Chiesa e sinagoga nel pensiero e nell'azione del vescovo ambraogio

The episcopate of Ambrose of Milan (374-97) is pivotal to understanding the developing relationship between the Church and the Empire in late antiquity and the movement from the pluralistic Empire to the Cristian State. As bishop of Milan, Ambrose devoted his efforts to defend the indipendence and assert the authority of the Church as regards the State and was able to play a prominent role in the political and religious affairs of his age. In his activity Ambrose distinguished himself by his aggressive intolerance towards the main competing religions in the Christian Empire: paganism, Arian heresy and Judaism. He viewed the Church as a lily, "but this lily grows amidst prickly shrubs, that is the Jews and heretics". Although Ambrose's animosity against Jews, along with that of the other Fathers of the Church, was based on theological grounds he did not limit himself to doctrinal polemics: in 388, the episode of of the burning of a synagogue by Christians in Callinicum marked the passage from theological controversy to active hostility. When Theodosius reacted to the burning of the synagogue by behaving as a Roman Emperor would have done in order to respect the law and the rights of the Jews, Ambrosed challenged him to behave as a Christian Emperor whose duty is to ensure the triumph of "true religion" over the jewish error. Assuring impunity to Christians, Ambrose won the challenge with the Emperor: from then on, the Church did manage to influence imperial legislation in a way detrimental to the Jews. Only in 1966, by the words of Pope John Paul II, the Church censured the behavior of Ambrose as "an attempt on other people's right to freedom and justice".