The Life
Ambrose was born to a Roman senatorial family around 339 in Trier (modern Germany), where his father was the praetorian prefect of Gaul. After his father’s death, his mother brought him to Rome to be educated. He studied poetry, rhetoric, Greek, and law. Around 370 he was appointed governor of Liguria and Aemilia and resided in Milan. In 374 the bishop of Milan died and a riot broke out between the Arian and Nicene parties. Ambrose, still only a catechumen, came to keep the peace. A child’s voice rang out: “Ambrose for bishop!” He was acclaimed by the whole crowd. Within eight days he was baptized, ordained, and consecrated bishop. He gave away his entire fortune to the poor. He defended the Nicene Faith against the Arians, taught his besieged congregation to sing antiphonal hymns during the siege of his basilica in 386, baptized Saint Augustine on Easter 387, and made the emperor Theodosius do public penance for the massacre of Thessalonica in 390. He reposed on Holy Saturday 397 and is one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church.
In 374, after the Arian bishop of Milan died, the Christian community split between the Arian and Nicene parties over the succession. A riot broke out in the basilica. Ambrose, the civil governor, came to keep the peace. As he was addressing the assembled people, a child’s voice rang out from the crowd: “Ambrose for bishop!” Both sides took up the cry at once — each party hoping that the man whose civil authority they all respected would be acceptable to the other side. Ambrose was astonished. He was still only a catechumen. He had never aspired to the episcopate. He tried to refuse: he attempted to flee the city, he hid in the country, he behaved as harshly as he could. None of it worked. The emperor confirmed the popular acclamation. Within eight days Ambrose was baptized, ordained successively through all the orders, and consecrated bishop. He was forty-five.
In Holy Week of 386, the Arian empress Justina demanded that Ambrose surrender one of his basilicas for Arian worship. She sent imperial troops to occupy it by force. Ambrose locked himself inside with his congregation. They were besieged for several days. To keep them calm and to occupy the long hours, Ambrose taught them to sing hymns of his own composition. He divided the congregation in two halves and had them alternate verses, after the antiphonal pattern he had learned from the Syrian East. The congregation sang day and night. The hymns reached the soldiers outside the basilica through the walls. The soldiers, most of them ordinary Christians, refused to attack their own brethren in the Faith. The empress was forced to back down. The basilica remained in orthodox hands. The episode is the first record of communal antiphonal singing in the Western Church, and it founded the entire Western tradition of Christian hymnody.
The young Augustine had come to Milan from Rome in 384 as the official rhetor of the imperial court. He was a brilliant young African with a complicated past, a long-time follower of the Manichees, an ambitious career man, the father of an illegitimate son. He came to Milan a sophisticated unbeliever. He began to attend Ambrose’s sermons — partly to study the bishop’s rhetoric, but increasingly to be moved by the Christian theology Ambrose was preaching. After many months of inner struggle, Augustine was converted in his famous garden scene in 386. The next year, on Easter Vigil 387, Ambrose baptized him in the Milan baptistery. The man who would become the deepest theologian of the Western Church received the Faith from the man who had taught it to him through long Sunday afternoons in his cathedral.
Ambrose’s hymnographic legacy is the foundation of Western Christian hymnody. He composed at least four securely authentic hymns and a dozen or so traditionally attributed to him: “Eternal Maker of Things,” “Splendor of the Father’s Glory,” “Come, Redeemer of the Nations,” “God the Creator of All.” They are written in iambic dimeter — short, simple, memorable, easy for a congregation to sing. They teach the Nicene theology of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Christian moral life through the ordinary medium of song. They have been sung in the Western Church for sixteen centuries, in Latin, English, German, and many other languages. The Te Deum, traditionally attributed to Ambrose, is the great Christian hymn of thanksgiving and is used in the Eastern Orthodox Molieben as well. Ambrose taught the Western Church to sing.
In 390 the Eastern emperor Theodosius the Great, in a fit of rage over a riot in Thessalonica, ordered the entire population of the city gathered into the hippodrome, where his troops massacred indiscriminately for some hours. About seven thousand people were killed. When the news reached Ambrose at Milan, he wrote the emperor a pastoral letter informing him that he was excommunicated until he made public penance. He met the emperor at the doors of the cathedral on the next major feast day and barred his entry until the imperial penance had been performed. Theodosius, after a struggle, accepted. He took off the imperial robes, prostrated himself in the cathedral in penitential ashes for some months, and finally was readmitted to communion. The principle Ambrose was enacting was that the Christian emperor stands under the Christian Church, not above it.
On the very day of his consecration as bishop, Ambrose gave away his entire personal fortune to the poor and to the Church. He had been a wealthy senatorial Roman with substantial inherited lands and considerable savings from his years as governor. He retained none of it for himself. He committed his sister Marcellina to the care of the consecrated virgins of Rome, made arrangements for the welfare of his other relatives, and embraced the simple life of a Christian bishop. Throughout his episcopate he continued the same pattern. When the Goths and other barbarians captured Roman Christians and held them for ransom, Ambrose sold the gold liturgical vessels of the Milan basilicas to ransom them back. When critics objected that he was profaning the sacred vessels, he answered: “Is it not better to save living souls than to save dead metal?”
The Lord’s saying about Caesar and God draws a distinction that Ambrose lived out in his confrontation with Theodosius. The emperor has his proper sphere of authority, which Christians are to respect. But there are things that belong to God alone — the moral law, the sacraments of the Church, the freedom of the human conscience before God — over which the emperor has no authority. Ambrose taught the Western Church to honor both spheres without confusing them. The Christian gives the emperor his proper due; the Christian also reserves to God what belongs to God alone. When the two come into conflict — as they did when Theodosius massacred the Thessalonians — the Christian conscience must side with God against the emperor. Ambrose’s courage at the cathedral doors stands on the foundation of this verse.
Saint Ambrose reposed in peace in his cathedral city of Milan on Holy Saturday, April 4, 397. He was about fifty-eight years old. He had been bishop of Milan for twenty-three years. He died on the eve of the Resurrection, after the long Lenten fast and on the threshold of the great paschal feast he had celebrated with his people for so many years. The whole city of Milan mourned. He was succeeded as bishop by his old teacher Simplician, the Roman presbyter who had instructed him in theology in the days after his consecration. His relics rest to this day in the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, in a crystal sarcophagus beneath the high altar, alongside the relics of the holy martyrs Gervase and Protase whom he himself had discovered.
Ambrose shows us, in extreme form, what a Christian bishop is supposed to be. He was an apostle: he preached the deep Faith with such depth that he converted Augustine. He was a theologian: he wrote treatises that shaped Latin Christian theology for centuries. He was a hymnographer: he composed the foundational hymns of the Western Church and taught his people to sing them. He was a defender: he stood at the cathedral doors of Milan against the imperial troops who came to seize his basilica. He was a prophet: he excommunicated the most powerful man in the Christian world for the massacre of innocent people. He was a shepherd: he gave away his fortune to feed the poor and sold the Church gold to ransom captives. All of these were one single life, given wholly to the Lord and to the people Ambrose had been called to serve. He shows the Western Church what episcopal sanctity actually looks like.