HistoricalChristian.Faith

Ambrose of Milan on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 339–397 AD (Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374, the foremost Latin churchman of his generation and the teacher who catechized and baptized Augustine at Easter 387; the citations below come from works spanning his episcopate — On the Death of Satyrus [c. 378], the Exposition of the Christian Faith [De Fide, c. 378–380], On the Holy Spirit [381], Concerning Repentance, Concerning Virginity, and On the Duties of the Clergy [c. 388]) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — cites it as "Scripture" and "it is written"; leaves no canon-list. Ambrose draws up no catalogue of the Old Testament books, so he renders no formal canon-verdict. But across his works he quotes the disputed books exactly as he quotes Moses, the Psalms, and the Gospel: the Wisdom of Solomon as what "Scripture says," Baruch as the very word of "the Lord," the Greek Susanna under "it is written," and Sirach wielded as a scriptural rebuke of Arius — with Tobit, Judith, and the Maccabean martyrs adduced beside the protocanon as patterns of holiness. His practice puts the weightiest Latin witness of the fourth century on the "using" side of the divide, beside his fellow Westerners Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactantius — and it stands in the direct line that runs from his pupil Augustine to the African councils that would enshrine the longer canon.

Claims & evidence

Wisdom of Solomon quoted as "Scripture": "He was taken away"

Preaching at the funeral of his brother in On the Death of Satyrus (I.30), Ambrose consoles himself that Satyrus died at an opportune hour, spared the barbarian invasions to come — just as Enoch was "translated" from a corrupt world. He grounds the consolation in a verse of the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon (4:11), introduced by the bare label he reserves for the protocanon:¹

For if no one mourns for Enoch, who was translated when the world was at peace and wars were not raging, but the people rather congratulated him, as Scripture says concerning him: "He was taken away, lest that wickedness should alter his understanding."

This is the firmest kind of "using" witness: the disputed book is not merely woven in but expressly named "Scripture" and adduced as the word that interprets a death — the same formula Ambrose gives Genesis or the Psalms.

Baruch read as the voice of "the Lord": "Put off, O Jerusalem, the garment of your mourning"

In the first book of Concerning Repentance (I.9.43), expounding God's readiness to forgive the penitent, Ambrose puts a passage of the deuterocanonical Baruch (5:1) directly into the mouth of "the Lord," as His own answer to repentant Jerusalem:²

And the Lord bids them lay aside the garments of mourning, and to cease the groanings of repentance, saying: "Put off, O Jerusalem, the garment of your mourning and affliction, and clothe yourself in beauty, the glory which God has given you forever."

Baruch was reckoned in the Greek and Latin tradition an appendix to Jeremiah, and Ambrose cites it as the direct speech of God — the same prophetic standing Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Basil gave the book.

The Greek Susanna under "it is written": "The Lord heard her voice"

In On the Holy Spirit (III.6.39), arguing that God hears the prayer of the chaste and the wronged, Ambrose tells the story of Susanna — the Greek addition to Daniel (ch. 13) — and clinches it with the citation-formula he uses for canonical narrative:³

For when Susanna, assailed by the conspiracy of the elders, saw that the mind of the people was moved by consideration for the old men, and destitute of all help, alone among men, conscious of her chastity she prayed God to judge; it is written: "The Lord heard her voice, when she was being led to be put to death."

The "it is written" attaches to the Greek-only Susanna narrative the very label later Fathers like Jerome would deny it — Jerome ranking Susanna among the parts of Daniel "not in the Hebrew." Ambrose treats it as written Scripture without qualification.

Sirach wielded against Arius: "Seek not that which is too deep for you"

The use is not merely edifying but doctrinal. In the fifth book of the Exposition of the Christian Faith (De Fide V.19.236), pressing the Arians on the unsearchable generation of the Son, Ambrose turns a verse of the deuterocanonical Sirach (3:22) into a scriptural rebuke aimed at the heresiarch by name:⁴

But Arius is not the Holy Spirit. Nay, it was said even to Arius and to all men: "Seek not that which is too deep for you."

The verse carries probative weight in a controversy over the deity of Christ — the word of Sirach set against a heretic as binding revelation, exactly as Alexander of Alexandria had chained Sirach 3:21 into his own case against Arius a generation earlier.

Tobit, Judith, and the Maccabean mother as patterns of holiness

Three softer uses adduce deuterocanonical figures as moral examples, braided into chains with protocanonical ones. In the Exposition of the Christian Faith (V.7.94), arguing that to be sent implies no inferiority in the one sent — his point about the Holy Spirit — Ambrose cites Tobit (9:3) beside Numbers 22:⁵

For Tobias sent Raphael the archangel, and an angel was sent to Balaam.

In Concerning Virginity (II.4.24), arguing that an act done for religion's sake is not defiled by its appearance, he sets Judith beside Rahab:⁶

And Judith adorned herself that she might please an adulterer, but because she did this for religion and not for love, no one considered her an adulteress.

And in On the Duties of the Clergy (I.41.212), cataloguing the church's martyrs, he holds up the mother of the seven sons from 2 Maccabees (7:20) — set, in the next breath, beside "those two-year-old children of Bethlehem" (Matthew 2:16):⁷

What shall I say of the mother who with joy looked on the corpses of her children as so many trophies, and found delight in the voices of her dying sons, as though in the songs of singers, noting in her children the tones of the glorious harp of her own heart, and a sweeter harmony of love than any strain of the lute could give?

These are historical-example uses rather than Scripture-formula citations, like Clement of Rome's "blessed Judith" — but they show the deuterocanonical narratives living in Ambrose's pastoral imagination as sacred history, set without seam beside Numbers, Joshua, and the Gospel.

Esdras adduced as a teaching authority — from a book outside even the Trent canon

One of Ambrose's citations cuts the other way, and is the more revealing for it. In On the Holy Spirit (II.6.49), answering Arians who pressed a verse of Amos to make the Holy Spirit a creature, Ambrose grants that a spirit — the wind, the spirit of the firmament — is indeed created, and grounds the point on the authority of "Esdras," citing a numbered book of Esdras as instruction:⁸

Esdras taught us that spirit is created, saying in the fourth book: "And upon the second day Thou madest the spirit of the firmament."

The verse is 4 Ezra 6:41 (the Latin 4 Esdras, the Apocalypse of Ezra; = 2 Esdras 6:41 in the King James Apocrypha) — and Ambrose adduces it the way he adduces a prophet: "Esdras taught us," a named book cited to settle a point in a doctrinal dispute. He was, in fact, among the firmest patristic users of this apocalyptic Esdras, quoting it elsewhere too (in On the Death of Satyrus he draws on the same book). Two things complicate any tidy account. First, the book's number is itself unstable: the de Romestin English here reads "the fourth book," but the critical Latin (CSEL) reads in tertio libro — "in the third book" — the translator having quietly conformed Ambrose's figure to the later Vulgate's "4 Esdras." The same 6:41 verse is cited as the "third" book by Ambrose and the "fourth" by his modern translator: a small, exact instance of the Esdras-numbering muddle that runs through the whole Latin tradition (and that bears on how Jerome counted his own four "books of Ezra"). Second, and more pointedly: 4 Ezra is in neither the Protestant nor the Tridentine canon — Trent (1546) excluded it, and it survives only in an appendix to the Clementine Vulgate. So the weightiest Latin churchman of the age was citing as a teaching authority an "Old Testament" book that neither later list would keep. The datapoint is genuinely two-edged: it confirms that the pre-Trent Latin West read disputed books as Scripture, while showing that its working "Old Testament" was broader and fuzzier than either the Reformation's canon or Trent's — not a clean witness to "the West always held exactly the Trent list."

Notes

• The weightiest Western "using" witness of the century. Ambrose's value to the canon question is geographical and chronological: he is the most authoritative Latin churchman of the late fourth century, and his practice runs the longer canon straight into the West. Even the apologist who argues the early church rejected the deuterocanon concedes that the Western church, under Augustine, received the Apocrypha; Ambrose is the generation just before and over Augustine — the bishop who baptized him in 387 — reading these books as Scripture before Augustine ever set out his reception-canon.
• Graded force, like the other "using" Fathers. Of the seven citations, the strongest are the three explicit-formula uses — Wisdom "as Scripture says," Baruch as the word of "the Lord," Susanna under "it is written" — and the doctrinal Sirach rebuke of Arius. The Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees citations are moral examples, the softer kind of use. Graded together they make Ambrose a many-sided "using" witness, not a one-off.
• List versus usage, the Western case. Ambrose belongs with the Fathers who read the disputed books as Scripture while drawing up no narrowing list — the Latin counterpart to the gap that runs through Athanasius, Cyril, and Basil. His near-contemporary Jerome, also a Latin and also at Milan's doorstep, drew the opposite, hardest line — ruling Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, and even Baruch out of the canon — so the two great Latin Fathers of the age stand on opposite sides of the divide that the African councils and the Reformation would inherit. The datapoint is weighed in the Arguments on whether the early church reckoned these books Scripture.
• A witness that cuts both ways. Ambrose's citation of 4 Ezra 6:41 (above) is the cleanest evidence that the working "Old Testament" of the late-fourth-century Latin West reached beyond the eventual Trent list, not just beyond the Protestant one: he cites as a teaching authority a book that neither the Reformation nor Trent (1546) would keep. It tells against a flat "the early church rejected the disputed books," but it equally tells against "the West always held exactly the Tridentine canon" — the real situation was a broader, fuzzier, and unevenly numbered Esdras corpus. The footnote records the matching numbering wobble: Ambrose's own Latin says the "third" book, his modern translator the "fourth," for one and the same verse.

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