Guides Along the Way: The Epistle of St. Ignatius to the Trallians

The town of Tralles (modern-day Aydin, Turkey) was also blessed by an epistle of St. Ignatius. The Epistle of St. Ignatius to the Trallians is a shorter letter, which I will comment on below.

The greeting of St. Ignatius continues his tradition of referring to himself as Theophorus and he relates peace and hope to the Death and Resurrection of Christ.

1. He states again (as he did in his Epistle to the Magnesians) that in the bishop, he has met the whole Church of Tralles. He also sings high praises of the Trallians, noting that they are not only good in action, but inherently. In other words, their choice in favor of Christ and their actions reflecting Him have become so habitual that they are affected on the level of what they are. The ancient ethic agere sequitur esse, that action follows being, is here answered with a complementary statement, that sometimes being is changed according to habitual action. Acting well makes one a good person, which in turn helps them to act even more perfectly well.
2. The people should be subject to the bishop and priests; also, deacons should be beyond reproach. Sin should be avoided as if it were fire. This simile seems fitting, since fire destroys and consumes, just as sin does.
3. The laity should follow and respect the bishop, the priests, and the deacons.
4. St. Ignatius comments on the same temptation that was the motivation for my starting this blog and taking the title Peregrinus. He has not yet been made perfect, he is not yet a saint, and though he is confident in his knowledge (he had much more than I do), he does not want to be told how intelligent he is because he fears the pride that may turn him to sin.
5. The saintly bishop, though aware that he has great knowledge of God and His ways, states that he does not wish to expound on the deeper things to the Tralles, who are too young spiritually to grasp them. This sounds to our ears like a statement of pride (and perhaps his last paragraph was meant to build up to this one, to assure us that he does not mean to be prideful), but it is similar to some things St. Paul said and, as a leader in the Church, it is rightfully St. Ignatius' place to feed the faithful as though they were growing children. He also makes a humble note of pointing out that he is still learning and there are many things he does not understand.
6. St. Ignatius continues the metaphor of feeding the faithful by warning them of the poison of heresy, which some people may try to mix into their food. It is interesting that he notes deadly pleasure; although heresy sometimes seems pleasant to those who favor it, it still leads to destruction.
7. He states that the way to be sure that we are not being fed poison is to follow the bishops, priests, and deacons. Here as in other places we see the forming of the concept of the Magisterium of the Church, which is composed of the bishops, whose teachings are passed through the whole hierarchy of the clergy.
8. He says that faith is the flesh of Christ and love is the blood of Christ. This can be taken as a metaphoric statement on faith and works. Love gives life to faith as blood to the body. The Body of Christ, the Church, shares one common faith which defines them as a group, a body, but this faith is worthless and the body dead if it does not have the blood, the life, of love. Love takes on one of its forms in obedience, and so the love of the Church consists in part of obedience to the bishop.
9. Here we begin to see St. Ignatius' refutation of the heresy he has only alluded to so far in his epistle. One by one, he insists on the reality of the main points of the life of Christ. The Docetist heresy, which was an offshoot of Gnosticism and taught that matter was evil, has been a recurring theme of many heresies. This particular occurance of it taught that Christ's body was not real and therefore that He did not really suffer. St. Ignatius, whom many believe to have been the child Jesus placed in their midst (cf. Matthew 18:1ff), was witness to the reality of much of what Christ went through.
 
10. He mounts the most powerful of defenses, that of the martyr: if "He only seemed to suffer...then why am I in bonds? Why do I long to be exposed to the wild beasts? Do I therefore die in vain? Am I not then guilty of against [the cross of] the Lord?"
11. St. Ignatius calls the Docetism heresy deadly and says that they were not planted by God. The tree God planted is the Cross, and the Docetists deny the cross.
 
12. He gives them final greetings and admonishes them to heed his word, since he does not want his letter to be evidence at the Judgment against anyone that they were warned.
13. He closes with an exhortation to obedience and love.

So far, this seems to me to be the most direct of his letters in confronting heresy. His personal witness to Christ is powerful and would be difficult to refute, while the Docetist heresy stems from Gnosticism, a philosophy pre-dating Christianity which they tried to blend with Christianity, rather than allowing it to be informed by Christianity, which is diametrically opposed to it.

His Servant and Yours,

Micah