Diehards: A Response

Peter Kaufman is much bolder a revisionist than Daniel Williams or myself. Where we both retain essentially the traditional picture of an Arian Auxentius and a Nicene Ambrose, Kaufman presents instead a pair of pragmatists, at least until Ambrose is embroiled in the Illyrian labyrinth. This reinterpretation must be measured against the evidence which Kaufman so exhilaratingly sifts.

Kaufman rightly emphasizes the difficulty of placing Auxentius in relation to the other bishops of northern Italy, and makes much of his apparent lack of “regional partisans.” But in doing so he distorts the two passages in contra Auxentium which refer to bishops. First, he muddies the waters unduly with the “impromptu council of Nicenes” invented by Manlio Simonetti. The only people being “heard” at c. Aux. 7 are Hilary and Auxentius: Hilary had lodged his complaint alone (note the singular, “suggessi”), and after his rebuff would leave town alone (c. Aux. 9). The “roughly ten bishops” (fere here, as usually when it modifies a number, is simply approximative) are as peripheral to Hilary’s account of the proceedings as they are to the grammar of the single sentence where they appear. Their identity, opinions and functions remain, indeed, “matters for conjecture,” but the important point is that even Hilary leaves them as passive witnesses to Auxentius’ blasphemous trickery.

Nor is it unreasonable to relate the quiescence of these bishops to the Auxentian synods which Hilary envisages in his conclusion. For Kaufman is simply mistaken to see this passage as an “insolent taunt.” When Hilary’s parting shot is quoted in full—“congreget nunc ille quas volet in me synodos, et hereticum me, ut saepe iam fecit, publico titulo conscribat, et quantam volet iram in me potentium moliatur” (c. Aux. 12)—it will immediately be seen that of the three events envisaged, he accepts the second as having already happened, while the “anger of the powerful” had just led to his expulsion from Milan; the synods, too, must therefore belong (at least in Hilary’s view) to the realm of the possible.

Kaufman also misrepresents Auxentius’ side of the story. For the bishop’s replies to Hilary are not “pruned and packed” into an “abstract,” but quoted verbatim and at some length (c. Aux. 13–15). And it is difficult to imagine a more straightforward, or eloquent, declaration of allegiance to the creed of Rimini. “Discretion during the 360s” might indeed “have dictated that even mildly contentious homoeans keep a low profile”; yet here Auxentius, under investigation by a notoriously suspicious and short-tempered emperor, supplies him with a cart-load of potentially incriminating papers. The chutzpah of this is worthy of Ambrose himself, and indeed arguably finds an echo in what the latter does to Valentinian’s son in de fide.

The idea that Valentinian’s government was “christologically diffident” is interesting and deserves further exploration. But Auxentius’ survival is more easily explained by that government’s well-attested concern for correct procedure, for his enemies never mobilized enough of his colleagues to secure his elimination. Kaufman invokes the ninety bishops of Damasus’ council, but almost all of these will have come from a different Italy entirely, the suburbicarian provinces, and so their votes counted for nothing; the same council’s synodal letter declares that Auxentius had been condemned by Venetian and Gallic bishops, not by the Aemilio-Ligurians who alone would impress Valentinian. These local bishops, indeed, were more probably non-partisan (ignorant simpletons, as Damasus’ synodal put it) than active homoeans; but that did not require Auxentius to dissimulate his own doctrine.

Neither emperor nor neighbors, then, cramped Auxentius’ freedom of ideological expression as much as Kaufman supposes. But the bishop did have opponents inside Milan. Kaufman both overstates Auxentius’ remark that Hilary and Eusebius “contendunt ubique schismata facere” (c. Aux. 15) as a specific claim “that Hilary was making, not exacerbating a schism in Milan” and suspends his customary skepticism in accepting this alleged claim. For Auxentius himself acknowledges that “aliqui de plebe,” a group of baptized Christians, had been hostile to him even before they were “stirred up” by Hilary and Eusebius (c. Aux. 13...