Milan: S. Ambrose

Edward Hutton prefaced his  visit to Milan's church of S. Ambrogio with a discussion of the great man whose shrine it is. In his writings on Italy Hutton included a number of biographies of saints, most of them not well known outside of their localities. But S. Ambrogio (St. Ambrose) was a different story. Born in 340 the son of a Roman patrician, his own achievements were so great that he became Bishop of Milan by popular acclamation even before he was baptized. As Bishop of Milan he went on to have a profound effect on history.*

 

And yet I must confess that the one certain and enduring impression I always receive in Milan does not come to me from these beautiful and lonely columns, but from a church, the Church of S. Ambrogio, which for all that it is a building of the ninth century and of the twelfth, carries me back at once to what often seems to me the most wonderful, as it is certainly the most fundamental, of those three centuries upon which Christendom has stood so strong; I mean the last century before the Barbarian invasion, the fourth of our era.

 

That wonderful and so fruitful age, so strangely neglected and so wilfully misjudged by our historians, is here in Milan, and especially in S. Ambrogio, brought vividly before us by the memory of the great Saint who dominated it, and whose shrine, rightly understood, the beautiful Church of S. Ambrogio, remains to this day.

 I suppose that to most men S. Ambrogio appears if at all, first as one of the Four doctors of the Latin Church, and then as a divine poet, the author for instance of the lovely Christmas hymn, Jesu Redemptor Omnium, which coming to us faintly in the early twilight on Christmas Eve, presently in the midnight hour fills all the sky and mingles itself with the song of the angels.  One remembers him, too, as the author of the ritual which bears his name, and of a certain manner of chanting named after him, and more especially perhaps as the Bishop who received S. Augustine into the Church, who baptized him, and, as it is said, composed with him an antiphon  the most wonderful of those proses which are wholly Christian in their origin, the Te Deum.

Jesu Redemptor Omnium
See Below for brief video

 

But S. Ambrose was something beside a poet, he was a very great man of action and a Saint. On his lips we hear not only the loveliest lines of Christian poetry, then at last come to perfection, but the most significant words of an age at least as subtle as our own. Rightly understood, the whole of S. Ambrose’s life was devoted to the establishment of Europe, of Christendom, that it might endure. He was not only sure of himself, he was sure of what he achieved. As the great enemy of Arianism, he was not merely combating what our indifferent age would consider a matter of pure opinion in an incomprehensible theology, he was laying with the utmost forethought and intention the indestructible foundations of European society and civilization, that the flood which was about to sweep all else away might not overwhelm them. Out of the ruins of the Empire we have constructed Europe, because he and the Church he served secured those foundations which are the vast monoliths of the Nicene Creed….

 

It is impossible to give any real impression of what the rule of Ambrose was in Milan, or even in such a book as this, of the Milan of that day. The most gentle of men, full of charity, learned and wise, he was yet a great statesman and a saint: his government passes before our eyes to the constant clash of arms, amid innumerable tumults, as when barricaded in the Portian Basilica, surrounded by thousands of the people of Milan, he is compelled to face  and to resist the demands of Justina the Empress, who with her young son Valentinian were Arians, and therefore the enemies  not of Ambrose only but of the Commonwealth. They demanded a church in that Milan which Ambrose had purged of heresy. He was adamant. “ My gold and my silver, nay my life, ask and they are yours; but the churches of God are not mine to give.” Such was his invariable answer.

Note: Here is a link to a brief rendition of Jesu Redemptor Omnium composed almost 1700 years ago..

 

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*His brother and sister are also regarded as saints.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 82-86.