Ambrose, Philo, and the Presence of Art in the Bible

Abstract

The present article is a treatment of Ambrose, Ep. 55 (Faller-Zelzer). In this letter, Ambrose addresses a problem that had long troubled educated readers of the Greek and Latin Bible, but came especially to the fore during the pagan-Christian cultural rivalries of the fourth century. The biblical authors did not appear to have written their works according to principles of literary art, or as we might put it, rules of composition and style. In defense, Ambrose puts forward the assertion that the requisites of art are in fact indicated in the biblical text. In formulating his claim, he relies heavily on a section of Philo's treatise On Flight and Finding. However, in this passage, Philo is not con-cerned with the issue of art in the Bible. The objective of the first section of the article is to answer the question of why Ambrose uses the passage for the purpose that he does. In the second section, the further progression and specific nature of Ambrose's argument is considered in light of the Philonic source. The problem elucidated and addressed here is the manner in which Ambrose appears to move away from the issue of the literary quality of the Bible and the claim about the sacred authors' awareness of the principles of art.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.