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of terms and going back and unseasonably depriving the party of the prop-
erty loaned, interferes not only with the officium displayed but also with the
obligation created by giving and receiving the property [ non officium tantum
impedit, sed et suscepta obligatio inter dandum accipiendumque]. ( Digest, Paul., 29 ad ed. , D. 13.6.17.3)
From this passage it becomes clear that, while obligatio derives from an action,
officium derives, as we already know, from a condition or a status (in this case
parentage or affinity: necessarii sunt, ut Gallus Aelius ait, qui aut cognati, aut
adfines sunt, in quos necessaria officia conferuntur [as Gallus Aelius said, there must be either kinsmen or relatives upon whom the necessary officia are conferred]; Festus 12.158.22L).
א A passage from Gellius (13.3.1) informs us that the Romans distinguished be-
tween necessitas, which indicated an absolute material necessity ( vis quaepiam premens et cogens) and necessitudo, which expressed a juridical obligation (of human or divine law, ius quoddam et vinculum religiosae coniunctionis). The same author informs us thus that to designate a law and an office, the term necessitas was less frequent ( infrequens). The distinction seems to coincide with what, according to Kelsen, opposes the two German
words müssen and sollen, material necessity and juridical necessity.
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5. Cicero suggests what the proper nature of officium may be when he
formulates the argument of the work. Every question surrounding officium, he
writes, presents two aspects: the first concerns the highest good ( finis bonorum), the second the precepts “by which one can give form to the use of life in all its
aspects [ in omnes partes usus vitae conformari possit]” ( De officiis 1.7). Although these precepts also in some way have to do with the good, what characterizes
them is that “they seem rather to look to the institution of the common life
[ magis ad institutionem vitae communis spectare videntur]” (ibid.). What does
“giving form to the use of life” and “instituting the common life” mean here?
That the meaning of these expressions is not only juridical or moral but, so to
speak, anthropological is clarified immediately after, when Cicero opposes the
way of life proper to beasts to the properly human way of life. While the animal,
moved only by sensation, adapts itself immediately to what is nearby and present
( quod adest quodque praesens est) and does not concern itself with the past and
the future, “the human being, because he is endowed with reason, by which he
comprehends the connections among things [ consequentia], perceives the causes
of things, understands the relation of cause to effect and of effect to cause, draws
analogies, and connects and associates the present and the future, easily surveys
the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct
[ facile totius vitae cursum videt ad eamque degendam praeparat res necessarias]”
(ibid., 1.11). This care of things and other human beings produced by reason
“stimulates their souls and makes them more capable of governing things [ exsus-
citat etiam animos et maiores ad rem gerendam facit]” (ibid., 1.12).
“Conducting life [ vitam degere],” “governing things [ rem gerere]”: this is the meaning of the “giving form to the use of life [ usum vitae conformare]” and the
“instituting the common life [ vitam instituere]” that were in question in officium.
If human beings do not simply live their lives like the animals, but “conduct”
and “govern” life, officium is what renders life governable, that by means of which the life of humans is “instituted” and “formed.” What is decisive, however, is that
in this way, the politician and the jurist’s attention is shifted from the carrying
out of individual acts to the “use of life” as a whole; that is, it is identified with
the “institution of life” as such, with the conditions and the status that define the very existence of human beings in society.
It is from this perspective that Seneca can speak of an officium humanum, of
an office that applies to human beings insofar as they are bound with their fellow
humans in a relationship of sociabilitas: cum possim breviter illi formulam humani officii tradere: omne hoc, quod vides, quo divina atque humana conclusa sunt, unum
est: membra sumus corporis magni. Natura nos cognatos dedit, cum ex isdem et in
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eadem gigneret. Haec nobis amorem indidit mutuum et sociabile fecit. (Meanwhile,
I can lay down for humankind a rule, in short compass, for our duties in human
relationships: all that you behold, that which comprises both god and humanity,
is one—we are the parts of one great body. Nature produced us related to one
another, since she created us from the same source and to the same end. She en-
gendered in us mutual affection, and made us prone to friendship; Ad Lucilium
epistulae morales 95.51–52). Officium thus constitutes the human condition itself, and human beings, insofar as they are membra . . . corporis magni (parts of one
great body), are beings of officium.
א In 1934, Max Pohlenz, one of the greatest scholars of Stoicism, published a mono-
graph whose subtitle was Cicero’s “De Officiis” and Panaetius’s Ideal of Life. Taking account of the date of publication, however, the choice of title is significant: Antikes Führertum.
According to Pohlenz, the ultimate sense of Cicero’s work was that of furnishing a theory of Führertum, of political leadership, as “service performed for the people in its totality [ Dienst am Volksganzen].” “Cicero,” he writes, “adhered to the ideal of the era of Scipio and dreamed of a new leader [ Führer], of a new Scipio who by the authority of his person would be able to raise to new life the ancient Roman constitution and the good times of old. . . . The
epoch of the libera res publica, in which a politician could guide the state by relying solely on the love and trust of the people, had faded. A new leader [ Führer] was necessary, who with an authoritarian power, even if perhaps still in the ancient form, would put an end to partisan struggles. Cicero himself felt that the ideal of the political leader [ das Führerideal ]
which he recognized was no longer adapted to the present. Hence the tragic character of
the De Officiis” (Pohlenz, 146).
However one wants to read the obvious parallelism with the situation in the Germany
of his time, it is significant that Pohlenz situates officium in the sphere of the theory of political governance. Officium is Führertum understood as a leitourgia, as service performed for the people.
6. At this point Cicero’s strategy becomes more clear: it is a matter of defin-
ing, between morality and law, the sphere of officium as that in which what is in
question is the distinctively human capacity to govern one’s own life and those
of others. But the ambiguity of this strategy, which at least in part explains its
influence on medieval and modern ethics, is that the definition of this sphere
is carried out alongside a rereading in the light of officium of an essential part of ancient ethics: the theory of virtue. From the beginning, in fact, by establishing four loci of honestum, Cicero affirms that a certain type of officia arises from each of them ( certa officiorum genera nascuntur; De officiis 1.5). But in the course of the discussion, these officia are then so closely tied up with the corresponding virtues that it is impossible to distinguish them from each other.
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&nbs
p; De officiis in fact presents itself in this sense as a treatise on the virtues: not only is the first book made up essentially of an analysis of justice, beneficence,
magnanimity, and temperance, but in the two following books, as well, ample
space is dedicated to the analysis of liberality and being true to one’s word and
to the definition of virtue in general (ibid., 2.18). If officium is what renders the life of human beings governable, the virtues are the apparatus that allows one
to actualize this governance. This treatment of the duties ( uffici) as virtues and of virtues as duties ( uffici) is the most ambiguous legacy that Cicero’s work was
to transmit to the Christian West.
7. It can certainly come as a surprise that three centuries later Ambrose, set-
ting about the task of writing what will be presented as a treatise on the ethics of
the priests, had decided to take up again not only the title but also the structure
and themes of Cicero’s work. The text is, in fact, constructed from beginning to
end in a tenacious parallelism—and at the same time in a taking of distance that
is just as ostentatious but no less real—with respect to its pagan model.
The long preamble on silence, articulated around a detailed midrash on
Psalm 38 ( dixi custodiam vias meas, ut non delinquam in lingua mea [I have said: I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue]), apparently serves only
to allow us to understand that the idea of the composition of the treatise had
come to Ambrose almost by chance while meditating on the silendi patientia
and the opportunitas loquendi that are at question in a verse of the Holy Scrip-
ture (“It was while I was meditating on this Psalm, then, that the idea came to
me to write about officia” [ successit animo de officiis scribere]; 1.7.23), rather than by the reading of Cicero’s text, which was very familiar to those, like Ambrose,
who had arrived at the priesthood from the halls of the tribunes and public ad-
ministration ( raptus de tribunalibus atque administrationis infulis ad sacerdotium; Epistle 1.4). In reality, the reference to Panaetius and Cicero that immediately
follows and the resolution to turn to his “sons in the Gospel” precisely as Cicero
had turned to his son ( sicut Tullius ad erudiendum filium, it ego quoque ad vos
informandos filios meos . . . quos in avangelio genui [In the same way that Cicero wrote to instruct his son, I too am writing to mold you, my sons . . . whom I
have begotten in the gospel]; De officiis 1.7.24) show beyond a doubt what the
author’s strategy is: it is a matter of transferring the concept of officium from
the secular sphere of philosophy to that of the Christian Church. To this end
he inserts a brief etiological account, according to which the composition of the
work derived from a suggestion of the Holy Spirit: “As though he was encour-
aging me to write on the subject [ quasi adhortaretur ad scribendum], the Holy
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Spirit brought before me a reading which confirmed my view that we too are
able to speak of officium [ qua confirmaremur etiam in nobis officium dici posse]”
(ibid., 1.8.25). It is not an accident that the passage in question is the Latin ver-
sion of Luke 1:23, which we have seen is one of only two places where the term
leitourgia appears in the Gospel: ut impleti sunt dies officii eius (“that the days of his officium were completed,” a reference to Zachariah’s priestly functions).
“From what we read here, then,” concludes Ambrose, “it is clear that we too are
able to speak of officium” (a “we can” that, after the Holy Spirit’s exhortation,
sounds more like a “we must”).
And not only Holy Scripture, he adds immediately, but also reason proves that
Christians can use the term, if it is true, according to the etymology that Ambrose
takes from Donatus, that officium derives from efficere ( quandoquidem officium ab efficiendo dictum). The etymology will meet with success among Christian
authors, who from Isidore and Sicardus to Durand will take it up again, adding
to it the tautological (paranymic) formula quia unusquisque debet efficere suum
officium (which does not mean “each must do his duty” so much as rather “each
must render his social condition effective”).
From the very beginning the three essential points of Ambrose’s strategy are
thus fixed, as though they go without saying: (1) to transfer into the Church and
Christianize the concept of officium; (2) officium translates leitourgia and not only kathēkon; (3) it refers to the sphere of operativity that Ambrose, as we have seen (chap. 2, §10 above), knows to be precisely that of the Christian mystery.
8. Exactly like its Ciceronian model, whose disorganized and “improvised”
character scholars have emphasized (Testard, 14), Ambrose’s book has also
appeared incoherent, repetitive, and above all without originality to modern
readers. In reality the often slavish tracing of Cicero’s text and the lack of origi-
nality cease to appear surprising if one understands that they are perfectly func-
tional for the goal that Ambrose puts forward, which is nothing other than the
introduction of the concept of officium into the Church. It is for this reason that he can follow Cicero’s argumentation point by point, except each time substituting for the pagan exempla examples drawn from Holy Scripture. To the episodes
from Roman and Greek history there now correspond events from the history
of the Hebrews. In the argumentation, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and
Jacob take the place of Cato, Pompey, Scipio, Philip of Macedon, and Tiberius
Gracchus.
Just as rigorous is the interweaving of officia and the virtues that the biblical
examples are called upon to document. Just as Cicero derived from the four
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parts of honestum the same number of offices and virtues, so Ambrose, taking up
Cicero’s list punctiliously ( prudentia, iustitia, fortitudo, temperantia), affirms that
“whatever category of duty you look at derives from one of these four virtues
[ ab his quattuor virtutibus nascuntur officiorum genera]” ( De officiis 1.15.116). In this way, through the simple substitution of examples, the pagan officia become
Christian, the Stoic virtues Christian virtues, the decorum of the Roman senator
and magistrate the dignity and verecundia of Christian ministers.
One can understand, then, why a master of prose like Cicero and a subtle
orator like Ambrose can apparently fall into “disconnected fragments” (accord-
ing to the editor of a recent Italian edition) and into a “lack of internal coher-
ence” ( Steidle, 19). The meaning of the two books is neither in inventio nor in dispositio—the two pillars of Latin rhetoric. What is at stake in both cases is, rather, essentially terminological and political. That is to say, in the one case it is a matter of bringing a concept extraneous to politics and morality into those spheres
and—under the pretext of a Greek translation—technicizing it. In the other case
it is a matter of transferring Cicero’s officium point-by-point into the Church to found on it the praxis of priests. But as often happens, a terminological transformation, if it expresses a change in ontology, can turn out to be just as effective and
revolutionary as a material transformation. Putting on the garments and mask of
officium, not only the virtues but the entire edifice of ethics and politics along with them meets with a d
isplacement whose consequences we must perhaps still weigh.
9. Neither Cicero nor Ambrose gives a definition of duty ( ufficio). The first,
who affirms in the preface of his work that every discussion of the problem must
begin by defining quid sit officium, afterward neglects to do so and limits himself to articulating his discussion of it by means of a twofold division. The second
explicitly declares that he is renouncing a definition in favor of exemplification.
In the absence of a definition, it then becomes convenient in Ambrose’s case to
reflect on the etymology of the term suggested by him, which perhaps contains
a useful indication. Repeating Donatus’s etymology ( ab efficiendo), as we have
seen, he adds to it, however, a striking specification: officium ab efficiendo dictum
putamus, quasi efficium: sed propter decorum sermonis una immutata littera (for the word officium is, we believe, derived from efficere, as though it were efficium,
“achievement”; but in the interests of euphony, one letter has been changed)
(1.8.26). In this way, through the fabulation of an inexistent word ( efficium), the term is forcefully brought back to the sphere of effectiveness and effectus ( efficere means aliquid ad effectum adducere): officium is not defined by the opus of an operari but by the efficium of an efficere. Thus it is pure effectiveness.
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Diezinger has brought to light the close correlation that liturgical texts es-
tablish between officium and effectus. The liturgical action ( officium in the broad sense) results from the coming together of two elements that are distinct and at
the same time inseparable: the ministerium of the priest— officium in the strict sense, which acts only as instrumental cause—and the divine intervention—the
effectus—that completes it and renders it effective. A series of texts pulled from ancient sacramentaries and the Missale romanum almost obsessively articulate this
correlation: id quod fragili supplemus officio, tuo potius perficiatur effectu . . . ut quod nostro ministratur officio, tua benedictione potius impleatur . . . quod humilitatis nostrae gerendum est ministerio, virtutis tuae compleatur effectus . . . ad piae devotionis officium et ad tuae sanctificationi effectu (Diezinger, 76, 106). And the extent to which this correlation is strict and is to be understood as a genuine biunity appears