Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman governor who was baptized and made a bishop in the same week, and who then taught emperors that they stood under God like everyone else. + In the winter of 374 the churches of Milan were about to riot over who should be their next bishop, and the provincial governor went down to the basilica to keep order. He was a career administrator in his mid-thirties, a lawyer’s son with a lawyer’s training, and though he had been raised in a Christian household he had never been baptized. He walked in to calm a crowd and walked out as the crowd’s choice. Within eight days he was baptized, ordained through the intervening ranks, and consecrated bishop of the most important city in the Western empire. Ambrose spent the next twenty-two years doing three things that shaped Latin Christianity permanently. He argued the Nicene faith, that the Son is God in the same sense the Father is God, into a Western church whose imperial court still preferred to call the Son something less than that. He put that faith into short, singable verses and taught a congregation to sing them, which is where hymn singing by a whole congregation takes hold in the West. And he told two emperors, to their faces, that the church was not a department of the state. One of those emperors, Theodosius, did public penance at his insistence after a massacre. He is also the man who baptized Augustine. A professor of rhetoric came to Milan in 384 to advance his career, went to hear the bishop preach because everyone said he was a fine speaker, and found the Old Testament opening under Ambrose’s handling in a way that removed the objection he had been leaning on for a decade. Augustine says so himself in the Confessions. One fact about him is worth carrying through everything that follows. He had no theological training whatever when he was made a bishop, and he said so in print: he was carried off from the judge’s bench, he wrote, and had to begin teaching what he had not yet learned himself.

(●) c. 339 to c. 372 AD: Born in a prefect’s household at Trier, trained in Roman law, and sent north to govern from Milan. + Ambrose was born around 339 AD, most likely at Trier on the Moselle, where his father held one of the great offices of the late empire: praetorian prefect of the Gauls, the civil governor of a territory running from Britain through Gaul and Spain to the edge of North Africa. Nobody wrote the birth year down, so it has to be worked out from two scraps that happen to survive. The tradition gives his age at death in 397 as fifty-seven, and in a letter written in the early 390s he calls himself fifty-three. Count backward from either one and you land in 339 or 340. The older handbooks dated that letter a good deal earlier and so pushed the birth back into the mid-330s, which is why a reader who checks two books will sometimes find two answers. Every date in his early life works like that, calculated backward from firmer points later on. The father died while the children were young and the family went back to Rome. There were three of them: Marcellina the eldest, then Satyrus, then Ambrose. Marcellina took the veil as a consecrated virgin in Rome in the 350s, which meant that she pledged herself publicly not to marry and to give her life to prayer and fasting. Ambrose describes the day in his own book on virgins: she made the profession by a change of dress in the church of St Peter on the birthday of the Saviour, with Liberius, the bishop of Rome, preaching to her there. Ambrose wrote some of his most personal letters to her; two of the sharpest accounts of the crises of his episcopate survive only because he sat down and told his sister what had happened. Satyrus gave up his own career in imperial service to manage the estates and the business of the diocese once his brother was bishop, and when he died in 378 Ambrose preached two funeral addresses over him that are among the frankest expressions of grief in ancient Christian literature. The education was the standard one for a young man of that class: Greek, rhetoric, and then law. He practised at the court of the praetorian prefect of Italy at Sirmium, did well, and around 372 was appointed consularis of Aemilia and Liguria, the governor of a northern Italian province seated at Milan. Milan at that date was not a provincial backwater. It was where the Western emperors actually lived, a walled city of palaces, garrisons and imperial offices, and Rome by comparison was a museum. Paulinus, the deacon who wrote his life a generation after his death, tells a story about the send-off: the prefect Probus is supposed to have ended his instructions to the new governor with the words, go and behave not as a judge but as a bishop. Whether or not the sentence was really spoken, someone thought it worth remembering afterward.

(●) 374 AD: A crowd that had gathered to fight over a bishop shouted for him instead, and he was baptized and consecrated within eight days. + Milan had been governed for twenty years by Auxentius, a bishop of the Homoian party, and that label is worth unpacking, because the quarrel inside it took up most of Ambrose’s working life. Early in the century a priest of Alexandria named Arius had taught that the Son, however exalted, however far above everything else God made, was still something God made, and so stood on the creature’s side of the line. The Council of Nicaea condemned that in 325, and then the argument ran on for two more generations, because a condemned position does not vanish the day a council votes. The Homoians were the wing of it that the imperial court preferred. Their formula was that the Son is like the Father, which sounds generous until you notice where it stops: like, and not of the same being. Auxentius had held the city for that party. When he died the city had two congregations with two candidates and no way to choose between them, and a disputed episcopal election in a fourth-century capital was a public order problem. The governor came to the basilica in that capacity. Paulinus reports that a child’s voice cut across the shouting with the words “Ambrose, bishop,” and that both parties took it up at once. Modern historians read the scene with more suspicion than Paulinus did, and it is fair to say that a governor who was trusted by both sides was the obvious compromise whether or not a child said anything. What is not in doubt is the outcome, or how strange it was. Ambrose was a catechumen, a person under instruction who has not yet been baptized, which in the fourth century was an ordinary and respectable condition for a busy layman to remain in for years. He was not a cleric of any grade. Church law had long forbidden exactly this kind of appointment. He tried to get out of it. The old accounts have him ordering torture in court to make himself look cruel, and then leaving the city by night and riding until dawn only to find himself back at a Milanese gate. What is certain is that he was baptized, passed in a few days through the grades of clergy that a man normally climbs over years, and was consecrated bishop on 7 December 374. He gave his money to the poor and settled his land on the church, keeping a provision for Marcellina, and then sat down to learn the job. Simplicianus, an older Roman priest, taught him. He read the Greek theologians the Latin West mostly had not: Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Athanasius, and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Everything he wrote afterward carries the marks of a man reading fast and teaching from what he read last week.

(●) 378 to 381 AD: An emperor asked him what Christians believe, and the answer became the West’s case against Arius. + The young emperor Gratian was about to march east and wanted to know, before he went, what the faith of his own church actually was. The request produced De fide, On the Faith, written in stages between 378 and 380 and running eventually to five books. It is Ambrose’s longest sustained argument and the reason the Latin West had a home-grown defence of Nicaea at all. The timing mattered more than the emperor could have known. In August 378 the Eastern army was destroyed by the Goths at Adrianople and the emperor Valens, an Arian sympathiser, died on the field. A single afternoon of fighting did what decades of argument had not, because the court that had been leaning one way now needed a new occupant. His successor Theodosius was a Nicene Christian from Spain. Within three years the Council of Constantinople in 381 had settled the creed the churches still recite, and in that same year Ambrose himself presided in effect over a much smaller Western council at Aquileia, where two Homoian bishops from the Danube provinces were examined and deposed. He was a formidable chairman and not a gentle one. The transcript of Aquileia survives, and it reads like a cross-examination by a man who had spent years in courtrooms before he ever entered a pulpit. Alongside De fide he wrote three books On the Holy Spirit, drawing openly on Basil and on the Alexandrian teacher Didymus the Blind, arguing that the Spirit too is worshipped with the Father and the Son and is no creature. Jerome, never generous about contemporaries, complained that the Latin was Greek borrowed at second hand. He was not entirely wrong about the sources, and it did not matter: Ambrose was doing the work of translation the West needed, and the vocabulary he settled on stuck.

(●) 384 to 386 AD: He refused a pagan altar at Rome and a church building at Milan, and held the second refusal with soldiers in the street. + The first refusal was fought with paper. In 384 Symmachus, prefect of the city of Rome and the finest pagan writer of his generation, petitioned the court to restore the Altar of Victory to the senate house, where it had stood since Augustus and from which Gratian had removed it. His plea is famous and genuinely moving: so great a mystery cannot be reached by one road alone. Ambrose answered in two letters to Valentinian II, and the answer is uncompromising. The senate is now largely Christian, he argued, and Rome herself is not owed her old gods, for a city that has changed its mind may say so. The altar stayed out. The second refusal was fought with bodies. Valentinian II was a boy, and the effective power at court belonged to his mother Justina, who held to the Homoian faith and wanted a basilica in Milan for the court’s own worship at Easter. The demand was made and refused in 385, and in Holy Week of 386 it came back with soldiers behind it. Ambrose would not hand over a church. His position was simple and he put it in a sentence: the palaces belong to the emperor, the churches to the bishop. Imperial troops surrounded the building. The congregation moved in and would not leave, and Ambrose stayed with them, day after day, through that week. He did not call for resistance and he had no force to call on. What he told them was that a priest fights with tears. To hold a frightened crowd together for days inside a building, he taught them to sing. He wrote short hymns in a simple metre, eight stanzas of four lines each, and set the people to singing them in two halves answering each other, a practice already normal in the Greek East and new in the West. His opponents said afterward that he had bewitched the people with his hymns, and he cheerfully agreed that he had. The troops were eventually withdrawn.

(●) 386 to 387 AD: Among the people keeping vigil in that basilica was the mother of Augustine, the professor of rhetoric he would baptize at Easter. + Augustine had arrived in Milan in 384 to take the chair of rhetoric, a career appointment, with his mother Monica following him from Africa. He was thirty, brilliant, and stuck. He had spent nine years with the Manichees, a sect that explained evil by making it a rival substance to God, and had given up on them without finding anything better. Two things kept him from the church of his mother: he could not conceive of anything real that was not physical, and he thought the Old Testament, read as it stood, was crude. He went to hear Ambrose out of professional curiosity, to see whether the man’s reputation as a speaker was deserved. He says he was listening for the delivery and the sense came in anyway. What did the work was Ambrose’s handling of the difficult passages: the bishop kept quoting Paul, that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, and then showing what an Old Testament text meant when it was read as pointing forward to Christ. Augustine found that the objections he had been making for a decade were objections to a reading nobody informed actually held. Monica was among the people who kept guard in the basilica during the crisis with Justina, and Augustine records the hymn singing of those days as the moment the Milanese practice began, adding that it spread from there through nearly the whole world. In the same season the bodies of two martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, were found and moved to Ambrose’s new basilica, with reports of healings that Augustine says he witnessed the aftermath of at close range. Augustine was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter vigil of 387, along with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. He went home to Africa and became, in time, the most influential theologian the Western church has had.

(●) 390 AD: After the massacre at Thessalonica he shut the emperor out of communion until he repented in public. + A popular charioteer was jailed at Thessalonica, a riot followed, and the garrison commander was killed by the crowd. Theodosius ordered a reprisal. Soldiers penned the population into the circus and killed them. The one figure the ancient sources give is seven thousand, and it comes from the historian Theodoret writing some sixty years afterward, who reports it as what was said rather than as a count. No contemporary gives a number. What the contemporaries do say is enough: Ambrose, writing within weeks, told the emperor that nothing of the kind had been recorded before, and nobody undertook to defend what had been done to a crowd of people who had done nothing. Ambrose was not in Milan when the news broke and he did not confront the emperor in the street. He wrote a private letter, and its opening move is the interesting one. He does not begin by condemning. He begins by saying that David, a king who committed murder to cover adultery, is not remembered chiefly for the sin but for what he did next, and asks whether Theodosius is ashamed to do what a king in Scripture did (2 Samuel 12; Psalm 51). Then he says the thing that made the letter matter. He would not celebrate the eucharist, the service of bread and wine that stands at the centre of Christian worship, in the emperor’s presence. Theodosius submitted. He laid aside the imperial insignia, stood among the penitents in the church at Milan, and did not receive communion until Ambrose readmitted him at Christmas, an interval Theodoret puts at eight months. Nothing quite like it had happened before: an emperor answering to a bishop, in public, for an act of state. Five years later Theodosius died in Milan and Ambrose preached the funeral oration, and the tone is not triumph but affection.

(●) 397 AD: He died in the night that followed Good Friday and was buried on Easter morning. + Ambrose died in Milan before dawn on 4 April 397, the Holy Saturday of that year, and was buried on Easter Sunday. He had been bishop for twenty-two years and was in his late fifties. Paulinus, who was there, says that from the Friday afternoon he lay with his arms stretched out in the shape of a cross and his lips moving in prayer. He had named Simplicianus, the old priest who had taught him his theology after his sudden ordination, as the man he wanted to follow him, and Simplicianus did. They laid him in the basilica he had built, beside the two martyrs he had found eleven years earlier. The three of them are still there, under the altar of the church that carries his name. Whatever a reader makes of relics, the continuity is a real thing to stand in front of: the man who baptized Augustine, in the city where he did it, sixteen centuries on.

What He Taught

(T1) The Son is not the highest of God’s creatures. He is God, of one being with the Father. + Think of what a family firm looks like from outside. The founder’s son signs contracts, runs the business, speaks for the firm, and yet everyone knows he is not the founder, and that on the day he was hired he was hired. The Arian account of Christ is a version of that picture applied to God: the Son is the greatest thing God ever made, exalted above every other creature, worshipped even, and still on the creature’s side of the line between God and everything else. Arius put the position in a phrase that his opponents never let him forget: there was a time when the Son was not. Ambrose refused the picture at its root, and the reason he gave was not first about texts but about what worship is. If the Son is a creature, then Christians who worship him are worshipping a creature, and that is the thing Scripture forbids in the plainest terms. The way out is not to worship him less. It is to see that he was never on that side of the line. Ambrose held to the word the Council of Nicaea had chosen in 325, homoousios, of one substance, which is simply a technical way of saying that whatever it takes to be God, the Son has it in the same sense the Father has it, not in a lesser or borrowed sense. He knew he was writing for a court, and he made a point about method that is easy to miss. He distrusted winning this by cleverness. The heretics, he says, keep all their strength in dialectic, the art of formal disputation, and God did not choose to save his people that way. So De fide argues mostly from Scripture read whole, and it presses the passages the Arians pressed rather than avoiding them: the Son who does not know the hour, the Son who is made a little lower than the angels, the Son who prays. His answer in each case is that the Son took a real human life, and that what is said of him as man is not said of him as God.

(Q) "Christ, therefore, is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten of the Father, not made; of one substance with the Father." + Source: Ambrose, Exposition of the Christian Faith (De fide) I.18.118 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, de Romestin). He is quoting the creed of Nicaea back to an emperor who had asked what the faith was, and the point of the repetitions is that each phrase closes a door: of God, not from nothing; begotten, not made; one substance, not a similar one.

(T2) A congregation learns the faith by singing it, and a doctrine sung is a doctrine kept. + Anyone who has stopped being able to recall a phone number but can still sing every word of a song learned at fifteen has the whole of Ambrose’s insight already. He needed to hold a crowd inside a besieged basilica, and he needed the crowd to know what it was there for, and he found one instrument that did both jobs at once. The form he used is almost aggressively plain: four lines to a stanza, eight syllables to a line, eight stanzas, in the simplest Latin rhythm available, sung antiphonally, which means the congregation split in two and the halves answered each other line by line. That was Eastern practice and it was new in the West. The content is not plain at all. His Advent hymn walks through the incarnation clause by clause, insisting on the virgin birth, on the one Christ who is both God and man, on a Son who comes out from the Father and returns to the Father. A congregation singing that in 386 was singing the answer to the party outside the doors, and knew it. His opponents complained that the people had been charmed by his hymns, and he did not bother to deny it. He asked instead what could possibly have more power than the confession of the Trinity said daily by the mouth of the whole people. Four hymns are still accepted as certainly his, and Augustine quotes one of them, Deus creator omnium, from memory in the Confessions as a thing that steadied him in grief. The style became the model for Latin hymn writing for the next thousand years, which is why hymnbooks still print texts as Ambrosian.

(Q) "Come, thou Redeemer of the earth, / And manifest thy virgin-birth: / Let every age adoring fall; / Such birth befits the God of all." + Source: Ambrose, Veni redemptor gentium, first stanza, in John Mason Neale’s translation as revised for The English Hymnal (1906). Neale made the version for The Hymnal Noted of 1852, where the second and third lines ran differently; the wording sung since is the revision. The hymn is Ambrose’s Advent hymn and one of the four whose authorship has never been seriously doubted. A later stanza in the same version calls the Son a giant in twofold substance one, which is the doctrine of (T1) put into something a crowd can sing on a cold night.

(T3) The emperor is inside the church, not above it. + It is worth pausing on how odd this claim was in 386. For four centuries the Roman state had assumed that religion was one of its departments; the emperor held the office of chief priest, and the idea that a subject might tell him where his authority stopped was not a live option. Even after Constantine, the assumption did not change so much as change sides. Emperors called councils, exiled bishops, and expected the result to hold. Ambrose did not deny that the emperor was owed obedience, and he was not claiming a bishop’s power over the state. His argument is narrower and harder to dislodge. There are things that belong to Caesar and things that belong to God, and Jesus said so when the question was put to him with a coin in his hand (Matthew 22:21). A palace is Caesar’s. A church is not, because it is not the bishop’s either, and a man cannot hand over what was never his to give. That is why Ambrose would not surrender the basilica and also would not defend it: he had no right to give it away and no right to raise a mob for it, so he stayed inside and waited. The line he drew has been quoted ever since by people wanting very different things from it, and it is worth being exact about what he actually said. He said the emperor is within the church, not above the church, and that a good emperor seeks the church’s help rather than refusing it. That is a claim about where a Christian ruler stands when he walks through the door: not in a box at the side, but in the congregation, under the same word as the man next to him.

(Q) "For the Emperor is within the Church, not above it." + Source: Ambrose, Sermon Against Auxentius on the Giving Up of the Basilicas, section 36 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, de Romestin). Preached to the congregation occupying the basilica while soldiers stood outside. Earlier in the same sermon he tells them what his own resistance amounts to: he can grieve, weep and groan, and against weapons and soldiers and Goths his tears are his weapons, because those are a priest’s defence.

(T4) What the church locks away is the life of the poor, and gold exists to be spent on them. + Ambrose kept coming back to one story out of the Old Testament: a king wanted a vineyard, the man who owned it would not sell his family’s inheritance, and the king’s wife had him killed on false testimony so the king could take it (1 Kings 21). Naboth is a small case, one plot of land, and Ambrose treats it as the shape of every large one. He wrote a whole book on it, and he preached it at the men sitting in his own congregation who owned the land. Two convictions run through the social writing. The first is that creation was given for everyone’s use, so a rich man who calls surplus his own has taken something rather than earned it; on this Ambrose is following Basil of Caesarea, whose sermons on wealth he had read, and both of them are following the plain sense of the way Scripture speaks about the earth and about greed. The second is that the church has no business being an exception. When Gothic raiders in the Balkans held Roman captives for ransom, Ambrose had the consecrated gold and silver vessels of the Milanese church broken up and melted down to pay for them, and when he was attacked for it he defended the act in print: it is better to preserve living souls for the Lord than metal. That is not a claim that possessions are evil, and Ambrose never says so. It is a claim about what a Christian’s money is for while there is anyone in front of him who needs it. A church treasury and a private fortune are both, on this view, holding something in trust, and the test of the trust is what happens when a hungry man knocks.

(Q) "We must take care lest in our money chests we shut up the welfare of the needy, and bury the life of the poor as it were in a sepulchre." + Source: Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy II.16.78 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, de Romestin). Written as practical instruction for his own clergy on how church money should be handled. A section earlier he had said that the highest form of generosity is to redeem captives, to snatch men from death and give a citizen back to his country.

(T5) The Old Testament is read rightly when it is read as pointing forward to Christ. + Consider how differently you read a letter from someone who is now dead once you know how the story ended. Nothing in the words has changed. What has changed is that you can see what they were moving toward. Ambrose read Israel’s Scriptures that way, and the technical name for it is typology: the conviction that particular persons, events and institutions in the older covenant were built to prefigure what God would do in Christ, so that the earlier thing is a real event in its own right and also a shape waiting to be filled. He learned the method from Origen and from Philo, and he used it constantly. Israel walks through the sea and Egypt drowns behind them, and Ambrose sees baptism. The bitter water at Marah turns sweet when a piece of wood is thrown in, and he sees the cross. Manna comes down and feeds people who did not grow it, and he sees the eucharist. Paul had licensed the move himself when he said these things happened to them as an example (1 Corinthians 10:11), and Ambrose leans on Paul’s sentence that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6). There is an obvious danger in this and the church has never been unaware of it: a reader determined to find Christ under every stone can stop attending to what the text actually says, and later Christian exegesis sometimes did exactly that. Ambrose is not immune. But the historical effect of his practice is not in dispute, because one man in his congregation wrote down what it did to him. Augustine had rejected the Old Testament on the strength of readings that took every sentence flat, and hearing Ambrose handle those same passages removed the obstacle. That is a considerable thing for a preaching method to have accomplished.

(Q) "You observe that even then holy baptism was prefigured in that passage of the Hebrews, wherein the Egyptian perished, the Hebrew escaped." + Source: Ambrose, On the Mysteries III.12 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, de Romestin). On the Mysteries is a set of instructions given to the newly baptized in Easter week, explaining afterward what had just happened to them. The crossing of the Red Sea is his standing example of a real event that carries a shape (T5).

(Q) "You are a man, and it has come upon you, conquer it. Sin is not done away but by tears and penitence." + Source: Ambrose, Letter 51, section 11 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, de Romestin). Written privately to Theodosius after Thessalonica. The whole force of the letter is in the first clause: the emperor is being addressed as a man, in the category every other man is in, and the remedy on offer is the one available to everybody.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave the Latin West a Nicene theology in its own language, and a way of singing it. + Before Ambrose, the serious trinitarian argument was being conducted in Greek, by Athanasius in Alexandria and by Basil and the two Gregories in Cappadocia, and a Latin-speaking priest in Italy or Gaul who wanted to know what to say to an Arian neighbour had a thin shelf in his own language to reach for. Hilary of Poitiers had begun the work of carrying it into Latin, and Ambrose finished it, partly by translating and partly by simply using the Greek material as though it were the common property of the whole church. De fide and On the Holy Spirit are where a Latin-speaking bishop or priest could find the arguments made in words he already used. The hymns travelled further and faster than the treatises. Augustine’s account of their beginning is that the church at Milan took up the practice so that the people would not waste away with grief during the siege, and that it spread from there through nearly the whole world. What spread was the form: a short, metrical, doctrinally loaded stanza that ordinary people could carry home. Later Latin hymn writers worked inside the pattern Ambrose set, and the office hymns, the ones sung at the fixed hours of daily prayer in monasteries and cathedrals, hour after hour, day after day, were still being written to it a thousand years later. The chant tradition of Milan is called Ambrosian to this day, though the surviving melodies are much later than he is. The Western church has counted him, since the Middle Ages, as one of its four great Latin teachers alongside Jerome, Augustine and Gregory the Great, and the Eastern churches keep his feast as well. What that recognition is actually recording is narrow and worth stating plainly: he was the man on the spot when the Western church needed both a defence of the Nicene faith and a form of worship that would carry it, and he supplied both.

(†) He removed the obstacle that was keeping Augustine out, and Augustine never stopped saying so. + Ambrose’s largest single effect on Christian thought was indirect, and he may not have known he was having it. He preached, week by week, to a congregation that included a professor who had come for the rhetoric. The Confessions records the sequence: first Ambrose received him kindly and Augustine liked him as a man before trusting him as a teacher; then the spiritual reading of the hard Old Testament texts dismantled the objection Augustine had been living on; then Ambrose’s own teacher Simplicianus told him the story of the Roman rhetorician Victorinus, who had made a public profession of faith late in life. Augustine was baptized at the Easter vigil in 387. The debt is broader than the conversion. Augustine’s early theology of the sacraments, his habit of typological reading, and a good deal of his account of Christian conduct come through Ambrose, and Ambrose’s On the Duties of the Clergy, which took Cicero’s pagan handbook of civic duty and rebuilt it around Christian ends, was the first Latin manual of Christian ethics and stayed in use for centuries. And when Augustine needed a Latin authority on original sin and grace to set against the Pelagians, who held that a man can keep God’s commands by the free will he already has, with grace as teaching and example rather than a power at work inside him, the authority he cited was Ambrose. His opponents could not simply wave that citation away. So the line runs: Ambrose reads the Greeks and preaches; Augustine listens and is baptized; Augustine writes; and the Latin Middle Ages, the Reformers, and most of what Western Christians still argue about grace, all run downstream of that. It is a fair description of Ambrose’s place in the story to say he is the hinge, and he got there by taking a job he did not want.

(†) Theodosius standing among the penitents became Christendom’s working example that power is answerable. + Within two generations the story of Thessalonica was being retold by the Greek church historians Theodoret and Sozomen, and it kept being retold because of what it showed rather than what it settled. An emperor with an army had done something monstrous, a bishop with nothing had told him so, and the emperor had agreed. Ambrose’s own funeral oration for Theodosius five years later says the thing gently: the man put off his royal robes and wept publicly in church for the sin that others’ deceit had brought on him, and was not diminished by it. The idea behind the scene is older than the scene. Nathan walked into David’s palace and told the king he was the man (2 Samuel 12:7), and Ambrose’s letter is deliberately built on that precedent. What the fourth century added was a Christian ruler with real power submitting to the discipline in front of witnesses, which turned an argument into a memory. That memory did work in the West for the next thousand years, in law, in political theory, and in more than one confrontation between a king and a bishop. The claim it embodies is modest and immovable, and it is the same claim as (T3). Nobody is outside the moral law by reason of office. A ruler who has done evil is a man who has done evil, and the road back for him is the road back for anyone.

(†) Where he fell short: at Callinicum he used that same authority to shield an act of destruction from justice. + In 388 a Christian mob at Callinicum on the Euphrates burned the local synagogue, and Theodosius ordered the local bishop, who was held responsible, to pay for rebuilding it. That was an ordinary application of Roman law: property had been destroyed, and the people who destroyed it should make it good. Ambrose intervened to stop the order, and the primary sources for what he did are two documents in his own hand, Letters 40 and 41. The argument he makes in Letter 40 is bad, and it should be said plainly. He tells the emperor that no serious harm was done, offers to take the blame himself so that the bishop will not be punished, declares that he himself set fire to the synagogue or ordered it done, and warns that if the money comes from Christians it will amount to the state financing unbelief. Letter 41 records how he closed the matter. Theodosius was present in church at Milan; Ambrose preached at him; and then, standing at the altar, he told the emperor he would not proceed until he had a promise, and pressed until he got one. The order was dropped. Two things are true at once here and both need saying. The tool is exactly the one used at Thessalonica: a bishop refusing to go to the altar in order to move an emperor. At Thessalonica it was used to make a ruler answer for the killing of the innocent, and at Callinicum it was used to keep a ruler from making the guilty pay for what they had burned. The second use is not a defensible one. Ambrose was pressing an emperor to withhold from a Jewish community the ordinary legal protection that any Roman subject was owed, and the fact that the same courage produced both episodes is a reason to look hard at the man and not a reason to soften the second. He was wrong at Callinicum, and he was wrong in the way that people are most dangerously wrong, which is while certain that they are defending something sacred.