Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Ambrosiaster on Merit and Reward

The following comes from:

 

Ali Bonner, The Myth of Pelagianism (British Academy Monographs; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 191-92

 

Ambrosiaster on merit and reward

 

Ambrosiaster used the language of ‘merits’ (merita) and ‘rewards’ (praemia) to sell his brand of Christianity to his readers just as freely as Evagrius and Jerome did. He advertised a direct equation between virtue and reward just as they had done.281 He compared David and Saul in order to illustrate how their autonomous decisions determined their merit, which in turn determined God’s judgement:

 

[Saul] was furious because twice his prayers were not heard, since he was unworthy. But rather than persist with prayer so that he would have created merit in himself, through which he would have become worthy, instead impatient and indignant at God’s judgement, he sought help from idols that he had previously condemned as worthless. See then how it is clear that the judgement of God’s foreknowledge is just, even to those who do not want it.282

 

Ambrosiaster’s interpretation of the simile of the potter shaping pots at Rom. 9:21 made God’s justice paramount, and this justice referred back to God’s foreknowledge of autonomous human decisions.283

 

This is a very brief survey of the extent to which the author known as Ambrosiaster took the same interpretative standpoint as Pelagius did later. It serves to illustrate the typical content of ‘vulgate’ doctrine in circulation in the Latin West in the late 4th century. It also shows how far interpretation of the Bible was an unsupervised arena in which individuals were free to express themselves and to think creatively in writing. This presumption of free discussion was the norm inherited from classical traditions of philosophical enquiry and the rhetorical educational system.284

 

Notes for the Above:

 

(281) Ambrosiaster, In epistolas Paulinas, on Rom. 5:3 (ed. Vogels, CSEL 81/1, p. 153), Ambrosiaster stated that virtue, in the form of steadfast hope: ‘Has great merit with God’; ‘Magnum meritum est apud Deum.’

 

(282) Ambrosiaster, In epistolas Paulinas, on Rom. 9:16 (ed. Vogels, CSEL 81/1, p. 323), ‘[Saul] furens, quia semel et iterum non sit auditus, cum esset indignus, nec in prece perstitit, ut meritum sibi faceret, per quod esset dignus, sed inpatiens et de Dei iudicio indignatus ab idolis, quae prius uelut nullius momenti damnauerat, auxilium requisiuit. Ecce iustum esse iudicium praescientiae Dei etiam nolentibus manifestum est.’

 

(283) Ambrosiaster, In epistolas Paulinas, on Rom. 9:21 (ed. Vogels, CSEL 81/1, p. 329), ‘For as I said earlier, he knows who ought to be shown mercy’; ‘Scit enim cuius debeat misereri, sicut supra memoraui.’

 

(284) Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, p. 222.