Veneration and Patronages

The Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called is honored throughout the Orthodox and Western worlds on November 30, the date fixed by the Synaxarion of Constantinople and confirmed in the Western calendar. His liturgy gives him the title Prōtoklētos, and his patronage extends over the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Russia, Romania, Scotland, and Georgia. Few apostles command so wide a veneration or so many national devotions.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The cult of the Apostle Andrew is one of the most widely diffused in Christendom, and it is unusual in spanning East and West, Greek and Slav, the Black Sea and the North Sea. Its center is the feast of November 30, its proper name is Prōtoklētos, “the First-Called,” and its branches are the several nations and churches that claim Andrew as founder, evangelist, or patron. The feast and the patronages are not separate things: each national devotion is anchored in the liturgical commemoration of November 30, on which the relevant church keeps Andrew with particular solemnity.

The Feast of November 30

Andrew is commemorated on November 30 in the Orthodox East and, on the same date, in the Roman and Anglican West. The date is given in the Synaxarion of Constantinople (ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, Propylaeum ad Acta Sanctorum Novembris, Brussels, 1902), the standard Byzantine calendar of saints, where Andrew’s notice stands at the end of November as the close of the ecclesiastical year’s first quarter. The Orthodox menaion appoints the full liturgical office for the day, and The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v. “Andrew, St.,” confirms November 30 as his feast across the Eastern and Western calendars (Cross and Livingstone, eds., ODCC, 3rd ed., 2005). The date is ancient and stable; it appears already in the early Byzantine synaxaria and passed without dispute into the Latin martyrologies.

The hymnography of the day is built around the title and the kinship. The apolytikion (troparion) appointed for the feast addresses Andrew directly as the “first-called of the Apostles and brother of the foremost [Peter],” binding the priority of his calling to his relation to the chief of the apostles (The Festal Menaion, apolytikion of St. Andrew, November 30). The kontakion and the stichera of the day develop the same themes: Andrew as the first to follow Christ, as the first evangelist who brought his brother Simon to the Lord, and as the apostle of the nations of the Black Sea littoral. The canon at orthros rehearses his missionary journeys and his martyrdom at Patras, so that the office gathers the whole arc of his life into a single commemoration. Because the feast falls within the Nativity Fast, its celebration is marked but not festal in the fullest sense, yet in the churches that claim Andrew as patron it is kept with great solemnity.

The Title Prōtoklētos and the Iconography

The liturgy never calls Andrew simply “the Apostle” but Prōtoklētos (Πρωτόκλητος), “the First-Called,” the settled surname grounded in John 1:35–42, where Andrew is the first of the Twelve to follow Christ and the first to confess and proclaim the Messiah (see The Calling). The title governs his iconography as well as his hymnography. In Byzantine and Slavic icons Andrew is shown as an older man with thick, somewhat unruly grey hair and a full grey beard, distinguishing him from the younger, dark-haired apostles; he holds a scroll, and frequently a cross. In earlier art the cross is an ordinary upright; in later Western and some Eastern art it becomes the distinctive X-shaped saltire associated with the manner of his martyrdom at Patras (see The Saltire and Its History). The saltire, in time, became the visual emblem of all the Andrean patronages, from the Russian naval ensign to the flag of Scotland.

Constantinople and the Ecumenical Patriarchate

Andrew is the patron and reputed founder of the see of Constantinople. The tradition, developed in Byzantium and studied exhaustively by Francis Dvornik, holds that Andrew preached in Byzantium and ordained Stachys (named in Romans 16:9) as the first bishop of the city, thereby giving the imperial capital an apostolic founder to set beside Rome’s Peter (Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, Harvard, 1958). Dvornik traced how this “Stachys tradition” was elaborated to support the standing of the see; whatever its historical value, it became the firm foundation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s devotion to Andrew (see The Apostolic Throne of Constantinople). November 30 is accordingly the patronal feast of the Phanar, kept by the Ecumenical Patriarch with a patriarchal liturgy.

Since the 1960s the feast has been the occasion of a mutual exchange of delegations between Constantinople and Rome that expresses their reconciliation: Rome sends a delegation to the Phanar for the feast of Andrew on November 30, and Constantinople sends a delegation to Rome for the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul on June 29 — a symbolic recognition of the brotherhood of the two apostle-brothers and the two apostolic sees. The Ecumenical Patriarchate also confers, in connection with Andrew, the Order of Saint Andrew the Apostle, whose lay honorees are styled “Archons” — distinguished laymen recognized for service to the Church and to the Patriarchate. The order takes the First-Called as its patron precisely because he is the patron of the throne it serves.

Russia

Andrew is venerated as a patron of Russia, the patronage resting on the Kievan tradition that the apostle, traveling up the Dnieper, blessed the hills where Kiev would later rise and foretold the Christian city to come — a legend preserved in the Primary Chronicle and discussed in connection with the later imperial cult (see Andrew and the Hills of Kiev). On this foundation Peter the Great built two enduring institutions. In 1698 he instituted the Imperial Order of Saint Andrew the First-Called (Орден Святого Андрея Первозванного), the highest order of the Russian state, whose insignia bear the saltire and the figure of the crucified apostle; abolished after the Revolution, it was re-established by the Russian Federation in 1998 and remains Russia’s premier decoration. Under Peter the Great the Russian Navy likewise adopted the Saint Andrew’s flag — a blue saltire on a white field — as its naval ensign, again invoking the cross of the apostle; the flag was suppressed in the Soviet period and restored in 1992, and it remains the ensign of the Russian Navy today.

Romania

Andrew is the patron saint of Romania. The basis is the ancient tradition, accepted in Romania as part of its Christian origins, that Andrew preached the Gospel in Scythia Minor — the region of Dobruja, between the lower Danube and the Black Sea coast, in modern Romania — during his mission to the lands north and west of the Black Sea (see The Mission to Scythia). A cave in Dobruja is venerated as the Cave of Saint Andrew, traditionally where the apostle sheltered and prayed during that mission, and it is now a place of pilgrimage with a church built before it. In recognition of this patronage the Romanian state has made November 30 a national and public holiday, declared a day of celebration of the patron saint of the Romanian people, on which the country honors the apostle who is held to have first brought it the faith.

Scotland

Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and his saltire — a white diagonal cross on a blue field — is the Scottish national flag. The patronage rests on the medieval legends connecting the apostle’s relics with the place that became St Andrews in Fife, where a church and later a cathedral grew around the cult; the legends of the relics’ arrival and of the saltire’s appearance in the sky before a Pictish victory are treated in the cross-history file (see The Saltire and Its History). The standard scholarly account is Ursula Hall, St Andrew and Scotland (St Andrews, 1994), and ODCC, s.v. “Andrew, St.,” notes his Scottish patronage. November 30 is Saint Andrew’s Day, observed as Scotland’s national day; under the St Andrew’s Day Bank Holiday (Scotland) Act it has been an official bank and national holiday in Scotland since 2006.

Georgia and Other Patronages

Andrew is honored in Georgia as a first apostle of the country, the tradition holding that he preached in the Georgian lands and planted the first seeds of the faith there before the later mission of St Nino (see Andrew and the Hills of Kiev for the parallel Caucasus traditions). The Georgian Orthodox Church keeps his feast on November 30 with particular honor as the apostle of its own origins. Beyond these national devotions, Andrew is widely invoked as the patron of fishermen — fitting for the apostle whom Christ called from his nets to be a fisher of men (Matthew 4:18–20) — and, in the proper sense, as the patron of the apostolic see of Constantinople whose founder he is held to be. In every case the patronage is fixed to the feast: wherever Andrew is claimed, November 30 is the day on which the claim is liturgically renewed.

See Also

References

  • Cross, F. L., and E. A. Livingstone, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, s.v. “Andrew, St.” (confirming the November 30 feast and the Scottish patronage).
  • Dvornik, Francis. The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
  • The Synaxarion of Constantinople. Edited by Hippolyte Delehaye, Propylaeum ad Acta Sanctorum Novembris. Brussels, 1902 (the November 30 commemoration).
  • Hall, Ursula. St Andrew and Scotland. St Andrews: University of St Andrews, 1994.
  • The Festal Menaion. Apolytikion of St. Andrew the First-Called, November 30 — the liturgical source for the title Prōtoklētos and the hymnography of the feast.