Saturday, November 25, 2023

Travis W. Proctor on Ignatius Belief in the Incorporeality of Demons

  

. . . Ignatius underscores the fleshly constitution of Jesus’s risen body by contrasting it with demonic “bodilessness.” This juxtaposition is comparable to the Gospel of Luke’s contrasting Jesus’s body with a “ghost” (πνεῦμα) (24:36), as well as the Letter of the Apostles’ explicit claim that the risen Jesus was neither a “ghost” nor a “demon” (11). Ignatius joins other Christian writers in explicating Jesus’s resurrected corporeality through its trans-corporeal comparison to other entities. Among these witnesses, Ignatius’s condemnation stands out for its explicit invocation of “bodilessness.” And yet, at first glance, it is difficult to determine what exactly Ignatius means by “bodiless” demon. Are we to imagine that Ignatius’s demons lack any kind of corporeality whatsoever, or, like the “uneducated” mentioned by Origen in On First Principles . . . might Ignatius here be using “bodiless” simply to designate a “thinner” type of existence that was not as solid or tangible as human “flesh” (Interestingly, Orien, as part of his discussion of why some thinkers in his day use “bodiless” to refer to entities that lack a solid body, mentions a resurrection tradition identical to the one quoted by Ignatius [On First Principes, pref. 8]) (Travis W. Proctor, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Church [New York: Oxford University Press, 2022], 61)

 

. . . Ignatius also mentions demons in connection with his condemnation of his Christological opponents. In Smyrnaeans 2, Ignatius launches a direct attack against Christians espousing an alternative Christology: “They are the ones who are only an appearance,” Ignatius proclaims, “and it will happen to them just as they think: they will be without bodies—and demonic!” Ignatius here censures his opponents by condemning them to an afterlife that would be an imitation of the “bodiless” Jesus to which they adhered. The problem for Ignatius, of course, would be that several early Christian groups and texts ascribed a positive valuation to a bodiless afterlife and located true salvation in the soul’s abandonment of its fleshly vessel. . . . When we consider the remainder of the Ignatian corpus, it becomes clear that this latter phrase (“flesh and spirit”) serves as a summation of Ignatius’s understanding of ideal embodiment. In his Letter to the Magnesians, for example, Ignatius prays that his recipients “experience the unity of the flesh and spirit of Jesus Christ—our constant life” (1.2; LCL, Ehrman; emphasis mine). When writing to the Romans, Ignatius greets his audience: “I extend warmest greetings blamelessly in Jesus Christ, our God, to those who are united in both flesh and spirit in his every commandment” (pref; LCL, Ehrman; emphasis mine). In advising the Ephesians, Ignatius emphasizes that they “abide in Jesus Christ both in flesh and in the spirit” (10.3; LCL, Ehrman). In a final example, Ignatius informs Polycarp that his dual nature is essential for his leadership role: “You are fleshly and spiritual for this reason, that you may deal gently with what is visible before you” (2; LCL, Ehrman). According to Ignatius’s anthropology, then, humans are composed of both flesh and spirit, possessing a two-part makeup that enables them to commune with the divine while also carrying out proper Christian roles in the mundane world. Humanity’s flesh/spirit duality is in direct imitation of the composition of Jesus, both before and after his resurrection. Through their “fleshly” and “spiritual” makeup, Christians can maintain a kind of trans-corporeal relation with Jesus, and thus participate fully in the Christian community.

 

Ignatius’s condemnation of his opponents to be a “bodiless” existence, therefore, threatens a severing of this corporeal connection to Jesus and the Christian community. Since Ignatius ostensibly equates “bodily” with a dual flesh-and-spirit makeup, his use of “bodiless” is likely a reference to “lacking flesh.” Put another way, Ignatius appears to belong to that group of Christians, described previously by Origen as “uneducated,” who typically limited embodiment to those entities that possessed a solid “fleshly” physiology similar to that of humans. Demons serve Ignatius well, therefore, in attacking his Christological opponents, insofar as demons stand in as an inversion of ideal embodiment, lacking the flesh that is required to have a “true” human body and experience embodied fellowship with Jesus. (Ibid., 65, 67-68)