Clementine Literature

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The Clementine literature is a pair of overlapping early Christian novels — the Homilies and the Recognitions — written in the name of Clement of Rome and built around the apostle Peter’s missionary journeys. The two works tell nearly the same story in different arrangements. Clement, a well-born Roman troubled by questions about the soul and the world’s beginning, attaches himself to Peter, travels with him through the cities of the Syrian coast, and is at last reunited with the family that shipwreck and exile had scattered — the recognition that gives the Latin version its name. Folded into that frame is a long doctrinal contest: Peter pursuing and disputing the magician Simon from town to town.

Scholarship treats the two as recensions of a lost common source, a now-vanished writing that both reworked. The Homilies survive in Greek; the Recognitions come down chiefly in the Latin translation Rufinus made around 406, with a Syriac witness alongside. The finished works date to the fourth century, but the materials reach back further, and the underlying source is usually placed in the third — drawing in turn on still older traditions. None of this is the work of the historical Clement, the late-first-century Roman bishop under whose name it travels; the attribution is part of the fiction.

What has drawn most attention is the religious colour of the texts. They preserve a markedly Jewish-Christian outlook, foreign to the Pauline Christianity that became mainstream: the Law is honoured, James of Jerusalem holds the highest authority, and Peter is the true apostle against whom false teachers measure short. Many readers since the nineteenth century have heard, in the figure of Simon — the “enemy” who corrupts the gospel with foreign wisdom — a coded attack on Paul himself. The reading is contested. That Simon sometimes carries Pauline phrases is clear in the text; that the authors meant their whole Simon to be Paul is an inference scholars weigh rather than settle.

The Simon of these pages is also the fullest early portrait of the man later tradition made the father of all heresy. He travels with a woman, Helena, whom he calls the First Thought of God fallen into the world and now ransomed back — a myth that the heresiologists report of the historical Simonians and that resembles, in outline, the descended and recovered wisdom-figure of several Gnostic systems. Whether the romance preserves real Simonian teaching or only the polemic shaped against it is hard to decide, since the hostile sources and the novel feed each other.

For later esotericism the Clementine corpus matters mostly as a reservoir. It is among the longest sustained early depictions of Simon Magus, and so of the legend that runs forward into Faust and the magus tradition; it carries, embedded in argument, fragments of Hellenistic religious speculation about the soul, providence, and the hidden order of things. The romance closes the way such romances do, with the family restored and the heretic put to flight. What outlasted the story was the quarrel inside it.

→ In the library: Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Helen Of Troy · Hermes Trismegistus