Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ of the doctrine of Jewish witness,⁵⁰ we can now move forward to a deeper appreciation of Augustine's constructions of Jews and Judaism. At the outset, one must refrain from attributing these Augustinian perceptions to direct, personal interaction between the bishop of Hippo and the Jews of his day. Evidence of Jewish settlement in northern Africa during the late imperial period allows only inconclusive estimations of the size and vitality of specific Jewish communities. Various studies of this question, in fact, reason circularly, relying predominantly on the limited evidence provided by Augustine himself.⁵¹ Jewish communities clearly existed in numerous North African locations, but no good indication of their size or significance exists; one highly doubts that Augustine beheld the sort of Jewry encountered by John Chrysostom in late-fourth-century Antioch or by Cyril of Alexandria in earlyfifth-century Egypt.⁵² Nor can one simply stipulate a direct link between the proselytizing activity of Jews and the Judaizing tendencies of Christians. The available data may suggest that Augustine should have known and dealt with practicing Jews,⁵³ but his dealings with them undoubtedly lacked the intensity and dangers experienced by John and Cyril. Augustine's own writings confirm this impression. Although they reveal some actual contact with contemporary Jews, much more clearly do they document the limitations of Augustine's familiarity with the Jewish community and with Judaism. Augustine knew an occasional word of Hebrew at most. His allusions to the particulars of Jewish religious practice are so few and so unimpressive that one cannot justifiably conclude that they derived from personal experience. Augustine acknowledged that his estimation of the reliability of the Jewish texts of Scripture stemmed from hearsay. If some of the unnamed individuals who assisted Augustine in understanding the Old Testament were Jewish, he owed the overwhelming preponderance of his knowledge of postbiblical Jewish tradition to other patristic writers, most notably Jerome.⁵⁴ Augustine's laments over the continued refusal of the Jews to accept Christianity—typically contrasted with the more successful attraction of Jews to the church in apostolic times—fail to indicate that they resulted from any personal disappointment in missionary activity.⁵⁵ Most of the strictures against Judaizing in the Augustinian corpus appear in lists of unacceptable practices in Christian life, hardly establishing that Augustine deemed such behavior a clear and present danger in his community.⁵⁶

      Rather, the doctrine of Jewish witness took shape against the backdrop of several major themes in Augustine's theology and writings: the interpretation of the Old Testament, especially Genesis; the appraisal of terrestrial history; and the assessment of human sexuality.⁵⁷ Relating to the Jews in varying degrees, these central concerns of Augustine clearly overshadowed his inclination to anti-Jewish polemic. They ranked much higher on his theologian's agenda, and, to the extent that he did take an interest in the Jews and Judaism, they controlled the nature and the extent of that interest. I shall first consider these Augustinian concerns individually and then evaluate their significance for our story.

      BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

      Early in his career as a biblical commentator, in his De Genest contra Manichaeos, Augustine distinguished between the literal or carnal meaning of the sacred text and its spiritual or allegorical sense; the literal sense understands Scripture exactly as “the letter sounds”; the allegorical, the figures or enigmas the letter contains. Significantly, Augustine did not yet equate this contrast with another one: that between history, which relates events of the past, and prophecy, which foretells those of the future. In this early Augustinian schema, one may interpret both history and prophecy either literally or allegorically. History and prophecy, in other words, denote the chronological orientation—or orientations—perceived in the narrative, whether or not, in the case of history, the narrated events actually transpired. Literal and allegorical refer to disparate levels of meaning sought by the reader in the text—as in the Jews' literal or carnal observance of the Sabbath, which contrasts with its allegorical understanding by Christians.⁵⁸ Here, in his first Genesis commentary, Augustine interpreted the opening chapters of Scripture chiefly in their figurative, allegorical sense,⁵⁹ though he considered them both as history and as prophecy and, in retrospect, he later regretted his inability adequately to expound on their literal sense.⁶⁰

      The independence of Augustine's distinctions between literal and allegorical, on one hand, and history and prophecy, on the other hand, was short-lived. Within several years of his first commentary on Genesis, Augustine returned to the interpretation of the biblical cosmogony in his De Genest ad litteram liber imperfectus (An Unfinished Book on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, ca. 393), in which he listed a fourfold scheme of biblical interpretation: “according to history, according to allegory, according to analogy, according to etiology. It is history when past deeds (of God or of humans) are recorded; allegory, when statements are understood figuratively; analogy, when the congruence of old and new testaments is demonstrated; etiology, when the causes of statements and deeds are related.”⁶¹ The particulars of this passage and its context—an avowedly literal commentary on Scripture—appear to signal some change in Augustine's hermeneutic. One cannot help but infer a measure of opposition between history and allegory; although the definition of history—the narration of events— remains the same as in De Genesi contra Manichaeos, its differentiation from allegory suggests a link between the historical and the nonallegorical—namely, the literal. No longer did Augustine allow for the possibility of nonfactual history; that is, a narrative about the past relating events that never, in fact, occurred. And Augustine's inclusion of much figurative interpretation—that is, not exactly the “the letter sounds”—in a commentary he entitled On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis hints further that he wished to reevaluate the essence of the literal sense. Nevertheless, if Augustine harbored the intention of definitively identifying the historical with the literal in the early 390s, it remained unfulfilled for quite some time. This first rendition of his literal Genesis commentary was admittedly imperfectus, a failed attempt abandoned prior to its conclusion.

      Perhaps this failure derived directly from Augustine's inability to define and to capture the literal, nonfigurative understanding of the Bible that he had hoped to convey; and, until the turn of the century, at least, his interpretation of the Old Testament remained overwhelmingly figurative.⁶² The first books of the De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), which Augustine wrote in 397, boldly subordinate the literal meaning of Scripture to its allegorical sense, inasmuch as “there is no reason for us to signify, that is, to give a sign, if not to draw forth and transmit to the mind of another that which transpires in the mind which gives the sign.”⁶³ Provided that one interprets Scripture so as to enhance his Catholic faith, the grounding of the interpretation in the concrete reality of the sign—that is, the dependence of a figurative reading upon the literal meaning of the text— matters relatively little. In fact, “a person supported by faith, hope, and charity so that he retains them resolutely does not need the scriptures except for teaching others,”⁶⁴ whereas “he who honors or venerates some signifier while ignorant of what it signifies is enslaved to the sign.”⁶⁵ Not the plain meaning of the biblical text but the doctrine—and unity—of the church serves as ultimate arbiter in the reconciliation of ambiguities,⁶⁶ because the Bible “asserts only the Catholic faith in matters past, future, and present.”⁶⁷ Despite the attribution of value to Mosaic law in the historicizing typology of the Contra Faustum,, it too belittles the value of the literal sense in its own right. Many provisions of the law—for instance, the uncleanliness of nonkosher animals—can be understood only figuratively;⁶⁸ Augustine pointed out that Philo the Jew himself recognized that much in the Old Testament, when understood literally, casts “the disgrace of ridiculous fables” on books of divine authorship, and he resorted to allegory as a result.⁶⁹ Therefore,

      one should not believe that there is anything narrated in the prophetical books which does not signify something in the future—except things placed so as to explain those matters which foretell of that king [Christ] and his people, whether through literal or figurative speech and deeds. For, just as in harps and other such musical instruments, not all things which are touched resonate with sounds, only the strings; the other parts of the entire body of the harp have been fashioned in such a way that those [strings], СКАЧАТЬ