Blessed Memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr! Today’s memorial offers us the occasion to reflect upon the radical, totalizing nature of the Christian message. The reason for this being that the exemplar the Church sets up for our consideration today is one of those who the Church has always looked to as radically embodying the Gospel message, i.e., the martyrs. There are many who read the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch and see in his professed desire for martyrdom something grotesque, something masochist, something akin to a desire for one’s own annihilation and thus in radical contradiction with our innate desire for life. I want to suggest the reason for the misunderstanding is the failure to comprehend the intimate connection between Ignatius’s explicit desire for martyrdom and another of the Church’s central doctrines, no less radical in its nature, that of the Eucharist. Only in connection to the Eucharist does the desire to “be fodder for the wild beasts” make any sense at all (Letter to the Romans, 4.4). However, once the connection is made and the life and letters of Ignatius are set across from the Eucharist, the two become mutually illuminating. To get at this, I want to bring out three Eucharistic teachings present in Ignatius’s Letters.  

The first teaching is one that has sadly become a cause of division among Christian brothers and sisters, and this is the teaching of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. The point of contention surrounds the great bread of life discourse of John 6. For Catholics and Orthodox Christians, when Jesus teaches “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35) and further on, after some balk at this, asking “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52), his reaffirmation:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him (John 6:53-56).

The Greek used in certain places here will come into play once again further on. However, to be drawn out in this first point is the fact that at the earliest times of the Great Tradition, Christian thinkers did not read this as a thin symbol or sign, but rather with a robust symbolic or sacramental realism.

This Eucharistic realism is apparent in several of Ignatius’s Letters. For instance, in reference to gathering for the Eucharistic celebration in his Letter to the Ephesians, echoing very closely the words of our Lord that “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:54), he exhorts his readers: “at these meetings you should heed the bishop and presbytery attentively, and break one loaf, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote which wards off death but yields continuous life in union with Jesus Christ” (Letter to the Ephesians, 20.2). Again, in his Letter to the Romans, he writes: “I take no delight in corruptible food or in the danties of this life. What I want is God’s bread, which is the flesh of Christ, who came from David’s line; and for drink I want his blood: an immortal love feast indeed!” (Letter to the Romans, 7.3). And, once more, in his Letter to the Philadelphians, Ignatius cautions his readers, “Be careful, then, to observe a single Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and one cup of his blood that makes us one, and one altar, just as there is one bishop along with the presbytery and the deacons, my fellow slaves. In that way whatever you do is in line with God’s will” (Letter to the Philadelphians, 4). Finally, in his Letter to the Smyrneans, he cautions against the teaching of the Docetists with regard to the Eucharist, writing: “Pay close attention to those who have wrong notions about the grace of Jesus Christ…They hold aloof from the Eucharist and from services of prayer, because they refuse to admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins…” (Letter to the Smyrneans, 7.1). The teaching will be echoed by Justin Martyr, again in the second century, who making reference to the teaching of the Apostles in the Gospels in his First Apology writes:

This food we call Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake except one who believes that the things we teach are truth…we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink; but as Jesus Christ our Savior being incarnate by God’s word took flesh for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the word of prayer which comes from him, from which our flesh and blood are nourished by transformation, is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus (First Apology, 66). 

While it is absolutely true that these passages reflect a very early, and we might do better to say, young, understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and thus a long chronological distance from the doctrine of transubstantiation to be proclaimed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (Denzinger, 802), it is likewise true that in these early second century Letters of Ignatius, we see the doctrine in seedling form, just beginning to break the surface of the soil of the Gospel in which it is rooted.

Along with this early attestation of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is another teaching regarding this most central sacrament of Christian life, i.e., that to receive the Eucharist, while an intimate personal encounter, is not a private encounter. What I mean by this is that while the Eucharist is indeed understood as establishing a personal union between the recipient and living Christ, being the “medicine of immortality” and an “immortal love feast,” as we saw Ignatius say above, it does not for all this become the private possession of the individual Christian, nor is its reception intended solely for the individual’s own private good. Rather, the reception of the Eucharist has as its aim the creation of the Church, transforming the individuals who receive it into members of one unified Body of Eucharistic praise. Thus, in his Letter to the Ephesians, Ignatius writes:

Hence you should act in accord with the bishop’s mind, as you surely do. Your presbytery, indeed, which deserves its name and is a credit to God, is as closely tied to the bishop as the strings to a harp. Wherefore your accord and harmonious love is a hymn to Jesus Christ. Yes, one and all, you should form yourselves into a choir, so that, in perfect harmony and taking your pitch from God, you may sing in unison and with one voice to the Father through Jesus Christ (Letter to the Ephesians, 4.1-2).

Here we see two things. First, the dynamics first sounded here are echoed in the Eucharistic liturgy today, when at the elevation of the Eucharistic Species after consecration, the priest sings, “through him, with him, in him, O God Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor are yours forever and ever!” And second, as he is lead to his own Eucharistic sacrifice, Ignatius is above all concerned with the unity of the Church, and thus implores his readers to remain united in Christ through the person of the bishop. Thus, in his Letter to the Smyrneans, Ignatius exhorts his readers:

Flee from schism as the source of mischief. You should all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ did the Father. Follow, too the presbytery as you would the apostles; and respect the deacons as you would God’s law. Nobody must do anything that has to do with the Church without the bishop’s approval. You should regard that Eucharist as valid which is celebrated either by the bishop or by someone he authorizes. Where the bishop is present, there let the congregation gather, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church (Letter to the Smyrneans, 8.1-2).

Again, the teaching of Ignatius extolling above all the absolute importance of the Body of Christ echoes the teaching of Jesus, and his high priestly prayer that Christians “may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us,” with the explicit reason being “so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Ignatius more explicitly echoes this teaching in his Letter to the Magnesians, where he exhorts his readers:

Let no one think of his neighbor in a carnal way; but always love one another in the spirit of Jesus Christ. Do not let there be anything to divide you, but be in accord with the bishop and your leaders. Thus you will be an example and a lesson of incorruptibility (Letter to the Magnesians, 6.2).

The same idea is expressed in his Letter to the Trallians, where cautioning again against the flames of division stoked by the Docetists he writes: “God stands for unity” (Letter to the Trallians, 11.2). Ignatius’s repeated insistence that the Eucharist creates the unity of the Body of Christ and therefore demands that individual members of this Body strive to live harmoniously with one another in unity with the bishop is a reminder continually needed by Christians, perhaps especially today. Sadly, there are many voices in the Church today, who despite their efforts to proclaim the Gospel and make the saving love of Jesus Christ known to the world, stoke the flames of division. This is seen most especially in the work of those critical of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. To them it must be reiterated, as Catholics, we don’t have the prerogative of picking and choosing from the teachings of the Church. Such an attitude simply is not Catholic, but Protestant, and such claims, to any serious student of the history of theology, sound much less in concert with the Gospels, and the writings of Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and Newman and much more akin to those of Luther, who, it should be added in fairness and kindness to our Lutheran brothers and sisters, had much firmer grounds for theological complaint given his own historical context. In contrast, the complaints made by some today seem to stem either from a facile reading of the Council’s teachings, leading to sweeping claims regarding the orthodoxy of their content, or from the sometimes imprudent implementation of those same teachings which, it likewise should be said, led to certain abuses. Thus, it would be wise for these voices to reconsider their positions, and work instead for unity within the Church through a serious re-reading both of the Council’s documents and to the historical developments in theology which led up to the teachings contained therein. To refuse to do so is completely at odds with the reception of the Eucharist, which Ignatius calls an “immortal love feast indeed!”

This leads, finally, to the climax of what Ignatius has to teach us today, as much in word as in deed. That is, that the Eucharist is aimed at the total transformation of the individual such that, in the words of Paul, the Christian presents their “bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” our “spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). Paul continues, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). It is evident that to become a “living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” is what Ignatius desired above all as he was led to his martyrdom. Thus, in his Letter to the Romans he writes “Just pray that I may have the strength of soul and body so that I may not only talk about martyrdom, but really want it. It is not that I want merely to be called a Christian, but actually to be one. Yes, if I prove to be one, then I can have the name. Then, too, I shall be a convincing Christian only when the world sees me no more” (Letter to the Romans, 3.2). Then, just a little further on comes perhaps the most well known lines Ignatius penned. Asking the Christians in Rome not to interfere with his martyrdom he writes:

I plead with you, do not do me an unreasonable kindness. 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…Then I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. Pray Christ for me that by these means I may become God’s sacrifice…if I suffer, I shall be emancipated by Jesus Christ; and united to him, I shall rise to freedom (Letter to the Romans, 4.1-3).

To many, as was said above, such words are outrageous, even expressing some sort of nihilistic desire. However, two things might be said here. First, Ignatius’s desire to be “ground by the teeth of the wild beasts” very closely parallels the words of Our Lord in John 6. For, after some balk at his claim that the bread which he shall give for the life of the world is his flesh (John 6:51-52), Our Lord doubles down, as it were. Though impossible to see in the English translation, the word used in verses 50 and 51 (and 53) is the Greek phagē, coming from the word phago meaning to eat or to consume. This is the same word used by those who balk in verse 52. However, in verses 54 and 56 is trōgōn from the Greek trógó, meaning to gnaw, munch, or crunch. Thus here, Ignatius is making an explicit connection between his impending martyrdom and the Eucharist. And attend, please, to the effect Ignatius hopes his sacrifice will have, that he will be a real disciple of Jesus and thereby be a more effective testament to his saving power. For the Church, up and down the centuries, martyrdom is the most powerful and most effective means of evangelization for it radically demonstrates the Christians’ complete love for Christ, a love that will risk nothing for fear of being separated from the One whom they have so desperately fallen in love with. This is the truest expression of the Holy Spirit’s gift of the fear of the Lord, and in the martyr we see one so powerfully transformed by that same Spirit, that the tradition came to see very early that in the martyrs, Christ was present in a way very similar to that of the Eucharist (see e.g., Servais Pinckaers, The Spirituality of Martyrdom…to the Limits of Love, 7). What’s more, just as the Eucharist gives life to the Church and to its individual members, the passions of the martyrs were understood to have a very similar power to transform those who witnessed their martyrdom. Thus, we find Augustine echo Tertullian’s famously dictum that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Augustine, Sermon 286.3). Thus, in their passion, the martyr, in imitation of Christ displays most clearly, not only their love for Christ, but love for the Church, and indeed, for the whole human family, desiring for all saving unity in Christ. This is what is not seen if the Letters of Ignatius are read apart from the Eucharist and what leads many to see his words as written by an unhealthy mind.

So where does all this leave us, we might rightly ask. God willing with the desire to imitate the martyrs, might be the simple answer. Yet how do we do this? A brief twofold answer might be given in response. First, none of this is possible without participation in the Eucharist, for it is only in unity with Christ that we as Christians, both individually and communally, are able to make his presence known to the world. This is something we explicitly pray for in the Eucharistic Liturgy. In the prayer after communion of the 27^th week in ordinary time, we pray: “Grant us, almighty God, that we may be refreshed and nourished by the Sacrament which we have received, so as to be transformed into what we consume. Through Christ our Lord.” Second, partaking of the Eucharist compels us to live Eucharistic lives, and this we do through a life of virtue. Thus, Augustine writes that the only proper way to celebrate the feasts of the martyrs is to imitate their virtues (e.g., Sermon 299F.4-5). The most obvious way to imitate the virtues of the martyrs is through the practice of the works of mercy. Thus, in his Letter to the Smyrneans, Ignatius not only criticizes the Docetists for their lack of faith in the Eucharist, but in the same breath for their failure to practice the works of mercy:

Pay close attention to those who have wrong notions about the grace of Jesus Christ…They care nothing about love: they have no concern for widows or orphans, for the oppressed, for those in prison or released, for the hungry or thirsty. They hold aloof from the Eucharist and from services of prayer, because they refuse to admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins… (Letter to the Smyrneans, 6-7.1). 

This is perhaps the most profound message Ignatius has for us today. Our reception of the Eucharist must never lack a rich harvest of loving deeds. For him, to do one without the other simply makes no sense. Rather we, as Christians must embody the desire of Christ that all may come to saving unity in Him. Thus, by practicing the works of mercy, we too imitate the passion of our God (Letter to the Romans, 6.3) and by his grace we pray that these actions of self-sacrificing love bear fruit in charity, for the life of the world (Optatum Totius, 16).

Your servant in Christ,

Tony

Tony Crescio

Tony Crescio is the founder of FRESHImage Ministries. He holds an MTS from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Christian Theology at Saint Louis University. His research focuses on the intersection between moral and sacramental theology. His dissertation is entitled, Presencing the Divine: Augustine, the Eucharist and the Ethics of Exemplarity.

Tony’s academic publications can be found here.