The Emperor Is Within the Church

About this volume

The bishop who told emperors no

This volume holds the Ambrose who governed: On the Duties of the Clergy, his three books of Christian ethics built on Cicero’s framework — the manual that taught the Western clergy their office for a millennium — with the treatises to virgins and widows, On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments explaining baptism and the eucharist to the newly baptized, On Repentance against the rigorists, and the great dogmatic works written for the emperor Gratian: five books On the Faith and three On the Holy Spirit.

Then the letters — the church-state archive of the fourth century: the Altar of Victory exchange, where Symmachus’ eloquent plea for the old religion meets Ambrose’s answer; the basilica-crisis letters written while his congregation sang inside the surrounded church; the letters that brought Theodosius to penance. With them stand the funeral orations — for his brother Satyrus, for young Valentinian II, for Theodosius — and the hymns that began Latin hymnody, sung at Milan ever since.

As across the whole project, we translate the original works only, in fresh English, and give them away free to read.