The saints

Saint Ambrose of Milan

Bishop and Doctor of the Church · Feast day December 7 · About 339 to 397 · Milan, Italy · Also known as Ambrosius

Saint Ambrose was the powerful bishop of Milan who baptized Augustine, stood up fearlessly to emperors, and gave the Western church some of its earliest hymns and its love of congregational song. A Roman governor acclaimed bishop by the people before he was even baptized, he became one of the four great Latin doctors of the church and a model of the shepherd who is both tender and unbending.

O sing unto the LORD a new song: sing unto the LORD, all the earth.Psalm 96:1 (KJV)

A son of the Roman aristocracy

Ambrose was born around the year 339 into one of the great Christian families of the Roman aristocracy, the son of a high imperial official who governed a vast stretch of the empire from Gaul. Raised in Rome after his father's death, he received the finest education the ancient world could give, mastering Greek, rhetoric, law, and the classical learning that equipped a man for the highest public service. He was groomed from boyhood for a career in government, and he rose through it quickly, admired for his fairness, his eloquence, and his integrity in an age when those qualities were rare among officials.

By his early thirties he had been appointed the Roman governor of the province of Aemilia and Liguria, whose seat was Milan, then one of the working capitals of the Western empire and the residence of emperors. It was a post of real power, and Ambrose held it with such justice that he was loved by the people he governed. He was still only a catechumen, a Christian believer not yet baptized, in the manner of many in that age who delayed baptism, and he had no thought whatever of a career in the church. God had other plans, and they arrived through a riot.

Acclaimed bishop by a child's cry

When the bishop of Milan died, the city fell into bitter and dangerous conflict over who should succeed him, for the church there was split between the orthodox Christians who confessed the full deity of Christ and the Arians who denied it, and the choice of a bishop meant the victory of one party over the other. Fearing violence, Governor Ambrose went to the basilica in person to keep the peace and to calm the crowd. As he spoke, urging them to order and moderation, a voice, by an old and beloved account the voice of a child, suddenly cried out, Ambrose for bishop, and the whole assembly, both parties together, took up the cry as with one throat.

Ambrose was appalled. He protested that he was not even baptized, that he had no training in theology, and that he had no wish for the office, and he tried every way to escape it, even attempting to flee the city by night, only to find himself, the story goes, back at its gates by morning. But the people would not be refused, and the emperor confirmed their choice. Within the space of a single week Ambrose was baptized, ordained through every rank of the ministry in turn, and consecrated bishop of Milan. He gave away his considerable wealth to the poor and the church, kept back only enough to provide for his sister, and set himself, humbly and at once, to learn the theology he would now be required to teach, studying Scripture and the Greek fathers late into his nights.

The bishop who won Augustine

Ambrose became a tireless preacher and a patient teacher, and his single greatest convert was Augustine, the restless and skeptical young professor of rhetoric who came to Milan as a critic of the faith. Augustine came at first only out of professional curiosity, to judge whether the famous bishop's eloquence lived up to its reputation, and he sat in the congregation admiring the form of the sermons while meaning to dismiss their content. But he found himself caught instead by the substance of what he heard, for Ambrose's wise, unhurried preaching opened the Scriptures to him as he had never seen them, dissolving the crude objections that had kept him from the faith and showing him a Christianity far deeper than the one he had rejected as a boy.

It was Ambrose who baptized Augustine at Easter in the year 387, and so the two greatest fathers of the Latin church are bound together forever, the elder shaping the younger who would one day surpass even him in influence. Augustine remembered his teacher always with gratitude and awe, and preserved a small famous detail about him: that Ambrose, when reading, read silently, his eyes moving over the page while his voice was still, a habit so unusual in an age of reading aloud that Augustine marveled at it and wondered at its cause. Through Ambrose the whole later theology of the West received, indirectly, one of its foundation stones.

Standing up to emperors

Ambrose feared no earthly power when the honor of God or the good of his people was at stake, and in an age that treated emperors as almost divine, he insisted on a principle that would echo through Christian history: that the emperor is within the church, not above it. When the empress mother Justina, an Arian, demanded that Ambrose hand over one of the churches of Milan for the use of those who denied Christ's deity, he flatly refused, and when soldiers were sent to seize the basilica, the people occupied it together with their bishop and held it, filling the long, tense nights with the hymns Ambrose taught them to sing, until the court gave way.

His most famous stand came against the emperor Theodosius, the most powerful man in the world and himself an orthodox Christian, whom Ambrose loved. When Theodosius, in a fit of rage, ordered the massacre of thousands of the people of Thessalonica in reprisal for a riot, Ambrose refused him communion until he did public penance for the innocent blood he had shed. It was an astonishing act, a bishop barring the door of the church to the emperor of Rome. And Theodosius submitted. He laid aside his imperial robes, and wept, and did public penance before the whole congregation, and only then was received back. The scene became a landmark in the long history of conscience holding power to account, remembered for centuries as the moment a churchman made an emperor kneel to God.

The father of Latin hymnody

To strengthen and unite his people through the long nights of their standoff with the Arian court, Ambrose gave the Western church a lasting gift: congregational singing. He composed hymns in simple, sturdy, four-line Latin verse, easy for ordinary people to learn and sing together, setting the great truths of the faith, the coming of Christ, the light of God, the resurrection, to melodies the whole church could carry as one voice. Several of his hymns are still sung today, and the entire tradition of the Western church singing together, rather than merely listening, owes much to his example. He understood that truth set to music sinks into the heart and lodges there past the reach of argument, and he was proved right.

He wrote widely as well, on the meaning of Scripture, on the duties and virtues of the Christian life, on the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's table, and in defense of the deity of Christ against the Arians who still pressed hard on every side. His clear, practical, deeply pastoral writing made him one of the four great doctors of the Latin church, ranked with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. By a charming tradition, because a swarm of bees was said to have settled on his mouth when he was an infant in the cradle and left a drop of honey there without stinging him, a sign taken to foretell his future sweetness of speech, Ambrose became the patron of beekeepers and of all whose work is with bees and honey.

Why Ambrose still matters

Ambrose is the model of the shepherd who serves his flock with both tenderness and steel, gentle enough to win over a searching and cynical young Augustine, and bold enough to make the master of the world do penance. He teaches that faith is not a private matter to be kept safely behind the palace walls, that the powerful stand under the judgment of God like everyone else, and that the church proclaims its deepest truths best when the whole people sings them together. He died in 397, mourned by a city that had made him its bishop against his will and come to love him as a father. Sing unto the Lord a new song, cries the psalm, and Ambrose taught a whole civilization to do exactly that, and to keep singing it in the dark.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Augustine · How to pray · Saints for December 7 · Saint of the day