Ambrose

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In the winter of 374 the see of Milan fell vacant, and the city that held it was an imperial capital. Auxentius, the bishop who had just died, had been an Arian, and the congregation that gathered to choose his successor split at once along the fault line of the age — the party that confessed the Son fully God against the party that held him a lesser, made thing. The provincial governor came to the basilica to keep the peace. He was a Roman official in his mid-thirties, trained in law and rhetoric, the son of a praetorian prefect of Gaul, and he had no business with the altar: he was an unbaptized catechumen, a man enrolled for instruction who had not yet received the rite that would make him a Christian in full. While he spoke to quiet the crowd, a cry went up for him — Ambrose for bishop — and was taken up on both sides at once, the one name both factions could accept. He resisted, and the resistance is part of the story the sources tell with relish: he is said to have tried to disqualify himself, to have fled the city, to have hidden. Within a week, in 374, he was baptized, ordained through the grades of the clergy in turn, and consecrated bishop — the whole of an ecclesiastical career compressed into a few days, on December 7. He demanded that the baptism be administered by a Catholic and not an Arian hand.

Ambrose (c. 339–397) thus became bishop of Milan and, in the verdict of later ages, one of the four theologians named the Latin Doctors of the Church, alongside Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. What he did with the office reshaped the relation of church and empire in the West. Milan in his lifetime was where emperors held court, and he dealt with them at close range — not as a courtier waiting on power but as a man who had himself governed provinces and knew exactly what an imperial chancery could and could not do.

The bishop and the court

Three confrontations fixed his reputation, and they unfold in sequence over six years. The first was fought with words. In 384 the prefect of Rome, the orator Symmachus, petitioned the young emperor Valentinian II to restore the Altar of Victory to the Senate house, where it had stood for centuries before it was removed; the altar was the visible token of the old religion of the Roman state, and its return would have meant the public toleration of the Senate’s pagan cult. Ambrose answered with two letters of his own, arguing that a Christian emperor could not maintain at public expense an altar to a goddess, and that the past’s prestige was no argument against the truth. The petition was refused. The exchange survives as one of the sharpest set-pieces of the contest between the old gods and the new faith in the Latin West, conducted entirely in the register of administration and rhetoric.

The second was fought with bodies and song. In 385 and again in 386 the court — moved by Valentinian’s mother Justina, who held to the Arian confession — demanded that a basilica be surrendered for Arian worship. Ambrose refused to yield consecrated ground to what he held a heresy, and his congregation occupied the building rather than let it be taken, holding it through a vigil that lasted day and night while imperial troops stood outside. To keep up the spirits of a frightened, sleepless crowd, antiphonal singing was introduced into the Western church in the manner of the Eastern — the people divided into two choirs answering each other verse by verse through the Psalms and through hymns Ambrose had composed for the purpose. Augustine, who was in Milan in those months, remembered the singing in his Confessions as the moment the custom took root in the West. The basilica was not surrendered. A vigil and a melody had held a building against an empire.

The third was the gravest. In 390 a riot at Thessalonica ended in the lynching of a Roman military commander, and the emperor Theodosius — then the senior ruler of the whole Roman world — answered with a slaughter: thousands of the city’s inhabitants were killed in the hippodrome, gathered as if for the games and cut down. Ambrose, who had already once faced Theodosius down over the affair at Callinicum on the Euphrates — where the emperor had ordered a bishop to rebuild a synagogue a Christian mob had burned, and Ambrose pressed him until he rescinded the order — now wrote to him privately and refused him communion until he should do public penance for the dead. The emperor submitted. Stripped of the imperial insignia, he stood among the penitents in the church at Milan, and was readmitted only after a season of penance. The assertion underneath the gesture was that even the master of the world stood under the moral judgment of the church.

How much weight the episode bears is a matter modern scholarship has reopened. The older ecclesiastical historians made it the founding image of the church calling power to account, and the image was potent enough to be painted, carved, and invoked for more than a thousand years. Neil McLynn’s study of Ambrose recast it as something subtler and more political — the massacre perhaps an escalation of crowd-control that ran past the emperor’s intent before he could recall the order, the penance a settlement arranged between two men who both needed it to succeed, and Ambrose throughout a careful manager of his own appearances. What is beyond dispute is the afterlife: later ages took the scene at Milan as the precedent for the claim that a Christian ruler was a son of the church before he was its lord.

The Greek learning and the conversion of Augustine

His intellectual influence ran along a quieter channel, and it is the one that reached furthest. Ambrose preached a figurative, philosophically inflected reading of Scripture — drawing on the Greek exegetes whose work he read in the original, on Origen above all, on Basil of Caesarea, and behind them on Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish reader of Genesis as allegory — and inflected by the Neoplatonism then circulating among educated Milanese. The books of the Platonists that shaped the city’s intellectual air also shaped its preaching; the bishop who read the opening of Genesis as a layered figure rather than a flat tale was working in the same current as the philosophers who read the visible world as the image of an invisible order. His commentary on the six days of creation, the Hexameron, follows Basil’s work of the same name into Latin while drawing the cosmos toward the soul; his commentary on Luke and his expositions of the Psalms turned the sacred text into a field of correspondences.

It was in these sermons that the young Augustine, arrived in Milan in 384 as a teacher of rhetoric and bound at the time to the Manichees, first heard the Hebrew Bible defended as something other than crude and embarrassing story. He had come to listen for the eloquence and stayed for the matter. Augustine’s Confessions credit those sermons with making Christianity intellectually possible for a man trained to despise it — the figurative reading dissolved the objections that had kept the Scriptures beneath him, and the Platonic books supplied a metaphysics in which a wholly incorporeal God and the reality of evil as privation both made sense. Ambrose baptized him at the Easter vigil of 387. The most consequential theologian of the Latin West was thus, in the order of grace as the Confessions tell it, the convert of a man who had been a provincial governor a dozen years before.

Hymn, chant, and rite

Ambrose did as much as any one figure to fix the shape of Latin worship, and the instrument was the hymn. He composed for congregational singing in a strict, plain meter — iambic dimeter, eight stanzas of four short lines — verse simple enough for an unlettered crowd to learn by ear and carry home, doctrinally exact enough to teach the Nicene faith while it consoled. The form was a weapon as much as a comfort: in a city contested between confessions, a hymn that the whole people could sing in unison pressed the orthodox creed into the memory more durably than any sermon. A morning hymn, Aeterne rerum conditor, and an evening hymn, Deus creator omnium, stand among the small number critics regard as securely his; Iam surgit hora tertia and Veni redemptor gentium are usually counted with them, and a larger body gathered under his name over the centuries. The Benedictine editors of the early modern period, the Maurists, narrowed the canon they would credit to him to about a dozen; the careful scholarship of the hymns specifically separates the few plausibly Ambrose’s from the much larger Ambrosian tradition.

That distinction matters because the bishop’s name became a label for things he did not himself make. A whole body of chant and a distinct liturgical usage — the rite still observed in the archdiocese of Milan — long bore the name “Ambrosian,” gathering authority from his memory rather than authorship from his hand, much as the later Gregorian chant gathered under Gregory the Great. The Ambrosian Rite preserves to this day a Western liturgy not derived from Rome, a living trace of the era when Milan was a capital and its bishop a power in his own right.

Clergy, sacraments, and the ascetic ideal

He wrote extensively, and the writings divide along the lines of his office. For his clergy he composed De officiis ministrorum, On the Duties of the Clergy — modeled openly on Cicero’s De officiis and taking over the old Roman scheme of the virtues and the tension between the honorable and the expedient, but resetting it on biblical foundations of humility, charity, and self-denial. It is the first systematic treatise of Christian ethics, and it survives in a modern critical edition that lays the Latin beside the English. For the newly baptized he wrote De mysteriis and De sacramentis, explaining the rites of initiation. Against the Arians he wrote De fide and De Spiritu Sancto, defending the full divinity of the Son and the Spirit. And across many works he pressed the ascetic life he prized above all — De virginibus and its companions, exalting consecrated virginity as the highest Christian calling and helping seed in the Latin West the monastic ideal that Benedict of Nursia and John Cassian would later institutionalize. So many women took the veil under his preaching that Milanese fathers were said to keep their daughters away from his sermons.

He died at Milan on April 4, 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.

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