Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
of biblical doctrine the Manicheans approximate pagans more than do the Jews;13 for, unlike the Jews, they seek “to break the commandments of the law, even in whose figures we recognize that Christ is prophesied.”14
THE OLDER AUGUSTINE
For an instructive example of Augustine's teaching on the Jews during the later stages of his career, we turn to his monumental De civitate Dei (On the City of God, ca. 414–25), composed in the wake of the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and during years of controversy with the Pelagians. Again we encounter a work that Augustine neither addressed to the Jews nor wrote out of particular interest in them but that necessarily considered Jewish existence, Jewish books, and Judaism within the context of its central concerns. As Augustine traced the parallel histories of heavenly and earthly cities from creation until his own era, he continued to resort to typological oppositions between the church and the Jews that abounded in the patristic Adversus ludaeos tradition—Sarah versus Hagar, Jacob versus Esau, and so forth. He reaffirmed the correspondence between old and new covenants—the former hidden in the latter, the latter revealed in the former—such that the teachings of the Old Testament were true both in their proper, historical sense and in their prefigurative, typological sense. Yet the temporal validity of the Old Testament remained limited; with the temple in Jerusalem destroyed, continued literal observance of Mosaic law was meaningless and, with regard to God's plan for human salvation, essentially irrelevant.15
What, if anything, had changed in Augustine's teaching? Augustine had hinted in the De vera religione that the history of the heavenly city in pre-Christian times corresponded to that of the Jewish people. Anti-Christian fallout from the debacle of 410 now induced Augustine to highlight the superiority and independence of this sacred history, against the culture of its earthly counterpart; and, alongside the motifs of his earlier works, the De civitate Dei therefore blends several positive elements into its otherwise negative portrayal of the Jews. Especially during the period of the Old Testament, the Hebrews stood out as the first monotheists: Their prophets, their wisdom, and their written language were the most ancient; the contents of their Scripture were indisputably authentic and free of contradiction; and, contrary to charges that the Jews had falsified them, the textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible are reliable even now.16 Expanding upon the earlier suggestion of the De vera religione, Augustine instructed: “The adversaries of the City of God, belonging to Babylon,” may well include “the Israelites according to the flesh, the earth-born citizens of the earthly Jerusalem”;17 but earthly Israel and Jerusalem nonetheless symbolize the heavenly city.18 Through the Hebrew people, “through some who were knowledgeable and some who were ignorant, there was foretold what would occur from the advent of Christ until the present, as it continues to transpire.”19 Had the Jews not sinned repeatedly against God, and had they not, ultimately, put Jesus to death, independence, dominion, and Jerusalem would still be theirs.20 And though the biblical Ishmael, the disinherited older son of the patriarch Abraham, typifies the synagogue in its relationship with God, Augustine did not disqualify the Jews from God's blessing of Abraham's children altogether:
Isaac is the law and prophecy; Christ is blessed in these even through the mouth of the Jews, just as if he were blessed by one who does not know him, since they do not understand the law and prophecy…. The nations serve him; the princes adore him. He is lord over his brother, since his people rules the Jews…. He who has cursed him is accursed; and he who has blessed him is blessed. Our Christ, I say, is blessed—that is, he is truly mentioned—even by the mouths of the Jews, who, although they err, nonetheless chant the law and the prophets. (They think they are blessing another [messiah], whom they await in their error.)21
Despite their misguided intentions and their outcast state, the Jews bless Christ and, almost despite themselves, they are thus recipients of divine blessing as well. For all their iniquity and misunderstanding, Augustine allotted the Jews a distinctive function and character in God's plan for human history and salvation, a role that extended from the period of the Old Testament into that of the New. This is his acclaimed doctrine of Jewish witness to the truth of Christianity, the innovative feature of Augustinian anti-Judaism par excellence, which the De civitate Dei elaborates with clarity and emphasis:
Yet the Jews who slew him and chose not to believe in him…, having been vanquished rather pathetically by the Romans, completely deprived of their kingdom (where foreigners were already ruling over them), and scattered throughout the world (so that they are not lacking anywhere), are testimony for us through their own scriptures that we have not contrived the prophecies concerning Christ…. Hence, when they do not believe our scriptures, their own, which they read blindly, are thus fulfilled in them…. For we realize that on account of this testimony, which they unwillingly provide for us by having and by preserving these books, they are scattered among all the nations, wherever the church of Christ extends itself.22
Within the De civitate Dei's more nuanced exposition of the early stages in the history of salvation, and not simply in support of the figurative exegesis of the Bible that dominated the Contra Faustum, Augustine here reoriented and sharpened several ideas of his earlier, anti-Manichean treatise: The Jews survive as living testimony to the antiquity of the Christian promise, while their enslavement and dispersion confirm that the church has displaced them. Yet here, in the De civitate Dei, Augustine added significantly to the substance of his earlier formulation:
For there is a prophecy given previously in the Psalms (which they still read) concerning this, where it is written…: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law [legem tuam]; scatter them in your might.”23 God thus demonstrated to the church the grace of his mercy upon his enemies the Jews, because, as the Apostle says, “Their offense is the salvation of the Gentiles.” Therefore, he did not kill them—that is, he did not make them cease living as Jews, although conquered and oppressed by the Romans— lest, having forgotten the law of God, they not be able to provide testimony on our behalf in this matter of our present concern. Thus it was inadequate for him to say, “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law,” without adding “scatter them.” For if they were not everywhere, but solely in their own land with this testimony of the scriptures, the church, which is everywhere, could surely not have them among all the nations as witnesses to the prophecies given previously regarding Christ.24
The De civitate Dei does not suffice with explicating the phenomenon of Jewish survival as the fulfillment of divine prophecy. It interprets the divine prophecy of Jewish survival as a mandate for the faithful: Slay them not, that is, ensure their survival and that of their Old Testament observance; and scatter them, guaranteeing that the conditions of their survival demonstrate the gravity of their error and the reality of their punishment.
We shall soon return to a review of Augustine's pronouncements concerning the benefits of continued Jewish survival and their proper implications for Christian policymakers. It remains for us first to consider Augustine's sole work dedicated explicitly to anti-Jewish polemic, the brief Tractatus adversus ludaeos (Treatise against the Jews), evidently composed during the final years of his life (ca. 429),25 containing little that is new or distinctive. This sermon first discusses the Pauline doctrine of the inversion of Jews and Gentiles in the divine plan for salvation, noting that the Jews still refuse to acknowledge the Christological import of biblical testimonies. Despite the Jewish claim that Christianity has forsaken the teachings of the Old Testament, it has, in fact, fulfilled them; because Christians now obey the law in its spiritual sense, its literal observances have been rendered obsolete—“not because they have been damned but because they have been changed; not that the things, which themselves used to be signified, might perish, but in order that the signs of these things might suit their times.”26 In support of these claims, the Tractatus presents a Christological interpretation of the three Psalms (45, 69, 80) entitled “for the things that shall be changed”— pro its quae immutabuntur or commutabuntur— a misreading of the Hebrew shoshannim (lit. lilies), perhaps for shinnuyim, changes.27 Echoing earlier etymologies, Augustine concluded that the Jews are not “the true Israel, that is, that which will see the Lord face to face.”28 These changes wrought in