Ambrose

← Encyclopedia

Ambrose (c. 339–397) was bishop of Milan and one of the four theologians later named the Latin Doctors of the Church, alongside Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. He came to the office by an accident the sources never tire of recounting: a Roman governor with no clerical training, sent to keep order during a disputed episcopal election, found the crowd acclaiming him instead. He was still an unbaptized catechumen. Within a week, in 374, he was baptized, ordained, and consecrated bishop.

What he did with the position reshaped the relation of church and empire in the West. Milan was then an imperial capital, and Ambrose dealt with emperors at close range. He resisted the Arian Christianity favored at court, refusing to surrender a basilica to it and holding the building with a vigil of psalm-singing congregants. He pressed the young Valentinian II, opposed the restoration of the Altar of Victory in the Roman Senate, and, most famously, compelled the emperor Theodosius to do public penance after the massacre of thousands at Thessalonica in 390 — an assertion that even a Christian ruler stood under the church’s moral judgment. Whether this episode established a durable principle or merely a vivid precedent is a question historians still weigh. What is settled is not the event’s force but its afterlife: later ages took it up as the founding image of the church calling power to account.

His intellectual influence ran along a quieter channel. Ambrose preached a figurative, philosophically inflected reading of Scripture, drawing on Greek exegetes and on the Neoplatonism then circulating in Milan, and it was in his sermons that the young Augustine first heard the Hebrew Bible defended as something other than crude story. Augustine’s Confessions credit those sermons with making Christianity intellectually possible for him; Ambrose baptized him in 387. Ambrose also helped fix the shape of Latin worship. The introduction of metrical, congregationally sung hymns into the Western church is associated with him, and a body of liturgical chant and rite long bore the name “Ambrosian,” though scholarship is careful to separate the few hymns plausibly his from the larger tradition that gathered under his authority.

He wrote extensively — on the duties of clergy, on the sacraments, on virginity and the ascetic life he prized — and died at Milan in 397, his reputation as pastor, statesman, and teacher already settled. The figure who survives is less the systematic theologian than the bishop who treated the office as a public trust: a man who had governed provinces, and went on governing, in a different key.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Benedict Of Nursia · John Cassian