Evaluations and interpretations of St. Ambrose

Ambrose’s reputation after his death was unchallenged. For Augustine, he was the model bishop; a biography was written in 412 by Paulinus, deacon of Milan, at Augustine’s instigation. To Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, Ambrose was “the flower of Latin eloquence.” Of his sermons, the Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam (390; “Exposition of the Gospel According to Luke”) was widely circulated.

Yet, Ambrose is a Janus-like figure. He imposed his will on emperors, but he never considered himself as a precursor of a polity in which the church dominated the state, for he acted from a traditional fear that Christianity might yet be eclipsed by a pagan nobility and Catholicism uprooted in Milan by Arian courtiers. His attitude to the learning he used was similarly old-fashioned. Pagans and heretics, he said, “dyed their impieties in the vats of philosophy,” yet his sermons betray the pagan mysticism of Plotinus in its most unmuted tints. In a near-contemporary mosaic in the chapel of San Satiro in the church of San Ambrogio, Milan, Ambrose appears as he wished to be seen: a simple Christian bishop clasping the book of Gospels. Yet the manner in which he set about his duties as a bishop ensured that, to use his own image, the Catholic church would rise “like a growing moon” above the ruins of the Roman Empire.