Research Ethics In Ambrose Politics

Saint Ambrose is as famous as Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome and Great Gregory who are prominent Christian thinkers, and together they are called the "Four Latin Doctors" of the early church period. In the West, there are many scholars who study Saint Ambrose and his thoughts. However, most of the principal research is focused on the theological area of Saint Ambrose, while research in the political ethics area is minimal. Consequently, in order to fill the void, in this paper I will conduct a systematic study of the political ethical thoughts of Saint Ambrose.After completing my research, I believe that the political ethical thoughts of Saint Ambrose are the most significant and valuable parts of his whole theological and philosophical system and that they stand out as an apex within the wisdom traditions of the world. These thoughts not only play a great role in the development of later Christianity, but also have a significant impact on the shaping and development of Western civilization. For instance, his views of church and state not only defend the independence of the handling of spiritual events of the church and draw a clear boundary between church and state, but also lay a solid foundation for the development of later Christianity and set a classical pattern of church and state that still has great influence today. In other words, we can say that the theory of church and state is the most meaningful and important part of his political ethical thoughts. Based on the theory of church and state, Ambrose went further and came up with views on justice, liberty and property that are strong colored by Christianity.From the perspective of political ethics, this paper, which is based on the results of previous research, uses the methods of literary analysis and comparative study to dig deeply and to systematically study Saint Ambrose’s political ethical thoughts. In the first section, at the beginning, I talk about the life of Ambrose and the social and historical background of his era. Then, I define the intention and extension of the Political Ethics concept. Finally, I discuss the theological and philosophical foundations of Ambrose’s political ethical thoughts. In the first chapter, I focus on the most important part of his political thoughts, the theory of church and state. Firstly, in the theoretical section, I focus on his writings and then deeply analyze his views on church, on state and the relationship between the two. In the practical application section, from the perspective of history, I mainly introduce the four conflicts between church and state which were conducted by Saint Ambrose, before deeply analyzing the ethical thoughts and epic significance behind these conflicts. In the second chapter, I talk about his views on justice, which is a key concept for his political ethics, and mainly focus on his redefining of the justice concept. Then I study his views of the highest form of justice and his ideas of a just war. In the third chapter, I study his views on liberty. In the first part of this chapter, I present his ideas of the intention of liberty. In the second part, I focus my attention on his views of how to realize true freedom. In the fourth chapter, I mainly analyze his viewpoints of property based on two texts, On Naboth and The Duties of Clergy. Firstly, I study his ideas of the nature of property. Secondly I summarize his criticism of the private property which is caused by the greed of human beings. Finally, I introduce his arguments on how to use property correctly.