In AD 116, on his way to face the lions at Rome, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote a letter of encouragement to the Christian community at Ephesus. In it, he praised its members for being synodoi — literally, "on the same road". "You are all synodoi, God-bearing and temple-bearing," St Ignatius told them. "Christ-bearing, holy-bearing, in all things ordered becomingly by precepts of Jesus Christ."
During the last papacy, we were often told that the Church must embrace synodality. Since Ignatius is, I believe, the first writer on record to have praised Christians for being synodal, and since he carries great authority as one of the earliest Fathers of the Church, we may compare his conception of synodality with the one being practised today.
Why does Ignatius call the Ephesians synodoi? He gives his immediate reason just before the passage quoted above: "I know that you had some men pass through who held bad doctrine, and that you did not allow them to sow the seeds of it amongst you, stopping up your ears so as to give them nowhere to cast them. Your Faith is your guide, and charity is the road that leads you to God."
Ignatius uses various other pieces of imagery that further convey his vision of synodality. He repeatedly exhorts the Ephesians to persist in obedience to their bishop and to their presbyterate (cf. §21). The word he uses for obedient is hypotassomenoi, a word equivalent to subordinate and with the same military connotations. Martial metaphors came more naturally to the Fathers than to today's churchmen, and Ignatius certainly had the biblical image of Christian soldiership in mind. For him, Christian obedience was akin to the ordered, purposeful obedience of a line of battle.
Later, Ignatius praises the Ephesians for their unity, saying that the priests of Ephesus are conformed to the bishop as strings to a lyre, so that through their unanimity Jesus Christ sings forth (§32). He tells them to regard their bishop as Christ (§42f), for he is like the steward sent by the father of his family to govern his household. Ignatius also stresses Christians’ need to reject false teachers. He talks of "those that bear the name of Christ but do things unworthy of God". Such men, he says, are to be shunned as wild beasts or as rabid dogs, whose bite is stealthy and hard to cure (§46ff).
These passages give us a glimpse of Ignatius's vision of synodality — that is to say, of what it means for the members of a Christian community to be truly synodoi, "on the same road". The synodal Ephesians are marching purposefully on the straight and narrow path to God, true soldiers of Christ. They are single-minded, and know where they are going, because they are subordinate to their bishop, who sets the direction. That direction is the only one possible: the one that leads by way of the Cross. They avoid the contagion of heresy, stopping up their ears when they hear it spoken, and their clergy’s teaching forms a beautiful harmony.
How does this purposeful vision square with the modern notion of synodality? Consider the official logo of the Synodal Pathway (right). No ordered hierarchy is discernible. Everyone is jumbled together: bishop, religious and laity. The bishop is partly hidden behind some laypeople, and the whole procession is led by a child. Even he doesn't seem to know where he is going, for he is being steered by another child.
Am I reading too much into a logo? Well, the most vocal proponents of synodality do seem to believe that it involves a loosening of the Church's structure and coherence. Massimo Faggioli, for example, has made it clear in his voluminous writings about synodality that it implies a new kind of ecclesiology that is less hierarchical and which allows for regional variation of doctrine. "Global Catholic today," he says, "means being all over the place and in plain sight." Elsewhere, he claims: "Catholicism isn't dominated or even necessarily guided by the bishops."
Similarly, Austen Ivereigh has written of the "hope for spaces of belonging in which all could express themselves without fear of exclusion", and a Church "better capable of holding in tension difference and disagreement", while Fr James Martin SJ has said that, thanks to synodality, "disagreement" on controversial issues is "here to stay".
In this vision of synodality — sometimes referred to as "creative tension" — there seems to be no place for a harmonious Ignatian unity of strings to lyre. One could hardly express a more un-Ignatian or un-patristic understanding of the Church. Since the Church allows the faithful to hold whatever views they like on any questions other than questions of faith and morals on which the Magisterium has spoken, a risk arises that what may emerge from this Synod 2021–2024 version of synodality is a Church that tolerates error.
What would St Ignatius have made of the claim that moral and doctrinal disagreement is creative? Well, we have already seen the answer: for him, the Ephesians were synodal because they refused to be taught falsehood.
The Church already has a creative tension within her: that of orthodoxy, which teaches that Our Lord is both fully man and fully God. God holds all things in being, and yet we also have free will. "The Father is greater than I," says Jesus, and yet the Father and Son are consubstantial. Christ is both our loving Saviour and our final Judge. Truth is bigger than only one image or analogy, and the holding of these opposites together is the source of the Church's intellectual life and creativity.
Proponents of the "creative tension" of modern synodality may risk pressing it into the service of a vision inimical to the true creative tension of clear, uncompromising orthodoxy. That would be radically different from the vision of Ignatius, for whom a Christian community counts as synodal when it is obedient to its hierarchs, marching in good order, purposeful, on a clear path with a clear goal, and when it refuses to hear teachers of bad doctrine.
This is a very different kind of "walking together" from that of Ignatius, and it calls to mind a very different biblical metaphor than Christian soldiership. Under concepts of modern synodality, the faithful hold together not because they agree on the direction of travel — like an army given its orders — but because they have pledged to hear each other out. Ignatius’s synodality means marching under the banner of Christ, while some recent interpretations have seemed to suggest a flock of sheep wandering the hillsides wondering where their shepherd is.
We do, however, have a new shepherd, and so one final question arises. Will Leo XIV be able to reshape synodality in a more fruitful and truly creative direction? So far, the signs are good. Pope Leo quoted Ignatius in his very first homily, and he has often stressed the importance of fidelity and truth. If he can unify the Church and ensure that she teaches with a loving but clear voice, even on sensitive subjects, then he will have a very successful pontificate indeed.
