What now was the condition of the Christian Church during the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, that is, from A. D. 68 (the date of the death of Nero) to A. D. 81? That the Christians were harried by a persecution under Domitian, who succeeded his brother Titus as Emperor in the year 81, reigning until A. D. 96, is universally accepted as certain; whereas Christian and profane historians alike, as a rule, represent the period covered by the reigns of Vespasian and Titus as a time of stillness for the harassed religion. Recent investigations, however, point to a somewhat different conclusion.
An important passage from Sulpicius Severus, a Christian writer of the fourth century, has, in late years, been critically examined, with the result that the passage in question is judged to have been based upon an extract from a lost writing of Tacitus. The words of Sulpicius Severus tell us of a Council of War held by Titus after the capture of Jerusalem in A. D. 70. In the council Titus is reported to have expressed the view that the Temple of Jerusalem ought to be destroyed in order that the religions of the Jews and of the Christians might be more completely extirpated. The Christians had arisen from amongst the Jews, and when the root was torn up the stem would easily be destroyed.t This points to the policy of stern repression, inaugurated by Nero, being continued for political reasons by Titus and his father Vespasian. There is a passage of Suetonius (Vespasian 15) where it is said that "Vespasian never liked the death of anyone or took pleasure, and in the case of merited punishment he wept and even groaned." The passage is mutilated, but it seems probable that the reference here is to punishments which, according to the precedent of Nero, were inflicted upon Christians. Such men as Vespasian and Titus would hate to inflict cruel punishment upon quiet subjects of the Empire, as they were conscious the Christians were; but it had been already decided by the Government to treat the Christian sect as enemies of the public weal, and in this decision the great princes of the Flavian House concurred, agreeing in the conclusion come to in the reign of Nero that the peculiar tenets of the Christians were inimical to the well-being of the State as then constituted.
Reasoning further from the famous correspondence of the Emperor Trajan with the proconsul Pliny, from which we gather that a practically fixed procedure had long been established in the treatment of the new sect of Christians, it would seem on the whole unlikely that the Christians enjoyed any period of real quietness directly after the death of Nero. That there was no active proscription is probable, but that they practised their religion under circumstances of difficulty and danger is almost certain. In Domitian's day, however, the persecution became once more active, and we shall have to chronicle amidst the crowd of unknown sufferers the fate of certain notable victims who were subjected to the severest penalties, and in some cases were even put to death.
To return to the important Church in Rome, which had suffered so grievously at the cruel hands of Nero. On the death of the two Apostles Peter and Paul, circa A. D. 67-68, the government of the Church of the capital of the Empire came into the hands of Linus, the same probably who sends greeting to Timothy on the eve of Paul's martyrdom (2 Tim. iv. 21). Of this episcopate of Linus we know nothing; even tradition is almost silent here. The "Liber Pontificalis," in which many ancient and some fairly trustworthy traditions are embodied, only tells us that this Linus issued a direction for women to appear in church with their heads covered. From the lists of the early Roman succession we find that Linus presided over the Roman community some twelve years. A veil of silence, too, rests over the episcopate of his successor, Anencletus or Cletus. The duration of his rule is also given in the Eusebian Catalogue as twelve years. Clement of Rome, who followed him, lived through the reign of Domitian, in whose days the fury of persecution awoke again. Clement survived the tyrant, dying in the third year of the reign of the Emperor Trajan, the year that closed the first century. Ecclesiastical writers speak of the proscription of Christians in the reign of Domitian as the second persecution of the Church. Although the policy of the Empire in the days of Vespasian and Titus, and in the early period of Domitian's reign, had been adverse to ,the existence of Christianity, the practical rule of action was, that the officials of the Government should not in any case seek out these "religious" offenders. It was true that a Christian was a criminal who deserved death, but the magistrate might shut his eyes to his existence until some notorious act on the part of the Christian or the information of an officious accuser compelled him to open them. But this unwillingness to proceed against the sect only gave them partial protection. The ill-will of an Emperor or even of a Provincial Governor at any moment might unsheathe the sword of the Law, never quite hidden in its scabbard; and the defenseless Christians would find themselves at once exposed to the severest penalties. If the Emperor was hostile, the persecution became general; if merely the Provincial Magistrate was ill-disposed to the sect, the persecution was generally confined to the district over which his authority extended.
This second severe attack differed in some respects from the Neronic persecution. Under Domitian there was no massacre of crowds of unresisting men and women as in the amphitheatre games of Nero. Individual Christians, some of them of the highest rank, even among the Emperor's own kinfolk, were arrested and put to death; but, although there was no wholesale butchery, the number of sufferers in the course of the active persecution under him was very considerable. The Church was constantly harassed; no Christian was safe from the consequences of the report of an infamous informer; and, in most cases, death speedily followed the arrest. Flavins Clemens, the cousin of the Emperor, was among the victims who perished; Domitilla, his wife, among the banished. Domitilla, however, lived to return to Rome after the tyrant's death.
We possess no records which give us any details respecting the state of the Church in Rome during the period of comparative quietness between the persecutions by Nero and Domitian. The Letter of Clement, however, a little more than a quarter of a century after Nero's death, gives us important information respecting the position of the Church of the Capital; while recent archaeological discoveries also throw a strong sidelight on the position of Christians at Rome, and incidental mention of individual Christians in contemporary writers assists us in our conception of the progress of the Church during that quarter of a century.
Although for the time seriously weakened by the severe measures of A. D. 64, and disheartened by the deaths of Peter and Paul, the Church in Rome gradually recovered from the calamity. It had made too firm a lodgment in the great city to be permanently injured, and it emerged from the fiery trial purified and strengthened. Its converts, too, as we have seen, were drawn from all ranks and orders; by no means was the Christian community only composed of slaves or freedmen, or of persons belonging to the plebeian trading classes. It numbered many wealthy Romans, some of them of the highest rank.
About the year 92 we find Clement occupying the position of Bishop of the Christian community at Rome. Now, no one outside the Apostolic ranks occupies so prominent a place in early Christian story as does this Clement, who, in the various lists of the Roman succession which from the middle of the second century onwards have come down to us, generally appears as the third in succession from St. Peter. When this Clement succeeded to the government of the Roman Church, the reign of Domitian was more than half over. The duration of his episcopate is given in the lists as nine years. His death occurred, then, in the last year of the first century, when the Emperor Trajan was reigning.
Clement, without doubt, was the most prominent figure in the flourishing Church of the metropolis of the world in the age which succeeded the removal by death of Peter and of Paul; and evidently wielded an extraordinary authority in the Church, not only in Italy, but in distant countries more or less connected with Italy and with Rome. How great was the influence of the Church of Rome in other and remote centers we shall show presently.
We may put aside as mythical the various details connected with Clement which appear in the singular early romance generally known as "The Clementines." This curious religious romance dates from about the middle of the second century. Its unknown author seems to have wanted a hero for his story, and no more imposing name than that of the famous Roman bishop, who was at once a great Church administrator and a writer, could be found for his purpose. This very early work probably suggested a similar use of Clement's name to later writers.
It is this "Letter to the Corinthians," to which Irenaeus refers, which constitutes the real importance of Clement's life and work to us. There were other Bishops of Rome immediately preceding and succeeding Clement; but from none of them do we inherit a long and weighty document like this, issuing from the heart of the Church only a quarter of a century after the passing away of Peter and Paul, dating from a time when John was still living and teaching at Ephesus; a document which not only bears in itself ample proofs of its genuineness, but is testified to by ancient and trustworthy authorities in the most positive and decisive language.
That it was in the hands of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, is perfectly clear from the long list of parallel passages, many of them copied verbatim by Polycarp from Clement, in his Epistle to the Philippians circa A. D. 108-10. Irenaeus, circa A. D. 170-80, we have already quoted as referring expressly to it, ascribing to it a position of very high importance, because it records the traditional interpretation of Apostolic teaching, which was the standard of truth in the great church of Rome from the earliest times. Dionysius of Corinth, circa A. D. 170, relates how this epistle was read in church publicly on the Lord's day. Clement of Alexandria, before the close of the second century, quotes this epistle frequently and with great respect. Origen, a few years later, quotes several passages from Clement's letter, and holds his testimony in honor. Coming down the stream of time, the historian Eusebius, to whose patient industry we owe so much of our knowledge of the Church of the "Age of the Persecutions," writing in the first half of the fourth century, calls Clement's epistle "great and marvelous," and dwells on its "having the testimony of antiquity to its genuineness." Besides the above, Clement is quoted by name by Cyril of Jerusalem, circa A. D. 347; Basil of Caesarea, circa A. D. 375; Upiphanius, circa A. D. 375; Jerome, circa A. D. 375-410; and by Ruflnus, circa A. D. 410.
So highly was this letter of Clement of Rome held in honor that it was frequently read publicly in churches other than that of Corinth, to which it was addressed. Eusebius tells us that it was the custom to do so in very many churches, both formerly and in his own time. This epistle of Clement, which was so widely known and highly valued from the end of the first century onwards for more than three hundred years, is a document written in Greek. It is somewhat longer than Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and incidentally, among other and less important points, gives much information respecting the position which Rome occupied towards other Churches; upon the attitude which the Christian Church was directed to assume towards the Emperor and the Government of the Empire; and upon the fundamental doctrines which were the groundwork of the dogmatic teaching of the large and important Christian community of the capital in the last years of the first century.
And yet, highly valued and prized as was this letter of Clement the Bishop of Rome, the eminent teachers who made use of it, and the Churches who even introduced it into the public teaching of the congregation, evidently placed it on a lower and very different level from the writings of such men as Paul and Peter, whose letters at a very early period were received as absolutely authoritative.
Who, now, was this Clement who was then so widely known and honored? Origen, who wrote in the first half of the third century, and whose profound scholarship and literary power place him very high as a witness, without any doubt identifies him with the Clement mentioned by Paul writing to the Philippians (iv. 3) as among the "fellow laborers whose names are in the Book of Life." This identification is adopted by the historian Eusebius, and by not a few early writers; and although modern critics consider it as somewhat precarious, all serious scholars agree in accepting the very early constant and definite tradition that he was the disciple of one or both of the great Apostles Peter and Paul, whose names are so closely connected with the foundation of the Roman Church.
Dismissing as unlikely the theory maintained by some that Clement the Bishop was identical with Flavins Clemens, the cousin of Domitian, it seems on the whole most probable that the famous Bishop was a man of Jewish descent, perhaps a freedman belonging to the household of Flavins Clemens, the Emperor's cousin, who suffered martyrdom in the course of the persecution of Domitian.
Very vivid is the light thrown upon the inner life of the Church of Rome in the last decade of the first century by the letter of the Bishop, the genuineness and authenticity of which, as we have seen, is undoubted. In the first place, it tells us what was the position of the Church of the capital towards other Churches. Now the object of the letter was to induce the rulers of the Church of Corinth to put an end at once to a spirit of faction and insubordination to their official rulers which had arisen lately in the community there. The danger to the well-being and prosperity of the Church was evidently very great, and the tone adopted by the Church of Rome in the letter of Clement was urgent, almost imperious. The recognition of the ascendancy of the Church of Rome is implied in the fact, already noted, that this letter was for a long period constantly read in the public services of the Church of Corinth.
In the second place, very clearly is the attitude adopted by Christians towards the reigning Emperor and the Government set forward in Clement's letter. The Christians in Rome had had experience of the first and one of the most terrible persecutions to which the followers of Jesus were ever exposed. They had then passed through a long period when the sword of proscription was ever threatening, if not actually drawn, in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and in the earlier years of Domitian. They had very lately gone through a renewed period of bitter trial during the latter portion of Domitian's reign. But in the letter of Clement, which accurately reflected the mind and policy of the Christian Church of the metropolis in the closing years of the first century, not an angry word is written, not a hint of resistance to the powers that be is ever whispered. After referring to the victories of persecution, after openly stating that at the hour of writing the letter the Christian community was exposed to some dire penalties, after penning the sad sentence, "We are struggling on the same arena, the same conflict awaits us and you," Clement wrote the following noble prayer for Ruler and Governor: "Guide our steps to walk in holiness and righteousness and simpleness of heart, and to do such things as are good and well pleasing in Thy sight, and in the sight of our rulers. Give concord and peace to us and to all that dwell on the earth . . . that we may be saved; while we render obedience to Thine Almighty and most excellent Name, and to our Rulers and Governors upon the earth. Thou, O Lord and Master, hast given them the power of sovereignty, through Thine excellent and unspeakable might, that we, knowing the glory and honor which Thou hast given them, may submit ourselves unto them, in nothing resisting Thy will."
This expression of quiet loyalty to the Emperor and the Magistrates of the Empire on the part of the important Roman community at such an early period, while a cruel persecution was actually going on, voiced by so eminent a Christian leader as Clement, the Bishop of Rome, is of great importance; and after the affirmations respecting doctrines, which we shall presently deal with, is perhaps the most interesting disclosure respecting the inner life of the primitive Church in this great letter. The principle of unswerving loyalty to the chief of the State, and of uncomplaining submission to the harshest Imperial decrees, here laid down so sublimely in this weighty utterance of the Roman Church circa A. D. 96, passed into the unwritten law of the Church. It is dwelt upon by other famous Christians in writings which have come down to us, probably about a century after the death of Clement, notably by the eloquent Carthaginian theologian Tertullian.
Loyal obedience to the constituted power of the Empire was pressed home in the most emphatic terms by the Apostles Peter and Paul; and their disciple Clement, when he became head of the great Church they founded, reiterated the charge given by those inspired followers of the Master.
But, in the inner life of the very early Christian Church, of still greater importance is the testimony afforded by Clement's writings to the fundamental doctrines taught in the Christian Church of Rome a quarter of a century after the deaths of Peter and Paul Irenaeus quotes Clement's letter as passing on to other Churches the tradition which he, Clement, had lately received from the Apostles.
Very definite was the teaching on the Atonement and Mediation of Christ. The spirit of Clement was deeply tinged with the thoughts and the very language of the Epistle to the Hebrews; constantly he speaks of the "blood of Christ" with reference to "ransom," "deliverance," etc. He emphatically believed in the pre-existence of Christ, and their persecutors in the first century. It was the model upon which the Christians ordered their behavior to the State during the second and third and the early years of the fourth century.
The Divinity of Christ is even asserted by Clement in terms which the more guarded theologians of the fourth century would have shrunk from using, for fear of being charged with Patripassian errors.
These are only great landmarks in Clement's famous writing; but the letter shows how deeply saturated was the writer with the doctrinal teaching of the more important Epistles of Paul to the Romans and Corinthians, as well as with the Catholic truths set out in several of the smaller Epistles, notably in that to the Ephesians. He was equally at home too with Peter's first and weightier Epistle, and also with that of James; the Epistle to the Hebrews, its thoughts and even its language, were evidently so familiar to Clement that many ancient scholars attributed the authorship of that great letter to him. To sum up, he is a powerful witness to the unity, to the oneness of the teaching of the primitive Church; never divided, as some modern critics love to assert, into schools of which the honored names of Peter and Paul and James were respectively the watchwords.
The witness of the letter of Clement to the inner life of the Christian community of Rome at the end of the first century has been wonderfully enriched by an unexpected discovery in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The Epistle of Clement of Rome was first published about two centuries and a half ago from a precious MS. presented to King Charles I. by Cyril Lucar, Patriarch, first of Alexandria and subsequently of Constantinople, and brought to England in the year 1628. It is now in the British Museum, and is known as "A." It contained originally the Old and New Testaments, but has been mutilated. The MS. was written as far back as the fourth century, or possibly a little later in the fifth century. The letter of Clement stands at the end of the New Testament, in this MS., which until the last few years was the only existing MS. of our letter, and just at the end a page was wanting.
In the year 1875 the letter was published by Bryennios, Metropolitan of Serrae, from a MS. lately discovered in the library of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople. In this MS. the long lost page existed. Very shortly after a Syrian MS. was unearthed, also containing the letter with the lost page. We therefore now possess the whole of Clement's writing.
The recovered page contains a beautiful and striking prayer of considerable length, occupying above seventy lines of an ordinary octavo page. It is a kind of litany, opening with an elaborate invocation of God; then comes an intercession for wanderers, hungry ones, captives, etc. These intercessions are followed by a general confession of sins and prayer for pardon and Divine help. It is in the course of this long litany and prayer that the remarkable sentences occur to which reference has been already made, which indicate the attitude assumed by the suffering and persecuted Christians towards the Emperor and his Government.
Bishop Lightfoot of Durham draws the following conclusions from this prayer of Clement:
"What then shall we say of this litany? Has S. Clement introduced into his epistle a portion of a fixed form of words then in use in the Roman Church?" He thus answers his question: "There was at this time no authoritative written liturgy in use in the Church of Rome, but the prayers were modified at the discretion of the officiating minister. Under the dictation of habit and experience, however, these prayers were gradually assuming a fixed form. . . As the chief pastor of the Roman Church would be the main instrument in thus molding the liturgy, the prayers, without actually being written down, would assume in his mind a fixity as time went on. When, therefore, at the close of his epistle he asks his readers to fall on their knees, and lay down their jealousies and disputes at the footstool of grace, his language naturally runs into those measured cadences which his ministrations in the Church had rendered habitual with him when dealing with such a subject. . . It has all the appearance of a fixed form."
The deduction which must be drawn from the presence of this "memory" of what was evidently a public liturgy, is that before the end of the first century there were fixed forms of prayer; if not written, certainly committed to memory, and used in the religious assemblies of the Church in Rome. Before Clement, the disciple of Peter and Paul, had passed away, the Roman Church, with its wide almsgiving by no means confined to the members of the metropolitan Church, its government, its forms of service, its authoritative teaching in all fundamental articles of doctrine, evidently had already been carefully organized.
The especially reverent care for the bodies of the faithful departed was a great feature among the Christians of the first three centuries. We shall a little later discuss and illustrate this anxious solicitude of Christians for their dead, when we come to speak of the cemeteries or catacombs. Already, however, in the days of Clement's episcopate, and even earlier, we have proofs of this care and solicitude.
Late investigations have clearly identified the catacombs on the Via Ardeatina, hard by the well-known Appian Way, as the cemetery of Domitilla. This cemetery was made upon and beneath the estate of Flavia Domitilla, the kinswoman of Domitian, whose husband, the former consul, suffered for his faith in the Domitian persecution, when Domitilla herself was banished. The cemetery in question was one of the earliest prepared by wealthy Roman Christians for the reception of the dead members of their own family, as well as to provide a resting place for the remains of poorer members of the Church. Among the various pieces of identification of the cemetery is the character of the adornment of its sepulchral chambers, which belong unmistakably to the first century. The cemetery of Domitilla, however, is not the only one which clearly belongs to this very early time.
The story of Clement after he passed away came to be invested with a mythical dignity which is without example in the ante-Nicene Church. The events of his life have been so strangely involved in consequence of the religious romances which bear his name (the Clementines, etc., above referred to) that for the most part they must remain in inextricable confusion. We have endeavored to disentangle something, separating some clear facts from the merely legendary, and to present, mainly drawn from his own words, just a few really historical records of this first-century leader of the Church of the metropolis, and of his work.
A striking historical monument of Clement has recently been brought to light. It was a custom of very early date in the Church to build over the tomb of a saint or martyr a little memorial chapel or oratory. This oratory is frequently styled the "Memoria." Now Jerome, writing circa A. D. 392, tells us how a Church or Basilica erected at Rome at the foot of the Coelian Hill protects (custodit) the "Memoria" of Clement. It was, from Jerome's words, no very recent erection. (He was writing at the close of the fourth century.) Constantly during the centuries which followed the death of Jerome, we come upon mentions of this church or basilica of Clement. Late excavations throw much light upon this venerable relic of the famous pupil of the Apostles Peter and Paul. It was found that three distinct buildings existed; one erected over the other. Beneath the present church is an earlier basilica in which the original columns are now standing. This was the church of which Jerome writes in the fourth century. It was built in the hollow between the Coelian and Esquiline Hills. After the utter ruin of large portions of the city, caused by the storming of Rome by Robert Guiscard in the year 1084, the dip or hollow between the two hills was, in part, gradually filled up by the debris of the ruins of that quarter of the city, which especially suffered in that crushing calamity. As time went on, over the old basilica, which was buried beneath the debris in question, arose the "new" church, which is still standing. The new basilica, though it was somewhat smaller, closely followed the lines of the old church of the age of Constantine, that of which Jerome writes. Much of the stone and marble furniture which had not perished was brought up and placed in the present church, which retains more of the details of primitive church architecture (of the fourth century) than any other building in Rome. Directly underneath these two churches was found a third and yet lower building (the discovery was in 1858-61). This lowest edifice was partly composed of masonry dating back to the regal or republican period. But what was of the highest interest in this third building was a chamber, which the famous archaeologist De Rossi, whose researches have thrown so much light upon the Church of the first three centuries, believes to have been the original "Memoria " of Clement. To the west of this chamber, with its wonderful traditions, was found another long vaulted chapel, with an altar and other remains, showing that it was once used for the worship of Mithras, a divinity who became, towards the end of the second and during the third century, a favorite and fashionable object of worship in Rome and its neighborhood. De Rossi thinks that this "chapel" was once a part of the original house of Clement; that it was confiscated in one of the earlier persecutions and devoted to the popular rites of Mithras; and that, some time after the peace of the Church (A. D. 313), it was restored to the Church when a basilica (the one spoken of by Jerome) was erected over the original little "Memoria" of Clement.
Clement passed away circa A. D. 100, dying, it would seem, a natural death. We do not hear anything of his martyrdom till about three centuries later.
The Acts of Clement are evidently fictitious, and were probably written not earlier than the end of the fourth century. In these he is related to have been banished to the Chersonese, where he suffered martyrdom. In the ninth century his bones were strangely discovered, brought back to Rome, and deposited in the basilica bearing his name. That such a translation of his "supposed" remains took place in the pontificate of Adrian II. (A. D. 867-872) is apparently, however, an authentic record.
What, then, was the "Memoria" spoken of by Jerome centuries before? Was it a chapel, erected actually over Clement's remains, or was it simply a little oratory commemorative of the great Bishop? The former would seem more probable; in which case the first basilica of Clement was no doubt built over his actual tomb.
The word "Memoria" sometimes alternates with "Confessionary," being used to denote the small oratory or chapel built over the tomb of a martyr or saint. Jerome's words are precise here: "A church erected at Rome preserves to this day (or protects to this day) the memorial chapel built in his name."