life is prolonged by woodland shrubs, and again the want of the rustic populace fled for refuge to the oaks of Dodona. What such thing did the provinces endure, when public honor fed the ministers of the religions? When was the oak shaken for the use of men, when were the roots of plants torn up, when did mutual fruitfulness desert the regions in their alternating failures, while the grain-ration was common to the people and to the sacred virgins? For the provision of the priests commended the produce of the lands, and it was a remedy rather than a bounty. Or is it doubtful that what now scarcity has claimed for all was always given for the abundance of all? 16. 'Someone will say that the public expenditure was denied to the costs of a foreign religion. Far be such a sentiment from good princes;
so that what was contributed to certain persons out of the common store should seem to belong to the right of the exchequer. For since the commonwealth consists of individuals, what proceeds from it should in turn be the property of individuals. You govern all things, yet you preserve to each man his own; and with you justice prevails more than license. Consult, surely, your own munificence, whether it would wish those things to be reckoned public which you have transferred to others. Profits once conferred upon the honor of the city cease to belong to those who grant them: and what at the beginning was a benefit, becomes by use and time a debt. He therefore tries to strike an empty fear into your divine mind, who asserts that you bear the guilt of those who provide, unless you submit to the odium of those who take away. 17.
'May the hidden safeguards of all the sects favor your clemency: and may these above all, which once aided your ancestors, defend you, and be worshipped by us. We seek that condition of the religions which preserved the empire for the deified parent of your eminence, which supplied lawful heirs to a fortunate prince. That elder, now deified, gazes from his starry citadel upon the tears of the priests, and reckons himself accused by the violation of the custom which he himself willingly preserved. 18. 'Grant also to your deified brother the correction of another's counsel: cover over the deed which he did not know had displeased the senate; since it is established that the embassy was for this very reason excluded, lest the public judgment should reach him.
It is for the reputation of former times that you should not hesitate to abolish what is shown not to have been the prince's own.' To the petition of Symmachus AMBROSE replies, and, after having secured to himself the goodwill of VALENTINIAN, he takes up the three chief heads in that same petition. For against the personification by which Rome was feigned to demand her ancient rites, there is set the contrary plea of the same Rome demanding the opposite; while the sacred virgins and the priests of Christ are compared with the Vestals and the little sacrificers; and finally, that it was being repeatedly asserted that famine had avenged those ceremonies once they were abolished, is shown to be vain by the most invincible arguments. AMBROSE, bishop, to the most blessed prince and most clement emperor VALENTINIAN augustus. 1.
When the most distinguished man, the prefect of the city, Symmachus, had referred to your clemency that the altar which had been removed from the senate-house of the city of Rome should be restored to its place; and you, emperor, although still in the apprenticeship of a younger age, flourishing with fresh years, yet a veteran in the virtue of the faith, did not approve the entreaties of the heathen; at that very moment when I learned of it I presented a memorial: in which, although I had included what seemed necessary to my representation, I nonetheless asked that a copy of the petition be given me. 2. And so, not doubtful of your faith, but provident for caution and certain of your pious examination, I reply to the assertion of the petition by this discourse, asking this one thing, that you think it is not the elegance of words but the force of facts that is to be looked for. For golden, as the divine Scripture teaches (Eccl.
VI, 11), is the tongue of learned wise men, which, endowed with bedizened speech and as it were glittering with the flash of a brilliant eloquence like a precious dye, captivates the eyes of minds by the appearance of beauty and dazzles them at sight. But this gold, if you handle it more carefully with your hand, is on the outside a price, but within is base metal. Turn over, I beg, and shake out the sect of the heathen: they sound things precious and grand, they defend things barren of truth: they speak of God, they adore an image. 3. Three things, therefore, did the most distinguished man, the prefect of the city, set forth in his petition, which he thought powerful:
namely, that Rome, as he says, demands her ancient forms of worship; and that to her priests and Vestal virgins emoluments ought to be granted; and that, the emoluments of the priests being denied, a public famine ensued. 4. In the first proposition, Rome with a tearful complaint of speech weeps, demanding, as he says, the ancient forms of the ceremonies. "These sacred rites," she says, "drove Hannibal from the walls and the Senones from the Capitol." And so, while the power of the sacred rites is proclaimed, their weakness is betrayed. Hannibal, then, long mocked the Roman rites, and, with the gods fighting against him, came by conquering up to the very walls of the city. Why did they suffer themselves to be besieged, for whom the arms of their gods fought? 5.
For of the Senones, what shall I say, whom—as they were penetrating the secret recesses of the Capitol—the remnant of the Romans would not have withstood, had not a frightened goose betrayed them by its cackling? Behold what sort of guardians the Roman temples have! Where then was Jupiter? Was he speaking in a goose? 6. But why should I deny that the sacred rites served as soldiers for the Romans? Yet Hannibal too worshipped the same gods. Which, then, do they wish? Let them choose. If among the Romans the sacred rites conquered, then among the Carthaginians they were overcome: if among the Carthaginians they triumphed, then certainly they were of no profit to the Romans. 7. Let that invidious complaint of the Roman people therefore cease: Rome did not commission this. With other voices she addresses them: "Why do you daily stain me with the vain blood of an innocent flock?
Not in the entrails of cattle, but in the strength of warriors lie the trophies of victory. By other disciplines did I subdue the world. Camillus did soldier's service, who, when the standards had been carried off from the Capitol, slew the conquerors of the Tarpeian rock and brought them back: valor laid low those whom religion did not remove. What shall I say of Atilius, who spent even his death upon his military service? Africanus found his triumph not among the altars of the Capitol, but among the battle-lines of Hannibal. Why do you set before me the examples of the ancients? I hate the rites of the Neros. Why should I speak of two-month emperors, and of the ends of kings coupled with their beginnings? Or is it perhaps a new thing that barbarians have gone beyond their own borders?
Were they too Christians, by whose pitiable and unheard-of example, under one a captive emperor, under another a captive world, betrayed their own ceremonies for having deceived as to what they had promised of victory? Was there then too no altar of Victory? They repent the fall: hoary old age has drawn a blush for blood it should be ashamed of. I do not blush, being grown old together with the whole world, to be converted. But it is surely true that no age is too late for learning thoroughly. Let that old age blush which cannot mend itself. It is not the hoary head of years that has been praised, but of character (Wisd. IV, 9). There is no shame in passing over to better things. This alone I had in common with the barbarians, that formerly I did not know God. Your sacrifice is the rite of being sprinkled with the gore of beasts.
Why do you seek the voices of God in dead cattle? Come and learn upon earth the heavenly warfare: here we live, and there we do our soldiering. Let God Himself, who founded it, teach me the mystery of heaven—not a man, who has not known his own self. In whom should I rather believe concerning God than in God? How can I believe you, who confess that you are ignorant of what you worship? 8. By one road, he says, it is not possible to arrive at so great a mystery. What you are ignorant of, that we have come to know by the voice of God. And what you seek by conjectures, we hold ascertained from the very wisdom and truth of God. Your things, therefore, do not agree with ours. You entreat peace for your gods from emperors; we ask peace for the emperors themselves from Christ.
You adore the works of your own hands; we count it an injury that anything which can be made should be thought God. God does not wish to be worshipped in stones. Indeed even your own philosophers laughed at these things. 9. But if you for this reason deny that Christ is God—because you do not believe that He died (for you do not know that that death was of the flesh, not of the divinity, which brought it about that none of believers now dies)—what is more imprudent than you, who worship insultingly and disparage with honor? For you think your god to be wood. O insulting reverence! You do not believe that Christ could die. O honoring obstinacy! 10. But, he says, the ancient altars must be restored to the images, the ornaments to the shrines. Let these things be demanded back by a partner in superstition:
a Christian emperor has learned to honor the altar of Christ alone. Why do they compel pious hands and faithful lips to render ministry to their own sacrileges? Let the voice of our emperor resound Christ, and speak Him alone whom he perceives within; because the king's heart is in the hand of God (Prov. XXI, 1). Has a heathen emperor ever raised an altar to Christ? While they demand back the things that were, they admonish by their own example how much Christian emperors ought to render of reverence to the religion which they follow; since the heathen rendered all things to their own superstitions. 11. We began long ago, and now they follow those once shut out. We glory in blood; expense moves them. We reckon these things in the place of victory; they think them an injury.
Never did they confer more upon us than when they ordered Christians to be scourged and proscribed and slain. Religion made a reward of what perfidy thought to be a punishment. Behold the great-souled! Through injuries, through want, through punishment we have grown: they do not believe that their ceremonies can endure without profit. 11. Let the Vestal virgins, he says, have their immunity. Let those say this who cannot believe that virginity can be without payment: let those provoke by gains who distrust the virtues. Yet how many virgins have the promised rewards made for them? Scarcely seven Vestals are taken in.
Behold the whole number, which the fillets of the bound head, the purple of the robes dyed in crimson, the pomp of the litter surrounded by an attendant train of ministers, the greatest privileges, the immense profits, and finally the prescribed terms of chastity have constrained. 12. Let them lift up the eyes of mind and body; let them behold the populace of modesty, the people of integrity, the assembly of virginity. Their ornament is not a fillet for the head, but a humble veil for use, noble for chastity: not sought-after but renounced enticements of beauty: not those insignia of purple, not the luxury of delicacies, but the practice of fastings: not privileges, not gains: in short, everything of such a kind that you might think one called back from the pursuit while the duties are exercised. But while the duty is exercised, the pursuit is called forth.
Chastity is heaped up by its own expenses. That is not virginity which is bought with a price, which is not possessed by zeal for virtue: that is not integrity which is bid for at auction by a temporary monetary gain. The first victory of chastity is to conquer the desires of property; because the zeal for gain is a temptation of modesty. Yet let us suppose that subsidies of bounty are to be conferred upon virgins. What gifts will overflow to Christian women? what treasury will suffice for such great resources? Or if they judge that it should be conferred upon the Vestals alone, are they not ashamed that those who claimed everything for themselves under heathen emperors should, under Christian princes, think that no common lot is owed to us? 13.
They complain that public sustenance is not due to their priests and ministers either. What an uproar of words has thundered forth from this! Yet on the contrary, even the emoluments of private inheritance are denied to us by recent laws, and no one complains; for we do not count it an injury, because we do not grieve at the loss. If a priest should seek a privilege to decline a curial burden, he must yield up his paternal and ancestral possessions and the possession of all his resources. How greatly would the heathen aggravate this complaint, if they had it, that a priest buys the leisure of his ministry at the cost of his whole patrimony, and as a private person purchases by the loss of all advantage the exercise of a public service: putting forward the watches kept for the common safety, he consoles himself with the wages of domestic want;
because he did not sell his ministry, but procured grace. 14. He will compare cases. You wish to excuse the decurion, when it is not permitted to excuse the priest of the Church. Wills are written to the ministers of the temples; no profane person is excepted, none of the lowest condition, none prodigal of his self-respect: out of all men the clergyman alone is shut off from the common law—he by whom alone on behalf of all the common vow is undertaken, the common office is rendered: no legacies even of grave widows, no donation. And where no fault is detected in his morals, nevertheless a penalty is prescribed upon his office. What a Christian widow has bequeathed to the priests of a shrine, is valid: what she has bequeathed to the ministers of God, is not valid. This I have set down not that I may complain, but that they may know what I do not complain of;
for I prefer that we should be lesser in money than in grace. 15. But they reply that the things which have been either given or left to the Church have not been violated. Let them too say who has taken away gifts from the temples, as has been done to the Christians. If these things had been done to the heathen, an injury would rather have been repaid than inflicted. Is justice now at last put forward, is equity demanded? Where then was that sentiment, when, the resources of all Christians being plundered, they begrudged them their very vital breath, and forbade nowhere to any deceased the last commerce of burial? Those whom the heathen cast headlong, the seas restored. This is the victory of faith, that they themselves now carp at the deeds of their elders, whose acts they condemn. But what, in the name of evil,
is the reasoning, that they should seek the gifts of those whose deeds they condemn? 16. Yet no one has denied offerings to the shrines and legacies to the soothsayers: only the estates have been taken away; because they were not using in a religious way those things which they would defend by the right of religion. Those who use our example, why did they not use our duty? The Church possesses nothing for itself except faith. These are the revenues it provides, these the fruits. The possession of the Church is the maintenance of the poor. Let them count up how many captives the temples have redeemed, what sustenance they have contributed to the poor, to what exiles they have ministered the means of living. The estates, therefore, were intercepted, not rights. 17. Behold the deed, which—as they say—a public famine avenged as expiating a grievous wickedness;
because that which was being given for the advantage of the priests began to profit the use of all. For this reason, then, the shrubs—as they say—stripped of their bark, the lips of the failing licked with a wretched sap. For this reason men, exchanging the Chaonian acorn for grain, recalled again to the pasturage of cattle and to the sustenance of an unhappy diet, by shaking the oak, consoled their wretched hunger in the woods. New prodigies of the earth, forsooth, which had never happened before—when heathen superstition was seething throughout the whole world! In very truth, when before did the crop, with empty ears, mock the vows of the greedy farmer, and the herbage, sought in the furrows, disappoint the hope of the rustic populace of its grain? 18.
And whence were the oracles of their own oak held by the Greeks, except that they reckoned the remedy of woodland nourishment a gift of the heavenly religion? For such gifts they believe to be of their gods. Who adored the oaks of Dodona except the heathen people, when it endowed the dreary fodder of the field with the honor of the groves? It is not probable that their gods, in indignation, brought as a punishment that which they were wont, when appeased, to confer as a gift. But what equity is it, that, grieving that sustenance was denied to a few priests, they themselves should deny it to all; when the vengeance was more merciless than the fault? It is not, therefore, a fit cause which has bound up so great a sickness of a world deceiving men; so that, while the crops were green, the ripened hope of the year should suddenly die. 19.
And surely many years ago the rights of the temples were abolished throughout the whole world: did it only now at last come into the mind of the gods of the heathen to go and avenge their injuries? For this reason did the Nile not swell in its accustomed course, to avenge the losses of the City's priests—he who did not avenge his own? 20. Yet grant that they think the injuries of their gods were avenged in the preceding year; why in the present year were they held in contempt? For now neither does the rustic populace feed on the torn-up roots of plants, nor explore the consolations of the woodland berry; nor snatch food from the brambles: but, glad in successful labors, while it admires even its own harvests, it has satisfied its fasting with the fullness of its prayer: the earth has rendered us its produce with interest. 21. Who, then, should be so amazed at the changes of the years, so new to human uses?
And yet even in the preceding year we know that very many provinces overflowed with produce. What shall I say of the Gauls, richer than usual? Pannonia sold the grain which it had not sown: and second Rhaetia learned the envy of its own fertility; for she who was wont to be safer through hunger, by her fruitfulness roused an enemy against herself: the autumn's grain fed Liguria and the Venetias. Therefore neither did that year wither through sacrilege, nor did this year flower with the fruits of faith. Let them deny too that the vineyards overflowed with abundant offspring. And so both we have received the harvest with interest, and we possess the benefits of a more generous vintage. 22. There remains the last and greatest topic, whether you, emperors, ought to restore those subsidies which have profited you; for he says:
"May they defend you, may they be worshipped by us." This, most faithful Princes, is what we cannot bear; that they reproach us, alleging that in your name they make supplication to their gods, and, without your commanding it, they commit a monstrous sacrilege, interpreting your connivance as consent. Let them have their own safeguards: let those safeguards defend their own people, if they can. For if those safeguards cannot be of help to those by whom they are worshipped, how can they defend you, by whom they are not worshipped? 23. But, he says, the rite of our forefathers must be kept. What of the fact that all things afterward advanced to something better? The world itself, which either first, when the seeds of the elements were drawn together through the void, had hardened in a tender sphere, or was still murky with the dim horror of an undigested work;
did it not afterward, when the distinction of heaven, sea, and lands was made, receive the forms of things by which it appears beautiful? The lands, stripped of their dripping shadows, were astonished at the new sun. The day does not shine forth in its beginning, but in the course of time it glitters with the increase of its light and boils with heat. 24. The moon herself, by whom in the prophetic oracles the likeness of the Church is figured, when first rising she is restored into her monthly ages, is hidden from us by darkness: and gradually filling out her horns, or unfolding them in the region opposite the sun, she reddens with the splendor of a bright radiance. 25. Men did not before know how to be exercised in the fruits of the earth:
afterward, when the careful farmer began to rule over the fields and to clothe the shapeless soil with vineyards, their wild spirits, softened by domestic cultivation, put off their savagery. 26. The very first age of the year, which colored us with a like experience by the nod of the things that bring forth: but in its course it grows green with flowers that will fall, and ripens into its latest fruits. 27. We too, rude in our age, have the infancy of our senses: but, changed with the years, we lay aside the rudiments of our wit. Let them say, therefore, that all things ought to have remained in their beginnings; that the world, having been overspread with darkness, displeases because it has shone forth with the splendor of the sun. And how much more pleasing it is to have dispelled the darkness of the mind than of the body, and that the radiance of faith should have flashed forth than that of the sun!
Therefore the first beginnings of the world, as of all things, wavered, so that the old age of a venerable, hoary faith might follow. Let those whom this disturbs find fault with the harvest, because its fruitfulness is late: let them find fault with the vintage, because it is at the close of the year: let them find fault with the olive, because it is the last fruit. 28. Therefore our harvest also is the faith of souls; the grace of the Church is the vintage of merits, which from the rising of the world flourished green in the saints, but in the latest age poured itself out among the peoples, so that all might observe that the faith of Christ crept in not upon untrained minds (for there is no crown of victory without an adversary), but, the opinion which had previously prevailed having been hissed away, what was true is rightly preferred. 30.
If the old rites used to delight, why did that same Rome succeed into foreign rites? I pass over the ground hidden by a price, and the shepherds' huts gleaming with degenerate gold. What of the fact—to answer from the very thing they complain of—that the images of captured cities, the conquered gods, and the foreign rites of an alien superstition were received by emulous rivals? Whence, then, comes the example, that Cybele washes her chariot in the simulated stream of the Almo? Whence the Phrygian prophets, and the ever-hated deities of unfair Carthage among the Romans? Whom the Africans worship as Caelestis, the Persians as Mithras, and most as Venus, for a diversity of name, not for a variety of divinity. Thus they believed even Victory to be a goddess, who is surely a gift, not a power:
she is given, she does not rule; she is the favor of legions, not the power of religions. Is she, then, a great goddess, whom a multitude of soldiers claims for itself, or whom the outcome of battles bestows? 31. They ask that an altar to her be built in the senate-house of the city of Rome, that is, where the greater number of Christians assemble. There are altars in all the temples, an altar even in the temple of the Victories. Since they delight in number, they celebrate their sacrifices everywhere. What is it but to insult the faith, to claim the sacrifice of a single altar? Is this to be borne, that a heathen should sacrifice and a Christian be present? Let them inhale, he says, let them inhale even against their will the smoke into their eyes, the symphony into their ears, the ashes into their throats, the incense into their nostrils, and let the cinder, stirred up from our hearths, sprinkle the faces even of those who turn away.
Are the baths not enough for them, not the porticoes, not the squares occupied with images? Even in that common assembly will there not be a common condition? Will the pious portion of the senate be bound fast by the voices of those who adjure, by the oaths of those who swear? If it refuses, it will seem to betray a falsehood: if it acquiesces, to confess a sacrilege. 32. Where, he says, shall we swear upon your laws and words? Does your mind, then, which is held enclosed by the laws, gather suffrage from the ceremonies of the heathen, bind its faith? Now not only of those present, but even of the absent, and—what is more, emperors—your faith is assailed; for you compel, if you command.
Constantius, of august memory, not yet initiated into the sacred mysteries, thought himself defiled if he were to behold that altar. He ordered it to be carried away; he did not order it to be set back. The former has the authority of a deed; the latter does not have the authority of a precept. 33. Let no one flatter himself concerning absence. He is more present who inserts himself into minds, than he who attests himself to the eyes. For it is more to be joined in mind than to be coupled in body. The senate has you as the presidents who must convene its assembly; for you it gathers: to you it offers its conscience, not to the gods of the heathen: it sets you before its children, yet not before its faith. This is the charity to be sought after; this is the charity greater than empire, if the faith be safe which preserves the empire. 34. But perhaps it may move someone that so most faithful a prince was forsaken:
as though the price of merits were to be measured by the perishable goods of this present world. For what wise man does not recognize that human affairs are set within a kind of orbit and revolving cycle, since they do not always meet with the same outcomes, but their conditions vary and their turns of fortune change? 35. Whom did the temples of Rome send forth more blessed than Gnaeus Pompey? Yet, after he had encircled the globe with three triumphs, he was driven from the battle line, a fugitive in war and an exile from the bounds of his own empire, and fell by the hand of a Canopic eunuch. 36. Whom did the lands of the whole East grant as a nobler king than Cyrus of the Persians? He too, after he had conquered the most powerful opposing princes and kept the vanquished alive, perished overthrown by a woman's arms.
And that king, who had even bestowed honor of a seat upon those he had overcome, had his head cut off and, by command, was thrust into a wineskin filled with gore to be sated with blood, and became a mockery to a woman's rule. So far in the course of this life are like things not requited with like, but with things far different! 37. Whom do we find even more devoted to sacrifices than Hamilcar, the leader of the Carthaginians? While, set throughout the whole time of the battle among the fighting ranks, he was offering sacrifice, and when he learned that part of his men had been defeated, he cast himself into the very fires he was kindling, that he might quench with his own body those whom he had found had profited him nothing. 38. And why should I speak of Julian? Who, being ill-disposed to believe the answers of the soothsayers, cut off from himself the means of returning.
Therefore in a common lot there is no common offense; for our promises have deceived no one. 39. I have answered those who provoked me, as one who was not provoked; for my aim was to refute the Petition, not to expound the superstition. Yet may their very petition, O emperor, make you more cautious. For when it had woven together a tale of former princes, claiming that the earlier of their number cultivated the rites of the fathers and the more recent did not abolish them, and had added besides, "if the religion of the ancients sets no precedent, let the connivance of those nearest do so" — it plainly taught what you owe both to your faith, that you should not follow the example of pagan rite, and to your piety, that you should not violate the decrees of your brother.
For if, merely on behalf of their own party, they have proclaimed the connivance of those princes who, though they were Christians, nevertheless did by no means abolish the decrees of the heathen — how much more ought you to defer to brotherly love, so that you, who ought to wink even at whatever perhaps you did not approve, lest you detract from your brother's statutes, should now also hold fast what you judge to be fitting both for your faith and for the bond of kinship. Ambrose excuses himself for not having come when summoned to the consistory, asserting that in a matter of faith or of the Church no one ought to judge except the priests; and that he is not contumacious in this, that he does not inflict an injury upon his own order. He adds that Auxentius would perhaps choose as judges Jews or unbelievers, that is, the bitterest enemies of Christ:
that he does not refuse to dispute about these matters in the Church or in a synod: and that this, in fine, is what he would have said in person, had he not been forbidden by his fellow bishops and the people. To the most clement emperor and most blessed Augustus Valentinian, Ambrose the bishop. 1. Dalmatius the tribune and notary has approached your clemency by a mandate, as he alleged, demanding that I too should choose judges, just as Auxentius had chosen. Yet he did not state the names of those who had been requested, but added this, that the dispute was to be in the consistory, the decision being left to the arbitration of your piety. 2. To which matter I reply, as I think, suitably.