The Relics of Clement of Rome

During the Khazar mission, while wintering at Cherson in the Crimea, Constantine sought out and recovered a set of relics he and his contemporaries identified as those of St. Clement of Rome — the late-first-century bishop of Rome who, by an old tradition, had been exiled to the Crimean quarries and martyred by drowning there. Constantine carried these relics with him through the Moravian mission and to Rome itself, where they were received with great honor; they secured the brothers a warm welcome at the papal court and bound their work to the Roman see. This file sets out the Clementine tradition, the recovery as the sources tell it, and the relics’ decisive role in the mission’s later fortunes.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)

St. Clement and the Crimean Tradition

Clement of Rome was, in the ancient tradition, the third or fourth bishop of Rome after Peter, the author of the great Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Clement, c. 96) — one of the earliest and most important sub-apostolic Christian writings — and a figure named already by Irenaeus and Eusebius in the lists of the Roman succession (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.15–16). To this securely early Clement a later, legendary martyrdom-tradition became attached: that under the emperor Trajan he had been banished to the Crimea, set to labor in the marble quarries near Cherson, and there put to death by being cast into the sea with an anchor about his neck, after which the waters were said to withdraw each year to reveal his tomb (the Passio and Martyrium of Clement; discussion in Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 4). This martyrdom narrative is hagiographic and late, not part of the early record of Clement, and is reported here as the tradition Constantine inherited, not as established history (METHODOLOGY §3.5). But it was firmly believed at Cherson in the ninth century, and it is the indispensable background to what Constantine did there.

The Recovery at Cherson

According to the account preserved in the Italian Legend — the Latin Vita cum translatione S. Clementis, compiled by Gauderic of Velletri (with Anastasius Bibliothecarius and possibly Leo of Ostia involved in its transmission) and drawing, it states, on a Greek account written by Constantine himself — Constantine, learning at Cherson that the local memory of Clement’s resting-place and the annual recession of the sea had long since lapsed, resolved to seek the relics out (Italian Legend; trans. and discussion in Dvornik 1970, ch. 3). He gathered the local clergy and people, led them in prayer and procession to an island or shoal in the bay, and there, in the search, bones and the anchor associated with the martyr were found and recovered (Italian Legend; Dvornik 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 4). The relics were brought back to Cherson with great solemnity and deposited in a church, and a portion of them Constantine kept by him.

The historical kernel and the hagiographic frame must again be distinguished. That Constantine, at Cherson, recovered bones venerated as Clement’s and treated them as a major find is securely attested across both the Slavic and the Latin source-streams and is accepted by scholarship (Dvornik 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 4). Whether the bones were in fact those of the first-century bishop of Rome is, of course, beyond verification and was beyond it in the ninth century; the identification rested on local tradition and Constantine’s pious confidence. The Italian Legend‘s framing of the recovery as a quasi-miraculous discovery, answered by prayer, is the legend’s own testimony to the event’s sacred character, reported here as such (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Constantine is also credited with composing a hymn and a “discourse” (a Sermo or Brevis historia) on the finding, which lay behind the later Latin accounts (Dvornik 1970, ch. 3; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 4).

The Relics as the Mission’s Passport to Rome

The lasting significance of the Clementine relics lay not in Khazaria but in what they did for the brothers years later, in the West. When Constantine and Methodius traveled to Moravia and then, summoned to answer for their work, made the long journey to Rome (c. 867–868), they carried the relics of St. Clement with them (Vita Constantini 17; trans. Kantor 1983; Dvornik 1970, ch. 5). For the bishop of Rome to receive the relics of one of his own most venerable predecessors — a martyr-pope long lost in the distant Crimea — was an event of the first importance, and the sources agree that Pope Hadrian II went out to meet the brothers and their precious burden in solemn procession and that the relics were installed with honor in Rome, traditionally associated with the ancient basilica of San Clemente (Vita Constantini 17; Italian Legend; Dvornik 1970, ch. 5; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 4). [Disputed: the precise resting-place is debated — the Italian Legend and long tradition associate the relics with the Roman basilica of San Clemente, where ninth-century frescoes commemorate Cyril; some scholars caution that the sources are not unambiguous about where in Rome the relics were finally deposited (discussion in Dvornik 1970, ch. 5).]

This gift transformed the brothers’ standing. They came to Rome not as suspect provincials peddling a novel liturgy, but as the men who had restored to the Roman Church the body of a holy pope and martyr; the relics earned them a hearing, predisposed the Papacy to favor, and helped secure the papal approval of the Slavonic books and liturgy that was the great object of their journey (Dvornik 1970, ch. 5; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 4; see To Rome and the Death of Cyril). When Constantine died in Rome in 869, he was buried — the Vita Constantini and the Italian Legend report — in the church of St. Clement, beside the relics he had carried so far (Vita Constantini 18; Dvornik 1970, ch. 5). The episode is a striking instance of how a relic could function in the medieval Church as a bond of communion and an instrument of diplomacy: a martyr of the apostolic Roman Church, recovered by a Byzantine missionary on the Crimean shore, became the credential by which a Slavonic liturgy won the blessing of Rome.

See Also

References

  • Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapters 8, 17–18. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
  • Italian Legend (Vita cum translatione S. Clementis), attributed to Gauderic of Velletri / Anastasius Bibliothecarius. Discussed and partly translated in Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, ch. 3.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.3.3; Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.15–16. (On Clement in the early Roman succession.)
  • Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, chs. 3, 5.
  • Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 4.