Note 63 — VIII. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. DIED 220 (?) A.D.

In the Clementine Homilies, which had a great authority and reputation in the earlier times of Christianity, St. Peter is represented, in describing his way of living to Clement of Rome, as professing the strictest Vegetarianism. “I live,” he declares, “upon bread and olives only, with the addition, rarely, of kitchen herbs” (ἄρτῳ μόνῳ καὶ ἐλαίαις χρῶμαι καὶ σπανίως λαχάνοις xii. 6.) Clement of Alexandria (Pædagogus ii. 1) assures us that “Matthew the apostle lived upon seeds, and hard-shelled fruits, and other vegetables, without touching flesh;” while Hegesippus, the historian of the Church (as quoted by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 2, 3) asserts of St. James that “he never ate any animal food”—οὔδε εμψυχον ἔφαγε: an assertion repeated by St. Augustine (Ad. Faust, xxii. 3) who states that James, the brother of the Lord, “lived upon seeds and vegetables, never tasting flesh or wine” (Jacobus, frater Domini, seminibus et oleribus usus est, non carne nec vino). The connexion of the beginnings of Christianity with the sublime and simple tenets of the Essenes, whose communistic and abstinent principles were strikingly coincident with those of the earliest Christians, is at once one of the most interesting and one of the most obscure phenomena in its nascent history. The Essenes, “the sober thinkers,” as their assumed name implies, seem to have been to the more noisy and ostentatious Jewish sects, what the Pythagoreans were to the other Greek schools of philosophy—practical moralists rather than mere talkers and theorisers. They first appear in Jewish history in the first century B.C. Their communities were settled in the recesses of the Jordan valley, yet their members were sometimes found in the towns and villages. Like the Pythagoreans, they extorted respect even from the worldly and self-seeking religionists and politicians of the capital. See Josephus (Antiquities xiii. and xviii.), and Philo, who speak in the highest terms of admiration of the simplicity of their life and the purity of their morality. Dean Stanley (Lectures on the Jewish Church, vol. iii.) regards St. John the Baptist as Essenian in his substitution of “reformation of life” for “the sanguinary, costly gifts of the sacrificial slaughter-house.”