The Emperor at the Door

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the emperor at the door — Ambrose of Milan, the emperor Theodosius, and the massacre at Thessalonica.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

For six Wednesdays this lane has worked in doctrine. The mandate to speak. The manner of the speaking. The cost of it. The competence it requires. The mission it serves. Tonight, a change of register: no argument, but a case. One pastor, one ruler, one crime, one door — the most famous encounter between a bishop and an emperor in the history of the church, in which nearly everything this lane has said in the abstract happened in the flesh. Four witnesses of the old church will carry it: two historians, the bishop's own letter, and a judgment written within living memory.

First, the setting, from Theodoret, in his history of the church. Thessalonica, he says, is a large and very populous city. A garrison commander there — Sozomen the historian gives his name as Buthericus — imprisoned a popular charioteer after an attempted outrage, and when the races came round and the crowd demanded the man's release and was refused, the city rose in sedition. Magistrates were stoned; the commander himself was killed. So far, a riot. What followed was not. Theodoret:

The emperor was fired with anger when he heard the news, and unable to endure the rush of his passion, did not even check its onset by the curb of reason, but allowed his rage to be the minister of his vengeance. When the imperial passion had received its authority, as though itself an independent prince, it broke the bonds and yoke of reason, unsheathed swords of injustice right and left without distinction, and slew innocent and guilty together. No trial preceded the sentence. No condemnation was passed on the perpetrators of the crimes. Multitudes were mowed down like ears of grain in harvest-tide. It is said that seven thousand perished.

And one detail, attested by Augustine among others: the emperor had promised the bishops to pardon the city, and was stirred up again by his courtiers, so that the order went out after mercy had been pledged.

Sozomen, the other historian, preserves one scene from inside that day — worth hearing whole, because seven thousand is a number and this is not. From Sozomen:

A merchant offered himself to be slain as a substitute for his two sons who had both been selected as victims, and promised the soldiers to give them all the gold he possessed, on condition of their effecting the exchange. They could not but compassionate his misfortune, and consented to take him as a substitute for one of his sons, but declared that they did not dare to let off both the young men, as that would render the appointed number of the slain incomplete. The father gazed on his sons, groaning and weeping; he could not save either from death, but he continued hesitating until they had been put to death, being overcome by an equal love for each.

The appointed number of the slain — the whole horror in four words: not battle, not even riot-suppression, but a quota.

Now the pastor. Ambrose was bishop of Milan, where the court then sat, and Theodosius was not a stranger to him but a friend — a baptized, communing, orthodox Christian emperor. Which is precisely what makes this the lane's test case. It is easy to imagine confronting a Nero. The harder question is what you do when the offender is your own parishioner, your protector, and the most powerful man in the world, all at once.

What Ambrose did first was not public. He wrote a letter — carried privately, and, as he says in its closing lines, written in his own hand that the emperor alone might read it. The letter survives, and we will read it at length, because it is the most instructive document in the whole affair: a working pastor thinking on paper about how to rebuke a king. He begins not with the crime but with his own dilemma. He had been shut out of the court's confidence — decisions were kept from him because he was known to object — and he lays out the trap this made. From Ambrose, to Theodosius:

What, then, could I do? Should I not hear? But I could not close my ears with the wax of the old fables. Should I utter what I heard? But I was bound to be on my guard in my words against that which I feared in your commands, namely, lest some deed of blood should be committed. Should I keep silence? But then my conscience would be bound, my utterance taken away, which would be the most wretched condition of all. And where would be that text? If the priest speak not to him that erreth, he who errs shall die in his sin, and the priest shall be liable to the penalty because he warned not the erring.

That last sentence is the watchman's charge from the prophet Ezekiel, and since the whole letter hangs on it, hear the text itself as the prophet received it. From Ezekiel:

Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me. When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.

The watchman text is why Ambrose cannot simply grieve in private and let the matter pass. On his accounting, silence would not be tact; it would transfer the blood to his own hands.

Notice next what the letter does not do. It does not flatter, but neither does it revile. Ambrose gives the emperor his due before he gives him his sentence. He goes on:

Listen, august Emperor. I cannot deny that you have a zeal for the faith; I do confess that you have the fear of God. But you have a natural vehemence, which, if any one endeavours to soothe, you quickly turn to mercy; if any one stirs it up, you rouse it so much more that you can scarcely restrain it. Would that if no one soothe it, at least no one may inflame it!

If any one stirs it up. The massacre had accomplices who never drew a sword — the courtiers who reheated the emperor's cooling anger after mercy had been promised. This lane spent a whole night on the four hundred prophets of Ahab's court; here they are again, unnamed, in a Christian court, and their work product is seven thousand dead. The historians will shortly give one of them a name.

Then comes the turn, and it is the most quoted passage of the letter. Ambrose does not argue from his office. He argues from a story — the same story the prophet Nathan told, which this lane read on its first Wednesday of the summer. He goes on:

Are you ashamed, O Emperor, to do that which the royal prophet David, the forefather of Christ, according to the flesh, did? To him it was told how the rich man who had many flocks seized and killed the poor man's one lamb, because of the arrival of his guest, and recognizing that he himself was being condemned in the tale, for that he himself had done it, he said: I have sinned against the Lord. Bear it, then, without impatience, O Emperor, if it be said to you: You have done that which was spoken of to King David by the prophet.

And the scripture he is reaching for closes the loop in one verse. From the second book of Samuel:

And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.

Mark the shape of the argument. Ambrose does not say: I, the bishop, outrank you. He says: the man you yourself call the model of kingship was told his sin to his face, and his greatness began at the moment he received the telling. He walks the emperor through David's other falls — the census, the plague, the fasting for Abner — and draws the lesson. From Ambrose:

It is no matter of wonder that a man should sin, but this is reprehensible, if he does not recognize that he has erred, and humble himself before God. Sin is not done away but by tears and penitence. Neither angel can do it, nor archangel. The Lord Himself, Who alone can say, I am with you, if we have sinned, does not forgive any but those who repent.

And then the sentence the whole letter exists to deliver. One friend to another, in a letter no one else was meant to read. He goes on:

I urge, I beg, I exhort, I warn, for it is a grief to me, that you who were an example of unusual piety, who were conspicuous for clemency, who would not suffer single offenders to be put in peril, should not mourn that so many have perished. The devil envied that which was your most excellent possession. Conquer him whilst you still possess that wherewith you may conquer. Do not add another sin to your sin by a course of action which has injured many.

And the practical consequence, stated without heat:

I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present. Is that which is not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood of many? I do not think so.

That is the discipline, in one quiet conditional sentence — no anathema, no proclamation. A pastor telling one communicant, who happens to command every legion on earth, that he cannot come to the table until he has repented. And the letter ends, astonishingly, in tenderness:

I follow you with my love, my affection, and my prayers. If you believe me, be guided by me; if, I say, you believe me, acknowledge what I say; if you believe me not, pardon that which I do, in that I set God before you.

Pardon that which I do, in that I set God before you — the lane's whole summer compressed into one sentence of working pastoral method.

So much for the letter. What happened next is told by Theodoret, with one caveat spoken plainly: he writes a generation later, and like a dramatist — his speeches are ancient reportage of the substance, not a transcript. The penance, the months of exclusion, and the law that came of it are solid, standing independently in Sozomen and in Augustine. As Theodoret tells it, the emperor came to the church as was his custom, and the bishop met him outside the outer porch and forbade him the threshold, saying:

You seem, sir, not to know the magnitude of the bloody deed that has been done. Your rage has subsided, but your reason has not yet recognised the character of the deed. Peradventure your Imperial power prevents your recognising the sin, and power stands in the light of reason. We must not because we are dazzled by the sheen of the purple fail to see the weakness of the body that it robes. You are a sovereign, Sir, of men of like nature with your own, and who are in truth your fellow slaves; for there is one Lord and Sovereign of mankind, Creator of the Universe.

He goes on:

With what eyes then will you look on the temple of our common Lord — with what feet will you tread that holy threshold, how will you stretch forth your hands still dripping with the blood of unjust slaughter? Begone. Attempt not to add another crime to that which you have committed. Submit to the restriction to which the God the Lord of all agrees that you be sentenced. He will be your physician, He will give you health.

He will be your physician. Even in the hardest speech the old sources ever put in a pastor's mouth, the discipline is prescribed as medicine, not punishment. And Theodoret's next sentence gives the half of the miracle that depended entirely on the emperor:

Educated as he had been in the sacred oracles, Theodosius knew clearly what belonged to priests and what to emperors. He therefore bowed to the rebuke of Ambrose, and retired sighing and weeping to the palace.

Eight months passed — eight months in which the master of the Roman world did not come to church. Then, as Theodoret tells it, the feast of the Saviour's birth came round, and the emperor sat in his palace weeping, and Rufinus — controller of the household, the courtier the historians do name — asked him why. The answer shows what the discipline had actually done:

I am groaning and lamenting at the thought of my own calamity; for menials and for beggars the way into the church lies open; they can go in without fear, and put up their petitions to their own Lord. I dare not set my foot there, and besides this for me the door of heaven is shut, for I remember the voice of the Lord which plainly says, Whatsoever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven.

For menials and for beggars the way lies open; for the emperor it is shut. The discipline had inverted the whole architecture of the empire, and the emperor himself could read the inversion. Rufinus offered to go and talk the bishop round — of course he did; managing the moods of the mighty was his profession. Theodoret says the emperor told him plainly it would fail: I know the justice of the sentence passed by Ambrose, nor will he ever be moved by respect for my imperial power to transgress the law of God. Rufinus went anyway, and the bishop, seeing him, called him the adviser of the slaughter to his face and said that if the emperor came in his power rather than his penitence, I shall prevent him from crossing the sacred threshold. If he is for changing his sovereign power into that of a tyrant I too will gladly submit to a violent death.

There is the cost of speaking, priced without discount. Ambrose had no army, and both men knew the threat was not rhetorical. But Theodosius, receiving Rufinus's warning in the middle of the forum, gave the answer on which the whole story turns: I will go, said he, and accept the disgrace I deserve.

What followed, in the house of salutation outside the church, was not a surrender but a negotiation — and this passage is why the case belongs in a handbook for pastors and not merely in a book of legends. The emperor asked that his bonds be loosed. The bishop asked what repentance he had shown. Then the emperor said something remarkable. Theodoret gives it so:

Yours, said the emperor, is the duty alike of pointing out and of mixing the salve. It is for me to receive what is given me.

Prescribe, and I will take the medicine. And here is what the bishop prescribed — not a humiliation, not a donation, not a pilgrimage. A law. From Theodoret:

You let your passion minister justice, your passion not your reason gives judgment. Put forth therefore an edict which shall make the sentence of your passion null and void; let the sentences which have been published inflicting death or confiscation be suspended for thirty days awaiting the judgment of reason. When the days shall have elapsed let them that wrote the sentences exhibit their orders, and then, and not till then, when passion has calmed down, reason acting as sole judge shall examine the sentences and will see whether they be right or wrong.

Sit with that, because it may be the most instructive detail in the whole affair. The penance for a massacre committed in anger was a permanent institutional restraint on anger — a thirty-day stay between any capital sentence and its execution, binding on the emperor himself. The bishop did not ask the ruler to feel worse; he asked him to build the fence at the exact cliff he had gone over. Sozomen confirms the law, and its purpose: that room might be made for the exercise of mercy and repentance. This is what the lane's earlier nights called competence. Ambrose spoke to the one province where a pastor is the expert — sin, passion, repentance, and the mercy of God — and out of that expertise came better statecraft than the statesmen had produced. The emperor accepted it, Theodoret says, thought it admirable, signed it at once, and the bishop loosed the bond.

Then the penance itself. Theodoret:

Now the very faithful emperor came boldly within the holy temple but did not pray to his Lord standing, or even on his knees, but lying prone upon the ground he uttered David's cry: My soul cleaves unto the dust, quicken thou me according to your word. He plucked out his hair; he smote his head; he besprinkled the ground with drops of tears and prayed for pardon.

The master of the world, face down on the pavement, praying a psalm of David — the letter's argument made flesh. One scene remained. When the emperor brought his offering, he stayed inside the rail of the sanctuary, as he had been used to do in the East. Theodoret:

Ambrose sent word to him by the chief deacon and said, The inner place, sir, is open only to priests; to all the rest it is inaccessible; go out and stand where others stand; purple can make emperors, but not priests. This instruction too the faithful emperor most gladly received, and intimated in reply that it was not from any audacity that he had remained within the rails, but because he had understood that this was the custom at Constantinople. I owe thanks, he added, for being cured too of this error.

Purple can make emperors, but not priests. It is the most famous sentence in the whole story, and notice that it comes after the reconciliation, not during the quarrel — a boundary drawn in peacetime, received with thanks. Theodoret closes with a double verdict: both the archbishop and the emperor showed a mighty shining light of virtue — the archbishop for the warmth of his zeal, and the prince for the purity of his faith. And he adds a coda. Back in Constantinople, at a feast, Theodosius brought his gifts and went out of the sanctuary of his own accord; asked why he did not stay within, the emperor answered with a sigh: I have learned after great difficulty the differences between an emperor and a priest. It is not easy to find a man capable of teaching me the truth. Ambrosius alone deserves the title of bishop.

Every ruler could say that; almost none can find the man. Four hundred prophets are always available. One Micaiah, one Nathan, one Ambrose — these are scarce, and the scarcity is the argument of half this lane.

One more ancient witness, the weightiest. Augustine of Hippo was alive when all this happened, and in his great book on the city of God he gave the affair a single sentence that has fixed its meaning ever since. From Augustine:

And what could be more admirable than his religious humility, when, compelled by the urgency of certain of his intimates, he avenged the grievous crime of the Thessalonians, which at the prayer of the bishops he had promised to pardon, and, being laid hold of by the discipline of the church, did penance in such a way that the sight of his imperial loftiness prostrated made the people who were interceding for him weep more than the consciousness of offense had made them fear it when enraged?

Augustine's point is easy to miss: the penance did not diminish the emperor in the eyes of his people; it moved them past fear into love. The thing every ruler's counselors warn against — never apologize, never kneel, it reads as weakness — is precisely the thing that made Theodosius beloved and the story immortal.

Now, before the scales tip into hagiography, the survey owes you the standing cautions. Theodoret is the most dramatized of the sources; the speeches are his craft even where the facts are firm. And Ambrose was no plaster saint: on other occasions his zeal ran to positions a later age has judged far more harshly, and the same iron that shut the door at Milan could be, in other causes, simply intolerance. The case is not offered as a life to imitate entire. It is offered as one documented occasion on which the thing this lane keeps describing actually happened: a pastor spoke to power, privately first and publicly when he had to, at real risk, within his real competence, out of real love — and power repented.

And Ambrose did not invent his ground. Its clearest scriptural precedent is a king at an altar. From the second book of Chronicles:

But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the LORD his God, and went into the temple of the LORD to burn incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the LORD, that were valiant men: and they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the LORD, but to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the LORD God.

The chronicler goes on: the king was wroth, the censer still in his hand, and leprosy rose in his forehead, and they thrust him out; and he was a leper to the day of his death, cut off from the house of the LORD. Uzziah was a good king — that is the point. The boundary does not bend for good kings. When Ambrose said the inner place is open only to priests, he was quoting Azariah across the centuries. Purple could not make Uzziah a priest either.

The wisdom books, meanwhile, had long since priced both sides of the transaction. From the Proverbs:

Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

And from the Psalms, David's own words — the receiver's side of the covenant, lived out on the pavement at Milan:

Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil, which shall not break my head.

The apostles kept the tradition inside the church's own house. Paul writes to the Galatians, in one unembarrassed sentence: But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. And to Timothy he made the withstanding an ordinance, with due process and impartiality attached:

Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses. Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear. I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality.

Doing nothing by partiality. That is the clause Ambrose kept when the offender wore purple, and the clause most quietly broken in every age — not by rebuking the powerful too harshly, but by never quite getting around to it.

The commonplace books, as usual, have been turning these stones for centuries, and tonight they offer a small curiosity first. Day's great encyclopedia of prose quotations, compiled in the eighteen-eighties, has a headword for Repentance — and shelved under it sits a sentence you have already heard tonight: neither angel nor archangel can release us when we have sinned, unless we bring repentance with us. The attribution reads simply: Saint Ambrose. The private letter to one reader became, in time, common property — its own quiet argument for writing the hard letter well.

The rest of the stones arrange themselves around the case. On the reproof itself, an old collection credits a Roman emperor with the tersest verdict in the file: It is not sharp reproof but flattery that causeth mischief. Solon, the lawgiver: Reprove thy friend privately; commend him publicly — precisely the order Ambrose kept, the letter before the door. Barrow, on the manner: reproof must be like a bitter pill wrapped in gold and tempered with sugar, for if it doth not savor of humanity, it signifieth nothing. And Quarles, on the reprover's own hands: He that cleanses a blot with blurred fingers makes a greater blot.

On the repentance, Thomas Fuller: You cannot repent too soon, because you know not how soon it may be too late. Thomas Adams, with the lane's favorite kind of sentence: Repentance is faith's usher, and dews all her way with tears. And Madame Swetchine, in four words: Repentance is accepted remorse.

What, then, does the case yield? Set it beside the lane's summer and the pieces click into place. The mandate: Ambrose counted the watchman's arithmetic and found silence the costlier sin. The manner: private first, in his own hand; tender even in severity; the door shut with a physician's sentence, not an executioner's. The cost: a man with no army telling a man with every army that he would gladly die rather than yield the threshold. The competence: he prescribed only in the field where he was the expert, and the prescription was better statecraft than the court had produced. And the mission: nothing in the affair aimed at the throne. Ambrose sought no office, annexed no power, and handed the emperor back to his empire better fitted to rule it. The church remained the church; that is why the state was helped.

And one figure must not escape the file: Rufinus, the man who could always get a meeting, of whom the emperor himself said, he will never be moved by respect for my imperial power. The flatterer's whole craft assumes every man has a price denominated in access; the episode turns on the discovery that one man did not. A church that wishes to be useful to rulers must first be the kind of institution that cannot be managed — and must bear the cost, which is ordinarily not martyrdom but simply exclusion from the room.

Last, the caution the case itself insists on. This story is beloved because it ended well, and it ended well because of the man on the floor as much as the man at the door. Theodoret praised the archbishop for his brave words and the prince for his docility, and the second praise is the rarer. A pastor cannot manufacture a Theodosius. He can only be found faithful in the letter, the door, and the salve — and leave the pavement to God.

Theodosius, prone on the stones of Milan, prayed the words of David; it is fitting to end where he ended. The fifty-first psalm — the psalm of the king who was told his sin and lived — whole:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

He goes on:

Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness. O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise. For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.

Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God. That petition was the emperor's own case, word for word.

And a closing hymn. Charles Wesley published it under a heading that could stand over the whole of tonight: after a relapse into sin. Depth of Mercy:

Depth of mercy! Can there be mercy still reserved for me? Can my God His wrath forbear? me, the chief of sinners, spare?

I have long withstood His grace, long provoked Him to His face; would not hearken to His calls, grieved Him by a thousand falls.

I my Master have denied; I afresh have crucified, oft profaned His hallowed name, put Him to an open shame.

There for me the Savior stands, shows His wounds and spreads His hands. God is love! I know, I feel; Jesus weeps, but loves me still!

Now incline me to repent, let me now my fall lament; now my foul revolt deplore! weep, believe, and sin no more.

Good night.