St Ignatius of Antioch, the God bearer

Biography

Ignatius was the second or third bishop of Antioch after the Apostles, held by tradition to have known the Apostle John. Condemned under Trajan around the year 107, he was marched under guard across Asia Minor to be thrown to the beasts at Rome, and on the road he wrote seven letters to the churches, received ever since among the most precious documents of the age after the Apostles.

The letters were written by a man going willingly to death, and their whole concern is the unity of the Church he was leaving: one bishop, one presbytery, one Eucharist, one altar, and no fellowship with the teachers of strange doctrine. He was devoured in the Roman amphitheatre, and the Church of Antioch gathered what the beasts left as relics.

The controversy

• Docetist teachers, who denied that the Lord truly took flesh and truly suffered, and Judaizing teachers were circulating among the churches of Asia, holding separate assemblies and drawing disciples away from the bishop.
• Against them Ignatius bound the Church visibly to the bishop and the one Eucharist, and with the same pen commanded the faithful to abstain from the heretics entirely, as from deadly plants and poisoned food.

Position taken

• The Church's unity is eucharistic and visible: one Eucharist, one altar, one bishop with the presbytery and deacons. To raise a second altar or follow a maker of schism is to fall from the kingdom.
• The same order that binds the faithful to the bishop binds them away from the false teacher: heresy is deadly poison in sweet wine, and the faithful are to abstain from it entirely. Ignatius never sets the two commands against each other; the bishop is followed as he stands in the faith of Jesus Christ.