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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2020
In Ambrose’s apologetic writing against the Roman prefect Symmachus, he makes a surprising argument for Christianity’s superiority over Roman religious practices, arguing that Christianity is in fact a newer and therefore superior form of religion. The whole world has “progressed” and so must religious practices. In the letters to Symmachus, Ambrose’s arguments are ad hoc and apologetic, not constructive. This article seeks to understand better the intellectual and historical contexts that make Ambrose’s surprising convictions possible by looking at Ambrose’s writings on creation in the context of the pro-Nicene debates. Considering Ambrose’s writing in the Hexameron, I argue that Ambrose’s account of cosmological progress finds an intellectual milieu in pro-Nicene reflection on the implications of Christ’s divine consubstantiality for a doctrine of creation. When Christ is no longer seen as a mediator between God and the world, a new space is opened up to speak of creation’s change and even “progress” without a worry that doing so will jeopardize creation as the divine handiwork. Ambrose’s apologetic strategy, though apparently not directly related to pro-Nicene debates, is illuminated when seen against this backdrop. The result is a better understanding both of Ambrose’s strategies in particular and of the situation of fourth-century apologetics more broadly.
I would like to thank Daniel H. Williams, Thomas Breedlove, and the two anonymous reviewers from HTR for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
1 Ambrose, ep. 73.23 (Sancti Ambrosi Opera: Pars Decima; Epistularum Liber Decimus, Epistulae extra Collectionem, Gesta Concili Aquileiensis [ed. Michaela Zelzer, CSEL 82/3; Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1982] 470; also Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches [trans. J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, with Carole Hill; Translated Texts for Historians 43; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005] 89).
2 D. H. Williams, “Ambrose as an Apologist,” StPatr 85 (2017) 65–75, at 73.
3 Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 312–21. For a fuller account of creation in patristic thought along similar lines, see Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (OECS; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4 Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 318.
5 Louis J. Swift writes, perhaps unjustly, that “scarcely a page of Ambrose’s [Hexameron] is without a borrowed thought, a reworked passage or a translated excerpt from the Cappadocian’s work” (Swift, “Basil and Ambrose on the Six Days of Creation,” Aug 21 [1981] 317–28, at 317). See also on this issue Hervé Savon, “Physique des philosophes et cosmologie de la Genèse chez Basile de Césarée et Ambroise de Milan,” in Philosophies non chrétiennes et christianisme (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1984) 57–72.
6 Pierre Courcelle has argued that Augustine even heard Ambrose’s hexameral sermons during Holy Week of 387, though this is not completely accepted (Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessiones de saint Augustin [Paris: de Boccard, 1950] 93–106).
7 Frank Egleston Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912).
8 A final feature that prompts comparison of these two texts is that, if there is a major difference between Ambrose and Basil on these texts, it is that Ambrose’s work is markedly more polemical than Basil’s pastoral approach. As Swift explains: “Though Basil spends much time refuting opponents’ views, he is inclined to begin and end his sermons on a pastoral note with expressions of anxiety over the welfare of the congregation, exhortations to virtue, or statements of wonder at nature’s beauty. However much he gets involved in polemics, the pastoral role is always before him. Ambrose’s [Hexameron] is organized somewhat differently. In the first six sermons pastoral concerns are subordinated in large measure to polemical ones. Only with the seventh homily do we get a relaxation of the defensive mode and a growing preoccupation with explicating the text for the community of the faithful” (Swift, “Basil and Ambrose on the Six Days,” 319).
9 Classic studies of this famous episode include Jean-Rémy Palanque, Saint Ambroise et l’Empire romain. Contribution à l’histoire des rapports de l’église et de l’état à la fin du quatrième siècle (Paris: de Boccard, 1933); Leokadia Małunowicz, De ara Victoriae in Curia Romana (Vilnius: Société des Sciences, 1937); Henri Bloch, “A New Document of the Last Pagan Revival in the West, 393–394 AD,” HTR 38 (1945) 199–244; Hans A. Pohlsander, “Victory: The Story of a Statue,” Historia 18 (1969) 588–97; Richard Klein, Der Streit um den Victoriaaltar. Die dritte Relatio des Symmachus und die Briefe 17, 18 und 57 des Mailänder Bischofs Ambrosius (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972); James J. Sheridan, “The Altar of Victory: Paganism’s Last Battle,” L’antiquité Classique 35 (1966) 186–206. More recently, see Peter Brown, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) 103–9; Rita Lizzi Testa, “The Famous ‘Altar of Victory Controversy’ in Rome,” in Contested Monarchy: Integrating the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century AD (ed. Johannes Wienand; Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 405–21; and Williams, “Ambrose as an Apologist,” 65–75.
10 Brown regards nobilitas to result from a convergence of three factors: birth, culture, and high office. But a significant feature is the antiquity of their gained wealth: “Their wealth was not that of parvenus, gained only recently from collaboration with the new empire of Constantine. Rather, they were the parvenus of an earlier age” (Brown, Eye of the Needle, 94–95).
11 See especially François Paschoud, “Le rôle du providentialisme dans le conflit de 384 sur l’autel de la Victoire,” MH 40 (1983) 197–206; Michele Renee Salzman, “Reflections on Symmachus’ Idea of Tradition,” Historia 38 (1989) 348–64.
12 Salzman, “Symmachus’ Idea of Tradition,” 348, quoting Norman H. Baynes, review of J. A. McGeachy, “Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and the Senatorial Aristocracy of the West” (PhD diss., University of Chicago) 1942.
13 See, e.g., Cotto’s speech in Cicero, Nat. d. 3.2.
14 Symmachus, Rel. 3.8 (CSEL 82/3: 26; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 73–74).
15 Ibid., 3.3 (CSEL 82/3:23; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 72).
16 Ibid., 3.8 (CSEL 82/3:25; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 73).
17 As Paschoud describes, this kind of providence concerns “d’une attidude of religieuse utilitariste, qui considère le respect des rites et des préceptes comme faisant partie d’un accord qui impose aussi au contractant divin des obligations précises,” and well summed up by the Latin formula do ut des (“Le rôle du providentialisme,” 197).
18 Averil Cameron, “Remaking the Past,” in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (ed. G. W. Bowersock, P. R. L. Brown, and O. Grabar; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) 1–20, at 1.
19 Salzman, “Symmachus’ Idea of Tradition,” 350.
20 Symmachus, Rel. 3.3 (CSEL 82/3:25; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 73).
21 Ibid., 3.9. A parallel is found slightly later in Claudian, Bell. Gild. 1.21–25.
22 Optimi principes, patres patriae, reveremini annos meos in quos me pius ritus adduxit (Symmachus, Rel. 3.9 [CSEL 82/3:26–27; Ambrose of Milan (trans. Liebeschuetz) 74]).
23 Salzman, “Symmachus’ Idea of Tradition,” 350.
24 Suus enim cuique mos, cuique ritus est; varios custodes urbibus cultus mens divina distribuit (Symmachus, Rel. 3.8 [CSEL 82/3:26; Ambrose of Milan (trans. Liebeschuetz) 73]).
25 Aequum est quicquid omnes colunt unum putari. Eadem spectamus astra, commune caelum est, idem nos mundus involuit; quid interest qua quisque prudentia verum requirat? Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum (ibid. 3.10 [CSEL 82/3:27; Ambrose of Milan (trans. Liebeschuetz) 74]).
26 Salzman, “Symmachus’ Idea of Tradition,” 350 n. 11, who also cites Porphyry.
27 Maijastina Kahlos credits Themistius for Symmachus’s use of monistic language to argue for the “internal unity of religions” and the athletic metaphor of the path (Maijastina Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity [London: Duckworth, 2009] 97). For Themistius, see Or. 5.69A.
28 In addition to Nat. d., see the parallel idea in Cicero, Div. 2.148: “For it is the part of the wise man to preserve ancestral traditions by retaining rituals and ceremonies; and, meanwhile, both the beauty of the world and the regularity of celestial phenomena force us to confess the existence of an all-powerful and eternal nature which must be sustained and worshipped by the race of humans” (Loeb Classical Library 20:537).
29 See Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture (HUT 26; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989).
30 Paschoud argues that Ambrose differs from Augustine’s City of God in this regard, and even from his own earlier account of providence in De fide, where he interpreted the invading Goths in terms of Ezekiel’s “Gog” (“Le rôle du providentialisme,” 204–6).
31 Ambrose, ep. 73.7 (CSEL 82/3:37; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 82).
32 Paenitet lapsus, vetusta canities pudenda sanguinis traxit ruborem. Non erubesco cum toto orbe longaeva converti (ibid.).
33 Nullus pudor est ad meliora transire (ibid. [CSEL 82/3:38; Ambrose of Milan (trans. Liebeschuetz) 83]).
34 Ibid., 73.23 (CSEL 82/3:47; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 89).
35 Ibid.
36 Mundus ipse, qui vel primum coactis elementorum per inane seminibus, tenero orbe, concreverat, vel confuso adhuc indigesti operis caligabat horrore; nonne postea distincto coeli, maris, terrarumque discrimine, rerum formas quibus speciosus videtur, accepit (ibid.).
37 Ibid., 73.24 (CSEL 82/3:47; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 89).
38 Ibid., 73.25 (CSEL 82/3:48; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 89–90).
39 Ibid., 73.26 (CSEL 82/3:49; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 90).
40 Liebeschuetz cites references to Virgil, Ecl. 6.31–38; Aen. 1.292, 3.645; and Georg. 1.99, 2.51, as well as allusions to Horace’s Odes in this section (Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 89–90).
41 Ambrose, ep. 73.28 (CSEL 82/3:48; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 90).
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 73.30 (CSEL 82/3:49; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 91).
46 E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) 1–25.
47 Ibid., 15.
48 Ibid., 23.
49 John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 BC to AD 220 (rev. ed.; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) 47–48.
50 On the “demise of the demiurge” in Plotinus, see Carl Séan O’Brien, The Demiurge in Ancient Thought: Secondary Gods and Divine Mediators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 290–303. For further studies on the complex relationship between Neoplatonism and nature, see Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus’ Enneads (ed. Michael Wagner; Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); and Neoplatonism and the Philosophy of Nature (ed. James Wilberding and Christopher Horn; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
51 Dodds, Ancient Concept of Progress, 23.
52 Ambrose, in fact, uses this phrase at ep. 72.10: Dignum ergo est temporibus vestris hoc est Christianis temporibus (CSEL 82/3:16; Ambrose of Milan [trans. Liebeschuetz] 66–67). On tempora Christiana, see Robert A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and idem., “Tempora Christiana Revisited,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless; London: Routledge, 1999) 201–13.
53 Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997) 74.
54 For the relevant texts in the pre-Augustinian Latin tradition, see Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) 132–52.
55 While space does not permit such an exercise here, it would be profitable to compare the account of Ambrose’s view of history given here with recent revisionist approaches to Eusebius of Caesarea’s (in)famous “triumphalist optimist” notion of history, as found in, e.g., Aaron Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ “Praeparatio Evangelica” (OECS; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 237–39, and Hazel Johannessen, The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea (OECS; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 139–70. If my argument holds, one should find a difference in the way Eusebius narrates the arrival of Constantine’s reign as a certain kind of progress as compared to Ambrose’s apologetic arguments against Symmachus. Regardless, Johannessen shares the underlying assumption that one’s politics and ecclesiology are interdependent with one’s view of history and salvation (Demonic in the Political Thought, 139).
56 Ambrose, Hex. 1.1–4 (Sancti Ambrosi Opera: Pars Prima [ed. Carolus Schenkl, CSEL 32/1; Vienna: Temsky, 1896] 3–4; also, Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel [trans. John J. Savage; FC 42; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1961] 3–5).
57 A thorough account of Ambrose’s cosmological concerns and influences in the opening sections of the Hexameron is provided in Jean Pépin, Théologie cosmique et théologie chrétienne (Ambroise, Exam. 1, 1–4) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964).
58 Ambrose, Hex. 1.1.4 (CSEL 32/1:4; FC 42:4).
59 Ibid., 1.2.6 (CSEL 32/1:5; FC 42:6).
60 He will clarify later, in contradistinction to the Platonic demiurge, that God is not just a “designer of their form” but “Creator of their nature” (Hex. 2.1.2 [CSEL 32/1:41; FC 42:46]).
61 Ibid., 1.2.5 (CSEL 32/1:4–5; FC 42:5).
62 Ibid., 1.2.7 (CSEL 32/1:6; FC 42:7).
63 Ibid., 1.3.10–4.12 (CSEL 32/1:9–10; FC 42:10–11).
64 Ibid., 1.3.8 (CSEL 32/1:8; FC 42:8).
65 See Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought (trans. A. S. Worrall; London: T&T Clark, 1994) 150, who credits Tatian as “the first Christian theologian known to us who expressly advanced the proposition that matter was produced by God.” This was an idea implicit in Justin, who nonetheless still held to a demiurgic creation out of unoriginated matter.
66 Ambrose, Hex. 1.4.15 (CSEL 32/1:13; FC 42:14–15).
67 Ibid., 1.4.16 (CSEL 32/1:14; FC 42:16).
68 Ibid., 1.5.19 (CSEL 32/1:15; FC 42:17).
69 See ibid., 1.8.29 on the Spirit’s work in creation.
70 Ambrose writes: “Certainly not without reason do we read that the world was made, for many of the Gentiles who maintain that the world is co-eternal with God, as if it were a shadow of divine power, affirm also that it subsists of itself. Although they admit that the cause of it is God, they assert that the cause does not proceed from His own will and rule. Rather, they make it to be analogous to the shadow in respect to the body. For the shadow stays close to the body and a flash follows the light more by natural association than by exercise of free will” (Ambrose, Hex. 1.5.20 [CSEL 32/1:16–17; FC 42:17]).
71 Ibid., 1.6.22 (CSEL 32/1:18; FC 42:21).
72 Ibid. On this significant feature in Augustine’s doctrine of creation, see Augustine, Gen. litt. 4.3.7, and for scholarship see W. J. Roche, “Measure, Number and Weight in St. Augustine,” New Scholasticism 15 (1941) 350–76; Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of St. Augustine (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs; Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 101–10.
73 Neque enim creatura legem tribuit, sed accipit aut servat acceptam. Non ergo quod in medio sit terra, quasi aequa lance suspenditur, sed quia majestas dei voluntatis suae eam lege constringit (Ambrose, Hex. 1.6.22 [CSEL 32/1:18; FC 42:21]).
74 Laudent alii quod ideo nusquam decidat terra, quia secundum naturam in medio regionem possideat suam, eo quod necesse sit eam manere in regione nec in partem inclinari alteram, quando contra naturam non movetur, sed secundum naturam…. sed omnia reposita in eius existimo uoluntate, quod voluntas eius fundamentum sit universorum et propter eum adhuc mundus hic maneat (ibid. [CSEL 32/1:20; FC 42:22–23]). Later he will reaffirm: “The word of God gives nature its power and an enduring quality to its matter, as long as he who established it wishes it to be so” (ibid., 2.3.10 [CSEL 32/1:48; FC 42:53]).
75 Ibid., 1.7.25 (CSEL 32/1:23; FC 42:26).
76 Ambrose writes: “Scripture points out that things were first created and afterwards put in order, lest it be supposed that they were not actually created and that they had no beginning, just as if the nature of things had been, as it were, generated from the beginning and did not appear to be something added afterwards…. God created first and afterwards beautified, in order that we may believe that He who made and He who adorned were one and the same person. Otherwise, we might suppose that one adorned and that another performed the act of creation, whereas the same person achieved both, creating first and afterwards adorning, in order that one act might be believed as a result of the other” (ibid., 1.7.27 [CSEL 32/1:25–26; FC 42:29]).
77 Quis ergo non miretur dissimilibus membris disparem mundum in corpus unum adsurgere et insolubili concordiae caritatisque lege in societatem et coniunctionem sui tam distantia conuenire, ut quae discreta natura sunt, in unitatis et pacis vinculum velut individua conpassione nectantur? aut quis haec videns, possibilitatem rationis infirmo ingenio rimetur? quae omnia vis divina inconprehensibilis humanis mentibus et ineffabilis sermonibus nostris voluntatis suae auctoritate contexuit (ibid., 2.1.1 [CSEL 32/1:41; FC 45–46]).
78 Ibid., 3.10.46 (CSEL 32/1:89–90; FC 42:101).
79 Ibid., 3.13.55 (CSEL 32/1:97–98; FC 42:110).
80 Ibid., 3.17.71 (CSEL 32/1:108; FC 42:121).
81 Ibid., 3.7.31 (CSEL 32/1:80; FC 42:91).
82 Ibid., 3.7.32 (CSEL 32/1:80; FC 42:91).
83 This is the basic premise of Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011).
84 Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 142–43.
85 Athanasius, C. Ar. 2.2 (Athanasius [trans. Khaled Anatolios; ECF; New York: Routledge, 2004] 111).
86 Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 118.
87 Basil writes in Hex. 1.11: “Let us glorify the best Artisan for what has been wisely and skillfully made. From the beauty of visible things, let us contemplate him who is beyond beautiful” (Basil of Caesarea [trans. Stephen Hildebrand; ECF; New York: Routledge, 2018] 101).
88 Basil, Hex. 1.5 (Basil of Caesarea [trans. Hildebrand], 96).
89 For example, Gregory of Nyssa in De Perfectione writes: “Let no one be discouraged who sees in human nature the penchant for change; rather, changing in every way for the better, ‘transforming from glory unto glory’ (2 Cor. 3:18), let him or her turn so as by daily growth to become ever better, constantly perfecting himself or herself, never arriving too soon at the limit of perfection. For this is precisely what perfection is: never to cease from growing toward what is greater or to set any boundary around perfection” (quoted in Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 148).
90 Homoian theologies, such as that prominent at the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia in 359, resisted the pro-Nicene language of homoousios on account of its nonbiblical origin and the fact that human reason was incapable of understanding the mystery of divine generation. Eunomian, or heterousian, theologies—identified with Eunomius of Cyzicus and Aetius—presented a different challenge to pro-Nicenes: they held that one could in fact comprehend the divine origin, and the Son and Father were of decidedly different essences (hetero-ousia). A brief account of these approaches can be found in Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 133–49.
91 Ayres notes two features that mark Basil’s text as characteristically pro-Nicene: first, “a strong emphasis on presenting the creation as revelatory of the Triune God’s infinite power”; and second, the semiotic or figural character of creation. He concludes: “Things in the world are both mysterious in their nature and only truly approached when seen as reflecting the God who ordered them and is mysteriously present in them” (Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 317).
92 Rowan Williams, “Creation,” in Augustine through the Ages (ed. Allan Fitzgerald; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 251–54, at 252. See also idem, “Good for Nothing? Augustine on Creation,” AugStud 25 (1994) 9–24; Simon Oliver, “Augustine on Creation, Providence, and Motion,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 18 (2016) 379–98.
93 Williams, “Creation,” 252.
94 Moreover, while Ambrose’s Hexameron was well received in the later Middle Ages, it generally went unnoticed in the early Middle Ages (see Michael Gorman, “From Isidore to Claudius of Turin: The Works of Ambrose on Genesis in the Early Middle Ages,” REAug 45 [1999] 121–38).