While Ambrose of Milan was a major actor on the ecclesiastical and political stage of late antiquity, he was also a devoted catechist and theologian. This chapter focuses on how Ambrose trained the spiritual senses of catechumens throughout Lenten and Eastern catechesis. In Lenten sermons on the patriarchs, Ambrose focused on baptism as a death to physical ways of seeing. In Holy Week sermons (On the Hexameron and Explanatio symboli), he sought to restructure catechetical knowledge by offering pro-Nicene accounts of God and creation. In mystagogical sermons (De mysteriis and De sacramentis), he gave neophytes instruction on how to perceive the spiritual meaning of the Christian rites.

The first section addresses the debate between Julian’s supporters and detractors following his sudden death in 363. Christian preachers turned Julian’s propagandistic use of his life into proof that Roman history was regulated by Christian providence. However, they also had to confront Julian’s re-assessment of the power dynamics between the ruler and the priests in the post-Constantinian empire. I argue that Julian was wary of how the identification of religious allegiance as the criterion for determining whether an emperor was a philosopher-ruler affected the interaction between the emperor, now decentred from his religious structures of choice, and the ecclesiastical leaders. The second section shows that that the episcopal engagement with philosophical ideas both provided clerics with a weapon against Julian’s attempts to re-centre the ruler in religious matters and shaped the relationship between the bishops and emperors in addressing heresy - a key challenge faced by Christianity in its self-construction as perfect system of knowledge. Episcopal appeals to an exclusive control of knowledge also affected the public role of non-conforming philosophers, which I illustrate with a case study of Synesius of Cyrene.

This chapter explores the literary use to which the bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) put two of his female relatives: his sister Marcellina, who was a consecrated virgin in Rome, and their ancestor the martyr Sotheris. I will argue that Ambrose exploited the meanings conveyed by these two women to justify his past as an imperial officer, strengthen his legitimacy as bishop, and depoliticise his interventions in imperial politics. Ambrose’s discourse relied on long-established Roman and Christian notions of femininity that depicted women as domestic and vulnerable objects of pity. At delicate moments during his episcopate, however, Ambrose reinterpreted these traditional images and narratives in original ways and used the symbol of his female relatives to foreground a distinctively Christian model of authority, which differed from aristocratic rule and imperial bureaucratic structures.