Marcellinus of Rome

The bishop of Rome under Diocletian

The historical outline is secure and very brief. Marcellinus was elected bishop of Rome in the summer of 296, following Caius, and the fourth-century Roman lists give him a pontificate of a little over eight years, ending in 304. The whole of the second half of that period lies under the edicts of Diocletian — the demolition of churches, the surrender and burning of the Scriptures, the imprisonment of the clergy, and finally the general order to sacrifice. Rome lost its bishop and then went for some years, on any reckoning, effectively without one: the see was vacant or contested until Marcellus was established about 308, and the Roman church was afterwards torn for a generation over what to do with those who had complied. Marcellinus stands exactly at that fracture, and everything told about him is coloured by it.

The most reliable single datum about him is where he was buried. The Chronography of 354, in the list of the depositions of the Roman bishops, records Marcellinus's burial in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, on the 26th of April — which is why the Latin calendars keep him on that day, and why the detail of the burial in Priscilla's crypt, which the legend supplies with a vision to explain it, is in fact the one part of the narrative independently attested.

The charge of apostasy

That Marcellinus lapsed was asserted in his own century — by the Donatists of Africa, who used the story polemically to argue that the Roman succession itself was polluted by traditio, the handing over of the sacred books. Augustine answered them directly, and treated the accusation as a slander: he lists it among the fabrications of his opponents and denies that any such thing is on record against Marcellinus or against his archdeacon. The Donatist charge and Augustine's denial are the earliest form in which the question appears, and neither side is a disinterested witness.

Whatever the truth of the accusation, it was too good a story to lose, and in the early sixth century it was rewritten from the other end. During the Roman schism of Symmachus and Laurentius, partisans of Symmachus forged a small library of documents to establish that the bishop of Rome cannot be tried by anyone — prima sedes a nemine iudicatur — and among them was an alleged Council of Sinuessa, at which a great assembly of bishops and presbyters heard Marcellinus confess that he had sacrificed and refused to pass sentence on him, saying that the first see is judged by none and that he must judge himself. This document, the Gesta de Marcellino, is by universal consent a forgery of about 500, and it is the direct ancestor of the story the Byzantine synaxarion tells: the sackcloth and ashes, the assembly of bishops (the Greek notice numbers them one hundred and eighty), the self-judgement, the request to be left unburied.

The synaxarion's account

The Byzantine notice, which is what the Orthodox books actually commemorate, runs as follows. In the persecution under Diocletian and Maximian Marcellinus was arrested and tortured, and at length burned incense before the idols; the emperor, delighted, clothed him in rich garments and treated him as a friend. Conscience gave him no rest. He went into Campania and laid his sin before a synod of one hundred and eighty bishops and presbyters at Sinuessa, coming before them in sackcloth with ashes on his head and confessing openly; and when they put it to him to judge himself, he pronounced himself unworthy of the priesthood and asked that when he died his body should be thrown out unburied. The fathers would not have it. They answered him with the case of Peter, who denied his Master out of fear and wept bitterly and was forgiven, and they left him in his office.

He came back to Rome and went to the emperor and took back what he had done — declaring before him that he had denied Christ in weakness and now confessed Him. Diocletian, enraged at being made a fool of, had him tortured again and then beheaded with the sword, and with him three men who had confessed with him, Claudius, Cyrinus (Quirinus) and Antoninus. Marcellinus went to his death praying to the Christ who receives repentant sinners.

The last movement of the story concerns his burial, which he had forbidden. His body was left thirty-six days in the open. Then the Apostle Peter appeared to Marcellus, the new bishop — the man who had most reason to think the sentence just — and asked him how long he meant to leave his predecessor unburied; and when Marcellus objected that the dead man had condemned himself, Peter answered that Marcellinus had repented, and that the words of a penitent were not to be used against him. So Marcellus took up the body and buried it honourably in the crypt which Priscilla had made for the burial of martyrs on the Via Salaria.

The reason the Church kept the story

Nothing in the Orthodox calendar suppresses the fall; the commemoration is of the fall and the return. That is unusual and deliberate. The Church has never had many saints whose notice begins with an apostasy, and the notice of Marcellinus is constructed so that the weight falls on two sentences: the bishops' reminder that Peter denied and was restored, and the Apostle's ruling that a penitent's self-condemnation may not be held against him. Read that way the day is not about the papacy or about the Donatist quarrel at all, but about the measure of repentance — and about the pastoral principle, argued in Rome for a century after Diocletian and settled in the canons, that the lapsi who return are received.