Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

the question of whether the church will be the bastion of intellectual specialists or a layman's church.”¹⁰⁸ More recently, Robert Markus concurred that human sexuality afforded Augustine singular insight into both the glory and the misery of the fallen human condition. Genesis commentary proved a benchmark for the progress of Augustine's thought on all of these issues; in keeping with Augustine's distinctive notion of the saeculum, “a rehabilitation of the flesh” stood at the foundation of “a defence of Christian mediocrity.”¹⁰⁹ No doubt the best evidence for this argument remains Augustine himself, who paid tribute to the divine blessing of human sexuality as the De civitate Dei neared the crescendo of its conclusion: “That blessing which he had conveyed before the sin, stating ‘Be fertile and increase and fill the earth,’ he did not wish to withhold even after the sin, and the fecundity thereby granted has remained in the condemned species. The guilt of sin could not remove the wonderful power of the seed—and even more wondrous, the power by which the seed is produced—instilled and somehow ingrained in human bodies.”¹¹⁰ The younger Augustine, the Augustine of the late 380s and the 390s could never have reached such a judgment. These words characterize the viewpoint of an older, more experienced Augustine, who formulated his doctrine of Jewish witness during the same stage of his life.

      THE AUGUSTINIAN SENSE OF THE JEW

      I have reviewed these preeminent themes in Augustinian thought at some length, because their intersection—the meeting of text, body, and concrete historical event—offers the most enlightening framework for appreciating Augustine's construction of Jews and Judaism. Not by coincidence did his most thorough formulation of this doctrine, earmarked by its appeal to Psalm 59:12, take shape during the same years as his resolute commitment to literalist exegesis, his enhanced appreciation of terrestrial history, and his more sympathetic attitude to human sexuality. How, then, did each of these trajectories in Augustinian thought intersect the doctrine of Jewish witness?

      The link between Judaism and the literal interpretation of Scripture hardly requires additional demonstration. Augustine explained, repeatedly and pointedly: The Jews preserve the literal sense, they represent it, and they actually embody it—as book bearers, librarians, living signposts, and desks, who validate a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament. Unlike the “true bride of Christ,” the Jew knows not the difference between letter and spirit. While precisely this blindness obviates his salvation, it simultaneously facilitates his role as witness.¹¹¹ From such a perspective, the more important the literal—that is, the original, historical—meaning of biblical narrative in the instruction of Christianity, the more valuable the Jewish presence in a properly ordered Christian society.

      Like the saeculum in the Augustinian philosophy of history, Augustine's Jew constitutes a paradox, a set of living contradictions. He survived the crucifixion, though he deserved to die in punishment for it; he somehow belongs in Christendom, though he eschews Christianity; he accompanies the church on its march through history and in its expansion throughout the world, though he remains fixed “in useless antiquity.” This Jew pertains, at one and the same time, to two opposing realms. The De vera religione, recall, identifies the promise of the Old Testament with an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one, but states that believers in the one God before Jesus “led the life of the earthly man while subject to a measure of righteousness.”¹¹² Augustine's literalist Jew exemplified the folly that the De doctrina christiana terms “a miserable enslavement of the spirit: to take signs for things [of consequence in themselves], to be unable to lift the eye of the mind above the physical creature to see the eternal light”; but such error among biblical Jews was different, Augustine noted, “since they were subjugated to temporal things in such a way that the one God was commended by them in everything.”¹¹³ Identifying the earthly Jerusalem prefigured by Sarah's handmaid Hagar (compare Galatians 4:21 and following) with the synagogue, the De civitate Dei likewise demonstrates what Gerard Caspary has termed the parameter of “concentric structures” in the Pauline and patristic exegesis of classic biblical pairs: Granted that Hagar and Sarah, or the two cities they signify, are opposites; yet, “a certain part of the earthly city has been rendered an image of the heavenly city, by symbolizing not itself but the other city, and therefore a servant [. serviens].”114

      Although the three Augustinian texts just cited refer primarily to pre-Christian times, the De civitate Dei proceeds to extend the enigmatic status of the Jews into the present age of the church. Suggestively, Augustine's account of the annals of the heavenly city on earth breaks off with the establishment of Christianity. Inasmuch as “since the coming of Christ, until the end of the world, all history is homogeneous,”¹¹⁵ one may not construe contemporary political events as the essence of God's plan for human redemption, and they command minimal attention in the Augustinian review of sacred history. In this vein, the passage of the De civitate Dei that records the life and death of Jesus and elaborates the doctrine of Jewish witness at length makes mere mention of Augustus Caesar, that “by him the world was pacified.”¹¹⁶ The pax romana may well have endowed the saeculum of the Christian era with its defining political character; but neither its agents nor its institutions, before or after the conversion of Constantine, could claim membership ex officio in the heavenly city. As a result, Augustine's magnum opus pays less attention to Roman imperial history than to the history of the Jews in their dispersion! Although they themselves were damned, their unique, testificatory role in the divine economy of salvation contributes to the ultimate victory of Christianity, and their history, before and after Jesus, more closely adumbrates the direction of the earthly history of the heavenly city. Rooted in and defined by membership in the earthly kingdom, the Jews—in their servile and testimonial capacity—nevertheless benefit the church and retain some connection to the heavenly kingdom too. Forging a link between otherwise conflicting realms, Augustine's Jews thus share in the functional value of the saeculum, that temporary, ambiguous domain of intersection between earthly and heavenly cities so critical to the Augustinian worldview. Just as the sacking of Rome in 410 moved Augustine to define Rome's purpose in Christian salvation history, perhaps the continued existence of the Jews in a Christian age demanded rationalization—rationalization provided by the doctrine of witness. Like the concrete events of terrestrial experience through and from which the Christian church yearns for its final redemption, the Jews belong to history, and yet, as signposts along the road to salvation, they point to its culmination.¹¹⁷

      The same Jew who embodied—for better or for worse—the literal sense of the Bible and the material reality of earthly experience also represented a straightforward and positive appreciation of human sexuality. Biblical and rabbinic Judaism construed the divine instruction of the first parents to “be fertile and increase” not only as an obligation but also as evidence of divine election. Along with their creation in the image of God, the sexual nature of human beings situated them on a cosmic frontier of sorts, midway between angels and beasts, blessed with unique opportunity and yet encumbered by singular responsibility. In most strains of ancient Judaism, marriage, sexual reproduction, and family life constituted norms of foundational importance; they pertained directly to the rationale for all human existence on earth and, in particular, to the place of the chosen people within the divine economy of salvation.¹¹⁸

      Augustine's allegorical exegesis of “Be fertile and increase” in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, throughout the Contra Faustum, and near the end of the Confessiones thus comported well with disparaging references to the carnality of the Jews. Despite their presumptions to ascetic and spiritual perfection, Augustine contended that the Manicheans emulated the “impious nation of carnal Jews” and shared in the Jewish life of “carnal disorder.”¹¹⁹ Yet when Augustine subsequently responded to the anti-ascetic convictions of Jovinian and the Pelagians, he encountered ideas much more akin to a Jewish understanding of human nature and sexuality. Paradoxically, against these “views of a silent majority that believed as firmly as did their Jewish neighbors that God had created humanity for marriage and childbirth,”¹²⁰ Augustine evinced a more favorable appraisal of human sexuality, and he tempered his attack upon the Jews. The stereotype of the carnal Jew admittedly did not disappear,¹²¹ but anti-Jewish polemic in general—and this stereotype in particular—figure much less prominently in Augustine's later, anti-Pelagian writings than one might otherwise