Clement the Hymnographer
Our Venerable Father and Confessor Clement the Hymnographer, composer of canons
Venerable · Confessor · b. before 765 — d. after 824, in exile
Commemorated 30 April — Commemoration of the confessor and composer of canons
Clement "the Poet" (ὁ Ποιητής) is one of the great canon-writers of the iconophile generation: a monk of the late eighth and early ninth centuries who composed some thirty canons for the service books, who was a confessor for the holy icons and died in exile, and who left his signature across the Church's hymnography in an unusual way — the initial letters of his theotokia spell out ΚΛΗΜΕΝΤΟΣ, "of Clement," a device that later hymnographers imitated. Almost every canon of his touches, somewhere, on the veneration of the icons or the folly of iconoclasm, so that his poetry is at once liturgy and confession. He is commemorated on April 30.
The holy mountain and the iconoclast persecution
Almost nothing of Clement's outward biography is transmitted; what is known of him is reconstructed from his own hymns. He was born before 765, was living still after 824, and — on the natural reading of the notices — passed his monastic life on "the holy mountain," which in that century and in that context means most probably Mount Olympus in Bithynia, the great monastic massif that produced so many of the iconophile confessors of the second period of iconoclasm.
He was an ardent venerator of the icons, and he suffered for it. The tradition styles him a confessor: he was persecuted under the renewed iconoclasm of the ninth century, was sent into exile, and there reposed in peace — not by the sword, but worn out under sentence, which is the characteristic end of the iconophile monk of that generation.
Two of his own compositions provide the chronological anchors. He wrote a canon in honour of Niketas of Medikion, the iconophile abbot who died in 824, which places Clement's activity after that year and inside the circle that venerated the confessors of the persecution; and the maturity of his corpus, together with the attribution to him of canons for feasts already fixed by the mid-eighth century, requires a birth well before 765.
The canons
Clement's importance is as a composer of canons — the long, nine-ode poetic structures that carry the theology of a feast or a saint through the Matins service. About thirty canons are credited to him. His method was not that of the great melodists: he did not compose new melodies, but took over heirmoi and metrical patterns already in use in the Church's books and fitted his own odes to them. This is why his work spread easily and quietly into the service books, and why so much of it survives anonymously or under other names.
His acrostic is his signature and his innovation. Where earlier hymnographers ran an acrostic through the initial letters of all the troparia of a canon, Clement used the initials of the theotokia — the final troparion of each ode, addressed to the Mother of God — to spell ΚΛΗΜΕΝΤΟΣ. The device is economical (it leaves the rest of the canon free for the subject) and it puts his name, in effect, always in the Theotokos's hands; later Byzantine hymnographers, including some of the Studite school, took it up after him.
The iconophile stamp on the corpus is unmistakable. Nearly every canon of Clement's finds occasion, somewhere in its nine odes, to confess the veneration of images or to strike at the iconoclasts. In his canon for the Archangels Michael and Gabriel (November 8), for instance, a troparion praises the bodiless powers "whose countenance we honour in icons" — grounding the veneration of images of the angels in the received Christological doctrine of the incarnate Word, which is exactly the argument of the iconophile theologians of his day made singable. In a Church whose services were themselves a battlefield, this was a deliberate strategy: the confession that could be suppressed in a treatise could not be got out of the canon that a monastery sang at Matins.
Feast and commemoration
April 30 (church date; New Calendar civil April 30, Old Calendar civil May 13). The day belongs principally to the Apostle James the son of Zebedee, and Clement is commemorated with him in the synaxarion notice; he has no proper sung office in the ordinary Menaion, and where his memory is kept liturgically it is with the commons of a venerable father. An anonymous canon written in his honour survives, whose verses turn — as one would expect for a poet — on his own art: that "Clement gladdened the earthborn below with songs, and departed gladdened" to the songs and the intelligences above. There is a certain justice in the reticence: the man who signed himself only through the theotokia of other people's feasts is commemorated on a day that belongs to an apostle.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, the image of God was preserved unimpaired, for thou didst take up the Cross and follow Christ; and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal: wherefore, O venerable Clement, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 2 (common of a venerable father)
With songs thou didst gladden the children of earth, and with songs thou hast passed to the choirs of the bodiless powers; for having confessed the venerable image of the Word made flesh, thou didst endure exile for His sake, O Clement: wherefore we cry unto thee, Rejoice, O harp of the Spirit.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Clement is painted as a monk of the ninth century and, where he is distinguished at all from the general run of venerable fathers, as a hymnographer: in the dark tunic, mandyas and koukoulion (or bare-headed with the hair cropped), of middle age or elderly, with a moderate pointed beard, holding an open scroll or codex on which the beginning of a hymn is written — the attribute that Byzantine painters give to Cosmas of Maiuma, Joseph the Hymnographer and Theophanes, and by which the poets of the Church are known in the icon. A pen, or an inkhorn, is sometimes added. Since he is a confessor for the icons, some later images place a small icon of Christ in his hand or beside him. No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection; he is a saint of the synaxarion notice rather than of the panel icon, and the menologion cycles that would ordinarily supply a miniature do not cover the end of April.
Disputed questions
- Was he the abbot of the Studion? Several calendars, including OrthodoxWiki and various Greek notices, style him "Clement, abbot of the Studion monastery," and there is a respectable scholarly suggestion behind it: St Theodore the Studite addressed three letters to a monk named Clement who had left the Studion for a heretical position and afterwards returned to Orthodoxy, becoming Theodore's disciple and notary; and a Clement is recorded as succeeding St Nicholas the Studite as abbot of the Studion in 868. The identification of all three — the hymnographer, Theodore's correspondent, and the abbot of 868 — is chronologically very hard: a man born before 765 would be past a hundred in 868. Either the hymnographer is not the abbot, or the dating drawn from his canons is wrong, or (most likely) two or three men of the same name have been conflated. This entry keeps the synaxarion's own title for him, Clement the Poet, and records the Studite identification as a possibility rather than a fact.
- Which of the canons are his? Because he reused existing heirmoi and signed only through the theotokia, the attribution of individual canons is often uncertain, and manuscripts assign the same canon now to Clement, now to Joseph the Hymnographer or to Theophanes. The acrostic ΚΛΗΜΕΝΤΟΣ is the one firm test, and it is the basis on which the corpus has been reconstructed.
- Not to be confused with the other Clements of the calendar: Clement of Rome, apostolic father and hieromartyr (Nov 25); Clement of Ancyra, hieromartyr (Jan 23); or Clement of Ohrid, the disciple of Cyril and Methodius and himself a hymnographer in Slavonic (Jul 27), with whom the epithet "hymnographer" invites confusion — the two are a century apart and wrote in different languages.