De Officiis and Christian Ethics

De Officiis Ministrorum, Ambrose’s three-book manual of conduct for the clergy of Milan, is the first systematic treatise of Christian ethics in the Latin language. It is a deliberate Christian reworking of Cicero’s De Officiis: Ambrose takes over the Ciceronian and Stoic framework of the honorable (honestum) and the useful (utile), and the four cardinal virtues, but refounds the whole on Scripture, humility, the example of the saints, and charity — subordinating the useful to the honorable and making almsgiving and the ransoming of captives the test of true liberality. This file sets out the work’s design, its transformation of Cicero, and its ethics.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Design and Date

De Officiis was written, in three books, as a rule of conduct for the clergy of Milan — Ambrose addresses them as his “sons,” the priests and deacons of his church — and it stands as the first systematic treatise of Christian ethics in Latin (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.1–7; trans. NPNF II/10; Davidson, Ambrose: De Officiis, OECS, introduction). [Disputed: the date is given by consensus as the late 380s; Ivor Davidson narrows it to c. 388–389, while older scholarship allows a range of roughly 386–391. The traditional title De Officiis Ministrorum (“On the Duties of the Ministers”) is widely judged a later expansion; Davidson and others hold the original title to have been simply De Officiis, matching Cicero. Authorship is not in doubt.]

The architecture is borrowed wholesale from Cicero, whose own De Officiis — written in three books to his son — was the classic Roman treatise on duty. Ambrose follows Cicero’s tripartite plan exactly: Book I treats the honorable (honestum), what is morally right; Book II the useful or expedient (utile); Book III the apparent conflict between the honorable and the useful, resolving it in the honorable’s favor (Ambrose, De Officiis 1–3; Davidson, OECS). The very gesture is a claim: that the Church has its own officia, its own ethics of office, able to take up and surpass the best of pagan Rome.

Transforming Cicero

The borrowing is also a transformation, and the transformation is the point. Ambrose takes the Stoic-Ciceronian materials and reorders them around Christian foundations:

  • The four cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance — Ambrose retains as the scaffolding of honestas, but he detaches them from pagan self-sufficiency and roots them in the fear of God and the examples of Scripture; he finds them already in the patriarchs and prophets, claiming, indeed, that the philosophers took their wisdom from the older revelation of the Hebrews (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.24–29; trans. NPNF II/10). The four cardinal virtues, baptized in this way, would pass through Ambrose into the standard scheme of Western Christian ethics.
  • The honorable over the useful. Where a pagan might calculate advantage, Ambrose insists that nothing truly useful can be dishonorable, and nothing honorable truly disadvantageous — so that the apparent conflict dissolves, and the Christian is never required to choose expediency over righteousness (Ambrose, De Officiis 3.1–9). The useful is reconceived: a deed’s true profit is its righteousness and its reward with God.
  • Humility and self-denial replace the Stoic ideal of the magnanimous, self-possessed sage. The model is not Cato but Christ and the saints; the governing dispositions are modesty of speech, bearing, and desire, and a charity that empties itself for others (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.1–22, on modesty and silence).

The Three Books in Detail

Each book repays a closer look at how Ambrose takes a specific Ciceronian topic and turns it. Book I, on the honorable, opens not with a philosopher’s definition but with a bishop’s apology for teaching at all — Ambrose, raised to the episcopate without the slow apprenticeship of the schools, presents himself as learning and teaching at once, “set to teach before I had learned” (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.1.4; trans. NPNF II/10). He then takes up Cicero’s opening theme of decorum — the fitting, the seemly — and recasts it as Christian verecundia: the modesty of speech, gait, gesture, and eye that becomes a cleric, illustrated not from the Roman forum but from David’s silence before the wicked (Psalm 39) and from the deportment of Scripture’s holy men (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.18.67–1.23.104). Cicero’s four sources of the honorable become the four cardinal virtues; Cicero’s discussion of magnanimitas is quietly demoted, for the Christian “great soul” is shown in contempt of riches and in suffering for righteousness, not in the proud self-sufficiency of the Stoic sage (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.36.180–1.39.191; Davidson, OECS, commentary ad loc.).

Book II, on the useful, performs the boldest inversion. Cicero had defined the utile in terms of the goods that secure a man’s standing — wealth, influence, the goodwill of others won by liberality and reputation. Ambrose accepts the vocabulary and empties it of worldliness: the truly useful is what profits unto eternal life, and the goodwill worth seeking is not popular favor but the love that flows from justice and almsgiving (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.1.1–2.7.29). He keeps Cicero’s discussion of how to win confidence and how counsel should be given, but the counsellor’s wisdom is now Solomon’s, and the trust to be won is the flock’s trust in its shepherd (2.8.40–2.12.64). Book III, on the apparent conflict of the honorable and the useful, follows Cicero’s structure of test cases but answers them from Scripture: where Cicero adduced Regulus and the honest sale, Ambrose adduces the patriarchs, Tobit, Judith, Esther, and above all the refusal of the holy men to purchase safety or gain by any wrong (Ambrose, De Officiis 3.12.78–3.22.135). The resolution is absolute — numquam igitur utilitatis gratia decoris vel honestatis gratia deserenda est, “never, then, for the sake of advantage is what is seemly or honorable to be abandoned” (cf. De Officiis 3.9; Davidson, OECS).

The Cardinal Virtues and Moses Before the Greeks

Ambrose’s treatment of the four cardinal virtues is the structural hinge of Book I, and it carries a polemical historical claim. He defines and orders them — prudence as the foundation, since it seeks the truth and is bound up with the knowledge of God; justice as that which renders to each his own and to God His worship; fortitude as the loftiest, the strength that despises death and worldly loss; temperance as the modesty and measure that orders the rest (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.24.115–1.45.228; trans. NPNF II/10). But he insists that this wisdom is not the philosophers’ invention. The Greeks, he argues, drew their best teaching from the older Scriptures: “David was before Aristotle in time, and Solomon outdid the wisdom of the Greeks” — the philosophers learned from Moses and the prophets and then claimed the borrowed treasure as their own (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.31.118 and 1.43.211; Davidson, OECS, on the furta philosophorum topos; Ramsey, Ambrose, 50–52). This claim — that pagan ethics is a derivative and corrupted form of an original Hebrew revelation — was a commonplace of patristic apologetic (Justin, Clement, Eusebius), and Ambrose deploys it precisely to justify his appropriation of Cicero: in baptizing the cardinal virtues he is only reclaiming what was Scripture’s to begin with.

Speech, Silence, and the Ideal Cleric

A recurring concern, woven through Book I, is the discipline of the tongue. Ambrose opens the whole treatise on the theme of silence, taking David’s “I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue; I have set a guard upon my mouth” (Psalm 39:1) as the text for a meditation on when to speak and when to be still (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.2.5–1.9.31; trans. NPNF II/10). The good cleric is mild in speech, slow to anger, free of the loud laughter, the cutting jest, and the flattering or quarrelsome word; his voice should be plain and manly, neither effeminate nor rustic (1.18.67–1.23.104). The ideal that emerges across the work is a coherent portrait of the model minister: chaste, hospitable, free from avarice, prudent in counsel, courageous in adversity, generous to the poor, dignified but not pompous in bearing — a portrait that would furnish the West with its enduring image of the holy bishop and feed directly into Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis (Davidson, OECS, introduction; Ramsey, Ambrose, 52–54).

The Ethics of Almsgiving

The most striking ethical content concerns wealth, liberality, and the poor, and here Ambrose is at his most radical. Justice, for him, requires that the goods of the earth be held for common use; he reads in nature itself a primordial communism of God’s gifts: “God has ordered all things to be produced so that there should be food in common for all, and that the earth should be a common possession for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few” (Ambrose, De Officiis 1.28.132; trans. NPNF II/10). What the rich man gives to the poor, on this view, is not bounty but restitution.

Out of this comes the great defense of redeeming captives as the highest form of liberality. In Book II Ambrose addresses, and justifies, his own breaking-up of the consecrated church plate to ransom prisoners taken by the Goths after Adrianople (378) — an act for which the Arians had attacked him (see The See of Milan). “The Church has gold, not to store up, but to lay out, and to spend on those who need,” he writes; “it had been better to preserve living vessels than gold ones”; and “the redemption of captives is a great good” — the chalice that redeems sinners by Christ’s blood may rightly be melted to redeem the captive from the enemy (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.28.136–138; trans. NPNF II/10). He crowns it with the deacon Lawrence, who, ordered to surrender the Church’s treasures, presented the poor: “These are the treasures of the Church” (Ambrose, De Officiis 2.28.140). He sets limits — unconsecrated vessels are melted first, consecrated ones only at need and without irreverence, never for private gain (2.28.142–143) — but the principle is uncompromising: the Church’s wealth belongs to the poor and the captive, and to hoard it while they perish is the real sacrilege.

Wealth, Usury, and Common Ownership

The social teaching of De Officiis is of a piece with a cluster of Ambrose’s other works, and it is sharper than almost anything else in the Latin Fathers. The premise is the original common ownership of the earth’s goods (De Officiis 1.28.132): private property is a consequence of greed and of the fall, not of nature, so that the rich man who keeps a surplus while the poor go hungry is not generous when he gives but is merely returning stolen goods. Ambrose works this out at length in the companion treatises De Nabuthae (“On Naboth”), a furious sermon against the engrossing landlord — “you who clothe your walls, do you leave men naked?… the earth was made in common for all, rich and poor” (Ambrose, De Nabuthae 1.2, 12.53 [CSEL 32.2]; trans. McGuire) — and De Tobia (“On Tobit”), a sustained attack on usury. There Ambrose condemns the lending of money at interest as a form of legalized murder, the creditor feeding on the debtor’s flesh: “usury is the killing of a man… he who takes usury commits robbery, he does not seek to live but contrives the means of death” (Ambrose, De Tobia 2.6–3.9 and 15.51 [CSEL 32.2]; trans. Zucker; Ramsey, Ambrose, 173–178). The one apparent exception he discusses — the Deuteronomic permission to exact usury from a foreign enemy (Deuteronomy 23:19–20) — he reads as license only against those one might lawfully kill in war, and so as no warrant for usury among Christian brethren. The whole forms a coherent economic ethic: goods are common, surplus belongs to the needy, and the extraction of interest from a brother’s need is sin.

Influence

De Officiis gave the Latin Church a Christian ethics with a classical backbone — the cardinal virtues, the scheme of duty, the resolution of the honorable and the useful — and it transmitted that synthesis far. Through it the Ciceronian moral vocabulary entered Christian thought; through it the four cardinal virtues became fixtures of Western catechesis, later joined by the three theological virtues; and its teaching on common ownership and almsgiving fed a long tradition of Christian social thought. It is, with Cyprian’s letters and Tertullian’s treatises, one of the founding documents of Latin Christian ethics — and the only one that set out, deliberately and successfully, to outdo Cicero on his own ground.

The line of descent is traceable. Augustine, Ambrose’s convert, took up the cardinal virtues and famously redefined them as forms of charity — “virtue is rightly ordered love” — so that prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance became four modes of the love of God (Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae 15.25). The decisive synthesis came when the four cardinal virtues of the philosophers, transmitted through Ambrose’s baptism of them, were joined to the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity drawn from 1 Corinthians 13 — producing the sevenfold scheme of virtue that structures Western moral theology from the patristic period through the Sentences of Peter Lombard to the Secunda Secundae of Thomas Aquinas, where each of the seven receives its own systematic treatment (Davidson, OECS, introduction; Ramsey, Ambrose, 54–55). Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis, the medieval West’s standard handbook for the bishop’s office, stands in direct continuity with Ambrose’s portrait of the ideal cleric; and the genre Ambrose founded — the Christian treatise de officiis — was self-consciously revived in the Carolingian period, when figures such as Jonas of Orléans and later Bonaventure wrote their own works of clerical duty in its shadow. Through these channels the De Officiis shaped not only the content of Western moral theology — its virtue-scheme, its social teaching on property and usury, its ideal of the minister — but the very form in which the Latin Church would think about Christian conduct.

See Also

References

  • Ambrose of Milan. De Officiis (Ministrorum), 3 books [PL 16]; crit. ed. and trans. Ivor J. Davidson, Ambrose: De Officiis, 2 vols., Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford, 2001); Latin also Testard (CCSL 15); trans. NPNF II/10 (de Romestin). Specific loci: 1.24–29 (cardinal virtues); 1.28.132 (common use of goods); 2.28.136–143 (ransoming captives); 3.1–9 (honorable and useful).
  • Ambrose of Milan. De Tobia and De Nabuthae [CSEL 32.2, ed. Schenkl]; De Tobia trans. Lois M. Zucker (Washington, 1933); De Nabuthae trans. Martin McGuire (Washington, 1927). On usury and on common ownership.
  • Augustine of Hippo. De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae 15.25 (the cardinal virtues as forms of love). Trans. NPNF I/4.
  • Cicero. De Officiis. Trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library. Ambrose’s model.
  • Davidson, Ivor J. Ambrose: De Officiis. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The definitive edition, translation, and commentary; on title, date, and the transformation of Cicero.
  • Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 47–55. On De Officiis.
  • Campenhausen, Hans von. The Fathers of the Latin Church. London: A. & C. Black, 1964, 87–116.
  • Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 2:500–540.