A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

was afraid of.
In 379, Ambrose met the young emperor Gratian for the first time, in Milan.
Gratian had now been emperor for four years, and his initial policy had been one
of religious toleration. Before he had appointed Theodosius to fill the vacuum
caused by Valens’ death at Adrianople, he had specifically allowed the Nicenes
whom Valens had removed to return to their sees while preserving any
established Homoians in theirs. In August 379, however, he had issued jointly
with Theodosius an edict forbidding ‘heresy’, although this was not followed by
any expulsions of Homoians. Ambrose was determined to persuade the young
emperor to support the Nicenes more aggressively, and when asked, he agreed to
provide the impressionable Gratian with an outline of the Nicene faith. He
worked at it busily over the winter of 379-380.
De Fide, ‘On the Faith’, the first two books of which were presented to
Gratian in March 380, has been derided for its intellectual shallowness and its
attempts to manipulate the emperor. Ambrose intimated that he had been asked
to provide Gratian with details of the faith that would bring him victory, and
throughout the work he linked imperial success to Nicene orthodoxy, specifically
warning the emperor that if he campaigned in Illyricum, he risked being won
over by ‘Arians’ and would suffer defeat in consequence. In one of his most
extraordinary assertions Ambrose claimed that it was no longer the military
eagles that led the legions but ‘your name, Lord Jesus and Your Worship’. 9 That
Jesus, who had died at the cruel hands of Roman soldiers, could be transformed
into a leader of the legions illustrates how far Christianity had been integrated
into imperial politics. Ambrose also adopted Athanasius’ crude device of
grouping all the subordinationists together and demonising them, and so
contributed to the growing tradition of Christian invective that corroded serious
theological thought. His exegesis of the scriptures was also rudimentary, ‘little
more than fantastic nonsense woven into a purely delusive harmony’, as one
assessment puts it. 10 In his scholarly work Ambrose drew on the texts of others
- the fourth volume of De Fide relies heavily on Athanasius, for instance - and
his fellow Christians were not taken in by his plagiarism. Jerome rebuked him
for ‘decking himself like an ugly crow with someone else’s plumes’ and, in a
phrase typical of the writer’s invective, ridiculed a work by Ambrose on the
Holy Spirit as totum flaccidum. 11
But Ambrose excelled in his brilliantly managed public performances. He was
totally unscrupulous in seeking to publicly humiliate his enemies. The first of