Trace & Aura by Patrick Boucheron

Trace & Aura: The Recurring Lives of St. Ambrose of Milan
By Patrick Boucheron
Translated by Lara Vergnaud & Willard Wood
Other Press, 2022

French historian Patrick Boucheron’s 2019 La trace et l’aura: Vies posthumes d’Ambroise de Milan now has a vibrant English-language translation, courtesy of Other Press and translators Lara Vergnaud and Willard Wood, and the title in both cases is singularly apt: St. Ambrose, one of the great founding figures of the Christian Church, was the subject of busy legend-making even while he was still alive, and the process continued until relatively recently. One Christian in five million could tell you even a single thing about St. Ambrose in 2022, but for centuries, as Bourcheron points out, his life and writings and music was scrutinized, debated, and rhapsodized by cleric and layman alike, both in his beloved Milan and across the breadth of Christendom. The studiosi ambrosiani, the Ambrosian Rite, the tradition of hymns – all these things seem inseparable from the Church in Italy.

Boucheron opens his book with limited aims, although still wildly impossible given the vastness of the literature: to study the elaboration of the Ambrosian legend as it was carried forward by three people: St. Augustine, Paulinus of Milan, and of course St. Ambrose himself. And he does this, with amazing concision and a wit that at every turn stops the book from feeling as scholarly as it is. 

But the book quickly and easily expands beyond even this enormous ambit, becoming in strange and convincing ways both as celebration of the great core of the Ambrosian legend (a man unwillingly but unflinchingly fighting, and eventually overcoming, the assembled temporal powers of the world in the name of his faith) and an equally-inviting celebration of how we study the past. “What a strange idea, when you think about it, to take an interest in these old refrains and, more seriously, to pretend they could be of interest to anyone else,” Boucheron muses at one point. “Yet here’s the thing: you can think, or dream really, all you want, but we don’t choose the ghosts that haunt us. Menacing or mocking, they remain the faithful companions of our obsessions. And so, here, once again, we will read a ghost story for consenting adults.”

Anamnesis is the term our author invokes, this purely liquid task of trying to reconstruct the past. One strong inference waiting to be drawn from this strange, beautiful book is that the task can’t be done, even though pilgrims still go to Milan’s lovely Basilica of Sant’ Ambrogio to attempt it. They, like this book, might argue they’re attempting more than that. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.