LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 1

      The Doctrine of

      Jewish Witness

      Augustine of Hippo (354–430) lived during an age of transitions. During his lifetime, the division between Eastern and Western capitals of the Roman Empire became a permanent one, as the imperial government in the city of Rome itself entered the last generations of its history. More than any later fifth-century event, like the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476, the sacking of Rome by the Germanic Visigoths in 410 signaled the decline of classical civilization in contemporary eyes. Political change, with its accompanying social ferment, induced many to question the presuppositions upon which their societies and worldviews rested, contributing roundly to the cultural anxiety that characterized this period, to experimentation with new notions of personal power and security that sought to allay such anxiety, and to the propagation of new value systems in keeping with these ideas. Where, ultimately, did personal fulfillment lie? How might one seek to achieve it?

      As the Roman Empire stood on the brink of a new era, so did the Christian church. Augustine formally embraced Christianity soon after Theodosius the Great declared it the official religion of the empire. Although the imperial ban on the pagan cult capped the victory of the recently persecuted Christian church over its detractors, it confronted church and state alike with an array of new problems. Christianity had claimed to spurn the pleasures and powers of this world, sharply demarcating the realms of God and Caesar, looking forward to an apocalypse that would replace existing political institutions with the rule of Christ and his saints. A Christian empire might ensure the safety and supremacy of Christians and their church, but how did it bear on the Christian quest for salvation and its underlying philosophy of human history? Furthermore, if Constantine's conversion earlier in the fourth century and Theodosius's marriage of the empire to the church decades later appeared to vindicate the Christian revolution against classical pagan civilization, how did the sacking of imperial Rome by the “barbarians” figure in this equation? Did it, as the old pagan aristocracy suggested, manifest the gods' wrath over the conversion of the empire to Christianity? If not, precisely what significance attached to such events of political history in God's plan for the salvation of the world?

      Like these and other issues of his day, the course of Augustine's life, itself rife with conversions, transitions, power struggles, and intense self-examination, has been studied exhaustively. Alongside the decline of Rome and the triumph of the Roman Catholic Church, it too heralded the approaching junction between classical antiquity and the ensuing Christian Middle Ages. The concerns of Augustine's career invariably informed his distinctive ideas of the Jew. To trace the history of those ideas properly, one must appreciate the chronology of their appearance during Augustine's life and their place in the Augustinian worldview.

      AUGUSTINE ON THE JEWS AND JUDAISM

      THE EARLY YEARS: ON THE AGES OF MAN

      Between his conversion to Christianity in 386 and his arrival in the North African town of Hippo in 391, Augustine formulated his renowned sevenfold scheme for the periodization of human history. In the De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis against the Manicheans, 388–389), Augustine found a biblical foundation for his theory in the story of creation in six days, and in the nature of the seventh day, the Sabbath, in particular: “I think that the reason why this rest is ascribed to the seventh day should be considered more carefully. For I see throughout the entire text of the divine scriptures that six specific ages of work are distinguished by their palpable limits, so to speak, so that rest is expected in the seventh age. And these six ages are similar to the six days in which those things which Scripture records that God created were made.” On this basis Augustine proceeded through the six days of the Genesis cosmogony, linking them to the successive eras of terrestrial history, even linking the biblical refrain, “and there was evening and there was morning,” to specific developments within each historical period. When he reached the primordial Tuesday Augustine wrote:

      It was therefore morning from the time of Abraham, and a third age like adolescence came to pass; and it is aptly compared to the third day, on which the land was separated from the waters…. For through Abraham the people of God was separated from the deception of the nations and the waves of this world…. Worshipping the one God, this people received the holy scriptures and prophets, like a land irrigated so that it might bear useful fruits…. The evening of this age was in the sins of the people, in which they neglected the divine commandments, up to the evil of the terrible king Saul.

      Then in the morning was the kingdom of David…. It is aptly compared to the fourth day, on which the astral bodies were fashioned in the sky. For what more clearly signifies the glory of a kingdom than the excellence of the sun…? The evening of this age, so to speak, was in the sins of the kings, for which that people deserved captivity and slavery.

      In the morning there was the migration to Babylonia…. This age extended to the advent of our lord Jesus Christ; it is the fifth age, that is, the decline from youth to old age…. And so, for the people of the Jews that age was, in fact, one of decline and destruction…. Afterwards those people began to live among the nations, as if in the sea, and, like the birds that fly, to have an uncertain, unstable dwelling…. God blessed those creatures, saying “Be fertile and increase…,” inasmuch as the Jewish people, from the time that it was dispersed among the nations, in fact increased significantly. The evening of this day—that is, of this age—was, so to speak, the multiplication of sins among the people of the Jews, since they were blinded so seriously that they could not even recognize the lord Jesus Christ.¹

      Augustine's review of biblical history from Abraham to Jesus may appear to add little, if anything at all, to standard patristic doctrine concerning the Jews. Yet this early Augustinian text, whose subsequent influence in medieval historiography surpassed its importance even for Augustine himself,² already demonstrates how various other issues of pressing concern led Augustine to dwell upon' the Jews and Judaism. Here the characterization of the Jews somehow exemplifies his approach to biblical exegesis—in this case allegory, and the allegorical interpretation of Genesis in particular. Moreover, inasmuch as the Jews dominate much of the divine plan for human history, they assume significance in the exposition of Augustine's scheme of salvation history, a connection to which Augustine returned soon thereafter in his De vera religione (On the True Religion, 389–391). Here he reviewed the six or seven proverbial ages in the life of a human being as they apply both to the “old,” exterior or earthly man, and to the “new,” inward or heavenly man, a contrast that similarly bears on the totality of human history. Adumbrating his later theory of the two cities, Augustine thus proposed that

      the entire human race, whose life extends from Adam to the end of this world, is—much like the life of a single person—administered under the laws of divine providence, so that it appears divided into two categories. In one of these is the mass of impious people bearing the image of the earthly man from the beginning of the world until the end; in the other is a class of people dedicated to the

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