Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
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 who had remained stationary in useless antiquity, a Jew who, in fact, never was.
Augustinian hermeneutic fashioned such a Jew nonetheless, and this construction had a long and colorful career. I have suggested elsewhere125 that Augustine made a fourfold contribution to Christian anti-Judaism in the medieval West: the recognition of a definite need for the Jews (appropriately dispersed and subjugated) within Christian society; the focus of Christian anti-Jewish polemic on the interpretation of the Old Testament; the direction of such polemic to Christian and pagan— but not to Jewish—audiences; and a lack of concern with postbiblical Judaism. Why polemicize and missionize among the Jews if Christendom required their presence? Why concern oneself with postbiblical Judaism if the Jews, as Augustine construed them, preserved and embodied the law of Moses and if the development of Judaism effectively stopped on the day of Jesus' crucifixion, when the Old Testament gave way to the New? I would now add two qualifications to this assessment of Augustine. First, earlier Christian theologians, those mentioned in the introduction to this book along with others, may have anticipated certain aspects of this “Augustinian” outlook on the Jews. Yet the doctrine of Jewish witness was new, and it conditioned the transmission of “standard” patristic Adversus ludaeos doctrine to Augustine's medieval successors. Second, just as Augustine had reformulated the ideas of the earlier fathers, so too did churchmen who followed him develop new applications and understandings for the doctrine of witness, which quickly assumed an independent life of its own.
With this in mind, the time has come to study the history of the medieval Christian perception of the Jew more thoroughly. If one tends to remember the medieval Christian posture toward the Jews and Judaism as Augustinian, that hardly means that Augustine himself would have concurred. His profound impact on and authority among his successors meant that few could reject his teaching, but many reinterpreted it in keeping with changing ideas and historical circumstances. The history of the idea of the Jew as witness has much to teach us concerning the medieval Christian thinkers who inherited it—and concerning their Christianity. Although the idea unavoidably bore on the realia of Christian-Jewish relations, my primary interest remains with the fate of Christianity's hermeneutical Jew himself. What happened to him as the Augustinian mind-set and historical context that had spawned him receded into the past?
An earlier version of this chapter, entitled “Augustine on Judaism Reconsidered,” was presented to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 1991. I subsequently reformulated my conclusions in a paper on “Anti-Jewish Discourse and Its Function in Medieval Christian Theology” delivered to the New Chaucer Society in 1992.
1. Augustine, De Genest contra Manichaeos 1.23, PL 34:190–93.
2. On the sevenfold periodization of history, see, among others, Auguste Luneau, L'Histoire du salut chez les pères de l'Église: La Doctrine des âges du monde, Théologie historique 2 (Paris, 1964); and Paul Archambault, “Ages of Man and Ages of the World,” REA 12 (1966), 193–228. See also below, chapter 3, on Isidore of Seville.
3. Augustine, De Vera religione 26.49–27.50, CCSL 32:218–19.
4. See below, n. 8.
5. Augustine, Contra Faustum 16.9, CSEL 31:447.
6. Ibid. 15.8, p. 432.
7. Ibid. 12.12–13, pp. 341–42 On medieval traditions concerning Cain and their ancient sources, see Oliver F. Emerson, “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 21 (1906), 831–929; Ruth Mellirlkoff, The Mark of Cairl (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), esp. pp. 92–98; and Gilbert Dahan, “L'Exégèse de l'histoire de Caïin et Abel du xiie au xive siècle en Occident,” RTAM 49 (1982), 21–89, 50 (1983), 5–68
8. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 12.12, pp. 341–42 (emphasis mine).
9. Ibid. 12.23, p. 351.
10. Ibld. 16.21, p. 464.
11. Ibid. 12.24, pp. 352–53; cf. also 15.2. Augustine rendered the Latin of Paul's epistle as “oportet et haereses esse, ut probati manifesti fiant inter vos.” On the importance of this theme for Augustine, see Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, “Bible et polémiques,” in Saint Augustin et la Bible, ed. Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, Bible de tous les temps 3 (Paris, 1986), pp. 329–31; and also below, n. 124.
12. Augustine, Contra Fartstum 9.2, p. 309.
13. Ibid. 16.10.
14. Ibid. 16.25, p. 470.
15. For instance, Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.2, 16.26, 16.37, 17.18.
16. Ibid. 15. 11ff., 18.38ff. This stance, however, did not obviate Augustine's general preference for the readings of the