The Shaping of the West

Beyond the baptism of one man, Ambrose shaped the whole Latin tradition. He was the great conduit by which the theology of the Greek East — the Cappadocians, Athanasius, Origen, Philo — crossed into Latin and reached Augustine, and through Augustine the entire West. This file sets out that larger role: Ambrose as bridge between East and West, his formative influence on Augustine’s theology and so on all subsequent Western thought, and his standing as one of the architects, with Augustine and Jerome, of Latin Christianity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Bridge Between East and West

The single most important thing to grasp about Ambrose’s place in Christian history is that he stood at a crossing-point of languages. In the late fourth century the great theological achievements were Greek — the Nicene defense of the Son by Athanasius, the doctrine of the Spirit by Basil and the Cappadocians, the exegetical method of Origen, the scriptural allegory of Philo — and the Latin West had no equivalent and, increasingly, could not read the Greek (see The Man and the See). Ambrose could. His command of Greek let him take the riches of the Eastern fathers and pour them into Latin, and he did so systematically across his whole corpus:

De Spiritu Sancto carries Basil’s, Athanasius’s, and Didymus’s pneumatology into Latin (see De Spiritu Sancto);
the Hexameron adapts Basil’s homilies on creation;
the exegetical treatises on Genesis and the patriarchs naturalize Philo and Origen in the West (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron).

Jerome called it plagiarism; the truer description is translation in the deepest sense — the transfer of a whole theological culture across a linguistic frontier (Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Latin Church, 87–116; Ramsey, Ambrose, 55–66). Without Ambrose the Latin West would have received the Greek fourth century late, partially, and at second hand. With him it received it in the lifetime of Augustine — which made all the difference.

The Formation of Augustine’s Theology

Ambrose’s deepest influence runs through Augustine, and through Augustine into the entire structure of Western Christian thought. Three strands are clearest:

Biblical interpretation. Ambrose’s spiritual, figurative reading of the Old Testament, which removed the Manichaean stumbling-block for Augustine (see The Baptism of Augustine), became the foundation of Augustine’s own exegesis and, through Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana and his commentaries, of the medieval Latin practice of the “spiritual senses” of Scripture (Augustine, Confessions 6.4; Brown, Augustine of Hippo).

Trinitarian and pneumatological orthodoxy. Augustine received the Nicene faith — the consubstantial Son and the divine Spirit — in the form Ambrose had given it in Latin in De Fide and De Spiritu Sancto, the form refined from the Greek (see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle). Augustine’s own monumental De Trinitate builds on the Latin Nicene settlement that Ambrose, more than anyone, had secured.

Mariology and the ascetic ideal. Ambrose’s doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, his Mary–Church typology, and his exaltation of consecrated virginity passed directly into Augustine, who develops the Ambrosian themes of Mary as virgin-and-mother and of the Church as the virgin who bears Christians (see Marian Theology and De Virginibus). Augustine’s reverent reserve about Mary and sin — “for the honor of the Lord” he would have “no question raised” (Augustine, De Natura et Gratia 36.42) — extends an Ambrosian trajectory.

To these three strands a fourth should be added: the theology of grace and the divided will. Augustine’s mature anti-Pelagian doctrine — that the will cannot turn to the good without prevenient grace, that fallen humanity inherits a guilt and a bondage from Adam — was not, he insisted, a private departure but the received faith, and he could appeal to Ambrose as its earlier Latin witness (see below). Ambrose had written of the human race “fallen in Adam,” of grace as the necessary condition of every good work, and of Christ alone as conceived and born without the stain that marks all others — themes Augustine recognized as the seed of his own (Augustine, Contra Julianum 2.5.14; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan; Ramsey, Ambrose, 57–60). The convert of 387 became the great doctor of grace partly by drawing out what his baptizer had already taught.

It is not too much to say that the theologian who shaped the Latin Middle Ages was himself shaped, at the decisive moment, by Ambrose — and that much of what is “Augustinian” in Western Christianity is Ambrosian at the root.

Ambrose’s Authority in the Grace Controversy

The transmission can be made concrete. In the bitter Pelagian controversy of his later years, when his teaching on original sin and the necessity of grace was attacked as a novelty, the aged Augustine reached repeatedly for Ambrose as the catholic authority who had taught the same doctrine before him — and, pointedly, as a father whom even the Pelagians professed to honor. Against Julian of Eclanum he marshals Ambrose’s words on the sin transmitted from Adam, on the inability of the will to do good without grace, and on the sinlessness of Christ alone among those born of woman, citing him by name as the witness of the whole Church: Pelagius himself, Augustine notes, had praised Ambrose as one in whose books “the Roman faith shines forth” (Augustine, Contra Julianum 1.3.10, 2.5.14–6.15; Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 4.11.29–4.12.34; trans. NPNF I/5). To turn Ambrose against the Pelagians was a deliberate stroke: Augustine was demonstrating that his own theology of grace was not his invention but the received faith of Nicene Milan, vindicated by the very father his opponents claimed to revere. Here the line from Ambrose to Augustine is not a matter of scholarly reconstruction but of Augustine’s own explicit appeal.

[Important: a caution against a common confusion. The anonymous fourth-century Latin author known as “Ambrosiaster” — the unknown commentator on the Pauline epistles whose work circulated under Ambrose’s name through the Middle Ages, and whose teaching on original sin (the famous in quo omnes peccaverunt reading of Romans 5:12) influenced Augustine — is not Ambrose. The name “Ambrosiaster” (“would-be Ambrose”), coined by Erasmus, marks precisely the misattribution. Augustine, who at one point cited the Ambrosiaster commentary under the name of “Hilary,” was himself partly misled by the false ascription. The genuine Ambrose and the pseudonymous Ambrosiaster are distinct authors and must not be conflated, even though both fed the Augustinian doctrine of grace (Souter, A Study of Ambrosiaster; Ramsey, Ambrose, 57–58).]

One of the Architects of Latin Christianity

Ambrose belongs to the small group of men who built Latin Christianity as a distinct theological and liturgical culture. With Augustine (his convert), Jerome (his sometime critic), and the later Gregory the Great, he would be numbered among the four great Latin Doctors of the Church (see Doctor of the Church). His contributions to that building were specific and lasting:

a Latin Nicene theology, defended in De Fide and De Spiritu Sancto and enforced at Aquileia;
a Latin Christian ethics, in De Officiis, with the cardinal virtues and the scheme of duty (see De Officiis and Ethics);
a Latin mystagogy and a strong eucharistic realism, in De Mysteriis and De Sacramentis (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron);
the foundations of Latin hymnody and a distinct Western liturgical tradition (see Father of Latin Hymnody);
and the enduring Western model of church and state — the bishop who judges the sins of emperors (see Theodosius and Thessalonica).

Each of these became a permanent feature of the Latin Church.

The Medieval and Carolingian Reception

The Ambrosian legacy did not merely survive into the Middle Ages; it became structural to Latin Christianity. In liturgy and hymnody, the metrical hymns Ambrose fathered — the iambic-dimeter strophes of Aeterne rerum conditor, Deus creator omnium, Veni redemptor gentium — became the model for the entire Western tradition of the Divine Office, the “Ambrosian” hymn-form imitated by Prudentius, Sedulius, and the anonymous hymnographers whose work fills the Frankish and monastic hymnals (see Father of Latin Hymnody; Campenhausen, Fathers of the Latin Church). The distinct Ambrosian Rite of Milan, alone among the Western non-Roman liturgies, resisted absorption and survives to this day, a living memorial of its founder (see The Ambrosian Rite). In doctrine, his De Officiis gave the medieval West its scheme of the cardinal and theological virtues and its model of the clerical life, mediated through Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and codified in the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (see De Officiis and Ethics).

The Carolingian renaissance, which set itself to recover and standardize the patristic inheritance, gave Ambrose a place of the first rank. It was in this period that the scheme of the four Latin Doctors — Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory — took firm shape, the four set on a level with the four Evangelists and the four Greek Doctors and later given visual form in countless church programs (see Doctor of the Church). His treatises were copied, excerpted into the great florilegia and canon-law collections, and quarried by Carolingian theologians; Hincmar of Reims invoked his authority in the disputes of the ninth century (and transmitted the Te Deum legend; see The Baptism of Augustine). Above all, the Ambrosian model of church and state — the bishop who excommunicated Theodosius and humbled an emperor to penance (see Theodosius and Thessalonica) — became the perennial precedent of the medieval West, cited across the Investiture Contest, the quarrels of Gregory VII and Becket, and the whole long argument over the two swords. Few patristic legacies were drawn upon so continuously, or in so many distinct registers — liturgical, doctrinal, ethical, and political — across the Latin Middle Ages.

A Pre-Schism Father, Held in Common

Because all of this belongs to the undivided Church of the first millennium, Ambrose is not a “Western” father in any sectarian sense but a father of the whole Church, venerated in the Orthodox East as fully as in the Latin West (see Doctor of the Church and Orthodoxy Guide: The Pre-Schism Church). His very life embodies the catholicity that preceded the schism: a Latin bishop who thought with Greek fathers, who defended an ecumenical creed, who shaped a Western tradition out of Eastern wealth. The Orthodox reception of Ambrose (see Doctor of the Church) is therefore not an ecumenical courtesy but a recognition of what Ambrose was: a father of the one Church, before the dividing of the ways, whose work belongs to East and West alike.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 6.4 (the spiritual exegesis); De Natura et Gratia 36.42 (Mary and sin); De Trinitate; De Doctrina Christiana; trans. various (Chadwick; NPNF I).
Augustine of Hippo. Contra Julianum 1.3.10, 2.5.14–6.15 (Ambrose cited against the Pelagians); Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 4.11.29–4.12.34; trans. NPNF I/5. Augustine’s explicit appeal to Ambrose’s authority on grace.
Souter, Alexander. A Study of Ambrosiaster. Texts and Studies 7.4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905. On the anonymous Pauline commentator wrongly named for Ambrose; the not-Ambrose caution.
Campenhausen, Hans von. The Fathers of the Latin Church. London: A. & C. Black, 1964, 87–116. On Ambrose as bridge between Greek and Latin.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. On Ambrose’s influence on Augustine.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 55–92. On Ambrose’s sources and legacy.
McLynn, Neil B. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. On Ambrose’s standing and self-fashioning.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 2:450–700.