Overview

One of the most important religious sites in the world is largely hidden and rarely visited. It lies under the piazza in front of Milan's cathedral, and was uncovered by archaeologists only after World War II. It is part of the foundations of a fourth century cathedral from the time of Bishop Ambrose, the most powerful figure in the Christian West during Late Antiquity. To reach it, one must go inside the huge later cathedral and find a stairway by its western wall. After descending narrow stairs one reaches an eight-sided pool (piscine) that was used for total-immersion baptisms by Ambrose. There at dawn on Easter of 387, a cluster of people seeking baptism had gathered after an all-night vigil. Among those seeking baptism was Augustine, an African who had served as the imperial orator at the Milan court of the Emperor. Augustine would go back to his native Africa to become the bishop of Hippo and the most influential writer of the Christian West during the whole later course of the Middle Ages. Alongside him stood his son, his mother, his brother, and two of his pupils and academic colleagues. Nothing less than the future of the Western church was being formed in this cluster of talent and devotion. Font of Life tells the story of this crucial event in the history of the Church. Beginning with the archaeology of Ambrose's Milan and the discovery of the baptistery, Garry Wills tells the story of the at times prickly relationship between Ambrose and Augustine and its importance for the future history of the Church, illuminating the scene of the baptism itself, along with the sources of its ritual, and introducing us to the company of the relatives and friends who greeted Augustine as he emerged from the pool. Appropriately, the book ends with a reflection on the later relationship between Augustine and Ambrose and the influence of the latter upon Augustine's later thought - which has been so seminal in the development of Christian thought ever since.

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9780199605798

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<br> Unusually instructive...But he does more than bring us down from the fairy-tale roof of the Duomo of Milan (the usual goal of tourists) to the ruins that now lie hidden beneath the ground. He takes us for a vertiginous drop of almost 1,800 years into a Christianity profoundly different from our own. --New York Review of Books<br><p><br> Wills shows where Ambrose and Augustine differed from each other in theology, temperament, and even ritual preference. He engagingly offers insight into the religion, politics, and culture of the time. -- Library Journal<br><br><p><br> A small masterpiece of exposition. --Booklist<p><br> A well-researched and fascinating historical look at Ambrose, Augustine, and the sacrament of baptism. --Publishers Weekly<p><br> Garry Wills is as deft and compelling when he untangles the ideas and politics of the age of Augustine as when he writes about John Wayne or Abraham Lincoln. This is a work of fresh and genuinely original scholarship told with verve and a keen sense of why the issues of fourth-century Milan still matter today. --James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University<p><br> The font in the Milan baptistery where Ambrose baptized Augustine at Easter 387 provides the setting for Garry Wills's dramatic evocation of the relations between two of the most powerful and influential figures in the early Christian church. He reveals the personal and theological distance that separated them in the years before and after the baptism. Wills's depiction of Augustine's confrontation with Ambrose is like a magnificent diptych in which the figures take on shifting forms and colors as the light changes. This is a nuanced, perceptive, and utterly persuasive account of two great men. --G. W. Bowersock, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton <br><p><br>

Author Information

Garry Wills is Emeritus Professor of History at Northwestern University. He has published widely in religious, cultural, and political history over an academic career spanning more than five decades and has received numerous awards for his works, which include Lincoln at Gettysburg (1993, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), and What Jesus Meant (2006).

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