Peter Brown of Princeton University, probably the world's leading scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, reviews several books on Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Augustine of Hippo in "A Tale of Two Bishops and a Brilliant Saint," New York Review of Books, 8 March 2012. The following excerpt comments on works by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz dealing with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and John Chrysostom, who became bishop of Constantinople, both great preachers, who countered imperial authority with a "confident Christian asceticism:"
...After Ambrose became bishop of Milan, no one knew if he would last. He persistently defied the court of the boy emperor Valentinian II; he imposed public penance on an emperor, and he lashed out against the rich in his sermons. Yet he died in place, the Grand Old Man of Italy. John Chrysostom [depicted here to the right of St. Matthew in an illustration from a Greek codex], by contrast, was handpicked by the emperor Arcadius to be bishop of
To establish the true weight of Ambrose, Liebeschuetz reaches back in time to the long roots of his thought and action in a Stoic moralism that enjoyed a new flowering in Christian circles as a result of the ascetic movement. He also reaches eastward in space to Ambrose’s near contemporary in the Greek world, John Chrysostom. For what the two men had in common was a remarkable development. In their hands, long-established codes of living in this world (propounded by philosophers since classical times) were transformed. They came to be seen as divinely sanctioned precepts with which to achieve entrance to the other world....
For Ambrose and John, asceticism did not mean flight from the world. It meant engagement in the world in the name of another world, more brilliant, more enduring, and more certain than their own. Both emerged from the ascetic battle against the “inertia of flesh and blood” with their traditional codes not abandoned but transformed. They took on the hardness of an industrial diamond. Both “believed that they knew God’s plan for the human race.” To bring these plans to fruition, both strove to combine the classical tradition of public courage, summed up in the long-cherished virtue of outspokenness—parrésia—with the tone of a Hebrew prophet bearing a message from God.
As we have seen, each fared very differently. Liebeschuetz tells us why, in a series of memorable character sketches: Ambrose “armed with charm, cunning, and, when the situation seemed to call for it, ruthlessness”; Chrysostom truly a Golden Mouth, but crippled by a “psychological handicap” when dealing with women in positions of power....
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