ST. PAUL AND ST. CLEMENT OF ROME TO THE

CORINTHIANS.

"TAKE up the Epistle of the blessed Paul the apostle.

wrote he first unto you in the beginning of the Gospel?

What
Of

a truth he charged you in the spirit concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because that even then ye had made parties."

Nearly forty years had passed away since this, the First Epistle of the "blessed Paul" to the Corinthians was written, and the words quoted above addressed by St. Clement to the same Church. The writer may have been the fellowworker 2 with the apostle at Philippi, whose name was in the Book of Life. But the identification, although sheltered by the name of Origen and others after him, of a Philippian (apparently) and a Roman, is on various grounds improbable, and has found little favour with modern critics.* Whether a yoke-fellow of St. Paul's or not; whether second, or third, or fourth bishop; whether or not, either converted or ordained by St. Peter-and to some spiritual connection with that apostle the legend of the Clementine Recognitions seems to point; or by St. Paul, or by both apostles; Clemens was bishop of the Roman Church when this weighty and powerful letter was written, and, according to the express statement of Irenæus," "had seen the blessed apostles, had conversed with them, and had their preaching still ringing in

5

Text used Funk, where sections are given, or Lightfoot. Translation Lightfoot's.

2 Phil. iv. 3.

4

3 Euseb., Epiph., Jerome.

* Bp. Lightfoot, Funk, etc., reject it; Bp. Wordsworth, Phil. (s.l.), inclines

to accept it.

Vid. Canon Scott Holland's Apostolic Fathers, p. 73; Evans' Biography of the Early Church, p. 16.

iii. c. 3. 3.

L

1

3

his ears, and their tradition before his eyes." His Epistle was written either in 95, at the end of Domitian's reign, or in 96, at the beginning of Nerva's, when the persecutions had ceased. The time of its publication probably, then, almost coincided with the delivery of that wondrous apocalyptic peal of the son of thunder. For nearly thirty eventful years that "preaching and tradition" had been shaping his forms of thought and moulding his life. If the aged Irenæus so vividly and minutely remembered "the very place in which the blessed Polycarp used to sit when he discoursed, and his goings out and his comings in, and his manner of life and his personal appearance, and the discourses which he held before the people, and how he would describe his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord; if the followers of a Francis of Assisi, or the pupils of an Arnold or Newman, reflect in after life and character some of the master-light of all their shining,

vividly Pauline" doctrine is what we expect to find, and do find in Clement. And his warmth of feeling, deep moral tones, as clearly proclaim the fountain of his inspiration. Himself, it may be, the spiritual prisoner of the aged prisoner of Jesus Christ, he must have rejoiced and wept with his friends, and his friends' friends; and have shared with them the legacy of golden memories, and the responsibility of magnificent examples. Among such may well have been Claudius Ephebus and Valerius Bito, "our messengers, faithful and prudent men that have walked among us from youth unto old age unblameably.". The streets of Rome, the synagogues of Rome, the Ghetto, the poor "purlieus of the Transtevere," "the gloomy haunts of the catacomb," the Prætorian camp, the Prætorian guards, the precincts of the imperial palace, the bridges of the beggar exiles, the basilica

1 ἔναυλον.

3 Accepting the later date of the Apocalypse.

2 As Funk, p. xxiii.

Holland, p. 180.

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Chaps. Ixiii. and lxv.

of his trial, and the Tullianum, recalled from place to place, from time to time, the unforgotten presence of the "blessed" apostle. Some in the household of the Cæsars, many of the freedmen and dependents of Flavius Clemens, must have been exponents of the Pauline Gospel, and living epistles of their spiritual father. We can well imagine how, in the stormy ruin of the Neronian, and the fitful fury of Domitian's persecution, the name of the prince of apostolic sufferers and preachers must have rested on the lips and inspired the souls of those who added to the wealth of Roman glories the blood of martyrs and the patience and faith of the saints. What moving memories rose up like a cloud of witnesses from the road-like one, yet more sacred, "without the gate "-leading to the port of Ostia, whereon the wan and toil-worn form of the apostle was seen bound on his last best voyage. Neither were the events the eyes of St. Clement had witnessed during his

Roman life likely to dull

the image of the great apostle to the Gentiles on his memory. For who had trodden so closely on the footprints of the Man of sorrows? Who as deeply had sounded all the depths and shoals of persecution, as potently had comforted his fellow-sufferers for all time? Clement had passed through much tribulation; he had learned many lessons of hope and fortitude. When he looked back he could recall the multitudo ingens, who had fallen into the ranks of the white-robed army. He and his contemporaries had seen the nine days' Reign of Fire; had seen or known the "fall by fire, within eight months of each other, of two national temples," 1 that of Jupiter Stator at Rome, that of the God of their fathers at Jerusalem; had seen the sacred furniture of the holy place, the seven-branched candlestick, the golden table, the trumpets which announced the year of jubilee, the Book of the Law, and the vessel of incense, borne in the triumphal procession before the Imperators, Vespasian and Titus, through

1 Vid. Merivale, Romans under the Empire, vii. 252.

With such a freight of joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, was the ship of the Church laden; and now that gifted Church, over which Clement ruled, had emerged from its double baptism of blood, uprising like snowy heights stained with sunset, crowned with many crowns, and bearing on its bosom the two illustrious apostolic names.

Whatever be the cause, the overmastering influence of St. Paul is patent on every page of the Epistle. It will be the purpose of this essay to trace out some of the indications of that influence. But our field of comparison will be limited to that Epistle which Clement invited the Corinthians to "take up," and its sequel. The ground of comparison will naturally be divided into the following sections:-1. Doctrinal; 2. Ethical; 3. Ecclesiastical; 4. Verbal and incidental; 5. Certain contrasts.

The occasion of St. Paul's first letter was the report of the state of the Corinthian Church brought to him at Ephesus by certain of the household of Chloe, and a simultaneous letter of inquiry as to some cases of conscience. The purport of his reply was threefold, viz. to correct the moral and ecclesiastical disorders, to solve spiritual difficulties, and to promote the collection of alms for the relief of the poor saints at Jerusalem. The occasion of St. Clement's letter is reported to us by Irenæus as follows:-"No small dissension having arisen 2 E. B. Browning.

1 Hor. Od. iii. 6.

1

among the brethren in Corinth, the Church in Rome sent a very able letter to the Corinthians, urging them to peace," etc.; and the contents of the letter are sufficient indication. But there is no evidence that the interposition of the Roman bishop, or Church, as of the apostle, was invited. The action of the Church in Rome appears to have been taken upon its own sense of duty and co-responsibility. The object of the episcopal letter coincides with the first intended by the apostle. A determined attack is made upon "the detestable and unholy sedition, which a few headstrong and self-willed persons had kindled to such a pitch of madness that," etc.2 The inspired apostle and his pupil alike had in view the general well-being and concord of the faithful, and more particularly the peace and integration of the Corinthian Christians. Each letter was an eirenicon. The jealous, sectarian, individualizing spirit which had split the Corinthians into Pauline, Petrine, Apolloite, and Christine parties equally threatened, under changed watchwords, the moral and devotional harmony, the catholicity of faith and worship, the very existence of the "Church of God which sojourned in Corinth." Further details will appear later on.

Passing on to the consideration of any common basis in doctrine, we have no hesitation in deriving St. Clement's twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth chapters on the subject of the resurrection from St. Paul's great section. As part

of the apostle's language is an expansion of our Lord's simile of the grain of wheat, so St. Clement-consciously or unconsciously-borrows from the apostle :

"Let us understand how the Master continually showeth unto us the resurrection that shall be hereafter; whereof He made the Lord Jesus Christ the first-fruit, when He raised Him from the dead. . . . Let us mark the fruits, how and in what manner the sowing taketh place. The sower goeth forth and casteth into the earth each of the seeds; and these 3 Chap. i.

1 iii. 3. 3.