Today’s first entry in the Martyrologium Romanum says:
1. Memoria sancti Ambrosii, episcopi Mediolanensis et Ecclesiae doctoris, qui pridie Nonas aprilis in Domino obdormivit, sed hac die potissimum colitur, qua celebrem sedem adhuc catechumenus gubernandam suscepit, cum civitatis praefecturae officio fungebatur. Verus pastor et doctor fidelium, maxime in omnes caritatem exercuit, libertatem Ecclesiae ac rectae fidei doctrinam adversus arianos strenue defendit et commentariis hymnisque concinendis populum pie catechizavit.
St. Ambrose of Milan (+4 April 397), a titanic figure of the late 4th century who changed the shape of Church and State relations for a thousand years, who brought much of the wisdom of Greek writings to the West, and who helped to bring St. Augustine of Hippo into the fold.
Would that we might see his like again in the great capitals of the world.
There are too many interesting things about Ambrose for them all to be shared here, but we have space for a couple.
There is a famous moment recounted by St. Augustine in his Confessions (Bk VI) about visiting St. Ambrose.
Augustine walked into the room where Ambrose was sitting and saw him staring at a book! Ambrose was reading and not even moving his lips!
Augustine was so impressed by this that slipped silently out of the room without saying anything to Ambrose, lest he disturb him.
Augustine was very impressed by Ambrose and had wanted to talk to him about various problems and doubts. Because of all the people pressing around Ambrose, who was tremendously important and sought after, Augustine was never able to get near him in public.
Let’s read the text and hear about it from Augustine himself!
Remember, at this point Augustine is a hot property in Milan and not yet Christian, though interiorly twisting on the spikes of difficult doubts and problems.
Augustine wasn’t really praying yet and he he still was considering things in very worldly terms.
6,3. Nor had I come yet to groan in my prayers that thou wouldst help me. My mind was wholly intent on knowledge and eager for disputation. Ambrose himself I esteemed a happy man, as the world counted happiness, because great personages held him in honor. Only his celibacy appeared to me a painful burden. [Augustine was not chaste at the time and he was angling for a politically favorable marriage.] But what hope he cherished, what struggles he had against the temptations that beset his high station, what solace in adversity, and what savory joys thy bread possessed for the hidden mouth of his heart when feeding on it, I could neither conjecture nor experience.
Nor did [Ambrose] know my own frustrations, nor the pit of my danger. For I could not request of him what I wanted as I wanted it, because I was debarred from hearing and speaking to him by crowds of busy people to whose infirmities he devoted himself. And when he was not engaged with them—which was never for long at a time—he was either refreshing his body with necessary food or his mind with reading.
Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room—for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him—we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence—for who would dare interrupt one so intent?—we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men’s business. Perhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. And even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one.
Amazing stuff there.
Keep in mind that, i the ancient world, books were rare. If you had a book, you were probably wealthy. If you got your hands on a book, you had to remember what you read because you might not ever see that particular book again. There would be public readings of books so that more people could hear them. People had to read aloud, actually, to help their memory. The more senses you could involve, the easier it was to remember the material. This holds true today! But, in the ancient world, people who read, generally read aloud.
Notice that Augustine, writing many years after the scene he recounts, and now a bishops himself, understands what it is to be entirely lacking in free time. He wonders if Ambrose read quietly so that the intellectually hungry people around him wouldn’t ask him to explain what he was reading, thus cutting short his own time for study. Also, Augustine himself later in life suffered from having a very weakened voice. In his sermons we actually hear him saying once in a while to the crowd that they had to stop making so much noise in their reactions to him, because his voice to too weak to shout over them! At any rate, Augustine puts a positive spin on what Ambrose did.
Busy tired clergymen understand each other.
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Remarkable.
The ancient world was also much closer to an oral literary culture than we are (though in many ways we may be returning to it). Poetry was generally written to be recited, and even prose, heavily influenced by the study and practice of rhetoric, was composed with the ear as well as the eye; many writers seem to have been concerned that their writings would sound when read. The sound of the text was simply considered an important component of the composition.
I also heard, don’t know if this is true, that at the time of Sts Ambrose and Augustine the text in books did not provide spaces between words!!! We see this sometimes in manuscrips and the beautiful illuminations, books of hours etc. from that time. I am a reading teacher so this little tidbit was amazing to me. Makes reading extremely difficult!
Reading aloud can ensure proper meaning as well. This is why Ic personally consider the new translation and Latin Mass to be important. The inflection and pacing is vital. I have heard people complain of St Paul’s loquacious and technical sentences. Yet if people will read them aloud with the intent of adding meaning the delicate thoughts blossom.
For example, a slight pause can have a huge impact on the meaning of a sentence: “What’s that in the road ahead?’ versus “What’s that in the road, a head?” The same playful spaces give all the meaning to music. I wonder if St Ambrose was hearing the voices of the writers in his head, or if he was patiently assembling the thoughts in his mind. It is also a wonder that mind as great as St Augustine’s had the humility to see the value of one such as Ambrose. That is a virtue for use lesser men to imitate!
Chrissin: That’s true. I studied paleography, and at one point the words in books (this is true of Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek) were all run together. I’m afraid I don’t remember when the divisions came in, but long after the first Bibles were made. There was also no punctuation — and in the case of Hebrew, they only wrote the consonants! Also, there was only one case, what we would today call “upper case” letters. Upper case letters and lower case letters are actually two separate alphabets that were merged together. So the introduction of word spacing, punctuation, and u&lc letters were quite the revolution in making it easier to read. You may know that cursive/script alphabets (again, we use TWO) were developed much later by busy professional scribes so that they could write faster. In Elizabethan days, documents were all written in cursive by secretaries and signed in print letters by important people — the opposite of what we do today, although many schools are eliminating cursive writing and going back to print/block letters.
It amazes me that St. Anselm, St. Augustine, et al. dictated their books. They did not write them by hand, as later authors did. Secretaries took down what they said on wax tablets, in a sort of shorthand. Imagine dictating those immense, dense theological tomes! And all those quotes that were apparently memorized! I suppose they edited the copied-out works, but maybe not. Maybe they were so good at composing in their heads that they didn’t edit. I was trained as a reporter right before computers came in, and we had to compose in our heads before we typed our stories. Yes, you COULD edit them, but the goal was to have them as perfect as possible before you typed, so that they could go to typesetting and then to layout as soon as possible. Now you can change things as much as you want so you compose as you type.
Remarkable story Father!! Your readers may be interested in buying stories of the lives of saints (including Sts. Augustine and Ambrose) and catholic coloring books as a gift for kids at Christmas. I buy mine at a wonderful Catholic publishing company in middle america http://www.neumannpress.com/
They also have fine reprints for Adults and a wonderful St Gregory Hymnal that can be used for the extraordinary form as well as the ordinary form.
True monastic spirituality of a more individual mode…the great Benedictine ideal, for example could be applied here. One of the most influential books in my life is Jean LeClercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, which shows the connection between prayer, silent prayer, and study. These are great gifts, which Augustine must have learned from Ambrose after his complete conversion.