St. Clement: A Man of Many Tortures

Tortures Untold

No matter how many times I read about various past Orthodox saints and the tortures they endured, I find myself feeling shocked and in utter disbelief--for a moment.

In the 21st century, our western society has a public outcry when various convicted and tried criminals are put to death. For instance, lethal injection use as one of the modes of capital punishment in our nation. Earlier this month, Saddam Hussein was put to death in Iraq by one of their standard methods: hanging. With both I have heard again and again how "inhumane" it is to practice these barbaric methods.

Meanwhile, our Orthodox saints endured not just death for the sake of their belief in Christ, but untold tortures wherein they survived many times until ultimate beheadings.

St. Clement was born in 258 in the Galatian city of Ancyra, by age twelve he was an orphan. Sophia was a kind woman who not only took him in and adopted him but also ended up taking in other abandoned children whose parents did not believe in Christ. Clement became a priest early on at 18 and later was made bishop of Ancyra. As fate had it for many Christians during that time, he was taken in by the governor of Galatia and ordered to worship other idols and gods. He refused, upon which his tortures promptly began.

My source is http://www.oca.org/: They suspended him on a tree, and raked his body with sharp iron instruments so that his entrails could be seen. They smashed his mouth with stones, and they turned him on a wheel and burned him over a low fire. The Lord preserved His sufferer and healed his lacerated body. Then Dometian sent the saint to Rome to the emperor Diocletian himself, with a report that Bishop Clement had been fiercely tortured, but had proven unyielding. Diocletian, seeing the martyr completely healthy, did not believe the report and subjected him to even crueler tortures, and then had him locked up in prison.

Many of the pagans, seeing the bravery of the saint and the miraculous healing of his wounds, believed in Christ. People flocked to St Clement in prison for guidance, healing and Baptism, so that the prison was literally transformed into a church. When word of this reached the emperor, many of these new Christians were executed. Diocletian, struck by the amazing endurance of St Clement, sent him to Nicomedia to his co-emperor Maximian. On the ship, the saint was joined by his disciple Agathangelus, who had avoided being executed with the other confessors, and who now wanted to suffer and die for Christ with Bishop Clement. The emperor Maximian in turn sent Sts Clement and Agathangelus to the governor Agrippina, who subjected them to such inhuman torments, that even the pagan on-lookers felt pity for the martyrs and they began to pelt the torturers with stones. Having been set free, the saints healed an inhabitant of the city through the laying on of hands and they baptized and instructed people, thronging to them in multitudes. Arrested again on orders of Maximian, they were sent home to Ancyra, where the ruler Cyrenius had them tortured.

Then they were sent to the city of Amasea to the proconsul Dometius, known for his great cruelty. In Amasea, the martyrs were thrown into hot lime. They spent a whole day in it and remained unharmed. They flayed them, beat them with iron rods, set them on red-hot beds, and poured sulfur on their bodies. All this failed to harm the saints, and they were sent to Tarsus for new tortures. In the wilderness along the way St Clement had a revelation that he would suffer a total of twenty-eight years for Christ. Then having endured a multitude of tortures, the saints were locked up in prison. St Agathangelus was beheaded with the sword on November 5. The Christians of Ancyra freed St Clement from prison and took him to a cave church. There, after celebrating Liturgy, the saint announced to the faithful the impending end of the persecution and his own martyrdom. On January 23, the holy hierarch was killed by soldiers from the city, who stormed the church. The saint was beheaded as he stood before the altar and offered the Bloodless Sacrifice. Two deacons, Christopher and Chariton, were beheaded with him, but no one else was harmed.