The " Vita ambrosii " or the true lie

First, we return to the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan to analyze the golden altar commissioned by Bishop Angilbert II (c. 830) and the tituli of the Vita ambrosii : twelve images, twelve bursts of life. The Vita ambrosii is the almost unique source of Ambrosian hagiography. When introducing the figure of its biographer, Paulinus diaconus, , it is impossible not to mention the work's dedicatee: "Venerable Father Augustine, you ask me too to retrace the life of the most blessed Ambrose, bishop of the Church of Milan"(Vita ambrosii, 1). Augustine is Ambrose's inventor: the account of their meeting evokes Ambrose's "reversed Platonism" (as Hervé Savon puts it), but also the portrait in action of a man of government. The work of Paulinus of Milan is thus reinterpreted both in the history of Christian biography in Italy, as a crucial milestone in the transition from the Passiones to the Vitae (echoing here the work of Stéphane Gioanni), and in the ancient secular tradition of narrative biography analyzed by Glen Bowersock in The True-Lie in Antiquity. We suggest drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes' approach, looking for the Ambrosian "biographemes" that can construct the life story as anamnesis or "countermarch".

Contents

• Back to the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan: the golden altar commissioned by Bishop Angilbert II (V. 830) and the tituli of the Vita ambrosii
• Twelve images, twelve bursts of life
• The Vita ambrosii and nothing else (or almost nothing else): why settle for so long?
• Latin lives, Greek lives: a remark on the simplicity of a hagiographic dossier
• Ambrose and his sister Marceline: a theology of virginity
• Ambrose and his brother Satyrus: two eulogies, a world turned upside down
• Augustine inventing Ambrose: the story of an encounter
• Ambrose the reader, who attracts by withdrawing
• Ambrose's reversed Platonism (Hervé Savon, Saint Ambrose and the exegesis of Philo the Jew)
• Augustine, "a catastrophic failure of the pedagogical system of late antiquity" (Peter Brown, The Life of Saint Augustine)
• The discovery of a divided self: "Now truly I was a whole, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself" (Augustine, Confessions [V, 10, 18])
• "Venerable Father Augustine, you also ask me to retrace the life of the most blessed Ambrose, bishop of the Church of Milan"(Vita ambrosii, 1)
• Paulinus diaconus : who is he? When did he write? 412 or 422?
• A banquet in Carthage: writing to keep memory alive(detraheret)
• The Pelagian ordeal and the Christian identity crisis (Robert Markus, Au risque du christianisme)
• From Passiones to Vitae : Paulinus of Milan and Christian biography in Italy
• The portrait in action of a man of government, "most holy bishop of the Church of Milan"
• The episcopal election of 374: "They suddenly agreed on his name alone with astonishing and incredible unanimity"(Vita ambrosii, 6)
• Prodigies, miracles, apparitions: the wonders of the Vita ambrosii
• Paulinus of Milan and the ancient secular tradition of narrative biography (Glen Bowersock, The Lie-True in Antiquity. Pagan literature and the Gospels)
• Parallel lives or plural biographies of a single person?
• "Biographèmes", whose distinction and mobility could travel beyond any destiny and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future corpus, promised to the same dispersion" (Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourrier, Loyola)
• The life story as anamnesis or "countermarch": in search of Ambrosian biographemes