The Resurrection and the Phoenix

Having called the Corinthians to repentance and humility, 1 Clement turns (chs. 23–28) to the certainty of the resurrection as the ground of obedience and hope. Against the “double-minded” who doubt, Clement argues from nature — the succession of day and night, sleeping and waking, and above all the dying and rising of the sown seed (ch. 24) — and then offers the centerpiece of the apologetic: the legend of the Arabian phoenix (ch. 25), a single bird reborn from its own decay, carried as a “sign” of God’s promise. This is the earliest Christian use of the phoenix as a symbol of resurrection, drawn from the natural-history compendia of the day and pressed into service of the gospel hope.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

In the long deliberative argument of 1 Clement, the resurrection is not a digression but a pivot. The Roman church has spent the first chapters diagnosing the Corinthian sedition and summoning its authors to repentance and humility; it now grounds that summons in a doctrine. Why should the proud submit, the factious yield, the whole congregation order its life in the fear of God? Because the God to whom they will answer is the living God who raises the dead, who “called us from darkness to light, from ignorance to the full knowledge of the glory of his name” (1 Clement 59.2; trans. Holmes 2007), and before whom every deed is open. The resurrection is the hinge on which the ethical appeal of the letter turns: it is the promised reward that makes obedience reasonable and the certain judgment that makes negligence ruinous. Chapters 23 through 28 set this out, and at their heart stands the strangest and most famous image in the Apostolic Fathers — a bird.

The Context: The Double-Minded and the Promise (ch. 23)

Clement introduces the theme by warning against doubt. “The Father, who is compassionate in all things and ready to do good, has compassion on those who fear him, and kindly and lovingly bestows his favors on those who draw near to him with a single mind” (1 Clement 23.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The danger is the dipsychos, the “double-minded” person who wavers and so cuts himself off from the promise — a moral type familiar from the Epistle of James (James 1:8) and pervasive in the Shepherd of Hermas. Against such doubters Clement sets a saying introduced as scripture: “Let this passage of scripture be far from us, where he says, ‘Wretched are the double-minded, who doubt in their soul and say, “These things we heard even in the days of our fathers, and look, we have grown old, and none of these things has happened to us.”’” (1 Clement 23.3; trans. Holmes 2007). The quotation continues with an image of slow ripening: as the vine first sheds its blossom, then puts forth a bud, then a leaf, then a flower, and after that the ripe grape, so the divine purpose, though it seems delayed, comes “suddenly” to its fruit.

The source of this citation is uncertain. It is not found in the canonical scriptures, and Clement quotes it as though it were authoritative. The same passage, expanded, appears in 2 Clement 11.2–4, where it is again called “the prophetic word.” The most that can be said is that both writers drew on a now-lost Jewish or Christian apocryphon — the prophecy of Eldad and Modad (cf. Numbers 11:26), to which the Shepherd of Hermas (Vis. 2.3.4) appeals by name, has been a leading candidate, though the identification cannot be confirmed (Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome, 1890; Lona, Der erste Clemensbrief, 1998). What matters for the argument is the rebuke it carries: the slowness of God’s promise is no evidence against it, for in nature the slowest ripening is the surest. The Lord “will come quickly and will not delay; and suddenly the Lord will come to his temple, even the Holy One whom you expect” (1 Clement 23.5, conflating Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah/Habakkuk language). The shared apocryphal quotation is one of the threads that binds the resurrection sections of 1 Clement and 2 Clement together.

The Argument from Nature (ch. 24)

Having silenced the doubter, Clement builds his positive case from the order of creation itself. “Let us consider, beloved, how the Master continually points out to us the coming resurrection that is to be, of which he has made the Lord Jesus Christ the firstfruits by raising him from the dead” (1 Clement 24.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The resurrection of Christ is the firstfruits — the language is Pauline (1 Corinthians 15:20) — and the rest of the chapter shows that the pattern of dying-and-rising is woven through the world God made, so that the great resurrection is only the climax of resurrections God performs without ceasing.

He offers three illustrations of increasing weight. First, the alternation of day and night: “Day and night show us a resurrection. The night sleeps, the day rises; the day departs, the night comes on” (1 Clement 24.3; trans. Holmes 2007). The day “dies” into night and the night “dies” into day, and neither perishes; the cycle is a perpetual rising. Second, by implication in the same movement, the daily round of sleeping and waking, in which the body lies as if dead and is restored. Third, and decisively, the seed and the harvest:

“Let us consider the crops: how, and in what manner, does the sowing take place? The sower went out and cast each of the seeds into the ground; and these, falling to the ground dry and bare, decay. Then from their decay the greatness of the Master’s providence raises them up, and from the one seed more grow and bring forth fruit.” (1 Clement 24.4–5; trans. Holmes 2007)

The seed analogy is the strongest because it is the most exact. The grain is sown dry and bare; it must die and decay in the earth; out of its dissolution God brings a new and multiplied life. This is precisely Paul’s own argument in 1 Corinthians 15:36–38 — “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies; and what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare seed” — and it echoes the word of the Lord in John 12:24, that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit. Clement does not cite these texts by chapter and verse, in the manner of his age, but the dependence on the Pauline harvest-image is unmistakable, and it grounds his whole apologetic on apostolic teaching rather than on natural speculation alone. The logic is an argument from the lesser to the greater and from the Creator’s power: the God who raises the buried seed can raise the buried body, for it is the same providence at work, and nothing is hard for him who made all things from nothing.

The Phoenix (ch. 25)

To this argument from the regular order of nature Clement now adds a marvel — a single extraordinary creature in which the whole drama of death and rebirth is enacted in one body. The passage deserves to be given in full:

“Let us consider the marvelous sign that occurs in the regions of the east, that is, in the vicinity of Arabia. There is a bird that is named the phoenix. This, being the only one of its kind, lives for five hundred years; and when it approaches its dissolution and is about to die, it makes for itself a coffin of frankincense and myrrh and the other spices, into which, its time being completed, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays, a certain worm is produced, which is nourished by the moisture of the dead creature and puts forth wings. Then, when it has grown strong, it takes up that coffin in which are the bones of its predecessor, and carries them from the country of Arabia as far as Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis; and in the daytime, in the sight of all, flying to the altar of the sun, it lays them upon it, and having done this it sets off back home. So the priests examine the records of the times, and find that it has come at the completion of the five-hundredth year.” (1 Clement 25.1–5; trans. Holmes 2007)

Every element of the story is calibrated to the resurrection theme. There is only one phoenix, unique and unrepeated. Its long life is completed; it prepares its own death deliberately, building a “coffin” or sepulchre of the costliest spices — frankincense and myrrh, the very spices of burial (cf. John 19:39–40). It dies, and the flesh decays; and out of the decay, as out of the sown seed, a new life is generated — a worm nourished by the moisture of the dead body, which grows wings and matures into a new bird. The young bird then performs an act of filial piety that is also a public testimony: it gathers the bones of its parent, bears them across the world to Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, and lays them in broad daylight, “in the sight of all,” upon the altar of the sun, so that the whole transaction is witnessed and the priests can verify by their records that the cycle has run its appointed five hundred years. Death, decay, regeneration, and a witnessed, dated, public vindication: the bird enacts the resurrection as a visible sign set in the order of creation.

Clement draws the conclusion in the chapter that follows: “Do we then think it to be a great and marvelous thing, if the Creator of the universe shall bring about the resurrection of those who served him in holiness, in the confidence of a good faith, seeing that he shows us even by means of a bird the magnificence of his promise?” (1 Clement 26.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The argument is a fortiori. If God will renew so wonderfully a mere bird, how much more will he raise those who have served him? The phoenix is offered not as proof in the demonstrative sense but as a “sign” (sēmeion) — a divinely arranged emblem in the creation that points beyond itself to the magnificence of what God has promised.

The Sources of the Legend

The phoenix did not come to Clement as a piece of revelation; it came as a piece of natural history. The legend was a fixture of Greco-Roman learning, and Clement’s version is recognizably the standard one. Its classic literary form is already in Herodotus, who reports from Egypt the bird that comes from Arabia to Heliopolis once every five hundred years bearing the body of its parent embalmed in myrrh, to bury it in the temple of the Sun — though Herodotus adds, with characteristic reserve, that he himself had not seen it and found the tale hard to credit (Herodotus, Histories 2.73). Ovid gives the poetic version, with the bird building its nest of cassia, spikenard, cinnamon, and myrrh in the topmost palm, dying in fragrance, and a young phoenix rising from the father’s body to carry the nest to the City of the Sun (Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.392–407). Pliny the Elder records it soberly among the birds of the world, noting the single specimen, the long life, the nest of spices, and the regeneration from the decaying remains (Pliny, Natural History 10.2). Tacitus reports a supposed appearance of the phoenix in Egypt under the consulship of Paulus Fabius (A.D. 34), reviewing the conflicting accounts of its life-span and the parent-burial with the detachment of a historian (Tacitus, Annals 6.28).

Clement’s use of this material is the earliest Christian appropriation of the phoenix, and it proved enormously influential. Through 1 Clement and the writers who followed — Tertullian, who pressed the same argument in De Resurrectione Carnis 13, and ultimately the Physiologus and the bestiary tradition — the phoenix became one of the standard emblems of the resurrection in Christian art and exegesis, appearing on tombs, in mosaics, and in the iconography of Christ’s rising (van den Broek, The Myth of the Phoenix, 1972). What Clement did, in effect, was to baptize a pagan natural-history legend: he took a wonder that his educated contemporaries reported as a fact of the world and read it as a sign placed by the Creator within the creation, a parable in feathers.

How to Read It

Here the modern reader must be candid without being either embarrassed or mocking. The phoenix is not a real animal. Clement, however, almost certainly believed that it was — and in this he was in the best company of his age. The bird stood in the natural-history compendia of Pliny and the ethnography of Herodotus, reported (with varying degrees of caution) as a remarkable but genuine creature of distant Arabia, not flagged as fable. To a learned man of the late first century, the phoenix was roughly on a footing with other marvels of remote lands that one had not seen but had on good authority. Clement adduces it exactly as he adduces day and night and the sown seed: as an observable fact of the created order from which the resurrection may be inferred. He was mistaken about the zoology, as his sources were.

This recognition costs the argument nothing essential. The force of 1 Clement 24–26 does not rest on the existence of the phoenix. It rests on two firmer foundations: the analogy of the seed, which is the apostle Paul’s own (1 Corinthians 15:36–38; John 12:24) and which is drawn from a genuine and universal natural process; and the omnipotence of the Creator, who made all things from nothing and so can certainly remake what he has made. The phoenix is the last and most vivid of a series of illustrations, not the load-bearing premise. An Orthodox and critical reader can therefore hold both truths at once: that the doctrine of the resurrection is sure, grounded in the raising of Christ as firstfruits and in the power and faithfulness of God; and that this particular illustration belongs to the mistaken natural science of Clement’s day, an honest argument from the best knowledge then available. The truth of the resurrection does not depend on the truth of the legend, and nothing in the faith is compromised by saying so plainly.

The scholarly handling of the passage has reflected this. Lightfoot treated it with measured sobriety, neither defending the bird’s existence nor dismissing Clement’s appeal to it, locating the passage carefully within its classical sources and within the resurrection apologetic of the early church (Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome, 1890). Modern commentators — Lona in his magisterial commentary and Lindemann in his — likewise read the phoenix as an instance of ancient learning deployed in a theological argument, without anachronistic apology (Lona, Der erste Clemensbrief, 1998; Lindemann, Die Clemensbriefe, 1992).

[Disputed: Whether Clement’s appeal implies that he held the phoenix to be a literal natural fact (the view of most commentators, including Lightfoot, Lona, and van den Broek, who note that his Greco-Roman sources reported it as fact) or whether he employed it knowingly as a mere symbol or rhetorical commonplace (a minority position) remains debated; the placement of the bird alongside day, night, and seed as parallel evidences of resurrection tells in favor of the literal reading, but the question turns on inferences about Clement’s mind that the text does not settle.]

The Theology: God Who Raises and Sees All (chs. 26–28)

The phoenix is in the service of a doctrine, and Clement returns to the doctrine at once. The resurrection is guaranteed first by the raising of Christ — already named the firstfruits (1 Clement 24.1; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20) — and by the promise of God, which “is faithful” and which the scriptures confirm: “You will raise me up, and I will praise you” (1 Clement 26.2–3, citing Psalm 28:7 [27:7 LXX] and Job 19:26 in the Septuagint forms). The God who promises cannot lie, and so the hope rests not on the marvel of the bird but on the veracity and power of God: “Nothing is impossible with God except to lie” (1 Clement 27.2).

From this Clement draws the moral that the whole letter has been pressing toward. The God who will raise the dead is also the God who sees and knows all things, from whom nothing can be hidden. He gathers the language of Psalm 139 (138 LXX): “Where shall I go, and where shall I be hidden from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you are there; if I depart to the ends of the earth, there is your right hand; if I make my bed in the depths, there is your Spirit” (1 Clement 28.3, citing Psalm 139:7–10). The omnipresence and omniscience of God are the practical edge of the resurrection hope: since we cannot escape his sight and must rise to give account, “let us draw near to him in holiness of soul, lifting up pure and undefiled hands to him” (1 Clement 29.1). The certainty of resurrection thus issues directly in the fear of God and the call to a holy life — which is, throughout, the burden of the appeal to the Corinthians.

In this way the resurrection sections do for the doctrinal argument what the appeal to humility does for the practical one. The hope of being raised, and the certainty of being seen and judged, undergird the entire ethical program of the letter — the call to lay down faction, to restore the presbyters, to live in the concord and lowliness that befit those who expect their Master. The phoenix, strange as it is to a modern eye, is one small turn in a sustained and serious theological argument: that the living God who raised Christ, who renews the seed and the day, and who shows his power even in a bird, will surely raise his servants, and that those who believe it should live accordingly. On the larger structure of that appeal, see Concord and Humility; on the letter as a whole, The Letter to the Corinthians.

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Ehrman, Bart D., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers, Volume 1. Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Lona, Horacio E. Der erste Clemensbrief. Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Vätern 2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998.
Lindemann, Andreas. Die Clemensbriefe. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 17. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
van den Broek, R. The Myth of the Phoenix according to Classical and Early Christian Traditions. Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain 24. Leiden: Brill, 1972.
Herodotus. Histories. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tacitus. Annals. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.