Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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      PART TWO

      The Augustinian Legacy

      in the Early Middle Ages

       Adaptation, Reinterpretation, Resistance

      Though Augustine's ideas conditioned Christian conceptualizations of Jews and Judaism for centuries to come, they underwent a gradual process of adaptation and reformulation that commenced almost immediately. For three prominent churchmen of the period—the Italian Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), the Spanish Archbishop Isidore of Seville (ca. 570–636), and the Frankish Archbishop Agobard of Lyons (769–840)—the Augustinian legacy could permit considerable latitude in the formulation of an ideological posture toward the Jews, and the attitudes of these men varied widely. Some investigators have preferred to understand their divergent viewpoints as gravitating between two different patristic outlooks that medieval theologians inherited from their predecessors: the intolerance of John Chrysostom, who aimed to undermine a Jewish presence in a properly ordered Christian society, and the relative tolerance of Augustine, grounded in the spirit of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, that sanctioned and ordained such a presence. Recognizing the complex ambivalence in Augustine's constructions of Jews and Judaism, however, I present the ideas of these three early medieval churchmen as rooted in his legacy, even as they departed from it in various respects. One ought not to characterize Augustine as an advocate of Jews and Judaism. The Jews per se hardly ranked high on his theological or episcopal agenda. His memorable exegesis of Psalm 59:12 entailed considerably more than “Slay them not”; as Augustine himself explained the words of the psalmist, “It was inadequate for him to say, ‘Slay them not…without adding further, ‘Scatter them.”’ And for all that the doctrine of Jewish witness proved innovative, Augustine never intended to stray from the mainstream of patristic tradition. Written at the end of his life, his Tractatus adversus ludaeos accordingly reiterates Pauline teaching on the futility of the law and the rejection of Israel, indicts the Jews of its day for complicity in Jesus' crucifixion (“whom you in your parents led to his death”), and berates the Jews for their blindness, deafness, and violent anger (saeviendo).¹ Moreover, differences among them notwithstanding, Gregory, Isidore, and Agobard all acknowledged that the Jews still had a particular role to play in the Christian economy of salvation and that their function presupposed their right to exist. Much as they had crystallized for Augustine, these prelates' constructions of the Jews continued to emerge at the juncture of biblical hermeneutic, the philosophy of history, and anthropology in their respective theologies. Pursuant to his own particular context and outlook, each of these ecclesiastical leaders preserved the metaphorical significance that the Jews had found in the Augustinian corpus: as embodiments of that which is incomplete and imperfect in the present, Christian world, and as an index of that which separates this world from its final redemption.

      What, then, accounts for the distinctive developments of the early Middle Ages in our story? How did Gregory, Isidore, and Agobard adapt what they had inherited from Augustine, from other church fathers, and from Roman law to the context of a rapidly changing Christian society and culture? What allowed for the sharp differences in their Jewish policies? How, for instance, did Gregory espouse a more tolerant stance vis-à-vis the Jews without ever enunciating the Augustinian exegesis of Psalm 59:12, whereas Isidore and Agobard advocated much harsher policies and yet cited patristic precedent for maintaining the Jews within Christendom?

      A helpful treatment of these issues must take note of critical developments that followed the fall of the Western empire in the cultural and intellectual history of the Latin West. Though early medieval theologians may have made few original contributions to Christian doctrine and biblical exegesis, numerous scholars have observed that their worldview was narrower, that it tended to streamline complex and ambivalent conceptions of the fathers who preceded them. Robert Markus has suggested that this amounted to “the eclipse of the ‘secular’ dimension in Christians' consciousness,”² the decline and disappearance of the intermediate realm of the saeculum that had distinguished Augustine's own mentality and had characterized the eschatology, the time-related rituals, the sacred space of holy places, and the monasticism of fifth-century Christendom. In the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, and especially in the ideas of Gregory the Great, Christian conceptions of the world began to divide sharply and more simplistically between the presently СКАЧАТЬ