Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Ambrose refused the Emperor Theodosius communion until he repented of a massacre — and got it. A book argues with the weight of the man who preached it, so Contend is high.
A Doctor of the Church, and the bishop everyone remembers for baptising Augustine. Easy to recall, quick to the floor.
Cited for this book
Ambrose is why Augustine could read the Old Testament at all. He had dismissed it as crude; Ambrose preached it figurally until it turned out to be a book he had never actually read. Augustine names the moment in Confessions 6.4 — he came to Milan to study a rival’s technique and stayed for what the technique was carrying.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | The Letter Kills | Allegory | Argument | 66 | 100% | 15 |
| 28 | Preached at Milan | Ecclesiology | Argument | 64 | 100% | 15 |
Read it: What the Eye Does Not See
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.
“You must not trust, then, wholly to your bodily eyes; that which is not seen is more really seen, for the object of sight is temporal, but that other eternal, which is not apprehended by the eye, but is discerned by the mind and spirit.”
Ambrose of Milan, On the Mysteries 3 (trans. de Romestin & Duckworth, NPNF² 10, public domain, lightly modernized).
“For that sacrament which you receive is made what it is by the word of Christ.”
Ambrose of Milan, On the Mysteries 9 (trans. de Romestin & Duckworth, NPNF² 10, public domain).
“For it is not less to give a new nature to things than to change them.”
Ambrose of Milan, On the Mysteries 9 (trans. de Romestin & Duckworth, NPNF² 10, public domain).
“I have been warned, not by man, nor through man, but plainly by Himself that this is forbidden me… And prayer by itself is a sacrifice, it obtains pardon, when the oblation would bring offense.”
Ambrose of Milan, Letter 51, to the Emperor Theodosius after the massacre at Thessalonica, 390 (trans. de Romestin, NPNF² 10, public domain).
⚑ A rights note, because you deserve to know what you are reading. Ambrose’s six days on creation has no public-domain English translation — the standard one is modern and in copyright. So what is above is Ambrose from elsewhere: the baptismal sermons, and the letter.
It is still the same preacher. Ambrose in the pulpit is always doing this — pointing past the visible thing to the invisible one, and telling you the invisible one is the solider of the two.
The last passage is him refusing communion to an emperor who had just had several thousand civilians killed at Thessalonica, and telling the emperor so in writing.
This is the man whose preaching unlocked the Scriptures for Augustine, who had thrown the Old Testament away as crude and found out from Ambrose that he had been reading it flat.