Marian Theology

Ambrose is one of the great early Latin witnesses to the Mother of God. This file sets out his Marian theology: his defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity — including her virginity in the act of giving birth (virginitas in partu) — against those who denied it; his presentation of Mary as the very pattern and model of the consecrated virgin; his pioneering of the Mary–Church typology, in which the Virgin Mother is the figure of the virgin Church that bears Christians in baptism; and his influence on Augustine’s Mariology. It includes a careful note distinguishing what Ambrose actually taught — Mary’s all-holiness and perpetual virginity, the inheritance shared with the Orthodox East — from the later Western definition of the Immaculate Conception, which he did not hold.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Perpetual Virginity

Ambrose taught, firmly and influentially, the perpetual virginity of Mary — that she was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ. This was not yet universally settled in the Latin West, and Ambrose became its chief Western defender. His most pointed defense was against Bonosus (of Sardica/Naissus), who denied Mary’s perpetual virginity and held that she bore other children after Jesus; against him Ambrose argued for Mary’s enduring virginity, and a Western synod under his influence condemned Bonosus’s teaching (Ambrose, De Institutione Virginis; the matter is connected to the synod of Milan, c. 391–393; Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy).

Ambrose went further than mere virginity before and after: he is the chief Western witness to virginitas in partu, Mary’s virginity preserved intact even in the act of giving birth — that the Lord’s nativity, like His conception, transcended the order of nature and left the seals of His Mother’s virginity unbroken. He develops this through the great type of the closed gate of Ezekiel: “What is this gate, but Mary? Closed, because a virgin. Mary is therefore the gate through which Christ entered this world, when He was brought forth by the virginal birth and the manner of His birth did not break the seals of virginity” (Ambrose, De Institutione Virginis 8.52 [PL 16]; on the gate of Ezekiel 44:1–3). It was largely through Ambrose that virginitas in partu passed firmly into the later theology of the Western Church — a doctrine held in common with the Orthodox East, where the perpetual virginity of the Aeiparthenos, the Ever-Virgin, is confessed without reserve.

The closed gate of Ezekiel is the most famous of Ambrose’s Marian types, but it does not stand alone. He gathers around it a whole cluster of Old Testament figures, drawn especially from the Song of Songs, which the patristic tradition read as the love-song of Christ and the soul, of Christ and the Church, and of Christ and His Virgin Mother. Mary is the hortus conclusus, the garden enclosed, and the fons signatus, the fountain sealed — “a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed” (Song of Songs 4:12) — the sealed and inviolate ground in which the flower of Jesse springs up untouched by any hand, the well shut from every other than the Bridegroom (Ambrose, De Institutione Virginis and Expositio in Lucam; on the hortus conclusus and fons signatus; Ramsey, Ambrose, 60–66). These images, like the closed gate, all say one thing under many figures: that the manner of Christ’s coming did not violate but rather sealed His Mother’s virginity, that He entered the world by a door that remained shut and drew His humanity from a ground that remained whole. To these Ambrose joins the rod of Aaron that budded without planting and the fleece of Gideon wet with dew from heaven, ancient types of a fruitfulness that owes nothing to nature’s ordinary course. The whole exegetical apparatus serves the single doctrine of the inviolate Virgin Mother, and through Ambrose this body of Marian typology passed into the standing vocabulary of Western — and, in its substance, of universal — devotion to the Theotokos.

Mary the Pattern of Virgins

In De Virginibus Ambrose presents Mary not only as a doctrine to be defended but as a model to be imitated — indeed as virginity itself made visible. He sets her life before the consecrated virgins of Milan as the mirror in which they are to see the form of their own calling: “Let the life of Mary be for you as if portrayed in an image, from which, as from a mirror, the appearance of chastity and the form of virtue shines forth. From this you may take your pattern of life, showing, as in an example, the clear rules of virtue: what you ought to correct, to effect, and to hold fast” (Ambrose, De Virginibus 2.2.6–7 [PL 16]; trans. NPNF II/10). He draws the portrait in detail — Mary’s humility, her modesty of speech and bearing, her constancy in prayer and reading, her purity of heart — so that the abstract ideal of the consecrated life acquires a face. This fusion of Mariology and the theology of virginity (see De Virginibus) is one of Ambrose’s most characteristic contributions: the Mother of God as the first and perfect of the virgins, the head of their company.

Mary’s Faith and the Magnificat

Ambrose’s Mary is not only the inviolate virgin of the dogmatic argument but a portrait of living faith, drawn most fully from his commentary on Luke. He dwells on the Annunciation and the Visitation, and above all on the Magnificat, the song in which Mary’s whole soul magnifies the Lord. Where Zechariah doubted and was struck dumb, Mary believed, and Ambrose makes her faith the hinge of the mystery: “Blessed is she who believed,” and by believing conceived (Luke 1:45; Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 2.17–30 [CSEL 32.4, ed. Schenkl]). From her example he draws the famous spiritual application — that “the soul of Mary magnifies the Lord, and the spirit of Mary rejoices in God,” and that “in each the soul of Mary, in each the spirit of Mary, that the spirit may rejoice in God” — so that every faithful soul is called to bear Christ in faith as Mary bore Him in the flesh (Expositio in Lucam 2.26). This linking of Mary’s bodily motherhood to the believer’s spiritual motherhood of Christ is one of Ambrose’s most fruitful themes, and it makes his Mariology not a remote dogmatics but a school of the interior life: Mary is the first and perfect believer, in whom faith and obedience bring forth the Word.

Ambrose also gives clear expression to the new Eve typology, the antithesis between Eve and Mary already developed by Justin and Irenaeus: as death came through the disobedience of a virgin, Eve, so life came through the obedience of a virgin, Mary; “through a woman came folly, through a virgin wisdom” (Ambrose, Expositio in Lucam and De Institutione Virginis; cf. the Eve–Mary parallel in the patristic tradition). Mary undoes in her fiat what Eve did in her grasping, and so stands at the head of the redeemed as Eve stood at the head of the fallen. Ambrose’s broader honoring of Mary’s dignity prepares, without anachronism, the way for the conciliar confession of her as Dei genetrix — the Latin equivalent of the Greek Theotokos that the Council of Ephesus would define in 431, a generation after his death — for everything in his Marian teaching presses toward the truth that the One she bore is God, and that she is therefore in the strict and proper sense the Mother of God.

Mary and the Church

Ambrose is credited as the first Latin Father to develop systematically the typology of Mary and the Church — the parallel between the Virgin who bore Christ and the virgin Church who bears Christians. As Mary conceived by the Spirit and remained a virgin in childbearing, so the Church conceives her children by the same Spirit in the virginal womb of the baptismal font and remains undefiled; Mary is the type, the Church the antitype, and each illumines the other (Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 2.7 and elsewhere; Ramsey, Ambrose, 60–66). The strongest statements of this theme stand in his commentary on Luke rather than in De Virginibus, but the conception is consistent across his work: the Marian mystery is not isolated devotion but the pattern of the Church’s own life. This Mary–Church typology, passing through Ambrose to Augustine, became a structural element of Latin ecclesiology and Mariology alike.

Influence on Augustine

Ambrose’s Mariology, like so much else, reached the wider West through Augustine, whom he had baptized and formed (see The Baptism of Augustine and The Shaping of the West). Augustine takes up the Ambrosian themes — Mary as virgin and mother, the Mary–Church parallel, the perpetual virginity — and develops them in his own preaching and treatises. His famous reticence about Mary and sin, where “for the honor of the Lord” he would have “no question raised at all” concerning her, extends the Ambrosian reverence for the all-holy Mother (Augustine, De Natura et Gratia 36.42). Much of what later Western devotion received as its Marian theology it received from Augustine, and from Augustine because from Ambrose.

A Necessary Distinction

One distinction must be drawn with care, for it is exactly the point at which the later Latin and the Orthodox traditions diverge. [Disputed/anachronism: Ambrose must not be read as a witness to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception — Mary’s preservation from original sin from the moment of her own conception — which is a much later Western development, defined as Roman Catholic dogma only in 1854 by Pope Pius IX (Ineffabilis Deus). Ambrose affirmed Mary’s perpetual virginity and her personal holiness and sinlessness of life, but he had not the developed doctrine of original sin that the Immaculate Conception presupposes, and he did not teach it.] This is the historically and confessionally responsible way to present him: Ambrose is a witness to Mary’s all-holiness and perpetual virginity — the inheritance the Orthodox East confesses fully in the Ever-Virgin and Theotokos — and not to the 1854 definition, on which the Orthodox Church has never agreed with Rome. Read so, Ambrose belongs wholly to the shared patristic Mariology of the undivided Church: a Latin father of the Theotokos, the perpetual virgin, the pattern of the consecrated life, and the type of the Church.

The Orthodox position is worth stating positively, lest the rejection of the 1854 dogma be mistaken for a lowering of Mary. The Orthodox Church confesses the Mother of God as Panagia, the All-Holy, and as Achrantos, the Immaculate or spotless — titles of the highest reverence, sung in every Divine Liturgy, by which she is honored “more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.” The East venerates her as wholly without personal sin, the pure vessel of the Incarnation, the new Eve who undid the old Eve’s disobedience. What the Orthodox Church does not receive is the specific scholastic framework of the 1854 definition — that Mary was preserved from the guilt of original sin transmitted at conception, a formulation that presupposes the particular Augustinian-Latin doctrine of inherited guilt which the Greek fathers, and the Orthodox tradition after them, did not hold in that form. Ambrose stands, with the East, on the side of the All-Holy and Ever-Virgin Theotokos; the developed doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, resting on a theology of original sin he did not possess, lies on the far side of a long Western development from him, and cannot be read back into his pages.

References

Ambrose of Milan. De Institutione Virginis 8.52 [PL 16]. On virginitas in partu and the closed gate of Ezekiel; the defense against Bonosus.
Ambrose of Milan. De Virginibus 2.2.6–7 [PL 16]; trans. NPNF II/10. Mary as the pattern and mirror of virgins.
Ambrose of Milan. Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 2 [CSEL 32.4, ed. Schenkl]. The Mary–Church typology.
Augustine of Hippo. De Natura et Gratia 36.42; trans. NPNF I/5. On Mary and sin.
Hunter, David G. Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. On Bonosus, Jovinian, and the synod.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 60–66. On the Mariology and the Mary–Church type.
Pius IX. Ineffabilis Deus. 1854. The definition of the Immaculate Conception (cited to mark the later development Ambrose did not hold).
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 2:600–630.