History and Virtue: Contextualizing Exemplarity in Ambrose

Ambrose’s antithetical stance toward “philosophy” has been well documented, as has his emphasis on exemplarity for moral formation. The article recontextualizes Ambrose’s antithetical writing against the philosophers by analyzing his recurrent claim of the remote antiquity of Christian exemplars. Because of their chronological and theoretical originality, these exemplars offer the oldest and truest ways to wisdom, thereby depicting non-Christian philosophy as derivative speculation. What emerges in Ambrose’s writing is a picture of Christianity dictated by exemplarity and legitimated by recourse to history.