The See of Milan

To be bishop of Milan in the later fourth century was to govern a great church at the operative center of the Western empire. This file sets out the city as the working imperial capital and what that proximity meant for the office; Ambrose the builder and administrator, who raised and consecrated churches and discovered and translated the relics of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius in 386; and Ambrose the almsgiver, whose governing principle — that “the Church has gold not to store up but to lay out” — led him to break up the consecrated plate to ransom captives after the Gothic catastrophe of 378, and to defend the act against Arian accusers in De Officiis.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Bishop in the Capital

Milan (Mediolanum) was, through the years of Ambrose’s episcopate, the principal western residence of the emperors — the seat of the boy Valentinian II and his court, and later of Theodosius the Great in his western years (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 1–52; see The Man and the See). The bishop of such a city was unavoidably a public man. He lived within reach of the palace and the consistory; the emperor and the great officers of state were, at times, his parishioners; the affairs of the empire passed through his city and sometimes through his church. This is the indispensable background to everything in Ambrose and the Emperors: the confrontations were possible because the antagonists shared a city.

It also made the bishopric an administrative burden of the first order. Augustine, who came to Milan in 384 and frequented Ambrose’s church, has left the most vivid contemporary picture of him: a man so pressed by “the business of people whose weaknesses he served” that those who wished to consult him had to compete with crowds, and Augustine could rarely get him alone (Augustine, Confessions 6.3). The see of Milan was not a contemplative retreat; it was a chancery, a court of arbitration, a relief agency, and a building site, all under one overworked bishop.

The Builder

Ambrose remade the sacred topography of his city. He raised a ring of new basilicas around Milan — among them the Basilica Apostolorum (later San Nazaro), the Basilica Virginum (San Simpliciano), and the church now bearing his own name, the Basilica Martyrum, where he intended to be buried and where his body still lies (Ambrose, Ep. 77 [Maur. 22]; Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals; see Doctor of the Church). These were not vanity projects but instruments of pastoral and doctrinal policy: a Nicene bishop physically anchoring the orthodox faith in the stone of a city long held by Homoians (see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle).

The siting and dedication of these churches were as deliberate as their architecture. By ringing Milan with basilicas at the gates and along the approach roads, dedicated to the apostles, the martyrs, and the consecrated virgins, Ambrose drew a sacred perimeter around the imperial capital, claiming its suburban landscape — the cemeteries where the Christian dead already lay — for a Nicene Church and its saints (Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 226–237). The very dedications carry his program: the Basilica Apostolorum received relics of the apostles obtained from the East, planting the authority of Peter and Paul in his own foundation; the Basilica Virginum monumentalized in stone the ideal of consecrated virginity that his preaching pressed (see De Virginibus); and the Basilica Martyrum would, with the inventio of 386, become the showpiece of the martyr-cult. The architecture itself preached. Ambrose is credited with composing tituli — verse inscriptions set up in his churches — and the cruciform plan attributed to the Basilica Apostolorum was read as a sermon in stone, its very shape confessing the cross (the surviving inscription, Forma crucis templum est, “the temple is in the form of a cross,” reflects this Ambrosian sensibility; Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals). To build, for Ambrose, was to catechize and to confess: each basilica was at once a place for the liturgy, a reliquary for the saints, and a doctrinal flag planted in a contested city.

The Relics of Gervasius and Protasius

The most celebrated and most loaded of these building projects was the dedication of the Basilica Martyrum. As Ambrose prepared to consecrate it in 386 — at the very height of the basilica crisis with the Arian court (see The Altar of Victory) — he was, he says, moved by a presentiment, and on excavating before the rails of the church of SS. Felix and Nabor the diggers uncovered two skeletons of great size, with much blood, which Ambrose identified as the long-forgotten martyrs Gervasius and Protasius. He had them translated to the new basilica, where a blind man, Severus, was said to be healed by touching the bier (Ambrose, Ep. 77 [Maur. 22], to Marcellina [PL 16:1062ff]; trans. NPNF II/10; Augustine, Confessions 9.7, who was in Milan and reports the discovery and the cure; Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 14).

The finding is reported here as the sources attest it, pinned to Ambrose’s own letter and to Augustine’s contemporary testimony, not certified as adjudicated history (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Its political charge is plain in the sources themselves: the discovery of martyrs’ relics, and the miracle that followed, rallied the Nicene people around their bishop at the decisive moment of the standoff with Justina’s court, and Augustine notes that it confounded the Arians (Augustine, Confessions 9.7; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 209–219, who reads the inventio in its political setting).

What Ambrose did with the relics, and the meaning he gave the act, is as important as the discovery itself. He had the two bodies translated with a vigil and a procession, and laid them beneath the altar of his new basilica — in the place, he said, that he had meant for his own tomb, yielding it to the martyrs: “Let these triumphant victims be brought to the place where Christ is the victim. But He upon the altar, who suffered for all; they beneath the altar, who were redeemed by His suffering” (Ambrose, Ep. 77 [Maur. 22] 13 [PL 16:1066]; trans. NPNF II/10). The image is drawn straight from the Apocalypse — the souls of the slain “under the altar” (Revelation 6:9) — and Ambrose makes it the charter of a developing practice. The placing of a martyr’s relics beneath the altar where the eucharist is offered binds the Church’s two sacrifices into one: the martyr’s witness in blood and Christ’s offering, the saints gathered at the table where their Lord is the victim. Ambrose did not invent the veneration of martyrs, but his theatrical and theologically articulate inventio of 386 did much to fix the cult of the martyrs under the altar as a norm of Latin church-building, so that in time it became unthinkable to consecrate an altar without its relics — a development whose roots later canonists and liturgists traced in part to this Milanese precedent (Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 36–40; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 209–219; Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals). Peter Brown reads the episode as a landmark in the rise of the saints’ cult in the Latin West: the bishop, by gathering the holy dead into the heart of his church, made himself the impresario of their power and bound the community to him through them (Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 36–49).

“The Church Has Gold to Spend”

If one act sums up Ambrose’s understanding of what the Church’s wealth was for, it is the melting of the sacred vessels to ransom captives. In the wake of the catastrophe of Adrianople (378), when the Goths overran Thrace and Illyricum and carried off multitudes into captivity, Ambrose broke up and sold consecrated gold and silver from the church of Milan to pay the ransoms (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.28.136–143 [PL 16:148ff]; trans. NPNF II/10; the NPNF note dates the ransoming to the Gothic devastation of 378).

He was attacked for it — pointedly, by the Arians, who seized on the sacrilege of destroying holy vessels — and his answer is one of the great statements of Christian stewardship. The Church holds gold, he wrote, “not to store up, but to lay out, and to spend on those who need” (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.28.137; trans. NPNF II/10). “It had been better to preserve living vessels than golden ones,” for “the redemption of captives is a great good,” and “is it not better that the priest should melt it down for the sustenance of the poor, if other means fail, than that a sacrilegious enemy should carry it off?” (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.28.137–138). The chalice that redeems sinners by Christ’s blood may rightly redeem captives from the enemy (2.28.138). He crowns the argument with the example of the deacon Lawrence, who, ordered to produce the treasures of the Roman church, presented the poor: “These are the treasures of the Church” (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.28.140, citing the acta of Lawrence). Ambrose did set limits — vessels not yet consecrated should be melted first, and the consecrated ones used only at need and without irreverence, never for private gain (2.28.142–143) — but the principle is uncompromising: the gold is the poor’s. The fuller ethics of almsgiving and the cardinal virtues in which this argument sits are treated in De Officiis and Ethics.

The Bishop’s Court

Among the heaviest of the burdens that besieged Ambrose’s house was a strictly judicial one. By the fourth century the bishop had become, by imperial sanction, a magistrate in fact as well as in pastoral practice: under the institution known as the audientia episcopalis, the bishop’s hearing, litigants could bring their disputes before him for binding arbitration, and a constitution of Constantine had given the bishop’s judgment a standing the civil courts were to recognize and enforce. The attraction was real — episcopal justice was free, swift, unbribed, and bound by Christian conscience rather than the fee-ridden delays of the secular tribunals — and the consequence was that a respected bishop in a great city found himself buried under a daily docket of cases, many of them tangled questions of property, debt, inheritance, and family. This is the precise content of Augustine’s portrait of Ambrose besieged by “the business of people whose weaknesses he served” (Augustine, Confessions 6.3): a large part of that business was litigation. Augustine, who would later groan under the same load as bishop of Hippo, learned at Milan what the office entailed.

Ambrose accepted the duty as integral to the episcopate and reflected on it in De Officiis, where the conduct of a bishop sitting in judgment — his impartiality, his refusal of bribes and of respect of persons, his tempering of strict justice with mercy, his care to reconcile rather than merely to condemn — is treated as part of the clergy’s ethical formation (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.24, 3.9; trans. NPNF II/10; see De Officiis and Ethics). The judicial role also fed directly into his pastoral intercession: a bishop who heard the city’s quarrels and knew its powerful men could plead for the condemned and press emperors for clemency with an authority grounded in the daily exercise of judgment (see Preaching and Care and Ambrose and the Emperors). The bishop’s court is the unglamorous, indispensable underside of Ambrose’s power: before he ever rebuked an emperor, he had spent his mornings doing justice for the obscure.

Discipline, Property, and the Clergy

Ambrose governed his clergy as closely as his finances. De Officiis was written precisely as a rule of conduct for the Milanese clergy — on modesty of speech and bearing, on the management of money, on the cardinal and the distinctively Christian virtues (see De Officiis and Ethics). He held a firm line on the independence of the Church’s property and personnel from lay seizure — the same principle that, raised to the level of high politics, produced his refusal to surrender a basilica to the emperor (see The Altar of Victory). And he was, on the witness of Paulinus, austere in his own life: sparing in food, given to fasting and vigils and to long hours of private prayer and study, accessible to the poor and the troubled while guarding the dignity of his office (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 38–39).

The portrait that emerges is of a bishop who fused two things the age tended to keep apart: the contemplative, ascetic ideal of the Eastern monastic fathers, which he admired and propagated, and the practical genius of a Roman administrator. He could melt a chalice to feed the captive and quote Cicero to instruct the deacon in the same week. It was this fusion — sanctity organized — that made the see of Milan, in his hands, the most powerful bishopric in the Latin West.

References

Ambrose of Milan. De Officiis 2.28.136–143 [PL 16:148ff]; trans. NPNF II/10 (de Romestin); crit. ed. Davidson (OECS), Testard (CCSL 15). On melting the plate to ransom captives and “the Church has gold to spend.”
Ambrose of Milan. Epistula 77 [Maurist 22], to Marcellina [PL 16:1062ff]; trans. NPNF II/10. The discovery and translation of Gervasius and Protasius.
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 6.3 (Ambrose besieged by business); 9.7 (the relics and the cure of Severus); trans. Chadwick (Oxford, 1991).
Paulinus of Milan. Vita Sancti Ambrosii 14, 38–39, c. 422 (PL 14). On the relics and Ambrose’s ascetic regimen.
McLynn, Neil B. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, esp. 209–219. The inventio of 386 in its political context.
Krautheimer, Richard. Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. On Ambrose’s church-building program in Milan.
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, esp. 36–49. On the inventio of 386 and Ambrose’s role in the rise of the martyr-cult and relics under the altar.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 30–55. On the administration of the see.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 1:111–160, 298–319.