De Virginibus and Consecrated Virginity

De Virginibus, written for his sister Marcellina in the early years of his episcopate, was Ambrose’s first treatise, and with the works that followed it — De Viduis, De Virginitate, De Institutione Virginis, Exhortatio Virginitatis — it made him the foremost Latin advocate of consecrated virginity in the fourth century. This file sets out the treatise and its setting: the praise of the virgin-martyr Agnes with which it opens, the theology of virginity as a higher Christian calling, the opposition Ambrose’s advocacy provoked among the families of Milan, and its place in the broader controversy that culminated in the condemnation of Jovinian.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

A Treatise for His Sister

Ambrose’s earliest work was about virginity, and it was personal. De Virginibus (“Concerning Virgins”), in three books, was written around 377, in the third year of his episcopate, and addressed to his sister Marcellina, herself a consecrated virgin who had received the veil from Pope Liberius at Rome some twenty years before (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.1, 3.1 [PL 16]; trans. NPNF II/10; see The Man and the See). The household that had produced the saint had also produced a way of life, and Ambrose set himself to commend it to his whole church. Around De Virginibus he gathered a cluster of related works over the following years: De Viduis (“On Widows,” c. 377), De Virginitate (c. 378), De Institutione Virginis (c. 391–392), and Exhortatio Virginitatis (c. 393–394) — a sustained literary campaign for the consecrated life that has few parallels in the Latin fourth century (Ramsey, Ambrose, 38–47; Dudden, Life and Times, 1:145–160).

Agnes

De Virginibus opens, after the prologue, with the figure of Agnes, the Roman girl martyred for her virginity, because the first of the addresses fell on her feast (21 January). Ambrose’s portrait of her is one of the masterpieces of early Christian rhetoric — the child of twelve who feared neither the executioner’s sword nor the loss of her life, only the loss of her purity, and who went to death as to a wedding: “She stood, she prayed, she bent her neck. You could see the executioner tremble, as though he himself had been condemned… Thus in one victim there was a twofold martyrdom, of modesty and of religion: she both remained a virgin and obtained martyrdom” (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.2.5–9 [PL 16]; trans. NPNF II/10). Agnes sets the key of the whole work: virginity is not a withholding but a self-offering, a martyrdom of the will continued through a whole life.

The Theology of Virginity

For Ambrose, consecrated virginity is a higher calling — not a condemnation of marriage, which he is careful to honor, but a more excellent way, an anticipation on earth of the angelic life of heaven where they neither marry nor are given in marriage (Matthew 22:30). The virgin is the bride of Christ, espoused to the heavenly Bridegroom, and her integrity of body is the sign and instrument of an integrity of heart wholly given to God (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.5–8). Ambrose roots the ideal in Scripture and in the example of the saints, above all in Mary, whom he presents as the very pattern of the consecrated virgin (see Marian Theology). His praise of virginity is lyrical and exalted, and it was enormously influential: through Ambrose, and through the Augustine he formed, the high Latin theology of consecrated virginity took shape.

He is, at the same time, careful to keep the balance the Church requires. He commends marriage as good and honorable, condemns those who disparage it, and treats widowhood and the married state as their own genuine goods, lower than virginity but real (Ambrose, De Viduis; De Virginibus 1.6.24–7.35). The ordering — virginity, widowhood, marriage — is a hierarchy of goods, not a contempt for the lower goods; this is the patristic consensus, and Ambrose holds it.

The Opposition

Ambrose’s campaign met resistance, and the resistance is itself revealing. He reports that mothers kept their daughters away from his preaching, fearing he would talk them into the veil and so out of marriage and grandchildren, and that young women came to Milan to be consecrated from as far away as Bologna, Piacenza, and even Mauretania, against their families’ wishes (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.10–11, esp. 1.11.58 [PL 16]; trans. NPNF II/10). He answers the social objections directly — including the complaint that widespread virginity would depopulate the empire — arguing that the choice of God over marriage is the freest and highest a soul can make: “Are they then who are allowed to choose a husband not allowed to choose God?” (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.11.58; the depopulation objection at 1.7.34). The opposition shows how genuinely counter-cultural the ascetic ideal was in a society built on the family and its continuity, and how forcefully Ambrose pressed it.

To the recurring charge that the spread of virginity would thin the population and weaken the state, Ambrose returns a confident answer that is worth setting out, since it became a standard reply of the patristic tradition. He observes, first, that the number who actually embrace consecrated virginity is small, and that the alarm is therefore overblown; second, that virginity does not in fact diminish but in a manner increases the people of the Church, since the virgin gains as her children all whom her prayers and example bring to God; and third — turning the objection on its head — that wars, not virgins, depopulate the world, and that where the ascetic ideal flourishes there is more peace and more life, not less (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.7.34–36). The places where virginity is honored, he argues, are precisely the places of fruitfulness, for the renunciation of one is the spiritual increase of many. The argument is partly rhetorical, but it touches a real point: the Church’s experience was that the ascetic vocation drew the strongest devotion of a few without emptying the married estate of the many, and that the consecrated served the common life of the Church rather than subtracting from it (Brown, The Body and Society, 341–365; Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy).

The Wider Ascetic Movement

Ambrose’s campaign for virginity was not an isolated enthusiasm but the Western edge of a movement that was sweeping the whole fourth-century Church. The catalyst, felt across both East and West, was Athanasius’s Life of Antony (c. 357), which carried the ideal of the Egyptian desert into the imagination of the Mediterranean world; translated into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch, it was read in Milan in Ambrose’s own day, and it was precisely this book — overheard in the famous garden scene at Milan — that helped tip Augustine toward his conversion (Augustine, Confessions 8.6.14–15; Brown, The Body and Society, 341–365). The monastic ideal of the East was reaching the West along several channels at once: through Athanasius himself, an exile in the West who brought the desert with him; through the ascetic households of Rome, where Marcella had turned her palace on the Aventine into a center of ascetic study and prayer, and where Jerome, from 382, was the spiritual guide of a circle of noble Roman women — Marcella, Paula, Eustochium — who embraced consecrated virginity and widowhood with a rigor that scandalized respectable society (Brown, The Body and Society, 366–386; Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy). Ambrose at Milan was the bishop who took this movement, still in many ways a private and aristocratic ferment, and gave it the full weight of episcopal advocacy from the pulpit of a great see — making consecrated virginity not merely the choice of certain devout families but a public ideal pressed upon a whole local church. His treatises are thus a Latin counterpart to the eastern monastic literature, naturalizing in the West an ascetic ideal whose roots lay in the deserts of Egypt and Syria.

Virginity as Martyrdom Continued and Bridal Mystery

Two theological threads give Ambrose’s praise of virginity its particular intensity. The first is the conception of virginity as a continuation of martyrdom. With the peace of the Church under Constantine the age of the great persecutions had closed, and the question pressed itself on the fourth century: how, without the arena, was the total self-offering of the martyrs to be lived now? The ascetic answer — that virginity and the consecrated life were the new martyrdom, a daily and lifelong oblation of the body and will to God — is written into the very structure of De Virginibus, which opens not with a living virgin but with the virgin-martyr Agnes, in whom the two crowns are explicitly joined (the “twofold martyrdom, of modesty and of religion”). The virgin who keeps her body inviolate through a whole life offers the same total gift the martyr offered in an hour, prolonging the witness of blood into the slow witness of a consecrated lifetime (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.2.5–9; Brown, The Body and Society, 341–365; Ramsey, Ambrose, 38–47). The second thread is bridal mysticism, drawn above all from the Song of Songs: the consecrated virgin is the bride of Christ, espoused to the heavenly Bridegroom, and her bodily integrity is the sacrament of a heart wholly given. Ambrose reads the Song’s love-language of the spouse and the Beloved as the very grammar of the virgin’s life, so that virginity is not a negation — a mere not-marrying — but the most positive of vocations, a marriage to God Himself (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.7–8, drawing on the Song of Songs; Brown, The Body and Society, 356–365). These two themes, martyrdom-continued and bridal espousal, lift Ambrose’s account above prudential argument into a genuine spirituality of the consecrated life.

The fierceness of the opposition Ambrose met becomes intelligible only against the social realities the ascetic choice disturbed. In Roman society the daughters of the propertied classes were the instruments of family strategy — married young to cement alliances and to transmit inheritance, their bodies and fortunes the currency of the household’s continuity. For a young woman to consecrate her virginity was therefore to remove herself from the marriage market, to refuse to bear the heirs her family expected, and — crucially — to assert a degree of autonomy over her own person and property that the ancient family structure scarcely allowed (Brown, The Body and Society, 341–365; Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy). This is why mothers kept their daughters from Ambrose’s preaching: not from impiety but because his ideal struck at the economic and dynastic foundations of the household. The consecrated life, for all its renunciation, paradoxically opened to women a sphere of self-determination — over their bodies, their wealth, and their devotion — that marriage closed; and the wealth that a consecrated virgin or widow directed to the poor and the Church, rather than to a husband’s lineage, became a major engine of the Church’s charity. Ambrose’s advocacy was thus, among other things, a quiet redistribution of social and economic power, and his opponents understood it as such.

On Widows: De Viduis

The companion treatise De Viduis (“On Widows,” c. 377) extends Ambrose’s ascetic teaching to a second and very different order of consecrated life. Widowhood, in his scheme, is a genuine good, lower than virginity but higher than remarriage: the widow who does not remarry but devotes her remaining life to prayer, continence, and works of mercy holds an honored place in the Church, and Ambrose draws her portrait from the biblical widows — Anna the prophetess who served in the Temple, the widow of Zarephath, Naomi, Judith (Ambrose, De Viduis, esp. on Anna and the widow of Zarephath; trans. NPNF II/10). The treatise matters because it shows Ambrose’s scheme is not a simple cult of physical virginity but a graded theology of the consecrated life in all its states: virgins, widows, and the continent married each have their dignity, and the widow’s hard-won continence, embraced after the experience of marriage and often against the pressure to remarry for property’s sake, is in its way as demanding a witness as the virgin’s. De Viduis also answers, in passing, the same social objections as De Virginibus, defending the widow’s right to dispose of her own person and goods in the service of God rather than be passed again into a new husband’s house.

The Jovinian Controversy

Ambrose’s exaltation of virginity placed him on one side of a controversy that came to a head a decade later. The monk Jovinian denied that virginity was superior to marriage, teaching that the baptized who kept their baptismal grace were of equal merit whatever their state of life. [Disputed: Jovinian was condemned at Rome under Pope Siricius and then at a synod at Milan under Ambrose, conventionally dated c. 390–393, the exact dating uncertain (Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy, who gives the range).] Ambrose’s synodal letter against Jovinian defends the higher dignity of virginity and — significantly — the perpetual virginity of Mary, which Jovinian’s circle was thought to impugn (see Marian Theology). The fiercest answer to Jovinian came from Jerome, whose Adversus Iovinianum overshot into something close to a disparagement of marriage; Ambrose’s own treatment kept the steadier patristic line. The controversy fixed in the Latin Church the teaching that virginity, freely chosen for God, is a higher good than marriage — the teaching Ambrose had spent his episcopate commending.

References

Ambrose of Milan. De Virginibus, 3 books, c. 377 [PL 16]; trans. NPNF II/10 (de Romestin). Loci: 1.2.5–9 (Agnes); 1.7.34 (depopulation objection); 1.10–11, esp. 1.11.58 (opposition of families); 3.1 (Marcellina and Pope Liberius).
Ambrose of Milan. De Viduis; De Virginitate; De Institutione Virginis; Exhortatio Virginitatis [PL 16]; De Viduis trans. NPNF II/10. The companion works.
Hunter, David G. Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. On Jovinian and the dating of his condemnation.
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, esp. 341–386. On the fourth-century ascetic movement, Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the Roman ascetic circles, and the social meaning of virginity.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 38–47. On the virginity treatises.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 1:145–160.