Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ the physical creature to see the eternal light”; but such error among biblical Jews was different, Augustine noted, “since they were subjugated to temporal things in such a way that the one God was commended by them in everything.”¹¹³ Identifying the earthly Jerusalem prefigured by Sarah's handmaid Hagar (compare Galatians 4:21 and following) with the synagogue, the De civitate Dei likewise demonstrates what Gerard Caspary has termed the parameter of “concentric structures” in the Pauline and patristic exegesis of classic biblical pairs: Granted that Hagar and Sarah, or the two cities they signify, are opposites; yet, “a certain part of the earthly city has been rendered an image of the heavenly city, by symbolizing not itself but the other city, and therefore a servant [. serviens].”114

      Although the three Augustinian texts just cited refer primarily to pre-Christian times, the De civitate Dei proceeds to extend the enigmatic status of the Jews into the present age of the church. Suggestively, Augustine's account of the annals of the heavenly city on earth breaks off with the establishment of Christianity. Inasmuch as “since the coming of Christ, until the end of the world, all history is homogeneous,”¹¹⁵ one may not construe contemporary political events as the essence of God's plan for human redemption, and they command minimal attention in the Augustinian review of sacred history. In this vein, the passage of the De civitate Dei that records the life and death of Jesus and elaborates the doctrine of Jewish witness at length makes mere mention of Augustus Caesar, that “by him the world was pacified.”¹¹⁶ The pax romana may well have endowed the saeculum of the Christian era with its defining political character; but neither its agents nor its institutions, before or after the conversion of Constantine, could claim membership ex officio in the heavenly city. As a result, Augustine's magnum opus pays less attention to Roman imperial history than to the history of the Jews in their dispersion! Although they themselves were damned, their unique, testificatory role in the divine economy of salvation contributes to the ultimate victory of Christianity, and their history, before and after Jesus, more closely adumbrates the direction of the earthly history of the heavenly city. Rooted in and defined by membership in the earthly kingdom, the Jews—in their servile and testimonial capacity—nevertheless benefit the church and retain some connection to the heavenly kingdom too. Forging a link between otherwise conflicting realms, Augustine's Jews thus share in the functional value of the saeculum, that temporary, ambiguous domain of intersection between earthly and heavenly cities so critical to the Augustinian worldview. Just as the sacking of Rome in 410 moved Augustine to define Rome's purpose in Christian salvation history, perhaps the continued existence of the Jews in a Christian age demanded rationalization—rationalization provided by the doctrine of witness. Like the concrete events of terrestrial experience through and from which the Christian church yearns for its final redemption, the Jews belong to history, and yet, as signposts along the road to salvation, they point to its culmination.¹¹⁷

      The same Jew who embodied—for better or for worse—the literal sense of the Bible and the material reality of earthly experience also represented a straightforward and positive appreciation of human sexuality. Biblical and rabbinic Judaism construed the divine instruction of the first parents to “be fertile and increase” not only as an obligation but also as evidence of divine election. Along with their creation in the image of God, the sexual nature of human beings situated them on a cosmic frontier of sorts, midway between angels and beasts, blessed with unique opportunity and yet encumbered by singular responsibility. In most strains of ancient Judaism, marriage, sexual reproduction, and family life constituted norms of foundational importance; they pertained directly to the rationale for all human existence on earth and, in particular, to the place of the chosen people within the divine economy of salvation.¹¹⁸

      Augustine's allegorical exegesis of “Be fertile and increase” in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, throughout the Contra Faustum, and near the end of the Confessiones thus comported well with disparaging references to the carnality of the Jews. Despite their presumptions to ascetic and spiritual perfection, Augustine contended that the Manicheans emulated the “impious nation of carnal Jews” and shared in the Jewish life of “carnal disorder.”¹¹⁹ Yet when Augustine subsequently responded to the anti-ascetic convictions of Jovinian and the Pelagians, he encountered ideas much more akin to a Jewish understanding of human nature and sexuality. Paradoxically, against these “views of a silent majority that believed as firmly as did their Jewish neighbors that God had created humanity for marriage and childbirth,”¹²⁰ Augustine evinced a more favorable appraisal of human sexuality, and he tempered his attack upon the Jews. The stereotype of the carnal Jew admittedly did not disappear,¹²¹ but anti-Jewish polemic in general—and this stereotype in particular—figure much less prominently in Augustine's later, anti-Pelagian writings than one might otherwise expect. In their focus on original sin, on the resulting impossibility of meriting salvation through the observance of the law, on the correspondingly all-important character of divine grace, and on the essential differences between old and new covenants, these treatises forego numerous opportunities to liken Pelagian error to Jewish error; the Jews are notably absent from much of the discussion. Where Augustine did allude to them more extensively, as in the De spiritu et littera (On the Spirit and the Letter, 412) and the Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, 420–421), he avoided an overly explicit equation of that carnal mind which Paul deemed hostile to God (Romans 8:7) with the mentality of the Jews.¹²² On one occasion, Augustine openly rejected the conclusion that “the law of works was in Judaism but the law of faith in Christianity” as fallacious (fallat ista discretio).¹²³ Rather than contrast Christians with Jews and heretics, as he had done repeatedly in the anti-Manichean treatises considered above, he now consistently preferred to distinguish between varieties of precepts and, more importantly, between manners of responding to God's commandments.

      Why this curious shift in Augustine's appraisal of human sexuality, when, in view of the Pelagians, one might have expected a change of heart in the opposite direction? Augustine, I believe, had previously recognized that the dualistic Manicheans' strength derived in large measure from their deprecation of worldly pursuits, especially those of marriage and procreation, and he therefore interpreted “Be fertile and increase” figuratively to defend the unity of Scripture and its deity, effectively devaluing sexual reproduction. So too, to the extent that Catholic doctrine permitted, Augustine now agreed with his Pelagian opponents concerning the primordial sanctity of marriage and untainted sexual desire, reading the biblical mandate for procreation literally and thereby attempting to co-opt the appeal in the stance of his enemies.¹²⁴ Surely, one cannot write off such development in Augustinian thought to polemical opportunism; it, too, derived from a more literalist reading of Genesis and a more positive appreciation of this-worldly existence. It also informed the doctrine of Jewish witness. Like sex in the aftermath of the fall, the Jew exemplifies the imperfection of the contemporary Christian world, but somehow he retains a place within that world. He and his observance serve as living testimony— to God's original intentions for human life and to his future plans; to the Jews' own error and, by contrast, to the truth of the Christian faith.

      In the wake of the previous patristic Adversus ludaeos polemic, Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness marked a singular development in the history of Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion, I have endeavored to demonstrate that one should not attribute this doctrine to actual contacts that may have transpired between Augustine and the Jews of his day. Proof of such an explanation simply does not exist; moreover, that line of argument exaggerates the importance of the Jews among the diverse issues that engaged Augustine, who evidenced no deliberate intention of departing from the consensus of his patristic predecessors in this regard. Rather, one must appreciate the distinctive features of Augustinian anti-Judaism as emerging from within the heart of Augustinian thought. Changing considerations of exegesis, philosophy of history, and anthropology gradually converged, especially during the last two decades of Augustine's career, to yield a new construction of the Jews in his theological discourse—one that reflected and responded to the needs of that discourse. The injunction to “slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law,” presupposed a Jew very different from the Jews of the Roman Empire: a Jew СКАЧАТЬ