Staging the Church? Theology as theater (A study of the 4th-century moral treatises of Ambrose of Milan)

Scholarly evaluation of Ambrose's "De Officiis", preoccupied with tracing t he work's philosophical relationship to Cicero's Stoicism, has too often ne glected the question of the text's social location and its intended readers hip. By way of some soundings in the fields of social history and gender st udies, a new reading of "De Oficiis" may be offered, which sees the text as a set of stage directions for the leading players in an ecclesial drama wh ich Ambrose is seeking to enact in the theatrical imperium of the late four th-century West. By simultaneously evoking and subverting core assumptions of the classical characterization of a male Roman elite, Ambrose seeks to i mpress a watching world, and especially a discerning class of cultural soph isticates, with the spectacle of his church's hierarchy as a new and superi or officialdom, whose moral virtues surpass the attainments of their antece dents or competitors in the "saeculum". Cicero's paradigm is to be supersed ed by the superiority of the "officia" pursued by the leaders of a socially triumphant catholic faith.