ON ST. ANACLETUS,
ROMAN PONTIFF AND MARTYR.
IN THE YEAR 95.
COMMENTARY.
On the distinction of St. Anacletus from St. Cletus, his ancient cult, deeds, and relics.
Anacletus, Pope and Martyr, at Rome (S.)
BY THE AUTHOR J. B. S.
What we promised in the observation on Usuard's Martyrology on the XXVI of April, concerning discussing again the controversy over the identity or distinction of two almost synonymous Pontiffs, we shall now try to carry out, so far as it can be done through such dense shadows, The distinction asserted by Henschenius, yet briefly and succinctly, treading in the footsteps of our elders, from whom, after a rather laborious inquiry, nothing has thus far occurred to me which so greatly compels me to depart. Henschenius, on the said day the XXVI of April, prefixes this title to the first chapter of his Commentary: The holy Cletus and Anacletus, different Pontiffs; and he handles that argument learnedly, adducing pressing authorities by which he demonstrates that all the monuments of the Roman Church fight evidently for the asserted distinction; whence, by the most prudent rule of Baronius, recited also by us, namely that in those things which belong to the Roman Church greater faith is to be given to her own nurslings than to strangers, he all but proves that those two Roman Pontiffs, Cletus and Anacletus, who were truly two, were, by the rest, whether Greeks or Africans, on account of the likeness of the names, welded into one; just as he proves in the same place that this befell others also, and namely from the confusion of the Pontiffs Marcellus and Marcellinus, which not a few most learned men undertook to maintain, but from which I so deterred the distinguished Castellanus before his death that at length he confessed that he had wholly retracted that opinion, which I did not fail to indicate in the said Observations on the XVI of January and the XXVI of April.
[2] Furthermore, of the holy Cletus and Anacletus I sincerely confess maintained also by others, that the distinctions do not so far appear to me so evident, except that the suffrages of the more ancient writers, though foreign, that is, not Roman, learnedly weighed by our Peter Halloix on St. Irenaeus, and not everywhere refuted by Henschenius, so hold my mind in suspense that, all things being carefully and long weighed, I see that I must subscribe to Antonio Pagi, who in his Critique of Baronius, at the year 101, having recorded the death of St. Anacletus as of one distinct from St. Cletus, and having touched in passing on the contrary opinion of the learned, especially the French, plainly declares that he acknowledges the matter to be uncertain, but that he will not depart from the common opinion: and the same is professed again by his nephew Franciscus in the Breviary of the Roman Pontiffs, volume 1, page 15. Nor in that uncertainty does it please me to depart from the views of Henschenius, whatever way Papebroch seemed to lay out another path, by which both one Cletus and, in a manner, a twofold one could be supposed, once by setting him before St. Clement, and again by making him successor to St. Clement: which, though I do not deny to have been happily enough devised, are yet judged by the learned to be such that they satisfy neither the one nor the other of the contending parties. To us it has always seemed safer not to depart from the ancient monuments of the Roman Church, so long as a more evident authority to the contrary does not appear, especially in those things which conduce to arranging the series of the Pontiffs.
[3] it seems it must be held from the more received opinion; The praised Henschenius, as diligently as he unrolled and discussed their ancient Catalogues, so not drowsily did he clear the ground, before Volume I of April, discerning the ages, characters, and deeds of the several Pontiffs, and by the authority of those Catalogues from the fourth century onward he especially contends, for distinguishing Cletus from Anacletus, in numbers 2, 3, and 4, which we here wish to be held as inserted, where the very different origin, the different acts and times of each Pontiff are related, which one could not conveniently reduce to one and the same man. Add to these the other ancient Catalogues, prefixed by the praised Pagi to his Critique of Baronius, which no one but rashly would say are to be despised. These things, moreover, are still further confirmed from the Roman Missals and Breviaries, in which for so many centuries Cletus and Anacletus have been celebrated, and are today celebrated, as two distinct Saints, on different days and Offices, throughout the Catholic world. There are added all the writers, as many as are known to have thus far treated of the Lives of the Roman Pontiffs, there enumerated by Henschenius, among whom there is one and concordant assertion, that Cletus is other than Anacletus, however they may perhaps dissent a very little in arranging their order. And in these things indeed nothing much occurs by which we should be persuaded to depart from Henschenius.
[4] Not so binding are the things which are alleged by him from the Martyrologies for maintaining the more common opinion; to which, if not all the Martyrologies are favorable, nor certainly could he draw Bede and Florus, even as edited by himself and Papebroch, over to his side, for although these two both record St. Cletus on the XXVI of April, yet of St. Anacletus they keep deep silence, and so that authority is bent rather against himself than against his adversaries. No less does the true text of Usuard tell against him on the said day the XXVI of April, where not Cletus but Anacletus or Anencletus is most expressly marked, while on this day, the XIII of July, not a word exists of either. Just as much is contributed by Wandelbert, adduced by Henschenius, in whom Cletus alone is mentioned. If therefore, to confess it candidly, the controversy is to be settled from the greater part of the Martyrologies related by him,
all these add more strength to the opinion of the French scholars than to ours, so that in this part I am forced to abandon Henschenius's argument, after I have bestowed no small labor in weighing the several considerations of the Martyrologies, and in weaving out their genealogy in the very preface to Usuard, which no one, so far as I know, has thus far picked at, except a certain anonymous monk of Pratum, wholly bent, with all the effort he can, on defending the true or pretended autograph of that monastery, in which to draw out the rope of contention I by no means think worth the labor.
[5] Yet not all the Martyrologies are so opposed to the more common opinion many things are opposed to the identity; that in them no support survives for it. Rabanus above all acknowledged Cletus and Anacletus as distinct, although, departing from the appointed days, he assigned the one to the XXIX of April, the other to the XI of June. Nor is Ado altogether contrary, for although he records Anacletus on the XXVI of April, but Cletus on the XII of July; this remains certain, that he by no means confounded the two Pontiffs, nor did Notker, who himself also transposed the feasts, yet in such a way that he announces Cletus on this day, on which by all the more recent writers Anacletus has been constantly marked, as you will easily understand from very many of the additions to Usuard. From these, moreover, it is plain that those old Martyrologists of the ninth century had before their eyes the ancient Catalogues of the Roman Pontiffs, from which why Usuard, the perpetual copyist of Ado, departed, I confess I cannot divine, unless perhaps he doubted somewhere concerning the identity or distinction of the two. It is not so wonderful that Cletus was passed over by the author of the Little Roman, for in composing his Martyrology he especially followed Rufinus, the interpreter of Eusebius, and since in that whole history a single Anacletus or Anencletus appears, he alone recorded that one, whom he had found in his source. It is plain therefore that Martyrologies are not lacking from which the common opinion is confirmed, to which are added all the more recent writers, except Castellanus, not so ready to retract this identity as the other concerning Marcellus and Marcellinus.
[6] yet so that the matter remains doubtful. But, as I said above, neither to me is the difference of these two Pontiffs so evident that I do not rather wholly agree with Pagi, that the matter is thus far so intricate, whether you regard the persons, or their deeds, their age and succession, that willy-nilly I am compelled to confess it altogether uncertain; nor are the Catalogues of the Pontiffs, the Missals, Breviaries, or Martyrologies to be reckoned of such weight as wholly to overthrow the authority of so many holy Fathers, the testimonies of so many ancient writers, diligently weighed by Halloix and others, which Henschenius does not sufficiently refute either from any quarter or on every side: to say nothing now of the cloud of more recent writers, eagerly contending for this, that under the double name one and the same lies hidden, who was called in Greek Ἀνάγκλητος, and by the Latins more contractedly, Cletus. However great the diligence I have applied, to discharge my given pledge, that whether from the succession of the Pontiffs, or from the different deeds, or from the different fatherland, or from elsewhere, I might dig out something new, whereby the distinction of the two might be rendered more certain; since there is nothing where you may safely set your foot; nor on the opposite side are those authorities of the ancients clear enough, in explaining which, and in twisting them to his own sense, Tillemont sweats, volume 2, page 555, this remains, that we should confess either opinion to be thus far doubtful and uncertain; yet meanwhile, so long as it is uncertain, we shall not depart from the common one, which so long will persist in its possession, until they bring forth more urgent arguments who strive with such effort to overturn it.
[7] What is to be thought more probable concerning his deeds, The age of St. Anacletus, his entrance upon the See and his departure from it, no one could safely enough fix, who has not aptly arranged together the times of his predecessors and successors, and to attempt that is almost as arduous as to settle the controversy already touched above. I shall therefore here too follow the more received opinion, although it is contrary to the present Roman Breviary, which the praised Franciscus Pagi thus briefly expressed: St. Anacletus, a Greek by nation, Athenian by fatherland, succeeded St. Cletus in the same year 83. The church which, as a presbyter, he had begun over the body of St. Peter the Apostle, being created Pontiff, he completed, according to the book of the Pontiffs. In two ordinations, held in the month of December, he created three deacons, five presbyters, and six bishops in various places. He held the Pontificate until the year of Christ 95, in which he fell as a Martyr under Domitian, after a See of twelve years, ten months, and thirteen days, for which Henschenius prefers to substitute merely two months: but we do not here discuss those scruples. His other deeds, related in the lesson of the aforesaid Breviary, whether taken from the Decretals wont to be circulated under his name, or received from elsewhere, are not narrated with the same probability as the rest, already given from Pagi: but the things which Saussay invents concerning him on the XI of October, and on the I of June in the Supplement, page 1124, deserve neither to be cited nor refuted. And that the Decretals themselves must be denied to him, the most received consensus today of all the learned sufficiently proves, against which you would in vain oppose Galesinius or others.
[8] likewise what of his relics. Of his sacred remains this alone can be said, which is also sufficiently clearly expressed in the praised Catalogues; that his body was deposited at St. Peter's, where he himself, while living, had prepared a tomb for himself in the Vatican, adorned at length by the abbot Bartolomeo Piazza in his Hemerologium on this day. That relics were thence carried elsewhere, we do not know with sufficient certainty; since Pancirolus and others, describers of the sacred places and pledges of Rome, assert that the whole body remains there, as may also be seen in the treatise on the Vatican Basilica, in Volume VII of June, pages 41 and 83. In the order of the Divine Office, according to the custom of the said Basilica, arranged by Joseph de Fide for the year 1665, on this day is read: Of St. Anacletus, Pope, double; we have his body. I remember to have read somewhere that relics of St. Anacletus are kept at Naples, and that Masinius found others at Bologna; but of what sort these are, or with what cult they are honored, or whether indeed others are elsewhere exposed, I have not found more distinctly explained. And here I judge the promised inquiry must be stopped, lest by heaping up more I recook an ungrateful cabbage, with no other fruit of labor than that I should be about to do what has been done, by repeating those things which they well know to have been disputed even to nausea, who are accustomed to unraveling such trifles; to others disputations of this kind are wont neither to please nor to profit.