The Life
Clement was born in Rome to a wealthy senatorial family. He had the best education of his age, but pagan philosophy left him cold. When the news of Christ’s resurrection reached the capital, he left Rome to find the apostles. He met Saint Barnabas in Alexandria, and then traveled to Palestine where Saint Peter himself baptized him. He became one of Saint Peter’s closest disciples and traveled with him for years. After Saint Peter’s death, Clement eventually became the Bishop of Rome. He wrote the famous Letter to the Corinthians, the oldest Christian writing we have outside the Bible. The Emperor Trajan exiled him to a quarry in the Crimea, where he kept on preaching, and where he was finally martyred by being thrown into the Black Sea with an anchor around his neck.
Clement was born into a Roman family of great wealth. He had access to the finest teachers, the imperial court, every comfort the empire could offer. None of it brought him peace. He could not stop wondering about the great questions of life: where do we come from, where do we go, what is the meaning of all this? Pagan philosophy gave him no real answer. When word began to reach Rome of a man named Jesus who had risen from the dead, and of apostles preaching this news in the East, Clement left his home and his estate and went to find them.
Clement met Saint Barnabas in Alexandria first, and listened to him for days. Then he went on to Palestine, where the Apostle Peter baptized him and made him a disciple. From that day Clement traveled with Saint Peter for many years, sharing his missionary labors, his sufferings, and his joys. The leader of the apostles became Clement’s spiritual father. Saint Peter himself ordained him to the priesthood, and prepared him to lead the Church.
After Saint Peter’s martyrdom in Rome under the Emperor Nero, Saint Linus succeeded him, then Saint Anacletus, and then Saint Clement. He was the third Pope of Rome, from about the year 92 to the year 101. While he was Bishop, a serious quarrel broke out in the Church of Corinth: some of the younger members had risen up against the elders and deposed them. Clement wrote the Corinthian Christians a long letter calling them to repentance and to good order. The letter is one of the most beautiful pieces of early Christian writing, and the oldest one we have outside the New Testament itself.
Saint Clement’s preaching converted so many Romans, even members of the imperial court, that the pagan priests grew alarmed. They denounced him to the Emperor Trajan, who had him arrested and sent into exile. He was put to forced labor at the marble quarries near the city of Cherson on the Black Sea, in what is now the Crimea. Many of his disciples chose to go into exile with him rather than be without their bishop. When Clement arrived at the quarries he found two thousand other Christians already condemned to the same labor.
Saint Clement gathered the suffering laborers in prayer for water. As he prayed, he looked up and saw a lamb standing on a hill in the distance. He went to the spot where the lamb had been, struck the ground with his pickaxe, and a great stream of clear water gushed forth. The miracle drew crowds from miles around. Many pagans heard Saint Clement preach about Christ, and were converted. The synaxarion says that during his exile some seventy-five churches were built in the Crimea.
When word of the conversions in the Crimea reached the Emperor Trajan, he was furious. He sent officers to put Saint Clement to death. They wanted to deny his disciples a body to venerate, so they took the saint out into the Black Sea in a boat, tied a heavy iron anchor around his neck, and threw him overboard. He sank to the bottom and gave up his soul to the Lord. The disciples mourned him on the shore. Then a great wonder happened: the sea drew back for a great distance, and the people walked out on the dry seabed and found a small marble shrine that the angels had built around the body of the saint, with the anchor laid beside him. From that day on, the sea would draw back every year on the anniversary of his death, for seven days, so that pilgrims could come and pray at his tomb.
The Letter to the Hebrews calls our hope in Christ “an anchor of the soul.” The early Christians took this image very seriously. They drew anchors on the walls of the catacombs. They wore them as small ornaments. They saw the anchor as the sign of the hope that holds us steady in the storms of this life. When the pagan executioners tied an anchor around Saint Clement’s neck and threw him into the Black Sea, they were unwittingly placing on him the very symbol of the hope by which he had lived. The anchor became his glory. Pilgrims still pray to him with the anchor in his icon today.
For seven hundred years pilgrims walked out on the dry seabed at Cherson each year to pray at Saint Clement’s tomb. Then in the early ninth century the sea stopped drawing back. The relics were lost. Fifty years later, in 861, Saints Cyril and Methodius came to Cherson on their way to preach the Gospel to the Slavs. They asked the bishop of Cherson to pray with them. Walking the shore in solemn procession, they prayed all night. At midnight the relics of Saint Clement rose miraculously to the surface of the sea. They took them in joy to Constantinople, and later to Rome and to Kiev.
Saint Clement matters to the Church because he heard the Gospel directly from Saint Peter, kept it faithfully, handed it on to the next generation, and died for it. Everything he wrote and everything he did was meant to keep the apostolic faith alive in his own time and to pass it forward. He shepherded the Romans, he wrote to the Corinthians, he preached to the prisoners in the Crimea, he died bearing witness to the same Lord all the way through. He shows us that the Christian life is the faithful handing on of what we ourselves have received, with our whole life as the seal.