Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
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Название: Living Letters of the Law
Автор: Jeremy Cohen
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: История
isbn: 9780520922914
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Despite limitless modern interest in Augustine, scholars have still not explicated much of the complexity in his teaching on the Jews and Judaism; above all, most have neglected the place of that teaching within the broader context of Augustine's life and work. As they typically do in the Adversas ludaeos traditions of the Catholic Church, inconsistency and ambivalence regarding Jews and Judaism abound in the Augustinian corpus. Notwithstanding Bernhard Blumenkranz's seminal study of Augustine's Tractatus adversus ludaeos (Treatise against the Jews), in which he cites more than eleven hundred pertinent passages in Augustine's other works,2 Augustine appears to have had relatively little concern with Jews or Judaism in his day. The overwhelming majority of his pronouncements merely echo the important themes of long-established Pauline and patristic traditions: spiritual/ Christological versus literal/carnal interpretation of the Bible; contrasts and continuities between the old, Mosaic covenant and the new, Christian testament; God's rejection of the Jews and election of the Gentiles, the true descendants of Abraham; Jewish blindness and guilt in the death of Jesus and rejection of Christianity; and the inappropriateness of Jewish life in the postcrucifixion era. As Louis Ginzberg observed nearly a century ago, Augustine's pronouncements concerning the Jews “belong to the weakest and least important productions of his pen.”3
Still, a distinctive Augustinian legacy does resonate sharply in the history of Jewish-Christian relations; and, given that the Jews per se did not figure prominently on the agenda of Augustine the bishop or Augustine the theologian, one rightly wonders, why this resonance? The Jewish question for Augustine surely deserves our attention, but chiefly insofar as it functioned within the broader framework of Augustinian thought and instruction. In the following chapter, we shall therefore review Augustine's noteworthy pronouncements concerning the Jews at key junctures in his career, and only then shall we turn to his sole overtly anti-Jewish treatise and its well-known call for preserving the Jews of Christendom.4 Next, we shall analyze Augustine's distinctive doctrine of Jewish witness, its components and the chronology of its development. Finally, against the background of several preeminent concerns of Augustinian theological discourse, we shall attempt to understand the significance of the doctrine for Augustine and the logic of its appearance at a particular stage in his life.
1. For example, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Les Auteurs chrétiens latins du Moyen Age sur les Juifs et le Judaisme (Paris, 1963), and the articles collected in his Juifs et Chrétiens: Patristique et Moyen Age (London, 1977); Rosemary R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974), pp. 148–49; Kenneth R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church: Papal Policy toward the Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Antisemttism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford, 1988), pp. 73ff., and Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 17–20; Gilbert Dahan, “L' Article Iudei de la Summa Abel de Pierre le Chantre,” REA 27 (1981), 105–126; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the lews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), pp. 91ff.; and Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolrc See and the Jews: History, Pontifical Instltute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts 109 (Toronto, 1991), pp. 4–6, 29off.
2. Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins (Basel, 1946); see also his “Augustin et les Juifs, Augustin et le Judai' sme,” Recherches augustiniennes I (1958); 225–41.
3. Louis Ginzberg, “Augustine,” The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1902), 2:3 14.
4. Jesús Alvarez, Teologia del pueblo judio (Madrid, 1970), p. 15, noted that Augustine dedicated four treatises to the subject of the Jews: Sermo 96 on the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32); Epistula 196 to Bishop Asellicus (see below, chapter 1, at n. 56); the Tractatus adversus ludaeos; and another sermon no longer extant.
CHAPTER 1
The Doctrine of
Jewish Witness
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) lived during an age of transitions. During his lifetime, the division between Eastern and Western capitals of the Roman Empire became a permanent one, as the imperial government in the city of Rome itself entered the last generations of its history. More than any later fifth-century event, like the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476, the sacking of Rome by the Germanic Visigoths in 410 signaled the decline of classical civilization in contemporary eyes. Political change, with its accompanying social ferment, induced many to question the presuppositions upon which their societies and worldviews rested, contributing roundly to the cultural anxiety that characterized this period, to experimentation with new notions of personal power and security that sought to allay such anxiety, and to the propagation of new value systems in keeping with these ideas. Where, ultimately, did personal fulfillment lie? How might one seek to achieve it?
As the Roman Empire stood on the brink of a new era, so did the Christian church. Augustine formally embraced Christianity soon after Theodosius the Great declared it the official religion of the empire. Although the imperial ban on the pagan cult capped the victory of the recently persecuted Christian church over its detractors, it confronted church and state alike with an array of new problems. Christianity had claimed to spurn the pleasures and powers of this world, sharply demarcating the realms of God and Caesar, looking forward to an apocalypse that would replace existing political institutions with the rule of Christ and his saints. A Christian empire might ensure the safety and supremacy of Christians and their church, but how did it bear on the Christian quest for salvation and its underlying philosophy of human history? Furthermore, if Constantine's conversion earlier in the fourth century and Theodosius's marriage of the empire to the church decades later appeared to vindicate the Christian revolution against classical pagan civilization, how did the sacking of imperial Rome by the “barbarians” figure in this equation? Did it, as the old pagan aristocracy suggested, manifest the gods' wrath over the conversion of the empire to Christianity? If not, precisely what significance attached to such events of political history in God's plan for the salvation of the world?
Like these and other issues of his day, the course of Augustine's life, itself rife with conversions, transitions, power struggles, and intense self-examination, has been studied exhaustively. Alongside the decline of Rome and the triumph of the Roman Catholic Church, it too heralded the approaching junction between classical antiquity and the ensuing Christian Middle Ages. The concerns of Augustine's career invariably informed his distinctive ideas of the Jew. To trace the history of those ideas properly, one must appreciate the chronology of their appearance during Augustine's life and their place in the Augustinian worldview.
AUGUSTINE ON THE JEWS AND JUDAISM
THE EARLY YEARS: ON THE AGES OF MAN
Between his conversion to Christianity in 386 and his arrival in the North African town of Hippo in 391, Augustine formulated his renowned sevenfold scheme for the periodization of human history. In the De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis against the Manicheans, 388–389), Augustine found a biblical foundation for his theory in the story of creation in six days, and in the nature of the seventh day, the Sabbath, in particular: “I think that the reason why this rest is ascribed to the seventh day should be considered more carefully. For I see throughout the entire text of the divine scriptures that six specific ages of work are distinguished by their palpable limits, so to speak, so that rest is expected in the seventh age. And these six ages are similar to the six days in which those things which Scripture records that God created were made.” On this basis Augustine proceeded through the six days of the Genesis cosmogony, linking them to the successive eras of terrestrial history, СКАЧАТЬ