Ambrose Calls an Emperor to Penance

While Theodosius I was in Italy, the people of Thessalonica rioted. According to Sozomen the trouble began when Butheric, the general commanding in Illyricum, imprisoned a popular charioteer; the crowd demanded his release for the races and killed the general (Sozomen, Church History 7.25). The emperor ordered reprisals, and soldiers killed inhabitants and visitors alike, without trial (Sozomen, Church History 7.25) (Theodoret, Church History 5.17). Theodoret, writing sixty years later, says that seven thousand were reported killed (Theodoret, Church History 5.17).

A contemporary account survives in a letter of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, to the emperor. Ambrose says that he had pleaded against the order beforehand, that Theodosius himself tried too late to revoke it, and that a synod of bishops then meeting had deplored it. He had left the city before the emperor returned, giving illness as his reason, and he wrote with his own hand a letter “which you alone may read”. In it he sets before Theodosius the example of King David, who said “I have sinned against the Lord”, and tells him: “Sin is not done away but by tears and penitence.” Then he states what he will do: “I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present.” He ends by asking pardon for putting God before his emperor (Ambrose, Letter 51).

Theodosius submitted. Augustine of Hippo, writing some twenty-five years later, says that the emperor had promised the bishops to pardon the city, was pushed by men around him to take vengeance, and then did penance under the discipline of the church in such a way that the people wept to see their emperor prostrate (Augustine, City of God 5.26). Sozomen adds that he confessed his sin publicly in church, laid aside the imperial ornaments for the time of his penance, and made a law that death sentences should wait thirty days before being carried out (Sozomen, Church History 7.25). A law to that effect stands in the Theodosian Code (Theodosian Code 9.40.13).

Theodoret tells a more dramatic story. In his account Ambrose meets the emperor at the porch of the church and forbids him to cross the threshold; Theodosius weeps in his palace for eight months; at Christmas Ambrose admits him only after he has issued the thirty-day law; and when the emperor lingers inside the sanctuary Ambrose sends him out with the words “purple can make emperors, but not priests” (Theodoret, Church History 5.17). Sozomen, too, has Ambrose stop the emperor at the church gates (Sozomen, Church History 7.25). None of this is in Ambrose’s letter, which shows a bishop avoiding a meeting and writing in private.

The letter states the demand and the later accounts the outcome: a Christian emperor accepted that a bishop could withhold the eucharist from him until he had repented in public.