pontiff’(De Romano pontifice)^51 Bellarmine takes on the Protestant challenge
to Peter’s primacy. His opponents cite the fact that ancient authors do not
agree on the date of Peter’s arrival in Rome or on the identity of his successor.
To show the falsity of this argument, Bellarmine contends that Christ’s death
on the cross is also an article of Christian faith, and yet many ancient authors
disagree about its date. He cites several examples of this disagreement, includ-
ing Clement and Lactantius, among those who think wrongly that Christ died
at the age of thirty, an opinion not to be followed, any more than that of
Irenaeus who had the Saviour crucified at the age of forty-eight.^52 In this
instance Clement is made tofit into an extraneous rhetorical framework.
Bellarmine uses him to check a point of his own doctrine, not to identify
with his teaching. In fact, in the cardinal’s eyes the author ofStromatahas no
individuality at all; he is one of the ante-Nicene fathers who are mistaken
about the year of Jesus’s death.
Bellarmine singles out Clement, however, when arguing for the reality of
Christ’s descent into hell. The cardinal disputes that his descent actually made
converts, and that some who were damned repented and so were saved,
especially pagans. Clement’s opinion, which is naturally contrary to this
received Roman Catholic view, is dismissed as‘improbable’.^53 This does not
stop Bellarmine from making fairly extensive use of Clement in the contro-
versy against the Trinitarians, where he portrays him as a direct precursor to
the post-Nicene fathers in his conception of the Trinity, praise he shares with
Irenaeus (whose subordinationism is well known).^54 With Bellarmine’s eccle-
siastical use of Clement in his controversies against‘Protestant heretics’—be
they Calvinists, Lutherans, or Antitrinitarians—we are very far away from the
main issues in Clement’s writings. We are equally far removed from Hervet’s
lay portrayal. Bellarmine has clericalized the Alexandrian father.
Some thirty years later the self-taught Calvinist theologian Philippe
Duplessis Mornay^55 makes fairly extensive use of Clement in hisTruth of
the Christian Religion against Atheists,Epicureans,Pagans and Jews(De la
vérité de la religion chrétienne contre les athées, épicuriens, païens et juifs).^56
Although sometimes viewed as thefirst Protestant apologist, we should
remember that Mornay wasfirst and foremost a layman, and that he was
writing in the vernacular primarily for the lay public. Sylburg’s edition was not
yet published, and Duplessis’s treatise came out just before the second edition
of Hervet. Therefore, the author ofDe la véritécould access Clement only via
(^51) Bellarmine,De controuersiis, tom. 1:De Romano pontifice, lib. II, cap. 5, 747–9.
(^52) Bellarmine,De controuersiis, tom. 1:De Romano pontifice, lib. II, cap. 5, 748.
(^53) Bellarmine,De controuersiis, tom. 1, contr. 2:De Christo mediatore, lib. IV, cap. 16, 573.
(^54) Bellarmine,De controuersiis, tom. 1, contr. 2:De Christo mediatore, lib. I, cap. 10, 344–9.
(^55) Hugues Daussy,Les Huguenots et le roi: le combat politique de Philippe Duplessis Mornay
(1572–1600)(Geneva: Droz, 2002) is the most recent work on Duplessis Mornay.
(^56) I refer to the second edition of the work (Geneva: Jacob Stoer, 1590).
The Church Fathers and the Humanities 53