St. Ambrose

1. Who Ambrose Was

Ambrose was born at Trier in Gaul, around 339, while his father held the office of praetorian prefect of the Gauls, one of the highest civil posts in the empire. The family was Christian and Roman in the old sense, with a claimed martyr in its past. After his father's death the household returned to Rome, where Ambrose was educated in law and rhetoric.

He had a brother, Satyrus, and a sister, Marcellina, who was consecrated as a virgin by the pope in Rome and is herself venerated as a saint. Both mattered to his later life. Satyrus managed his affairs after he became bishop and died young, and Ambrose preached two funeral orations for him that survive. Marcellina lived in Rome and received several of his most personal letters.

He entered imperial service, practised law, and by about 372 was governor of Aemilia and Liguria, resident in Milan. The emperor Valentinian I was reported to have told him to govern as a bishop rather than a judge, which is the kind of remark that gets recorded afterwards because of what happened next.

2. The Reluctant Bishop

In 374 Auxentius, the bishop of Milan, died. Auxentius had been an Arian, that is, a supporter of the position that the Son is not of the same divine substance as the Father, and Milan was divided between his party and the Nicene Catholics. The election of a successor threatened to become a riot, and the governor went to the basilica to keep order.

According to Paulinus of Milan, who wrote a life of Ambrose about a quarter of a century after his death at Augustine's request, a child's voice called out "Ambrose for bishop" and both parties took it up. Ambrose resisted, and the sources describe several attempts to make himself unacceptable. He was a catechumen, unbaptised, and holding a civil office that disqualified him under the rules of the day. The emperor's approval settled it.

Within about a week he was baptised, ordained through the successive grades, and consecrated bishop, on 7 December 374. He gave his personal property to the poor and the land to the Church, keeping a provision for his sister, and set about learning theology from the sources with the help of a priest named Simplicianus. His feast is kept on the day of that consecration.

The story is a favourite because of the speed, and its serious content is the disorder of the fourth-century Church, in which a divided congregation could seize on an unbaptised civil servant as a compromise and the empire would ratify it.

3. What He Did as Bishop of Milan

Ambrose spent twenty-three years running a large and contested church in the administrative capital of the western empire, and the work was concrete.

He preached constantly and taught the catechumens

Most of his surviving works began as sermons. His instructions to the newly baptised, preserved as On the Mysteries and the closely related On the Sacraments, are among the earliest detailed descriptions of Christian initiation in the West, and they are used as evidence for the shape of the liturgy in his time.

He fought Arianism in his own diocese

Milan had an Arian congregation with support at court, and much of Ambrose's writing was produced for that fight, including his books On the Faith written for the emperor Gratian. He held the Nicene position, that the Son is of one substance with the Father, which our page on the Trinity sets out in full.

He sold the church plate to ransom captives

After a military disaster left many Roman provincials in captivity, Ambrose broke up and sold consecrated vessels to buy them back. He was attacked for it, and he defended the act in On the Duties of Ministers, arguing that the Church holds gold in order to spend it on the ransom of the perishing rather than to keep it. It remains one of the clearest early statements that the Church's property is held for the poor.

He built and he buried

He built basilicas in Milan, and in 386 he located and translated the remains of two martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, at a moment when he needed the support of the Milanese people against the court. He was later buried beside them.

4. Mentor to Augustine

Augustine came to Milan in 384 as the city's public teacher of rhetoric, a young Manichee who despised the Bible as crude writing. He went to hear Ambrose out of professional interest in his technique.

What broke the deadlock, on Augustine's own account, was Ambrose's method of reading the Old Testament, which showed him that the passages he had ridiculed could be read at a level he had never considered. He writes that he was gradually drawn in, that he came for the style and stayed for the content. He also records the odd detail that Ambrose read silently, without moving his lips, which struck Augustine enough to write down.

Ambrose baptised Augustine, his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius at the Easter Vigil of 387. Monica, Augustine's mother, had followed her son to Milan and had come under Ambrose's influence herself. When she asked whether to fast on Saturdays as at Rome or not to, as at Milan, he told her that he kept the custom of whatever church he was in, and the proverb about doing as the Romans do descends from that answer.

The relationship was not a friendship of equals. Augustine complains that Ambrose was always surrounded by people with business and that he never managed a proper private conversation with him. The influence was mostly one-way, through preaching, and it produced the greatest theological mind of the Latin Church.

5. Standing up to Power

Ambrose is remembered above all for two confrontations with imperial power, and both are documented in his own letters rather than only in later legend.

The basilica crisis, 385 and 386

The court of the young emperor Valentinian II, guided by his mother Justina, demanded that a basilica in Milan be handed over for Arian worship. Ambrose refused, on the ground that a bishop cannot give away what belongs to God. Soldiers surrounded the building, the Catholic congregation occupied it, and Ambrose stayed inside with them. To keep the people steady through the days of the siege he had them sing hymns in alternating choirs, which is how the practice of antiphonal singing spread in the West.

His statement of the principle in the sermon against Auxentius is the line that outlived him: the emperor is within the Church, not above the Church. The court gave way.

Thessalonica, 390

After a garrison commander was killed in a riot at Thessalonica, the emperor Theodosius I ordered a reprisal, and thousands of civilians were massacred in the circus of the city. Ambrose wrote to him privately, in a letter that survives, telling him that he could not offer the Eucharist in his presence until he had done penance, and comparing him to David, who was a great king and repented when the prophet Nathan confronted him.

Theodosius did public penance and was restored to communion. The event is one of the foundations of the western tradition that political power is answerable to a moral law it does not make.

The famous scene of Ambrose physically barring the emperor at the cathedral door is a later dramatisation, found in the fifth-century historian Theodoret and made famous by painters. The contemporary evidence is a private letter and a public penance, which is if anything more impressive than the door.

6. The Part That Is Not Celebrated

In 388 a mob at Callinicum, on the eastern frontier, burned a synagogue, and the local bishop was involved. Theodosius ordered that the bishop rebuild it at his own expense and that the guilty be punished, which was the ordinary application of Roman law.

Ambrose intervened to have the order withdrawn. He wrote to the emperor and pressed the point publicly in his presence at Milan, arguing that no Christian bishop should be compelled to build a synagogue. Theodosius withdrew the order.

This page states that plainly because the alternative is to present a sanitised Ambrose. The same courage that made him defy an emperor over the massacre at Thessalonica was used, two years earlier, to shield an act of arson against a Jewish community and to obstruct a just restitution. The Catholic Church has repudiated that current in its own history. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate rejects hatred and persecution directed against Jews, and the Church has repeatedly asked forgiveness for the treatment of Jews by Christians. Ambrose's conduct at Callinicum is part of what was being repented of.

Holding both facts together is the honest position. The Church canonises people who were holy, and canonisation is not a certificate that every recorded action of a saint was right.

7. What the Sources Actually Are

Ambrose is unusually well documented for a fourth-century figure, and the classes of evidence are worth separating.

• His own works and letters. A large body survives, including letters about the basilica crisis and Thessalonica written at the time. This is the firmest ground.
• Augustine. An eyewitness to the Milan years, writing about a decade later in the Confessions, with his own purposes but no motive to invent the details he gives.
• Paulinus of Milan. His Life of Ambrose was written around 422 at Augustine's request by a man who had served as Ambrose's secretary. It preserves valuable material and also the miraculous and marvellous episodes, including the child's voice at the election and the swarm of bees that supposedly settled on the infant Ambrose's mouth.
• Later historians. Fifth-century church historians such as Theodoret add dramatic scenes, including the confrontation at the cathedral door, that are not in the earlier material.

The pattern is the usual one. The closer a source stands to the events, the plainer the story becomes, and the vivid tableaux tend to be later.

8. The Writings, the Hymns and the Ambrosian Rite

Ambrose wrote as a working bishop. His treatise On the Duties of Ministers reworks Cicero's book on duties into a Christian handbook for clergy and is the first substantial work of Christian ethics in Latin. The Six Days of Creation is a set of sermons on Genesis. On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments instruct the newly baptised. He wrote several works on virginity, a commentary on Luke, and the funeral orations for his brother and for the emperors Valentinian II and Theodosius.

He is also one of the fathers of Latin hymnody. Several hymns are securely attributed to him, including the morning hymn Aeterne rerum conditor and the Advent hymn Veni redemptor gentium, written in a simple metre that ordinary congregations could sing and remember. Augustine describes being moved to tears by the singing at Milan.

The Te Deum was long attributed to Ambrose and Augustine, composed on the spot at the baptism in 387. That attribution is a medieval tradition, and modern scholarship generally credits the hymn to Niceta of Remesiana. The Ambrosian Rite, the distinct liturgical use of the archdiocese of Milan that continues today, carries his name because he shaped the Milanese liturgy, and its texts as they stand are the work of centuries rather than of one man.

9. Feast Day, Relics and Patronage

Feast day

His memorial is 7 December, the anniversary of his episcopal consecration in 374 rather than of his death. He died on Good Friday, 4 April 397, and was buried on Easter Sunday.

Doctor of the Church

Ambrose was named a Doctor of the Church in 1298, together with Jerome, Augustine and Gregory the Great, the four original Latin Doctors.

Relics

His remains rest in the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, the church he built, laid beside the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius whose relics he had translated in 386. The three bodies are displayed together in the crypt.

Patronage

Ambrose is the patron of Milan, where 7 December is a civic holiday and opens the season at La Scala. He is also invoked by beekeepers, candle makers and wax refiners, from the legend recorded by Paulinus that a swarm of bees settled on his mouth as an infant and left honey there, which was read as a sign of his future eloquence. Learning and students appear in some lists. Patronages of this kind grow out of custom rather than from a decree.

10. What to Take From St. Ambrose

• Authority is answerable. The emperor is within the Church, not above the Church. Applied today, that means power of any kind, including power inside the Church, sits under the same moral law as everyone else.
• Say the hard thing privately first. Ambrose wrote to Theodosius in a private letter before anything became public, and gave him a way back through repentance. That order matters.
• Church property exists to be spent. He sold the chalices to ransom captives and argued the case in writing. It is still the answer to anyone who thinks the Church's goods are its own.
• Take the saints whole. Callinicum sits in the same record as Thessalonica. Reading a saint honestly means reading the parts the Church has since repented of.
• Start where you are. Ambrose was an unbaptised civil servant one week and a bishop the next, and he learned the job by studying at night. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and preparation begun today is the only kind that helps.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Ambrose?

Ambrose was bishop of Milan from 374 to 397 and one of the four original Latin Doctors of the Church. He was born at Trier around 339 into a senior Roman official family, trained in law, and was serving as imperial governor at Milan when the divided city acclaimed him bishop while he was still an unbaptised catechumen. He baptised Augustine in 387, fought Arianism, and forced two emperors to give way.

How did an unbaptised governor become a bishop in a week?

Milan was split between Arians and Nicene Catholics after the death of the Arian bishop Auxentius in 374, and the governor went to the basilica to prevent a riot at the election. According to Paulinus of Milan, who wrote his life about twenty-five years after his death, a child's voice called out for Ambrose and both parties agreed. He was baptised, ordained through the grades and consecrated bishop on 7 December 374, and he gave away his property to the poor.

Did St. Ambrose really block an emperor at the cathedral door?

The confrontation was real and the door scene is later embellishment. After the massacre of civilians at Thessalonica in 390, Ambrose wrote privately to Theodosius I telling him that he could not offer the Eucharist in his presence until he repented, and the emperor performed public penance. The dramatic image of the bishop physically barring the emperor from the church comes from the fifth-century historian Theodoret and from later painters rather than from contemporary evidence.

What did St. Ambrose do at Callinicum, and how should Catholics read it?

In 388 a mob burned a synagogue at Callinicum and the emperor Theodosius ordered the local bishop to rebuild it. Ambrose pressed the emperor publicly and privately until the order was withdrawn. The Catholic Church has since repudiated that current in its history, most formally in the Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate, which rejects hatred and persecution directed against Jews. Canonisation is a judgment about a person's holiness of life and it does not endorse every recorded action.

What did St. Ambrose write?

His major works include On the Duties of Ministers, the first substantial Christian handbook of ethics in Latin, On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments, which describe Christian initiation in his own church, The Six Days of Creation, several treatises on virginity, a commentary on Luke and books on the faith written against Arianism. He also wrote hymns in a simple singable metre, including Aeterne rerum conditor and Veni redemptor gentium. The Te Deum was long attributed to him, and modern scholarship generally credits it to Niceta of Remesiana.

When is St. Ambrose's feast day and what is he the patron of?

His memorial is 7 December, the anniversary of his consecration as bishop in 374. He died on Good Friday, 4 April 397, and his remains rest in the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan beside the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius. He is the patron of Milan, and he is invoked by beekeepers and candle makers because of the legend that a swarm of bees settled on his mouth when he was an infant.