Theodosius does public penance at Milan

other · 390 · Milan

Ambrose did not meet Theodosius when he came back to Milan. He pleaded illness and wrote instead, and Letter LI is that letter — the only account by anyone who was there. He puts it to the emperor as Nathan put it to David: I have written this, not in order to confound you, but that the examples of these kings may stir you up to put away this sin from your kingdom. He will not celebrate in his presence — is that which is not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood of many? And he says he wrote the last paragraph in his own hand for the emperor alone: he had dreamt that Theodosius came into the church and that he himself was not permitted to offer. Then the letter ends, urging repentance, and records no penance at all. The scene everyone remembers is in Theodoret, writing about sixty years later. The emperor arrives to enter the church as usual; Ambrose meets him outside the porch and forbids him the threshold — how will you stretch forth your hands still dripping with the blood of unjust slaughter? Theodosius withdraws and weeps for eight months, and at the feast of the Nativity lies face down on the pavement of the basilica, tearing his hair. Sozomen tells it the same way, with Ambrose taking hold of the purple robe at the gates. Neither scene is in Ambrose. The letter is fifty years earlier and written by one of the two men in it, and it describes a refusal conducted by post and a dream, not a confrontation in public. What all three witnesses do agree on is the substance, and it is the substance that mattered afterwards: the emperor was refused communion, he submitted, and the law that came out of it held every sentence of death or confiscation for thirty days so that reason and not passion would be the judge. Theodoret ends the episode with Ambrose sending word to Theodosius that the sanctuary is for priests — purple can make emperors, but not priests.

To be restored to communion, which Ambrose had refused him after Thessalonica.

An emperor doing public penance to a bishop, and a law holding every death sentence for thirty days so that anger could not be the judge.