of Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice. He also embraced other classic notions, such as amicitia, pietas, religio, disciplina, pudor, vericundia, and ultimately romanitas itself. But he didn’t just embrace them. He was a Christian, so he transformed them, and THAT is the key to Ambrose. • Amicitia: a relationship most like “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” • Pietas: obedience owed first to one’s father, then to the State, and finally the gods • Religio: proper respect for the gods…that is, observing the rituals correctly. • Disciplina: an ordered way of life (what the military tries to teach in boot camp). • Pudor: purity, integrity, wholeness, also modesty • Vericundia: the shame that comes from boastfulness, or humility, if your worth is left for others to assess. • Romanitas: all things Roman are superior to all things non-Roman. It is cultural hege mony fueled and supported by military and economic hegemony. Rome is a divine gift to the rest of the world and it may be imposed on them for their own good if they don’t grasp its innate value themselves. It would have been used the way Americans use the term “democracy” in foreign relations, particularly in the Middle East (as in, “we are invading to bring democracy to the region”).
The problem here is that a secular historian may interpret the thoughts and actions of a man of faith in a way in which that man of faith would not recognize or accept as sufficient or even valid. Of course, the opposite problem is that too syncophantic a hagiography is likely to emerge from Church historians. Between this Charybdis and Scylla there is a man of his times, temperament, and training; class, crises, and culture; family and faith.
To these he added his own profound sense of Christian ascetical practices. Paulinus, his secretary and first biographer, says that “the venerable bishop was a man of great abstinence, of many vigils and labors… (who) weakened his body with daily fasts.” (Vita Ambrosii. 38) He ate once a day, after sunset, except on high feast days and week-ends. He prayed regularly. He transferred his vast personal fortune to the Church and for the care of the poor. He sounds personally experienced when he advises his clergy: “I think that what you wisely do is…avoid the banquets of strangers, but so that you are still hospitable to travelers, and give no occasion for reproach by reason of your great care…Banquets with strangers engross one’s attention, and soon produce a love for feasting. Tales, also, of the world and its pleasures often creep in. One’s glass, too, even against one’s will, is filled time after time.” (De Officiis I. XX. 86) Cardinal Giacamo Biffi quietly suggests that perhaps the reason Ambrose was never very close to Augustine was because the older man just couldn’t tolerate “the intricate speculations and in the spiritual ruffles of this complicated intellectual, capable of the most subtle dialectical acrobatics and incapable of leaving himself finally to live in a just and dignified way…A man like Augustine would have presumed to take up whole days in patient conceptual arguments and of miniscule philosophical analyses, and a man with the temperament of Ambrose certainly would have had neither the means nor the taste to launch himself in that enterprise,” (in Pasini, 137) which is an amusingly candid way of saying that Ambrose was self-disciplined in his passions and practical in his pastoral theology. He had no time for belly-gazing intellectualism tinged by an over-wrought conscience. Neil McLynn concedes that: “the deeper springs of Ambrose’s personality…remain hidden…the ‘real’ Ambrose will in any case elude us. The polished surface of his writings will defeat our efforts to penetrate them…” and yet, “historians might nevertheless be forgiven their speculations as they weigh the different traits they discern in his works against one another…” (McLynn 375). 100
101