Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
But the saeculum, and the societies, groups and institutions whose careers constitute it, embraced both poles of the dichotomy…. To speak of the saeculum as the region of overlap between the heavenly and earthly cities, while true, is misleading if understood in terms of the logical notion of an overlap between two mutually not exclusive classes. For in their eschatological reality the two cities are, of course, mutually exclusive, while in their temporal reality they are indistinct: here the primary datum for Augustine is the integrity of the saeculum, or, more precisely, of the social structures and historical forms in which it is embodied…. All we can know is that the two cities are always present in any historical society; but we can never…identify the locus of either.92
Augustine thus refused to view even the Christian church of his age as perfect or to identify it with the heavenly city. By the same token, however, he could hardly dismiss the structures of society and the events of terrestrial history as profane and worthless. Inasmuch as the eschaton has yet to materialize, these social structures and historical events constitute the framework for the experiences of both cities. They are, in a word, all there is. Citizens of the heavenly city must therefore work to uphold the institutions of the saeculum, their imperfection notwithstanding, just as they yearn for liberation from them.
Markus's model of the saeculum as a key to the older Augustine's understanding of history informs an appreciation of the doctrine of Jewish witness on several grounds. Augustine elaborated both ideas during the last two decades of his life, and the chronology hints at further parallels between the two. Among these, the paradoxical ambiguity that characterizes the institutions of the saeculum, and the resulting responsibility of God's saints to function at once in two contradictory realms,93 will prove helpful in understanding the distinctive historical mission that Augustine assigned to the Jews. No less important, first expressions of the ideas of the saeculum coincided with the completion of the De Genesi ad litteram. For as Augustine had fallen back from allegorical and typological exegesis to embrace a more literalist hermeneutic, he necessarily took increased interest in the history of this world; indeed, the proper, literal truth of biblical narrative and the historical events of biblical antiquity were one and the same. When the De civitate Dei portrayed Cain as the founder of the earthly city, it deliberately avoided his typological prefiguration of the Jews that had allowed the younger Augustine to explain their survival; in the midst of a lengthy historical assessment of the primordial fratricide, Augustine now wrote: “Such was the founder of the earthly city—in which manner he also prefigured the Jews, by whom Christ the shepherd of humans (whom Abel the shepherd of livestock prefigured) was killed. Yet because this concerns prophetic allegory, I refrain from expounding it now; and I remember that in this regard I argued certain things against Faustus the Manichean.”94 The contrast between the standard patristic Cain of the Contra Faustum and the realistic portrayal he receives in the De civitate Dei is striking; as Peter Brown has suggested, “it is like coming from the unearthly symbolic figures of Type and Antetype that face each other in the stained-glass windows along the walls of a Gothic cathedral, to the charged humanity of a religious painting by Rembrandt.”95 Augustine's exegesis and historical philosophy evidently developed in tandem, endowing his writing with new life and conviction. Not by happenstance did a retreat from the typology of Cain in rationalizing the doctrine of Jewish witness accompany the emergence of Augustine's unconventional exegesis of Psalm 59:12 (“Slay them not”).96
HUMAN SEXUALITY
Augustine's new regard for the concrete realities of human experience surfaced in yet another cluster of his favorite subjects: the human body, sex, and sinful concupiscence. It is most instructive to note the convergence of scriptural exegesis, chiefly that of Genesis, and the investigation 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