CLEMENT
13
CLEMENT
Fathers". His feast is celebrated 23 November.
He lias left one genuine writing, a letter to the
Church of Corinth, and many others have been at-
tributed to him.
1. The Fourth Pope. — According to Tertullian, writing c. 199, the Roman Church claimed that Clement was ordained by St. Peter (De Pnescript., xxxii), and St. Jerome tells us that in his time "most of the Latins" held that Clement was the immediate successor of the .A.postle (De viris illustr., xv). St. Jerome himself in several other places follows thi.s opinion, but here he correctly states that Clement was the fourth pope. The early e\'idence shows great variety. The most ancient list of popes is one made by Hegesippus in the time of Pope Anicetus, c. 160 (Harnack ascribes it to an unknown author under Soter. c. 170), cited by St. Epiphanius (HiEr., xxvii, 6). It seems to have been used by St. Irenaeus (lla3r.. Ill, iii), by Julius Africanus, who composed a chronography in '222,l)y the third- or fourth-century author of a Latin poem againsit.Mar- (ion, and by Hii>- ]iolytus, whose chronology ex- tends to 234 and is probably found in the "Liberian Catalogue" of 3.")4. That cata- logue was itself adopted in the "Liber Pontifio- alis". Eusebiusin I lis chronicle and liistory used Afri- canus ; inthe latter he slightly cor- rected the dates. St. Jerome's chronicle is a translation of Eusebius's. and is our princijial means for restoring the lost Greek of the latter; the Armenian version and Coptic epitomes of it are not to be de- pended on. The varieties of order are as follows:
(1) Linus, Cletus, Clemens (Hegesippus, ap. Epipha-
nium. Canon of Mass). Linus, Anencletus, Clemens (IreniEus, Africanus
ap. Eusebiura). Linus, Anacletus, Clemens (Jerome).
(2) Linus. Cletus, Anacletus, Clemens (Poem against
Marcion).
(3) Linus, Clemens, Cletus, Anacletus [Hippolytus
(?), "Liberian Catal."; "Liber. Pont."].
(4) Linus, Clemens, Anacletus (Optatus, Augustine). At the present time no critic doubts that Cletus,
Anacletus, Anencletus, are the same person. Ana- cletus is a Latin error; Cletus is a shortened (and more Christian) form of Anencletus. Lightfoot thought that the transposition of Clement in the "Liberian Catalogue" was a mere accident, like the similar error "Anicetus, Pius" for "Pius, Anicetus", furtlier on in the same list. But it may have been a deliberate alteration by Hippolj-tus, on the ground of the tradition mentioned by Tertullian. St. Irenseus (III, iii) tells us that Clement "saw the blessed Ajiostles and conversed with them, and had yet ringing in his cars the preaching of the Apostles and had their tradition before his eyes, and not he only, for many were then sur\'i\'ing who had been taught by the Apostles". Similarly Epiphanius tells us (from Hegesippus) that Clement was a contemporary of Peter and Paul. Now Linus and Cletus had each twelve years attributed to them in the list;. If Hip- polytus found Cletus doubled by an error (Cletus
1 (Ideal)
XII, Anacletus XII), the accession of Clement would
appear to be thirty-si,x years after the death of the
Apostles. As this would make it almost impossible
for Clement to have been their contemporary, it may
have caused Hippolytus to shift him to an earlier
Iiosition. Further, St. Epiphanius says (loc. cit.):
"Whether he received episcopal ordination from
Peter in the life-time of the Apostles, and declined
the office, for he says in one of his epistles 'I retire,
I depart, let the people of God be in peace', (for we
have found this set down in certain Memoirs), or
whether he was aijpointed by the Bishop Cletus after
he had succeeded the Apostles, we do not clearly
know." The "Memoirs" were certainly tho.se of
Hegesippiis. It seems unlikely that he is appealed
to only for the quotation from the Epistle, c. liv;
probably Epiphanius means that Hegesippus stated
that Clement had been ordained by Peter and de-
clined to be bisho]), but twenty-four years later
really exercised the office for nine years. Epiphanius
could not reconcile these two facts; Hippolytus seems
to have rejected the latter.
CiiTonoloqy. — The date intended by Hegesippus is not hard to restore. Epiphanius implies that he placed the martjTdom of the Ajjostles in the twelfth year of Nero. Africanus calculated the fourteenth year (for he had attributed one year too little to the reigns of Caligula and Claudius), and added the im- perial date for the accession of each I'ope; but hav- ing two years too few up to Anicetus he could not get the intervals to tally with the years of episcopate given by Hegesippus. He had a parallel difficulty in his list of the Alexandrian bishops.
Afri<-anus
Hegeaippus
(from
Eusebius)
Interval
Real tlatfs a
°-
Linus
1
Nero 14 . .
....12
12
Nero 12 . . .
Vesp. 10. . .
Dom. 10. . .
Clemens
9
Dom. 12. .
...(7)
. .90
Euaristus ....
S
Trajan 2 .
. . (10)
Trajan 2. . .
99
.Alexander . . .
Id
Trajan 12.
....10
Trajan 10. . .
lo-
Sixtu.s
,111
Hadrian 3
. ..(9)
Hadrian 1 . .
ll?
.11
Hadrian 1
I. . (10)
Hadrian 11..
127
H.vginus
. 4
.\nton. 1.
.... 4
.Ajiton. 1 . . . .
VM
Pius
.l.S
Anton. 5.
15
Anton. 5
\A>.
Anicetus
.\nton. 20
Anton. 20. . .
.157
If we start, as Hegesippus intended, with Nero 12
(see last column), the sum of his years brings us right
for the last three popes. But Africanus has started
two years wrong, and in order to get right at Hyginus
he has to allow one year too little to each of the pre-
ceding popes, Sixtus and Telesphorus. But there is
one inharmonious date, Trajan 2, which gives seven
and ten years to Clement and Euaristus instead of
nine and eight. Evidently he felt bound to insert a
traditional date; and in fact we see that Trajan 2
was the date intended by Hegesijipus. Now we
know that Hegesippus s]5oke about Clement's ac-
<]uaintance with the Apostles, and said nothing about
any other pope until Telesphorus, "who was a glo-
rious martyr". It is not surprising, then, to find
that .Vfricanus had, besides the lengths of episcopate,
two fixed dates from Hegesippus, those of the death
of Clement in the second year of Trajan, and of the
martyrdom of Telesphorus in the first year of An-
toninus Pius. We may take it, therefore, that about
160 the death of St. Clement was believed to have
been in 99.
Identity. — Origen identifies Pope Clement with St. Paul's fellow-labourer, Phil., iv, 3, and so do Eu.sebius, Epiphanius, and Jerome; but this Clement was probably a Philippian. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was the custom to identify the pojie with the consul of 0."), T. Flavins Clemens, who was martjTed by his first cousin, the Emperor Domit- ian, at the end of his consulship. But the ancients never suggest this, and the pope is said to have
