Feast and Cult

St. Clement of Rome is honored across the whole undivided tradition as a holy hieromartyr — a bishop who died for Christ. In the Byzantine East he is commemorated as “the Hieromartyr Clement, Pope of Rome” (священномученик Климент, папа Римский) on 24 November, with a troparion, kontakion, and full Menaion service, and is depicted vested as a bishop with the anchor of the martyrdom legend. In the West his feast falls on 23 November in the present Roman calendar (formerly 25 November), and his name has stood for some sixteen centuries in the Roman Canon, the First Eucharistic Prayer, among the early martyrs “Linus, Cletus, Clement.” His memory is anchored materially in the Basilica of San Clemente al Laterano in Rome — a three-level site descending from a glorious twelfth-century church, through a fourth-century basilica with its medieval frescoes of Clement’s life and of Saints Cyril and Methodius, down to a first-century Roman house and Mithraeum. There the relics brought from Cherson in the Crimea were laid, and there St. Cyril, the apostle of the Slavs, is buried — a place where the early Roman Church, the Byzantine mission to the Slavs, and the Crimean relic-cult all meet under one roof.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Feast in the Christian East

In the Orthodox Church Clement is venerated as a hieromartyr — ἱερομάρτυς, a martyr who held the rank of bishop — and his memory is kept on 24 November. This is his day in both the Greek and the Russian/Slavic reckonings, and the Menaion for 24 November contains his proper service. On the Julian calendar still used liturgically by the Russian Church and on Mount Athos, that date falls on what is, in the current civil (Gregorian) calendar, 7 December; the feast itself is the same, the divergence being only between the two calendars by which the day is counted. In the Slavonic books he is titled священномученик Климент, папа Римский — “the holy hieromartyr Clement, pope of Rome” — and the Greek service names him likewise as Pope of Rome and disciple of the apostles.

A word on the spread of dates across the traditions will prevent confusion, for Clement’s commemoration sits at a point where several reckonings nearly coincide. In the East his fixed day is the 24th; in some calendars the 24th or 25th of November also carries the memory of St. Peter of Alexandria, the early-fourth-century bishop and martyr, so that the two hieromartyrs stand close together in the November synaxis — but Clement’s own day is the 24th. In the West, as set out below, the feast is the 23rd in the present Roman calendar and was formerly the 25th. A modest clarification is therefore in order.

[Disputed: the precise calendar-date of Clement’s feast varies across the traditions. The Orthodox East keeps it on 24 November (Julian = 7 December Gregorian). The Roman West keeps it on 23 November in the current calendar, having earlier observed it on 25 November. The variation is one of calendar and local usage, not of the saint commemorated; all three traditions honor the same Apostolic Father and hieromartyr. This file follows the 24 November dating for the Orthodox feast, in agreement with the section overview; older Orthodox service-books and synaxaria are occasionally cited at the 25th, which corresponds to the elder Western date.]

Alongside the principal feast, the Orthodox tradition also keeps the memory of the translation of Clement’s relics — the ninth-century recovery of relics venerated as the saint’s from the sea off Cherson in the Crimea, and their later carriage to Rome. That episode, bound up with the mission of Constantine-Cyril, is treated in its own file; it is noted here only because it gave the cult a second focus of commemoration and supplied much of the imagery — the sea, the anchor, the spring — that runs through the hymnography of the feast. (See The Relics and Cyril and Methodius.)

Hymnography and Liturgical Memory in the Byzantine Rite

For the 24 November commemoration the Byzantine rite provides Clement with a proper office in the Menaion: a troparion and kontakion as a hieromartyr, together with stichera at Vespers and a canon at Matins. The hymns address him as a successor of the apostles and a teacher of the Church, draw on the imagery of the martyrdom legend — the exile, the sea, the anchor by which the story has him drowned, the miraculous spring — and praise him as a steadfast confessor who watered the faithful with the streams of his teaching and sealed it with his blood. The kontakion in particular gathers up the sea-imagery, presenting Clement as a divine and unfailing fountain and an unbreakable pillar of the Church. The hymnography does not pause to weigh the historicity of the legend it draws upon; it uses the received story devotionally, to preach the manner of the saint’s confession, in the way the tradition has always sung its martyrs.

It is worth stressing that the liturgical veneration stands on its own ground and is undisturbed by the source-criticism applied elsewhere in this collection to the martyrdom narrative. The detailed account of how Clement died is a late hagiographical legend, first attested in the Passio Clementis no earlier than the fourth century (see The Anchor and the Sea); the Church’s honor of Clement as hieromartyr rests not on the verifiability of that Passio but on her long memory and unbroken commemoration of him as an Apostolic Father and disciple of the apostles. The faithful who keep the feast honor the saint; they are not making a historical claim about a fourth-century text.

The settled iconographic attribute of Clement is the anchor. He is depicted vested as a bishop — in the omophorion and sticharion of his rank, often holding a Gospel-book — with an anchor beside him or in his hand, the anchor that the legend makes the instrument of his martyrdom (the exile to the Crimean quarries, the anchor tied about his neck, the drowning, the sea-floor shrine uncovered yearly by the receding tide). The image itself thus preaches the story of his death even where no words accompany it. The anchor’s place in iconography is treated more fully, with its legendary source, in the companion file (The Anchor and the Sea); here it is enough to note that wherever Clement is shown with an anchor, in East or West, the picture is reciting the same received legend that the November hymns recite in song.

Clement in the Roman Canon

In the Latin West, Clement’s most ancient and most public liturgical commemoration is not a feast at all but a name spoken at the very heart of the Mass. In the Roman Canon — the First Eucharistic Prayer, the old fixed canon of the Roman rite reaching back in substance to late antiquity — the celebrant, within the Communicantes that recalls the saints of the Roman Church, names the apostles and then a short list of early Roman martyrs: “Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian…” The first three of these — Linus, Cletus (Anacletus), and Clement — are precisely the earliest bishops of Rome after Peter, named in the traditional succession in which Clement stands third or fourth (see The Letter to the Corinthians for that succession and the question of his place in it).

The significance of this is considerable. It means that for the better part of sixteen centuries, in every celebration of the Roman Mass that used the canon, the name of Clement of Rome has been spoken liturgically — not once a year on his feast, but daily, woven into the central prayer of the Eucharist itself. The commemoration is among the oldest continuous liturgical memorials of any of the early Roman bishops, and it places Clement in the company of the apostles and the great martyrs at the most solemn moment of the Western rite. Together the Eastern feast and the Western canon show a single figure honored, by two complementary liturgical means, across the whole undivided Church.

The Basilica of San Clemente al Laterano

Clement’s cult is anchored in stone in one of the most extraordinary sites in Rome: the Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano, on the slope between the Colosseum and the Lateran. What appears from the street as a single medieval church is in fact a vertical section through some nineteen centuries of Roman history — three superimposed levels, each beneath the last, descending from the twelfth century down to the first. It is, as the guide-literature observes, less a building than a stratigraphy of the Christian and pre-Christian city (Boyle, A Short Guide to St. Clement’s, Rome; Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae).

The Upper Basilica (Twelfth Century)

The present church — the one entered today — was built in the early twelfth century, raised by Pope Paschal II in roughly 1108–1123 after the older church below had been damaged in the Norman sack of Rome under Robert Guiscard in 1084. It preserves the basilical plan and reuses earlier furnishings, including a fine medieval schola cantorum (the enclosed choir-space with its marble screens) carried up from the lower church. Its crowning glory is the great twelfth-century apse mosaic, the Triumph of the Cross: the Cross set as the Tree of Life, from whose foot springs an immense acanthus-scroll spreading across the gold ground, teeming with figures, birds, and the four rivers of paradise, the Church Fathers and the faithful gathered about it. It is one of the supreme medieval mosaics of Rome, a theological image of the Cross as the source of the world’s life (Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City).

The Lower Basilica (Fourth Century)

Beneath the twelfth-century church lies a fourth-century basilica, one of the early Roman tituli — the titulus Clementis, a parish church named for (and traditionally associated with) Clement, attested by name from the late fourth century, when it appears among the title-churches of Rome whose clergy are recorded. This older church was the one buried and built over after 1084, and it preserves an extraordinary cycle of early-medieval frescoes.

Among them are the famous eleventh-century paintings of the life and miracles of St. Clement. One depicts the so-called Mass of St. Clement; another tells the legend of Sisinnius, a Roman official whose attempt to have the saint dragged off is confounded when his servants, struck blind, haul away a heavy column instead. The Sisinnius fresco is renowned beyond the history of art, because its captions preserve some of the earliest written specimens of the Italian vernacular — the servants’ coarse shout, “Fili dele pute, traite” (“Sons of harlots, pull!”), set against Clement’s Latin response — among the oldest surviving fragments of written Italian, a moment when the spoken language of Rome surfaces in paint at the threshold between Latin and Italian. Other frescoes in the lower church depict the translation of St. Clement’s relics and scenes of Saints Cyril and Methodius, commemorating the brothers who brought the relics to Rome — so that the lower basilica is itself a painted memorial of the events treated in The Relics and Cyril and Methodius.

The First-Century Level

Beneath even the fourth-century church lies the first-century level: a Roman insula and a substantial house, and — most striking of all — a Mithraeum, a temple of the god Mithras, with its altar carved with the tauroctony (Mithras slaying the bull) still in place in the vaulted cult-chamber. Here, directly under the basilica, is pre-Christian Rome: the mystery-cult that was Christianity’s rival, the masonry of the imperial city, and through it all the sound of running water, for a spring or underground stream still flows audibly through the lowest level, draining toward the Cloaca system. To descend through San Clemente is to pass, in a few flights of stairs, from the medieval Church through the Church of the age of Constantine to the pagan and domestic Rome of the first century in which Clement himself lived (Boyle, A Short Guide; Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum).

Cyril’s Tomb and the Crimean Relics

San Clemente is, for the Orthodox and especially for the Slavic Orthodox, a place of singular importance, because it binds Clement’s Roman cult to the apostles of the Slavs. The relics venerated as Clement’s, recovered from the sea off Cherson in the Crimea in 861 and carried westward by Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, were deposited here when the brothers reached Rome in 867/868. And here, having taken the monastic name Cyril, Constantine died in Rome on 14 February 869 and was buried — St. Cyril himself lies in San Clemente, beside the relics of the saint whose remains he had recovered (Vita Constantini; see The Relics and Cyril and Methodius). His tomb in the basilica is a major focus of pilgrimage for Slavic Christians, Orthodox and Catholic alike, and the lower-basilica frescoes of Cyril and Methodius keep the memory of the mission in the very walls.

Custody and Excavation

The basilica has been in the care of the Irish Dominicans since the seventeenth century, a continuous custody that has shaped its scholarship and its accessibility. The buried lower levels were brought to light through excavations begun in 1857 under the Irish Dominican Fr. Joseph Mullooly, prior of San Clemente, whose digging beneath the medieval floor uncovered first the fourth-century church and then, in stages, the first-century house and Mithraeum below. The excavation and the standard account of the site are summarized in Leonard Boyle’s A Short Guide to St. Clement’s, Rome, the long-standing Dominican guide, and the buildings are treated in the great corpus of Roman basilicas (Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae).

The Cult More Widely

Beyond San Clemente, the veneration of Clement is spread across both East and West. Churches are dedicated to him throughout the Orthodox and Latin worlds, a testimony to a cult that long antedates the divisions of later centuries.

In the Orthodox East the cult is especially strong in the Crimea and at Cherson — the region where the legend placed his martyrdom and where his relics were recovered. Near modern Sevastopol, on the site of ancient Chersonesus, the cave-monastery of St. Clement at Inkerman keeps his memory in the very landscape of the legend, a place of pilgrimage that ties the saint to the northern shore of the Black Sea and to the missionary history of the Slavs.

In the West, Clement’s patronage gathered around the anchor of his legend, making him a patron of mariners and of those who work on the sea, and giving his name to guild and civic associations — the dedication of London’s St Clement Danes, the medieval city churches and the trade-company connections that grew up under his name in England, are familiar instances. These associations are secondary and largely Western, but they show how widely the figure of the anchor-bearing bishop radiated through the popular cult.

The Unity of Veneration

Clement is one of those saints whose honor visibly transcends the later divisions of Christendom. He is commemorated by the whole undivided tradition: as hieromartyr on 24 November in the Orthodox East, with troparion, kontakion, and the imagery of sea and anchor; as a feast on 23 November in the Roman West, and daily in the Roman Canon among the first martyr-bishops of Rome. He belongs to the age before Schism, an Apostolic Father claimed by all (see The Pre-Schism Church; The Church Fathers).

Nowhere is that unity more concretely embodied than in San Clemente. Under one Roman roof the strands meet: the early Roman Church, in the fourth-century titulus and the first-century house beneath it; the Byzantine apostle of the Slavs, in the tomb of Cyril and the frescoes of the two brothers; and the relics from the Crimea, carried the length of the Christian world from a Black Sea bay to the city of which tradition made Clement bishop. The receding sea of the legend, the anchor of the icons, the canon of the Latin Mass, and the Slavonic service of 24 November all converge on this one place — a saint of the first century, honored materially and liturgically across East and West, whose veneration is itself a witness to the one Church that has always held him in reverence. The fuller weighing of what Clement and his letter have meant is taken up in the companion file (Legacy and Assessment).

References

The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, November volume. Ed. Holy Apostles Convent. Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent. (For the Orthodox commemoration of the Hieromartyr Clement on 24 November.)
Makarios of Simonos Petra, Hieromonk. The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, November volume. Ormylia: Holy Convent of the Annunciation of Our Lady. (Life and commemoration of St. Clement of Rome.)
The Menaion (November). (Contains the proper service — troparion, kontakion, canon — for the Hieromartyr Clement on 24 November.)
Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (For the medieval basilica and its apse mosaic in the topography of Rome.)
Krautheimer, Richard, et al. Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae: The Early Christian Basilicas of Rome (IV–IX Cent.). Vatican City / New York: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1937–1977. (The standard architectural corpus, including San Clemente.)
Boyle, Leonard E., O.P. A Short Guide to St. Clement’s, Rome. Rome: Collegio San Clemente. (The standard Dominican guide to the basilica and its three levels; the excavations from 1857 under Fr. Joseph Mullooly.)
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890. (For the relic-history and the martyrdom tradition, treated as cult rather than verified fact.)
Vita Constantini (the Old Church Slavonic Life of Constantine). Trans. Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. (For Cyril’s death in Rome, 14 February 869, and his burial at San Clemente.)