Imitation of the Passion

Ignatius of Antioch understood his coming martyrdom as the completion of discipleship: one becomes a true disciple of Christ, he believed, only by being conformed to Christ’s passion. His most daring phrase — “permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God” — predicates suffering of God himself, an early and startling instance of the language later theology would call theopaschite. This file traces the discipleship-as-imitation theme, the disputed cry “my love is crucified,” and Ignatius’s insistent self-description as a man “not yet” perfected.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

Becoming a Disciple Through Martyrdom

For Ignatius, “disciple” (μαθητής) is not a status already possessed but a goal reached through martyrdom. The conviction surfaces repeatedly and with the same grammatical shape: discipleship lies ahead, completed only in death. “Now am I beginning to be a disciple (νῦν ἄρχομαι μαθητὴς εἶναι),” he writes, in the very breath that he asks for fire and cross and the teeth of beasts (Ignatius, To the Romans 5.3; Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers II.2; ANF 1:76). And more pointedly still: “Then shall I be truly a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world shall not so much as see my body” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4.2; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:75). Full discipleship coincides with the body’s complete consumption — when nothing visible remains to anchor him to the perishing order.

This is why Ignatius can call death a “birth” and the world’s life a kind of dying. “It is good to set from the world unto God, that I may rise unto him” (Ignatius, To the Romans 2.2; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:74), and “do not hinder me from living; do not wish my death” — where “living” means union with God and “death” means survival in the world that has not yet attained him (Ignatius, To the Romans 6.1–2; ANF 1:77). The martyr’s road, then, is the discipleship-road brought to term: the disciple follows the master to the end, and the end is the Cross (on the death itself as offering, see Wheat of God).

“An Imitator of the Passion of My God”

The theological center of this discipleship is imitation — not mere admiration of Christ but conformity to his passion. The decisive sentence comes in the same letter: “Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God (ἐπιτρέψατέ μοι μιμητὴν εἶναι τοῦ πάθους τοῦ θεοῦ μου)” (Ignatius, To the Romans 6.3; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:77). Two features deserve attention. First, the word “imitator” (μιμητής): Ignatius does not seek to repeat or rival Christ’s redemptive act but to be conformed to it, to let his own suffering be patterned on and drawn into Christ’s. Second, and more striking, the genitive “of my God” (τοῦ θεοῦ μου) governing “passion” (πάθους): Ignatius predicates the passion of God.

This is one of the boldest formulations in the second-century corpus. To speak of “the passion of my God” is to attribute suffering — the supremely creaturely experience — to God himself. Ignatius is not careless here; the phrase coheres with his habit of calling Christ “our God” outright (Ignatius, To the Ephesians inscr.; 18.2; To the Romans inscr.; 3.3; To the Smyrnaeans 1.1; Lightfoot, II.2). What later theology will systematize as the communicatio idiomatum — the legitimate predication of the properties of each nature to the one person of the incarnate Word, so that one may say “God suffered” because the one who suffered in the flesh is God the Word — is here present in nuce, in the prayer of a bishop on his way to die (cf. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. 1978, 92–93). The fifth- and sixth-century theopaschite controversies, and the orthodox formula “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh,” lie far downstream; but Ignatius’s “passion of my God” is an early headwater (see Against Docetism for the Christological reality that makes the predication possible).

The phrase is intelligible only against Ignatius’s anti-docetic Christology. Precisely because Christ “truly (ἀληθῶς) suffered” in real flesh, and did not merely seem to (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 2.1; see Against Docetism), there is a real passion of God to be imitated. A docetic Christ — one who only appeared to suffer — could be admired but not imitated unto death; Ignatius’s whole martyrology presupposes the reality of the flesh he is so insistent upon. The imitation of the passion and the reality of the passion are a single conviction.

“My Love Is Crucified”: A Disputed Cry

A second, briefer phrase has generated centuries of interpretation: “My love has been crucified (ὁ ἐμὸς ἔρως ἐσταύρωται)” (Ignatius, To the Romans 7.2; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:77). The Greek ἔρως — passionate, desiring love, distinct from ἀγάπη — is the crux. The sentence admits two broad readings, and the disagreement is ancient.

[Disputed: that ὁ ἐμὸς ἔρως ἐσταύρωται means “my earthly desire/passion has been crucified” — i.e., Ignatius declares his worldly longings put to death, reading the line as a confession in the spirit of Galatians 6:14 (“the world has been crucified to me”); Lightfoot inclined to render it of Ignatius’s own crucified desire, and the immediately following words (“there is no fire of material longing in me, but only living water,” Ignatius, To the Romans 7.2) support a reference to mortified passion (Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers II.2, ad loc.) — versus that ὁ ἐμὸς ἔρως is a title of Christ, so that the sentence means “He who is my Love, the Crucified, is crucified for me” / “My Beloved has been crucified”; this Christological reading is attested very early, since Origen quotes the line as “one of the saints, Ignatius by name, said of Christ: ‘My Love is crucified’” (Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue; trans. Lawson, ACW 26, 1957, 35–36), and it is taken up by Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names 4.12, who reads ἔρως as a divine name and cites Ignatius in support (PG 3:709; trans. Luibheid, CWS, 1987)].

The dispute is genuine and old, and the best course is to report both readings with their support. Origen’s testimony is doubly valuable: it shows that the Christological interpretation was already current in the first half of the third century, and it preserves an independent early witness to the text. Origen invokes Ignatius precisely to license his own daring use of ἔρως-language for the soul’s love of God in the Song of Songs, finding in the martyr-bishop a precedent for calling holy desire by the name of eros (Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue, ACW 26:35–36). Whichever reading is primary, both feed the same stream of thought: the crucified Christ is the object and pattern of the martyr’s whole desire (see The Recension Problem on the textual history of the letters).

“I Am Not Peter and Paul”: Discipleship as Becoming

A persistent feature of Ignatius’s self-presentation guards the imitation theme against any note of self-exaltation: he insistently denies that he has arrived. He will not “command” the churches as an authority in his own right. “I do not command you, as though I were somebody (οὐχ ὡς τὶς ὤν). For even though I am in bonds for the Name’s sake, I am not yet perfected in Jesus Christ (οὐδέπω ἀπήρτισμαι ἐν Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ). Now am I beginning to be a disciple, and I speak to you as to my school-fellows” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 3.1; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:50). The chains do not make him a master; they make him a beginner.

The same reserve appears at Tralles: though “able to grasp heavenly things,” he holds back, “lest being but a babe in Christ” the deep matters should harm his hearers, and he refuses to presume on a maturity he has not reached (Ignatius, To the Trallians 5.1–2; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:67–68). And most memorably, in the rescue-letter: “I do not enjoin you, as Peter and Paul did. They were Apostles, I am a convict (κατάκριτος); they were free, but I am a slave even until now” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4.3; Lightfoot, II.2; ANF 1:75). The contrast is deliberate and theologically loaded. The apostles commanded with authority; Ignatius, a “condemned man,” can only ask. His authority will be sealed, if at all, not by office but by the death that conforms him to Christ.

This is the inner logic of discipleship-as-becoming. The disciple is not a finished imitator but one being formed; perfection (the verb ἀπαρτίζω, “to complete,” and τελειόω in the wider tradition) is eschatological, granted in and through the martyr’s death, not possessed in advance (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 3.1; To the Romans 4.2; cf. To the Philadelphians 5.1). The wheat is being ground; it is not yet bread (see Wheat of God). This reserve is also what distinguishes the imitation Ignatius seeks from presumption: he does not claim to reproduce Christ’s redemptive work but to be conformed to it as gift.

Martyrdom as the Icon of Theosis Through the Cross

The Orthodox tradition receives Ignatius’s imitation-theology as an early articulation of what it will later call deification (θέωσις) through the Cross. To “imitate the passion of my God” is to be united to Christ so closely that one shares his death in order to share his life — the pattern of Romans 6 and of the whole baptismal logic of dying-and-rising (cf. Ignatius, To the Romans 6.1–3; see Theosis). Martyrdom, in this reception, is not a substitute for the Christian’s ordinary life but its concentrated icon: every believer is called to be conformed to Christ’s death and resurrection, and the martyr displays in his body what the Liturgy enacts at the altar (see The Divine Liturgy) and what the eucharistic flesh communicates (see Eucharistic Realism).

Ignatius’s “passion of my God” thus became an anchor of later Christological reflection. It witnesses, at the very threshold of the second century, to the conviction that the one who suffered is God the Word — the conviction that Nicaea and Chalcedon would safeguard and that the theopaschite formula would sharpen against Nestorian division of the natures (cf. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. 1978, 92–93, 317–323). Orthodox tradition honors Ignatius the God-bearer (Θεοφόρος) precisely as a teacher who held together the reality of Christ’s flesh, the reality of his suffering as God’s own, and the call of every disciple to be conformed to that passion unto life (see The Apostolic Fathers and Church Fathers). In him, martyrdom is the imitation of the passion completed — the disciple at last made true.

References

Ignatius of Antioch. To the Romans 2; 4–7. Greek text and English translation in J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1889), vol. II.2. English also in Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), vol. 1, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885), 74–77.
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Ephesians inscr.; 3.1; 18.2. In Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, II.2; ANF 1:49–50, 57.
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Trallians 5.1–2. In Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, II.2; ANF 1:67–68.
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Smyrnaeans 1.1; 2.1. In Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, II.2; ANF 1:86–87.
Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
Origen. Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue. Translated by R. P. Lawson, Origen: The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, Ancient Christian Writers 26 (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957), 35–36.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. On the Divine Names 4.12 [PG 3:709]. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978), 92–93, 317–323.