Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
earthly man while subject to a measure of righteousness [servili quadam iustitia]. Its history is called the Old Testament, which, while appearing to promise an earthly kingdom, is in its entirety nothing other than the image of the new people and the New Testament, promising a heavenly kingdom.3
Augustine's allegory of the six ages assumes both microcosmic and macrocosmic proportions, reflecting the experience of the individual and that of society at large. The Jews and their religion are again, in pre-Christian times, at center stage; here, in the De vera religione, they also bridge the chasm between the two species of human existence. Their Old Testament pertains to the life of earthly man, proffering the rewards of an earthly kingdom. Yet somehow this covenant of the Jews entails “a measure of righteousness,” complicating the evaluation of its character. If correctly interpreted, it embodies the image of the new man and the New Testament. Such interconnections between exegesis, philosophy of history, and the Jews will prove critical to an appreciation of Augustine's place in our story.
AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
During the final decade of the fourth century, Augustine's ideas and career matured considerably. His polemic against the Manicheans continued to develop, with additional subtlety and with sustained vigor. His vehement opposition to the Donatists enhanced his leadership role in the African church and contributed to his notion of the coercive role of the state in a properly ordered Christian society. And his understanding of human will and divine grace in the process of an individual's salvation changed dramatically—a transformation we shall consider again below. The thirty-three books of the Contra Faustum (Against Faustus, 397–398) testify to much of this development and, not surprisingly, offer insight into the molding of Augustine's perspective on Jews and Judaism.
The Contra Faustum reiterates both the fundamental importance of the figurative interpretation of Scripture and, by way of example, the correspondence between the days of creation and the ages of world history;4 once again, exegesis and philosophy of history emerge as interdependent. Yet the persistent attacks of the dualist Faustus upon the Old Testament demanded that Augustine clarify his evaluation of the old law and of the people of the book with greater precision. He thus affirmed the accuracy and the authority of the books of Hebrew Scripture. He posited a perfect concord between the two testaments, inasmuch as everything in the Old Testament instructs concerning the New. “All that Moses wrote is of Christ—that is, it pertains completely to Christ—whether insofar as it foretells of him in figures of objects, deeds, and speech, or insofar as it extols his grace and glory.”5 Such prefiguration by word and event lies at the heart of the biblical typology with which Augustine responded to the Manichean polemic. All of the contents of the Old Testament were historically true (in the case of narrative) and/or valid (in the case of prophecy and precepts), and this accuracy underlay the truth of their prefigurative significance. At great length did Augustine therefore defend the stories and commandments of the Old Testament, seeking to demonstrate both their intrinsic coherence and their corresponding Christological value. To be sure, Augustine hardly deviated from accepted Pauline and patristic doctrine on the relative authority of the two covenants. Teachings of the Old Testament lost their worth as signifiers upon the inauguration of the New. The “true bride of Christ…understands what constitutes the difference between letter and spirit, which two terms are otherwise called law and grace; and, serving God no longer in the antiquity of the letter but in the novelty of the spirit [she] is no longer under the law but under grace.”6 Because Jesus fulfilled the law, Christians observe its precepts more thoroughly in their spiritual sense, while the Jews, over the course of time, have in fact neglected their literal observance—and still refuse to believe in Jesus and his church. Nevertheless, even in the wake of the crucifixion the Old Testament has not lost its value and function altogether. It continues to offer testimony to the truth of Christian history and theology.
What, then, of the Jews, those who continue to accept the Old Testament and persist in rejecting the New? How does their survival comport with the divine plan for human history, now that the symbolic, typological value of Judaism has outlived its necessity? Augustine's reply, bound to assert the triumph of the church over the synagogue and yet to subvert the Manichean rejection of biblical history, included strands of the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness so essential to the present inquiry. First, following established Christian tradition, Augustine perceived in Cain a type of the Jews and in Abel a figure of Jesus. Punished with an existence of exile and subjugation for the murder of their brother, the Cain-like Jews consequently bear a God-given mark of shame that ensures their miserable survival:
Now behold, who cannot see, who cannot recognize how, throughout the world, wherever that people has been scattered, it wails in sorrow for its lost kingdom and trembles in fear of the innumerable Christian peoples…? The nation of impious, carnal Jews will not die a bodily death. For whoever so destroys them will suffer a sevenfold punishment—that is, he will assume from them the sevenfold punishment with which they have been burdened for their guilt in the murder of Christ…. Every emperor or king who has found them in his domain, having discovered them with that mark [of Cain], has not killed them—that is, he has not made them cease to live as Jews, distinct from the community of other nations by this blatant and appropriate sign of their observance.7
Insofar as they are typified by Cain (Genesis 4:1–15), why need the Jews thus endure? Augustine made no mention of their scriptures in this regard but simply explained: “Throughout the present era (which proceeds to unfold in the manner of seven days), it will be readily apparent to believing Christians from the survival of the Jews, how those who killed the Lord when proudly empowered have merited subjection.”8 Owing to their punishment and guilt, the survival of the Jews in exile vindicates the claims of Christianity in the eyes of Christians themselves; for this reason has God ensured that none of the Gentile rulers obliterates them or the vestiges of their observance.
Second, Augustine also found in Ham, the rebellious son of Noah (Genesis 9:18–27), a figure of the Jewish people, now enslaved to the church of the apostles and to the Gentiles (prefigured in Noah's worthy sons, Shem and Jafeth, respectively):
The middle son—that is, the people of the Jews…—saw the nakedness of his father, since he consented to the death of Christ and related it to his brothers outside. Through its [that is, the Jewish people's] agency, that which was hidden in prophecy was made evident and publicized; and therefore it has been made the servant of its brethren. For what else is that nation today but the desks [scriniaria] of the Christians, bearing the law and the prophets as testimony to the tenets of the church, so that we honor through the sacrament what it announces through the letter?9
In the case of their likeness to Ham, Augustine beheld in the Jews “desks of the Christians,” that is, an implement for preserving, transmitting, and expounding the prophecies of Christianity inscribed in the Old Testament. The Jews authenticate these scriptures, demonstrating now to the enemies of the church that the biblical testimonies to its legitimacy and even to its victory over them have not been forged. By consequence, “in not comprehending the truth they offer additional testimony to the truth, since they do not understand those books by which it was foretold that they would not understand.”10
Third, the Contra Faustum links the substance of Augustine's anti-Jewish polemic with that of his attack upon. heretics in general, and the Manicheans in particular. Citing 1 Corinthians 11:19 (“there must be factions [hairéseis] among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized”), Augustine accorded both Jews and heretics the function of defining, albeit by contrast, the essential teachings of the church: “All who receive and read any books in our canon where it is demonstrated that Christ was born and suffered as a mortal, even though they do not respectfully clothe that mortality made bare in suffering with the harmonious sacrament of [Christian] unity…— although they may disagree among themselves, Jews with heretics or one sort of heretic with another—still prove useful to the church in a particular condition of servitude [; servitutis], either in bearing witness or [otherwise] in constituting proof.”11 Like the Jews, the Manicheans err by understanding the Old Testament solely in its carnal sense; and they, too, although not completely excised from the cultivated olive tree of God's elect (Romans 11>), “have