Against Docetism

Across the seven letters of the middle recension Ignatius hammers, with an almost liturgical insistence, on a single adverb — truly (ἀληθῶς). Against teachers who held that Christ had only seemed to be born, to suffer, and to die, he answers that the Lord was truly of David’s line, truly born, truly nailed up under Pontius Pilate, truly raised. For Ignatius this is not an abstract Christological nicety but the ground of the Eucharist he venerates and of the martyrdom he is travelling to meet: if the flesh of Christ was an appearance, then the bread is empty and his own coming death is a charade.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Heresy Named: τὸ δοκεῖν

The word “Docetism” derives from the Greek verb δοκεῖν, “to seem” or “to appear,” and from the cognate construction τὸ δοκεῖν, “in semblance” or “in appearance only.” Ignatius does not use the later technical noun, but he names the position with precision in its own characteristic phrase: there are, he writes, “certain unbelievers” who “say that He suffered in semblance (τὸ δοκεῖν)” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 2; trans. Lightfoot). The error, as Ignatius confronts it, is the claim that the Son of God did not truly take flesh and did not truly undergo birth, passion, and death, but only appeared to do so — so that the human life of Jesus, and above all his suffering, was a kind of divine pantomime over a body that was not really there, or not really capable of suffering. This is the position later doxographers would label docetic, and Ignatius is its earliest named Christian opponent (Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, 1985, on Smyrnaeans 1–7).

It is worth stressing that Ignatius confronts a practical and pastoral form of the error rather than a developed system. He does not refute a metaphysics; he refuses a slogan. The docetists of his letters are people within or beside the churches of Asia who could be heard saying that Christ suffered “in appearance,” and whose denial of the flesh had consequences for worship and for unity. Whether their teaching already amounted to the elaborate cosmologies of second-century Gnosticism is a separate and disputed question, treated below.

The Drumbeat of “Truly” (ἀληθῶς)

Ignatius’s answer is not argument but accumulation. The opening of To the Smyrnaeans is a small creed built entirely out of the word ἀληθῶς, “truly,” repeated against each point a docetist would deny. Jesus Christ, he writes, was “truly of the race of David according to the flesh, but Son of God by the Divine will and power, truly born of a virgin and baptized by John… truly nailed up in the flesh for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 1; trans. Lightfoot). The naming of Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch is deliberate: it pins the passion to datable history and to named magistrates, the very thing an “in appearance only” Christology dissolves. Ignatius continues that the Lord “suffered truly, as also He raised Himself truly; not as certain unbelievers say, that He suffered in semblance” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 2; trans. Lightfoot). The reality of the resurrection is asserted in the same breath and on the same footing as the reality of the suffering — the body that died is the body that rose, and after the resurrection, Ignatius insists, the risen Christ ate and drank with his disciples “as one in the flesh” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 3; trans. Lightfoot).

The same confession recurs, independently, in the letter to the Trallians, addressed to a different church and built around the same sequence of historical realities. There Ignatius writes of the Lord “who was truly born and ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died, in the sight of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth; who moreover was truly raised from the dead” (Ignatius, To the Trallians 9; trans. Lightfoot). The recurrence across two letters, to Smyrna and to Tralles, is itself significant: the anti-docetic confession is not an occasional flourish but a fixed element of Ignatius’s preaching, a standing pattern of words by which the reality of the Incarnation is asserted point by point (see The Corpus).

The Soteriological Stake: “Why Am I a Prisoner?”

For Ignatius the denial of Christ’s true flesh is not a remote speculation but a knife at the root of his own life and death. He is writing in chains, on the road to the beasts at Rome (see Arrest and Condemnation; The Road Through Asia). If Christ only seemed to suffer, then the imitation of Christ in martyrdom — the whole meaning of the journey Ignatius is on — is itself only a seeming. He draws the inference explicitly and with great force: “For if these things were done by our Lord in semblance, then am I also a prisoner in semblance. And why then have I delivered myself over to death, unto fire, unto sword, unto wild beasts?” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 4; trans. Lightfoot). The same logic governs the parallel passage to the Trallians: “But if it were as certain persons who are godless, that is unbelievers, say, that He suffered only in semblance, being themselves mere semblance, why am I in bonds? And why also do I desire to fight with wild beasts? So I die in vain” (Ignatius, To the Trallians 10; trans. Lightfoot).

This is the deepest point of Ignatius’s polemic: his anti-docetism and his theology of martyrdom are a single conviction seen from two sides. The martyr can be “an imitator of the passion of my God” (Ignatius, To the Romans 6; trans. Lightfoot) only if the passion of God was real flesh and real death; an imitation of an appearance is itself only an appearance, and a man who dies “in vain” is a fool, not a witness. To suffer with Christ presupposes that Christ suffered (see Imitation of the Passion; Wheat of God). Ignatius’s longing for the arena and his insistence on the true flesh of Christ are therefore not two themes but one — the reality of the body of Christ underwrites the reality of the bodies that follow him to death.

The Eucharistic Argument: Flesh Confessed and Flesh Refused

Ignatius binds the same conviction to the Eucharist, and in doing so gives the clearest evidence of how docetism showed itself in the life of the churches. The docetists, he reports, cut themselves off from the common worship: “they allow not that the eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 7; trans. Lightfoot). The reasoning is exact and mutually illuminating. Because the docetists deny that Christ truly had flesh that suffered, they cannot confess that the Eucharist is that flesh; and because they will not confess the Eucharist to be that flesh, they “abstain from eucharist and prayer” and absent themselves from the one altar of the church (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 7; trans. Lightfoot). The denial of the Incarnation thus produces a denial of the sacrament, and the denial of the sacrament produces schism from the bishop’s assembly.

Here the anti-docetic and the eucharistic threads of the corpus visibly knot together. The same Ignatius who writes that there is “one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup unto union in his blood; one altar, as there is one bishop” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 4; trans. Lightfoot) is the Ignatius for whom the Eucharist is “the medicine of immortality” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 20; trans. Lightfoot). The realism of his eucharistic language is continuous with the realism of his Christology: the bread is the suffering flesh because the flesh truly suffered (see Eucharistic Realism; Medicine of Immortality). To refuse the flesh of Christ in doctrine is, for Ignatius, necessarily to refuse it at the altar; and to withdraw from the altar is to fracture the unity of the church around its bishop (see Unity around the Eucharist; Monepiscopacy).

Who Were the Opponents?

The historical identity of Ignatius’s docetic opponents is debated, and the evidence does not permit certainty. Three features are reasonably secure from the letters themselves. First, the opponents denied the reality of Christ’s flesh and passion, holding that he suffered “in semblance” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 2, 4; To the Trallians 10). Second, they accordingly held aloof from the Eucharist and from the bishop’s assembly (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 7). Third, Ignatius regards them as a present danger to the churches of Smyrna and Tralles, “ravening dogs” whom the faithful must avoid (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 4; To the Ephesians 7).

Beyond this, scholars differ. Some read the opponents as proto-Gnostics, an early phase of the docetic Christology that would later flower in developed second-century systems; others are cautious about reading the mature Gnosticism back into Ignatius, who confronts a slogan rather than a system (Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, 1985). A further and distinct question is whether the docetists of Smyrna and Tralles are the same people as the “Judaizers” whom Ignatius opposes in To the Magnesians and To the Philadelphians, or a separate front (see Against Judaizing). On this the literature divides:

[Disputed: that Ignatius confronted a single opposing movement combining docetic Christology with Judaizing practice — a reading entertained by some who note that the two polemics share a common structure and that the docetic and Judaizing notices are never both fully developed in a single letter (cf. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, 1985, who observes that the docetism of the Judaizers may have existed “only in the mind of Ignatius”); versus the view that there were two distinct fronts — docetists in Smyrna and Tralles, Judaizers in Magnesia and Philadelphia — argued most fully by P. J. Donahue (“Jewish Christianity in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch,” Vigiliae Christianae 32 [1978]: 81–93).]

What is not in doubt is the substance of Ignatius’s response. Whatever the precise sociology of his opponents, he meets every form of the denial with the same confession of the true and historical flesh of Christ.

Orthodox Reception

Ignatius stands in the Orthodox tradition as one of the earliest post-apostolic witnesses to the full reality of the Incarnation — the confession that the Word truly became flesh, was truly born of the Virgin, truly suffered, and truly rose (see The Apostolic Fathers). His insistence on the truly of Smyrnaeans 1–2 and Trallians 9 anticipates, in the idiom of a martyr’s letter, the dogmatic labors of the later councils: the affirmation against Arianism that the Son is truly God (Nicaea, 325), against Nestorianism that the one born of the Virgin is truly the Son of God (Ephesus, 431), and against both docetic and Eutychian tendencies that he is truly and fully man, “in the flesh” (Chalcedon, 451) (see The Ecumenical Councils). Ignatius does not formulate the later technical vocabulary of nature and hypostasis; what he supplies is the pre-conciliar bedrock the councils would defend — that the salvation of the flesh required that the Word be true flesh. The Orthodox Church reads him, with Irenaeus after him, as a link in the living chain of apostolic confession between the New Testament and the conciliar definitions (see The Church Fathers; The Pre-Schism Church).

See Also

References

  • Ignatius of Antioch. The Seven Epistles (middle recension), esp. To the Smyrnaeans 1–7, To the Trallians 9–10, To the Ephesians 7, 20, To the Philadelphians 4, To the Romans 6. In The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, ed. and trans. J. B. Lightfoot, 2nd ed., 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1885 (1889 reprint). Online: https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ignatius.html
  • Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson, eds. The Apostle Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885. (Ignatius, ANF 1.) Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm
  • Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Greek-English edition of the middle recension.)
  • Schoedel, William R. Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. (Standard critical commentary; on the opponents of Smyrnaeans and Trallians.)
  • Donahue, P. J. “Jewish Christianity in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch.” Vigiliae Christianae 32, no. 2 (1978): 81–93. (The case for two distinct opposing fronts.)
  • Brent, Allen. Ignatius of Antioch: A Martyr Bishop and the Origin of Episcopacy. London: T&T Clark, 2007. (On the historical setting of the opponents.)