Ambrose I GENERAL INTRODUCTION N OR ABOUT THE YEAR A.D. 339 AMBROSE WAS BORN at Augusta Treverorum (Trier), the son of Aurelius Ambrosius, Prefect of Gaul. After the death of his father he was educated at Rome, and about A.D. 365 he and his brother Satyrus obtained legal posts at Sirmium on the staff of the Prefect of Italy. A few years later (c. 370-372) Ambrose was appointed Governor (Consularis) of the province of AemiliaLiguria in northern Italy. It was in this capacity that he was called upon to keep order at the election of a successor to the Arian bishop of Milan, Auxentius, an election which promised to be lively. Much to his consternation, he found himself chosen bishop by general acclamation, begun (it is said) by a child and taken up as an indication from heaven. Ambrose was the son of Christians and was brought up as a Christian, but, in the manner of his time, he had postponed baptism. When, despite his reluctance, the neighbouring bishops and the emperor Valentinian had approved his election, he was baptized (November 24th), ordained successively to the various grades of ministry and consecrated bishop on the 1st December, 373. He died in 397. Notable as a writer and fairly entitled to rank as a doctor of the Church, Ambrose was nevertheless essentially a man of action. A faithful pastor and energetic administrator of his own diocese, he also, as bishop of a capital city, supervised the ecclesiastical affairs of the whole secular diocese of Italy, including Western Illyricum. We find him establishing new sees, consecrating bishops, presiding over great councils (Aquileia, 381, Capua, 391-392), and generally acting as primate of a large and autonomous region. For his respect for the See of Rome, which was real, did not extend to an acceptance of its jurisdiction over his own provinces; and in fact the bishops of Gaul also were at this time tending to refer their problems to the Bishop of Milan and his Council. As Bishop of Milan, Ambrose was in close touch with the emperors, who frequently resided there. During the greater part of his episcopate Milan, not Rome, was the administrative capital of the western empire and the seat of the Court. Some of the outstanding incidents in his relations with the Court are illustrated in this volume-the struggle over the Altar of Victory, the refusal to hand over a church to the Arians of Milan, the embassies to Maximus, the affair of Priscillian, the episodes at Callinicum and Thessalonica with the excommunication of Theodosius. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that Ambrose was in large part responsible for the change from toleration in religion, which was the policy of Valentinian I and, at first, of his son Gratian, to the establishment of orthodox Christianity as the religion of the State, the penalizing of heresy, and the suppression of the pagan cults; though it must not be supposed that so strong and able an emperor as Theodosius was merely a tool of the great ecclesiastic. As a writer Ambrose was concerned above all with edification. He was neither an original thinker of the order of Augustine nor a scholar of the order of Jerome. Many of his writings are really sermons or catechetical instructions put together, perhaps quite hastily, from shorthand reports of what he had said. Of his attractiveness as a preacher and teacher we have the evidence of Augustine. His sermons are marked by an intimate knowledge of the Bible, which he interprets morally and allegorically after the example of Philo and Origen, whose work he knew. It was also upon Greek theologians-Athanasius, Didymus, Basil of Caesarea, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, Epiphanius-that he mainly relied for his dogmatic works. In this respect he was an important link between eastern and western Christianity. The exegetical writings include the Hexaemeron (nine sermons on the six days of creation), works on the stories of Paradise, Cain and Abel, Noah, and the patriarchs from Abraham to Joseph, sermons on several psalms, especially Psalm 119 (118 to him), and a substantial collection of sermons on St. Luke. He did not write the important commentary on Paul's Epistles, now conventionally ascribed to "Ambrosiaster." Another big group contains his ascetic teaching-several books on virginity and widowhood, fasting, temperance, and almsgiving. The dogmatic works are partly controversial, directed for the most part against Arianism, like those On the Faith, On the Holy Spirit, and On the Incarnation, and partly instructions, like those On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments, the latter once more attributed with some confidence to Ambrose. He also wrote On Penance against the rigorist Novatianists. The ninetyone Letters are of great historical interest, and with these may be associated the funeral orations on Valentinian and Theodosius, together with the more personal lament over his brother Satyrus. There remains, among the major works, the De Officiis Ministrorum, worked up from sermons preached to his own clergy and nominally a treatise on the clerical life, but in fact the first substantial manual of Christian ethics. Its scheme is taken from Cicero's De Officiis, and its moral concepts are Stoic in pattern; but all is transformed by his Christian faith. Ambrose taught a rounded "catholic" Christianity (one notices how often fides has to be translated "the faith"), his works as a whole contributing largely to the mediaeval catholicism of the West. The Bible is to him the fundamental authority for all life and thought, but, given the method of "spiritual". exegesis which reads meanings into the text, biblical authority tends to take second place to tradition and the accepted doctrines of the Church. "The Church to teach, the Bible to prove." Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy has been established, no problems are raised about the nature and authority of the Church and its ministry, the sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion are inexplicable mysteries, miracles of grace. Ambrose's doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin is well on the way to Augustine's, his eucharistic teaching is not far from transubstantiation, though it is not based on a precise philosophy, and he teaches purgatorial fire, prayer for the dead and the invocation of saints. There is much legalism, much appeal to the concepts of merit and reward; and the double moral standard of precepts and counsels is accepted. Indeed, there is a serious danger of a religion of works. At the same time, however inconsistently in theory, he has a profound sense of divine grace, and a vein of mysticism which sees the essence of religion in the personal union of the faithful soul with its Saviour. In the history of liturgy the name of Ambrose is attached to much more than can be safely attributed to him. He did, it seems, introduce into the West the eastern practice of antiphonal chanting by the congregation, and he did write some hymns, though perhaps only a dozen or so of the many subsequently believed to be his. The unquestioned hymns are Aeterne 12-E.L.T. |