Genesi e metamorfosi della tradizione ambrosiana

Résumé 0

The report has documented how early there arose, in the consciousness of the Church of Milan, the perception of itself as the guardian of the tradition—first of all magisterial—of its ancient bishop Ambrose. This fact, already indicated by the continuity in celebrating the Dies Natalis of his episcopate (December 7) even after Ambrose’s death, is confirmed by the interventions of the Milanese metropolitans Martinianus and Eusebius (the latter of Greek origin) during the debates linked to the councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), as well as by the title of vicarius Ambrosii applied by Gregory the Great to the holder of the metropolitan chair of Milan. If in the second half of the seventh century the hegemony of the Eastern ecclesiastical intellectuality in the West (which culminated in the documents of the Roman synod of 680, before the council convened in Constantinople in the same year) seems to have attenuated the vitality of rootedness in Ambrose’s teachings—as shown by the synodal texts of the metropolitan Mansuetus to emperor Constantine IV (written in the same year 680 by the Greek Damianus)—with the Carolingian age the revival of the reference to Saint Ambrose found its full expression in the definition “Ambrosian Church”, that we see in 881 used by the papal chancery too. After the Roman ecclesiastical reform of the eleventh century, the “Ambrosian” tradition of the Milanese Church—whose features previously included institutional, disciplinary, and also doctrinal aspects—assumed an almost exclusively liturgical shape. In this case we are facing a continuity of elements, some of which were already declared customary by Ambrose, while others were attested in his works, and still others represent the ritualization of late antiquity ecclesial practices. In Carolingian times this heritage underwent a strong consolidation, preserved—in its structural elements—in the following centuries. Therefore, as it is difficult to talk about a—more or less—belated “invention” of the Ambrosian tradition, so, as for its ritual aspects, we cannot but recognize a continuity of forms, orders, and texts, which refer undoubtedly to late antiquity, and not only Latin.