Ambrose

Boniface Ramsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134815043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan from 374 to 397, was one of the most important figures of the fourth century Roman empire. This volume explores the enormous impact of Ambrose on Western civilization, and examines the complexity of his ideas and influence; as a poet, ascetic, mystic and politician. Ambrose combines an up-to-date account of his life and work, with translations of key writings. Ramsey's volume presents a comprehensive and accessible insight into a relatively unexplored persona and argues that Ambrose has influenced the Western world in ways as yet unrealized.

1

INTRODUCTION

I

The period of time that concerns us in this book, at least to the degree that it provided the setting for the life and work of Ambrose of Milan, is the final quarter of the fourth century, when, as Bishop of Milan, Ambrose played a dominant role in Western Christianity. Thanks in large part to Ambrose and how he approached the issues that he faced, it was a time of decisive importance for the West. But it was, quite apart from Ambrose, a time with its own characteristics, and if we are to make any sense of Ambrose we must first try to appreciate some of those characteristics. They helped to shape him, and he reflected them.

Those who have read Ambrose in our own day and have had the opportunity to contrast him with his contemporaries might well agree that he is one of the Fathers of the Church—as the earliest non-scriptural Christian writers and preachers are conventionally known—who are the most approachable by us, due to his generally straightforward manner and to the practical rather than speculative bent of his thinking. Still, he is very different from us, and he is so very much because his times were different.

Until perhaps a few years ago we might have said that the chief difference between Ambrose’s times and ours consisted in the fact that religion was taken seriously then and is taken less so now. But we have learned from recent experience what we should have known all along, namely, that in most places religion is almost always taken quite seriously indeed and that its powers for good and for ill should never be underestimated. The difference, then, really lies more in the way religion was expressed in Christian antiquity.

For example, whether practiced or not, religious toleration, or respect for the other person’s religious point of view, whatever it might be, within certain commonly accepted limits, is a much endorsed value today. But it was not so in Christian antiquity, where passionate rejection of an opposing opinion was expected and was the norm. This was certainly true in Ambrose’s case, and we can see it full-blown in the letters that he wrote concerning the possible reestablishment of the Altar of Victory in the Roman Senate. We are at some remove here from the pleas for toleration and fair treatment made by Christians on their own behalf in the second century, when they were a persecuted minority. Toleration and respect, we might say, were desirable if one were powerless; otherwise, not.

This intolerance, or passionate rejection of an opposing point of view, on the part of Christians (to say nothing here of Jews and pagans), can almost certainly be related to the immense self-confidenceof the early Christian community. A reading of ancient Christian literature, starting with the New Testament, reveals very little if any self-doubt (which of course must be distinguished sharply from an awareness of sinfulness), even in time of persecution. This may be linked to the dearth of self-analysis that seems to be typical of early Christianity’s first three centuries; active introspection is not strongly evident until roughly the time with which this book deals, although there are passages from Origen in the first half of the third century that suggest otherwise. It was Augustine above all, many would say, who introduced self-reflection to the Church in the West, while the monastic movement would do somewhat the same for the East. Such self-confidence as we have spoken of is perhaps hardly surprising in a religion that was still in its beginnings. How would it have survived the trials of hostility and suspicion had it not been sure of itself? Of this self-assured attitude one could not find a more apt representative than Ambrose. The decisions that he made and the positions that he took—some of them founded on reasoning that thoughtful persons today might consider rather dubious—were embraced with the firmness that is the evident sign of a clear conscience. And in many of the most famous of these decisions, with a fearlessness born of self-confidence rather than of any certitude that he would not suffer on account of them, he set himself against no less a rival than the imperial authorities. The age of self-assurance may have been in its evening in Ambrose’s day, but the quality itself demarcates that day from our own at least as radically as anything else does.

Another difference worth mentioning in the area of religion has to do with the world of the invisible. To be religious almost necessarily means believing in an invisible realm, the realm of God and also of spirits and various ‘influences.’ In Christian (as in Jewish and pagan) antiquity, the invisible realm, rather than being a pallid and abstract reality, as it is for many moderns, was always just beneath the surfaces and appearances of things. It was intensely and even throbbingly present in the unseen form of angels and demons and the divine power itself. The monastic literature of the Egyptian desert is full to the point of extravagance of this intangible but potent world. We are also made somewhat aware of it, in a more restrained and theological fashion, in passages like the following from the treatise On the Mysteries. You saw there the levite [i.e., the deacon],’ Ambrose tells those who have just been baptized, as he gives a brief account of the ministers of baptism:

.You saw the priest, you saw the high priest [i.e., the bishop]. Consider not their bodily forms but the grace of their ministries…. You must think of him [i.e., the bishop] in terms not of his outward appearance but of his office.

(2.6)

And again, as he explains the grace of the water of baptism:

You ought not, then, to believe solely with the eyes of your body. What is invisible is more completely seen, because the other is temporal, whereas this is eternal. What is not grasped by the eyes but perceived by the spirit and the mind is more completely viewed.

(3.15)

Christians today would doubtless acknowledge the truth of what Ambrose says here, but they would probably not express it in precisely the same manner or give it the same emphasis.

The heightened awareness of the presence of spiritual beings and forces that we have alluded to contributed to facilitating a more ready belief in the ability and indeed the willingness of those beings and forces to cross over the very slender boundary between their world and ours in ways that would go beyond the normal workings of grace and sacramental dispensation of which Ambrose speaks in On the Mysteries. It would facilitate, in other words, a belief in miracles and divine and demonic interventions. A belief in miracles and supernatural interventions is, to be sure, part and parcel of modern Christianity as well. The difference between modern and ancient Christianity in this matter, however, lies in the openness to accepting such things. In antiquity that openness seems to have been far wider and far more evident among all classes, including the intelligentsia, than it is today Along these lines one may cite the remarkable happenings that Paulinus of Milan sees fit to recount in his life of Ambrose. It is true that Paulinus is conscious that his work may be met with some disbelief, and hence he insists on his veracity (cf.2). But the very fact that he narrates so many strange occurrences at all is a testimony to what he presumes that his readership is capable of ingesting.

Yet another difference between our age and that of Ambrose has to do with the treatment of Scripture. Modern biblical scholarship has helped us to place the Scriptures in the settings in which they were produced and to have a more accurate understanding of these settings. Antiquity had its own kind of biblical scholarship, with as much right to be called scientific, according to the norms that it established for itself and the seriousness with which they were applied, as does its modern and far-removed descendant. Ancient exegetes were interested in the original biblical contexts as well, and in the human authors’ conscious intentions—what those authors meant to say when they said such and such a thing. But they were generally more interested in what they considered to be the deeper or spiritual meaning of a given text, the meaning that lay below the surface and that might have been hidden from the human author himself. This deeper, spiritual meaning may usually be referred to as allegory, and the stress that the ancients laid upon it is complementary to the stress that they laid upon the invisible, spiritual world. Ambrose was an accomplished practitioner of allegory, and the manner in which he deals with the Song of Songs in his treatises On Virgins and On the Mysteries is illustrative of this. For him this book of the Bible is not about what it seems to be about—namely, the intimacy between two human lovers—but, rather, concerns the relationship between Christ and a particular human soul or between Christ and the Church, which many modern exegetes might allow to be merely a secondary meaning.

The contrast between the seen and the unseen, between the manifest and the concealed, brings to mind yet another duality— that between what contemporary thinkers have been accustomed to refer to as the secular and the sacred. Although in ancient times religion and other aspects of human life may have been conceptually distinct, in practice they were rarely separable. Some ancient Greeks and Romans may have been sceptical about their pagan gods, and some may have even ceased to believe in them, but the majority could not have imagined public or private life without them and the monuments and ceremonies associated with them. The presence of the Altar of Victory in the Roman Senate, and the official acts connected with it, were but a small example of the omnipresence of the sacred and of, from a modern perspective, its virtual indistinguishability from what we think of as secular life. The task that lay before the Christian leadership was not to drive a wedge between these two elements, since separating them would have been as unheard of to the Christians as to the pagans, but instead to replace one form of the sacred with another. The fourth century was above all the moment when this replacement was being orchestrated, and the role that Ambrose played in the process was crucial.

Under the heading of the religious character of the late fourth century and its difference from modern times a few words ought to be said about the function of the bishop. In antiquity the bishop was supreme in his see; although he was in communion with other bishops world-wide, he was accountable, except in fairly unusual circumstances, to no one else, including the Bishop of Rome. He was elected by the clergy of the see that he would govern (we are told in Ambrose’s case that the laity also took a significant part, which was not uncommon; the laity’s acceptance of the clergy’s candidate was at any rate an important factor), and his overwhelmingly primary responsibility was to care for the well-being of his flock. It is true that Ambrose himself was occasionally absent from Milan and was sometimes occupied with imperial affairs, but none of that would have caused a substantial shift in his focus. The bishops of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian era, from 312 on, may have suffered under heavy administrative burdens laid upon them by imperial legislation, but the literature of the time emphasizes that they considered their pastoral duties to be of overridingimportance. They preached and celebrated the eucharist several times a week, if not on a daily basis. They also busied themselves with the needs of the poor, of widows and orphans, of virgins, of their own clergy (of whom they seem to have had relatively few in comparison to many modern bishops). But the ancient texts suggest that, despite their numerous responsibilities and the fact that they enjoyed an exalted social status, at least if they exercised their functions in important cities, most bishops were remarkably accessible to the people: they replied to letters personally, practiced hospitality and generally made themselves available. A bishop like Ambrose, then, may have had a far-reaching reputation even in his own lifetime, but at bottom he was, as were his confrères in the episcopate, primarily a local personage.

This local quality is accentuated by the fact that local customs rather than universal rules were observed with regard to different religious activities. In a letter to a certain Januarius,Augustine mentions several such variations based on custom: in some places there is a fast on Saturday, in others not; in some places communion is received every day, in others not; in some places the eucharist is offered every day, in others only on Saturday and Sunday, and in still others on Sunday alone (cf.Letter 54.2). We know that even within the celebration of the liturgy there were variations from place to place. Ambrose provides us with a notable example of one when he tells us in his treatise On the Sacraments (3.1.4; cf. On the Mysteries 6.31–33) that the Milanese baptismal ceremony included .a footwashing; this unusual custom seems not to have existed outside Milan. Ambrose was well aware of such differences and evidently quite untroubled by them, for in the same letter to Januarius, Augustine cites Ambrose’s own words to his mother Monica, in which he explained to her that he adapted himself to whatever customs prevailed wherever he happened to be, and encouraged her to do the same.

Were we not familiar with the history of the early Church we might somehow be under the impression that it was a golden age of religious orthodoxy. It was, rather, a golden age of religious ferment and controversy such as—it could well be argued—would not be seen again until the Reformation, more than a millennium later. Religious issues, particularly in the fourth century, were of consuming interest, or at least of engrossing curiosity, to much of the population. Orthodoxy had its best-known representatives among the Fathers, although they themselves often had to grope in the dark and even, in some cases, embraced positions that the Church of later times would reject.

When Ambrose was ordained to the episcopacy in Milan, he succeeded an Arian bishop. Arianism—a term that applies to a wide range of sometimes mutually contradictory teachings—denied the full divinity of the second person of the Trinity and had convulsed the Church for much of the fourth century. By Ambrose’s day it was in slow decline but far from having breathed its last: Ambrose’s struggles with it occupied his energies for more than half of his term as bishop. He was also acquainted with and wrote against the views of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who negated the full humanity of Christ by refusing to accept his human soul and mind for the reason that these would have made him susceptible to sin. The Donatists, who claimed exclusive legitimacy for their church by insisting that it alone was morally pure, had divided a North Africa only too drawn to moral extremism of this sort; they were at the height of their success during Ambrose’s episcopate. From the harsh imperial legislation enacted against it and from the treatises of Augustine we have an idea how influential the dualistic tenets of Manicheanism were and what a threat they were seen to be. Not long after Ambrose’s death Pelagianism would burst upon the scene, with its doctrine of human perfectibility; it would even cite Ambrose in its own defense, which Augustine, Pelagius’ chief adversary, pointed out as an absurdity (cf. On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin 1.43.47–
50.55). Meanwhile various ascetical movements of suspect leanings— Pris-cillianism is one of them whose name has come down to us— enjoyed a vogue in certain circles. On the other side of the spectrum the monk Jovinian, against whom Jerome directed an especially excessive treatise, questioned the value of ascetical practices, particularly virginity. The writings of the great Alexandrian theologian Origen, who had died c. 253, had long proven to be a two-edged sword: they contained countless brilliant insights, but several of them were exceedingly problematic as well. The struggle over Ori-gen’s legacy would disrupt the Church more than ever before in the waning years of the fourth century.

Nor, when speaking of religious controversy during this period, must one forget Judaism and paganism. Judaism, it appears now, was probably more attractive to many early Christians than scholars had previously realized, which helps to explain some of the virulence of the attacks on it by the Fathers. Paganism, for its part, may have become less appealing for various reasons, but it was not in the nature of things, or of human beings, that it would ever disappear entirely. In Symmachus, who fought unsuccessfully against Ambrose to restore the Altar of Victory to the Roman Senate, it found one of its most talented spokesmen. Finally, as aspects of paganism, there were astrology, magic and simple superstition, beneath which lay the powerful ancient inclination to fatalism.

In the face of all these rivals orthodox Christianity was not an impassive object. In reacting to them it defined itself and assumed more and more of the contours that we recognize today. Against the Arians it spelled out its teaching not only on the second but also on the third person of the Trinity. (Ambrose’s treatise On the Holy Spirit bears witness to this concern.) Donatism was the occasion for developing a theology of the Church and the sacraments. The reaction to Apollinarianism was responsible for further understanding Christ’s human nature. Paganism helped the Church to elaborate its relationship with the state.

Contributing to the ferment characteristic of the time was monasticism. Still a very young phenomenon in the last quarter of the fourth century, it was introducing to the Christian world a new way of living the gospel message on the fringes of society, and it contained within itself the seeds of both religious renewal and, less happily, religious élitism. At this time, too, the function of the Virgin Mary, of the saints and of relics (Ambrose himself was a notable promoter of the cult of the Virgin as well as a discoverer of the relics of long-dead martyrs) was becoming an issue. The role of the priest in the Church was gradually changing: the priesthood was now, after three centuries, starting to emerge from under the long shadow of the episcopate. The Bishop of Rome, on the other hand, was just beginning to claim for himself the privileges and powers that a later age would spontaneously and unquestioningly associate with the papacy. Clearly this was a time of intense and complex religious activity rather than merely of sedate religious orthodoxy.

One place where this activity was particularly evident was in the sphere of the ascetical life, which has just been alluded to under the rubric of monasticism. By the last quarter of the fourth century monasticism, whose origins in the shape that we know can be traced to Egypt in the first quarter of the same century, had made a profound impression on the East in general and on a number of influential eastern bishops in particular, among them Athanasius and Basil the Great. It was in the process of taking root in the West, wit...