Chapter 6 - Dry Bones and the Westerly Wind
Whose bones were removed from Patras to Constantinople can never now be proved. If all the bits of bones alleged to be I those of Andrew that are residing in various sacred sites around Europe were reassembled and then subjected to genetic fingerprinting and carbon dating, I suspect there would be a miraculous fulfilment of Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones which came to life. As from the rib of Adam came another person, so from the bones of Andrew would arise a whole group of new disciples/apostles. In other words, the bones would be shown to derive from a number of different people.
It would be nice to think that those who handled the bones were more scrupulous than those who rewrote the papyri and that it would be possible to put Andrew - like a holy Humpty Dumpty - together again. Alas, it is highly unlikely. Some of | the relics fell into hostile hands (Turkish in the case of some Eastern relics, iconoclastic and Protestant in the case of the relics in St Andrews, Scotland); others have been broken up into pieces to be given to other centres as gifts or for money.
One thing that can be asserted, however, is that some bones were taken from Patras to Constantinople. Whether these. included the head is not so certain. It was not uncommon to separate a head, being a particularly potent relic, and many boasted of having the head of an apostle, while others begged to be given one. Some kind of shrine remained at Patras (cf. Gregory of Tours' reference to this flowing with manna and a story he tells of a traveller in Patras who asked for a doctor and was directed to a 'heavenly doctor who could cure without medicine' and, upon praying at Andrew's tomb, was promptly cured). Ursula Hall found references to an olive tree at Patras which was revered as the tree on which Andrew was crucified (St Andrew and Scotland, p. 81) and points out that there was a church of St Andrew at Patras from the Byzantine period, restored by Bishop Malatesta in 1426, for which Dufay wrote the motet Apostolo glorioso. This church was on the site of the temple of Demeter and nearby was a sacred spring, identified as St Andrew's Well to the Scots historian W. Skene when he visited Patras in 1844.
When another Scottish scholar, Principal Tulloch of St Andrews, visited Patras at the turn of the century he asked his diary 'Did Andrew ever live and labour here? Are his bones still lying there, as the stranger is assured, in the plain wooden coffer in the white cathedral church near the shore by the holy well that bears his name? All the devout of Patras profoundly believe this and flock thither on the anniversary of the saint, lighting the sacred shrine with their tapers as they invoke his guardian care. Or were his apostolic remains transported to Amalfi, as the good Catholics of southern Italy believe, while they point with confidence to the noble church which rises above their supposed resting place? Or did St Rule carry them off to St Andrews and build a shrine for them there and rear a national Christianity on this devout hypothesis? Hopeless as these questions are for the historian, they are beautiful to the imagination... I felt that morning at Patras as if St Andrew were a more living character than I had before realised him to be' (quoted in St Andrew: the Disciple, the Missionary, the Patron Saint, Peter Ross, p. 60).
Perhaps that reflection by a Presbyterian whose Church has not been known for giving excessive honour to the saints carries the best of all sentiments - a proper balance between forensic fact and piety in dealing with St Andrew. When Principal Tulloch visited Patras the head of Andrew that now graces the new Cathedral of St Andrew at Patras was certainly not there. A church was completed in 1979 partly to give honoured place to a head which was presented to Patras in 1964 by Pope Paul VI as an ecumenical gesture.
This head had followed a circuitous route. When Andrew's bones were taken to Constantinople by Artemius on Constantius' orders, the head was either left at Patras or returned there by a generous emperor at a subsequent date. It was certainly there by the medieval period, during which the Turks invaded Achaea in 1453. To safeguard the precious relic, Thomas Palaeologus, a member of the Achaean nobility, fled to Corfu with the head, and it was acquired by Pope Pius II, anxious to use it as a catalyst for a new crusade against the Turks. Brought to St Peter's in Rome with great ceremony on 11 April 1462, it was housed in a reliquary. The event is immortalised on the tomb of Pius II in the church of S. Andrea della Valle, which also houses a famous Andrean painting by Domenichino in which John the Baptist points out Jesus to Andrew, Jesus calls Andrew, the executioners torture Andrew, and he is then seen worshipping the cross and, finally, being carried to heaven by angels. Here art parallels literature - in both, the Gospels are used at first, then are supplanted by the legends.
But what of the bones within the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, now known as the Fatih Camii mosque? As we have seen, there was not a lot of excitement about them in earlier centuries, and when Emperor Justinian decided to rebuild the somewhat shaky building around AD 550, there were no signs in the church of any tombs or remains. Procopius, writing in about 560, records: 'But when the workmen dug over the whole place, so that nothing unseemly should be left, three wooden coffins were discovered lying there, neglected but bearing inscriptions saying that these were the bodies of the apostles Andrew, Luke and Timothy.' With enthusiasm the bodies were reburied in a suitable place of honour. Perhaps they had already been picked over and looted. Where else could the bones and relics have come from which appeared around Italy at the end of the fourth century?
Apart from the 'second-class relics' in the reliquary, the Andrean relics at Milan seem to have disappeared. Ambrose's Church of the Holy Apostles was rebuilt in the twelfth century, as S. Nazaro Maggiore, in honour of a local martyr. However, Milan's place alongside Amalfi and St Andrews as a centre of the Andrean cult is recorded in a mosaic in Westminster Cathedral, London. The other three places depicted in the mosaic are Bethsaida, Constantinople and Patras.
Whatever the authenticity of the three coffins reburied in 550, they provided a focus for honouring St Andrew and they remained in their new resting place until 1204, when Constantinople was captured from the Turks in the Fourth Crusade and the Greek emperor replaced with a Latin one. Cardinal Peter of Capua, in his role as papal legate, used the opportunity to get hold of various relics, including the 'body of St Andrew', which was brought to Amalfi, then one of the chief Italian ports. The reconstruction of the cathedral, in which the cardinal was involved, was a suitable excuse to unveil the bones on 8 May 1208. Chronicles of the time recorded 'all knew and believed' that they were the genuine article.
The cardinal appeared to have a taste for the secretive, for he kept some of the bones aside when he buried the rest in a reliquary under the altar. These turned up in 1603 and contained the back part of a skull and some other pieces of bone. The urn was reburied, dug up again in 1846 and finally put in the crypt, where it is now available for public veneration.
Beneath the altar at Amalfi is a room surrounded by metal grilles, floored with a large stone covering the tomb of St Andrew in which is a circular hole over which a metal vessel is suspended. Since at least 1308 a thick, dewy liquid called manna has collected on the vessel. This is collected on dates associated with Andrew and is used to cure the sick. The bones still appear to have life-giving powers.
Two men have done more than anyone else to promote St Andrew in the Western Church, and both were called Gregory. Gregory of Tours we have met already. He lived from 538 to 594 and is otherwise famed for his ten-volume history of the Franks. His interest in St Andrew was personal, since his birthday was 30 November. In his prologue to his book of St Andrew's miracles he reflects that most hagiography concentrates on the death of the saint but that he has found a lengthy account of miraculous deeds by St Andrew which he proposes to edit in a way which will 'please the reader'. It no doubt also pleased the more orthodox, since Gregory's version - based largely on a Latin version of the original Greek Acts of Andrew - was purged of the heretical, Gnostic tone of the original.
His story begins with Andrew leaving Achaea for Mermidona to save Matthias from infidels (not cannibals in his version), then travelling along the southern shores of the Black Sea and visiting Sinope and Nicomedia before going on the Byzantium and, finally, Macedonia. After preaching in Philippi and Thessalonica, he is arrested by the proconsul Virinus and thrown to the lions but survives unscathed. Finally he returns to Achaea, visiting Corinth and other places, ending in Patras. There he wins over the proconsul Lesbius to Christianity, but when Lesbius is replaced by Aegeates, whose wife and brother (Maximilla and Stratokles) are converted, Andrew falls foul of Aegeates and is imprisoned, tortured and finally crucified. Throughout Gregory's story Andrew is healing the sick, casting out demons, restoring the dead to life, taking a stern line on sexuality and advocating a life of chastity. Gregory omits details of the martyrdom itself, since, he points out, it is available elsewhere.
St Andrew was not yet prominent in Western Europe beyond Italy (Gregory's history of the Franks gives a prayer calendar of Tours cathedral for the decade beginning 480, and there is no mention of Andrew), but Gregory can claim much of the credit for the saint's popularisation.
The other man who acted as an apostle of the apostle was Gregory the Great, who ended his days in 604 as Pope but began life as a young man of wealth and influence in Rome. Renouncing the world on the death of his father in 574, he turned the family mansion on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew. (It is now the church of St Gregory the Great with an adjoining St Andrew chapel and famous paintings by Guido Reni and Domenichino. Reni's work shows Andrew worshipping the cross with the walls of Patras in the background.)
The choice of Andrew was not that extraordinary. As we have already seen, there was interest in Andrew in the fourth century in Rome. A feast of St Andrew was celebrated; there were several churches in his name; and by the end of the fifth century Pope Simplicius had adopted Andrew as his patron. One biographer of Gregory has him living simply as a monk, 'ruling jointly with St Andrew' on the Caelian Hill, but he was in for a rude shock. He was dispatched in 579 to Constantinople to work for Rome for seven years. There he would have encountered Justinian's newly rebuilt Church of the Holy Apostles with its three apostles reburied in positions of honour. There is a tradition that Gregory brought back to Rome in 586 an arm of Andrew, which was eventually housed on the Caelian Hill, but, as Ursula Hall points out (St Andrew and Scotland, p. 37), this is extremely unlikely given Gregory's published views on the breaking up of bodies to spread relics. Furthermore, he refused a request from Constantina, wife of the Byzantine emperor, Maurice, for a piece of the body of Paul (Letters, 4.40) on the grounds that bodies of the saints should not be disturbed.
In 590 Gregory became Pope and is credited with laying ' the foundations of what was to become the medieval papacy through his leadership and organisational skills. He was a genuinely great and selfless pope who wished to extend the Gospel to ordinary people who had not yet heard it properly. (There is a famous story that he saw flaxen-haired English boys who had become slaves in Rome and expressed the wish that these Angles could become angels. In 596 he sent Augustine, the prior of the St Andrew monastery in Rome, to Kent, where he was guaranteed a welcome by King Ethelbert. It was the start of a new chapter in the religious history of England; Andrew was to play a significant role in helping the English Church back on its feet before being claimed by Scotland.