Written: 380
Read: May 2006
De fide (“Of Faith”) by St Ambrose is his
defence of the Catholic faith against the Arians. He wrote it for
Gratian, a Catholic, who ruled the western Roman Empire in those days.
The Arians quoted Scripture to prove that Jesus was
neither God nor man but something in between. Unlike God
Jesus had a beginning, he served God, he was not all-knowing, and
so on. But Ambrose took those very same passages, and
others, to show that Jesus was both God and
man. This is what most Christians believe to this day.
This was the great dispute of those times. While all
Christians agreed that Jesus was not just a man, for centuries
they argued over his true nature — a subject called
Christology: Was he really God? Was he really a man? If
he were both, then did he have two wills or two natures? Was he a
hollowed out man with God inside? And so on.
This book and others like at the time helped to answer these
questions.
When you read the gospels it sometimes seems that Jesus is just a
man. Yet at other times he seems to assume he is God somehow —
that is what got him into so much trouble with the Jews. What is
going on?
The Arians answered this by saying that Jesus was something
in between. Ambrose shows that this makes sense of some
passages but at the cost of others. A better way to make sense of
Scripture is to say that that sometimes Jesus speaks as the
Son of God and sometimes as the Son of Man — because he
is both. Augustine uses this
very same idea in his book on the Trinity.
Even this answer is not perfect — there are still some
passages that still do not make complete and easy sense. But
these are the exception rather than the rule.
But the real fault of the Arians according to Ambrose was
not misunderstanding Scripture: it was their pride. In
their pride they thought they could be like God and understand
everything. Instead they only wound up making God something
common, something less than divine.
We might think the Arians are called “heretics” only
because they did not get to write the history books. Ambrose says
it goes much deeper than that: when presented with God in Jesus,
they refused to accept Him. Instead they thought of a hundred and
one reasons to explain him away as something else.
Points: 96
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