Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1977, Blaðsíða 17

15
equals in all respects, there is nothing for it but lottery-like chance;
but if there is inequality, the one who has less dependent on him
as a private or public individual should yield to the other. St Am-
brose admits that on similar grounds of benefit he would prefer
the “wise” man, the man of reason and virtue, to be saved, but
he makes it clear that if a Christian will be just and righteous he
may never seek to save his own life at the expense of another’s -
he must always yield. If St Ambrose does not linger on the discus-
sion, it is because this plain Christian duty makes the solution of
Hekaton’s other practical cases of conscience a simple matter9.
“Quam breviter absolvit omnes quaestiones philosophorum!”, as
he says elsewhere (III 97).
In the Bishop-story the problem of choice is not in the forefront
of the writer’s interest. It is taken for granted that the skipper and
the bishop are given places in the boat, along with others of most
account and whose loss would be felt most. We cannot tell precisely
what that meant though one suspects a naive identification of
public value and mannvirding, typical of a stratified society. In
the case of the bishop, however, it was obviously his sacerdotal
public office that counted in his rescue, while it would be as an
individual soul that he regretted his failure to share the blessed lot
of those who stayed in the sinking ship. But though the drowned
had yielded, or had had no option but to yield, on Stoic criteria of
recognised inequality, they nevertheless willy-nilly fulfill their Chri-
stian duty in Ambrosian terms and because of their self-sacrifice
and good end go straight to heaven.
The Bjarni-story is more complicated. Bjarni renounces any
principle of mannvirding, which makes us assume that distinction
in rank and private and public value was normally recognised. He
therefore proposes what in effect Hekaton recommends with a
slirug of the shoulders in the last of the Ciceronian sentences,
“quasi sorte aut micando victus alteri cedet alter”. There is, of
course, nothing unusual in Bjami’s proposal because drawing lots
was (and is) a common way of resolving problems of precedence.
It is prescribed by a Norwegian law in circumstances closely ana-
9 Cf. Raymond Thamin, Saint Ambrose et La Morale chrétienne au IVe sikele,
Annales de l’TJniversité de Lyon, Fase. 15 (1895), p. 213.