HistoricalChristian.Faith

Ambrose of Milan on the Historicity of Noah's Flood

Dates: c. 380 · Wikipedia
Summary: In On Noah and the Ark (De Noe et arca), Ambrose is the Latin witness to the history-and-allegory pattern. He is the most thoroughgoing of the Western allegorists on this narrative — the ark is read as a figure of the human body and of the Church, the Flood as the purging of the soul — yet he expounds the moral and figurative senses on top of a flood he reads as a real, dated event. He carries the chronology of Genesis 7–8 down to the day ("in the six hundredth year, according to Hebrew truth, on the first month, on the twenty-seventh day… the flood began"), adjudicates the Hebrew and Greek month-reckonings against each other, and repeatedly marks the seam between the two levels: a thing is said "according to the letter," and then "a higher understanding" or "deeper meaning" is drawn from it. He is the standing patristic counter-example to "allegorist = denier of the history."

Claims & evidence

The Flood is read as a real, dated event — the chronology carried down to the day, "according to Hebrew truth"

For it is written that in the six hundredth year, according to Hebrew truth, on the first month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the flood began: there were one hundred and fifty days of water infusion, the ark sat on the mountain in the seventh month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month: afterwards, the waters began to recede by the mercy of God, and for one hundred and fifty days the waters diminished, and then the tops of the mountains appeared: then after forty days, Noah opened the holy door of the ark, he sent out the raven and it did not return, he sent out the dove and it returned empty, then after seven days he sent out the dove again and it returned with an olive branch.

— On Noah and the Ark, ch. XVII, source. Ambrose treats the Flood narrative as a calendar he can reconcile: he weighs whether the month named is "the first and the seventh month," resolves the difficulty by "Hebrew truth," and tracks the 150 days of rising, 150 of receding, the 40 days, and the sendings of the raven and dove as a real sequence of real days. This is the work of a man reading historia, not a fable to be dissolved into figure.

The seam is marked explicitly: a thing is said "according to the letter," and then a higher sense is drawn from it

This is according to the letter. But as for what pertains to a deeper meaning, the sight of the flood is a type of the purging of our soul. Therefore, when our mind cleanses itself from the earthly allurements by which it was previously delighted, it will also wipe away the filth of old desires with good thoughts, just as it absorbs the bitterness of the turbulent waters with purer waters first.

— On Noah and the Ark, ch. XIII, source. The formula recurs throughout the book: "This according to the letter. However, a higher understanding leads us to think…" (ch. X). Ambrose does not replace the letter with the figure; he states the letter, closes it off, and then builds the moral and spiritual sense as a second story atop the first. The historical flood is the floor, not the thing explained away.

The ark is a figure of the human body — its very proportions read off the body's

And just as the wooden ark has three different dimensions: a length of three hundred cubits, a width of fifty cubits, and a height of thirty cubits, so it is with our body. There is a greatest distance according to length, a medium distance according to width, and a smallest distance according to height.

— On Noah and the Ark, ch. VI, source. This is the signature Ambrosian reading — the ark's 300×50×30 cubits mapped onto the proportions of the human frame, with the roof "finished to a cubit from the top" as the head where the senses gather, and the side-door (Gen 6:16) the body's "less noble part" honored by Scripture's reticence. Augustine would take up the same body-of-the-ark figure. Crucially, the allegory works because the dimensions are the real dimensions given to a real Noah; the figure presupposes the history it interprets.

The ark is also a figure of the Church, and Noah's deliverance a type of the cross of Christ

For in three hundred is certainly signified the cross of Christ, by whose type the righteous man was delivered from the flood. And in fifty is the number of Jubilee, by which the Holy Spirit was sent from heaven, pouring forth grace into human hearts.

— On Noah and the Ark, ch. XXXIII, source. The side-door figure he refers at once "to both the members of the Church and to the Church itself" (ch. VIII), and the number three hundred — the Greek letter tau, shaped like a cross — he reads as the cross "by whose type the righteous man was delivered from the flood." The ark = Church / Christ's cross typology that Augustine sets down as a rule (City of God 15.26) is already fully formed in Ambrose, his teacher's contemporary — and, as in Augustine, laid atop a flood taken as fact.

The Flood happened in real time — dated to spring, the six hundredth year answering the sixth day of creation

It happened during the spring time that the Flood occurred, so that people were more tormented by it; and in the six hundredth year of Noah, in order to coincide with the creation of humanity, the destruction of humanity occurred.

— On Noah and the Ark, ch. XIV, source. Even where Ambrose mines the date for symbolic resonance — the Flood in Noah's 600th year answering Adam's creation on the sixth day, the springtime when "births increase" making the punishment the more bitter — the symbolism is read out of a fixed historical datum, the recorded year and month. He does not float the date free of history; he finds significance in the history's own numbers. Where the letter could be read "literally" he says so outright (ch. XX: "Unless… we wish to understand the stated form literally; that the first year was the year in which the flood began, after six hundred years").

Notes

• Ambrose slots on the timeline between Theophilus of Antioch (c. 185), the clean historical-apologetic witness, and John Chrysostom (c. 388), the Antiochene literalist. Ambrose is the Latin allegorist of the trio — yet he is no less committed to the history. He is the counter-example that makes the point: the heaviest figurative reading of the Flood in the Latin Fathers still rests on a flood read as a real, dated event.
• He is a chief witness for the argument Was patristic allegory of the Flood a denial of its history? (assessment: sound). Ambrose is one of the four "allegorists" (with Origen, Clement, and Augustine) named in that argument; his "according to the letter… but the deeper meaning" formula is the seam itself, drawn in his own hand.
• His ark-as-body and ark-as-Church figures feed directly into Augustine, who took the body-of-the-ark proportions and the side-door/cross typology and set the both/and down as an explicit hermeneutical rule in City of God 15.26–27. Reading Ambrose first shows that Augustine systematized a Latin practice already in place, rather than inventing it.
• On the question of geographic extent Ambrose is less explicit than Theophilus; his interest in De Noe is overwhelmingly moral and figurative. His value to the timeline is precisely as the allegorist who nonetheless keeps the history — see the historic-consensus thesis (assessment: sound), which the allegorists' retention of the literal event helps anchor.