Voices and influences
Ambrose of Milan
A Roman governor drafted into a bishop's chair before he was even baptized, who made an emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Summary
This site quotes Ambrose of Milan 908 times across 50 books, and lists 0 works.
- Lived died 397.
- Quoted here most in Luke: 271 of 908.
Ambrose of Milan
- Lived
- died 397
- Tradition
- Patristic
5 of 908 quotations
Own words
Quoted in full, because Ambrose of Milan died in 397 and these works are out of copyright. Each citation below names its edition and its year. A citation naming a modernised text means that edition makes its own editorial changes, and that edition's terms are not in this site's record.
Christ, then, is the beginning of our virtue. He is the beginning of purity, who taught maidens not to look for the embraces of humanity but to yield the purity of their bodies and minds to the service of the Holy Spirit rather than to…
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a husband. Christ is the beginning of frugality, for he became poor, though he was rich. Christ is the beginning of patience, for when he was reviled, he reviled not again. When he was struck, he did not strike back. Christ is the beginning of humility, for he took the form of a servant, though in the majesty of his power he was equal with God the Father. From him each various virtue has taken its origin.For this cause, then, that we might learn these different virtues, "a son was given us, whose beginning was upon his shoulder." That "beginning" is the Lord's cross—the beginning of strong courage, wherewith a way has been opened for the holy martyrs to enter the sufferings of the holy war.
Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. BSB
Therefore, in order to call the Gentiles to the grace of his resurrection (for it is indeed a rich and fertile land that produces eternal fruits, fruits a hundred and sixty times over), he subjected his shoulder to work, subjecting himself to the cross, in…
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order to carry our sins. And so the Prophet says: His authority is on his shoulder (Isaiah 9:6), that is, the power of divinity over the bodily passion, or the cross surpassing the body. Therefore, he placed his shoulder on the plow, enduring all insults, subjected to labor in such a way that he was wounded because of our iniquities, and weakened because of our sins.
Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. BSB
Accordingly, even at that time, the cross that was to come was prefigured in sign; and at the same time that he was stripped of his tunic, that is, of the flesh he took on, he was stripped of the handsome diversity of colors that…
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represented the virtues. Therefore his tunic, that is, his flesh, was stained with blood, but not his divinity; and his enemies were able to take from him his covering of flesh but not his immortal life.
Genesis 37:23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the robe of many colors he was wearing— BSB
Moses indeed killed the Egyptian and became a fugitive from the land of Egypt, in order to avoid the tyrant of that land.
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But he would not have killed that Egyptian man before he had first killed the Egyptian man of spiritual wickedness within himself, and had renounced the luxury of regal honors, considering the reproach of Christ a greater inheritance than the treasures of Egypt.
Exodus 2:12 After looking this way and that and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand. BSB
A wish is a request for blessings from God with a promise to fulfill a duty. And so, when you obtain what you have asked for, it is ungrateful to delay the promise.
Deuteronomy 23:21 If you make a vow to the LORD your God, do not be slow to keep it, because He will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. BSB
Influence, on the record
This site quotes Ambrose of Milan 908 times across 50 books.
This site’s own count of what it does with the voice
The life, in order
The life told as one accountfrom this site's record
Ambrose was born about 339 at Trier, where his father served as praetorian prefect of Gaul — one of the four or five highest offices in the Western empire. The father died young and the family went back to Rome. Ambrose was trained in law and Greek, entered the imperial service, and by about 372 was governor of Aemilia and Liguria, with his seat at Milan. Milan was then the working capital of the West, where the emperor actually lived. In 374 the bishop of Milan died, and the city split. The Arian party and the Nicene party each packed the basilica, and it looked like a riot. The governor went in to keep order and make a speech about calm. Someone in the crowd — the tradition says a child — called out, Ambrose for bishop, and both sides took it up. He was thirty-five, a career administrator, and not baptized. He tried to get out of it. He was baptized, ordained through every clerical rank in eight days, and consecrated bishop on 7 December 374. He gave his land to the church and the rest of his money to the poor, hired a priest named Simplicianus to teach him theology, and started reading Greek Christian writers no one in the Latin West had absorbed yet — Origen, Basil, Athanasius. He learned the job in public, at speed. He turned out to be extraordinary at it. He preached every Sunday and taught the congregation to sing: antiphonal hymns, two sides of the church answering each other, an Eastern practice he planted in the West. Some of the hymns are his own and are still sung. Augustine, who heard him, says he wept at the singing and could not stop. He also decided that the church was not a department of the state, and he made it stick three times. In 385 and again in 386 the Empress Justina, an Arian, demanded that one of Milan's basilicas be handed over for Arian worship, with her son the boy-emperor Valentinian II behind the order. Ambrose refused. Imperial troops surrounded the church. He and the congregation stayed inside, day and night, and he taught them the hymns to keep their courage up through the siege. He sent back the line that made the position permanent: the emperor is within the church, not above it. The troops withdrew. He pressed the same claim in 388 over Callinicum, where a mob of Christians had burned a synagogue and Theodosius ordered the bishop to pay for rebuilding it — a just order, and Ambrose fought it until the emperor gave way. It is the ugliest episode in his record and should be named as what it is. Then came Thessalonica. In 390 a riot there killed the imperial garrison commander, and Theodosius answered by turning his soldiers loose on the crowd in the circus. Something like seven thousand people were killed in a few hours. Ambrose wrote him a private letter — it survives — telling him he could not celebrate the Eucharist in his presence until he repented publicly, and that David had been a great king and still said, I have sinned. When the emperor came to the church in Milan, the bishop met him at the door and did not let him in. Theodosius, master of the Roman world, took off his imperial robes, stood among the penitents for months, and was readmitted at Christmas. No one had seen anything like it. It set a precedent the West lived under for a thousand years: there is a bar the state does not cross, and someone will be standing at the door. His other lasting work was quieter. He wrote On the Duties of the Clergy, a Christian answer to Cicero's book on duty, and treatises on the Holy Spirit and on the sacraments that carried Greek theology into Latin. And he preached the sermons that a rhetoric professor named Augustine came to hear for the technique. Ambrose showed him how to read the Old Testament without stumbling over its surface, took his confession, and baptized him at Easter 387. He kept his door open, ate almost nothing, and worked past exhaustion. He died on Good Friday, 4 April 397, and Milan filled with people who had watched a governor become a shepherd. Sources: Paulinus of Milan, Life of Saint Ambrose; Ambrose, Letters (including Letter 51 to Theodosius); Augustine, Confessions, books 5–9; Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History; Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 10.
908 quotations across 50 books
Where this voice is quoted
I have not covered up Your righteousness in my heart; I have declared Your faithfulness and salvation; I have not concealed Your loving devotion and faithfulness from the great assembly.
“A person can speak of his own justice without arrogance, … if he has faith in God and believes that on account of his faith he will be reckoned as just.”
Blessed is the one who cares for the poor; the LORD will deliver him in the day of trouble.
“Faith comes first, and mercy comes second.… Happy, therefore, is the one who understands the poverty of Christ, his utter destitution. Christ, though he was very rich, became poor for us.”
My visitor speaks falsehood; he gathers slander in his heart; he goes out and spreads it abroad.
“Judas went out, and he spoke. He went out from the faith, he went out from the council and number of the apostles.”
Even my close friend whom I trusted, the one who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.
“We need not imagine that Jesus did not know that Judas was going to betray him.… Of course Jesus knew it.”
Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and Amen.
“"So be it, so be it" is also an indication that you have reached the end of a book. The psalter appears to be divided into five books, and the first book ends with this psalm, namely, the forty-first.”
Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why the unease within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him for the salvation of His presence.
“Troubled by the hazardous turnings of this world, David says, "Why are you sad, O soul, why do you trouble me? Hope in God, for I will give praise to him, the salvation of my countenance and my God."”
Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls; all Your breakers and waves have rolled over me.
“Listen to this: "Deep calls on deep at the voice of your floodgates." Scripture of the Old Testament calls on Scripture of the New Testament for the consummation of holiness and the fullness of grace; it calls with the voice of grace and the outflowing…”
For it was not by their sword that they took the land; their arm did not bring them victory.
“Our ancestors, as heirs and next of kin of the patriarchs, were planted in the promised land. They did not gain this by any merits of their own.”
You have made us retreat from the foe, and those who hate us have plundered us.
“One who is carried off by people is not necessarily conquered. Take, for example, Paul. He rejoices in his sufferings. He glories in being let out through a window and lowered in a basket. Look at holy Jeremiah, holy Ezekiel, holy Daniel.”
Why do You hide Your face and forget our affliction and oppression?
“We cannot see God's face. But there is a place where, by faith, God shows himself to us. The place is with God; and if we were to stand on the rock—that is, in awareness of this flesh and in firmness of faith—we will see…”
My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses to the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.
“The Son lives by the Father, because he is the Son begotten of the Father; by the Father, because he is of one substance with the Father; by the Father, because he is the Word given forth from the heart of the Father, because he…”
God is within her; she will not be moved. God will help her when morning dawns.
“By his resurrection at dawn, the Lord confers on us wonderful and heavenly helps. His resurrection dispelled the night and poured on us the light of day. As Scripture says, "Rise, O sleeper; arise from the dead, and Christ shall enlighten you."”
Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, His holy mountain.
“He is everywhere great and powerful, but our narrow mind cannot take in the greatness of his divine power and grace. The closer our knowledge gets to God, the more wonderful his majesty appears to be.”
Beautiful in loftiness, the joy of all the earth, like the peaks of Zaphon is Mount Zion, the city of the great King.
“Truly the Lord is called great. For consider, he has poured exaltation and joy over all the orb of this earth where previously the land produced the most dreadful growth of sin; he has made joyful the earth that once abounded in sorrow, tears and…”
As we have heard, so we have seen in the city of the LORD of Hosts, in the city of our God: God will establish her forever. Selah
“Outside the city, we have heard. Inside the city, we have seen. God is the eternal light of this city. The light of day shines there without the sun we know in this world, and of the moon there is no need.”
Within Your temple, O God, we contemplate Your loving devotion.
“God's true temple is the body of Christ, and in that body lies the purification of all our sins. Truly, that flesh is God's temple, and in it there is no contagion of sin.”
March around Zion, encircle her, count her towers,
“Those who have wisely surrounded Zion and embraced it spiritually climb up onto its towers. There they tell of it to those not able to ascend its turrets.… Always the insidious foe has his eye on it, to see if he can approach and capture…”
both low and high, rich and poor alike.
“Both rich and poor together are called to a single vocation and invited to a certain humility and equality. The rich are not to turn up their noses at the poor, and the poor are not to be jealous of the rich.”
No man can possibly redeem his brother or pay his ransom to God.
“Just as there is one God, "so too there is only one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." He is unique. He alone redeems humankind. He goes far beyond brotherly love, for he sheds his own blood for strangers.”
Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You may be proved right when You speak and blameless when You judge.
“"I [the prodigal son] have sinned," he says, "against heaven and before you." He confesses what is clearly a sin to death, that you may not think that any one doing penance is rightly shut out from pardon.”
Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
“After this white robes were given to you as a sign that you were putting off the covering of sins and putting on the chaste veil of innocence, of which the prophet said, "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed; wash me, and…”
I said, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and find rest. How far away I would flee! In the wilderness I would remain. Selah
“As for the person who wishes to be lifted up by the hand of Christ, let him first fly away himself, let him have his own wings, for one who flees from the world has wings.”
My soul is satisfied as with the richest of foods; with joyful lips my mouth will praise You.
“Now let us turn our attention to the characteristic of fatness or richness of which David speaks intelligibly when he says, "Let my soul be filled as with marrow and fatness." Before that he had said, "And may your whole burnt offering be made fat."”
You sent abundant rain, O God; You refreshed Your weary inheritance.
“Damasus cleansed not, Peter cleansed not, Ambrose cleansed not, Gregory cleansed not; for ours is the ministry, but the sacraments are yours.”
You have ascended on high; You have led captives away. You have received gifts from men, even from the rebellious, that the LORD God may dwell there.
“It does not escape our notice that some copies have likewise, according to Luke: "How much more shall your heavenly Father give a good gift to them that ask him."”