Saint Ambrose of MilanBishop, Doctor, and Shepherd of an Empire (c. 339–397)

I.A Shepherd for a Turning Age

Few figures of the early Church stand so squarely at the crossroads of history as Saint Ambrose of Milan. He was born into the governing class of the late Roman Empire and trained for a career in law and administration. Then a crowd acclaimed him bishop before he had even been baptized. For twenty-three years he was the shepherd of one of the most important cities in the Western world. In that time he counseled and confronted emperors. He defended the faith of Nicaea against a powerful Arian party at the imperial court. He reshaped the worship of the Latin Church with hymns that are still sung today, and he poured out the treasures of his church to ransom captives. Perhaps most consequential of all, he preached the sermons that helped draw a restless African professor of rhetoric named Augustine back to the Catholic faith.

Ambrose is honored as one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church, alongside Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Saint Gregory the Great. Yet he is in many ways the least known of the four. Jerome has his Vulgate, Augustine his Confessions and City of God, Gregory his reforms and the chant that bears his name. Ambrose's legacy is harder to summarize, because it is woven so deeply into the fabric of Western Christianity. It lives on in the way the Church understands its relationship to secular power, in the rhythm of its morning and evening prayer, in its teaching on the sacraments, and in its care for the poor. To read his life is to watch the Church of the catacombs become the Church of the cathedrals. It is also to see a holy man trying, with all his gifts and all his limitations, to keep that Church faithful to Christ through the change.

This essay traces Ambrose's life from his cradle in the imperial city of Trier to his deathbed in Milan on Holy Saturday of the year 397. It draws on the biography written by his secretary, the deacon Paulinus, and on the vivid memories of Saint Augustine in the Confessions. Above all it draws on Ambrose's own sermons, letters, treatises, and hymns. Along the way we will pause to consider what this fourth-century bishop still has to teach the Church, and each of us, today.

II.A Child of the Imperial Household

Ambrose was born around the year 339 in Augusta Treverorum, the city we now call Trier, on the Moselle River in western Germany. In the fourth century Trier was no provincial backwater. It was one of the capitals of the Roman Empire, a residence of emperors, and the administrative heart of the vast prefecture of the Gauls, which stretched from Britain to Spain. His father, also named Ambrose (Aurelius Ambrosius), held high office there. Tradition, which most biographers follow, identifies him as the praetorian prefect of the Gauls, one of the most powerful civil officials in the Western Empire.

The family was Christian and noble, with deep roots in the city of Rome. Ambrose was the youngest of three children. His elder sister, Marcellina, would become a consecrated virgin and his lifelong confidante. His brother, Uranius Satyrus, would follow him into public life and later manage the practical affairs of his household when Ambrose became bishop. The family even counted a martyr among its forebears. Ambrose later wrote with evident pride of Saint Soteris, a virgin of his family who had suffered for Christ in an earlier persecution, enduring blows without a cry before she gave her life.

Paulinus, Ambrose's first biographer, preserves a charming story from these earliest days. The infant lay asleep in his cradle in the courtyard of the official residence, his mouth open, when a swarm of bees suddenly came down and covered his face, passing in and out of his mouth. The nurse made to drive them away. The father, who was walking nearby with the child's mother and sister, stopped her, because he wanted to see how the strange event would end. After a while the swarm rose into the air and flew so high that it vanished from sight. Alarmed and amazed, the father is said to have exclaimed: “If this little one lives, he will be something great.” (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 3)

To ancient readers the meaning was obvious. Legend told that a swarm had settled in the same way on the lips of the infant Plato, foretelling the sweetness of his words. The honeyed swarm became Ambrose's emblem. To this day he is portrayed with a beehive at his side, and he is honored as the patron of beekeepers and candle-makers, the people who work with the wax and honey of the hive. The story perhaps says less about natural history than about how his contemporaries remembered him: as a man whose speech was sweet, nourishing, and persuasive, and whose words, like honey, preserved what they touched.

While Ambrose was still a boy his father died, and his mother brought the family to Rome. There the household lived in modest dignity, close to the Church and its clergy. Rome in the mid-fourth century was still overwhelmingly a city of the old gods in its public life. Its Senate was dominated by great pagan families who guarded the ancestral rites. Yet its Christian community was large and growing, and the bishop of Rome was an increasingly prominent figure. The young Ambrose grew up between these two worlds and learned to move easily in both.

Around the year 353 his sister Marcellina received the veil of a consecrated virgin from Pope Liberius in the Basilica of Saint Peter, on a feast of the Lord's Nativity. Decades later Ambrose set down the substance of the pope's sermon on that occasion in his treatise On Virgins, which he dedicated to her. Paulinus records a revealing domestic scene from those years. The boy saw the women of the household kiss the hands of the bishops and clergy who visited. He would then hold out his own right hand to his sister and the others, playfully insisting that they kiss it too, since he too would one day be a bishop. Marcellina gently rebuked him as a child who did not know what he was saying. (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 4)

Ambrose received the finest education Rome could offer a young man of his class. He studied grammar and literature, rhetoric, and law, and he gained a thorough command of Greek. That skill was already growing rare in the Latin West, and it would prove decisive for his later work as a theologian. He knew his Virgil and his Cicero intimately, and their cadences echo through everything he later wrote. In time he would read Plato, Plotinus, Philo of Alexandria, and Origen in their own language. Few Western bishops of his age could say the same.

III.The Making of a Roman Magistrate

Having completed his studies, Ambrose followed the path laid out for the sons of the senatorial aristocracy. With his brother Satyrus he practiced as an advocate in the court of the praetorian prefect at Sirmium, near the modern Serbian town of Sremska Mitrovica, then the capital of the Illyrian provinces. His eloquence brought him to the attention of Sextus Petronius Probus. Probus was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men of the age, a Christian aristocrat who held the prefecture of Italy, Illyricum, and Africa, and he took Ambrose into his council of advisers.

Around the year 370 (scholars differ by a year or two), Probus secured for him the governorship of the province of Aemilia-Liguria in northern Italy, with the rank of consularis. The appointment was a weighty one. The governor's seat was at Milan (Mediolanum), which had become the principal residence of the Western emperors because it lay closer than Rome to the threatened frontiers on the Rhine and the Danube. As governor, Ambrose was responsible for justice, public order, and the collection of taxes across a wide and prosperous region. When he set out, Probus gave him a parting instruction that later generations would read as an unconscious prophecy:

By every account he governed well. He was fair in judgment and approachable, and he was respected even by those who disagreed with him. Yet for all his public standing he was still only a catechumen. Like many Christians of his class in that age, Ambrose had enrolled among those preparing for baptism but put off the sacrament itself. The practice was common in the fourth century. It was born partly of reverence and partly of the fear that sins committed after baptism would be harder to forgive. It was a choice that would soon place him in an extraordinary position.

The Church of Milan that Ambrose came to know as governor was a divided one. Nearly twenty years earlier, in 355, the emperor Constantius II had sent the city's Nicene bishop, Dionysius, into exile in the East. Constantius favored the opponents of the Council of Nicaea, and he installed in Dionysius's place a Cappadocian named Auxentius. Auxentius held what historians now call the “Homoian” position: the Son, he said, is “like” the Father, but he refused the Nicene confession that the Son is “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father. Western councils condemned him again and again. Yet Auxentius held the see for nearly two decades, protected by an imperial policy of leaving bishops in place. Milan's Christians had learned to live with a quiet but bitter division, and the governor knew it.

IV.“Ambrose for Bishop!” The Election of 374

When Auxentius died in 374, the city erupted. Both parties were determined to see their own candidate elected: the Homoians who had followed Auxentius, and the Catholics who held to Nicaea. The assembly that gathered in the cathedral to choose a successor threatened to become a riot. As governor, it fell to Ambrose to keep the peace. He went to the church and addressed the crowd, urging calm and an orderly election, as a magistrate should.

Then, as Paulinus tells it, a child's voice rang out from the crowd: “Ambrosium episcopum!”, “Ambrose bishop!” The whole assembly took up the cry, Arian and Catholic alike, and what a moment before had been a quarrel became a unanimous acclamation. Whether the voice truly belonged to a child or simply to a quick-witted member of the congregation, the result was the same. The people had found a man both parties could trust, precisely because he belonged to neither.

Ambrose wanted nothing to do with it. With a candor that has puzzled readers ever since, Paulinus describes a series of stratagems by which the governor tried to make himself unacceptable. Against his usual custom he ordered prisoners to be put to the question in public. He announced his intention to withdraw into the life of a philosopher. He even, it is said, invited women of ill repute into his house, all to persuade the people that he was unworthy of the office. Each time the crowd only cried out the more loudly: “Your sin be upon us!” (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 7–8)

At last he fled by night, meaning to make for the city of Pavia (Ticinum). But, so the story goes, he lost his way in the dark. At dawn he found himself once more before the gates of Milan, at the gate called the Roman Gate. He was placed under guard, slipped away again, and hid on the country estate of a friend, the senator Leontius. Meanwhile a report had gone to the emperor Valentinian I. The emperor was delighted that a judge he had appointed should be sought out for the priesthood, and he gave his consent. When Leontius learned of the imperial decision, he surrendered his guest.

Ambrose now bowed to what he had come to recognize as the will of God. He asked only one thing: that he be baptized by a Catholic bishop, for he was wary of the Arians. He was baptized and passed swiftly through the ministries of the Church, and on the eighth day after his baptism he was consecrated bishop of Milan. That day is traditionally dated 7 December 374, and it remains his feast day in the Church's calendar to this day. He was about thirty-five years old.

The speed of it all troubled some. The Council of Nicaea had forbidden the ordination of the newly baptized, and Ambrose himself never pretended that his preparation had been adequate. Years later, in the opening pages of his treatise on the duties of the clergy, he confessed it with disarming humility:

I was snatched into the priesthood from the judgment seat and the insignia of office, and I began to teach you what I had not yet learned myself. So it came about that I began to teach before I began to learn. I must therefore learn and teach at the same time, since I had no leisure to learn beforehand.

V.A Bishop Learns His Faith

Ambrose's first acts as bishop announced the kind of shepherd he meant to be. He gave his gold and silver to the Church and to the poor. He signed over his landed estates to the Church, keeping back only the income needed to support his sister Marcellina. (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 38) Satyrus gave up his own career to manage the household's affairs, so that his brother could devote himself entirely to prayer, study, and the care of souls.

Then he set himself to study. He was guided by Simplician, an older and deeply learned priest who had known Rome's intellectual world and had played a part in the celebrated conversion of the Roman philosopher Marius Victorinus. Under him Ambrose plunged into the Scriptures and into the great theologians of the Greek East. He read Origen, whose allegorical method of interpretation shaped his preaching for the rest of his life. He also read Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher whose commentaries on the books of Moses he borrowed from freely, along with Athanasius, Didymus the Blind, Cyril of Jerusalem, and above all Basil of Caesarea. His knowledge of Greek made him one of the chief channels through which the theology of the East flowed into the Latin West.

Basil the Great himself wrote from Cappadocia to greet the new bishop. He marveled that God had called a man from the seat of the world's judges to the chair of the apostles. Ambrose had asked for the return of the relics of Dionysius, the exiled Nicene bishop of Milan who had died far from home, and Basil arranged to send them back. It was a fitting beginning: the healing of an old wound in the Church of Milan, made with the help of the East.

His working day soon became legendary. Saint Augustine, who came to know the bishop a decade later, remembered how Ambrose was perpetually surrounded by crowds of people bringing him their business and their troubles. In the rare moments when he was alone, he refreshed his body with food or his mind with reading. Augustine recorded one detail with a kind of wonder:

When he read, his eyes ran over the page and his heart searched out its meaning, but his voice and tongue were at rest. Often when we came to him (for no one was forbidden to enter, and it was not his custom to have visitors announced), we would find him reading like this, in silence, and never otherwise.

This passage was once taken as proof that silent reading was almost unknown in the ancient world. Scholars now think it was more common than that. Still, Augustine's account gives us an unforgettable picture: the busiest man in Milan, absorbed in a book, reluctant to be disturbed, and so open to all comers that his door was never shut.

Above all, Ambrose preached. He preached every Sunday and on the feasts of the martyrs, and in Lent he often preached every day as he prepared candidates for baptism. Most of the books that bear his name began life as sermons, later polished for publication. His style is rich, musical, and saturated with Scripture. He moves easily from the literal sense of a passage to its moral lesson and then to its mystical meaning in Christ and the Church. A congregation that listened to him for years received what amounted to a complete education in the faith.

VI.Contending for the Faith of Nicaea

The battles of Ambrose's episcopate only make sense against the background of the controversy that had divided the Church for half a century. Around the year 318, Arius, a priest of Alexandria, began to teach that the Son of God, though exalted above all creatures, was himself a creature: “There was when he was not.” The Council of Nicaea in 325 rejected this teaching. It confessed the Son to be “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.”

The council's victory was far from final. Under the sons of Constantine, a succession of imperial councils promoted compromise formulas designed to keep the peace by blurring the question. The so-called Homoian creed said only that the Son is “like the Father, according to the Scriptures,” and it forbade all talk of “substance.” It was imposed on the bishops gathered at Ariminum (Rimini) and Seleucia in 359. Saint Jerome later summed up the result in a famous line: “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.”

By Ambrose's day the tide had begun to turn, but the struggle was far from over. In the Latin-speaking West, the Homoians remained strong in the Danubian provinces of Illyricum. They also enjoyed the patronage of the Gothic soldiers who served in growing numbers in the imperial army, for the Goths had received Christianity in its Homoian form through the missionary bishop Ulfilas. Milan itself still had a substantial Homoian community after twenty years under Auxentius.

Ambrose's friendship with the young emperor Gratian (who reigned 367–383), son of Valentinian I, gave him an extraordinary platform. Around 378 Gratian was preparing to march east to help his uncle Valens against the Goths, and he asked the bishop of Milan for a written account of the faith. Ambrose answered with the first two books of On the Faith (De fide), later expanded to five, a sustained defense of the full divinity of the Son. In 381 he followed it with On the Holy Spirit. Drawing heavily on Basil, Didymus, and Athanasius, he affirmed that the Spirit, too, is truly God, worthy of the same worship and glory as the Father and the Son.

That same year, 381, the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed and expanded the Nicene Creed in the East. In the West, Ambrose was the dominant voice at a council of bishops held at Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic. Two Illyrian bishops were examined there on their faith: Palladius of Ratiaria and Secundianus of Singidunum, the modern Belgrade. When they would not confess the Son to be truly and eternally God, they were deposed. The minutes of the council survive. They show Ambrose at his most formidable: lawyerly, insistent, and utterly unwilling to allow ambiguity on the central question of who Christ is.

For Ambrose this was never an abstract quarrel about words. If Christ is not truly God, then God has not truly come among us, and humanity has not truly been redeemed. His hymns, sermons, and treatises return again and again to this conviction. The Son who was born of Mary, who wept at the tomb of Lazarus, and who hung upon the Cross is the eternal Word, equal to the Father in glory. The faith of Nicaea was, for him, simply the faith of the Gospel.

VII.Gold for the Captives: The Bishop and the Poor

On 9 August 378, near Adrianople in Thrace, the Roman army of the East was annihilated by the Goths. The emperor Valens was killed. In the chaos that followed, Gothic bands ranged across the Balkans and carried off thousands of captives. Families were torn apart, and men, women, and children were held for ransom or sold into slavery.

Ambrose responded with a decision that scandalized his opponents. He ordered the sacred vessels of the Church, chalices and plates of gold and silver, to be broken up and melted down, and he used the metal to ransom prisoners. The Arian party at court accused him of sacrilege. A decade later, in his treatise on the duties of the clergy, he gave his answer. It has become one of the classic statements of Christian charity:

The Church has gold, not to store it up, but to lay it out and to bring help in time of need. What need is there to guard what does no good? Will not the Lord say to us: “Why did you let so many of the needy die of hunger? You had gold; you should have provided food. Why were so many captives carried off and never ransomed?” It is better to preserve living vessels than vessels of metal. The sacraments do not require gold.

The gesture was not an isolated one. Ambrose's preaching on wealth and poverty ranks among the most searching in all Christian literature. His sermon On Naboth is built around the story of King Ahab, who seized the vineyard of a poor man and had him killed (1 Kings 21). In it Ambrose insists that the earth was created as the common possession of all, rich and poor alike. He borrows from Basil a heart-rending scene of a destitute father forced to decide which of his children to sell to pay his debts. And he turns on the rich with a sentence that the Church has quoted ever since:

In On Tobias he condemned the lending of money at crushing interest to the desperate. In On Elijah and Fasting he set the luxury of the banquet halls beside the hunger at their doors. These were not the words of a revolutionary. Ambrose accepted the social order of his time. But they were the words of a pastor who would not let his flock forget that every possession is held in trust from God, and that the poor have a claim upon it.

He practiced what he preached. He interceded with emperors and magistrates for condemned prisoners, and he sheltered the accused in his churches. His house was open to anyone who came. Paulinus adds a tender detail about his ministry to penitents. Whenever anyone confessed their sins to him, Ambrose wept so freely that he moved the sinner to tears as well. He never revealed to anyone the sins entrusted to him, but spoke of them to God alone, interceding for the penitent. (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 39)

VIII.The Altar of Victory

In the Senate House at Rome stood an altar and a statue of the goddess Victory. The emperor Augustus had placed them there after his triumph at Actium, and for four centuries senators had offered incense on the altar before their deliberations. Constantius II removed it in 357. Julian, the last pagan emperor, restored it. In 382 Gratian removed it again, and at the same time he cut off the public funds that had supported the pagan priesthoods and the Vestal Virgins.

In 383 Gratian was murdered during the rebellion of the usurper Magnus Maximus. The next year, with the twelve-year-old Valentinian II on the throne at Milan, the pagan senators saw their opportunity. Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, prefect of the city of Rome and one of the most cultivated men of his age, sent the young emperor a formal petition for the altar's restoration: his celebrated Third Relation. It is a dignified and moving document. It appeals to tradition, to the gratitude Rome owed the gods who had made her great, and to religious tolerance. Its most famous line pleads that so great a mystery as the divine cannot be reached by one road alone.

Ambrose learned of the petition and wrote at once to the young emperor. He demanded a copy and warned Valentinian that, as a Christian, he could not lend his authority to the pagan cult. His second letter answers Symmachus point by point. In one memorable passage he imagines Rome herself replying to her champion. Symmachus had pictured Rome as an aged mother clinging to the customs of her youth. Ambrose's Rome answers that it is no shame to pass on to better things:

He turned Symmachus's appeal to fairness around. The Church, he pointed out, had grown not through imperial subsidies but through poverty and the blood of martyrs. Christians asked nothing from the treasury for their own worship, so why should the state pay for the sacrifices of others? Valentinian, guided by Ambrose, rejected the petition.

Modern readers may feel some sympathy for Symmachus, whose plea for the many roads to the divine sounds familiar to contemporary ears and is often quoted today. Ambrose's response came from his conviction that a Christian ruler could not, without betraying his own faith, give public honor to other gods. Worth noting too is what he did not demand: no pagan was to be forced to believe, and the senators remained free to worship as they chose in private. The debate between the two men remains one of the great set pieces in the passage from the pagan to the Christian world. And history added an irony neither man could have foreseen. That same year Symmachus, as prefect of Rome, recommended a promising young African teacher for the post of court rhetorician at Milan. The young man's name was Augustine.

IX.The Basilica Besieged

The gravest crisis of Ambrose's episcopate came from inside the imperial palace. Justina, widow of Valentinian I and mother of the young Valentinian II, was a committed Homoian, and with Gratian dead she became the dominant influence at the court in Milan. Around her gathered a Homoian community that included many officers of the Gothic regiments, and they had a bishop of their own. He was Mercurinus, from the Danubian province of Lower Moesia, who had taken the name Auxentius, perhaps deliberately recalling Ambrose's Arian predecessor.

As Easter approached, the court demanded that one of the city's churches be handed over for Homoian worship: first the Portian Basilica outside the walls, then the New Basilica inside the city. Ambrose refused. He told the imperial officers that a bishop could not hand over a temple of God. In January 386 the court issued a law granting freedom of assembly to those who held the faith of the Council of Ariminum, and threatening with death anyone who disturbed them. The measure was aimed squarely at Ambrose.

He was summoned to debate Auxentius before the emperor, with lay judges to decide between them. He declined, in a letter to Valentinian that is a landmark in the history of the relations between Church and state. In matters of faith, he wrote, it is the custom for bishops to judge Christian emperors, not for emperors to judge bishops. When he was ordered to leave the city, he went to the church instead and stayed there.

During Holy Week the basilica was surrounded by soldiers. Inside, the bishop and his people kept vigil for days and nights together. In the sermon he preached during the siege, known as the sermon Against Auxentius, Ambrose set out principles that would echo through the next fifteen centuries of European history:

Tribute belongs to Caesar; we do not deny it. The Church belongs to God; it must certainly not be handed over to Caesar. … For the emperor is within the Church, not above the Church. … Palaces belong to the emperor, churches to the bishop.

He insisted just as firmly on what he would not do. He would not call the people to arms or meet force with force. His only weapons, he said, were those of a priest:

It was during those tense days and nights that Ambrose introduced a practice that would transform the worship of the Western Church. To keep up the spirits of his people, he taught them to sing hymns and psalms in the manner of the Eastern churches, with two choirs answering one another. Augustine was in Milan at the time, and his mother Monica was among the faithful keeping vigil in the church. He later recorded that the custom began then “lest the people waste away with weariness and grief,” and that it had since spread to nearly every congregation in the world. (Augustine, Confessions IX.7.15)

Ambrose's opponents complained that he had bewitched the people with his songs. He did not deny it. “They say the people are led astray by the charms of my hymns. I certainly do not deny it,” he told his congregation. What, he asked, could be more powerful than the confession of the Trinity sung every day by the mouths of the whole people? (Sermon against Auxentius 34)

In the end the court backed down. The soldiers were withdrawn, and the basilicas stayed in Catholic hands. The bishop's steadfastness was not the only factor. Across the Alps the usurper Maximus was posing as a champion of Nicene orthodoxy, and that threat probably did as much to persuade Justina that a confrontation with the most popular man in Milan was unwise. But the episode fixed in the memory of the Church an image that would never fade: the bishop in his church, surrounded by his singing people, refusing to surrender God's house to the emperor's soldiers.

X.The Martyrs Found: Gervasius and Protasius

Only weeks after the siege, in June 386, Ambrose was ready to dedicate a new basilica. He had built it on the western edge of the city, in a cemetery where Christians had long been buried. The people asked him to consecrate it as he had consecrated the Basilica of the Apostles, with relics of martyrs beneath the altar. Ambrose replied that he would, if he could find any. Moved, as he later wrote, by a kind of burning presentiment, he ordered the ground to be opened before the chancel screen of the nearby shrine of Saints Nabor and Felix.

There the diggers found the bodies of two men of great stature, with much blood, Ambrose reports. He identified them as the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, whose memory had been half forgotten in the city. The relics were carried in solemn procession to the new church. On the way, a blind man named Severus, a butcher by trade and well known throughout Milan, touched the cloth that covered them and recovered his sight. Augustine, who was in the city, records the miracle in his Confessions and again, decades later, in The City of God. (Confessions IX.7.16; City of God XXII.8)

Ambrose placed the martyrs beneath the altar of the new basilica, in a tomb he had originally prepared for himself. He explained the decision to the people in words that reveal his understanding of the priesthood:

I had destined this place for myself, for it is fitting that the priest should rest where he was accustomed to offer the sacrifice. But I yield the right-hand side to the sacred victims; that place was owed to the martyrs.

That church is the one we know today as the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio. Eleven years later Ambrose was laid to rest there beside the martyrs whose bodies he had found. In the crypt beneath its high altar the three lie together still.

The discovery marked an important moment in the Western veneration of the saints. Ambrose gradually ringed Milan with great churches: the Basilica of the Apostles (today San Nazaro in Brolo), the Basilica of the Martyrs (Sant'Ambrogio), the Basilica of the Virgins (today San Simpliciano), and the Basilica of the Prophets. Together they formed a crown of sanctuaries around his city. In later years he would recover the bodies of the martyrs Vitalis and Agricola at Bologna in 393, and that of Nazarius at Milan in 395. For Ambrose, the martyrs were not distant heroes. They were the true founders and protectors of the Church, witnesses whose blood still spoke, and whose presence beneath the altar joined the sacrifice of Christ to the self-offering of his saints.

XI.The Preacher and the Professor: Ambrose and Augustine

In the autumn of 384, a thirty-year-old North African arrived in Milan to take up the post of official professor of rhetoric to the imperial court. The position brought prestige and the promise of a brilliant career. His name was Aurelius Augustinus. He had been raised a Christian by his devout mother, Monica, but had long since left the faith of his childhood. For nine years he had followed the Manichaeans, and he was now drifting toward skepticism. He was a gifted teacher, restless and ambitious, living with a companion and their young son.

And so I came to Milan, to Ambrose the bishop, known throughout the world as one of the best of men, and your devout worshiper. … That man of God received me like a father, and welcomed my coming as a bishop should.

Augustine began to attend the bishop's sermons. By his own admission he went at first purely as a professional, to judge whether Ambrose's eloquence lived up to its reputation. He found the bishop's style less entertaining than that of the famous Manichaean teacher Faustus, but more learned. And the substance slipped in along with the style. “While I opened my heart to take in how eloquently he spoke,” Augustine wrote, “there entered in as well, little by little, how truly he spoke.” (Confessions V.14.24)

What struck Augustine most was the way Ambrose read the Old Testament. The Manichaeans had taught him to despise the Hebrew Scriptures as crude and unworthy of God. Ambrose had been trained in the spiritual interpretation of Philo and Origen, and he unfolded the hidden sense of passages that had seemed absurd when read only literally. Augustine heard him repeat often to the people, as a rule to be carefully kept, the words of Saint Paul: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). From Ambrose's sermons Augustine also began to grasp that God and the soul are spiritual realities and not material bodies. That insight dissolved one of the chief obstacles that had kept him from the faith.

In the spring of 385 Monica joined her son in Milan, having crossed the sea from Africa. She soon became one of the most devoted members of Ambrose's congregation. “She loved that man as an angel of God,” Augustine wrote, because she knew it was through him that her son had been brought to his present state of wavering between error and truth. Ambrose, for his part, admired her deeply. Whenever he met Augustine he would break into praise of her and congratulate him on having such a mother, little knowing, Augustine adds, what kind of son she had. (Confessions VI.1.1; VI.2.2)

Two small episodes from these years show Ambrose's pastoral wisdom. In Africa, Christians customarily brought food and wine to the shrines of the martyrs. When Monica tried to do the same in Milan, the doorkeeper turned her away, because Ambrose had forbidden the custom: it resembled pagan funeral feasts and was being abused by the intemperate. Monica, who might have argued with anyone else, obeyed at once, out of love for the bishop.

On another occasion she was troubled that the Church in Milan did not fast on Saturdays, as the Church in Rome did. Augustine put the question to Ambrose, who answered with characteristic good sense: “When I am here, I do not fast on Saturday; when I am at Rome, I do. Whatever church you come to, keep its custom, if you wish neither to give offense nor to take it.” (Augustine, Letters 36 and 54) His advice survives, in proverbial form, in our own saying: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

Augustine longed to pour out his soul to Ambrose, but the bishop was always surrounded by people, and Augustine was too diffident to interrupt the few moments the bishop kept for himself. In the end it was Simplician, Ambrose's own teacher, whom Augustine approached for counsel. Simplician told him the story of Marius Victorinus, the famous Roman rhetorician who had publicly professed the faith in his old age. The story struck Augustine to the heart.

Shortly afterward, in a garden in Milan in the late summer of 386, Augustine heard a child's voice chanting from a neighboring house: “Tolle, lege; tolle, lege”, “Take up and read; take up and read.” He opened the letters of Saint Paul and read: “Not in reveling and drunkenness … but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:13–14). The struggle of years was resolved in an instant. There is a quiet symmetry here. A child's voice had once made Ambrose a bishop; now a child's voice made Augustine a Christian.

After a season of retreat with his friends at Cassiciacum, in the hills north of Milan, Augustine wrote to Ambrose to tell him of his conversion and to ask which books of Scripture he should read in preparation for baptism. Ambrose recommended the prophet Isaiah, because, Augustine supposed, Isaiah foretells the Gospel and the calling of the Gentiles more plainly than any other. Augustine found the opening chapters hard going and set the book aside, to return to it when he was more practiced in the Lord's way of speaking. (Confessions IX.5.13)

Early in 387 Augustine returned to Milan and gave in his name for baptism. Throughout Lent he attended Ambrose's instructions to the candidates, instructions much like those preserved in Ambrose's treatises On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments. On the night of the Easter Vigil, 24–25 April 387, in the octagonal baptistery beside the cathedral, Ambrose baptized Augustine together with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. An inscription traditionally attributed to Ambrose explained the building's eight sides: they recalled the “eighth day,” the day of the Resurrection, on which the old creation is made new. The foundations of that baptistery, San Giovanni alle Fonti, can still be visited today beneath the square in front of Milan's cathedral. It is one of the most moving places in Christendom: here the bishop who had been baptized in haste baptized the greatest theologian of the West.

A medieval legend holds that at the baptism Ambrose and Augustine, moved by the Holy Spirit, improvised the hymn Te Deum laudamus, singing it verse by verse in alternation. Scholars now generally attribute the hymn to another author, often to Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana. But the legend says something true. The bond between the bishop and the convert became one of the great channels of grace in the history of the Church. For the rest of his long life Augustine would cite Ambrose with reverence, as a teacher and an authority beyond reproach, and the Confessions remain our most vivid window onto the bishop of Milan at work.

XII.Emperors and Penance: Callinicum and Thessalonica

In 388 the Eastern emperor Theodosius I marched west and defeated the usurper Maximus, who had driven Valentinian II out of Italy. For the next three years Theodosius lived mostly at Milan. The relationship between the emperor and the bishop became one of the most famous, and most debated, in history. Theodosius was a sincere and devout Nicene Christian. In 380 his edict Cunctos populos had declared the faith of Nicaea to be the religion of all the peoples of the empire. But he was also a soldier with a fierce temper, and Ambrose was a bishop who did not hesitate to tell him when he had gone wrong.

Callinicum

The first clash concerned events far away. In 388 at Callinicum, a garrison town on the Euphrates, a Christian crowd burned down the town's synagogue, encouraged, it was said, by the local bishop. A band of monks also destroyed a meeting place of the Valentinian gnostics. Theodosius did his duty under the law: he ordered that the culprits be punished and that the bishop rebuild the synagogue at his own expense. Ambrose protested vehemently, first by letter and then in a sermon preached in the emperor's presence. He refused to go up to the altar until Theodosius promised to withdraw the order, and the emperor gave way.

A faithful account of Ambrose's life cannot pass over this episode, and his admirers today rightly read it with deep discomfort. The emperor's order was just. The Jewish community of Callinicum had been grievously wronged, and the laws of the Christian empire itself protected synagogues. Ambrose argued that a Christian bishop could not in conscience be compelled to build a house of worship for those who denied Christ. That argument reflects a hardening of Christian attitudes toward Judaism in the fourth century that would bear bitter fruit in later centuries. The Church today, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate, deplores every form of hatred and persecution directed against the Jewish people, at any time and from any source.

Saints are not made by being right about everything. They are made by the grace of God working in fallible human beings. Ambrose's holiness is real, and so are the limits of his vision. Honesty about both is part of honoring him truly.

Thessalonica

Two years later came the episode for which Ambrose is best remembered. In 390 a riot broke out in Thessalonica, according to the ancient historians over the imprisonment of a popular charioteer. Butheric, the commander of the imperial troops in the region, was murdered by the mob. Theodosius, enraged, ordered reprisals. The people of the city were gathered in the circus, supposedly for games, and soldiers fell upon them. The slaughter went on for hours. According to the historian Theodoret, some seven thousand people died. A countermanding order, sent after the emperor's anger had cooled, is said to have arrived too late.

Ambrose was horrified. He left the court, pleading illness, and wrote the emperor a private letter in his own hand, so that Theodosius alone would read it. It is a remarkable document: not a public denunciation but a pastor's appeal to a penitent. He reminded the emperor of King David, who sinned grievously and repented when the prophet Nathan confronted him. He wrote, he said, not to shame Theodosius, but so that the example of kings might move him to put away this sin from his reign. And he stated plainly that he dared not offer the Holy Sacrifice in the emperor's presence:

Theodosius submitted. He laid aside the insignia of imperial rank and did public penance in the church of Milan, and at Christmas of 390 he was readmitted to communion. Five years later, in his funeral oration for the emperor, Ambrose recalled the scene with deep affection:

He stripped off every emblem of royalty that he wore. In the church he publicly wept for his sin, which had crept upon him through the deceit of others, and he begged for pardon with groans and tears. … And afterward there was no day on which he did not grieve for his error.

Later historians, especially Theodoret of Cyrrhus writing in the following century, dramatized the scene. In their telling Ambrose meets the emperor at the doors of the cathedral and bars his way before all the people. The legendary moment inspired painters for centuries. The truth, as Ambrose's own letter shows, was quieter and in some ways more impressive: a bishop speaking privately to an emperor's conscience, and an emperor humbling himself publicly before God. The most powerful man in the world had acknowledged, before his own subjects, that he too stood under the moral law of Christ. In the long history of Christian Europe, few moments would prove more consequential.

XIII.Hymns, Liturgy, and the Sacraments

Ambrose's confrontations with emperors made him famous, but it was his work as a pastor of souls that made him beloved, and at the heart of that work was the liturgy.

Ambrose is rightly called the father of Latin hymnody. There had been Latin hymns before him, and Saint Hilary of Poitiers had attempted them. But Ambrose created the form that would shape the prayer of the Western Church for a thousand years: eight stanzas of four lines each, in a simple, steady meter (iambic dimeter). It was easy enough for ordinary people to learn by heart and dignified enough to bear the weight of doctrine. So influential was the model that any hymn in this meter came to be called an “Ambrosian” hymn. Of the many hymns attributed to him, scholars accept a handful as certainly his own, and four of them are guaranteed by the testimony of Augustine.

In the hymn for the dawn office, Aeterne rerum conditor, the rooster's cry becomes a sermon. It rouses the sleeper, puts the night's dangers to flight, brings hope back to the sick, and recalls the moment when Peter, hearing the cock crow, wept for his sin. In the evening hymn, Deus creator omnium, God clothes the day in beauty and the night in the grace of sleep, that rest may restore the weary body. Augustine never forgot that hymn. After his mother Monica died at Ostia in the autumn of 387, he found he could not weep. He slept, and on waking the verses of Ambrose came back to him, and with them, at last, the comfort of tears. (Confessions IX.12.32)

His Advent hymn, Veni, redemptor gentium (“Come, Redeemer of the nations”), sings of the Incarnation with dazzling compression. It is still sung in the Liturgy of the Hours. A thousand years later Martin Luther rendered it into German as Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, and in that form it became the basis of cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. Through hymns like these, Ambrose taught the Church's faith to people who would never read a treatise. Each morning and evening, millions of Christians still pray in forms he shaped.

The Ambrosian Rite

The liturgical tradition of the Church of Milan bears his name. The Ambrosian Rite is still celebrated today throughout most of the Archdiocese of Milan and in parts of the Swiss canton of Ticino. It is one of very few ancient Western rites to survive the centralizing reforms that followed the Council of Trent. Among its distinctive features is an Advent of six weeks rather than four. Whether every feature goes back to Ambrose himself is doubtful. But its survival testifies to the extraordinary loyalty of the Milanese to their patron. To this day they call themselves Ambrosiani.

Teacher of the sacraments

Ambrose's instructions to the newly baptized, On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments, are among the most precious witnesses we have to Christian initiation in the early Church. On the Sacraments appears to be a stenographer's record of the addresses he actually gave during Easter week. Step by step they lead the neophytes back through the rites they have just experienced. They explain the “opening” of the ears (the Ephphetha), the renunciation of the devil, the threefold immersion in the font, the anointing, the white garments, and finally the approach to the altar. They also describe the washing of the feet of the newly baptized. That was a custom of Milan that Rome did not share, as Ambrose frankly acknowledges: “In all things I desire to follow the Church of Rome; yet we too have human sense,” and what is rightly kept elsewhere, Milan rightly keeps as well. (On the Sacraments III.1.5)

On the Eucharist, he is unambiguous. By the word of Christ, the bread and wine become his Body and Blood, and the faithful who receive them receive Christ himself. On the Sacraments also preserves the earliest known text of the heart of the Roman Canon, the ancient Eucharistic Prayer still used in the Church today.

If, then, there is such power in the word of the Lord Jesus that things which were not began to be, how much more is it able to make things that were continue to be, and be changed into something else?

XIV.A Library of the Spirit: His Writings

Ambrose's writings fill several large volumes, and nearly all of them grew out of his preaching. They fall naturally into a few families.

Commentaries on Scripture. His Hexameron (“Six Days”), a series of nine sermons on the creation account in Genesis preached during Holy Week, draws gratefully on Basil's homilies on the same theme. It glows with delight in the created world: the sea and its creatures, the birds of the air, the industrious hive, the vine. Around it cluster treatises on the figures of Genesis: On Paradise, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, or the Soul, Jacob and the Happy Life, Joseph, and The Patriarchs. Here the patriarchs become mirrors of the soul's journey toward God. His Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke, in ten books, is his longest work. His commentary on Psalm 118 (Psalm 119 in Hebrew numbering) follows the psalm's twenty-two Hebrew letters in twenty-two sermons on the love of God's law.

Moral and ascetical works. On the Duties of the Clergy (De officiis) deliberately takes up the title and plan of Cicero's famous treatise and baptizes them. The classical virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance are reinterpreted in the light of Christ and the saints of Scripture. It is the first comprehensive work of Christian ethics in Latin, and it shaped moral teaching in the West for centuries. Alongside it stand his treatises on consecrated virginity and widowhood, many addressed to Marcellina, along with On the Good of Death and On Flight from the World.

Doctrinal works. On the Faith and On the Holy Spirit defended the teaching of Nicaea. On the Sacrament of the Lord's Incarnation treated the mystery of Christ's two natures. On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments taught the meaning of initiation. In On Penance he insisted, against the rigorist Novatianists, that the Church has received from Christ the power to forgive every sin to the truly repentant.

Orations and letters. His two books On the Death of His Brother Satyrus, delivered in his grief around 378, form a moving meditation on the hope of the resurrection. His funeral orations for Valentinian II and Theodosius stand at the head of a long Christian tradition of such speeches. Some ninety of his letters survive, addressed to emperors, bishops, friends, and above all to his sister. They give us an unparalleled view of the Church and the empire at a turning point.

Scholars also recognize that some works once credited to him were written by others. The most famous is an important commentary on the letters of Saint Paul, whose unknown author is now known simply as “Ambrosiaster.”

Perhaps no passage captures the warmth at the center of Ambrose's theology better than this one, from his treatise On Virginity. It has been loved and quoted by Christians ever since:

Christ is all things to us. If you wish to heal your wounds, he is the physician. If you burn with fever, he is the fountain. If you are weighed down by sin, he is justice. If you need help, he is strength. If you fear death, he is life. If you long for heaven, he is the way. If you flee from darkness, he is light. If you seek food, he is nourishment. “Taste, then, and see that the Lord is good: happy the one who hopes in him.”

XV.The Final Years and a Holy Death

In May 392 the young emperor Valentinian II, now about twenty-one, was found dead at Vienne in Gaul. He had fallen out with his powerful Frankish general Arbogast. He had also sent urgently for Ambrose to come and baptize him, for he was still a catechumen. The bishop was already on his way across the Alps when the news of his death arrived. In his funeral oration Ambrose consoled the emperor's grieving sisters with a teaching that would become part of the Church's inheritance. Valentinian had longed for baptism but died before receiving it, and Ambrose taught that he had been washed by his faith and his desire:

Arbogast then raised a rhetorician named Eugenius to the purple. Though nominally a Christian, Eugenius courted the pagan aristocracy of Rome. He restored the Altar of Victory and funds for the old cults. Ambrose would not receive him. When Eugenius came to Milan in 393, the bishop withdrew, traveling to Bologna, Faenza, and Florence. At Bologna he took part in the recovery of the relics of the martyrs Vitalis and Agricola. At Florence he dedicated a new basilica, the forerunner of today's church of San Lorenzo.

In September 394 Theodosius defeated Eugenius and Arbogast at the river Frigidus in the Julian Alps, a battle long remembered as the last great contest between the Christian and pagan parties of the empire. But the emperor's triumph was brief. He died at Milan on 17 January 395, leaving the empire to his young sons Arcadius and Honorius. Forty days later Ambrose preached On the Death of Theodosius, at once a eulogy, a political statement, and a meditation on mercy. It contains one of the earliest accounts of the finding of the True Cross by the empress Helena, mother of Constantine.

Ambrose himself had little more than two years to live. He went on preaching, writing, and traveling. He consecrated bishops, settled disputes, and dictated his commentaries until early in 397, when he fell gravely ill. Paulinus, his secretary, was taking dictation from him on Psalm 43 when he saw something he never forgot. A small flame, like a little shield, covered the bishop's head and then entered his mouth, “as a man enters his own house,” and his face turned as white as snow. (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 42) Readers of the Life have long noticed how the story echoes its beginning: the swarm that entered the mouth of the infant in his cradle, and now the flame that entered the mouth of the dying bishop.

When news of his illness spread, the general Stilicho, the real power behind the throne of the young Honorius, is reported to have said that the death of such a man would mean ruin for Italy. He sent the leading men of the city to beg the bishop to pray for his own recovery. Ambrose's reply has become one of the most quoted sayings of the early Church:

As he lay dying, four of his deacons were standing at the far end of the room, discussing in whispers who might succeed him, and one of them named Simplician. They thought the bishop too far away to hear. But Ambrose called out three times: “Senem, sed bonum!”, “Old, but good!” Simplician, his old teacher, was indeed chosen to succeed him. (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 46)

On the last day of his life he lay from late afternoon until the hour of his death with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross, his lips moving in prayer. Honoratus, bishop of Vercelli, was resting in an upper room of the house when he heard a voice call him three times, telling him to rise and hurry, for the bishop was about to depart. He came down and gave Ambrose the Body of the Lord. Having received it, Ambrose breathed his last. It was the early hours of Holy Saturday, 4 April 397. He was about fifty-seven years old. (Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 47)

His body was carried to the cathedral, where it lay during the night of the Easter Vigil. On Easter Sunday he was laid to rest in his basilica, beside Gervasius and Protasius, as he had wished. Some twenty-five years later, at the request of Saint Augustine, the deacon Paulinus wrote the Life of Ambrose that remains our principal source for the bishop's life.

XVI.Legacy: Doctor of the Church

Ambrose was venerated as a saint from the moment of his death. In 1298 Pope Boniface VIII formally declared him, together with Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, one of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church. In Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, Bernini's majestic Cathedra Petri encloses the ancient wooden chair of Peter in a throne of gilded bronze. Four colossal figures of the Doctors of the Church support it. In front, wearing their mitres, stand the Latin fathers Ambrose and Augustine; behind them are the Greek fathers Athanasius and John Chrysostom.

In Milan, Ambrose is everywhere. The people still call themselves Ambrosiani. The city's great library, opened by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1609, is the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and its liturgy is the Ambrosian Rite. His feast on 7 December is a city holiday. The traditional market of Oh bej! Oh bej! fills the streets near his basilica, and that evening the opera house of La Scala opens its season. In the golden chapel of San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro, attached to his basilica, a fifth-century mosaic portrait (the one shown at the top of this page) shows the bishop thin-faced, with large, searching eyes, his name spelled out above him: AMBROSIVS. It was made within a century of his death, and many scholars think it may preserve a true likeness, perhaps copied from a portrait taken from life.

In Christian art he is shown in a bishop's vestments with a book and crozier. He often appears with a beehive, recalling the legend of his cradle, and sometimes with a scourge. The scourge has been explained in different ways: as a sign of his struggle against heresy, or of the penance he required of an emperor. He is the patron saint of Milan, of beekeepers and candle-makers, and of learners and students. The Eastern Orthodox Church also honors him as a saint and father, on the same day, 7 December.

His influence on the teaching of the Church can hardly be overstated. His insistence that the emperor is “within the Church, not above it” helped shape the Western understanding of the distinction between spiritual and temporal power. His preaching on wealth anticipates the Church's social teaching on the universal destination of goods. His instructions on the sacraments remain a foundation of the Church's understanding of baptism and the Eucharist. His Marian teaching is quoted by the Second Vatican Council, his words appear throughout the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and his hymns are sung in the Liturgy of the Hours. And through Augustine, whom he brought to the font, his influence passed into every later age of Western thought.

XVII.What Saint Ambrose Teaches Us Today

More than sixteen centuries separate us from the bishop of Milan. His world of emperors and prefects, Gothic soldiers and pagan senators, is long gone. Yet the questions he faced are strikingly close to our own, and his answers still repay reflection.

Courage rooted in prayer. When the soldiers surrounded his church, Ambrose did not take up arms. He took up the psalms. His resistance was entirely spiritual: vigil, song, preaching, and tears. In an age that often confuses strength with force, he reminds us that the Christian's first weapon is prayer, and that a community at prayer is harder to break than any fortress.

The poor are the treasure of the Church. “It is better to preserve living vessels than vessels of metal.” Ambrose melted the chalices of his church to free the captives, and he told the rich that their alms were not gifts but restitution. Every generation of Christians must ask again what its gold is for.

Beauty serves the truth. Ambrose taught the faith through song as much as through argument. He knew that people come to love what they sing, and that a doctrine set to music lodges in the heart. The care we take with our worship, with its music, its words, and its silences, is not a luxury. It is one of the ways God draws souls to himself.

We never know whose life our faithfulness will change. When Ambrose preached on the books of Moses, he could not have known that a skeptical young professor in the congregation, there only to study his rhetoric, would become Saint Augustine. Nor did Monica know, through her long years of tears, how her prayers would be answered. Faithful teaching, patient prayer, and simple kindness bear fruit we may never see.

God's call does not wait for us to feel ready. Ambrose fled from his vocation, and then he embraced it with his whole heart. He began to teach before he had learned, and he spent the rest of his life learning. Many of us feel unprepared for what God asks. Ambrose's life suggests that readiness is less a condition we achieve than a grace we receive along the way.

Holiness is not perfection. Ambrose's story includes moments that trouble us, and we should not hide them. The saints are not models of flawless judgment. They are witnesses to the mercy of God, who works through imperfect people for purposes greater than they can see. To honor Ambrose truly is to learn from his courage and charity, and to grieve where he fell short.

In the end, the secret of Ambrose's life is the one he spoke of so often: Christ is all things to us. The governor who became a bishop, the bishop who stood before emperors, the pastor who wept with penitents and sang with his people: all of it flowed from a heart that had found in Christ its physician, its fountain, its strength, its way, and its light. As he lay dying, he could say without fear that he had not lived in a way he was ashamed of, “for we have a good Lord.” May we live so as to say the same.