ABSTRACT
Books profiling the leading figures of the early church tend to commit one ofthree crimes against Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374 to 397. Very often they trivialize him, reducing his significance to that of supporting actor to the real protagonist of the later West, Augustine, whose creative genius and theological influence more or less totally eclipse the gifts of the one under whose spell he took his decisive steps towards Christianity in the first place. At best, Ambrose merits a bland paragraph or two outlining his impact upon Augustine, with a few predictable phrases explaining that he was in any case first and foremost a ‘man of action’, which (however true) is apparently intended to suggest that his intellectual abilities were slight. In other surveys, conversely, Ambrose is idolized, depicted as the stained-glass saint, other-worldly to the core, staunch champion of truth against error and sponsor of the rights of the church against every hubristic claim from secular authority. Icon of holiness and fearless defender of the faith, he appears to have scarcely a shortcoming at all. Third, worst of all, and remarkably often, Ambrose has been ignored altogether. The assumption apparently is that, doctor of the church or no, he holds little interest for those concerned to trace the big picture of Christianity’s development. In far too many undergraduate church history syllabuses, and in the textbooks which they spawn, Ambrose scarcely merits a mention.
