164. Ignatius of Antioch.

I. Life of Ignatius.

Ignatius, surnamed Theophorus,¹²²⁶ stood at the head of the Church of Antioch at the close of the first century and the beginning of the second, and was thus contemporaneous with Clement of Rome and Simeon of Jerusalem. The church of Antioch was the mother-church of Gentile Christianity; and the city was the second city of the Roman empire. Great numbers of Christians and a host of heretical tendencies were collected there, and pushed the development of doctrine and organization with great rapidity.

As in the case of Rome, tradition differs concerning the first episcopal succession of Antioch, making Ignatius either the second or the first bishop of this church after Peter, and calling him now a disciple of Peter, now of Paul, now of John. The Apostolic Constitutions intimate that Evodius and Ignatius presided contemporaneously over that church, the first being ordained by Peter, the second by Paul.¹²²⁷ Baronius and others suppose the one to have been the bishop of the Jewish, the other of the Gentile converts. Thiersch endeavors to reconcile the conflicting statements by the hypothesis, that Peter appointed Evodius presbyter, Paul Ignatius, and John subsequently ordained Ignatius bishop. But Ignatius himself and Eusebius say nothing of his apostolic discipleship; while the testimony of Jerome and the Martyrium Colbertinum that he and Polycarp were fellow-disciples of St. John, is contradicted by the Epistle of Ignatius to Polycarp, according to which he did not know Polycarp till he came to Smyrna on his way to Rome.¹²²⁸ According to later story, Ignatius was the first patron of sacred music, and introduced the antiphony in Antioch.

But his peculiar glory, in the eyes of the ancient church, was his martyrdom. The minute account of it, in the various versions of the Martyrium S. Ignatii, contains many embellishments of pious fraud and fancy; but the fact itself is confirmed by general tradition. Ignatius himself says, in his Epistle to the Romans, according to the Syriac version: "From Syria to Rome I fight with wild beasts, on water and on land, by day and by night, chained to ten leopards [soldiers],¹²²⁹ made worse by signs of kindness. Yet their wickednesses do me good as a disciple; but not on this account am I justified. Would that I might be glad of the beasts made ready for me. And I pray that they may be found ready for me. Nay, I will fawn upon them, that they may devour me quickly, and not, as they have done with some, refuse to touch me from fear. Yea, and if they will not voluntarily do it, I will bring them to it by force."

The Acts of his martyrdom relate more minutely, that Ignatius was brought before the Emperor Trajan at Antioch in the ninth year of his reign (107–108), was condemned to death as a Christian, was transported in chains to Rome, was there thrown to lions in the Coliseum for the amusement of the people, and that his remains were carried back to Antioch as an invaluable treasure.¹²³⁰ The transportation may be accounted for as designed to cool the zeal of the bishop, to terrify other Christians on the way, and to prevent an outbreak of fanaticism in the church of Antioch.¹²³¹ But the chronological part of the statement makes difficulty. So far as we know, from coins and other ancient documents, Trajan did not come to Antioch on his Parthian expedition till the year 114 or 115. We must therefore either place the martyrdom later,¹²³² or suppose, what is much more probable, that Ignatius did not appear before the emperor himself at all, but before his governor.¹²³³ Eusebius, Chrysostom, and other ancient witnesses say nothing of an imperial judgment, and the Epistle to the Romans rather implies that Ignatius was not condemned by the emperor at all; for otherwise it would have been useless for him to forbid them to intercede in his behalf. An appeal was possible from a lower tribunal, but not from the emperor’s.

II. His Letters.

On his journey to Rome, Bishop Ignatius, as a prisoner of Jesus Christ, wrote seven epistles to various churches, mostly in Asia Minor. Eusebius and Jerome put them in the following order: (1) To the Ephesians; (2) to the Magnesians; (3) to the Trallians; (4) to the Romans; (5) to the Philadelphians; (6) to the Smyrneans; (7) to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. The first four were composed in Smyrna; the other three later in Troas. These seven epistles, in connection with a number of other decidedly spurious epistles of Ignatius, have come down to us in two Greek versions, a longer and a shorter. The shorter is unquestionably to be preferred to the longer, which abounds with later interpolations. Besides these, to increase the confusion of controversy, a Syriac translation has been made known in 1845, which contains only three of the former epistles—those to Polycarp, to the Ephesians, and to the Romans—and these in a much shorter form. This version is regarded by some as an exact transfer of the original; by others, with greater probability, as a mere extract from it for practical and ascetic purposes.

The question therefore lies between the shorter Greek copy and the Syriac version. The preponderance of testimony is for the former, in which the letters are no loose patch-work, but were produced each under its own impulse, were known to Eusebius (probably even to Polycarp),¹²³⁴ and agree also with the Armenian version of the fifth century, as compared by Petermann. The three Syriac epistles, however, though they lack some of the strongest passages on episcopacy and on the divinity of Christ, contain the outlines of the same life-picture, and especially the same fervid enthusiasm for martyrdom, as the seven Greek epistles.

III. His Character and Position in history.

Ignatius stands out in history as the ideal of a catholic martyr, and as the earliest advocate of the hierarchical principle in both its good and its evil points. As a writer, he is remarkable for originality, freshness and force of ideas, and for terse, sparkling and sententious style; but in apostolic simplicity and soundness, he is inferior to Clement and Polycarp, and presents a stronger contrast to the epistles of the New Testament. Clement shows the calmness, dignity and governmental wisdom of the Roman character. Ignatius glows with the fire and impetuosity of the Greek and Syrian temper which carries him beyond the bounds of sobriety. He was a very uncommon man, and made a powerful impression upon his age. He is the incarnation, as it were, of the three closely connected ideas: the glory of martyrdom, the omnipotence of episcopacy, and the hatred of heresy and schism. Hierarchical pride and humility, Christian charity and churchly exclusiveness are typically represented in Ignatius.

As he appears personally in his epistles, his most beautiful and venerable trait is his glowing love for Christ as God incarnate, and his enthusiasm for martyrdom. If great patriots thought it sweet to die for their country, he thought it sweeter and more honorable to die for Christ, and by his blood to fertilize the soil for the growth of His Church. "I would rather die for Christ," says he, "than rule the whole earth." "It is glorious to go down in the world, in order to go up into God." He beseeches the Romans: "Leave me to the beasts, that I may by them be made partaker of God. I am a grain of the wheat of God, and I would be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of God. Rather fawn upon the beasts, that they may be to me a grave, and leave nothing of my body, that, when I sleep, I may not be burdensome to any one. Then will I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world can no longer even see my body. Pray the Lord for me, that through these instruments I may be found a sacrifice to God."¹²³⁵ And further on: "Fire, and cross, and exposure to beasts, scattering of the bones, hewing of the limbs, crushing of the whole body, wicked torments of the devil, may come upon me, if they only make me partaker of Jesus Christ.... My love is crucified, and there is no fire in me, which loves earthly stuff.... I rejoice not in the food of perishableness, nor in the pleasures of this life. The bread of God would I have, which is the flesh of Christ; and for drink I wish his blood, which is imperishable love."¹²³⁶

From these and similar passages, however, we perceive also that his martyr-spirit exceeds the limits of the genuine apostolic soberness and resignation, which is equally willing to depart or to remain according to the Lord’s good pleasure.¹²³⁷ It degenerates into boisterous impatience and morbid fanaticism. It resembles the lurid torch rather than the clear calm light. There mingles also in all his extravagant professions of humility and entire unworthiness a refined spiritual pride and self-commendation. And, finally, there is something offensive in the tone of his epistle to Polycarp, in which he addresses that venerable bishop and apostolic disciple, who at that time must have already entered upon the years of ripe manhood, not as a colleague and brother, but rather as a pupil, with exhortations and warnings, such as: "Strive after more knowledge than thou hast." "Be wise as the serpents." "Be more zealous than thou art." "Flee the arts of the devil."¹²³⁸ This last injunction goes even beyond that of Paul to Timothy: "Flee youthful lusts,"¹²³⁹ and can hardly be justified by it. Thus, not only in force and depth of teaching, but also in life and suffering, there is a significant difference between an apostolic and a post-apostolic martyr.

The doctrinal and churchly views of the Ignatian epistles are framed on a peculiar combination and somewhat materialistic apprehension of John’s doctrine of the incarnation, and Paul’s idea of the church as the body of Jesus Christ. In the "catholic church"—an expression introduced by him—that is, the episcopal orthodox organization of his day, the author sees, as it were, the continuation of the mystery of the incarnation, on the reality of which he laid great emphasis against the Docetists; and in every bishop, a visible representative of Christ, and a personal centre of ecclesiastical unity, which he presses home upon his readers with the greatest solicitude and almost passionate zeal. He thus applies those ideas of the apostles directly to the outward organization, and makes them subservient to the principle and institution of the growing hierarchy. Here lies the chief importance of these epistles; and the cause of their high repute with catholics and prelatists,¹²⁴⁰ and their unpopularity with anti-episcopalians, and modern critics of the more radical school.¹²⁴¹

It is remarkable that the idea of the episcopal hierarchy which we have developed in another chapter, should be first clearly and boldly brought out, not by the contemporary Roman bishop Clement,¹²⁴² but by a bishop of the Eastern church; though it was transplanted by him to the soil of Rome, and there sealed with his martyr blood. Equally noticeable is the circumstance, that these oldest documents of the hierarchy soon became so interpolated, curtailed, and mutilated by pious fraud, that it is today almost impossible to discover with certainty the genuine Ignatius of history under the hyper- and pseudo-Ignatius of tradition.