Andrew of Crete

Andrew was born in Damascus about 650. The tradition says he could not speak until he was seven years old, and that his tongue was loosed after he received communion. At fourteen he was sent to Jerusalem and became a monk at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he was made a notary of the patriarchate. In 685 he was sent to Constantinople carrying the Jerusalem church's assent to the decisions of the Sixth Ecumenical Council on the two wills of Christ. He stayed in the capital, served as deacon at the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, and ran an orphanage and a home for the aged. Somewhere around 711 he was made archbishop of Gortyna on Crete. His record there includes one bad patch that the sources do not hide: he attended the synod of 712 under the usurper Philippikos Bardanes which briefly repudiated the Sixth Council. When the emperor fell the following year, Andrew retracted. He was restored, and spent the rest of his life in Crete. He is credited with organizing relief during a siege of the island by Arab raiders. He died about 740 on the island of Lesbos while returning from Constantinople. What he is remembered for is the hymnody. Andrew is generally credited with inventing, or at least establishing, the kanon — the long liturgical poem in nine odes built on the biblical canticles, which became the backbone of Eastern Orthodox worship and remains so. His own masterpiece is the Great Canon. It runs to roughly two hundred and fifty stanzas, and it is sung during the first week of Great Lent and again, entire, on the Thursday of the fifth week. Its method is simple and relentless. Andrew walks through the whole Bible from Adam onward, and at every figure he turns the story on himself: he does not describe Cain's sin, he confesses it as his own; he is Esau selling the birthright, he is David watching from the roof, he is the man beaten and left by the roadside. The refrain returns again and again — have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me. It is one of the longest hymns in Christian use, and it is not sung to admire it. It is sung to break a heart open before Easter. He also left a substantial body of homilies, several of them among the earliest sermons preached for feasts of the Virgin, and other canons still in use. Sources: Andrew of Crete, The Great Canon (in The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware); Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 97; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV.