The Legends of St Clement

The feast of Pope St Clement I, which we keep today, is one of the most ancient of the Roman Rite, attested in almost every pertinent liturgical book going as far back as we have them, to the so-called Leonine Sacramentary in the middle of the 6th century. It is kept on the same day in the Ambrosian and Mozarabic Rites, and one day later in the Byzantine.

The Apotheosis of St Clement, 1807, by the German painter Josef Winterhalder the Younger (1743-1807).

According to the consensus now generally accepted, he was the fourth Pope, although there is some confusion in the earliest sources as to his place in the order of St Peter’s successors. A tradition known since at least the time of Origen, who died ca. 252, identifies him with the Clement whom St Paul mentions in the Epistle to the Philippians (4, 3). This tradition is accepted in the Roman Missal as we currently have it, which read this verse in the Epistle of his Mass (Phil. 3, 17 – 4, 3), but this is not attested in the oldest Roman Mass lectionaries.

Clement vies with the anonymous writer of the Didache for recognition as the author of the first known Christian work outside the New Testament. In the Greek city of Corinth, some members of the Church had unlawfully deposed their presbyters, and Clement wrote them a fairly lengthy letter, in which he ordered that the deposed clerics be restored. This work was very well known in antiquity, and treated in some places on a par with the Sacred Scriptures by being read at the liturgy. It is included with the Gospel of John in a fragmentary Bible of the fourth century, and in one of the most important surviving great codices of the fifth, the Codex Alexandrinus. Despite the mention of it in St Jerome’s book On Illustrious Men, it was forgotten by the West until the 17th century, when the Alexandrinus was given to the English king Charles I in 1627. Since that time, it has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly study; one Anglican divine even described the letter as the first act of papal aggression against the independence of the local churches.

Part of the Epistle of St Clement shown in a photographic facsimile of the Codex Alexandrinus made in 1856.

This letter is Clement’s only known authentic writing, but the Codex Alexandrinus also has a text placed right after it, which is commonly, though improperly, referred to as his Second Epistle, a general sermon on the Christian life dated to roughly 120-140 AD. St Jerome also mentions it in On Illustrious Men, noting that it had been “reproved by the ancients”; on the other hand, he himself accepts the authenticity of two treatises on virginity which have often been attributed to Clement, but are properly dated to the third century.

In the pre-Tridentine Roman breviary, one of the Matins lessons for St Clement declares that “he wrote many books in his zeal for the Faith and the Christian religion”, a statement which is repeated in other words in the 1568 edition of St Pius V. This does not seem to refer, however, to the works mentioned above, which are three, not many; generously four, if we count the one explicitly rejected by no less an authority than St Jerome. I believe it is rather a holdover from earlier medieval sources, and refers to another set of apocryphal works, which modern scholars call the Pseudo-Clementine literature.

The history of this material is extremely complicated, and I can do no more than give a rough summary here. The article about it in the old Catholic Encyclopedia is quite thorough, although it was published in 1908, and has most likely been superannuated in some regards.

The lost original version of the Pseudo-Clementines is a document ascribed to the fourth century, and is generally believed to have resulted from the fusion and elaboration of two earlier apocryphal works. One of these is a purported account of St Peter’s preaching in various places. Eusebius of Caesarea speaks of this document in his Ecclesiastical History (III, 38), noting that it was attributed to Clement, but that it was not mentioned by any writers earlier than himself. St Jerome quotes Eusebius to this effect in On Illustrious Men, and refers to it elsewhere as “Periodi Petri – the wanderings of Peter.”

The Fall of Simon Magus, 1745, by the Italian painter Pompeo Batoni (1708-87).

The other, which provides the narrative framework, is the Klementia, a novel written in the third-century, fraught with plot twists, surprise revelations and improbable coincidences, the story of how the young Clement came to be separated from his family, and after becoming a disciple of Peter, was eventually reunited with them. Many people from the New Testament appear as characters in it, such as the Apostles James and Barnabas, the centurion Cornelius (Acts 10), and the Syro-Phoenician woman healed by Christ (Mark 7, 25-30), who is given the name Justa, and made to be the stepmother of two of Peter’s disciples. Simon Magus figures very prominently in the book as Peter’s antagonist, and much of the theological content (which is extensive, and in some regards bizarrely unorthodox) is framed within disputes between them.

Fairly early on, the book was split into two recensions, which have much in common, but also diverge from each other considerably in many places. The Greek one is known as the Clementine Homilies, while the other, whose Greek original is now lost, is called the Recognitions, from the Dickensian scenes in which so-and-so is at last revealed to be the long lost child of such-and-such, etc. The latter was the version known to the West throughout the Middle Ages, through the Latin translation made by a one-time friend of St Jerome named Rufinus, who, however, took the liberty of suppressing some of the more strangely unorthodox passages. (The acrimonious break between him and Jerome was provoked in part by his doing the same to some of the writings of Origen.)

In the long entry on St Clement in the Golden Legend of Bl. Jacopo da Voragine, about 60% of the material is taken from the Recognitions. But if the words of the Roman Breviary about Clement’s “many writings” are in fact a glancing reference to them, the story itself is given no space at all therein.

The Roman Matins lessons also skip the first part of what the Golden Legend says about Clement’s career after he became Pope. This is the story of how, after he converts a woman named Theodora, her husband Sisinnius follows her to church to see what she is doing there, but is struck blind and deaf on entering the building. At Theodora’s request, Clement comes to their house and heals him, but Sisinnius believes that he achieves this by magical powers which he plans to also use to seduce his wife. Sisinnius therefore orders his servants to seize Clement and bind him, but the servants’ minds are turned by God, and they wind up seizing and binding a marble column instead. Clement then says to Sininnius, “Because you call stones gods, you have merited to drag stones.”

In the 1860s, archeological investigation under the basilica of St Clement in Rome led to the discovery of the remains of the original church of the 4th century. At the very end of the 11th century, or the beginning of the twelfth, this structure was filled in and transformed into the foundation of a new basilica on top of it, thereby preserving some frescoes which at the time were very new, ca. 1065-1090. One of these depicts exactly this part of the legend of Clement, with Sisinnius and Theodora. At left, Clement is shown celebrating Mass at an altar decorated as it would have been in the later 11th century, accompanied by a group of clerics. (Note the candelabrum hanging from the baldachin, rather resting than on the altar.) On the right Theodora looks on as Sisinnius, struck blind and deaf, is led out of the church by his servants.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. 

The lower part shows Sisinnius yelling at his servants; the captions which give their names and his words to them are the oldest known prose inscriptions in Italian, and, unsurprisingly, very rude indeed. (“Fili delle pute” means “whoresons”; the translation of the other part is unprintable.) A version of Clement’s words cited above is given in Latin: “Because of the hardness of your hearts, you have merited to pull away stones.” The upper part of the fresco (cut in half when the floor of the new basilica was made) shows Clement with his predecessors, Ss Peter, Linus and Cletus, and five other figures, now unlabeled.

The story goes on to say that because of Clement’s success at making converts, he comes to the attention of the Emperor Trajan, who exiles him to the Crimean peninsula, where there was a penal colony attached to a marble quarry, with many Christians among the condemned. (The Romans did in fact exile people to the shores of the Black Sea, one of them being the poet Ovid.) On arriving, Clement learns that the workers must get their water from six miles away; he therefore prays and receives a vision of a lamb standing on a rock and pointing with its foot. Like Moses, Clement strikes the rock at that place to which the lamb pointed, and water begins to flow from it. This part of the story furnishes the proper antiphons for the psalms of Lauds and Vespers of St Clement’s Office, as e.g. the third one, “I saw the Lamb standing upon the mountain, and from under His foot a living spring floweth.”

St Clement Making Water Run from the Rock, by the Italian painter Bernardino Fungai (1450-1506). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. 

This leads to the conversion of many others, but three years later, the news of this reaches Trajan, and he therefore sentences Clement to death. Executioners are sent from Rome, who row Clement out three miles from the shore, and throw him into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck.

The Martyrdom of St Clement, also by Fungai.

At the shore, his disciples pray that the Lord might show them the location of his body, (presumably in order to recover it), and the sea miraculously recedes to reveal a small marble temple, with St Clement’s body in an ark, and the anchor next to it. The Christians walk out to visit it, but it is revealed to them they are told not to remove the body; instead, each year, around the anniversary of his death, the water recedes again to reveal the temple. This gives us the Magnificat antiphon for Second Vespers of feast: “O Lord, Thou gavest to Thy martyr Clement a dwelling place in the sea, after the fashion of a marble temple, fashioned by the hands of Angels, granting a way to the people on the land, that they may tell of Thy wondrous deeds.”

One year, at the end of the feast, a woman is frightened by the sound of the returning waters, and rushes back to the shore, accidentally leaving behind her little son, who had fallen asleep in the temple. The following year, when the waters recede again, she returns to find him safe and sound, and indeed still sleeping, unaware that he had been under the sea for a whole year.

This story is also depicted in the lower basilica of St Clement in Rome, in a fresco in the narthex. In the lower part are shown the family who paid for it, a couple named Beno and Maria, from an otherwise unknown place called Rapiza, along with their daughter Altilia, and their son, “the little boy Clement.” To the right of Maria is a dedicatory inscription which says that they had the fresco made as a thanksgiving “for the grace which (they) received”; it seems likely that this refers to the birth of the son whom they named for the church’s patron Saint.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.