Andrew of Crete the Martyr

A monk of Crete in the age of iconoclasm

Andrew was born and tonsured on the island of Crete, and there pursued the ascetic life — the hymns of his feast remember him "trained first in asceticism on the mountain," destroying the invisible arrays of the demons with the armour of the Cross before ever he faced a visible persecutor. His manhood fell in the reign of Constantine V (741–775), son of Leo the Isaurian, whom posterity nicknamed Kopronymos — the most determined iconoclast of all the emperors. After the council he convened at Hieria in 754 had condemned the making and veneration of icons, Constantine turned decree into persecution: icons were effaced or burned, and the monks — the stubborn backbone of icon-veneration — were mocked, mutilated, exiled, and killed. The synaxaria of this era fill with the monastic confessors and martyrs of his reign: Stephen the Younger (November 28), Peter the Stylite, Paul of Crete, and Andrew.

The confession in the church of Saint Mamas

What drew Andrew from Crete to the capital, the tradition says, was the report that the emperor was casting virtuous and pious Christians into prison in the place of thieves and robbers — that piety itself had become the crime. He found Constantine at the church of the great-martyr Mamas in Constantinople, and there, before the whole assembly, rebuked him openly as a persecutor of Christ in his members and in his image. To the emperor's defence — that it is folly to give veneration to wood and paint — the monk made the answer that is the whole theology of the icon in one sentence: whoever suffers for the holy icons suffers for Christ, and whoever insults the icon on which Christ is depicted offers the insult to Christ himself.

The enraged emperor had him seized on the spot. Andrew was beaten without mercy, imprisoned, and tortured; the hymnography adds that he was rolled and dragged over the ground until the way was, in the words of his sticheron, "made smooth" by his body — another precious stone, not shattered by the blows but levelling the road of the faith and overturning the "rotten foundation" of Copronymus's doctrine. Finally he was dragged through the streets toward the place of execution; and as he was dragged, one of the mob — the tradition says a fish-seller, a partisan of the emperor's heresy — cut off his foot with a knife (the Greek synaxarion's distich knows the detail exactly: "Cut off, Andrew, in one of thy two feet, thou completest the course of thy contest"). Of this wound the martyr died, in the year 767, released by death from his torments. His body, the accounts say, was cast out with the corpses of criminals; the faithful recovered it and buried it at a place in the city called Krisis (ἡ Κρίσις), where in later times a monastery of Saint Andrew stood — and from that resting-place the martyr took the epithet the Greek books use of him to this day, "Andrew in Krisei," which conveniently distinguishes him from his great hymnographer namesake.

Veneration and later cultus

At his tomb in the Krisis quarter healings were worked; the tradition particularly credits the martyr with healing those afflicted with seizures and demonic torment, and his kontakion sings of Constantinople keeping radiant festival as the possessor of "a great treasure, thy much-suffering body." A century after his death, Joseph the Hymnographer (†886, April 4) composed a canon in his honour, in Tone 2, with the acrostic "With longing I hymn the namesake of courage" — playing, as the whole service plays, on the meaning of the name Andreas, "manly." The site of the Krisis monastery in Constantinople is commonly identified with the church that survives, much rebuilt, as the Koca Mustafa Pasha mosque (the former monastery of Saint Andrew in Krisei).