The Man and the See

Behind the dramatic election of 374 stood a particular man and a particular city. This file sets out the family that formed Ambrose — the consecrated virgin Marcellina, the lay brother Satyrus, the senatorial-Christian household; the administrative and rhetorical formation that made him a statesman before he was a theologian; the rare command of Greek that let him bring the Eastern fathers into Latin; and the strategic see he inherited, Milan, the working capital of the Western empire and a Homoian stronghold for two decades, where being bishop meant living at the elbow of the imperial court.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

A Christian Senatorial Household

Ambrose belonged to the Roman governing class at the moment that class was becoming Christian. The family was of the clarissimi, the senatorial order; his father had held or aspired to the praetorian prefecture of Gaul (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 3–4; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 31–35; see From Governor to Bishop). It was also a devout household with a saint in nearly every place: of the three siblings who reach us, one became a celebrated bishop, one a consecrated virgin venerated as a saint, and one is honored as a saint in his own right.

His sister Marcellina was the eldest and, in the order of grace, the first. She made her public profession of virginity at Rome, receiving the veil from Pope Liberius on the Feast of the Nativity, an event Ambrose himself records and dates to his memory, conventionally placed around 352–354 (Ambrose, De Virginibus 3.1 [PL 16:231]; trans. NPNF II/10). She is the dedicatee of De Virginibus and the recipient of Ambrose’s most intimate letters — the running, almost diary-like accounts of the basilica crisis and of the Callinicum affair are written to her (Ambrose, Ep. 76 [Maur. 20]; Ep. 74/extra coll. 1 [Maur. 41]; see The Altar of Victory). Through her the household’s ascetic ideal entered Ambrose’s theology of virginity (see De Virginibus).

His brother Satyrus (Uranius Satyrus) followed the family’s public path: trained in law, he served as a provincial governor, and on Ambrose’s elevation gave up his own career to manage the bishop’s worldly affairs, freeing him for the Church (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 9; Ambrose, De Excessu Fratris 1.20–25 [PL 16:1352ff]; trans. NPNF II/10). When Satyrus died, around 378, Ambrose preached over him two funeral orations — De Excessu Fratris Satyri, among the tenderest things he wrote, and a major early Latin meditation on death and resurrection (Ambrose, De Excessu Fratris 1–2; see The Mysteries and the Hexameron, which treats his De Bono Mortis). Satyrus too is venerated as a saint.

This is the formation behind the bishop: a man bred to public responsibility, governance, and family piety, for whom the Church and the Roman order were not opposed worlds but one inheritance — a disposition that explains both his ease at court and his refusal to let the court dictate to the Church.

The Statesman’s Equipment

Ambrose came to the episcopate with the wrong training and the right instincts. He had no theology; he had law, rhetoric, administration, and the habit of command. The shape of his greatest works bears the marks of it: De Officiis, his manual of clerical ethics, is built on the frame of Cicero’s treatise of the same name, the statesman’s classic recast for the clergy (see De Officiis and Ethics); his letters to emperors argue like briefs; his handling of councils and crises is that of a man who knew how power actually moved. Augustine, who watched him work, saw a bishop perpetually besieged by the business of the city and the suits of petitioners (Augustine, Confessions 6.3).

The one piece of equipment that set him apart from his Latin contemporaries was Greek. Ambrose read the Eastern fathers in the original at a time when most of the Latin West could not, and he used them systematically. De Spiritu Sancto draws openly on Basil of Caesarea, Athanasius, and Didymus the Blind — so openly that Jerome accused him of plagiarism (see De Spiritu Sancto); the Hexameron follows Basil’s; the exegetical treatises mine Philo and Origen (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron). His historical importance is in large part this: he was the great conduit by which the theology of the Greek fourth century crossed into Latin, and so reached Augustine and, through Augustine, the whole Western tradition (Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Latin Church, 89–93; Ramsey, Ambrose, 55–60).

It is worth being specific about whom he read, because the list is in effect a map of his theology. For the doctrine of the Spirit and the defense of Nicaea he drew above all on Basil of Caesarea, whose De Spiritu Sancto underlies his own treatise of the same name, and on Athanasius and Didymus the Blind of Alexandria, the latter’s lost or fragmentary work on the Spirit being known to the Latin West largely through Ambrose’s mediation (see De Spiritu Sancto). For the reading of Genesis he followed Basil’s Hexaemeron closely enough that his own Hexameron is in long stretches a Latin recension of it (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron). For the allegorical and moral exegesis of the Old Testament — the manner that would capture Augustine — his masters were Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish exegete whose readings of the patriarchs Ambrose Christianized wholesale, and Origen, whose spiritual sense of Scripture he naturalized in the Latin pulpit. He also knew the work of Eusebius and could draw on the Cappadocian settlement more broadly. The borrowing was open and unembarrassed — to Ambrose it was the duty of a Latin bishop to put the riches of the Greeks at the service of his own people — but it was selective and reordered to his purposes, not slavish; and it was so substantial that Jerome, the period’s other great bilingual, accused him of having decked himself in Greek plumage and turned “an ugly crow” into a creature of borrowed colors (see De Spiritu Sancto). The accusation, unjust as a charge of theft, is exact as a description of the channel: through this one well-read Latin statesman the dogmatic and exegetical achievement of the Greek East passed into the West.

Milan: A Capital, Not a Backwater

The see Ambrose inherited was, in worldly terms, the most important in the West after Rome — and arguably, in the years of his episcopate, more important still. Since the later third century Milan (Mediolanum) had served as the principal residence of the Western emperor: it was here that Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan (313), here that Valentinian I and then the boy Valentinian II held court, here that Theodosius the Great would reside in his Western years. The bishop of Milan therefore lived not in a provincial town but at the operative center of imperial government, within reach of the palace, the consistory, and the army (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 1–52; Dudden, Life and Times, 1:60–80).

This is the single fact that makes Ambrose’s career possible. The confrontations that define him — the Altar of Victory, the demand for a basilica, the rebuke of Theodosius — happened because the emperor was in his city, sometimes in his congregation. Proximity gave him leverage no other Western bishop possessed and exposed him to pressures no other faced. The bishop of Milan could not be a recluse; he was, of necessity, a politician (see The See of Milan and Ambrose and the Emperors).

Milan’s pre-eminence was the legacy of the Tetrarchy. When Diocletian reorganized the empire at the end of the third century, Milan became the residence of Maximian, Augustus of the West, and so one of the working capitals from which the late Roman state was actually governed — a status the older capital of Rome, increasingly ceremonial and remote from the frontiers, had largely ceded. The city’s fabric answered to the role: an imperial palace, a circus abutting it for the public appearances that bound emperor to people, a mint striking the coin of the Western government, great baths, and a circuit of walls fit for an administrative metropolis (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 1–52; Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals; Dudden, Life and Times, 1:60–80). Its situation explains its importance: Milan lay in the rich plain of the Po, athwart the roads that ran from Italy over the Alpine passes into Gaul and toward the Danube, close enough to the northern frontier that an emperor based there could reach a threatened front in days. It was a command post for the defense of the West — and the bishop of that command post lived among generals, ministers, and the machinery of the army. The mint and the palace were not background scenery; they are why the dowager empress Justina’s court could mount a sustained campaign for a basilica there in 385–386, and why Ambrose’s resistance was a matter of empire-wide consequence (see The Altar of Victory).

A Class Turning Christian

Ambrose’s household was a single instance of a vast, slow movement: the Christianization of the senatorial aristocracy across the fourth century. The conversion of Constantine had made the faith respectable and then advantageous, but the old governing families — the keepers of Rome’s priesthoods, the patrons of the ancestral cults — turned slowly and unevenly, often household by household, with a Christian wife or a consecrated daughter leading the way while the men kept the old offices and sometimes the old altars. By Ambrose’s generation the balance was tipping, and the see of Milan in his hands became one of the engines of that tipping: a bishop who was himself a clarissimus, who spoke the aristocracy’s language and shared its formation, could win its sons in a way no outsider could. The contest was still live and sometimes bitter — it is the very substance of the Altar of Victory dispute, in which the pagan senator Symmachus, Ambrose’s own kinsman and social peer, pleaded for the restoration of the goddess’s altar in the Senate house, and Ambrose answered him as one aristocrat to another (see The Altar of Victory). That the two protagonists of that drama were relatives of the same senatorial stock is the most economical illustration of where the Roman governing class then stood: half-converted, arguing the question within single families, and turning — with bishops like Ambrose to receive them — toward the Church (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 263–275; Williams, Ambrose of Milan, 38–68; Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Latin Church, 87–116).

Among the Western Sees

Ambrose did not hold Milan in isolation; he stood at the head of a network of Western bishops and dealt with the other great sees as a leading figure among near-equals. With Rome under Pope Damasus (366–384) his relations were close and collaborative: the two cooperated against the Homoians, Damasus lending Roman authority to the Nicene cause that Ambrose pressed at court, and Ambrose deferring to Rome’s primacy of honor while in practice carrying the heavier political weight, because the emperor sat in his city and not in Damasus’s (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 53–106; Williams, Ambrose of Milan, 154–184). With Aquileia under Bishop Valerian, the alliance was tighter still and openly operational: at the Council of Aquileia in 381, convened with imperial sanction and dominated by Ambrose, the Homoian bishops Palladius of Ratiaria and Secundianus of Singidunum were deposed, and Ambrose — though a guest in Valerian’s see — directed the proceedings like a prosecutor, turning a small Western synod into a decisive blow against Latin Homoianism (Ambrose, Gesta Concilii Aquileiensis; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 124–137; see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle). The pattern is consistent: Ambrose worked through the collegiality of the Western episcopate, respected the standing of Rome and the rights of his fellow bishops, and yet, by force of access and personality, made himself the effective leader of the Latin Church’s Nicene party.

A Homoian Inheritance

Ambrose also inherited a doctrinal battlefield. For roughly two decades Milan had been governed by Auxentius, the Homoian bishop seated under Constantius II, and the city’s church establishment, its clergy, and a substantial part of its people had been formed in the anti-Nicene theology favored by the Eastern-leaning court (Williams, Ambrose of Milan, 38–68; see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle). The Homoian party did not vanish when Ambrose was consecrated; it retained court patronage, above all through the dowager empress Justina, and it would mount, in 385–386, a serious bid to recover a basilica and a foothold in the capital (see The Altar of Victory, which treats the basilica crisis). Ambrose’s whole episcopate was, in one of its dimensions, the long work of making Milan — and through Milan the West — durably Nicene.

That he was the man for it was not obvious in 374. He was a baptized-eight-days bishop who had to be taught his own faith. But the combination proved formidable: a statesman’s nerve and a court insider’s access, joined to a fast-acquired but genuine command of the best Greek theology, in the one Western city where the emperor could be reached. The accident of the election had put exactly the right man in exactly the right see at exactly the right moment of the Nicene crisis — which is why the tradition read the accident as providence (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 6–9; see From Governor to Bishop).

References

Paulinus of Milan. Vita Sancti Ambrosii 3–9, 38, c. 422 (PL 14). On the family, Satyrus’s service, and the election.
Ambrose of Milan. De Virginibus 3.1 [PL 16:231]; trans. NPNF II/10. On Marcellina’s profession before Pope Liberius.
Ambrose of Milan. De Excessu Fratris Satyri 1–2 [PL 16:1345ff]; trans. NPNF II/10. The funeral orations for his brother.
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 6.3; trans. Chadwick (Oxford, 1991). On Ambrose besieged by city business.
McLynn, Neil B. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 1–52. On Milan as imperial capital and the political setting.
Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 38–68. On the Homoian church of Auxentius.
Ambrose of Milan. Gesta Concilii Aquileiensis (Acts of the Council of Aquileia, 381) [CSEL 82.3, ed. Zelzer; PL 16]. The deposition of Palladius and Secundianus under Ambrose’s direction.
Campenhausen, Hans von. The Fathers of the Latin Church. Trans. Manfred Hoffmann. London: A. & C. Black, 1964, 87–116. On Ambrose’s use of the Greek fathers.
Krautheimer, Richard. Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. On the physical fabric of imperial Milan and its churches.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 18–60.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 1:60–110.