrew of Crete the Calybite” or “in Crisi”), a monk martyred under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V for venerating the icons, commemorated October 17 — a confusing near-namesake, since he too is “of Crete” and is associated with the icon controversy, but he is a different person of a slightly later generation (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Andrew of Crete”; Andrew of Crete (martyr), Wikipedia). Second, the Apostle Andrew the First-Called (commemorated November 30) is, of course, an entirely separate figure of the apostolic age. The archbishop of Crete and author of the Great Canon is securely identified by his feast of July 4, his office (archbishop of Crete), and his work (the Great Canon and the homilies of PG 97).

This is not pedantry: the conflation of the hymnographer with the iconoclast-era martyr has occasionally muddled popular accounts, and the careful identification of the July 4 saint as the author of the Great Canon is part of attesting his veneration correctly.

A Cult Carried by the Canon

What distinguishes Andrew’s veneration from that of many ancient hierarchs is that it rests less on a rich body of miracle-stories or a famous shrine than on the living presence of his work in the prayer of the whole Church. Many Orthodox Christians who could say little about the events of his life nonetheless encounter him every Lent, in the most intense and memorable services of the fast, as the author of the Great Canon (see Its Place in Lent). His sanctity is, so to speak, sung rather than narrated: he is venerated as the man who gave the Church the words in which it weeps for its sins. In this he is like his great contemporaries — John of Damascus, Kosmas of Maiouma, Romanos before them — whose deepest veneration is bound up with the hymns the Church still sings in their names (see The Witness of His Generation).

The Hymns of His Feast

The services for July 4 honor Andrew in the very idiom he perfected, and they make explicit the Church’s reasons for venerating him. He is praised as a hierarch — a faithful shepherd of Crete — and above all as the hymnographer of repentance, the one who taught the Church to weep. The liturgical texts dwell on his gift of katanyxis (compunction) and name the Great Canon as the instrument by which he stirs the whole Church to penitence; the saint, that is, is celebrated for the very thing he gave to others. There is a fitting circularity here: the man who composed the Church’s supreme penitential canon is himself commemorated, on his feast, in canons and stichera that ask his prayers and praise his tears (the Menaion for July 4; Greek Synaxaria).

The hymns of his feast also quietly hold together the whole shape of his life — the hierarch, the ascetic, the teacher of repentance — without dwelling on the fall of 712, which the liturgical celebration, in the manner of the Church’s feasts, passes over in favor of the holiness that crowned the life. The episode is preserved in the histories and the Lives (see The Synod of 712); the feast celebrates the saint the penitent became.

A Pan-Orthodox Saint

Andrew’s veneration is universal across the canonical Orthodox Churches, Greek and Slavic alike — a true pan-Orthodox cult — precisely because the Great Canon holds an identical, central place in the Lenten services of the entire Byzantine rite. In Greece and the Greek-speaking world he is honored as a native son of the Aegean and the archbishop of Crete; in the Slavic Churches the Great Canon (Velikiy Kanon) and the “Standing of St. Mary of Egypt” (Mariino stoyanie) are among the most beloved services of the year; everywhere the saint of July 4 is known above all as the voice of Lenten repentance. The depth of that reception, and the editions and scholarship that have carried the Canon into the modern world, are treated in the companion file (see Tradition and Scholarship).

The Saint and His Penitence

There is a final fittingness in the way the Church venerates St. Andrew that is worth naming. The man is honored, above all, as the teacher of repentance — and his own life, including its fall and its return (see The Synod of 712), makes that veneration ring true rather than hollow. The Church does not celebrate Andrew as a flawless hierarch who descended to teach repentance to lesser men; she celebrates a bishop who himself fell, wept, and rose, and who out of that experience gave the whole Church the words of its own return. The veneration of Andrew is therefore, at bottom, the veneration of repentance itself — of the truth that a soul can fall grievously and yet, by the mercy of God, be raised and even sanctified.

This is perhaps why the Great Canon, and through it its author, has been so beloved across the centuries and the jurisdictions. It does not speak from above to sinners; it speaks from within sin, in the voice of one who knows the fall from the inside. The Church venerates Andrew of Crete as one of her own — a sinner saved, a penitent perfected — and in honoring him she honors the gospel of repentance he both lived and sang.

References

Saint Andrew, Archbishop of Crete. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 4. (The feast of July 4; the death and the translation of relics.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “The Tomb of St. Andrew of Crete in Eressos of Lesvos.” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2018. (The tomb at Eresos; the relics; the nineteenth-century translation to Crete; portions at Ypsilou and Leimonos; the 1938 church and the July 4 feast.)
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan. Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Andrew of Crete.” (The feast and the figure; distinguished from the martyr Andrew of Crete, Oct. 17.)
The Greek Synaxaria and the Menaion for July, for the hymns of Andrew’s feast.