Ambrose and Symmachus on Tradition

If Ambrose were to convince the nominally Christian audience of ep. 73 that the return of the Altar was a more serious issue than it first appeared, a key task would be to undermine Symmachus’s arguments from tradition.^{Footnote 9} Not only was this one of the key strategies in Symmachus’s Relatio, it was also a prominent sentiment that funded the Roman sense of nobility. To be a senator of nobilitas, one needed not only economic wealth or a legal title but also a link to the past.^{Footnote 10} This was something Symmachus possessed—coming from an established Italian family—and something to which many upstart senators would have been attracted. Ambrose’s letter thus focuses on tradition as a means of unmasking the threat posed by Symmachus’s argument, and indeed Symmachus himself as an embodiment of the quintessential Roman nobilitas.

Many scholars have noted the importance of tradition for Roman intellectuals in the late fourth century.^{Footnote 11} Michele Salzman summarizes: “The preservation of tradition has been viewed as the ‘most potent factor of the senatorial resistance’ and a key component of the propaganda of the last decades of the fourth century.”^{Footnote 12} While arguments for tradition were not new in this period, they seem to have been invested with a new sense of urgency. In making his particular case, Symmachus employs at least three arguments from tradition for the support of Roman religious customs: one utilitarian, another based on nature, and a final one based on a theological claim.

Symmachus’s utilitarian arguments are quite conventional. He emphasizes, in a manner reminiscent of Cicero’s De natura deorum,^{Footnote 13} the utilitas of honoring the gods as that “which more than anything else convinces men that gods exist.”^{Footnote 14} He recognizes the need to honor the gods who provided safety in eras past (“Who is on such good terms with the barbarians as not to need the altar of Victory?”),^{Footnote 15} and he invokes the mere presence of religion (praesentia religionis) as a “very powerful deterrent to wrongdoing.”^{Footnote 16} Doubtless, the recent military defeats and famines—even the untimely death of the emperor Gratian—would have had many Romans looking to ancient customs as means of procuring imperial success. It is in this sense that François Paschoud refers to Symmachus’s argument as a form of divine “providentialisme”—one that outlines the “contract” between the divine and human spheres.^{Footnote 17} This was not an attempt to romanticize the past; rather, the antiquity of Roman customs served as a very practical application to Rome’s present concerns.^{Footnote 18}

In addition to arguing for the utilitas of tradition, Symmachus shows how adherence to custom is inherent in the natural order. Symmachus appeals to traditional religion as a way of upholding the mos majorum, the custom of the elders, especially of one’s own parents.^{Footnote 19} He must show where and how Valentinian ought to follow and where he ought to correct his predecessors, especially Constantius and Gratian.^{Footnote 20} Symmachus’s use of prosopopoiea (personification) to speak in the voice of Rome is another instance of a kind of natural argument for antiquity.^{Footnote 21} Lady Roma protests that she is too old to change, that the emperor ought to have “respect for her years.”^{Footnote 22} Finally, Symmachus shows the inherent naturalness of preserving custom in the sentiment, “love of tradition is a great thing” (consuetudinis amor magnus est). As Salzman notes, the choice of the word consuetudo to describe tradition “conveys the impression that the continuance of pagan rites is virtually a biological need as well as a natural right.”^{Footnote 23} The love for tradition, for Symmachus, was stitched deeply into the fabric of human existence.

However, the most eloquent, or at least most famous, disputation Symmachus makes against the “innovation” of removing the Altar is a theological one. The divine mind (mens divina) is too far beyond human comprehension to be captured by any one religious expression, and so has “distributed” different rites and cults to particular locales.^{Footnote 24} Symmachus writes: “It is reasonable to think that whatever is worshiped by each of us is ultimately the same. We look at the same stars. We share the same sky. The same universe surrounds us. What does it matter with what philosophy each individual seeks for the truth? It is not possible to reach so great a secret (secretum) by a single route.”^{Footnote 25} Such arguments were not uncommon among Neoplatonic writers of his day, such as Marius Victorinus^{Footnote 26} or Themistius,^{Footnote 27} and can be traced back to earlier Middle Platonic rationales, as found in Cicero, for example.^{Footnote 28} Here Symmachus applies them to appeal for the restoration of the Altar and the subsidies owed to priests and vestal virgins. Symmachus will go on to raise issues concerning the economic problems related to the defunding of priests and vestal virgins—points to which Ambrose will also respond. In some sense these may be the more pressing concerns. However, it is especially the arguments concerning tradition, which impinge on his view of history and the divine-cosmological relation, that provide a substantial focus for Ambrose’s reply.

On the surface, Ambrose’s response to Symmachus appears to break with traditional apologetic arguments, which stressed Christianity’s antiquity. At some points he even appears to depart from an account of God’s providential ordering of human affairs, positing instead mere human causality as the reason for Rome’s defeats and misfortunes. What are we to make of these tactics?

A cursory glance at apologetic writing from the second and third centuries makes it apparent that early Christians expended great energy to justify their status in the empire by appealing to the antiquity of Christianity. Apologists such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, Tertullian, Lactantius, Minucius Felix, and others argued for Christianity’s superiority to Greek philosophies and religions by proving Christianity’s more ancient origins, and thus its more divinely inspired account of truth.^{Footnote 29} The best of Plato, to these apologists, was merely plagiarized Moses. The link to antiquity was central to proving the legitimacy of the Christian faith against accusations that it was a novel superstitio.

Such arguments are surprisingly absent in Ambrose’s apologetic against Symmachus, however. In fact, instead of arguing for the antiquity of Christianity, Ambrose makes the case that Christianity is in fact new, and just for that reason superior to Roman religion. Even more provocatively, Ambrose interweaves his account of Christianity’s novelty with an apparently secularizing reading of providential history.^{Footnote 30} In his alternative personification of Lady Rome, Ambrose rebukes Symmachus’s notion that the gods, whose favor was secured through the ancient customs, enabled the protection and security of Rome. It was not the “useless blood of harmless herds” that enabled Rome’s victory but her military skill and courageous leadership: “Africanus won his triumph fighting amid the battle-lines of Hannibal, not among the altars on the Capitol.”^{Footnote 31} Likewise, against the claims that the Roman divinities protected the city against floods and famine, Ambrose shows that annual harvests and crop yields imply no congruency with fidelity to traditional worship practices. Ambrose appears to undercut the Roman account of providence, not with an alternative Christian account but by contending that Rome’s fortunes or calamities were not due to the activity of the gods but instead to its military might and the fluctuations of nature.

Ambrose proceeds to bolster his account of the superiority of Christianity with an argument that this superiority is in keeping with the natural improvement of the world itself. In his counter prosopopoiea of Rome, Ambrose has her admit that, although she is “white-haired with age,” she is ashamed of her past and has now “converted along with the whole world” (cum toto orbe longaeva converti).^{Footnote 32} “To change to the better side is nothing to be ashamed of,” she confesses.^{Footnote 33} Where Symmachus had drawn on Rome’s antiquity to express resistance to altering the ancient customs, Ambrose reverses the pattern, showing how Rome’s old age is not incompatible with the possibility of conversion to the newer and better.

When he returns to similar arguments later in the letter, it is in the context of responding to Symmachus’s request that “the cult of our ancestors must be preserved.”^{Footnote 34} Here Ambrose’s sense of cosmological progress comes into sharp relief. “What about the fact that since those days all things have progressed for the better” (Quid quod omnia postea in melius profecerunt)?^{Footnote 35} One sees this betterment, Ambrose says, in the two-stage pattern of the world’s origins:

The bishop proceeds by finding accounts of progress everywhere in nature: in the cycles of the moon, which emerge from darkness to light (and also prefigure the church);^{Footnote 37} in the way in which land is cultivated through agricultural practices;^{Footnote 38} and in the fields that are barren at the beginning of the year but eventually produce a rich harvest.^{Footnote 39} With heavy allusions to the rustic imagery of Virgil’s poetry, Ambrose adapts themes of natural development from classical literature into a creative argument for Christianity’s supersession of Greco-Roman religion.^{Footnote 40}

If traditional Romans are to be consistent about their maintenance of ancient customs, Ambrose prods, they should deny all these accounts of progress in the natural world and instead “say that everything should have remained as it was in its beginnings.”^{Footnote 41} They would need to admit that the once-darkened world “now displeases them, since it has been illuminated by the brightness of the sun.”^{Footnote 42} Ambrose counters that we can welcome the fact that the “youthful condition of the world, as of everything else, has given way in order that the venerable old age of ‘grey haired faith’ can take its place.”^{Footnote 43} We should no more be troubled by the advent of new religious customs than by the fact that seeds grow into harvests.

He concludes these arguments by connecting the various forms of natural development to the maturation of humanity as a result of the Christian faith: “our faith too is a harvest, a harvest of souls.”^{Footnote 44} The emergence of the Christian faith is, like the development of the world, a part of natural law. In a mature world, people can now see that Victory is not herself a goddess but the gift of divine power. “Victory is bestowed; it does not rule.”^{Footnote 45} At this point Ambrose seems to have altered, or at least nuanced, his earlier argument that Rome’s success was a result of military might instead of divine providence. Where earlier it appeared that Ambrose offered a secularized explanation of Rome’s victories, he now shows that in fact these victories were due to the role of God’s providence—though it takes a mature Christian Rome, who has forsaken her idolatrous past, to see how this is so. This pattern of apparent providential distancing (separating natural or essential relations between the divine and created orders) and subsequent re-theologizing (reconnecting the orders through an account of divine will) is a pattern he will exemplify in the Hexameron.

Ambrose here has not given a very in-depth or satisfactory account of creation. Nor was that his intention. He has made these remarks, again, to reveal the fault lines beneath Symmachus’s plea for the restoration of the Altar of Victory based on tradition. His concerns are apologetic, not constructive. Nonetheless, the significant contrast with earlier apologists warrants probing why and how Ambrose thought that boldly declaring the superiority of Christianity as the result of the natural progression of the world would have the kind of suasive appeal he imagined.

Ambrose on Providence and Creation in the Hexameron

Ambrose was able to make such seemingly novel apologetic arguments, not because he assumed a non-providentialist or progressivist account of history, but because he had imbibed a new form of theological providence, one that emphasized the relative independence of the world—creation as ontologically separate from God—but that was nevertheless intimately related to God through its being ordered to the divine will. The developments in theological pictures of creation, which Ambrose learned from pro-Nicene theologians like Basil of Caesarea, provided a language to clarify the ontological distinction between creator and creature while still affirming God’s proximity or nearness. In viewing Ambrose’s reflections on creation in the Hexameron, we see something of the larger intellectual habitus that makes possible the apologetic novelty of ep. 73.

Before turning to the Hexameron, it must be noted how discordant this cosmic imaginary would have been within the typically Greco-Roman framework. Influenced to a large degree by a Platonic notion of the forms, most philosophies, as E. R. Dodds pointed out some time ago, were resistant to ideas of change and progression.^{Footnote 46} As the immutable forms preexisted materiality and temporality, the flux of human history was seen as but the deviation and return to an originary state. “For Plato all progress consists in approximation to a pre-existing model…. There is thus, strictly speaking, no open future and no such thing as invention.”^{Footnote 47} While ideas of progress similar to Ambrose’s were not entirely foreign to the Greeks—Dodds points to second-century (BCE) scientists like Archimedes and Hipparchus—the primary mold of Antique Platonism resisted ideas of an evolving world.^{Footnote 48}

If by the Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic periods, philosophers continued to be reluctant to accept ideas of progress, they were so despite new and competing ways in which to view the world’s relation to the divine and semidivine creative principles. In Middle Platonic thought, as John Dillon notes, the idea of the forms “suffered various transformations” as the Platonic demiurge converged with the Stoic Logos, making possible the inevitable link of the forms to the mind of God.^{Footnote 49} In Plotinus, a notion of the demiurge had all but disappeared, being subsumed into a metaphysical monism that distanced the One from the world and matter through the various emanations of the Intellect, Soul, and World Soul.^{Footnote 50} And yet, despite the shifts in cosmological and cosmogonical thought, the basic Platonic problematic of a material world of time and flux in juxtaposition with an eternal world of forms problematized any view of worldly progression. In theory and in methodology, as Dodds summarizes, the great systematizers of this period—Galen in the sciences, Ptolemy in geography and astronomy, Papinian and Ulpian in Roman law, and Plotinus in philosophy—were men who “stood with their backs to the future”; for them, “all wisdom was in the past.”^{Footnote 51}

To account for Ambrose’s novel argumentation, we can suggest that, on one level, it was because he was writing in the self-consciously historical moment that he and his contemporaries would call tempora Christiana.^{Footnote 52} “Christian times” does not here name a kind of self-confident presumption that fourth-century Christians were now, sanctioned by Constantine, “in charge.” What is meant here is something along the lines of what Frances Young has described as a “new kind of apologetics” in the fourth century, one in which Christian intellectuals reinterpreted the past to appropriate the best of Hellenic culture and literature into the comprehensive culture of Christianity.^{Footnote 53}

The Christian reinterpretation of the past included an account of how Christ not only prefigured the great wisdom of the past but also recapitulated it. Christ brought to completion or “summed up” the wisdom of former ages, which to a certain extent entailed an account of progress in history. Irenaeus may be the most famous proponent of recapitulation, but Tertullian and Cyprian likewise employed a grammar for speaking of the ways in which a reformare ad melius was at hand.^{Footnote 54} So, on the one hand, Ambrose highlights and extends these understandings of the way in which Christ improved the world order. But on the other hand, his view was more radical. It was also more than simply the product of a so-called Christian view of history overcoming a Greek view—the triumph of a “horizontal” linear view of time overriding a “vertical” emphasis on eternality.^{Footnote 55} The Ambrosian view of history triangulates with new modes of understanding creation and providence, which were in turn influenced by refined distinctions of the God-world relationship emerging from pro-Nicene theology.

The first homily of the Hexameron demonstrates this twofold pattern: first to distance creation from any necessary or essentialist relation to the divine, and second to resupply the link through an account of the divine will, chiefly expressed in christological language.^{Footnote 56} Ambrose begins his discourse with a polemical edge, surveying the divergent Greek cosmogonies before displaying the superiority of the divinely inspired Moses.^{Footnote 57} Plato and his pupils upheld three first principles—the divine, the forms, and matter—whereas Aristotle had posited only two—form and matter. Pythagoras maintained that there was only one world; others, like Democritus, had suggested multiple worlds. Plato had posited that the world had a distinct origin but will always exist; others held that the world did not always exist and will one day cease to exist. Some said the world was itself God, containing the divine mind within it; others said God was in parts of the world. “How is it possible to arrive at an estimate of the truth amid such warring opinions?” Ambrose asks.^{Footnote 58} Moses, who had learned the wisdom of the Egyptians, removed himself from all earthly cares, and given himself to divine contemplation, could provide the answers.^{Footnote 59} Ambrose deliberately distances the biblical view from the demiurgic conception of creation.^{Footnote 60} The creator in Genesis 1 is “not one who imitates matter under the guidance of some Idea, from which He formed His work, not in accordance with His will, but in compliance with a self-proposed model.”^{Footnote 61} God did not need to wait for a later “pupil” to come along and fashion a world out of the contemplation of these forms. Rather, God is both author and creator. Moses attests to the idea that “the substances of things visible and invisible were contained in the divine mind.”^{Footnote 62}

Ambrose offers additional contestations to the view that God and the world are coeternal. He explains the world as a temporally bounded entity, with a finite beginning and end.^{Footnote 63} The creature, he says, is bestowed with “infirmity” so that the creature is not mistaken to be unoriginate, uncreated, or “partaking of the divine essence.”^{Footnote 64} He amasses a number of biblical passages that describe the bounded world as the creation of an eternal God (Isa 40:12–13, 22–23; Jer 10:11–14). At the outset of his homilies, then, Ambrose is concerned first to distance the biblical view of creation from the philosophers’ views, which too easily could lead to a belief in two eternal principles—coequal in time and status.

So far, Ambrose’s view accords with the earlier Christian view of creation ex nihilo, which originated from apologetic contexts in the writings of Justin, Tatian, and Theophilus,^{Footnote 65} and which furthermore took shape in various anti-gnostic campaigns and would be transmitted to later generations through Augustine’s various writings on creation. Ambrose will soon, however, introduce the christological component of this doctrine of creation, and here the pro-Nicene emphases come into sharper relief. Commenting, as Basil had done, on the various senses of the word “beginning”—temporal, numerical, or foundational—Ambrose notes that the word “beginning” is also applied to the “power of God,” not only in the sense of creating the world temporally (in the beginning), numerically (in a certain order), and foundationally (through providing a set structure), but also in a “mystical sense” to refer to Christ.^{Footnote 66} Based on pivotal texts in the Nicene controversies—John 8:25; Prov 8:22; John 1:3; Col 1:15—Ambrose is led to understand Christ as “the beginning” (principium) referenced in Genesis 1, who “in a moment of His power made this great beauty of the world out of nothing, which did not itself have existence and gave substance to things or causes that did not themselves exist.”^{Footnote 67}

Ambrose soon employs other christological arguments to undergird this doctrine of creation, making careful distinctions between creation’s relation to God and the Son’s relation to the Father. Drawing on Heb 1:3 (Christ as “the brightness of the glory of his Father and an image of his substance”), Ambrose offers the typically pro-Nicene account of the Son’s imaging of the Father as a relation of closeness rather than difference: “If you are seeking after the splendor of God, the Son is the image of the invisible God. As God is, so is the image. God is invisible; then the image also is invisible.”^{Footnote 68} Ambrose distinguishes the world from Christ by closely linking Christ to the Father. The world is not the shadow or splendor of God; it evinces no essential participation in God. Rather, creation is the product of God’s artistic creative action in the Son. The Son alone is the radiance or splendor of God, and the world the object of his creative work, sustained by the divine will. Ambrose will later complement this picture with pneumatological aspects of the divine creative activity (particularly in explicating the Spirit’s brooding over the waters in Gen 1:2).^{Footnote 69} Here, however, the pro-Nicene emphasis on the unity of substance relating Father and Son—as distinct from a unity of will, which links God and the world—propels an anti-traditional interpretation of the created order.

Having stressed the separation of God and creation, while asserting Christ as the “power and wisdom of God,” Ambrose next dispels Greco-Roman notions of the earth as a self-sustaining entity—a logical consequence of affirming matter and the divine as two coeternal principles.^{Footnote 70} In contrast to notions of a world suspended upon elemental matter such as air or water, Ambrose offers instead the simplicity of the biblical position that creation is held by the power and will of God. For in the words of Job, “[God] hangeth the earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7).^{Footnote 71} It is not a purely natural law that sustains the world; it is not even sustained by “number, weight and measures” (Wis 11:21).^{Footnote 72} For the creature does not give the law but receives it; the “majesty of God holds the world together by the law of his own will.”^{Footnote 73} Though the world may appear to human beings as immovable, it is so only by the voluntas Dei, not by necessity or by the power of its own nature. After amassing an array of biblical texts affirming that the earth is sustained by nothing other than God’s power and will (Job 38:4–6; Ps 103:5, Ps 74:4), he concludes:

For Ambrose, the world does not endure because it possesses infinite or eternal qualities. It endures because the divine will sustains it. The pro-Nicene grammar afforded to Ambrose, following Basil, enables him to distinguish relations of nature (Father and Son) and relations of will (the divine and creation), which could be used to counter Greco-Roman cosmologies. Ambrose can thus articulate a clear distinction between God and creation, while also avoiding the view that the earth is somehow self-sustaining or self-governing. The will of God—Christ—governs and sustains the world through its intimate involvement.

Having argued against Greco-Roman conceptions of the coeternality between God and the world, Ambrose immediately runs into difficulty with the second verse of Genesis 1, namely, that “the earth was void and without form,” which he takes up in the second homily.^{Footnote 75} The past tense of the verb “was” seems to suggest—contrary to what he has just argued—that matter (hylē) is in some sense eternal, which was then formed by God in demiurgic fashion. Ambrose explains that matter could not have preexisted, because there would have been no “where” for it to be. Any spatial residence for the world to exist would also need to have been created at some point in time. Instead, Genesis describes a twofold stage of development, whereby God first made and then beautified the world. Responding then to the question of why God did not beautify the world instantaneously, Ambrose answers that although God could have created in this way, Scripture reveals a developmental origin to the world to show that the world was created (and not eternal) and also to reveal God as both the creative and ordering power of creation—that is, to guard against a conception that one divine being created and another beautified.^{Footnote 76} A developmental view of the world here protects the unity of God as both creator and fashioner of matter.

Summarizing the arguments made in the first two homilies, Ambrose wonders over the creation of the universe:

The picture presented here closely coheres with the argument given against Symmachus (ep. 73.23) about the two-stage development of the world as primary witness to the progress of all things. In the Hexameron, while Ambrose is not targeting the obsolescence of Roman religious rituals, he does have in view the various alternative non-Christian cosmologies.

A final theme featuring developmental motifs in the Hexameron emerges in the fifth homily (Hex. 3.6–17), where Ambrose speaks of creation’s natural progression as a figuration of human growth. Commenting on Gen 1:11 (“Let the earth bring forth the green herb after its kind”), Ambrose demonstrates various instances in which vegetative life signifies the Christian life. Taking examples from the natural world mentioned in other passages of Scripture, Ambrose uncovers the Christian mysteries hidden in the orders of creation. For example, he describes “the fertility of the earth,” which “carries into effect its age-old fecundity by exercise of spontaneous growth”—a teaching from nature that promotes the work of providence, not human effort, as the agent bringing in the kingdom of God, a teaching confirmed in Jesus’s parable of the seed growing into a great tree even though the sower has gone to sleep (Mark 4:26–27).^{Footnote 78} Likewise, he shows that the grafting of a barren fig tree onto a productive tree mystically signifies the conversion of the Gentiles to the Christian faith, cautioning Christians against shunning outsiders.^{Footnote 79} Another example occurs when, reflecting on the kinds of evergreen trees that maintain their “vesture” even in the harsh seasons, Ambrose counsels: “Imitate the palm … so that it may be said also to you: ‘Thy stature is like a palm tree’” (Song 7:7).^{Footnote 80} In these examples, Ambrose seeks to cultivate in his hearers a sensibility towards the world that reveals how human life attains to God. In each case, the natural developments in the created order provide the fodder for reflecting on the biblical and moral principles of growth in Christian virtue.

This is not to say that human beings will of necessity grow into Christian maturity by a law of nature. Ambrose does not suggest that the Christian life mirrors nature in a way that is devoid of grace. In fact, he takes the failure of humans to grow into Christ-likeness by nature as a result of how deeply sin has rendered human life idiosyncratic from nature. How is it, he asks, that if each plant produces fruit “after its own kind,” human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, do not correspond to their proper kind? “The green herb corresponds to its kind. You do not correspond to your kind. When a grain of wheat is scattered over the soil it returns the gift of its kind; but you degenerate.”^{Footnote 81} Ambrose takes this disjuncture as an opportunity to survey a litany of heretical beliefs about Christ, showing why it is important to teach that Christ is God and humans the work of Christ (opus Christi).^{Footnote 82} Manichaeans teach that the creator of humans was a different god than the creator; Photinus, in a different way, disavows that Christ was involved in the construction of the world; and Eunomius says that Christ is unlike the Father. Only in the pro-Nicene position, in which Christ’s imaging of God does not entail a dissimilarity of substance, is there the possibility that human beings may be restored to a genuine likeness of God.

For Ambrose, in sum, there is an implicit but significant connection between creation’s relationality to God and christological precision. The picture of creation that emerges in the Hexameron is one in which creation is clearly distinct from God yet is also closely linked by the power of the divine will, chiefly expressed through Christ, the consubstantial image of God. As creation is understood to be the work of the Christ who is consubstantial with the Father, there is a simultaneous strengthening of the ontological gap between the divine and creation and a breaking down of the spatial distance between the “true God” and that which he has made. This doctrinal development prioritizes creation’s nonnecessity, its graced or willed existence, and renders more plausible—against the predominant Platonic assumption of a preexisting, stable matter—a creation that advances or develops. Such a conception of “progress” in the created order, in turn, coalesces with accounts of human growth in virtue. The possibility of progressing in sanctity is of a piece with a creation that is, by grace, being turned toward God.

Excursus: Ambrose among the Pro-Nicenes

It is worth noting, before coming to a conclusion, how Ambrose’s views of creation fit within the context of other pro-Nicene creation theologies. While this cannot but be a cursory sketch of other positions, it will offer at least some context for understanding the intellectual environment in which Ambrose operated. It is well recognized that the debates sparked at Nicaea between Arius and Alexander soon became an all-encompassing flame that touched nearly every aspect of Christian doctrine and practice—from baptismal liturgies and theologies of salvation to conceptions of creation and theological epistemologies.^{Footnote 83} To be sure, the question of how an eternal God relates to a temporal creation had long been at the forefront of Christian reflection. Yet, as Paul Blowers notes, when the church had recourse to an ontologically mediatory role for the Son/Word, it answered these questions differently than when, after Nicaea, pro-Nicene bishops eradicated subordinationist language for the Son and stressed the strict ontological gulf between creator and creation.^{Footnote 84}

The attention to creation came into focus at least as early as Athanasius’s polemics with a so-called Arianism that, he argued, would rob God of the title of creator. Since his opponents also granted that Christ was creator, if Christ were excised from the divine essence, this would entail that “God” is not, properly speaking, a creator. For “if there is no Son,” Athanasius asked rhetorically, “how then do you say that God is Creator, if indeed it is through the Word and in Wisdom that everything that is made comes to be?”^{Footnote 85} By clearly separating creator and creature, and locating the creative activity in the trinitarian essence, Athanasius facilitated a theological grammar that founded the generative aspects of creation, which are related to God by will, on the fundamental generation of the divine Son, related to God essentially. As Khaled Anatolios comments: “For Athanasius, … the Father-Son relation, which is constitutive of the actuality of God’s generative and creative capacity, grounds, precedes, and supersedes the willed relation between God and the world. The fecundity of the act of creation … is grounded in the fecundity of the generation of the Son.”^{Footnote 86} For Athanasius, in other words, there is a close connection between how one configures the Father-Son relation and how creation exhibits its developmental and fecund qualities.

In the Hexameral writings of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, there is a similar emphasis on how a pro-Nicene theology of the creative divine word configures an understanding of the generativity and dynamism of creation. In both of these figures, however, a more overtly pedagogical emphasis adheres. For the Cappadocian brothers, as for Ambrose, creation is a wondrously diverse work of art that manifests the divine Artist.^{Footnote 87} And yet this Artist is explicitly not a sub-divine or mediating divinity but the consubstantial Son of the Father. As a result, created being unfolds in a twofold manner—first an invisible, spiritual realm, followed by a sensible creation that becomes, Basil says, a gymnasium of the soul. This latent developmental structure in creation, with its capacities for growth and decay, is what funds the possibilities of training in virtue.

For Gregory of Nyssa, likewise, the changeability and mutability of creation, far from constituting an Origenist fall from an eternally immutable realm, is the very possibility for growth in human virtue—the epectasy of ever-increasing desire for the divine.^{Footnote 89} Both Cappadocians view attentiveness to creation, which bears the immediate presence of a nonetheless infinite God, as charting a course between apophatic Homoian theologies, on the one hand, and Eunomian epistemological certainties, on the other.^{Footnote 90} What is offered instead are renewed possibilities for glorifying God through sensing the presence of the triune mystery revealed in the created order.^{Footnote 91}

A final point of contact for situating Ambrose’s views of creation is Augustine’s notion of the rationes seminales (see Gen. litt. 6.14.25–17.29). As Rowan Williams notes, this difficult-to-define concept in Augustine was a product of reflection on God’s creation in contrast to demiurgic models of creation. Since creation was not the imposition of form on preexisting matter, it can instead be described, as Williams puts it, as “the setting in being of a living system destined to grow toward beauty and order, even if this beauty and order is not at any given moment fully apparent.”^{Footnote 92} The rationes seminales thus name a way of describing the “latent powers of development in created things,” but which are not simply reducible to natural processes: “The rationes do indeed contain the potential in things for natural development, but they also specify the ways in which things in the world may be acted upon by God.”^{Footnote 93} Williams contrasts this understanding with the deterministic way in which Plotinus used a similar but more Stoic-infused concept (Enn. 3.1.7 and 2.1). For Augustine, the rationes are not independent of God’s will and involvement, but they do contain generative and formative processes within them. Thus the temporal character of creation, Williams says, is axiomatic for Augustine. His view of creation promotes an appreciation for the dynamic, time-filled ordering and flourishing of the natural order.

Ambrose has not generally been recognized for having achieved the clarity of expression that one finds in Augustine. And his dependence on Basil, furthermore, has prevented his account of creation from receiving much direct attention.^{Footnote 94} Nonetheless, despite idiosyncrasies, there are enough family resemblances in Ambrose’s account and those of other key pro-Nicene figures that warrant consideration of how this pattern of thinking might have spurred developments in other areas of thought—in this study, Ambrose’s apologetic writing against Symmachus. While more could be said in order to validate these comparisons, I hope to have shown that developments in theological controversies can resonate in seemingly unrelated disputes. For Ambrose, an ordered account of creation as distinct from God nonetheless admits an intimate involvement via the divine will, the result of which is an appreciation for the generativity and fecundity of creation.

Conclusion

The point of expounding Ambrose’s Hexameron, again, is not to suggest its originality to Ambrose or to imply that its writing had any immediate bearing on the Altar of Victory controversy. The purpose, rather, has been to situate Ambrose’s apologetic tactics amid emerging modes of imagining creation and cosmology. In terms of the implications for scholarship, this argument suggests that those historical dynamics that are primarily seen as cultural or political (Ambrose’s apologetic against Symmachus) are not unrelated to territory that is primarily under the purview of theologians or historians of doctrine (Trinitarian theology). In coming to grips with a figure as complex as Ambrose, it will not help to siphon these areas off as distinct spheres of inquiry. While social or cultural historians may worry that theology on its own insufficiently narrates the complexities of historical reality, the reverse is also true: if theological developments are neglected, we risk losing a fuller picture.

With the kinds of arguments Ambrose makes in the Hexameron in view, I have tried to show how we might better understand the rather cursory arguments he makes against Symmachus, which at first seem so novel in comparison with earlier apologetic strategies. Whereas Symmachus had offered a fairly traditional account of history, in which divine providence in the course of future events would be maintained through the continuity of antique religious practices, Ambrose seems to dismiss the entire project with one stroke. However, the arguments that come across as rash or flippant in the apologetic treatise against Symmachus are made plausible in part due to deeper transitions in pro-Nicene theological polemic. The new attention to nature and history that is more fully expounded in the later Hexameron is previously at work in funding the critique of Roman religious custom in ep. 73. The world, held together by the power of divine will and not necessity, is now free to evolve, change, and progress, without any threat to the stability of God’s providence. As an apologist for the Christian faith, Ambrose has recourse to a new theological imaginary, one that will hopefully bolster his nominally Christian audience to remain firm against Symmachus’s eloquent appeals to tradition.