Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

their kingdom…and scattered throughout the world…, are testimony for us through their own scriptures…. For there is a prophecy given previously in the Psalms…: ‘Slay them not.’”⁴⁵ Given the administrative context in which Gregory had to define the status of what he unquestionably still perceived as Roman Jewry, one can readily discern the logic of his translation of Augustinian theology into papal policy: If Augustine had deemed the status of the Jews under Roman rule to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it behooved Gregory, head of the Roman Church, to maintain that aspect of imperial policy and govern his subjects accordingly. Gregory claimed justification for his Jewish policy in terms of Roman legal precedent, both in the application of the Theodosian Code to the protection of synagogues and the restriction of Jewish slaveholding and in a recurring appeal to the general import of Roman legislation. Inasmuch as the Jews “are permitted by Roman law to live, so may they maintain their observances as they have learnt them without any hindrance, as justice would dictate.”⁴⁶ His principle of Sicut ludaeis invokes a similar rationale, limiting Jewish rights to that which is “permitted by law [permissum est lege]”47 Furthermore, the recurring emphasis on the public rituals of the Jews—their holy days, their celebrations, their communal worship and its venue—in Gregory's protective edicts bespeaks the Augustinian notion that the divine mandate of “Slay them not” entails the perpetuation of their Judaism, the forma Iudaeorum148 and not merely the preservation of their lives. As we have seen, Gregory acknowledged the didactic purpose of Jewish survival in a dispersed, subjugated state. He reaffirmed Augustinian instruction that the blindness of the Jews in Jesus' day resulted in their persecution of him and that such blindness, then and now, constitutes divine punishment for their sin. Gregory's aforecited rationale for preaching to contemporary Jews despite their intransigence reads much like the directive of Augustine's Tractatus adversus ludaeos: “Testimonies should be taken from the holy scriptures, whose authority is very great among them, too; if they refuse to be restored by the benefit which they offer, they can be convicted [convinci] by their blatant truth.”⁴⁹

      On the other hand, the role and the image of the Jews in the Gregorian corpus depart from the Augustinian model in several noteworthy respects. First, Gregory's theological-exegetical works ascribe historical importance to the Jews of Jesus' day and to the Jews of the end of time, paying minimal attention to contemporary Jewry. Although his policy as pope applied the spirit of Roman law and the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness in practice, he did not depict the Jews of his own age as significant players in the unfolding drama of Christian salvation history. Rather, Gregory looked forward to the final days of that history, when all remaining Jews would accept Christianity, and such anticipation comports well with his justification of special allowances for Jewish proselytes. A mandate for missionary preaching to the Jews likewise accompanied the prohibition against using force to convert the Jews, in the hope that, “demonstrating what we tell them with evidence from their own books, we might be able, with the help of God, to direct them into the arms of mother Church.”⁵⁰ This emphasis too one generally finds lacking in the works of Augustine, who paid lip service to the traditional apostolic longings for the conversion of the Jews but accorded little urgency or hope for success to contemporary missionary efforts.⁵¹ Lastly, Gregory elaborated much more extensively than did Augustine on the Jews' alliance with the devil and Antichrist, who had determined the direction of Jewish history in the past and would continue to do so in the future. Gregorian doctrine conveys a pronounced sense of enmity between the Jews and the faithful, emanating directly from the ongoing, insidious opposition of Satan to the designs of God. In such subversion “the Jews now excessively persist; hence, as long as they lovingly inhabit the place of their treachery, they fight against the redeemer.”⁵² Gregory's protection of Jewish rights notwithstanding, one leaves his writings with an appreciation of the Jews' historical role far more negative than that of Augustine.

      In his departures from Augustinian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Gregory manifested—and, in fact, exemplified—the new, distinctive mentality of early medieval Latin Christendom described briefly at the beginning of part 2 of this book.⁵³ His was a mind-set that beheld all experience and reality as a continuous unity, an outlook that perceived reality essentially as one but, in its unredeemed state, as reflecting the divisiveness of sharp, fundamental oppositions. As Carole Straw has written so eloquently,

      to understand Gregory one must begin by recognizing that he has modified the paradoxes of the mature Augustine and that the fluid boundaries of late antiquity have all but vanished. The supernatural is mingled with the world of ordinary experience, and in surprising ways. Visible and invisible, natural and supernatural, human and divine, carnal and spiritual are often directly and causally connected…. In Gregory's world, invisible reality exists alongside the visible reality it sustains and determines. The other world is at one's very elbows, though often hidden to those of carnal minds…. Gregory tends to link causally flesh and spirit, present and future worlds, displaying a certainty and predictability in their interconnection…. As the spiritual and carnal boundaries are broken for body and soul, this world and the next, so too the boundaries between the self and others weaken, and social unity is intensified. Each individual exists only as a member of the larger, transcendent body of Christ, which is political and social as well as religious…. To pursue a separate course is to subvert both self and society, to imitate the devil's delusion of self-sufficiency.⁵⁴

      Paradoxically, both dualism and monism appear to characterize this Gregorian worldview, and one must distinguish carefully the different levels of reality that manifest them. Gregory's thought is rife with foundational contrasts: God and the devil, Christ and Antichrist, New Testament and Old, faithful and infidel, spiritual and carnal, heavenly and terrestrial, virtuous and sinful. Yet the dissonance endemic to these oppositions pertains to a sinful, unredeemed reality, and it functions in the divine master plan expressly to underscore the need for restoration. In other words, good and evil members of these oppositional pairs struggle fiercely in the world of Gregory's experience, but, ultimately, their combat facilitates a salvific resolution. Though plagued by the inadequacies and evils of his age, Gregory thus awaited the eschaton more eagerly than did Augustine. For him, God's world is truly an integrated one: Visible and invisible realities exist continuously, side by side, and are essentially equivalent. Political institutions, societies, and cultures all adhere to a single, grand divine scheme of things, from which their raison d'etre derives; if the Middle Ages remembered Gregory somewhat unfairly as a destroyer of classical culture, he unquestionably strove to marshal all facets of human creativity in the perfection of Christendom, attributing value to nothing that made no such contribution.⁵⁵ Even the devil works God's will in the final analysis.⁵⁶ Straw has thus perceived “a grammar of reconciliation and complementarity” at the base of Gregory's singular vision of sacramental reality:

      Gregory sees carnal and spiritual realms as interrelated, connected as end-points of a continuum. Like faces of a coin, ends of a stick, or poles of a magnet, they are extremities of a single whole…. Though opposite, carnal and spiritual realms are very much united through various degrees of complementarity and reconciliation. At any one moment, only a single aspect of the relationship might appear, such as the conflict between spirit and flesh, or the sympathy of body and soul. But when opposition is overt, unity is latent.⁵⁷

      Gregory found the key to reconciliation in Christ, who alone could successfully mediate the boundary between humanity and divinity, who resolves the tension of all such cosmic oppositions, and whose covenant and church integrate the various dimensions of spiritual and temporal experience into a perfect, Christian whole.

      This general pattern of Gregory's thought informed his biblical hermeneutic, his philosophy of history, and his anthropology in a manner that may well help to account for his departure from Augustinian constructions of Jews and Judaism. Unlike the mature Augustine, Gregory displayed an “addiction to the allegorical interpretation of Scripture.”⁵⁸ His exegesis categorically emphasized the allegorical and moral, and it extended but minimal attention to the literal sense of Hebrew Scripture. To be sure, Gregory acknowledged the historical sense in his well-known cover letter to Leander, which accompanied the completed Moralia on Job: “It should be known that some passages we run through in a historical