Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
76–77.
109. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, chap. 4, esp. pp. 45, 57–62.
110. Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.24, CCSL 48:846.
111. For further consideration of Augustine on Jewish blindness, see Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983), 8–10, 22.
112. See above, n. 3 (emphasis mine). Admittedly, one may question how many Israelites Augustine would have actually included in this description.
113. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.5.9–3.6.10, ed. Green, pp. 140–43.
114. Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.2, CCSL 48:455. And see Cranz, “De civitate Dei, XV, 2”; and Gerard E. Caspary, Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), chap. 3 (esp. pp. rrzff., on the parameters of “ethical polarization,” “hierarchical subordination,” “concentric structures,” and “temporal precedence” in Christian hermeneutic-all of which function to “insure directionality and at the same time protect the dialectical pair” on the Pauline exegetical circle). On the singularity of Hagar's dual status as image of the earthly Jerusalem, which, in imaging the heavenly city, renders her the image of an image as well, see also Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, and Levinas (Chicago, 1991), pp. 8ff.
115. Markus, Saeculum, pp. 20–21.
116. Augustine, De cruitate Dei 18.46, CCSL 48:643. See Markus, Saeculum, p. 52, and van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, pp. 158–59 and n. 711.
117. Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, esp. pp. 274ff. and 365ff., situates Jewish-Christian traditions at the root of Augustine's doctrine of the two cities.
118. Among others, see Cohen, “Be Fertile,” and Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
119. Augustiile, Contra Fausturn 12.12–13, CSEL 25:341–43; cf. also 9.2, 12.4, 12.24, 15.2, 16.13, 16.19. AS Vance, “Augustine's Confessions,” p. 627, has observed, figurative exegesis entailed for Augustine “the repression of that obscure, lust-begetting, uncanny, killingle tter of the Old Law and its re-vision in the New.” According to Vance, pp. 631ff., the commentary on Genesis in the Confessiones signified for Augustine a personal re-creation and a ritual of liberation from sin. “Since the Old Law had come to dominate Augustine through the intimately related forms of an idolatrous love of letters and a passionate attachment to creation, especially to women, who, through Eve, had wreaked so much havoc in the creation, obviously only through new experiences of language and love may Augustine be redeemed from the Letter and the Law of Sin.”
120. Brown, Body and Society, p. 401. See also Brown's enlightening discussion in “Late Antiquity,” in A History of Private Life, I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantrum, ed. Paul Veyne (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. pp. 266–67.
121. E.g., Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 7.9, PL 42:57:“:Is turn autern Israel scimus esse carnalem, de quo idem dicit [Apostolus], 'Videte Israel secundum carnem.' Sed ista isti non capiunt, et eo se ipsos carnales esse convincunt.” Robbins, Prodigal Son, provides a most interesting discussion of this motif in Augustine's works in particular (esp. pp. 37ff.) and in Western literary tradition in general.
122. For example, Augustine, De spiritu et littera 17.29, 19:34. Augustine's closest approximation of such an equation appears in Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 3.4.9, CSEL 60:495, where faith and love are contrasted with the Jews' “earthly cupidity and carnal fear [terrena cupiditas metusque carnalis].”
123. Augustine, De spiritu et littera 13.21, CSEL 60:173.
124. I have argued this at length in “Be Fertile,” pp. 252ff. This conclusion militates against that of Fredriksen, “Excaecatio occulta justitra Dei,” pp. 323–24, who rejected Blumenkranz's contention (“Augustin et les Juifs,” p. 237) that “la polémique antijuive est intimement liée a la polémique antihérétique.” While the connection between the two polemics may have been other than what Blumenkranz maintained, the fact remains that Augustine's anti-Manichean and anti-Pelagian agenda had an impact on his attitude to the Jews and that Augustine attributed to heretics a historical function not dissimilar to that of the Jews. See the citations above, nn. 11–12.
125. Cohen, Friars and the Jews, pp. 20–22.
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