Doctor of the Church

Ambrose is venerated as one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church and, in the Orthodox East, as a pre-schism Western father. This file sets out that twofold reception: his death on Good Friday 397 and his relics in the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, where they rest to this day beside the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius; his iconography — the beehive of his “honeyed” eloquence and the scourge of his discipline; his ranking among the four Latin Doctors with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, formally so named in 1298; and his veneration across the Orthodox Churches on his feast of December 7.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Death and Burial

Ambrose died at Milan in 397, on the night of Holy Saturday, in the early hours of Good Friday, 4 April — fittingly for a bishop whose whole theology turned on the Cross and the Resurrection, he passed at the threshold of Pascha (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 47–48; the Orthodox tradition recalls his death “in the Paschal season”). Paulinus, who knew him, records that as he lay dying he saw the Lord coming to him with a smile, and that he died with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross, having received the Body of the Lord (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 47 — reported as the Vita’s account, per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Paulinus, his secretary and biographer, sets the deathbed in fuller scene. Ambrose had been ill, and the Count Stilicho, judging the death of so great a man a public calamity, sent the noblemen of the city to beg him to pray for his own recovery; Ambrose answered that he had “not so lived among you that I am ashamed to live, nor do I fear to die, for we have a good Lord” (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 45 — reported as the Vita‘s account, per METHODOLOGY §3.5). In his last hours, Paulinus relates, Honoratus the bishop of Vercelli, resting in another room, was three times roused by a voice bidding him rise, for Ambrose was about to depart; he came down and gave him the Body of the Lord, “and as soon as he had received it Ambrose breathed his last, taking the good viaticum with him, so that his soul, refreshed by the strength of that food, now enjoys the company of angels” (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 47). On the question of the succession Paulinus records that Ambrose, asked whom he wished to follow him, named Simplicianus — the aged priest who had once been his own guide in the faith and who had instructed Augustine — saying only “an old man, but a good one”; and Simplicianus did succeed him in the see of Milan (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 46; cf. The Baptism of Augustine, where Simplicianus appears as Augustine’s counselor).

He was buried in the Basilica Martyrum he had built, now the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, beside the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius whose relics he had discovered and translated in 386 (see The See of Milan). His body still lies there, in a crystal coffin beneath the high altar, flanked by the two martyrs — one of the few of the great fathers whose relics remain visible in the church he raised. In 835 Archbishop Angilbert II enshrined the three together in a porphyry sarcophagus; the relics were recognized again in the nineteenth century (Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, storia; Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals).

The Cult and the Basilica

The veneration of Ambrose began at once and never lapsed. His tomb in the Basilica Martyrum drew pilgrims from the first, and the basilica itself — rebuilt and enlarged across the centuries into the great Romanesque church that stands today, one of the oldest in Milan — became the heart of the Ambrosian cult and a principal goal of pilgrimage in northern Italy. The discovery in 1864, beneath the high altar, of the skeleton of Ambrose lying between the two martyrs exactly as the tradition had described, confirmed the continuity of the relics through more than a millennium; the three bodies were re-vested and re-enshrined, and they remain on view in the crypt, clothed and crowned, to this day (Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, storia). The basilica gave its name to a whole architectural and liturgical patrimony — the “Ambrosian” basilica-plan, the Ambrosian chant, the Ambrosian Rite (see The Ambrosian Rite) — and Ambrose became, with his successor-figures Charles Borromeo and the Madonnina of the Duomo, one of the patrons of the city, his feast of December 7 still the great civic festival of Milan. Few of the fathers can be visited so directly: the pilgrim to Sant’Ambrogio stands above the very bones of the bishop who baptized Augustine and humbled Theodosius.

The Doctor of the Church

The title Doctor of the Church (Doctor Ecclesiae) names a saint whose holiness of life is joined to an eminence of teaching of lasting profit to the whole Church — not merely a learned man, but one whose doctrine the Church holds up as a sure guide. The concept crystallized in the medieval West around a recognized foursome of Latin Doctors — Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great — the four whose feasts Boniface VIII raised to duplex rank in the decretal Gloriosus of 1298, fixing them as the great teachers of the Latin Church (Boniface VIII, Gloriosus, Liber Sextus 3.22, 1298). This Western foursome was consciously framed as a parallel to the great four Doctors of the Greek East — Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom (the “Three Holy Hierarchs”), with Athanasius often added as the fourth — so that the undivided Church came to be pictured as resting on eight great fathers, four Latin and four Greek, the pillars of its doctrine in West and East alike (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Doctors of the Church”). The symmetry is more than decorative: it expresses the conviction that the one faith was taught with equal authority in both languages of the early Church, and that Ambrose belongs, on the Latin side, in exactly the company that the East accords to its own greatest hierarchs.

One of the Four Latin Doctors

The Iconography

Two emblems mark Ambrose in Christian art, and each tells part of his story.

The beehive. From Paulinus’s Vita comes the legend of the bees that settled on the infant Ambrose’s face and mouth, leaving honey, after which they flew off out of sight — an omen, his father said, of the child’s future “honeyed” eloquence (Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 3; see From Governor to Bishop). The story gave Ambrose his medieval epithet Doctor mellifluus, “the honey-flowing Doctor,” and made the beehive his attribute; he is, by extension, a patron of bees and beekeepers. The emblem honors the truth that the lawyer-governor became one of the great preachers of the Latin Church.

The scourge. Ambrose is also depicted holding a knotted scourge or whip, often with three thongs. It carries two meanings: the discipline he imposed on the emperor Theodosius after Thessalonica (see Theodosius and Thessalonica), and, in the reading of the three thongs as the Trinity, his scourging of the Arian heresy (see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle). Together the two emblems hold the whole man: the honey of the preacher and the scourge of the unbending pastor of souls and of emperors.

One of the Four Latin Doctors

Ambrose is numbered among the four great Doctors of the Latin Church — with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great — the foursome that, in the West, parallels the four great Eastern fathers. [Disputed: the grouping was informal earlier but was given formal liturgical recognition by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298, in the decretal Gloriosus incorporated into the Liber Sextus (Sext. 3.22), which raised the four feasts to duplex rank and named the four distinguished Doctors; the year is sometimes given as 1295 in popular sources, but the decretal is of 1298.] The title “Doctor of the Church” honors a saint of eminent learning and holiness whose writings are of lasting benefit to the whole Church — and Ambrose’s claim to it rests on everything in this collection: the Nicene theology, the ethics of De Officiis, the mystagogy, the hymnody, the formation of Augustine.

Venerated in the Orthodox East

Because Ambrose belongs to the undivided Church of the first millennium, he is venerated not only in the West but fully in the Eastern Orthodox Church, as one of the pre-schism Western fathers held in common by East and West (see The Shaping of the West and Orthodoxy Guide: The Pre-Schism Church). His feast is kept on December 7 — the same day in East and West — which commemorates not his death but his episcopal consecration on 7 December 374 (see From Governor to Bishop). The Orthodox Church in America commemorates “Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan… a noted Father of the Western Church” on that day, recounting the bees of his infancy and confessing him “a rule of faith and an image of meekness, a teacher of temperance” (OCA, Lives of the Saints, December 7; GOARCH likewise lists him on December 7).

His Orthodox veneration is not an ecumenical courtesy but a recognition of fact: Ambrose confessed the faith of the Ecumenical Councils, defended the consubstantial Son and the divine Spirit, taught the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos, witnessed to the real change of the eucharistic gifts, and stood for the moral accountability of power to God — all of it the common inheritance of the one Church before the schism. The Orthodox East receives him as one of her own fathers, a Latin bishop who thought with the Greek fathers and confessed the universal faith.

The liturgical texts appointed for his day place him squarely among the hierarch-saints of the Church. The troparion sung on December 7 hails him in the common idiom of a holy bishop: “A rule of faith and an image of meekness, a teacher of temperance has the truth of things revealed thee to thy flock; therefore thou hast achieved high things by humility, riches by poverty. O Father and Hierarch Ambrose, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved” — the very troparion of St. Nicholas and of the great hierarchs, applied to Ambrose as one of their number. The appointed kontakion likewise extols him as a teacher who, by divine eloquence, drove away the impiety of heresy and shepherded his people in the true faith (OCA, Lives of the Saints, December 7; the hymns as appointed for the feast). To sing the hierarch’s troparion over a Latin father of the fourth century is itself a confession: that the Church which prays it knows no division, before the schism, between the holiness of the East and the holiness of the West.

The Western Saints of the Undivided Church

The reception of Ambrose belongs to a wider Orthodox practice: the veneration of the pre-schism Western saints, the holy men and women of the Latin West who lived and died in the communion of the undivided Church before 1054 and who are therefore, in the Orthodox understanding, fully the Church’s own. The principle is straightforward — a saint glorified within the one Church before the breach is the common inheritance of all who keep that Church’s faith, whatever the later division of East and West. The Orthodox calendar accordingly keeps a great company of Western fathers and saints: the other three Latin Doctors — Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, and Gregory the Great (Gregory the Dialogist, especially honored in the East as the author of the Liturgy of the Presanctified); the earlier Western fathers Cyprian of Carthage, Hilary of Poitiers, Leo the Great (whose Tome the Fourth Ecumenical Council acclaimed), and Irenaeus of Lyons (treated in his own collection); the monastic and missionary saints Martin of Tours, John Cassian, Benedict of Nursia, Patrick of Ireland, Columba, and Bede the Venerable; and many more. In recent decades, as Orthodoxy has taken root in the historically Western lands, the deliberate recovery of these saints — their lives, their feasts, their local cults — has become a notable feature of Western-rite and convert Orthodoxy, and Ambrose stands among the most eminent of them: not a guest in the Orthodox calendar but a native of the one Church it confesses (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Pre-Schism Church).

A Note on the Two Ambroses

It is worth repeating, finally, the distinction this collection keeps throughout: this Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, is not St. Ambrose of Optina, the nineteenth-century Russian elder (Alexander Grenkov, 1812–1891), who was in fact tonsured under the patronage of this very Ambrose of Milan and given his name (see the St. Ambrose of Optina collection). The Russian elder’s December 7 patron and the bishop of this guide are one and the same saint; the two collections, however, treat two different men, and are kept distinct.

See Also

References

  • Paulinus of Milan. Vita Sancti Ambrosii 3, 47–48, c. 422 (PL 14). On the bees, the death, and the burial.
  • Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, December 7. The Orthodox commemoration and troparion.
  • Boniface VIII. Gloriosus (Liber Sextus 3.22), 1298. The formal naming of the four Latin Doctors.
  • Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, Milan. Storia (basilicasantambrogio.it). On the relics and the tomb.
  • Krautheimer, Richard. Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. On the Basilica Ambrosiana.
  • Catholic Encyclopedia. “Doctors of the Church” and “St. Ambrose.” New York: Robert Appleton, 1907–1912 (used to locate the 1298 decretal and the iconography; cross-checked).
  • Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 1–18, 55–60.