Saint Ignatius of Antioch

A bridge to the Apostles

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Saint Ignatius stands at the very dawn of the Church, a living bridge between the age of the Apostles and the generations that followed. Born around the year 35, he was, according to ancient tradition, a disciple of the Apostle John, and he became the third bishop of Antioch — the great city where, the Book of Acts records, the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. He is surnamed Theophoros, the “God-bearer,” one who carries God within him; a touching tradition even identifies him with the little child whom the Lord set in the midst of the disciples as a model of humility.

For some forty years Ignatius shepherded the church of Antioch, one of the most important Christian communities in the world. He guided his flock through a perilous time, when to confess Christ could cost one’s life, and he prepared them — and himself — for the supreme test of faith.

Arrested for Christ

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During a persecution under the Emperor Trajan, Ignatius was arrested and condemned to die in the arena at Rome, thrown to the wild beasts for the entertainment of the crowd. Bound and guarded by a squad of rough soldiers whom he wryly called “ten leopards,” the aged bishop was marched in chains the long way from Syria across Asia Minor toward the capital of the Empire and his death.

The seven letters

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It is what Ignatius did on that final journey that makes him immortal in the memory of the Church. As his guards led him from city to city, Christians came out to meet and encourage him, and in response he wrote a series of seven letters — to the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, and Smyrna, and one to his friend Saint Polycarp. These letters, written around the year 107, are among the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, and they open a priceless window onto the faith and life of the Church barely one generation after the Apostles.

In them we already find the Church ordered under a bishop with his presbyters and deacons; we find the Eucharist confessed as the true Body and Blood of Christ, “the medicine of immortality”; we find an urgent call to unity and to guarding the true faith against error. It is Ignatius who gives us the very first recorded use of the phrase “the Catholic Church,” meaning the whole, universal Church of Christ: “Where the bishop is, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”

He wrote with equal force against a dangerous error already creeping into the Church — the claim that Christ had not truly come in the flesh but had only seemed to suffer and die. Against this, Ignatius insisted with passionate exactness that Jesus was really born, really ate and drank, was really crucified under Pontius Pilate, and really rose again in the body. If Christ only seemed to suffer, he argued, then our faith and our own sufferings for Him are empty; but because Christ truly took our flesh and truly conquered death in it, the Christian can face the lions in hope. His letters thus give us not only the structure of the early Church but the very heart of her faith in the Incarnation.

Again and again he pleads for unity — unity around the bishop and the Eucharist, unity in love, unity against the divisions that the enemy sows. To gather as one people around one altar, he taught, is itself a defense against error and a foretaste of heaven. These themes — the reality of the Incarnation, the centrality of the Eucharist, the unity of the Church, and the glory of martyrdom — make these seven short letters a window onto the faith of the Church at the very moment the apostolic age was passing into history.

Longing to be with Christ

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Most astonishing of all is the spirit in which Ignatius faced his death. Far from fearing the beasts, he longed to give his life for the Lord he loved, and he begged the Christians of Rome — who might have used their influence to save him — not to rob him of his martyrdom. His words have echoed down the centuries as one of the purest expressions of love for Christ ever written.

“I am the wheat of God, and I am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.”St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans

Crown of martyrdom

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Ignatius reached Rome and was thrown to the lions in the arena, attaining the martyr’s crown he had so ardently desired, around the year 107. His fellow Christians gathered the few remains the beasts had left and carried them home to Antioch as a treasure.

His surname, the God-bearer — Theophoros — came to seem prophetic. Ignatius had carried Christ within him through a long life of service and through the terror of the arena, and in the end he was united to the One he bore. Honored as one of the “Apostolic Fathers” who knew the Apostles in the flesh, he stands among the very first witnesses to the faith of the Church after the New Testament, and his seven letters are read and treasured to this day. Saint Ignatius remains a burning witness that the Christian faith is worth living for and worth dying for — and that to be united to Christ is the deepest desire and the highest joy of the human heart.

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