André de Crète

This article offers the first French translation of a homily by Saint Andrew of Crete devoted to the Annunciation. The text belongs to the Byzantine homiletic genre and presents itself as a gloss on the Gospel narrative of Luke enriched with poetic acclamations addressed to the Mother of God. The author develops a reflection on the mystery of the Incarnation: God, seeing humanity estranged from Him, chooses to become a creature and to take flesh in the womb of a Virgin. The Marian mediation thus appears as the place of encounter between the divine and the human. This translation constitutes a significant contribution for French-speaking readers by making accessible a major text of the Greek homiletic tradition, shedding light on the theology of the Incarnation and the veneration of the Theotokos in the Orthodox tradition.

This article presents a homily by Saint Andrew of Crete, an eighth-century archbishop and theologian, devoted to the human condition and the fate of the deceased. It consists of a translation accompanied by historical and theological contextualization. Composed during the reign of the iconoclast emperor Leo III the Isaurian, this homily develops a rigorous meditation on human finitude and the decomposition of being after death. The author deploys a deliberately somber rhetoric, interpreted as an implicit denunciation of imperial hubris. The contribution of this text is twofold: it illuminates Byzantine eschatological thought during a period of doctrinal and political crisis, and bears witness to the way in which patristic preaching could serve as a tool of spiritual and moral resistance against temporal power, while maintaining a perspective of hope in God.