Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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      In direct contrast to the De Genesi ad Manichaeos, Augustine's literal commentary accordingly seeks to show how everything in Genesis is to be understood primarily not in the figurative but in the proper sense.⁸⁷ Owing to Christianity's axiomatic identification of Judaism with the literal interpretation of the Bible, I shall argue below, Augustine's increasingly positive inclination to a literalist hermeneutic undoubtedly nourished the development of his conception of the Jews.

      TERRESTRIAL HISTORY

      The social historian Robert Nisbet has deemed the historical ideas of the De civitate Dei a veritable cornerstone of the Western idea of progress: “Reality for Augustine lay in the unitary human race and its progress toward fulfillment of all that was good in its being.”⁸⁸ Like his biblical hermeneutic, however, Augustine's valuation of thisworldly human experience developed over time; the two concerns influenced one another considerably.

      Although commonly agreeing that Augustine's philosophy of history changed considerably during the course of his adult life, scholars of the last half-century have struggled to define precisely when, how, and why. Some forty years ago, F. Edward Cranz linked a major shift in this dimension of Augustine's doctrine to his changing ideas on divine justice and human freedom, on grace and human will.⁸⁹ Late in the 380s, in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos and the De vera religione, Augustine translated Platonic notions of the gradual process whereby the human soul achieves philosophical perfection into his sevenfold schema of humanity's spiritual development throughout earthly history. During the next decade, however, as Augustine retreated from his belief in a human's ability to will faith in God, he replaced the seven ages of history with a fourfold division that emphasized the radical disjunction between epochs and the absolute dependence on divine grace: before the law, under the law, under grace, and the perfect peace of the final redemption (ante legem, sub lege, sub gratia, in pace). Especially in the wake of the Ad Simplicianum (To Simplicianus, 396), Augustine's earlier sense of innate progress in human spiritual history gave way to a quintessential contrast between the damned and the saved, which ruled out the possibility for any secular or political experience, even the Christianization of Rome, to serve as the vehicle for salvation. This comported well, Cranz maintained, with Tyconius's assertion of identity between Old and New Testaments, which Augustine now adopted: There is a single principle of salvation, not a series of grades that an individual—or the entire human race—ascends in turn. A stark opposition between unredeemed and redeemed, which deprived the Jewish past of the significance that it had had in Augustine's earlier notion of seven ages, now facilitated his two-tiered interpretation of human history in the De civitate Dei.90

      Much in Cranz's argument may prove correct, but his claim that Augustine's new understanding of the human condition devalued the historical importance of the Jews hardly comports with a careful review of the Augustinian corpus. Only at the end of the 390s did Augustine begin to elaborate the unique, testimonial function of the Jews in sacred history, and only in his later works—the De civitate Dei, for example— did the doctrine of Jewish witness achieve its full expression.⁹¹ I therefore believe that an alternative appraisal of Augustine's historical thought by the historian Robert Markus proves more instructive for the present discussion.

      Focusing above all on the De civitate Dei, Markus has singled out two key features of the older Augustine's philosophy of history: On one hand, Augustine posited a sharp, qualitative distinction between sacred and profane history, which emerged after years of contemplating the human condition, from a limitation of sacred history to that recounted by the divinely inspired authors of Scripture, and in the wake of the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. The Augustinian theology of disjunction between the realms of sacred and profane, Markus has demonstrated, first received clear-cut expression during the second decade of the fifth century. On the other hand, although Augustine denied Christian Rome ultimate significance in his scheme of salvation history, he likewise rejected the apocalyptic equation of Rome with the evil Babylon. Rather, he reconciled the contemporary alliance of church and empire as reflecting the imperfections of the saeculum, the locus of interpenetration of heavenly and earthly cities—none other than the present, pre-eschatological world that enshrines the essential ambiguities of human experience:

      At the most fundamental level, that of their ultimate allegiance, men were starkly divided between the two cities. But the saeculum, and the societies, groups and institutions whose careers constitute it, embraced both poles of the dichotomy…. To speak of the saeculum as the region of overlap between the heavenly and earthly cities, while true, is misleading if understood in terms of the logical notion of an overlap between two mutually not exclusive classes. For in their eschatological reality the two cities are, of course, mutually exclusive, while in their temporal reality they are indistinct: here the primary datum for Augustine is the integrity of the saeculum, or, more precisely, of the social structures and historical forms in which it is embodied…. All we can know is that the two cities are always present in any historical society; but we can never…identify the locus of either.⁹²

      Augustine thus refused to view even the Christian church of his age as perfect or to identify it with the heavenly city. By the same token, however, he could hardly dismiss the structures of society and the events of terrestrial history as profane and worthless. Inasmuch as the eschaton has yet to materialize, these social structures and historical events constitute the framework for the experiences of both cities. They are, in a word, all there is. Citizens of the heavenly city must therefore work to uphold the institutions of the saeculum, their imperfection notwithstanding, just as they yearn for liberation from them.

      Markus's model of the saeculum as a key to the older Augustine's understanding of history informs an appreciation of the doctrine of Jewish witness on several grounds. Augustine elaborated both ideas during the last two decades of his life, and the chronology hints at further parallels between the two. Among these, the paradoxical ambiguity that characterizes the institutions of the saeculum, and the resulting responsibility of God's saints to function at once in two contradictory realms,⁹³ will prove helpful in understanding the distinctive historical mission that Augustine assigned to the Jews. No less important, first expressions of the ideas of the saeculum coincided with the completion of the De Genesi ad litteram. For as Augustine had fallen back from allegorical and typological exegesis to embrace a more literalist hermeneutic, he necessarily took increased interest in the history of this world; indeed, the proper, literal truth of biblical narrative and the historical events of biblical antiquity were one and the same. When the De civitate Dei portrayed Cain as the founder of the earthly city, it deliberately avoided his typological prefiguration of the Jews that had allowed the younger Augustine to explain their survival; in the midst of a lengthy historical assessment of the primordial fratricide, Augustine now wrote: “Such was the founder of the earthly city—in which manner he also prefigured the Jews, by whom Christ the shepherd of humans (whom Abel the shepherd of livestock prefigured) was killed. Yet because this concerns prophetic allegory, I refrain from expounding it now; and I remember that in this regard I argued certain things against Faustus the Manichean.”⁹⁴ The contrast between the standard patristic Cain of the Contra Faustum and the realistic portrayal he receives in the De civitate Dei is striking; as Peter Brown has suggested, “it is like coming from the unearthly symbolic figures of Type and Antetype that face each other in the stained-glass windows along the walls of a Gothic cathedral, to the charged humanity of a religious painting by Rembrandt.”⁹⁵ Augustine's exegesis and historical philosophy evidently developed in tandem, endowing his writing with new life and conviction. Not by happenstance did a retreat from the typology of Cain in rationalizing the doctrine of Jewish witness accompany the emergence of Augustine's unconventional exegesis of Psalm 59:12 (“Slay them not”).⁹⁶

      HUMAN SEXUALITY

      Augustine's new regard for the concrete realities of human experience surfaced in yet another cluster of his favorite subjects: the human body, sex, and sinful concupiscence. It is most instructive to СКАЧАТЬ