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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Long Middle
Andrew of Crete
died 740Patristic
The archbishop who wrote the Great Canon, a long hymn of repentance the Eastern church still sings through Lent.
Summary
- Lived died 740.
- Stood in The Long Middle (AD 600–1500).
- Hangs on The Hymn Writers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived2 moments · AD 600–1500
- c. 723Boniface fells the oak at GeismarAn English monk walks into the German forests and cuts down an oak sacred to Thor, telling the crowd it is only a tree. The early account says he built a chapel from its timber. He was killed in Frisia in 754, and the Fulda monastery still shows a book said to be the one he raised against the swords.
- 731Bede finishes his history of the English churchAt the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, a monk who almost never left home writes the *Ecclesiastical History of the English People*, careful, sourced, and the reason we know this century at all. He is dictating a translation of John's Gospel into English when he dies in 735.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Andrew of Crete at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Wrote the Great Canon, a long hymn of repentance the East still sings through Lent.
Hangs on The Hymn Writers: The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.
Standing beside himThe Long Middle · 51 on this stretch of wall
Asked why God became man, and answered it so well the question has never gone away since.
Wrote England's first history from inside a Northumbrian monastery and dated everything from the birth of Christ, which is why we still count years that way.
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Preached with such fire that Europe followed him, and wrote 'Jesus, the very thought of Thee.'
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Wrote the most careful theology of the Middle Ages, then saw something of God and called all of it straw.
Wrote Columba's life, and pushed through a law protecting women and children from war.
Charlemagne's teacher, who cleaned up the Bible's Latin text and rebuilt the schools of Europe.