Legacy and Assessment

A closing assessment of St. Clement of Rome and of 1 Clement, the letter sent in the name of the Roman church to the Corinthians about the year 96. The collection has traced a single sustained irony: the Church possesses in 1 Clement one of the most important documents of the early-Christian period — the oldest datable Christian writing outside the New Testament, the earliest external witness to the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, a foundational testimony to ordered ministry, a model of pastoral care, and a treasury of early exegesis, Christology, and liturgical prayer — while of its author almost nothing certain can be recovered. This file gathers those threads, restates the genuinely contested questions and where each is treated, sets the primacy debate in perspective, and places Clement among the Apostolic Fathers as the Church’s bridge from the apostles to the great theology of the second century.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The whole of this collection has worked along the seam between a thin record and an overgrown one — between what can be securely affirmed of Clement of Rome and the abundant later accretion of office, legend, and controversy that gathered around his name. The discipline of an Orthodox reference work is to keep these apart: to hold the one secure work in its full weight, to set the spurious and the legendary at the distance their attestation warrants, and to present the live disputes as disputes. What follows is the synthesis that discipline produces. It begins with the letter, because the letter is what is certain; it returns at the end to the man, because the man is what is not.

The Enduring Significance of 1 Clement

The first thing to be said of 1 Clement is that it is a fixed point. Dated by the broad scholarly consensus to about the year 96 — at the close of Domitian’s reign, the “sudden and repeated misfortunes and reverses” of its opening (1 Clement 1.1; trans. Holmes 2007) most naturally read as that emperor’s harassment of the Roman church — it is the oldest Christian document outside the New Testament whose date can be established with any confidence (Holmes 2007; Lona 1998). The qualification “datable” matters: other texts may be early, but few can be anchored as this one can, by its sender, its occasion, and its internal markers, to a single decade of the first century. That anchorage gives the letter a value independent of everything else in it. It is a witness from inside the late-first-century Church, written while men who had known the apostles were still alive, and it tells us — not by theory but by simply doing it — how one major apostolic church spoke, reasoned, prayed, read its Scriptures, and understood its own order. The date and its grounds are themselves a contested matter, treated as such below and in The Letter to the Corinthians; but even on the minority later datings the letter remains among the very earliest Christian writings outside the canon.

From that fixed point several distinct contributions follow. The first is historical. 1 Clement 5 is the earliest external witness to the deaths of Peter and Paul, naming them as “the greatest and most righteous pillars” who “were persecuted and contended unto death,” Peter enduring “not one or two but many labors” and Paul, “after he had been seven times in chains,” bearing testimony “before the rulers” and so “departing from the world” (1 Clement 5.1–7; trans. Holmes 2007). The passage does not narrate the manner of either death, and the collection has been careful not to read more into it than it says; but as the first non-canonical notice that both apostles suffered and died — and, in context, that they did so at Rome — it is a primary source of the first importance. Its language, its silences, and its evidential weight are examined in The Apostles in Rome.

The second contribution is ecclesiological. Chapters 42 and 44 set out, more clearly than any earlier text, an understanding of the ordained ministry as apostolic in origin and orderly in transmission: the apostles, “having received their orders… went forth… preaching… and appointed their firstfruits… to be bishops and deacons of those who were going to believe” (1 Clement 42.1–4), and, foreseeing strife over the office, “appointed the aforesaid persons and afterwards gave the further injunction” that on their death “other approved men should succeed to their ministry” (1 Clement 44.1–3; trans. Holmes 2007). Whether the ministry Clement describes is already a monepiscopate or a college of presbyter-bishops is one of the live questions of the field, and is left open here and in Order and the Ministry. What is not in doubt is that this is a foundational witness to the conviction that the ordered ministry derives from the apostles and is not to be overthrown by congregational will — a text invoked again and again in later discussions of apostolic succession and holy orders, across confessional lines.

The third contribution is pastoral and theological. 1 Clement is, in its rhetorical form, a discourse “on concord” (peri homonoias), one church’s loving and learned intervention to heal another’s schism — the deposition by the Corinthians of their lawful presbyters. Its remedy is moral before it is juridical: the recovery of concord (homonoia), repentance, obedience, and above all humility (tapeinophrosynē), crowned by the humility of Christ himself and grounded in the peaceful order of creation. This theology of concord and humility — the master-theme of the first two-thirds of the letter — is treated in Concord and Humility. It is worth saying plainly that the letter’s enduring devotional power lies here: it is not a treatise but an act of charity, the care of church for church, and that is the form its authority has always taken.

The fourth contribution is to the history of Christian thought and worship. 1 Clement is a treasury of early Christian use of the Old Testament in its Greek (Septuagint) form, quoted at length and with evident reverence as Scripture, alongside an emerging use of New Testament material — Paul’s own first letter to Corinth is invoked by name (1 Clement 47.1–3), and the letter is among the precious early witnesses to the developing shape of the canon. Its Christology is high and liturgical: Christ is named “the high priest of our offerings, the guardian and helper of our weakness” (1 Clement 36.1; trans. Holmes 2007), a high-priest Christology that echoes the Epistle to the Hebrews and shows that language already in settled use at Rome. And in chapters 59–61 the letter preserves the earliest long Christian liturgical prayer outside the New Testament — a great intercession blessing the Creator, pleading for the afflicted and the wandering, and praying even for the civil rulers “that they may administer the government… blamelessly” (1 Clement 60–61; trans. Holmes 2007) — a window onto how the late-first-century Roman church actually prayed.

These contributions earned the letter a remarkable afterlife. It was read aloud in the liturgical assembly at Corinth well into the second century; Bishop Dionysius of Corinth, writing to Pope Soter about 170, says it was still being read “for our admonition” on the Lord’s Day, as it had been “from the beginning” (Eusebius, HE 4.23 [NPNF II/1]). It was esteemed and quoted by Clement of Alexandria, by Origen, and by Irenaeus, who counts it among the witnesses to the Roman succession (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3, in Eusebius, HE 5.6 [NPNF II/1]). And it stood, in some quarters, on the very edge of the canon: in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus 1 Clement (with the homily called 2 Clement) is bound at the close of the New Testament itself, a manuscript fact that registers how near to Scripture the letter was held. The textual life of the letter — its near-loss, its survival in Codex Alexandrinus, in the eleventh-century Jerusalem manuscript discovered by Bryennios in 1873, and in Syriac, Latin, and Coptic versions — is set out in The Manuscript Tradition.

The Elusive Man and the Influential Letter

Against all this stands the silence about the author. The central irony the collection has traced is that the Church possesses this document of the first rank and yet knows almost nothing certain of the man whose name it bears. The letter is anonymous: it is sent in the name of “the church of God that sojourns in Rome” to “the church of God that sojourns in Corinth” (1 Clement prescript; trans. Holmes 2007), and it never once names Clement, claims a personal title for him, or offers a word of autobiography. The attribution to Clement is early and steady — Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, and Eusebius all carry it — but it is external to the document, and everything beyond the bare fact of a leading Roman Christian named Clement active in the 90s rests on later, thinner, and partly conflicting witnesses. His social rank is uncertain; his family unknown; whether he is to be identified with the consul Titus Flavius Clemens, executed under Domitian, or was a freedman of that house, or neither, has never been resolved, and the evidence is set out on both sides and left open in The Historical Clement. His death is a further uncertainty: the Orthodox tradition remembers him as a hieromartyr drowned in the Black Sea with an anchor about his neck, but this account is a late hagiographical legend, unknown to any first- or second-century source and first attested centuries afterward, and it is reported as the tradition’s claim rather than as established history in The Anchor and the Sea.

This must be stated honestly, in keeping with the methodology of the collection: the value of the witness does not depend on a full biography of the witness. We do not need to know Clement’s rank, his house, or the manner of his death to know what his letter is and what it tells us. The letter speaks; the man behind it recedes. That is not a defect in the evidence to be explained away but the actual shape of the record, and an Orthodox reference work serves the saint better by saying so than by lending the certainty of fact to what the sources leave in shadow.

Handling a Thin-and-Overgrown Record

The way this collection has handled that record is itself part of its argument, and bears a brief restatement. The discipline has three movements. First, distinguishing the one secure work from the spurious accretions: the so-called Second Epistle of Clement is in fact an anonymous mid-second-century homily, the oldest surviving Christian sermon, misnamed and only later attached to Clement’s name; and the Pseudo-Clementine literature — the Homilies and Recognitions — is a third- or fourth-century romance that made Clement the narrator of a fictional career, with no historical bearing on the man. These are treated, and set firmly apart from the genuine letter, in the section on the second epistle and the spuria. Second, pinning the martyrdom legend to its late attestation, per the collection’s methodology (§3.5): the anchor and the receding sea are reported as the tradition’s account and traced to their earliest written sources — the Greek Passio and Gregory of Tours — rather than asserted as history. Third, presenting the genuinely contested questions as both-sides disputes rather than resolving them by assertion (the collection’s §4 discipline).

It is worth naming those live questions plainly, with the place each is treated. There are four or five. (i) The nature of the ministry in the 90s — already a monepiscopate, or a college of presbyter-bishops — is contested in Order and the Ministry. (ii) The date — the dominant c. 96 against minority arguments for an earlier or later setting — is weighed in The Letter to the Corinthians. (iii) The Flavius Clemens identification is left unresolved in The Historical Clement. (iv) The historicity and manner of the martyrdom are held to their late sources in The Anchor and the Sea. (v) The reading of the letter for or against a Roman primacy is the contested ground of the section on East and West. In none of these has the collection presumed to settle by assertion what the sources leave genuinely open.

The Primacy Question in Perspective

Of those questions the last has the longest and most freighted history, and a measured closing word is owed to it. 1 Clement remains contested ground between Rome and Orthodoxy. The Roman tradition has read in the letter — in the very fact that the Roman church intervened with such authority in the affairs of another, and in its language of obedience and of grief that its counsel might be disregarded (1 Clement 59.1; 63.2) — an early intimation of the Roman see’s care for the wider Church. The Orthodox reading sees rather a letter sent in the name of a church, not a bishop, exercising the fraternal authority that any apostolic church might exercise toward a sister in distress, and finds in it no claim of jurisdiction. On the historical question — what the letter itself shows — the collection keeps both readings in play; on the dogmatic question it does not stand between the confessions: papal supremacy, the developed doctrine the Roman reading ultimately serves, is a teaching the Orthodox Church has examined and not received. The collection has set the two readings side by side without re-arguing them here; they are treated in the section on Clement among the Apostolic Fathers and the East–West section that frames it. What the letter unambiguously witnesses, on any reading, is something the two traditions hold in common: the early Church’s communion across distance, its ordered apostolic ministry, and the care of one church for another. That witness is not in dispute, and it is the more enduring thing.

Clement’s Place Among the Apostolic Fathers

Clement stands, finally, among the Apostolic Fathers — the small company of writers who span the generation between the apostles and the great theologians of the later second century, treated in the repository’s account of the Church Fathers. With Ignatius of Antioch, whose seven letters carry the same concern for unity and ordered ministry toward the bishop (St Ignatius of Antioch), and with Polycarp of Smyrna, the disciple of John who links the sub-apostolic age to Irenaeus (St Polycarp of Smyrna), Clement forms the Church’s bridge from the apostles to the second-century flowering of Christian theology. His liturgical veneration — his feast as a holy hieromartyr, his place in the cult of the undivided Church — is set out in the section’s account of the feast and cult; here it is enough to say that he is honored across East and West alike, in a memory that predates and outlasts their division.

It is a fitting close that the man should recede and the letter remain, for the letter’s whole burden is that self-assertion gives way and concord abides. The saint whose biography we cannot write left the Church a word it has never stopped needing to hear: “Let us therefore be humble-minded, brethren, laying aside all arrogance and conceit and folly and wrath” (cf. 1 Clement 13.1; trans. Holmes 2007). Concord, humility, order, and love — the care of church for church — are Clement’s abiding message, and the one letter that is certainly his still speaks them.

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. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1890.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
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.