VIII

AMBROSE AND THE POLITICS OF CONTROL

‘You will not find that any one of the western nations have any great inclination for philosophy or geometry or studies of that sort, although the Roman empire has now been so long paramount there.‘¹ This was the emperor Julian’s own view of intellectual life in the western empire, where he had commanded the Roman armies on the Rhine. Even though this bleak assessment may have reflected the prejudices of a highly educated Greek, it is certainly true that the Latin world was not buzzing with theological speculation in the same way as the east. In his exhaustive commentary on the evolution of Nicene thought, the scholar Lewis Ayres has almost nothing to say on the western empire. ‘Our knowledge of Latin Christology and Trinitarian theology [in the west] between 250 and 360 is extremely limited and certainly not that we can make certain judgements about its overall character.‘² This suggests that the sweeping assertions of some commentators that the west was overwhelmingly Nicene need to be taken with caution. One particular problem was that the early Latin translations of the Greek scriptures were so clumsy that educated readers were put off by their crudeness. Gregory of Nazianzus himself complained of ‘the narrowness of the [Latin] language and the paucity of their vocabulary’, which in his view made ‘the Italians’ incapable of distinguishing between the terms used of the Trinity.³

It is hardly surprising that the Nicene Creed was largely unknown in the west as the Council of Nicaea had been made up of Greek-speaking bishops from the east. Western participation had been virtually nonexistent, and the Bishop of Rome was represented only by an observer. The earliest recorded awareness of Nicene thought appears to date from 359, when Constantius’ determination to impose his subordinationist creed prompted a reaction by the western bishops meeting at Rimini; they seemed to have been attracted to the Nicene Creed as a bulwark against subordinationism.⁴

The most thoughtful of the western pro-Nicenes was Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers in Gaul from 353. He had read widely in the works of Tertullian and absorbed his ideas on the Trinity, but then had come across the writings of Athanasius when these began to permeate the west. As an outspoken champion of the controversial bishop, he was exiled by the subordinationist emperor Constantius II to the east, to Phrygia, where, unusually for a westerner in this period, he learned Greek and became acquainted with Greek theology. By now he was a fully converted Nicene supporter.⁵ After Constantius had promulgated his Homoian creed in Constantinople in 360, Hilary travelled to the capital in the hope of persuading the emperor to allow him to debate the Nicene alternative in public. He was unsuccessful, but the emperor allowed him to return to Gaul, and the years before his death in 367 were devoted to networking among the western bishops. Most of his work On the Trinity was written during his exile and draws on ideas he must have encountered there and added to his reading of Tertullian. Hilary was not an original philosopher, but he seems to have been struggling valiantly to create a Latin terminology for the understanding of the Nicene doctrine of God. But when he tried to tackle the problem of how Jesus could suffer as a human being while not losing his full divinity, he got himself into a terrible tangle, largely through his belief that Jesus could not feel pain even in his human form. ‘Though the blow struck or the wound fell upon him or the knots tightened or the ropes raised him, they brought to him the force of suffering but not the pain of suffering.’⁶ But if Jesus did not suffer at all, what was the nature of the sacrifice on which the salvation of mankind depended?

Western support of Nicaea centred on the idea that there was a single unified Godhead within which God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit related to each other as equals. Some fragments of theological texts that have survived describe God as a light from which Jesus emanated as rays, or a ‘flowing’ of the Son from the Father. When Theodosius in his edict of 380 decreed the single deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal majesty, this would appear to be a fair summing up of what he may have been brought up to believe in the Spain of the 360s and 370s. It is interesting that the Holy Spirit was given a much higher status in these western formulations than it received in the Nicene Creed of 325, but the boundaries between the three members of the Trinity were not clearly defined.

The western Church too was vulnerable to factions inspired by personal rivalry or theological differences. The status and patronage available to bishops was immense and the underlying tensions were exposed as soon as a bishopric fell vacant. In Rome in 366, over a hundred were killed in the street fighting that broke out on the death of Bishop Liberius before his successor, Damasus, was elected. Damasus’ use of thugs to secure his victory was repugnant to most of his fellow bishops, and his moral authority was weakened for the rest of his reign. In 374, similar tensions between Homoians and Nicenes gripped the city of Milan after the death of the Homoian bishop Auxentius. This time the state intervened in the person of the praetorian prefect, Petronius Probus, who appears to have engineered the appointment of one of his protégés, the provincial governor Ambrose. In his report to Valentinian I, Probus claimed that Ambrose had entered the cathedral to restore order after the congregation there had been disturbed by Nicene intruders. He had then been acclaimed by the people as the new bishop even though he was not yet a baptised Christian. Valentinian accepted this version of events and Ambrose was duly baptised and enthroned within a week. Many in the Church were less impressed. The scholar Jerome was disgusted that ‘a catechumen today becomes a bishop tomorrow; yesterday at the amphitheatre, today in the church; in the evening at the circus, in the morning at the altar; a little time ago a patron of actors, now dedicator of virgins’.⁷

Ambrose had been born in about 339. His father had been a prefect in Gaul, but after his death, while Ambrose was still a boy, the family had moved to Rome.⁸ Although Ambrose had never been baptised there, his family had had strong links with the Nicene clergy of the city, and so it was as a committed, if still theologically uneducated, Nicene that Ambrose took office in Milan. He was soon mastering theology. His earliest works show a preoccupation with virginity, which he idealised as a higher state of being. However, as so often with those who rejoice in the rejection of sexuality, his emotional clumsiness did much to offend. Many families of the city were upset by his crude attempts to persuade their daughters to take vows of perpetual virginity, which undermined traditional Roman family values. One widow in particular was repelled by the way he insulted her when she considered remarrying. When in 378, just at the time of the disaster at Adrianople, a number of wealthy women died, their families were shocked when Ambrose suggested that they were better off dead than alive when there was the risk of being violated by invaders. This desire for control of others, whether these were virgins, widows, heretics, buildings or emperors, was to become the defining theme of Ambrose’s reign as bishop. Even demons cowered before him. The son of the praetorian prefect Petronius Probus was troubled by an evil spirit, which confessed that Ambrose was the only man in the world he was afraid of.

In 379, Ambrose met the young emperor Gratian for the first time, in Milan. Gratian had now been emperor for four years, and his initial policy had been one of religious toleration. Before he had appointed Theodosius to fill the vacuum caused by Valens’ death at Adrianople, he had specifically allowed the Nicenes whom Valens had removed to return to their sees while preserving any established Homoians in theirs. In August 379, however, he had issued jointly with Theodosius an edict forbidding ‘heresy’, although this was not followed by any expulsions of Homoians. Ambrose was determined to persuade the young emperor to support the Nicenes more aggressively, and when asked, he agreed to provide the impressionable Gratian with an outline of the Nicene faith. He worked at it busily over the winter of 379-380.

De Fide, ‘On the Faith’, the first two books of which were presented to Gratian in March 380, has been derided for its intellectual shallowness and its attempts to manipulate the emperor. Ambrose intimated that he had been asked to provide Gratian with details of the faith that would bring him victory, and throughout the work he linked imperial success to Nicene orthodoxy, specifically warning the emperor that if he campaigned in Illyricum, he risked being won over by ‘Arians’ and would suffer defeat in consequence. In one of his most extraordinary assertions Ambrose claimed that it was no longer the military eagles that led the legions but ‘your name, Lord Jesus and Your Worship’.⁹ That Jesus, who had died at the cruel hands of Roman soldiers, could be transformed into a leader of the legions illustrates how far Christianity had been integrated into imperial politics. Ambrose also adopted Athanasius’ crude device of grouping all the subordinationists together and demonising them, and so contributed to the growing tradition of Christian invective that corroded serious theological thought. His exegesis of the scriptures was also rudimentary, ‘little more than fantastic nonsense woven into a purely delusive harmony’, as one assessment puts it.¹⁰ In his scholarly work Ambrose drew on the texts of others - the fourth volume of De Fide relies heavily on Athanasius, for instance - and his fellow Christians were not taken in by his plagiarism. Jerome rebuked him for ‘decking himself like an ugly crow with someone else’s plumes’ and, in a phrase typical of the writer’s invective, ridiculed a work by Ambrose on the Holy Spirit as totum flaccidum.¹¹

But Ambrose excelled in his brilliantly managed public performances. He was totally unscrupulous in seeking to publicly humiliate his enemies. The first of these events was the ‘council’ he dominated at Aquileia in 381. In the power vacuum created by Valens’ death, Gratian had, through his edict of toleration, bid for religious leadership of the whole empire, and in the summer of 380 he called a general council of bishops from both east and west that would meet at Aquileia the following year. The city, an ancient Roman colony founded in 181 BC, was located at the head of the Adriatic where trade routes from northern Europe reached the sea. It had grown rich on both trade and its own industrial production and had a population of some 100,000. Under Constantine’s patronage, a grand double church had been built - one building was reserved for catechumens and the other for those admitted to full church membership - and these were decorated with stunning floor mosaics that were only rediscovered under medieval silt in the early twentieth century.

To Gratian’s embarrassment, however, he was then upstaged by Theodosius, who announced that his own council of the east would meet in Constantinople the same year. For some time, Gratian appears to have hoped that the bishops meeting at Constantinople would travel on to Aquileia, but this was never likely. It was now that Ambrose showed his genius for improvisation. He suggested to Gratian that the real challenge facing the western Church was the dispute between the Nicenes and the subordinationists centring on the continuing ‘Arian’ presence in Illyricum, and that the issues could be resolved at a smaller council. Ambrose’s target in Illyricum was Palladius, the Bishop of Rataria. Palladius had been a bishop no fewer than thirty-five years, since 346, and was a convinced subordinationist. Ambrose had already mentioned him by name as a heretic in De Fide, and when Gratian had sent on a copy of the book to Palladius for comment, the latter had replied to Ambrose with disdain for this ‘useless and superfluous recitation of clever trickery’. Like most subordinationists, Palladius had confidence in the superiority of his interpretation of the scriptures, and he exhorted Ambrose to ‘search the divine scriptures, which you have neglected, so that under their divine guidance you may avoid the hell towards which you are heading on your own’.¹² There was no love lost here on either side.

When Palladius was summoned by the prefect of Italy to the council at Aquileia in September 381, he assumed that there would be an opportunity to see off Ambrose; there was no indication that free debate would not be allowed. Yet when Palladius arrived at Aquileia, accompanied by another Homoian bishop, Secundianus of Singidunum, he found to his horror that a small building close to the churches had been set up like a law court, presided over by the Bishop of Aquileia, Valerian, with Ambrose sitting beside him as if he were a prosecutor. Instead of the great council of the west in front of which Palladius had hoped to display his authority and learning, there were only some ten bishops from Italy, all hand-picked supporters of Ambrose, and a few other bishops from Gaul and North Africa. Palladius realised that he had been set up.

Ambrose began the meeting by presenting Palladius with a letter written by Arius, to Alexander in 320 and asked him whether he agreed with it. This was a devious tactic. Many subordinationists had never read Arius who represented only one current within the wider sea of subordinationism. Palladius replied that he had come to debate the nature of the true faith in general, not to discuss a text which he had never seen before and that had no relevance. What he, Palladius, wished to do was to initiate a discussion that could then define the agenda for a full council. The surviving records show that the two bishops now began tussling with each other for dominance. Ambrose tried to get Palladius to sign a document condemning Arius; Palladius realised that this would be tantamount to accepting the legitimacy of Ambrose’s stage-managed assembly and thus refused. For some time he managed to escape getting drawn into Ambrose’s net, keeping his silence when repeatedly questioned on Arius, while insisting that Ambrose had no right to act as an inquisitor. Ambrose was reduced to the feeble response that Palladius’ silence implied his acceptance of Arius’ views.

Palladius then appears to have taken the initiative by moving the argument on to firmer ground: the interpretation of scripture. He must have realised that Ambrose’s lack of theological training would have left him vulnerable to what was subordinationism’s strongest card. In the event, Ambrose wisely deferred to the superior knowledge of one of his supporting bishops, Eusebius of Bologna. Palladius cleverly kept the discussion focused on the scriptures without letting it drift to wider issues, but then made a fatal mistake: he misquoted the gospel of John and conflated two verses containing Jesus’ assertion that ‘the Father is greater than I’. Ambrose now announced that Palladius was falsifying scripture and Ambrose’s supporters roared that he be anathematised. When Palladius tried to leave the room, he was restrained by force. Ambrose, claiming that he was holding the meeting on the direct authority of Gratian, pronounced that Palladius was a heretic. Palladius’ companion, Secundianus, suffered a similar interrogation before he too was condemned.

The proceedings of this assembly show Ambrose’s opportunism and the ruthlessness through which he exerted his authority. When he wrote to the emperor, ostensibly on behalf of the ‘council of Aquileia’, he claimed that he had established that Palladius and Secundianus were ‘Arians’ and that they must be deposed. He presented the small assembly of his bishops as if it represented ‘the western Church’ acting in defence of universal Christianity. The letter was even addressed to Theodosius as well as to Gratian on the grounds that the western bishops had a legitimate interest in the vacancy at Antioch, where the rights of Paulinus should be upheld against those of Flavian. (It is interesting that Ambrose made no mention of the Council of Constantinople, which had been held earlier in the year. One must assume that he didn’t want it to be considered more important than his own - though he certainly knew of it through Acholius of Thessalonika, who attended the later sessions.) Theodosius’ reply was dismissive. The eastern and western Churches, divided by geography and language, and increasingly by separate administrations, were by now drifting apart. When Bishop Damasus tried to regain the initiative for the west by calling a council to be held in Rome in 382 to which all eastern bishops were invited, only three easterners, among them Paulinus, discarded at Antioch, attended.

There is no evidence that Gratian acquiesced in Ambrose’s demand to depose the two ‘Arian’ bishops. But Ambrose persisted. He was both helped and hindered by the weakness of the young emperor, who seems to have been particularly susceptible to the machinations of others when he established his court permanently in Milan in March 381. Milan’s central location made it a good base from which to defend the northern borders of the western empire, and the young Valentinian II and his mother Justina were already settled there. Ambrose benefited from the possibility of direct access to the court, but it was clear that a number of important Christian figures arrived from Rome to take advantage of the shift of power to Milan. One of their successes had been to secure the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate in Rome, which had always been associated with the success of the Senate’s deliberations. This was part of a campaign to withdraw state funds for ancient rites and went along with a refusal by Gratian to take on the traditional imperial title of pontifex maximus, chief of the priesthood.

The court’s move to Milan was unpopular with those communities that had prospered from the imperial presence in Trier and Sirmium. There was additional resentment when Gratian recruited mercenaries from among the Alans, one of the Germanic tribes. He showed a somewhat un-Roman enthusiasm for their skill as archers, and his public appearance in an Alan costume might have been the moment when his credibility was irrevocably lost. Stories of the lack of control in his court and the proliferation of corruption abounded. Theodosius paid him less and less respect and in January 383 accorded his own eldest son Arcadius the status of an Augustus without even referring the matter to Gratian. From then on things went downhill for Gratian. In the summer of 383 the commander of the British legions, Magnus Maximus, revolted and crossed over the Channel to Gaul, and when Gratian marched north to confront him he found his army melting away. Left isolated in a province that offered him no support, he was killed by an officer who had defected to Maximus.

Gratian’s death left the twelve-year-old Valentinian II as sole legitimate emperor in the west, but there was little the boy could do against Maximus, who now held power in Gaul and who proclaimed himself to be a Nicene, possibly in the hope of attracting Theodosius’ support for his usurpation. Maximus offered to take Valentinian under his wing, but the young emperor was sufficiently well established in Italy, with a court of Italian aristocrats whose status depended on his continued rule, to be able to refuse. Although the details of any agreement are lost, both rulers appear to have recognised each other’s position and the right to control their own territories without the interference of the other. Theodosius too accepted that he could do little to confront Maximus. They had, in fact, once served together in the elder Theodosius’ army in Britain.

Valentinian received strong support from his mother Justina, the widow of Valentinian I, who appears to have had much of her late husband’s tenacity. Both she and her son were Homoians, and they had built up a body of supportive clergy in Milan headed by an ‘alternative’ bishop, who had taken the name of Ambrose’s Homoian predecessor, Auxentius. Their retinue also included Gothic troops who, like all the Germanic tribes, were subordinationists. The scene was set for a power struggle between the Nicene Ambrose and the Homoian court.

Once again Ambrose was to show his opportunism and genius for manipulation of a public event in his favour. The first conflict arose over the Altar of Victory in the Senate in Rome. A group of pagan senators, led by the city’s prefect, Symmachus, took advantage of the change of emperor to formally request Valentinian for a restitution of all pagan privileges to Rome, including the return of the altar to the Senate. Symmachus was a consummate tactician, and rather than attempting to confront Christianity on behalf of the ancient pagan beliefs of the capital, he portrayed the issue as one of tolerance. Echoing the arguments of Porphyry and Themistius, he pleaded for the recognition of diversity of worship: ‘The divine Mind has distributed different guardians and different cults to different cities. As souls are given separately to infants as they are born, so to peoples the genius of their destiny... If a long period gives authority to religious customs, we ought to keep faith with so many centuries, and to follow our ancestors, as they happily followed theirs... Allow us, we beseech you, as old men, to leave to posterity what we received as boys... We ask, then, for the peace for the gods of our fathers and our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look to the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what paths each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road.’¹³ He reminded the emperor that when the altar had first been removed from the Senate, a famine had struck the city; the pagan gods were as adept at showing their displeasure by punishing wrongdoers as was the Christian god! Symmachus’ eloquent plea convinced some of the Christians at Valentinian’s court, but Ambrose was having none of it. In two letters to the emperor, the first a statement of general principle and the second a detailed reply to Symmachus’ text, he presented his advice. If Valentinian accepted the request he would be supporting paganism itself, and he could not possibly make such a move without informing Theodosius (who, as Ambrose knew, would surely back the bishop in the matter). As for Symmachus’ plea for tolerance, ‘Salvation is not sure unless everyone [sic] worships in truth the true God, that is the God of Christians, under Whose sway are all things: for He alone is the true God, Who is to be worshipped from the bottom of the heart; for the “gods of the heathen”, as Scripture says, “are devils”.’¹⁴ When Valentinian acquiesced in his bishop’s demand, the underlying issue of religious toleration, clearly presented by Symmachus, was firmly rejected. The debate - and Ambrose’s victory - marked another turning point.

As Ambrose’s confidence grew, there developed an extraordinary power struggle between the Nicene bishop and the Homoian court. It started in 385 when the court demanded access to one of the basilicas of the city for their own Homoian services. The church requested, referred to as the Basilica Portiana, was probably today’s San Lorenzo, which may originally have been an imperial mausoleum and thus the emperor’s preserve in any case. When Ambrose was summoned to the imperial palace to be told of the demand, a large demonstration followed him, and some of his supporters shouted that they would prefer to be martyred for their true faith than betray the Nicene Creed. The court had little option but to ask Ambrose to calm the crowd, which he did with the promise that nobody would invade any of the city’s basilicas. He had outwitted the emperor and the demand for the basilica was dropped.

In a more determined move by Valentinian and Justina to assert their Homoian faith, they issued a law on 23 January 386 confirming that those who supported the creed laid down by Constantius II at Rimini and Seleucia, and subsequently at Constantinople in 360 - in other words the Homoian faith - should be guaranteed the freedom of assembly. The wording of the law made it clear that this was an affirmation of existing rights, not the creation of new privileges. Any ‘tumult’ against this law would be treated as treason. It was decided that the emperor himself would hold a major service at Easter in early April, and nine days before the feast a court official approached Ambrose with a formal request to use the Basilica Nova, the city’s cathedral. If there were any disturbances, Ambrose himself would be held accountable. Ambrose had to be careful, and he responded by claiming that Church tradition did not allow a priest to hand over a church. The court countered by reiterating its earlier demand for the Basilica Portiana, and occupied the building, which was soon decorated with the imperial insignia.

Ambrose could not be seen to be instigating any opposition, and so it was that a ‘spontaneous crowd’ swarmed off to the Basilica Portiana. Troops were dispatched by the court to guard the entrances, with orders that they should let people in but not out again in the hope that they would eventually capitulate if left without food. Preaching in the cathedral, Ambrose skilfully portrayed himself and his own faith as under siege, and roused congregations not to open demonstration but to quiet resistance within both basilicas. He proclaimed that if he was attacked in any way, he would be a martyr. However, he remained exceptionally vulnerable, even more so when news came through that those protesting inside the Basilica Portiana had taken down the imperial hangings and had damaged them in the process. This could be construed as a direct insult to the emperor and liable to be punished severely.

In the event, it was the court that gave way. Many of the soldiers sent to the Basilica Portiana were Nicenes and susceptible to Ambrose’s insistence that they would be betraying their faith before God. Some even deserted their posts. The court simply could not risk a refusal to obey orders or a massacre of Ambrose’s supporters if they did stand firm. In addition, an ominous letter arrived for Valentinian from Maximus intimating that the young emperor would only survive in power if he supported the Nicene faith, which Maximus had already adopted. Valentinian gave in. The troops were withdrawn by the court and an uneasy calm descended on Milan. Ambrose was still subject to any direct enforcement of the law of 23 January, but his manipulation of the situation had been masterful.

Ambrose consolidated his success through a major building programme. When by June 386 another basilica, now known as Sant’Ambrogio, was nearing completion, Ambrose let it be known that he would be buried under its central altar. There was simply no precedent for such pretensions. Traditionally a church was dedicated to an earlier martyr, not the city’s presiding bishop. Milan seems to have suffered little in the persecutions of the previous century, and when an earlier church had been dedicated, relics had been imported from elsewhere.

Many believed that this should happen again, but the bishop countered with the extraordinary claim that he had a presentiment where relics of the city’s own martyrs could be found. He then led a crowd to a local memorial previously erected to two martyrs, Nabor and Felix, whose fate had been recorded, and ordered the digging to start. Soon two sets of bones emerged. Ambrose later reported that there was fresh blood on them, which he interpreted as a sign that God had preserved the bodies as evidence that they were martyrs. He had also brought along two women possessed by demons, and with the bones before them, the demons cried out from inside them, proclaiming in their agonies that these were martyrs by the name of Gervasius and Protasius. Crowds accompanied the bloodied remains into the city and further miracles were announced, including the curing of a blind butcher who had rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief that had touched the bier on which the bodies had been carried. There were voices from the court mocking these opportune finds and the dubious evidence used to justify their legitimacy, but Ambrose had the remains buried in his new basilica within a day. The whole episode was presented as another victory for the Nicene faith.

By 387, Valentinian and Justina had been outmanoeuvred and their position was crumbling. There is evidence in the last months of 386 that leading officials were beginning to resign and leave Milan. Their weakness on a broader front was shown when they were forced to call on the help of Theodosius, who had to send them one of his generals to bolster their position. Valentinian’s position was not helped by a visit of Ambrose to Maximus in Trier later in 386 in which Ambrose appears to have launched into recriminations against Valentinian. Consequently, during the summer of 387, Maximus moved into Italy, claiming that he was bringing the Nicene faith with him. There seems to have been no resistance to the usurper, and Valentinian was forced to flee with his mother eastwards to Thessalonika. Here he had his first meeting with Theodosius, and the two emperors counterattacked until Maximus was hunted down and killed at Aquileia. It was now that Theodosius forced Valentinian to renounce his Homoian faith as a price for his support. The Nicene faith had become the official religious policy of the empire, upheld by Valentinian, the late Maximus and Theodosius alike. Theodosius was clearly in charge, and having taken up residence in Milan, he was in a position to consolidate his faith in the west. He could be sure of the support of Ambrose, but which of them would prove the dominant partner in the relationship was still to be decided.