TRINITY · 17 OCTOBER & GESIMAS / LENT · 23 FEBRUARY Bishops & Martyrs
Ignatius of Antioch & Polycarp of Smyrna
Bishops & Martyrs · The Last Links to the Apostles · d. c. 107 & 155
Ignatius — ig-NAY-shus · Theophorus — thee-OF-or-us · Polycarp — POL-ee-karp · Smyrna — SMER-na · Antioch — AN-tee-ok · Troas — TROH-as · Irenaeus — ir-ih-NAY-us
O God, who didst strengthen thy servants Ignatius and Polycarp to confess thy name before the powers of this world and to seal their witness with their blood; Grant that we, nourished by the same Body and Blood which they adored, may hold fast the faith once delivered to the saints, and in the hour of trial find in thee the courage we cannot find in ourselves; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
There is a point in every tradition where living memory ends and written record begins. In the Church’s case that point is very precisely located: it falls somewhere between the death of the Apostle John, the last surviving eyewitness of the Lord, and the death of Polycarp of Smyrna (POL-ee-karp), who had known John, who had known Ignatius (ig-NAY-shus), who had himself — so the tradition says — been a disciple of John. Three links in a chain, and when Polycarp died in the arena at Smyrna (SMER-na) in 155, the chain was broken. Everything from that moment forward rests on texts, on tradition, on the transmitted memory of the community. Ignatius and Polycarp are the last men who could have said: I heard this from someone who was there. Their two feast days — Ignatius on 17 October in Trinity, Polycarp on 23 February in the Gesimas — stand at opposite ends of the liturgical year, but they belong together, because together they form the final visible hinge between the world of the Apostles and the world of the Church that came after.
Ignatius calls himself Theophorus (thee-OF-or-us) — the God-bearer — in the opening of every one of his seven letters. He was the Bishop of Antioch (AN-tee-ok), the city where the disciples were first called Christians, and he was arrested under Trajan and condemned to be thrown to the beasts in Rome. The journey from Antioch to Rome took months, and Ignatius spent every stage of it writing letters to the churches along the way — to the Ephesians, the Magnesians (mag-NEE-zhanz), the Trallians (TRAL-ee-anz), the Romans, the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and one personal letter to Polycarp himself. They are among the most extraordinary documents in Christian antiquity: written in chains, by a man who knew he was going to die, and who was more concerned with the theological life of the churches he was passing through than with his own survival. He writes about the Eucharist as the medicine of immortality. He writes about the bishop as the living image of God the Father in the assembly. He writes to the Romans — with a fierceness that has startled every reader since — begging them not to intervene to save him: Let me be fodder for wild beasts — that is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ. He did not want rescue. He wanted completion.
Polycarp received Ignatius’s letter, and kept it. When the church at Philippi later asked Polycarp for copies of Ignatius’s correspondence, it was Polycarp who provided them — the first archivist of the tradition, the man who understood even in the second century that these letters must be preserved. His own letter to the Philippians, which accompanied the copies, is a document of warm, careful, unshowy pastoral authority: the letter of a man who has been a bishop for a very long time and knows exactly what his people need to hear. He survived to extreme old age — into his eighties at least, perhaps his nineties — and was arrested during a local persecution and brought before the proconsul. When commanded to revile Christ, he gave the answer that the church at Smyrna recorded and sent to all the churches, the sentence that stands as the perfect distillation of all that Ignatius had written on the road to Rome: Eighty-six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me? He was burned at the stake. The fire, the account says, arched around him without touching him — as a ship’s sail filled by the wind — and he had to be dispatched with a dagger. The fragrance from the fire was as the scent of incense.
Between them, Ignatius and Polycarp define the terms on which the Patristic tradition would conduct its entire subsequent conversation. From Ignatius: the Eucharist as the centre of the Church’s life, the bishop as the focus of unity, the body of the martyr as the continuation of the Incarnation into history — I am becoming a disciple, he writes, now that I desire nothing visible or invisible but only to attain to Jesus Christ. From Polycarp: the living transmission of the Apostolic teaching, the pastoral patience of the long episcopate, the simplicity of a faith that does not require sophistication to sustain it through fire. Together they gave to Irenaeus of Lyon (ir-ih-NAY-us), who had known Polycarp in his youth, everything Irenaeus would need to build the first great systematic theology of the Church. The chain did not simply end with Polycarp: it became a written tradition of inexhaustible fertility. What the two martyrs lit, the whole subsequent history of Christian thought has been reading by.
O Almighty God, who didst give to thy servants Ignatius and Polycarp the grace to confess thy name before the rulers of this world, and didst strengthen them to offer their lives as a sacrifice of praise; Grant that we, who have received from them the faith once delivered to the saints, may hold it without wavering, proclaim it without shame, and pass it on without diminishment to those who shall come after us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.