new kingdoms of the West, though ruled by Arian barbarians, were staffed with the elites of Rome. And it was the latter who, in the end, prevailed. These patricians, both clerics and civil servants, simply shifted their worldview from a Roman tradition that was pagan to the Roman Catholicism that Ambrose, perhaps more than anyone else, created, explained, defended, and lived. Sure, it will be inevitably and markedly changed with the emergence of the likes of Merovingians, the Angles and Saxons, the Vikings, and crucially, from the Celtic Christians emanating from Ireland, Iona, and Lindisfarne, but a lot remains: law, language, ritual, virtues, tradition, art, and architecture. Look around and you will see that, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, Ambrose would still find elements that would be remarkably familiar. He should, he ensured it.
V II: THEOLOGY Most people who read Ambrose’s theological works get put off by how unsystematic it is. That is true…it is. He is reacting more or less spontaneously to an immediate issue rather than trying to set out a program or, to borrow a later concept, a ‘summa.’ Moreover, a lot of his writing began in oral form as homilies and that oral ‘echo’ is sometimes so evident that you would swear you could hear a member of the congregation yawn or a rooster crow. Also, he was very frequently rebutting something that someone else had said, so we can get the feeling that we are hearing only half of what was often a heated conversation. Then there is his prose style, in keeping with the period that also gave us the turgid poetry of Ausonius (his Mosella is an acquired taste), he can be a bit, ah, generous in his decorative flourishes. Finally the character of the man emerges in his theological arguments and they reveal him to be of compressed and controlled passion, sharp and blunt, if not always clear and precise. He was self-taught on-the-job, and though his classical liberal arts education would have prepared him well for that challenge, he could be guilty of fairly heavyhanded borrowing, especially from Origen, Philo, Didymus, but also Virgil, Ovid, and especially Cicero. His creativity and freshness is not so much in new ideas as how he can weave together the ideas of so many others in a way that is of immediate use…not at all unlike the work of a lawyer lining up his witnesses and evidence to make his case. Lindisfarne, England
In Biblical exegesis he loved drawing connections between themes, ideas, even single images, regardless of whether they were in Hebrew or Greek, New or Old Testament. This method is called a grappolo, literally: ‘as if clustered.’ He drew both moral and mystical lessons from them and never doubted that every word was written about Christ through Divine inspiration. He focused a lot of his attention on Genesis, the Patriarchs, the Psalms, some prophets, the Song of Songs and Luke. It is inspiring and often delightful reading, but not the sort of thing that would pass for serious biblical scholarship today, being unaware of historical, social, literary, linguistic, and cultural criticisms for example. Here’s a sample: The sinful woman who anoints Christ’s feet with her tears] carries in herself the image of a far greater woman, that is the soul and also the Church, come to the earth to reunite to herself at last the people with the good perfume…. She does not stop kissing his feet, so as not to be any more on the level of speaking than on wisdom, of not being on the level of love any more than of justice, of not being more on the level of flowering with lips than on chastity, of not being more on the level of kissing than on humility. [the Church] assumes the figure of the sinful woman from the moment that Christ himself assumes the aspect of a sinner. To us is given the Son of the Virgin…to us is given Emmanuel, God With Us, to us is given the cross, death, resurrection of the Lord. If Christ agreed to suffer for all, all the more has he agreed to suffer for us, because he suffered his passion for the Church. It isn’t for nothing that we are able to give worthily in exchange to God—in fact what ought we give in exchange for the afflictions rendered on the body of the Lord, what in exchange for the wounds, what in exchange for the cross, the death, the tomb? Shame on me if I do not give love! Let us give, therefore, love for our debt, charity for blessing, recognition for this richness, love all the more he who is the more condemned.”
Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke, VI, respectively 13-15, 20-21, and 25-27
You can see that for Ambrose all scripture is Christological and everyone and everything becomes a complex allegory. In this case, the sinful woman is the Church and at the same time the soul of the Christian. His doctrinal works tend to be polemical; that is, their goal is to refute a heretical position, most often concerning the full divinity of Christ against the homoeans, the place of the Holy Spirit as a full member of the Trinity, and the point of the sacraments, especially penitence. Listen to an excerpt: Let the Church, our Mother, weep for you, and wash away your guilt with her tears; let Christ see you mourning and say, Blessed are you that are sad, for you will rejoice.’ It pleases Him that many should entreat for one…And if you weep bitterly Christ will look upon you and your guilt shall leave you, for the application of pain does away with the enjoyment of wickedness and the delight of the sin. And so while mourning over our past sins we shut the door against fresh ones, and from the condemnation of our guilt there arises as it were a training for innocence. De Poenitentia I.X.92
96
97