The Myth of Ambrose

Saint Augustine's Conversion
by Garry Wills

(Page 3 of 8)

... he was under the influence of her life and faith, as well as of Ambrose's sermons.

— Nock, Conversion

It is a commonplace that Ambrose, presiding in Milan, played the key role in Augustine's conversion, mainly by showing him that the Jewish scripture, which had seemed crude, could be read symbolically. Ambrose's sermons are supposed to have brought about this change in attitude. But Augustine tells us that he listened to the sermons for their style, not their content, and that he thought the style inferior to that of Faustus the Manichean (T 5.23). Far from opening the scripture to him, Ambrose just recommended that he read Isaiah after Augustine told him he was already willing to be baptized - and Augustine, far from reading Isaiah symbolically, found the book impenetrable (T 9.13). Augustine found what he needed with the help of Simplician, who directed him to the New Testament, to the letters of Paul, which would play a key role in the garden. Ambrose was still a distant and useless figure when Augustine underwent what he describes in that garden:

He [Ambrose] was unaware of my seethings at the pit of peril. I could not inquire of him what I wished, crowded out as I was from his hearing and speaking by a swarm of those with worldly needs, to whose demands he gave his attention (T 6.3).

Except for brief interviews on business, there was clearly no occasion to pursue fully all that I desired from that oracle of yours, his breast. To pour out my needs would have taken up time that was simply not available (T 6.4).

Those passages are enough to refute the old idea that Augustine was referring to Ambrose when he wrote his Neoplatonist mentor, Mallius Theodore, about "conversations held with you and our priest friend" (presbyter noster).⁹ The man referred to is clearly Simplician, Ambrose's Neoplatonist teacher, who baptized Ambrose and succeeded him as bishop of Milan. Augustine went to him for spiritual guidance. He corresponded with Simplician in later years (Epistle 37), something that Augustine never did with Ambrose.¹⁰ It was as the doyen of Milan Neoplatonists that Simplician would have known and conversed with Theodore. And Theodore, to whom The Testament makes only glancing and denigrating reference (T 7.13), is described by Augustine, when he was at Cassiciacum, as a leading force in his conversion and Christian aspirations.¹¹

Since, my Theodore, I look only to you for what I need, impressed by your possession of it, consider what type of man is presented to you, what state I believe I am in, what kind of help I am sure you can give me.... I came to recognize, in the conversations about God held with you and our priest friend, that He is not to be considered as in any way corporeal.... After I read a few books of Plotinus, of whom you are a devotee, and tested them against the standard of the sacred writings, I was on fire.... So I beg you by your own goodness, by your concern for others, by the linkage and interaction of our souls, stretch out your hand to me - to love me and believe you are loved in return and held dear. If I beg this, I may, helped by my own poor effort, reach the happiness in this life that I suspect you have already gained. That you may know what I am doing, how I am conducting my friends to shelter, and that you may see in this my very soul (for I have no other means to reveal it to you), I thought I should address you and should dedicate in your name this early discourse, which I consider more religious than my other ones, and therefore worthy of you. Its subject is appropriate, since together we pondered the subject of happiness in this life, and I hold no gift of God could be greater than that. I am not abashed by your eloquence (why should that abash me which, without rivaling it, I honor) nor by the loftiness of your position - however great it is, you discountenance it, knowing that only what one masters can turn a truly favorable countenance on one.¹²

Augustine complains that at the point when he was desperately seeking enlightenment, "There was no time to be had from Ambrose" (T 6.18), and in his early writings he says that it was cruel of the bishop not to help him in his need.¹³ His comments on the bishop's concern with worldly adjustments indicate that he thought he and his fellow Christian philosophers considered such a life beneath them: "I thought him [Ambrose] the kind of man made happy in worldly terms by the respect that great people paid him" (T 6.3). This is a reflection of the more sneering tone Augustine took in his early convert days, when he said of church rulers that they were too much in love with power. Even three years after his baptism he could write:

I hold that neither the men who are swept into administrative tasks by love of earthly glory, nor those who, not yet in office, pine for a public role, have been given the gift, in the babble of their endless meetings and missions, to become death's intimates, as we mean to be - though they could have divinized themselves (deificari) had they retired from the world.¹⁴

To Augustine, in his haughty early days, Ambrose looked like a demagogue, a trader in dubious miracles, one more interested in adjudicating worldly claims than in paying heed to spiritual distress like Augustine's.

Ambrose no doubt did have an influence on Augustine, but only after the garden scene. Augustine did, finally, get a very full sample of Ambrose's symbolic reading of Scripture - but only during his intensive preparation for baptism, six months after the garden scene - and he did, finally, come to realize the importance of that indoctrination. He first acknowledged its importance five years later.¹⁵ Indeed, Ambrose became increasingly useful to Augustine after he became a bishop himself and had to address many issues of power that he had scorned in his fervent days after baptism. Then, when Augustine's consecration as a bishop was challenged, it became important that he be known as Ambrose's convert. Furthermore, in the fight with the Pelagians over continence, Ambrose was a powerful and moderate alternative to Jerome's views on virginity and sex (O 1.xxxix). But it is anachronistic to read such indebtedness back into Augustine's state of mind before and during the garden scene.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.