Modern Scholarship

The modern study of Ambrose has moved from the reverent comprehensiveness of the older biographies to a sharp critical reassessment of the bishop as a master of politics and self-presentation. This file surveys the principal scholarship: F. Homes Dudden’s older standard The Life and Times of St. Ambrose (1935); Neil B. McLynn’s revisionist Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (1994), which reads Ambrose as a political genius and recasts the great confrontations — above all Thessalonica — as negotiated rather than dramatic; Daniel H. Williams on the Arian conflicts; Boniface Ramsey’s accessible introduction; and the critical editions and the recovered voice of Ambrose’s opponents.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Historiographical Arc

Before turning to the individual scholars it helps to see the long curve their work describes. The arc begins in hagiography: the foundational life is Paulinus’s Vita Ambrosii (c. 422), written at Augustine’s suggestion by a man who had served Ambrose, frankly devotional and modeled on the lives of Athanasius’s Antony and Sulpicius Severus’s Martin — a portrait of the saint and wonder-worker, not a critical biography. From Paulinus the line runs through the medieval legenda to the Maurists, the Benedictine scholars of Saint-Maur whose seventeenth-century edition of Ambrose (reprinted in Migne’s Patrologia Latina 14–17) remained the textual foundation for two centuries. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought the great positivist syntheses, culminating in Dudden (1935). Then, from about 1980, came the “linguistic and political turn”: a generation schooled in the new social history of late antiquity and in a sharper attention to the rhetoric of the sources, who ceased to read the texts as windows onto events and began to read them as acts — instruments by which Ambrose constructed his own authority and image. Its decisive product was McLynn (1994). The arc thus runs from the saint of Paulinus, through the hero of Dudden, to the political artist of McLynn — three ways of reading the same documents, each disclosing something the others missed.

The Older Standard: Dudden

For most of the twentieth century the standard work was F. Homes Dudden’s The Life and Times of St. Ambrose (2 vols., Oxford, 1935) — a vast, learned, sympathetic narrative that assembled nearly everything then known about Ambrose’s life, writings, and world (Dudden, Life and Times, vols. 1–2). It remains valuable as a quarry of detail and a guide to the sources, and this collection cites it throughout. Its limitation is its tone: it largely takes the hagiographical and the partisan sources at their own valuation, reading Ambrose’s career as the providential triumph of orthodoxy and Ambrose himself as the saintly hero his admirers described. The later scholarship reacted precisely against that confidence.

The Revisionist Turn: McLynn

The decisive modern work is Neil B. McLynn’s Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley, 1994), now the standard critical biography (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan). McLynn reads Ambrose not as a saint moving through events but as a political actor of the first rank — a man of the governing class who never stopped being a statesman, and who fashioned his own image with consummate skill. On this reading much of what the tradition took as spontaneous holiness was managed performance: the reluctance at the election a conventional or engineered “rite of refusal” (see From Governor to Bishop); the discovery of the relics of Gervasius and Protasius a well-timed rallying of the people at the height of the basilica crisis (see The See of Milan); and, most consequentially, the penance of Theodosius a carefully negotiated settlement between bishop and emperor, not the dramatic confrontation at the church door that Theodoret later painted (see Theodosius and Thessalonica).

McLynn’s central argument about Thessalonica deserves restating because it is the single most important revision in modern Ambrose scholarship. From the tactful, private character of Ambrose’s own Letter 51 — which offers the emperor a face-saving path rather than a public humiliation — McLynn concludes that the famous doorway scene is a later embellishment, and that the historical reality was a quiet, mutually advantageous arrangement that left both the bishop’s authority and the emperor’s dignity intact. This guide reports both the traditional tableau (pinned to its late source, Theodoret) and McLynn’s negotiated reading, per METHODOLOGY §4. The corrective is salutary: it strips away pious dramatization without denying the secure core — that an emperor did public penance to a bishop, and that the Church’s claim to judge the sins of kings was made good.

Williams and the Arian Conflicts

Daniel H. Williams’s Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts (Oxford, 1995) reassesses the doctrinal struggle (Williams, Ambrose of Milan). Williams argues against the triumphalist narrative — found already in the fifth-century historians and in Paulinus — that reads the Nicene victory in the West as swift and inevitable. He shows instead how contested, gradual, and politically dependent the outcome was, how serious and resilient the Homoian party remained, and how much the Nicene success owed to imperial power and to Ambrose’s management rather than to argument alone (see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle). His work, with McLynn’s, has made it impossible to write about Ambrose as the mere instrument of an assured orthodoxy.

The Critique of McLynn

McLynn’s book is now indispensable, but it has not gone unchallenged, and an honest survey must register the reservations. The most common is that his hermeneutic of suspicion can become reductive — that in resolving every act of Ambrose into a calculated move of self-interest and image-management, McLynn risks explaining away the religious convictions that were, after all, the man’s own stated motive and the Church’s experience of him. Critics observe that a method which reads sincerity as performance wherever performance would have served the bishop’s interests is, in the end, unfalsifiable: it can find the politician behind any act of piety, because the politician was always also there. Some reviewers found the portrait too cynical, a fourth-century bishop drawn rather too closely in the image of a modern operator, and noted that McLynn is at his strongest on the political surface of events and less interested in the theology and spirituality that the documents also carry. The corrective to the corrective is not to return to Dudden’s credulity but to hold both readings together: Ambrose was a consummate politician and a man of real faith, and the two are not in competition. This guide takes exactly that line (METHODOLOGY §4): McLynn’s analysis of the mechanics of Ambrose’s power is accepted where the evidence supports it, without conceding that statecraft exhausts the man (see The Net Effect for an Orthodox Reader below).

Other Scholars and the Wider Field

Around the two landmark books a substantial literature has grown, and several contributions deserve naming. Ivor J. Davidson, beyond his standard critical edition and commentary on the De Officiis (OECS, 2 vols., 2001), has written searchingly on Ambrose’s appropriation of Cicero and on the rhetoric of his self-construction, work that complements McLynn from the side of the texts. John Moorhead’s Ambrose: Church and Society in the Late Roman World (Longman, 1999) offers a balanced one-volume reassessment, more sympathetic than McLynn to Ambrose’s religious seriousness while fully alert to the political dimension — a useful counterweight and a good second book after Ramsey. Marcia L. Colish, the historian of Stoicism, has illuminated the Stoic substructure of Ambrose’s ethics, showing in detail how the De Officiis transposes Cicero’s Stoic moral framework into a Christian key (Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages; see De Officiis and Christian Ethics). Christoph Markschies, in his Ambrosius von Mailand und die Trinitätstheologie (Tübingen, 1995) and related studies, has reassessed the sources and structure of Ambrose’s Trinitarian theology and his use of the Greek fathers, sharpening the question of how original — and how derivative — Ambrose’s dogmatic writing actually is. To these may be added the great prosopographical and editorial infrastructure on which all the rest depends: A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris’s The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE), which fixes the careers and dates of Ambrose, his family, and the emperors and officials around him, and the ongoing CSEL editions noted below. Together these works have turned Ambrose-studies into one of the best-served fields in all of late-antique scholarship.

Ramsey and the Accessible Introduction

For the reader coming to Ambrose for the first time, the most useful single book is Boniface Ramsey’s Ambrose (Routledge, Early Church Fathers, 1997), which combines a clear introduction to the life and thought with fresh translations of representative texts (Ramsey, Ambrose). Ramsey is judicious on the disputed questions — the authenticity of De Sacramentis, the sources of De Spiritu Sancto, the extent of the hymn corpus — and provides a reliable orientation to the writings treated in Section 05 and Section 07.

The Editions and the Opponents’ Voice

Underlying all of this is the long labor of critical editing. The Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) has given critical texts of nearly the whole corpus — Otto Faller and Michaela Zelzer for the letters (CSEL 82) and the dogmatic works, Karl Schenkl for the exegetical works (CSEL 32), Michael Petschenig for the Psalm commentaries (CSEL 62, 64) — and the letter-numbering now rests on Zelzer’s reorganization, which gathers the most politically charged letters into the Epistulae extra collectionem (see the master README on the numbering). Ivor Davidson’s De Officiis (OECS, 2001) and Jacques Fontaine’s Hymnes (Cerf, 1992) are the standard editions of those works. The translations in J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz and Carole Hill’s Political Letters and Speeches (TTH 43, 2005) put the church-and-state documents into accessible English with a reliable concordance.

A distinctive gain of recent scholarship is the recovery of the opponents’ voice. The Arian bishop Palladius of Ratiaria, condemned at Aquileia, left a polemical apology surviving as marginal scholia, edited by Roger Gryson (SC 267); through it we hear, rarely for this period, the losing side’s complaint that Ambrose’s council was rigged (see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle). Reading Ambrose with Palladius, and with McLynn’s and Williams’s correctives, gives a fuller and more honest picture than the hagiography alone — without diminishing what Ambrose actually achieved.

The Net Effect for an Orthodox Reader

For an Orthodox reader, the modern scholarship is to be received the way this whole collection receives its sources (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4): gratefully and critically. The revisionists have not overturned the faith Ambrose confessed, the theology he transmitted, or the holiness the Church has always recognized in him; they have clarified the historical texture of his career — how a fourth-century bishop in an imperial capital actually exercised power — and stripped away the dramatizations that later piety added. The saint venerated on December 7 is unharmed by the discovery that he was also a brilliant politician; the Church has never supposed that sanctity and statecraft cannot meet in one man, and in Ambrose they conspicuously did (see Doctor of the Church).

It helps to name explicitly the two distinct questions the reader is always holding at once, for they are easily confused. The historical question asks what Ambrose did and how — by what means he was elected, how the relics were found and what use was made of them, what actually passed between bishop and emperor over Thessalonica. On these questions the critical scholarship is the proper authority, and its findings are to be accepted on the evidence, dramatizations and all set aside. The theological question asks what Ambrose confessed and taught — the consubstantial Son, the divine Spirit, the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos, the change of the gifts, the accountability of power to God — and on these the authority is the consensus of the Church, against which his teaching is measured and by which it is received. The two questions do not compete, but they must not be collapsed: a sound historical demonstration that the doorway scene at Milan was a later embellishment says nothing whatever against the doctrine that the Church may judge the sins of kings, which Ambrose taught and the Church holds. The Orthodox reader is thus free to follow McLynn and Williams as far as the evidence goes on the history, while receiving Ambrose’s theology and his sanctity on the Church’s own authority — to read him, in short, both historically and theologically, refusing the false choice of reading him only one way. So read, the bishop who emerges is neither the unblemished hero of the older piety nor the mere tactician of the harder revisionism, but what the sources together actually show: a man of the governing class who became a man of God, exercising real power with real skill in the service of a faith he genuinely held.

References

McLynn, Neil B. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 (Transformation of the Classical Heritage 22). The standard critical biography; the revisionist reading of the election, the relics, and Thessalonica.
Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 (Oxford Early Christian Studies). On the Arian conflicts and against the triumphalist narrative.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997 (Early Church Fathers). The accessible introduction with translations.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. The older comprehensive standard.
Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G., and Carole Hill. Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches. Translated Texts for Historians 43. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Gryson, Roger, ed. Scolies ariennes sur le concile d’Aquilée. Sources Chrétiennes 267. Paris: Cerf, 1980. The recovered voice of Ambrose’s Arian opponents.
Campenhausen, Hans von. The Fathers of the Latin Church. London: A. & C. Black, 1964. The earlier critical assessment.
Moorhead, John. Ambrose: Church and Society in the Late Roman World. London: Longman, 1999. A balanced one-volume reassessment, more sympathetic than McLynn to Ambrose’s religious seriousness.
Colish, Marcia L. The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1985. On the Stoic substructure of Ambrose’s ethics.
Markschies, Christoph. Ambrosius von Mailand und die Trinitätstheologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995. On the sources and structure of Ambrose’s Trinitarian theology.
Jones, A. H. M., J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris. The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE). 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971–1992. The prosopographical foundation for Ambrose’s career and milieu.
Davidson, Ivor J., ed. Ambrose: De Officiis. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Fontaine, Jacques, dir. Ambroise de Milan: Hymnes. Paris: Cerf, 1992. The standard critical editions of those works.