Clement in Venice: Gerasimos Vlachos, “Hymns of Clement,” and Why Mar Saba Isn’t Weird

 What follows is based on material and archival work by Mark Buckley. I’m just re-packaging his find and drawing out the implications.

One of the standard moves in the Letter to Theodore debate is to treat Mar Saba 65 as some freak, one-off anomaly:

– “A printed 17th-century book with a handwritten Clement text in the back? That’s bizarre.”
– “A ‘new’ Clement text appearing out of nowhere in an Orthodox monastery? Suspicious.”

Mark’s Venice discovery quietly blows up the idea that this sort of thing is “too weird to be real.”

Gerasimos Vlachos and his catalogue

Gerasimos Vlachos was a Cretan scholar-monk who ended his career as an Orthodox bishop in Venice. He built a serious personal library: over a thousand printed books plus bound manuscript volumes. In 1683, two years before his death, he sat down and made a systematic catalogue of the whole collection, clearly intending it to function as an institutional library. The plan failed, the books were dispersed, but the catalogue itself survived and is now digitized by the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice.

So we have, in effect, a snapshot of what one very well-read 17th-century Orthodox intellectual actually had on his shelves – printed vs manuscript, Greek vs Latin, classics vs patristics.

Turn through the catalogue and Clement of Alexandria pops up in the predictable places.

On p. 40, among the Greek books:

Κλημεντος Αλεξανδρεως απαντα

Clement of Alexandria, “the complete works” – presumably a codex or bound set of his Greek writings.

On p. 78, in the Latin section:

Clementis Alexandrini opera omnia

A western printed edition of Clement’s works in Latin. Nothing shocking there.

But the interesting bit is earlier, on p. 31.

“The hymns of Clement of Alexandria”

Here Vlachos lists what seems to be a bound manuscript volume of poetic material:

– Some authors are named in passing (Sappho, Erinna, Stesichorus, Alpheus of Mytilene), which probably means they occupy a page or a small section.
– Others are clearly substantial (Lycophron’s Alexandra, George of Pisidia’s Cosmologia).
– Then he notes various collections of hymns/poems by different writers.

And among them:

the hymns (plural) of Clement of Alexandria.

That plural is the needle in the haystack.

We already know one hymn attributed to Clement: the famous Christian hymn appended to the Paidagogos in several manuscripts. Annewies van den Hoek has argued it’s likely genuine Clement on lexical and contextual grounds.

On top of that, as Andrew Criddle reminded everyone, the manuscripts of the Paedagogus also preserve a second hymn “To the Pedagogue,” which modern scholars mostly regard as a medieval imitation of Clement – an early Byzantine writer trying to sound like Clement in verse. Stählin printed it, doubted it, at one point floated the idea that Arethas himself composed it, and then effectively backed away from that attribution once the manuscript evidence was properly weighed.

So already, before we ever get to Vlachos, we have:

– One hymn generally treated as genuinely Clementine.
– A second hymn that is “Clementine enough” for medieval scribes to stick it under his name, but probably not actually his.

Now add Vlachos: in 1683, a Greek bishop in Venice calmly lists “the hymns of Clement of Alexandria” among his manuscript holdings. Plural. Not a hypothetical work from Eusebius’ list of lost Clementine writings, not a wish-listed fantasy like a complete Hypotyposeis, but an actual volume sitting on his shelf.

He isn’t making a grand discovery claim; he’s just cataloguing what is there.

What this doesn’t give us – and what it does

No, this doesn’t hand us the lost Clementine “Book of Hymns” on a platter. The catalogue entry is only a pointer; the bound volume itself is (so far as we know) lost, or at least untraced. It’s the most frustrating kind of find: an addition to the list of things that used to exist.

But several important points follow:

1. There was, in the 17th-century Orthodox world, at least one manuscript volume circulating under the title “Hymns of Clement of Alexandria.”

2. This material was not part of the standard western Clement corpus and not something the big patristic lists of “lost Clement works” ever imagined.

3. The Orthodox scholarly ecosystem – bishops, monasteries, patriarchal libraries – was still hosting Clementine material that the Latin west had never catalogued and never argued over.

4. That material could mix “real Clement” with Clementine imitations. The line between authentic and spurious within the Clementine dossier was already blurred.

In other words, it is perfectly possible for:

– A previously unattested Clementine work (or pseudo-Clementine work)
– To live quietly in manuscript circulation
– In an Orthodox context
– Down into the 17th century
– Without any patristic handbook ever having prepared us for its existence.

That alone should make people pause the “This is too weird to be real” reaction to To Theodore.

Printed books + handwritten patristica = normal, not freakish

Buckley also points to something else: the broader pattern of how books moved and were used between the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Venice, and the monasteries.

We know, for example:

– The Patriarchate of Jerusalem had a long-standing habit of “decanting” books to its monasteries.
– Dositheos Notaras (Patriarch 1669–1707) poured serious money into importing western printed books – including patristic volumes – from Venice and England.
– The Orthodox “Republic of Letters” wasn’t just passively receiving; it was actively annotating, binding, and combining printed and manuscript material.

In that environment, the phenomenon represented by Mar Saba 65 – a 17th-century printed volume (Voss’s Ignatius) that later ends up with a Greek manuscript text scribbled into its blank leaves – is not an alien event. It is exactly the sort of thing that can happen when:

– printed patristic books are flowing in from Venice;
– monasteries and patriarchal librarians are using them as working tools;
– and scholars feel free to copy short texts, excerpts, and even whole treatises into the available space.

Vlachos’s catalogue shows one side of this culture: the bound manuscripts with mixed classical/patristic poetic content and oddities like “the hymns of Clement.”

Mar Saba 65 shows the other: the marginal/back-of-the-book inscriptions where newly copied patristic material is folded into an imported printed artifact.

Once you see both together, the Letter to Theodore stops being this singular monstrosity and becomes one more example of how Clementine material could be preserved, extended, or imitated in early modern Orthodox circles.

So where does that leave To Theodore?

A lot of the pushback against the letter rests on a kind of aesthetic prejudice:

– “If this were genuine, surely somebody in antiquity would have mentioned it.”
– “If Clement wrote more than what Eusebius lists, we’d know.”
– “Seventeenth-century manuscript additions to printed books are suspicious; that’s not how real patristic texts look.”

Vlachos’s catalogue, as Buckley has underlined, quietly undermines all three assumptions.

We now have:

– A 17th-century catalogue by a careful scholar describing Clementine hymns unknown to the traditional lists.
– Clear precedent for Clementine imitations being copied and transmitted under Clement’s name (the second hymn).
– A book culture where handwritten Clement material and printed volumes co-exist, where scribes and bishops are actively curating and reshaping what “the works of Clement” even mean.

Against that backdrop, the question “Why isn’t To Theodore just another one of these?” is perfectly reasonable.

It doesn’t prove the letter authentic. It doesn’t prove it’s ancient rather than medieval. But it completely undercuts the idea that a Clementine text in Greek, written into a 17th-century book belonging to a Jerusalem-connected monastic library, is “too odd” to be historic.

If anything, Buckley’s Venice evidence shows that:

– “New” Clement material could still be turning up in the 17th century.
– Clement’s name was attached to both genuine and imitative pieces.
– These things lived in exactly the sort of manuscript/printed hybrid culture that produced Mar Saba 65.

So instead of treating To Theodore as a unique, Smith-colored aberration, we might do better to see it as belonging to the same world as the “hymns of Clement” in Vlachos’s catalogue:

Clementine (or pseudo-Clementine) texts, circulating in Orthodox hands, unmentioned by the Fathers, and only visible today because someone, somewhere, thought they were worth copying into a book.