Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ of human history within the evolving Augustinian doctrine on the sexual nature of human beings.

      In an earlier study I analyzed Augustine's maturing interpretation of God's primordial blessing to human beings (Genesis 1:28), “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it,” as an index of developments in his estimation of human sexuality, noting the correspondence between these developments and the changing character of his biblical hermeneutic.⁹⁷ The De Genesi contra Manichaeos asks of this verse, “Should it be construed in a physical sense [carnaliter] or in a spiritual sense [spiritualiter]?”; and it responds straightforwardly, “Indeed, we can rightly understand it in a spiritual sense.”⁹⁸ Not only does the Confessiones maintain an allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1:28, but, as I noted above, it views this primordial blessing of human sexuality as scriptural support for the entire enterprise of figurative exegesis.⁹⁹ As Verna Harrison has argued in another context, ascetic renunciation—which figures so prominently in the Confessiones—and allegorical exegesis truly go hand in hand: “The interpretive move from letter to spiritual meaning directly parallels the ascetic's transfer of attention and desire from material to spiritual realities.”¹⁰⁰ But when, in his final years, Augustine reflected upon the shortcomings of the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, he turned directly to “Be fertile and increase” to demonstrate the inadequacies of this avowedly allegorical hermeneutic. To his earlier refusal to allow that God had intended a mandate for sexual reproduction in Paradise, he now replied, “I do not at all agree.”¹⁰¹ Corresponding to crossroads in the unfolding of his exegetical and historical ideas, this reversal in Augustine's appreciation of human sexuality began to appear in the aftermath of the Confessiones, and it received its first clear-cut expression in the ninth book of the De Genesi ad litteram. Only toward the end of his commentary, in one of the last chapters to be written, did Augustine proceed with absolute certainty, daring to label as ridiculous (ridiculum istuc est) the earlier patristic view that Adam and Eve were not yet ready for sexual activity and that their unauthorized sexual union amounted to theft from the symbolic fruit of the tree of knowledge.¹⁰² Once again, the new outlook found its place in the great synthesis of De civitate Dei:

      We have no doubt whatsoever that, in accordance with the blessing of God, to be fertile and increase and fill the earth is the gift of marriage, which God established originally, prior to human sin, creating male and female, which sexual quality is indeed evident in the flesh…. Although all of these things can appropriately be given a spiritual meaning, masculine and feminine cannot be understood [as Augustine had understood them in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos]103 as a simile for characteristics of the same individual human being, one of whose attributes being that which rules, another that which is ruled. But inasmuch as it is most clearly evident in the different sexual characteristics of the body, it would be very absurd to deny that male and female were created for the purpose of producing offspring, that they might be fertile and increase and fill the earth.¹⁰⁴

      Sexual desire and reproductive activity, held Augustine, pertain to human nature not only after the fall from Paradise but also in the state of grace that preceded the fall.

      If dramatic shifts in Augustine's opinions on exegesis and sexuality occurred at the same stage of his career and bore directly upon one another¹⁰⁵ so too must one appreciate the appropriateness of human sexual relationships within the historical-theoretical framework of the saeculum. Peter Brown thus appraised these first years of the fifth century as a critical transitional period in Augustine's career:

      A man whose own conversion had been prompted, in part, by the call of the desert, Augustine had come, within only ten years, to think about the Catholic Church from a viewing point deep within the structures of the settled world…. If the Catholic church was to remain united, it could do so only by validating Roman society. The bonds that held subjects to emperors, slaves to masters, wives to husbands, and children to parents could not be ignored, still less could they be abruptly abandoned in order to recover an “angelic” mode of life. They must, rather, be made to serve the Catholic cause.¹⁰⁶

      Other scholars have similarly analyzed Augustinian ideas on sexuality against the backdrop of the status of terrestrial history and institutions. Margaret Miles advocated “the thesis that Augustine's development in these areas moves from the tendency to view the body as the ground of existential alienation to affirmation of the whole person.”¹⁰⁷ She concluded that Augustine's later writings, “while apparently focusing on sexuality, actually use the issue as the testing ground for other issues: the power and the authority of the church and the question of whether the church will be the bastion of intellectual specialists or a layman's church.”¹⁰⁸ More recently, Robert Markus concurred that human sexuality afforded Augustine singular insight into both the glory and the misery of the fallen human condition. Genesis commentary proved a benchmark for the progress of Augustine's thought on all of these issues; in keeping with Augustine's distinctive notion of the saeculum, “a rehabilitation of the flesh” stood at the foundation of “a defence of Christian mediocrity.”¹⁰⁹ No doubt the best evidence for this argument remains Augustine himself, who paid tribute to the divine blessing of human sexuality as the De civitate Dei neared the crescendo of its conclusion: “That blessing which he had conveyed before the sin, stating ‘Be fertile and increase and fill the earth,’ he did not wish to withhold even after the sin, and the fecundity thereby granted has remained in the condemned species. The guilt of sin could not remove the wonderful power of the seed—and even more wondrous, the power by which the seed is produced—instilled and somehow ingrained in human bodies.”¹¹⁰ The younger Augustine, the Augustine of the late 380s and the 390s could never have reached such a judgment. These words characterize the viewpoint of an older, more experienced Augustine, who formulated his doctrine of Jewish witness during the same stage of his life.

      THE AUGUSTINIAN SENSE OF THE JEW

      I have reviewed these preeminent themes in Augustinian thought at some length, because their intersection—the meeting of text, body, and concrete historical event—offers the most enlightening framework for appreciating Augustine's construction of Jews and Judaism. Not by coincidence did his most thorough formulation of this doctrine, earmarked by its appeal to Psalm 59:12, take shape during the same years as his resolute commitment to literalist exegesis, his enhanced appreciation of terrestrial history, and his more sympathetic attitude to human sexuality. How, then, did each of these trajectories in Augustinian thought intersect the doctrine of Jewish witness?

      The link between Judaism and the literal interpretation of Scripture hardly requires additional demonstration. Augustine explained, repeatedly and pointedly: The Jews preserve the literal sense, they represent it, and they actually embody it—as book bearers, librarians, living signposts, and desks, who validate a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament. Unlike the “true bride of Christ,” the Jew knows not the difference between letter and spirit. While precisely this blindness obviates his salvation, it simultaneously facilitates his role as witness.¹¹¹ From such a perspective, the more important the literal—that is, the original, historical—meaning of biblical narrative in the instruction of Christianity, the more valuable the Jewish presence in a properly ordered Christian society.

      Like the saeculum in the Augustinian philosophy of history, Augustine's Jew constitutes a paradox, a set of living contradictions. He survived the crucifixion, though he deserved to die in punishment for it; he somehow belongs in Christendom, though he eschews Christianity; he accompanies the church on its march through history and in its expansion throughout the world, though he remains fixed “in useless antiquity.” This Jew pertains, at one and the same time, to two opposing realms. The De vera religione, recall, identifies the promise of the Old Testament with an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one, but states that believers in the one God before Jesus “led the life of the earthly man while subject to a measure of righteousness.”¹¹² Augustine's literalist Jew exemplified the folly that the De doctrina christiana terms “a miserable enslavement of the spirit: to take signs for things СКАЧАТЬ