Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ assume from them the sevenfold punishment with which they have been burdened for their guilt in the murder of Christ…. Every emperor or king who has found them in his domain, having discovered them with that mark [of Cain], has not killed them—that is, he has not made them cease to live as Jews, distinct from the community of other nations by this blatant and appropriate sign of their observance.⁷

      Insofar as they are typified by Cain (Genesis 4:1–15), why need the Jews thus endure? Augustine made no mention of their scriptures in this regard but simply explained: “Throughout the present era (which proceeds to unfold in the manner of seven days), it will be readily apparent to believing Christians from the survival of the Jews, how those who killed the Lord when proudly empowered have merited subjection.”⁸ Owing to their punishment and guilt, the survival of the Jews in exile vindicates the claims of Christianity in the eyes of Christians themselves; for this reason has God ensured that none of the Gentile rulers obliterates them or the vestiges of their observance.

      Second, Augustine also found in Ham, the rebellious son of Noah (Genesis 9:18–27), a figure of the Jewish people, now enslaved to the church of the apostles and to the Gentiles (prefigured in Noah's worthy sons, Shem and Jafeth, respectively):

      The middle son—that is, the people of the Jews…—saw the nakedness of his father, since he consented to the death of Christ and related it to his brothers outside. Through its [that is, the Jewish people's] agency, that which was hidden in prophecy was made evident and publicized; and therefore it has been made the servant of its brethren. For what else is that nation today but the desks [scriniaria] of the Christians, bearing the law and the prophets as testimony to the tenets of the church, so that we honor through the sacrament what it announces through the letter?⁹

      In the case of their likeness to Ham, Augustine beheld in the Jews “desks of the Christians,” that is, an implement for preserving, transmitting, and expounding the prophecies of Christianity inscribed in the Old Testament. The Jews authenticate these scriptures, demonstrating now to the enemies of the church that the biblical testimonies to its legitimacy and even to its victory over them have not been forged. By consequence, “in not comprehending the truth they offer additional testimony to the truth, since they do not understand those books by which it was foretold that they would not understand.”¹⁰

      Third, the Contra Faustum links the substance of Augustine's anti-Jewish polemic with that of his attack upon. heretics in general, and the Manicheans in particular. Citing 1 Corinthians 11:19 (“there must be factions [hairéseis] among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized”), Augustine accorded both Jews and heretics the function of defining, albeit by contrast, the essential teachings of the church: “All who receive and read any books in our canon where it is demonstrated that Christ was born and suffered as a mortal, even though they do not respectfully clothe that mortality made bare in suffering with the harmonious sacrament of [Christian] unity…— although they may disagree among themselves, Jews with heretics or one sort of heretic with another—still prove useful to the church in a particular condition of servitude [; servitutis], either in bearing witness or [otherwise] in constituting proof.”¹¹ Like the Jews, the Manicheans err by understanding the Old Testament solely in its carnal sense; and they, too, although not completely excised from the cultivated olive tree of God's elect (Romans 11>), “have remained in the bitterness of the wiid olive.”¹² Yet in their rejection of biblical doctrine the Manicheans approximate pagans more than do the Jews;¹³ for, unlike the Jews, they seek “to break the commandments of the law, even in whose figures we recognize that Christ is prophesied.”¹⁴

      THE OLDER AUGUSTINE

      For an instructive example of Augustine's teaching on the Jews during the later stages of his career, we turn to his monumental De civitate Dei (On the City of God, ca. 414–25), composed in the wake of the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and during years of controversy with the Pelagians. Again we encounter a work that Augustine neither addressed to the Jews nor wrote out of particular interest in them but that necessarily considered Jewish existence, Jewish books, and Judaism within the context of its central concerns. As Augustine traced the parallel histories of heavenly and earthly cities from creation until his own era, he continued to resort to typological oppositions between the church and the Jews that abounded in the patristic Adversus ludaeos tradition—Sarah versus Hagar, Jacob versus Esau, and so forth. He reaffirmed the correspondence between old and new covenants—the former hidden in the latter, the latter revealed in the former—such that the teachings of the Old Testament were true both in their proper, historical sense and in their prefigurative, typological sense. Yet the temporal validity of the Old Testament remained limited; with the temple in Jerusalem destroyed, continued literal observance of Mosaic law was meaningless and, with regard to God's plan for human salvation, essentially irrelevant.¹⁵

      What, if anything, had changed in Augustine's teaching? Augustine had hinted in the De vera religione that the history of the heavenly city in pre-Christian times corresponded to that of the Jewish people. Anti-Christian fallout from the debacle of 410 now induced Augustine to highlight the superiority and independence of this sacred history, against the culture of its earthly counterpart; and, alongside the motifs of his earlier works, the De civitate Dei therefore blends several positive elements into its otherwise negative portrayal of the Jews. Especially during the period of the Old Testament, the Hebrews stood out as the first monotheists: Their prophets, their wisdom, and their written language were the most ancient; the contents of their Scripture were indisputably authentic and free of contradiction; and, contrary to charges that the Jews had falsified them, the textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible are reliable even now.¹⁶ Expanding upon the earlier suggestion of the De vera religione, Augustine instructed: “The adversaries of the City of God, belonging to Babylon,” may well include “the Israelites according to the flesh, the earth-born citizens of the earthly Jerusalem”;¹⁷ but earthly Israel and Jerusalem nonetheless symbolize the heavenly city.¹⁸ Through the Hebrew people, “through some who were knowledgeable and some who were ignorant, there was foretold what would occur from the advent of Christ until the present, as it continues to transpire.”¹⁹ Had the Jews not sinned repeatedly against God, and had they not, ultimately, put Jesus to death, independence, dominion, and Jerusalem would still be theirs.²⁰ And though the biblical Ishmael, the disinherited older son of the patriarch Abraham, typifies the synagogue in its relationship with God, Augustine did not disqualify the Jews from God's blessing of Abraham's children altogether:

      Isaac is the law and prophecy; Christ is blessed in these even through the mouth of the Jews, just as if he were blessed by one who does not know him, since they do not understand the law and prophecy…. The nations serve him; the princes adore him. He is lord over his brother, since his people rules the Jews…. He who has cursed him is accursed; and he who has blessed him is blessed. Our Christ, I say, is blessed—that is, he is truly mentioned—even by the mouths of the Jews, who, although they err, nonetheless chant the law and the prophets. (They think they are blessing another [messiah], whom they await in their error.)²¹

      Despite their misguided intentions and their outcast state, the Jews bless Christ and, almost despite themselves, they are thus recipients of divine blessing as well. For all their iniquity and misunderstanding, Augustine allotted the Jews a distinctive function and character in God's plan for human history and salvation, a role that extended from the period of the Old Testament into that of the New. This is his acclaimed doctrine of Jewish witness to the truth of Christianity, the innovative feature of Augustinian anti-Judaism par excellence, which the De civitate Dei elaborates with clarity and emphasis:

      Yet the Jews who slew him and chose not to believe in him…, having been vanquished rather pathetically by the Romans, completely deprived of their kingdom (where foreigners were already ruling over them), and scattered throughout the world (so that they are not lacking anywhere), are testimony for us through their own scriptures that we have not contrived СКАЧАТЬ