Preaching and Care

Beneath the confrontations with emperors lay the ordinary work of a great bishop: the daily preaching from which almost all of Ambrose’s books grew; the spiritual, allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament that drew the crowds of Milan and unlocked Scripture for Augustine; the catechesis and Easter baptisms that received the city’s converts; and the relentless pastoral care — arbitration, intercession for the condemned, relief of the poor and the captive — that besieged his house. This file describes the shape of that ordinary labor, which the great public dramas only interrupted.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Preacher

Ambrose was, first and most constantly, a preacher. He preached at the regular liturgical synaxes, often daily through Lent and the Easter season, and his preaching was the workshop of his theology: nearly every prose work he left began as sermons — the Hexameron as homilies preached in a single week, De Mysteriis and De Sacramentis as catecheses to the newly baptized, the treatises on the patriarchs and on virginity as expanded addresses (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron and De Virginibus). To read Ambrose is, very largely, to read a bishop talking to his congregation.

The defining feature of that preaching was its spiritual, allegorical reading of the Old Testament, learned from the Greek fathers and from Philo and Origen, by which the hard or scandalous surface of the Hebrew Scriptures yielded a Christian and moral sense beneath. This was the most consequential single thing about his pulpit, because it is what reached Augustine. Augustine had come to Milan a Manichaean, contemptuous of the Old Testament’s anthropomorphisms and patriarchal narratives; hearing Ambrose preach those same texts spiritually — drawing aside “the mystic veil” and applying the Pauline rule that “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6) — dissolved the objection that had blocked his way to the faith (Augustine, Confessions 6.4; see The Baptism of Augustine). What Augustine first came for — the famous eloquence — held him; what he stayed for was the matter (Augustine, Confessions 5.13–14).

Ambrose’s celebrated manner of study lay behind the preaching. Augustine has left the unforgettable image of finding the bishop reading in silence, his eyes moving over the page while his voice was still — a scene that has generated its own scholarly literature (see The Baptism of Augustine for the discussion) but that in context simply shows a man who guarded his scarce time for the Scriptures behind the press of business (Augustine, Confessions 6.3).

The Catechist

In a church where adult baptism was still the norm and was concentrated at the Easter Vigil, the bishop’s pastoral year climbed toward the baptism of the competentes — those enrolled for Easter initiation. The structure beneath this is worth setting out, because Ambrose’s catechetical works only make sense against it. A convert ordinarily entered first the long, open-ended order of the catechumens, who heard the Scriptures and the sermon but were dismissed before the eucharist and might remain in that state for years — Ambrose himself, like Augustine, had been a catechumen of long standing. When a catechumen resolved to be baptized at the coming Pascha, he gave in his name at the beginning of Lent and passed into the intensive, time-bound order of the competentes or electi, the “enrolled” who were now candidates in earnest. Through the forty days of Lent these were catechized daily, examined, exorcized, and prepared — Ambrose mentions the traditio and redditio symboli, the handing-over and giving-back of the Creed, by which the candidate received the rule of faith and then recited it from memory — the whole rhythm building toward the Easter Vigil, when they were baptized, chrismated, and admitted for the first time to the eucharist, and then through the bright week of Easter were led, as initiates, into the meaning of what they had undergone (Ambrose, De Sacramentis 1.1, Explanatio Symboli; see The Mysteries and the Hexameron). The Lenten–paschal cycle was thus not merely the Church’s calendar but its assembly line for making Christians, and the bishop’s preaching year was shaped by it.

Ambrose catechized the candidates through Lent, and after their baptism, in the bright week, he led them through the meaning of the rites they had just received. This mystagogy is preserved in De Mysteriis and, in fuller and rougher form, in De Sacramentis, which appears to be an actual stenographic record of his Easter-week sermons to the newly baptized (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron). These works are, beyond their pastoral purpose, the single best witness we have to the baptismal, chrismational, and eucharistic rites of fourth-century Milan: the renunciation, the opening of the ears (Effeta), the anointings, the descent into the font, and the eucharist that followed (Ambrose, De Mysteriis 1–9; De Sacramentis 1–6).

The reason the explanation of the rites had to wait until after baptism is itself a feature of fourth-century practice: the disciplina arcani, the “discipline of the secret.” The deepest mysteries of the faith — the meaning of the eucharist and the font, the words of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, the very rites of initiation — were not to be unfolded before the unbaptized, but were guarded and disclosed only to those who had passed through the water. Ambrose states the principle plainly at the opening of De Mysteriis: now that the season of mystagogy has come, “it is time to speak of the mysteries, and to set forth the very meaning of the sacraments, which before baptism could not be explained to the uninitiated” — for “the light of the mysteries is poured upon those who least expect it more effectively than if some discourse had preceded it” (Ambrose, De Mysteriis 1.2 [PL 16:389]; trans. NPNF II/10). This is why his catechesis to the competentes during Lent dwelt on Scripture and moral preparation while the explanation of the sacraments was reserved for the neophytes in Easter week. The disciplina arcani is the discipline that gives the mystagogical sermons their dramatic structure — the reveal withheld until the night of baptism — and it is the reason these texts read as initiation into a guarded secret rather than as ordinary instruction.

The most famous of his catechumens was Augustine, whom Ambrose baptized at the Easter Vigil of 387 along with Augustine’s son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius (Augustine, Confessions 9.6; see The Baptism of Augustine). But Augustine was one of a city’s worth: every Easter Ambrose poured a fresh cohort of Milanese Christians out of the font, and the polished, urgent, image-laden catecheses survive because the bishop’s ordinary work of making Christians was worth writing down.

The Pastor Besieged

The third strand of the work was care — direct, individual, unending. Augustine’s portrait of Ambrose’s house is of a place under constant siege by “throngs of busy people whose infirmities he served,” so that anyone wanting the bishop’s ear had to take his turn and often went away unsatisfied (Augustine, Confessions 6.3). Some of this care reached the level of high politics — Ambrose interceded with emperors for the condemned and the proscribed, pressed for clemency, and at Callinicum and after Thessalonica set the discipline of the Church against imperial cruelty (see Ambrose and the Emperors). Much of it was humbler: the arbitration of disputes (bishops in the period routinely served as judges in the audientia episcopalis; see The See of Milan), the relief of the poor, the feeding of the hungry in famine, the ransoming of the captive, the burial of the dead.

The intercession for the condemned was not a generality but a recorded practice with names attached. Ambrose pleaded for clemency in the aftermath of usurpations, when the victorious emperor’s instinct was proscription and confiscation. After the fall of the usurper Maximus he interceded for those compromised by the failed regime; and most strikingly, in the affair of Priscillian — the Spanish ascetic executed for heresy by the emperor Maximus at Trier around 385 — Ambrose, with Martin of Tours, opposed the shedding of blood in a doctrinal cause and broke communion with the bishops who had procured the death, refusing to make the Church a party to a capital sentence for heresy (Ambrose, Ep. 30 [Maur. 24] on his embassies to Trier; see Ambrose and the Emperors). The pattern is consistent with his whole understanding of the office: the bishop stood between the condemned and the executioner, and the mercy he pressed on emperors was the same mercy he showed in his own court.

The Funeral Orator

Among the pastoral genres Ambrose practiced, the funeral oration (laudatio funebris, baptized into Christian use) became peculiarly his own, and four survive to mark its range. The genre was inherited from classical Rome — the public eulogy of the great dead — but Ambrose remade it into a Christian sermon on death and resurrection, fusing the consolation of the philosophers (Cicero, Seneca, the Stoic and Neoplatonic consolatio) with the hope of the gospel, so that grief is not merely soothed but transfigured by the promise of the rising body.

He first preached the form over his own brother. De Excessu Fratris Satyri — the two orations for Satyrus, around 378: the first delivered at the funeral, the second on the seventh or thirtieth day — turns private grief into a public consolation, the first oration a lament and tribute, the second a sustained argument for the goodness of death and the certainty of the resurrection, developing the same theme as De Bono Mortis (Ambrose, De Excessu Fratris 1–2 [PL 16:1345ff]; trans. NPNF II/10; see The Man and the See and The Mysteries and the Hexameron).

He then carried the form into the public sphere with two state orations of great political delicacy. De Obitu Valentiniani (392) eulogized the young Valentinian II, found dead at Vienne — whether by suicide or murder the sources dispute — and Ambrose, who had clashed with the boy’s court over the basilica, now had to commend him; he ventured the tender and theologically daring argument that the catechumen emperor, who had desired baptism from Ambrose’s own hand and died before receiving it, was nonetheless cleansed by his desire and piety (Ambrose, De Obitu Valentiniani; trans. Liebeschuetz, TTH 43). De Obitu Theodosii (395), preached forty days after the death of Theodosius the Great — the emperor whose public penance Ambrose had required after Thessalonica (see Theodosius and Thessalonica) — is the most political of all: before the army and the boy-heirs, Ambrose praised the dead emperor’s humility and faith, secured the loyalty of the troops to the Theodosian house, and wove in the legend of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross to bind the dynasty to the cross of Christ (Ambrose, De Obitu Theodosii; trans. Liebeschuetz, TTH 43). In each, the characteristic Ambrosian fusion holds: the consolation of a pastor and the address of a statesman, the cure of souls and the management of an empire, spoken in a single voice over an open grave.

The Music of the Congregation

One pastoral innovation of these years would outlast all the rest. During the basilica crisis of 386, to sustain the Nicene congregation through the long vigil while imperial troops surrounded the church, Ambrose set them to singing — introducing the antiphonal psalmody and the metrical hymns that made him the father of Latin hymnody (Augustine, Confessions 9.7; see Father of Latin Hymnody). It began as a pastor’s expedient — something for a frightened, exhausted people to do together through the night — and became one of the permanent instruments of Western worship. The whole subject is treated in Section 07; it belongs here only as a reminder that even Ambrose’s most lasting contribution to the liturgy was born of pastoral need under pressure.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 5.13–14 (coming to hear Ambrose); 6.3 (the silent reading; the besieged house); 6.4 (the spiritual exegesis); 9.6 (the baptism); 9.7 (the hymn-singing); trans. Chadwick (Oxford, 1991).
Ambrose of Milan. De Mysteriis and De Sacramentis [CSEL 73, ed. Faller]; De Mysteriis trans. NPNF II/10; both in FOTC 44 (trans. Deferrari). The catecheses on Christian initiation.
Ambrose of Milan. De Excessu Fratris Satyri 1–2 [PL 16:1345ff]; trans. NPNF II/10. The funeral orations and the theology of death.
Ambrose of Milan. De Obitu Theodosii [CSEL 73]; De Obitu Valentiniani [CSEL 73]; trans. Liebeschuetz and Hill, TTH 43. The state funeral orations.
Ambrose of Milan. De Mysteriis 1.2 [PL 16:389]; trans. NPNF II/10. On the disciplina arcani and the reservation of the mysteries to the baptized.
Ambrose of Milan. Epistula 30 [Maurist 24], on the embassies to Trier; trans. NPNF II/10. Context for his opposition to the execution of Priscillian and intercession after the usurpation of Maximus.
Paulinus of Milan. Vita Sancti Ambrosii 38–39, c. 422 (PL 14). On Ambrose’s manner of life and accessibility.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 30–55. On the pastoral and homiletic work.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 1:111–160.