Williams engages and revises standard treatments of the major conflicts in the career of Ambrose of Milan that scholars have typically viewed in “Arian vs. Nicene” terms. He argues that Ambrose regularly “frames” the actors and events in doctrinal categories to manufacture unanimity within his own Milanese Christian community. Drawing on recent studies that challenge the representation of religious groups as clearly defined units who share common beliefs, Williams maintains that one should acknowledge the fluid and dynamic nature of ancient Christian identity rather than presume the existence of rival factions. Close study of the sources for Ambrose's “orthodox” victories, especially the work of Ambrose himself, shows that orthodoxy and heresy played a relatively minor role in their unfolding. Rather, it was Ambrose's framing that depicted the parties threatening his authority as outcast “heretics” and his followers as the true believers.
Williams first challenges the assumption that shared doctrine fundamentally shaped early Christian ecclesial identity. Analyzing Gregory of Nyssa's famous sketch of the fierce and popular “doctrinal” debates in Constantinople around 383 (Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti 120.14–121.14), he argues that Gregory is not foremost recording “real-life” encounters; he is rather using a familiar polemical trope to depict his opponents as pseudo-philosophers with silly views. While Williams never denies that rival doctrinal camps often existed in late antique Christianity, he maintains that the evidence for their endurance and fixity is often presumed rather than demonstrated. Moreover, religious communities are marked primarily by shared rituals and symbols rather than “allegiance to a narrowly defined doctrinal agenda” (37). In this context, religious leaders often legitimized their own authority by policing the doctrinal boundaries that ensured consensus.
Given his doubts about the viability of clear, bright lines distinguishing ancient Christian factions, Williams is suspicious of categories such as “Arian” and “Nicene.” Modern attempts to refine them with more precise labels, such as “Homoian” for the followers of the Creed of Rimini (360), fare even worse: they do not correspond to any self-identity available in the ancient sources and, in fact, mislead readers through their precision. Thus, to remind us that such labels are defective, inverted commas abound (a practice that can be distracting, as in the phrase “the better-known and undoubtedly ‘Homoian’ bishop Auxentius of Durostorum” [253]).
Against this messy background, Williams identifies Ambrose's “framing” behind the major episodes in his career that are typically portrayed as disputes between the “orthodox” and the “heretics”: his election in 374, his involvement in the composition of De Fide and the management of the Council of Aquileia in 381, and the first and second “Basilica Crises” of 381 and 386. In every case Williams uses the statements and the silences in the ancient sources to show that the central actors cannot be reduced to their doctrinal allegiances. He engages recent historians—and especially Peter Kaufman's “Diehard Homoians and the Election of Ambrose,” (Journal of Early Christian Studies 5, no. 3 [1997]: 421–440) which critiques the influential biographies of Daniel Williams and Neil McLynn—to cast doubt on the common ascription of doctrinal motives to various ancient actors, including the Empress Justina and Ambrose's episcopal opponents. Thus, for instance, at the Council of Aquileia, Ambrose discredits Palladius by defining any disagreement with his own version of orthodoxy as an implicit endorsement of Arius; Ambrose thereby distanced his political rivals beyond the realm of respectable society. The basilica crises are conflicts not so much between “Nicene” and “Homoian” Christians but rather between Ambrose's community and threats from Roman civic authorities. And to the vexing question about the mysterious disappearance of the Homoians in the West after their “defeat” in 386, Williams argues that “Homoians” did not “disappear” because they were not really an identifiable community in the first place. Many of Williams's analyses will force scholars to rethink basic chronology and alliances, including the details of the “Second Basilica Crisis.”
Williams's study is painstaking and meticulous, and the text contains only a few misprints. He exposes many unreflective assumptions about the major players in late antique Milan and sheds light on obscure figures, such as the mysterious Julian Valens. Nevertheless, at points his argument depends on a systematic suspicion against his historical sources and Ambrose's expressed motives that is difficult to sustain. Thus, he identifies Ambrose's silence about the creed of Rimini as a refusal to enter into debate with the de facto theological majority (267) rather than, say, an honest claim that creeds are best handled in councils. Williams typically dismisses ancient historians’ claim that doctrine did, in fact, play a role in many of these disputes without sufficient evidence, as when, for instance, Theodoret's reference to heretical and orthodox factions at the time of Ambrose's election is passed over in a footnote (61 n.14). Indeed, Williams's compelling demonstration that the standard scholarly sources actually make little reference to doctrine can lead him to downplay the many other peripheral voices that do present these episodes in doctrinal terms.
Williams's Politics of Heresy is an impressive achievement. He reminds us that the beliefs of ordinary Christians in the ancient world were messier than rigid categories allow and that their pastors’ accounts of those beliefs were probably self-interested. All future Ambrosian scholars and students of late antiquity will benefit from his careful, if reasonably speculative, account of the central “doctrinal” achievements of the Bishop of Milan.
