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AUG UST INE A ND TH E
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\ C IIRISTIA'\. DLII '\.\1 Jewish co mmun ities began to curn inward , \Vith drawing from active re lations wit h a nd involvement in th e outside, gentile world. (This conjecture accounts for the general lack of early Jev.~sh respo nses to Christian an ti Jewish invective). His second proposal was that the stereotypical quality of Christian state· ment.s abou t Jews suggested that their usual source was not encounters with Jewish contemporaries bu t interpretations of Old Testament rexcs, especially of chose of the p rophets. (This second conjecture account.~ fo r the repetitive a nd a bstract quality of so much anti Jewish criticism: hearts th at are always stony, hard>or u ncircumcised; necks that are alwa}'S stiff; and so o n.) And, third, Harnack suggested that conh"a ludaeos invective was most often stimulated by Christians ' 4
4
polemical contacts not with Jews bur wit h the much larger population of potential co nverts, which is to say, wich pagans. Skeptical and hostile, th ese pagans would have pointed out to Christians that Je,rs did not fo llow the gentile Christian lead when in terpreting what were clearly Jewish books. Christian an ti-Jewish argument responded to pa· gans by making the case chat the Jews had t heir interpretatio ns all wro ng."' Other scholars challenged Ha rnack's conten t io ns. Two of these scholars, who published their work in che years just after World War II, stand in the immediate background of the present scudy. The first scholar, Bernhard Blu menkranz, minutely analyzed a late sermon of Augustine•s, tradirjonally idend fied as the "Sermon against t he j ews/' in Die j"denpl'edigt Ar and cross-ethnk relations explored in the macrocosm of Part 1. But we can also see, in wonderful detail, the effect that the particuJar co ntingencies of Augusti ne's own life had on his thought. His education and its limits; his relations with other Latin Christian inteHecruals~ the circumstances specific to late-fo urrh-cen rury North Afric.a, with its communities of Jews, pagans, and dissenting Ch ristians~ the instability of Latin versions of the Bible; the particular conclusio ns that he had come to in u nderstanding the biography as well as the rheo logy of the apostle Paul: all of these fac tors combined to lead Augustine to the st unning achievement of his teaching on Jews and j udaism .
•• • owE READ ERS some preliminary rernarks to explain several peculiar ities of this book. First, l have capitalized the word god only when it acts as rhe name of the biblical d eity: thus, "God spoke to Moses" bur "the god of Moses spo ke." T his decision reflects my effort to pur all o f o ur ancient actors o n the same level playing field. Traditional capiraJ ization seems like a fo rm o f special pleading. I did not want to write about "the god of Plato" if [ wrote about "the God of Abraham." 1
4
Second, modern English uses two words, Gentiles and pagans) where the Greek o n which these both rest has o nly a single word) ta ethne, '"the nations.'' The two English wo rds have different co nnotations. Gentile makes a statement abo ut a person's ethnicity: The person is not a je\v. Pagan refers to a person's religious beliefs: The person is neither a jew no r a Ch ristian. When Christianity began to appear in fi rst-century d iaspora synagogues, however, mutatis mutandis, pagans were Gentiles, and Gemiles ,,,..ere pagans. (The exceptions to this virtu· ally universal rule are explo red in the text.) The distinction between religion and ethnicity created by the two English words is an anachro nism fo r the first several centuries of the Christian E~ one that makes the quarrels within the first generatio n of the movemem
Prof()gut · :.:x1
and the reasons for later pagan anri·CI1risrian persecutions hard er to see. l note where this vocabulary presents pro blems. and I offset these problems by using the one word \vhen modern usage expects the other. The reader should prepare for enco un tering ('pagan Christians'' when we look at the first generation o f the Chr isdan movement in the Diaspora Third, throughout the presen t study I have tried to compensate fo r o ne of the abiding problems in the field o f anciem Christian studies: the language of the winners. Surveys of pre-Conscantinian Christianity often identi~' various Christian communities, marginalized o nly d uring the power struggles of the fo urth centu ry and later, as already "heretical'' in the lace fi rst century, o r in the second. o r in the third. Such an approach seems to grant ro the "orthodox... their own claim, nam ely, that rheir version of Christianity was the delining one, always the s.ame from the beginning and therefore authentic and in some special sense "true." It thereby invites and promotes anachronism. Before Constantine, each of the various Christian communities thought rhat its 0 \\11 views were correct and that the views of others, if d ifterenr, were false. Before 312, what we have is variety. After 312, we still have variety. By chat point, however, events had led to a clear, functional definition o f orthodoxy: the views that enjoyed the sup po rt of the emperor. After 312, in brief. what primarily d istinguished o rthodox Christians fro m their rivals was pmver. To chin k otherwise is simply m recapitulate in modern academic language rhe ancient rhetoric of the o rthodox bishops. (To see some version o f rabbinic Judaism as "orthodox" Judaism projects the same error onto ancient jewish communities.) Nonetheless, we remain stuck with the vocabulary of the winners. Scholars habitually identil)' various second- and third-century Christian groups by the names of their prominent leaders: Valentinians (the followers of Valentin us), Marcionires (the followers of Marcion), Manichaeans o r Manichees (the followers of Mani). And we identi~' the community char names them this wa)' as proto-orthodox o r as o rthodox. Fo r clarity, I have had to acquiesce. The reader should remember, however, that in their own eyes, all of these people were simply followers of Ch rist and, therefo re, "Christians." Fourth- a diffe rent version of the same problem- how should we
XX II • Prologu~
identify Paul and his jewish contemporaries in the first generation of che movement thac formed around the memory and the message of jesus of Nazareth? To caJI rhem ''jews" leads to confusion 1 because they are a particular kind ofJew, and it is their particularity thar gives chem their historical importance. {So roo. fo r example, with those Jews who were members of ocher first-century jewish schools or sects, such as the Pharisees o r the Essenes.) To call chis fi rst generation "Christian" risks anachronism, however. The term, and arguably the concept1 d id not exist d uring their lifeti mes. By their own lighcs1 these particular Jews saw themselves-when rhey were not arguing with each o ther-as Jews who had the correct understanding o f rhe Jewish god, rhe j ewish messiah, and the Jewish scriptures. The problem is no less acute when trying to speak about rhe non Jews who jo ined with them. Are these people "convercs"? (If so, in this period before a separate Chriscianity exists, then co what?} Or are they "Judaiz.ers)>~ that is, pagans who adopt some but not all Jewish practices? (\Vhich o nes? In what ways? And why?) J have finally o pted to use "Christian," while acknowledging the many poin ts made by good arguments ag.Unst such usage. Where t his label leads to problems of h istorical analysis, I men· tion it in the text. Fifth. J have designated the fourrh~centur)' Christian victors as both "catholic" and "orthodox.>~ This too reflects their own claim, es4
pecially in the age after Constantine. m represent universal (catholica) and right-thin king (orthodox) Christianity. Those later and more localized churches, (Lati n) Roman Catholicism and (Greek) Orthodoxy, descend from this community, but in our period rhey do nor yet exist. Thus Latin cheologlans in rhe fourch and fifth centuries can be '"or thodox" (like Ambrose 1 o r Augustine)~ and Greek prelates in the easeern Mediterranean (like Arhanasius of Alexandria), in claiming to represent an inrernacional and u niform Christian traditio n, can be "catholic." 1 hope that the use o f lower case leners will help avoid confusio n. Of co urse, impo rtant fo urth cent ury communities chat selfidentified as Ro mans and as o rthodox Christians lived outside of the immediate Mediterranean linguistic world of Greek and Latin. Vital trad itions also flourished in Coptic and in Syriac, and some of these conrribuced also ro the development of Christian anci Jewish invec4
4
4
4
Profogu~ • XX III
rive. Augustine, h owever, felt the impact o f those trad itions that ca me through Greek and especially through Latin texts. For that reason, the present study co nce nt rates on them.'9 Sixrh> while J have availed myself wh erever possible of standard translations of G reek and Latin texts> I have usually alrered and adjusted them. (This is true even when l used translations rhac l have previously published m)>self.) Bib lical quotations in English, often but nor always, d raw o n the text of the Revised Standa rd Versio n (RSV), t hough frequently I have adjusted these as well. Last, quotations o f b iblical rexts made bv , a ncient au thors often do not conform to rhe received texts and a uthorized translations of roday. Sometimes this is because the aurhor is quoting fro m n1emo1')'~ sometimes it is beca use h is text (especially if in Latin) differs from the Greek o r th e Hebrew t hat stands behind modern scientific editions o f t he Bible. In these instances, of course, l have kept rh eir readings an d translated accordingly. Seventh, and finally, my notes here a re discursive and only minimally bibliogra ph ical: I d id not intend them to be exhaustive. Two considerations pro mpted this decision. The first was p ractical. The earlier academic publications on which the present srudy rests a re readily accessible thanks to the ln ternec. Readers who \\'ant a fuller complement of schola rly bibliography a nd argumentatio n than I give here can consulr my \Vebpage ac Bosron University, where my earlier essays a re available in PDF format (mvw.bu.edu/ religion/faculty/ Fredriksen). My second co nsidera tion, however, was literru·yt thus aest hetic. The conclusions that [ have reached in the course of several decades~ work o n a \\•ide variety o f q uestions, in related but d iffe rent a reas, emerged only severally. ln AugustiiJf' and the jews, [ wanted to retell the results o f that research in one sweeping sto ry.
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- - - - - !'ART ONE - - - - -
THE L EGACY OF A LEXA NDER The IYXJts ofCbristianil)• run deep in }ttda;sm. And tire roots of ami-judaism rsm deep in Christianity. To grasp the fmw and complexity ofthese tttJO focts- and ofAugustine S singu1dr respome ro them- requires a stmst! of dreir historical matrix, the cttlwre that enabled d>eir bird1, sponsored their growth, and fod their long·lived, manifold imeractiom. TIJat culture tvas bom nearl)l sewn hundredyean before the brilliant bishcp I~Collceiwd his ideas abottt God, creation., and bistory; some tbree centuries before the mes.;age oftiJe risen Christ began its resbopillg ofMeditrrranean society. Understanding the traditions ofChristian anti:ftulaism, in order ro see how AttgmtineS idf'as on }e1Ps and judaism ul#matel)• challenged them, hegins with all under. hymns, plays, co mpetitions both a thletic a nd musical-citizens and residen ts displayed t heir respect fo r the heavenly pa trons o f their city, thereb)' ensur ing divine favo r. Further, the opening of a city council, the convening ofa court of law, the e njoyment o f an d participation in cul tural events such as rhetorical> theatr ical, o r athletic competitions- all ac-
riviries chat moderns experience as religiously neurraJ- in antiquity honored ch e gods.*' Public displays of piety measured civic responsibility. Indeed, to be a citizen meant co take responsibility for the cult of the cit)r's gods. These forms of social activit)'> by publicly demonsrrating respect for t he gods who superintended the well-being of t he city, like\\;se bound che city's inhabirants together while articulating che social rankings organizing rh em. Civic cult frequently involved shared eating, and shared eating forged bonds between citizens and other residents1 just as the sacrifices through which the gods "ate" forged a nd maintained t he bonds between heaven a nd earth. T hus a ncient civic rit ua] established a nd consolidated necessary relations with powerful patrons both celestial and (since rulers, too> received d ivine honors) terrestrial. Neglect of these responsib ilities was impious, a nd impiety risked divine anger, \vhich could be man ifest in any number of dangerous ways-drought> flood, plague, earthquake, invading armies. Proper cult pleased gods. When gods were happy, cities prospered. Finally, t he cu lt of t he ruler. introduced in to the Jvlediterranean wo1i d rh rough Alexander, was adapted a nd adopted by Rome. T he em· perors from Augustus on ruled and protected the commonwealth as heaven's special agent on earth . After death, rransla ted to a higher realm, t hey continued to serve as the e rnp ire's special agents. Imperial cult served both soldier and civilian, focusing t he allegiance and piety of the army while notionaJiy binding the empire•s wide-tlun g municipalities both politically and religiously (rerms chat a re virtually syn· onymous in this contexc). Establishing a cult co the emperor and h is family brought honor to one's ciry a nd rhe possibility of imperial pa· tronage. And to offer to the emperor, as to t h e goddess Roma (the di· vine personificadon of che city)> was to offer as well for the empire. Inscriptions identified the ruler as "divine'' (diems). Jn provincial temples and privace shrines, t he emperor whether living or dead cou]d a lso be referred co as "god" (dms in Latin; tbeos in Greek). Temples, priests, feast days, blood offerings, images1 incense, processions, ritual prostrations, fesrive gladiatorial combats: Through aU t hese mea ns, citizen s of the empire enacted divine honors to th e emperor. (Jewish cidzens, in light of cheir a ncestral customs, were excu sed from such
Gods aud Thtir Ht01r.r ns • lJ
liturgies.) After 312 c.E., wit h his decision to become a patron o f the chu rch, Constan tine eventually banned b lood offerings, but all t he resc o f the imJ'sending captive Judeans into exile in Babylon. Under and after Alexander, by contrast, Jews relocated voluntarily. As supporters o f Hellen istic regimes. whether as merchan ts, merc~maries, o r regular soldiers, th ey willin gly chose to move ou t in to t he broader Heiienistic world: Diaspora ('"dispe rsion'') was not exile. These Mediterranean Jews (or Judeans; either word translates the Greek ioudai01) came in time to view their diaspora commun ities as ''co lo nies., of the metropolis, the ''mother city" Jerusalem. Their city of residence became fo r them a p.1tria, their "fatherland'' and horne.1 lly the dawn of the Chr istian era, Jews had been settled fo r centuries eveql\vhere th roughout the Hellenistic world and in Italy as welL 1 Macca bees. a Jewish text composed in the mid-second cent ury B.c.e..> mentio ns substan tiaJ western je\\~sh populations in Eg)•pt, Syria, the cities and p rincipaJities o f Asia Minor> the Aegean islands,
Gods and the
011(0
God ·
.1 7
Greece proper, Crete, Cyprus, and Cyrene o n the northem coasr of Africa (1 Maccabees 15:22-23). The Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of the evangelists, preserves a remark by the pagan geographer and historian Strabo, himself an elder contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth. "This people,.. Srrabo noted, "has made its way inro eveq' city, and ir is not easy to find any place in the habitable world which has not received (them!" ( Josephus, Antiquities 14.115). Establishing themselves in their new cities of residence, these Jews, over the co urse of rhe centuries after Alexander, absorbed and adapted Greek language and culture. As rheir vernacular shifted from Aramaic to Greek, their scripcures shifted too. By about 200 B.C.E., Jews in Alexandria had completed the Septuaginr (LXX), the translation of their sacred texts into Greek. Thro ugh this medium, traditional jewjsh ideas abour divinity, worship, crearion, ethics} piety, and practice came ro be broadcasr in the international l.inguistk frequency. And d ue ro this same fact of translation, the vocabulary of paideia-Greek high cul tural ideas abour diviniry, humanity, cosmology, and governrnent- was established within the biblical text. This creative interpeneo·ation of Jewish and Greek ideas had enormous conseq uences for \Vesrern culture. Indeed, without the Septuagint, ir is impossible to imagine the eventual spread and growth ofChristianjty. Living among Greeks in the ciries of the western Diaspora, Jews also lived among Greek gods. Their new environment encouraged an attitude toward this pantheon that differed markedly from their scriptures' contempt for the pantheons of the Canaanires and Philistines. The Bible often reviled the other Semitic gods for inspiring human idolatry, sexual licentiousness, and infanticide. The behavio r of Greek gods, as described in ancienr poetry, was no less unsavory. Yet rhe classical deities, deeply integrared into the life of rhe polis, evenrually acquired "culture" via the ingenious interpretations of their welleducated human followers. Through the literar)' canon that shaped Hellenistic educacion- Homer and Hesiod; Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus~ comedians, grammar ians, literary critics, rhetoriciansthese gods dominated education itself. To rhe degree rhat wesrern Jews availed rhem..selves of the oppo nunities offered by rheir new Hellenistic environment, to that degree they made rheir peace with Greek
1& • All because ancienr ethn icity and religion
Gods and the On~ God · 19
stand o n the same contin uum.) A century later, o ne Niketas from Jerusalem gave a hundred drachmas in supporr of a festival dedicated to Dionysus. Higher up t he social scale, we fi nd t he example of Herod the G reat, king o f the Jews (d. 4 B.C. E.}. Famous fo r keeping che purity and food laws o f h is people, Herod insisted that a Gentile who sought marriage with his sister fi rst be circumcised; and he also gloriously re-furbished the Temple in Jerusalem. Yet Herod also built temples co foreign gods and to the empero rs, and he spo nsored O lympic games, dedicated to Zeus. Diaspora Jews seem no less flexi ble. Pious inscriptions from the Bosporus, co nsigning new freed men to the care of the syn agogue, open with praise to the "almighty god " and close with a nod to heaven, earth. and sky: Zeus, Gaia, and Helios. (Cf. Isaiah c2: ''Hear) 0 heavens) and give ear, 0 earth!"} And Jews m ig ht install inscriptions to their own god in pagan temples.-! How do \Ve understand this behavior? \Vere ancient jews not "monotheists'? By modern measure, yes and no. Their god, the god o f Israel, was for them the h ighest and mightiest god. By living according to ancestral custom ("the traditions o f my fathers,"' as Paul says; Galatians t:14},j ews enacted their respect fo r and their fidelity to their own god. (Both jews and outsiders identified these customs most comrnonly with Sabbath, food la\VS) and, for males, circumcision.} But these Jews were anc.if'nt monotheists. This meant that they (like the a posd e Paul) knew thac heaven and earth held other, lower divine personalities and fo rces as well. Jn certain circumstances, these divinities could be:J and were) acknowledged. The circumstances mattered. The man um ission inscripd ons mentioned earlier record pious individ ual acts, not civic communal ones. And Herod, by contrast> was a very public figure and the empire's loyal client: His political status obligaced him co make lavish displays o f largesse and of loyalty to Ro me. Neither set o f acrivicies need be seen as contravening "Jewish tradition," which (then as now) was incerpreced d iffe rently b)' diffe rent Jews in diffe rent p laces. Buc when in the second century B.C.E. a fo reign king> Anriochus JV, in trod uced Greek cult into jerusalem's templeJ the Maccabae:an revolc erupted, event uating in the establishment of a jewish kingdom under the victorious family of the Hasmoneans. And Caligula'.s effort to put his own statue
10 · AUGUSTINE ANI> T HE J EWS
in the Temple in 40 c.E. Ied to a massive strike in Judea an d Galilee and g rim predictions of an empirewide revolt. (Caligula's assassination averted the crisis.) The worship o f images-especially in the Temple in Jerusalem-was for Jews expressly forbidden by t h eir tradition. For this reason (the unhapp}' exceptions of Anriochus a nd Caligula to one side), aut horities routinely excused Jews, whether as loyal provincials or as Roman citizens., fro m obligations ro the gods of majority culture. The schools and th e courts, the councils, the theaters: All of these organs of the city provided o ne context for shared social (and to that degree, religious) activity between pagans and Jews in the Diaspora. jewish adolescents received good Greek educations in their cicies• gym· nasia and so joined the ran ks of the ephebe~ young adolescent males whose mun icipal duties entailed participating in cornpedtions dedicated ro the gods. Jews participated both as contestants and as spectators ar these events. (Again, given the intrinsically religious nature. of such activicies, the modern analogy is less to t he Super Bowl o r to Carnegie Hall than to high mass.) Every t ime we find a jewish ephebe, a Jewish town counselor, a jewish soldier o r actor o r a thlete, we find a Jew identified as a Jew who nonetheless spent part of his ·working da~· demonstrating courtesy toward gods not his. And while Jews in prin· ciple did not join actively in rh e sacrifices attendant upon rhe ruler cults native ro Hellen istic a nd, later, Roman culture, rhey dedica ted their synagogues ro rhese rulers (who were divine figu res for rhe local majority) and in Jerusalem made offerings on the empe ror's behalf. Prayers were offered not to rulers but for them.5
••• TWO JEWISH INSTITUTIONs-one local>o ne distant-served to express and to instill a special sense ofJewish identiry while ar t he same time providing) as these foreign dries did, a context for shared social and reLigious acrivities between Jews and pagans. 'TOe local institution was the "synagogue.'' Ancient literat ure and inscriptions sometimes use the renn S)'IJagOgC to designate the assem· bly of t helocaljewish community itself. Proseuc/J Jesus' brother, in the Acts of the Apostles, "for he is read "''"Y Sabbath in the synagogues"; tp t.) O n the analogy of pagan remples, synagogues could sen" as places where manumissions were enacted and recorded; and some pagan rulers gave synagogues, like temples, the srarus of places of asylum. Synagogue o rganizations hosted co mmunity fasts, feasts) and celebrations; they held archives of co mmunity records and copies of sacred books. They settled issues of community interest: announcing rhe calendar of festivals, negodating access to appro priate foodscuffs with the civic authorities, adjudicating internal disputes. They spo nsored fund drives, and rhey honored conspicuous philanthro py with public inscriptions. An intriguing number of big donors co diasporajewish com munities were not themselves Jews. They were pagans, and the record of their benefactions affords us a glim pse of the m ixed population that supported synagogue activities. One especially striking inscriptio n> from Acmonia in Phrygia., recalls the generosity of a first-centu ry Roman noblewoman, Julia Severa. This distinguished lady, a high priestess in the imperial cult (rhus publicly responsible for the worship given the Julian emperors), had paid for the synagogue building itself. Another very wealthy pagan lady in the third-century c.E., o ne Capitolina, recorded that she had (lavishly) furnished a synagogue interio r. jews in Aphrodisias in Asia Mino r, sponsoring a fund d rive of some sort (fourch o r fifth century c .E.), inscribed their donor monument with names of sponsors specified by affiliation: "native" jews, converts ro Judaism ("proselytes•')) and gentile sympathizers ("god-fearers")> whether pagan or (in view of the inscription's late dace) perhaps Christian. Nine in this last group were members of the town council. And synagogues elsewhere beneficed from the patro n-
H
• ,\UG UST I NI! AN O THE p:WS
age of city magistrates, whose generosity t he.y d uly p roclai med in srone.6 ..fb is same picture o f mixed populations in diaspora Jewish communities, teased from epigraphy, is supported by varied literary evidence. Professional magicians, fo r example1 evidently dropped by the synagogue to hear stories of a powerful god whom they could later evoke in their own spells. In the recipe books t hat th ey left behind, we find "magical" Hebrew (or Hebrew-like) words, as well as biblical e pisodes- badly garb led- that co uld easily have been picked up by listening to the Septuagint rea d and expo unded, as jewish corn munities were known to do every week. And a ncientjewsJ like their pagan counterparts, freque mly celebrated t heir holy days out of doors, singing, dancing~ processing, eating. The visibilit).. of such celebrations invited the interest and the pa rticipation of outsiders, as Philo of Alexa ndria (d. 50 c.E.?) a ttests. Philo d escribes an outdoor meal o n a beach just o u tside rhe d ry p roper, "where not only Jews bur also mu ltitudes of o thers cross the warer co do honor to rhe place l the site according to trad ition where the Sepruagint was t ra nslated] ... and also to give thanks to God " (lifo ofMoses 2-41-42). Both modem scholars and ancient o bservers refer co these inter· ested pagans as "god -fearers," and indeed that is how they referred to themselves. Another word used, both then and now, is "Judaizers." The terms are elastic, which fi ts the imprecision of o ur ancient data and o f the p henomena that they witness to. Occasional pagan involvement stands at o ne end of ch is behavioral spectrum, but levels of engageln ent \Vere known to increase. As pagan , jewish, and la ter Christian sources tell us, in terested pagans sometimes chose to assume some specifically jewish o bservances and to involve th emselves in more sustai ned ways with the activit ies of their j ewish neighbors. Ancient sources speak (and the non-jewish o nes complain) n1ost o ften a bout pagan s who assu me dietary restr ictions o r Sabbath observance or who participate in major jewish fasts (such as Yo m Kippur) or feasts (such as Passover). The Gospel of Luke tells the srory of a centurion inCa pernaum in the Galilee, evidently a Gentile, who solicits a cure from jesus. In support o f h is request, the Pharisees praise him as o ne who "loves our narion, and he built us our S)'nagogue''-an exa mple o f the
Gods and tht' Oth' God · l J
god-feare r-as-patro n (Luke 75). An other centurion , Cornelius) is identified explicitly as a god-fea rer. Though a worshiper of Ro man gods (since he is a commander in Rome•s army)> Cornelius d istinguishes himself through pious acts that Jews habi tually associated with Judaism: co nspicuous chari ty to the poor and consran t prayer ro God (Acts 10:2). Acts also depicts a significan t gendle presence within the jewish communkies of the Diaspora: Sebomenoi- rhac is, pagan "godfearers"- hear th e gospel t h rough t he synagogue.' The poinc_, fo r o ur p resenr purpose, is that these pagans, when t hey so chose, participa ted .1s pagan.s in Jewish communal activities. For pagans, multiple religious allegiances were entirely normal~ indeed, majoricy culture usually accorn modated this sore of openness to vario us cults. These Gentiles freely assumed as much or as little of Jewish a ncestraJ practices as they cared co, while continuing u nimpeded (as the case o f j ulia Severa demonstrares) in their own cults as well. No fo rmal constrain ts from the pagan side seem to have abridged this ad hoc, improvised, volun tary> and evidently comfortable arrangement. Nor, it must be srressed, did Jews irn pose constraints on this pagan support: After all, the deman d for exclusi\•e worship had been given by Israel's god to Israel alone. Welcoming the material support an d encouraging rhe interest and even the admiration of those from the host pagan majority, fu rthermore, simply made good sense, both socially and poli tically. Exclusive for insiders (Jews in princip le were not to worship fo reign gods),Judaism was thus inclusive fo r oucsiders (inrerested Gentiles, wherh er pagan o r, event ually, Christian, \vere welcomed). Jn the cities of antiquicy, ir seems~ no fe nces made good neighbo rs, and the give-and-take among commu nities with in these cities contr ibuted to ch e maintenance of the in tereth nic, rhus interreligious urban ecosystem. As with synagogue build ings in the Diaspora, so wit h the Temple in Jerusalem: It roo p rovided a common space for jews a nd pagans. The Temple \Vas the prime Jewish instit ution that served to focus Jewish identity at home a nd abroad, while also accommodating interested o utsiders. jews from everywhere within the empire and beyond came to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. For the lace spring festival ofShavuoc (Greek "Penrecost'·'), the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament lisrs Jewish
24 • AliGUSTII'JE AN'D Tllll. J EWS
pilgrims from Pa rthia, Mesopotamia, che Black Sea, Asia Minor, Egypt, Libya, Crete, Roman Arabia, and Rome itself (Acts 2:9-11). Interested pagans came as well, especially for the grand festivals: Both the Gospel of jo hn and joseph us mention such people, especial!}' in connection with Passover (John 12:.20; Antiquities 14.110). Those jews who d id not make t he jou rney-thevasdy greater majorit:y-could conrribure annually co defray rh e Temple's overhead expenses. This volunraq' donation of the "Temple tax," a half shekel or t\vo drachmas, in effect enabled Jews far off to panicipate in t he enactment o f their people's ancient cult. The funds they collected could be so considerable that t heir cities of residence occasionally sought to appropriate these mon ies for more local use. But pagan authorities honored the Jews' ancestral cuscom and guaranteed their right to collecc and to send this donation o n co Jerusalem. As a result of these volu nt ary donations, Jerusalem ran in t he black for as long as t he Temple stood.' Under He rod t he Great, king from 37 to 4 •.c.E., the Temple reached rhe acme of its splendor. Herod expanded rh e area around the old sancruary to some thirt)' five acres, enclosing it with a rnagnificent wall that ra n nine tent hs of a mile along its perimeter. Concentric courtyards of graduated size ringed rhe Temple's imerior sacred space. Jrs innermost sancrum was entirely empty, given over to the presence of the people's god. Next, dedicated to h is service and regulated by an· dent puri ty codes, stood the court of h is priests, who supervised offerings at the altar. Two othercourrs circumscribed this area. the inner one for jewish men> the o uter fo r Jewish \vomen. Bur t he whole was surrounded by rhe vast and beautiful stone tund ra of che Gentiles' Court, or the Court of the Nations. Gentiles and je\\:s would mingle in 4
4
ch is space> which Jews necessarily traversed ro reach th eir own courts for cult activity. As in che diaspora synagogue, so in jerusalem's rem· pie: Pagans as paga ns had a p lace to show respect fo r Israel's god ("a house of prayer for all the nations" in the prophet's famous phrase; Isaiah 567). In fact, ar rhe Temple, t hey had t he largesr courr of all. Is· rael's priests, meamvhile, burned offerings at God's altar on behalf of rh e imperial family and t he empire. Traditional p ietr, ethn ic p ride> international politics, tourism, public pomp: lt all came together in Herod's extraordinarily beaut iful building.
••• of comfo rtable )e\\~sh-pagan interactions sho uld not suggest that patience \'lith foreign gods was embraced u niversally as a virtue) o r that social life was friction free. \Vhen they so desired. Hellenistic jews could formulate their own teaching o f contempt, taking aim at pagan contemporaries> expatiating o n the immoral and demeaning consequences of idolatry. "How miserable are those, their hopes set on dead things, who give the name 'gods' to t he works o f hu man hands," chides the (Alexand rian?} author of Wisdom o f Solomon, sometime in rhe first century s.c.E. {\X'isdorn tj:tO). Such people k ill children in their initiation ce remo nies and give t hemselves over to frenzied reveling; they defile their own marriages with adultery, their societies with treachero us mu rders; they p rophesy falsehoods and commit perjury; they lie> cheat, and steal (\Visdom q:2j- 28}. Pa ul rhe apostle, a h un dred years later, repeats and amplifies \Visdom's themes. Pagans degrade themselves with passio ns and with unnat ural sexual acts; their minds a re debased> their ways maJicious, their societies violent (Romans t:tS-32). This rheto ric could heat up real life. The disastrous war against Rome began in Caesarea, where pagan sacrifices, p rovocatively staged dose ro a synagogue> goaded local jews to riot and eventually led the country in to o pen rebellio n (JewisiJ Wl,r 2.28)- 288). And d u ring the mysterious uprising o f the jews o f Cyprus and Cyren e in the years between the first j udean revolt {66"73 c .E.) and the last ( tj2- tjj c.e., under Bar Kokhba), the bloodshed was accompanied by the deliberate desecratio n and destruction of pagan temples} Ancient pagan evidence also bespeaks various grievances, these directed against d iaspora jewish communities and against och er resident foreign groups. Then as now> glo balization and multiethnic, multicultural empire provided o pportunities for the cultivation o f ethn ic stereo typing, racial p rejudice, and occasionally (as-notorio usly-in Alexandria, that most cosmopolitan of ancient cities) fits o f in terethnic violence. Greek and Ro man in tellectuals sounded xenophobic themes in th eir writings: Foreigners, they feared, would pollute the b lood, the traditions, and the moral fi be r of their culture. In t he cap ical itself, th e governing elite was particularly zealous to guard T H IS PICTURE
26 · AUGUSTINE ASO THE J EWS
rhe purity of Roman religion. From time to time the Senate ord ered rhe expulsions of foreigners and rheir cults-along with astrologers and magicians-from the city. It> These da..ssicaJ aurhors penned bilious remarks. They cornplained that Jews were antisocial> hareful to outsiders, sexually profligate, lazy (because resting one day our o f every seven), and cannibalistic. tvlodem readers, looking back through rhe anti-Semiric horrors of midtwentieth-cent ury Europe and the vio lence of medieval Christian anti-Judaism> are particularly sensitive to the anti Jewish prejudices ex pressed b)' rhe.se ancient writers. This sensiriviry ea.sil),. obscures the fact that classical authors, in maligning Jews and Judaism, conferred no special d istinction upo n then1. Egyptians, Parthians, and Persians; Gauls, Brirons, and Germans: All came in for their share o f swingeing insults and derogatory d escriptions, many o f them the same as those aimed at jews. (Egyptians, said rhese writers) were also lazy; like jews, Britons, and Germans, chey also are human Aesh; and so o n.) In the world oflearned Greco-Roman ethnic prejudice, as one historian has noted, even the stereotypes ''.:ere stereoryped.u O ne ancestral tradition particular ro judaism, however, did single jews o ur fo r viruperation of a special sort. Jewish piety in principle focused o n the jewish god alone. The sorts of practical acco mmodations that some Jews occasionaBy made to lesser deities d id not soften, fo r ancient contemporaries, the insult of this aspect of Jewish behavior. Again, rhe fact that Jewish practices were ancient and ancesrra] fo r the mosc part legitimated them both socially and even legally, and helped jews to obtain various exemptions, protectio ns. and considerations. Majority cul ture valued eth nic loyalty as t he index o f piety. Bur chis ancient premium o n eth nic loyalty is also and precisely what accounts fo r a special c.aregory of pagan anti-Jewish hostility. T he target of this hostility was not Jews as such. b ut rather those pagans who decided to make an extreme co mmitment to jewish ancesrral practices. That is, some pagans slid from associating in synagogues with Jews, [0 voluntarily keepi ng some Jewish customs, to deciding, finally, to "beco me" Jews themseh•es. In modern idiom, pagans sometimes converred ro j udaism. An tiquity had no word for '(conversion," and concepruaJiy the act 4
4
Gods dnd tbt 011e God • 27
itself was odd. Ancient gods traveled in rhe blood; ethnicity anchored piety. How rhen could an individuaJ change his ancestors> his past, and his traditions? The closest analogue in Ro man society was legaJ adoption> another rirual creation of fictive kinship. Adoption was regulated and authorized by magistrates, who \rere themsdves priests. An adopred person>crossing kinship lines, moved aJso fro m his own family's private religious o bligations (which focused on ancestors) to assu me those of his adoptive family. For Jewish society, this crossing of the ethnic frontie r, the e:~treme degree of association rhat we term "religious conversion," was most readily understood o n the analogy of forging po litical alliances. Thus, said Philo, pagans who became ex-pagans joined the Jewish bod)' politic (the politeia; On the Special Laws 1.9-51). Hosc:ile pagan writers thought similarly, and saw in such behavior a species o f rreason. Rornan elires in particular objecred to conversion ro Judaism as by definition conduct unbefitt.ing a Roman. The converr spur ned Roman law to take up Jewish law~ he abando ned his own ancestral rites>gods, fatherland1 and family to assu me foreign ones. Lower-class people who made this e.xtreme act of affiliation were eviden tly at small o r no risk. Aristocratic Ro mans, hmvever, born into special obligations ro the gods and to the state, were in a diftfrenr situation. The emperor Domitian executed some members o f the Roman u pper class p recisely fo r lapsing into "atheism/' rhat is> fo r spurning their own gods o n accoun t of treasonable loyalty to "rhe customs of t he Jews" (Dio, Roman Histvty 67.L4.1-2).'1 The problem with Judaism> in the eyes of these pagan critics, was not its peculiar cusroms per se. The idiosyncrasy o f any ethnic culture-special days> special foods. special gods, special rules-was what marked it as specific to a particular people. But to make a commitment to a foreigll god tv the poi11t offorsakillg the gods of one's own people-a co ndition u nique ro judaism in t he pre-Ch ristian period-was to bt>/uwe with ,1/arming and imtt!titJg disloJ' presented vario usly and in various combinatio ns in various apocaJyptic texts> would signal che coming of God 's kingdom and would mark its establishment. ApocaJyptic thought 1 in other words, represents neither a ('doctrine•' no r even a universal set of expectations. Rather, it expresses a particuJar mentality of urgency, coupled with intense religious conviction. lf times were terrible> if the wicked flourished and rhe righteous languished} rhar muse mean that God wouJd soon intervene to put rhings right, which was the way that rhey should be. The god of Israel was just, good, and powerful. He would nor tolerate for long this inversion of moral order. He would not permit history ro drift indefinicel)'- (The identities of the "wicked" and of the "righteous," of
JO • AliGVST lNE AS D Tllll. Jl!W'S
course, depended o n the perspective and the circumstances of the visionary writer.) Once one knew how to read these signs of the rimes, the codes fo r which \vere often revealed in apocalyptic rexts, one could know when the End would come, when God wou ld fulfill his long-
postponed pro mise of redemption. \Virhin rhese varied and variable traditions about rhe End time, the resurrectio n o f the dead was co nceived as a commu nal event. The idea represented an extension of the pro phetic idea of rhe ingathering of IsraeL The prophecy in Ezekiel 37, for example, can be read in t h is light. God a nd Ezekiel together ponder a valley of d ry bo nes. The Lo rd
commands; Ezekiel pro phesies. The bones rise up1 assemble, bloom with flesh, stand o n their feet, and live. ''Son of man," he said co me, "these bones ate rhe whole house of Israel. .. . [S]ay ro them, Thus sa)'S the Lord: Behold I will open
)tOUr graves, and I will raise you up, 0 my people; and I will bl'ing )'U home inro t he land of Israel. .. . Behold, I will rake the people
of Israel from t he nations among ''.:hich rhey haw gone~ and I \\~II gather rhem fi'Om all sides . . . . My servant David shall be king over t hem. ... My dwelling place shall be with them; I "; 11 be t heir god, a nd they shall be my people."
In other visions, chis idea o f communal resurrection and homecoming extended even more b road ly. Not only a.ll of Israel, living and d ead, would reassemble in Jerusalem; all of the dead> the nations as well, would be raised, and everyone judged. The wicked would receive rheir well-deserved reward~ at last>so would the just. Establishing finally h is unchallenged reign, God would p lant Israel back in the Land, while giving rhe nations a place also alongside the Jews in his king-
dom.1.> 'TOe earliest d isciples' experiences of the risen jesus th us represented an anomaly in the perspective of t his tradition. The resurrection of rhe dead had been imagined as a communal event, not an individ ual episode~ and in any case, resurrection was not to precede these other prophesied End -time events. And what possible meaning
Gods and tlu• Onr G.,d · 31
could an individual resurrection have, especiall)' as t he world continued o n just as it had before? Jesus' followe rs made a bold in ference. The miracle o f his resurrection, they p roclaimed, confirmed Jesus' orig inal prophecy: The kingdo m really WM at hand> the redemption o f Israel and the t ransfo nnacion of the world really was about to begin. And jesus h imself, they declared, was rhe kingdom's messiah. His firs t coming had e nded nor wit h his cruci fixio n but with his glorious resu rrectio n. His second coming would restore life to the d ead, defeat once for all t he power o f evil, gather in t he elect>and estab lish God's kingdom.c6 This good news o f che imminent redemption of Israel spread rapidly. Fired by their co nvictions, some o f Jesus' early followers took rhis message from Jerusalem throughour Judea, along th e seacoast and u p into Asia Minor, following pathways laid o ur by t he network o f synagogue commun ities. There th ey encoun tered what was for th em a new social reality: These diaspora synagogues, unlike their counterparts in Galilee and Judea, held interesred pagans in significanr numbers. Together with some of the synagogues' Jews (such as, eventually though not in itially, Paul), some of these pagans also responded positively to earliest Ch ristian ity's apocalyptic message. 1i How did these early jewish missionaries, so shortly after jesus' execution, react co chis unan ticipated pagan respo nse? As we can see fro m Pau l's letters, mid-fi rst century, the fi rst generation d id not know quite how to proceed. Some missionaries (like Paul and th ose in h is circle) argued fo r t hese Ch ristian Gentiles to be received , though provisionally, as Gentiles. As long as they behaved in certain ways-and a bove all, as we shall shortly see, in a specifically public, jewish waythey could join in a nd with the new commun ity. Other Christian missionaries stro ngly dissented from this view and pressed for more fo nnal affiliation to j udaisrn-not o nly th e same Jewish public behavior chat Paul insisted on but also Jewish private behavior. circu mcision fo r male pagans, actenrion to Israel's calendar, a nd th e comm icted maintenance ofJewish ancestral custom. Jn other words, conversion to Judaism. The confusio ns and vigorous disagreernents of th is fi rst generation of C hristian Jews imply that Jesus himself had never direccl)'
Jl ·
AUGUSTJNI: AS"O Tl-I E p:WS
addressed che gentile questio n. When we move from Paul's letters to che New Testament's next strara of hiscorical evidence, th e Gospe l of Mark (proba bly written sometime shortly after the Temple's destruction in 70 c. e.) and the traditions presetved in Q (material common co Ma tt hew and Luke that is not found in tvlark). we ca n see that instruction concerning sympathetic pagans is scarce in the gospel material icself. And even though all four canonical gospels presup pose the existence of a gentile mission-indeed. by the time thac they were writcen, in the final ch ird of t he firsc centu ry) thac mission seems to be already well estab lished in the Diaspora- these gospels do nor fearure Gen tiles with any pro minence in their respective narratives a bout Jesus' mission. All o f this literary evidence acco rds \Vich what we can surmise was the case hisco rically: Pagans did n ot figu re prominently among jesus• o riginal hearers in Galilee and j udea. Nor. evidently, did chey occup)' a major place in his teachings. Nonetheless, ch e questio n still remains: Even a bsenc clea r teachings from Jesus, wh)' should this enthusiastic pagan response to tbe good nett!$
of the coming kingdom batJe bmt a problem for the )Vtmg mollf1JJent in ·~· case? After all, Jewish co mmunities in the Diaspora had accommo· dated and beneficed from the incerest and even the participation of ou tsiders fo r hund reds of years by this po im ; and chey would continue co do so for lo ng after. With all t hese centuries o f such successful precedenc to look ro-and a precedent speci fic co d iaspora synagogue life- why did the m issionaries o f t his new messian ic movement not simply use the a·ad itional model, and welcome pagans as pagans in to t he fold? O ne part of the answer lies with the fact t hat the jesus movernent was messianic. That is, the convictions and co mmitments of its disciples, t he very way chac they defined t he missio n a nd message ofJesus and a rticulated be.l iefs about h is second coming, d rew u pon larger rra· ditions of apocalyptic thought. T hese tradicio ns focused sq uarely o n th e redemption o f Israel: the people's ret u rn to t he Land; t heir rededication to Torah; cheir feas ting a nd rejoicing o n God's moun tain, the home o f his h ouse) the Temple in jerusalem. \X' hat role in such imagined scenarios d id foreign nacions play? Speculations on the eschatological fate of Gentiles lie scactered
Gods and the
011(0
God ·
n
throughouc apocal)'pdc literatu re. \Ve can d uster t hem at two poles. At the negative extreme, God in his wrarh crushes these nations, destroying thern and their cirics. Thus, for example, the vision o f "Enoch": "The [Gentiles') towers shall be engulfed in fla me, and removed from th e whole earth. They shall be thrown into the judgment o f li re, and perish in wra th a nd in the force o f the eternaJ judgment" (1 Enoch 91:9). At rhe End, teaches 4 Ezra, a late-first-century c. E. apocalypric text, rh e natio ns will assemble near Mounr Zion. There they will be "reproved fo r rheir ungodliness . .. reproached fo r their evil t houghts," and they will be d estroyed (4 Ezra IJ=32- J8). "Rouse )'OUr a nger a nd po ur o ut your wrath," exhorts Sirach, o r Ben Sira, a text fro m rh e early second cenrury n.c.E. "Destroy the adversary and \\~pe o ut the en emy.... Ler him who survives be consu med in the liery wrath, and may rhose who ha rm your people meet destruction. Crush the heads o f the rulers of the enemy" (Sirach J67- 10). Consoling Israel, "Baruch"' promises, ~··vour enemy has overtaken you, but you will soon see rh eir destructio n, and will t read upon their necks'• (Baruch
4:15, pro bably ed ired in the second o r first cenrur)• B.C.E.) . At the positive po le, by cont rast, we fi nd t rad itions rhat look forward to the nations' inclusio n in the Kingdom of God. "'ln those d ays ten men fro m th e nations of every tongue will take hold of the robe o f a jew, saying, ' Let us go with you, tOr we hm•e heard chat God is with you' " (Zechariah 8:23). Afrer witnessing rhe eschatological inga thering o f lsraeiJ says "Tobirn (some time in the second centu ry B.C.E.), "all the Gentiles will praise rhe Lord._. and all who love rhe Lord God in trurh a nd righreousness will rejoice, showing mercy ro our b rethren," (Tobi t 147). "All the nations shall flow to ir," prophesies lsaial1 abou t jerusalem in the new age. " Jo.·lan)' peoples shall co me and say, 'Let us go up to the moun tain of the Lord, to the house of t he god of jacob' " (Isaiah 2:2- 3). This inclusive apocalyptic trad ition, in other words, envisaged rh e sociaJ makeup o f life in the kingdom as m irroring that o f everyday reality. (Confusingly, many of r.hcse writingst such as Isaiah and Sirach) express both extremes, those trad itions about final punishmenr and those abou t final inclusion.) jews and Gentiles, in the positive view, would reside rogether at r.he end of d ays in God's kingdom.'11 So far, rh is eschatological tradition of genrile inclusion seems
)4 • AUGUS T I NE ASO THE JEWS
little d ifferent from t he no neschato logical practice of receiving inter ested pagans as pagans in the d iaspora synagogue. But rhere was a huge d ifference> one t ha t we will see more clearly if we anend to a problem wirh our English usage. In the preceding paragraphs, I have used rhe two wo rds gentile and pagatJ interchangeably. Jn so doing, J have tried to have my usage reAect that of the New Testament's firstcentury Greek. In English , gentile and pag,m obviously are two different wordsJ and th ey have d ifferent connota tions. Gentile registers eth n iciry. It is a neutral way to indicate jewish starus-thar is> the person in question is nor a jew. Pagm1 on the och er han d indicates religion: not o nly "not jewish religionJ• but also "not Christian religio n." AndJ until very 4
rece ntly, pag(m would also register a note of d isdain or disapproval. Th is last is no su rprise because the word applied rh is way is a derogatory coinage of the fo urth-cent ury church, which wished co distinguish biblical religions fi·om rhe worship of the gods. O nly a single Greek word, however, stands behind both English ones: ta.edme, "th e nations."' This word rransla tes t he Hebrew ba goJ•im, "peoples." Jn th e Septuagint th e word denotes everyone who is not part o f IsraeL As with the paired terms Greek and barbarian, so too with l5mel and the nations: The two words ta ken together stand fo r ''aiJ h umanity,'' d ivided up roughl)' as "us'' and "them.'' An d, since "race" and "religion'' srood in the same continuu m in anriqujty. the biblical paired words Jsme/fta etlme dist inguished h umans acco rd ing ro ethnic group a nd, ar the very same time, according to "religion" (better, "ancesrral custom''). T he ethnic d istinction was the religious distinction was the an cestraJ distinction. (Hence Paul's comparable division of humanit)' into ! these th eoretical, eschatological Gentiles do twt"co nvert..-that is, they 4
4
do nor receive circumcision and/ o r in some way "become" Jews. Nor do they rurn to "Judaism" a nd t hus to jewish ann·srral custom. What the)' cw·n to is Israel's god, who is the god of t he whole universe. Jt is as Gen tiles that they worship him. So too> mutatis mutandis> o pined Paul>in a letter pulsing with apoca lyptic conviction. "You turned to God from idols." writes Paul to his pagan Christians in Thessa1onika) "co worship the t rue a nd living god" (r Thessalonian s 1:9). within the larger context of ancient Med iterranean piety, entirely normal-was simply to receive symparhetic outsiders. \X'ell before the b irth of Chr istianil)'> these .syn agogues had welcomed such pagan Gentiles. And well after the b irth of gendle C hristianity, these synagogues continued ro welcome pagan Gentiles. (Much to the an noyance o f later b ishops, diaspora syna· gogues even continued ro welcome Ch ristian Gentiles.) Bur the mid first cenn try diaspora ekklisiai, these riny, Jewish. messian ic convocations, seem universally to have insisted rhat sympathetic pagans renounce their native gods as a condi tion of belonging fully to rhe newcommuniry. The question thar (only eventually) spli t rhe early 4
4
4
Gods JIJd thr 011t' God · 37
n1ission was not tvbetiJCt· to accept these ex-pagan Gentiles as members) but whee her these people should become Jews more forma11y, rhus for men to receive circurncision and for aJI to assume other specificall)' jewish p ractices: dietary customs, the jewish calendar of holy days, and so o n. ("\Vhoever receives circu.mcision"-that is, who converts fully to Judaism-"is responsible for t he whole of t he Law," Paul warned t he ex-pagan pagans of Galatia; Galatians s:J). About the necessity of these pagans' relinqu ishing their own gods to join the church, however, both PauJ a nd his jewish opponents, t hose other Ch risrian missionaries whom he calls "the circu mcisers," seem to have had no dispute.
By consrructing t heir demand in this way, rh e first gen eration of missionaries, faced with their u nanticipated reception arnong the syn agogue's pagans, creatively a pplied an element of t he hoped-for apocalypric futu re to t heir present sit uation. Gentiles join ing t he movement were ro act as if they were "eschacological'' Gentiles-which, given t he new cornmun ity's convictions, they were. Unencumbered by the greater part ofJewish ancestral practice, th ey nevertheless were req uired, by Paul as by or hers, ro assume precisely t hat very visible public behavior that was most resented by pagan cultu re and that pagan critics un iversally associated with Judaism: Christian Gentiles could nor participate in cult to their native gods. In th e long run, however-precisely what t h ese early rnissionaries were convinced would never be-this requi remenr turned o ut co be extraordin ar ily disruptive. It threa tened to unsettle the ce nturies-long stab ility of }e\11sh - pagan relario ns nor o nly with in t he synagogue community itself but also-indeed, especiall) - within t he larger social an d religious context o f the Greco-Roman dry. By declining to participate in th eir own familiar cults, these non-pagan pagans alienated and offended members of their own households. (For cenrw·ies hereafrer, Ch risrianity would be accused of ripping families aparr and disrupting normal patterns of household au thority.) And by not converting to Judaisrn {a position most associated with th e apostle Pa ul, t hough others also held it), these Ch ristian Gendles maintained their social status and, in a sense, their civic or legaJ status as members o f majority culture. By removing themselves from the worship of th ose gods who were 1
rheirs by birrh and blood, these people walked inro a social and religious no-man's-land. Exemption from such worship was an accommodation extended to Jews alone, and rh at primarily on accoun t of Jewish ancestral custom. These new Christian pagans, rhe Gentiles-inChrisc, were violaring their own ancestral customs. Perhaps worse, rh ey behaved in a way that their farnilies, friends, a nd neighbors could idenrify only as Jewish and could associate only wirh rhe S)>nagogue. In consequence, these people were open to charges of "atheism" and "impiety," failing to show respect to their own gods. They thus became rh e focu s of local anxieties over public endangerment. Gods, deprived of culr, grew a ngry. When gods were angt)', people paid. The Acts of the Apostles, written a round JOO c.e., offers vivid and historically pla usible depictions of the u rba n response to the socially d isruptive message of this tiny messianic jewish subcu lture. Itinerant Christian m issionaries were repudiated by t heir host synagogues, run out of town by irate pagan cirizens, and occasiona.lly punished by ca urious Roman authorities attempting to keep the peace. T he unprecedented Christian "policy" of separating pagans-in-Chr isr from t heir native cults was enormously disruptive. It provides us, however. with a gauge of the apocalyptic convictions that motivated members of these fledgling communities in their fi rst few decades, both rhose of pagans who made such a commitment ro t he gospel and those of t he messianist jews who received them in to community. Everyone expected rhat rh is anomalous and inherently unstable situation v.·ould be speedily and fi nally resolved. T he kingdom was at hand. Christ would rerurn soon.N Bu r as Christ dela),.ed an d the kingdom tarried, improvisations, confusions, and conflicts moun ted within t he j esus movement itself Some baprized pagans evidently resumed their participation in pub lic cult, perhaps confused because their ancestral worship had caused no problem back when t hey had been non-Christian god-fearers in the synagogue. ("Do nor associate \\~th any one who bears the name of ' brother,''' t hunders Pau l, aroun d 50 c.E., «if he is g uilty of immorality or greed, or if he worships idols!"; 1 Corinth ians 5:11, cf. 8:7-12; 10:14). Jn urban centers like Antioch, mixed groups meeti ng in households, Christian jews and Christian pagans, became entangled in con-
Gods dnd the 011e God • 39
fusions over the kosher status of communiry food. {Galatians 2 gives Paul's account of these events; Aces 15, another.) Competing missio ns offered d iffering messages. (This coo is evident from PauiJ who reserves his greatest vituperation for his Christian competition.) By t he late 40s, evidendyJ son1e missionar ies made a p rin cipled case t hat Christian Gentiles should regularize t heir devotion to Israel's god by assum ing fo r themselves t he p ractices commanded b)' t his god, t hus converting to j udaism (Galatians passim; cf. Philippians p fT. Paul did not like his colleagues' idea). Such a po licy would be no less so· dally destabilizing to d iaspo ra synagogue commun ities> which might still bear the brunt o f t heir pagan neighbors' resentment. Bu t perhaps Christian Gent iles themselves m ig ht gain some relief. Precedent existed. As converts to judaismJ thC)' would have some p lace, socially and religiously, to sta nd. Majority Clllture had long acknowledged such pa· gan t ra nsitions to j ewish ancestral practice.
••• is difficul t to sav. As earlv as we have evidence ' ' from t he Christian movcrnent- that is, wit h PauJ's letters> mid-first cent ury- we hea r t he noise of roiling debate. The noise continued u na bated ever after. Ch ristian Jews a rgued with Christian Jews: This is the noisiest fight that we overhear in Paul's letters. ("Are chey HeW li AT I-l A PPEN EO NEXT
brei\~? So am l. Are t hey Israelites? So a m I. Are they descendanrs o f
Abraham? So a m I. Are they ministers of Christ? . . . I a n1 a better o ne"; 2 Corinrhians u :22-2J RSV.) They also argued wirh non-Chr isrian jews, who argued back: Some of t hese quarrels a re retrojected back into t he lifetime of jesus a nd shape t he gospel stories, especially those in Matthew a nd in jo hn. ("Woe to you, 0 scribes and Pharisees! Hyp· ocrites!" Matthew 2J IJ.) C hristian jews argued with C hristian Gentiles: Should nor t hese people, who had been swept up in t he red emption promised to Israel, also keep the Sabbath, the food laws, o r any of rhe o ther practices that God had revealed to Israel? And fi. nall)'- the arguments for which t he most abundant evidence remainsChristian Gentiles argued bitterly with each other. Vigorous variety characterized early Chr istianit)' no less chan it characterized th e Judaism t hat was its mat rix.
40 • ... UOUSTlNE AS"D THll JEWS
Christian variety, a nd its ammdant argum enrs, only increased with time. But beginning in the early second century, rhese argu ments come to be expressed with increasing sharpness and clarity. This is so because rhetorically and ph ilosophically trained intellectuals, fo rmerly pagan , began to make t heir own co nt rib ut io ns co evolving Christian movemen ts. Jn articulacing their commitment ro Christian revelation, these men had to make sense o f t he literary medium o f that revelation: the Septuagint fi rst o f all, but also the burgeoning body o f specifically Christian writings (various gospels; collections of apostolic letters, especially Paul's; sermons; apocalypses, a nd so o n). To do so, they inter preted t hese Greek texts, and defended t heir interpretat io ns, in light of their shared rhetorical and philosophical culture, high GrecoRoman paideia. In short, Christian rheology itself was another late c hild of Alexander's success. 4
3 • PA l DEJ A: PAGAN, JEWI SH , C HRI STI AN
These [pagan) philosopher> have bl!l!tl raised abotJe the rest by a glorious reputation, tvhid> they tborollii/>6' dest>rtJe. TIN!)' recognized tbat no material object can be god . .. and that notl>ing chattgeeolog;y o ften means something like "religio us though ts."' In antiquicy the term had g reater precision. ·nJeos in Greek means "d ivinity'' o r "god.'' Logos has a very broad range o f meanings: In the standard Greek lexicon , its d efinitions stretch for over five colum ns of very fi ne print. "Word /' "reason,'' "disco urse; · ~'order": aU these can translate logos. -nJeologia as the Greek wo rd fo r our word ''th eo logy" means "systematic, rational discourse on the nature of the divine."' Jn the Greek world, chis intellectual enterprise had been conceived not in temples o r arou nd altars but wit hin ancient academies. Theol ogy was in this sense a special b ranch o f philosophy, which was itself distinct from traditional cult. The ways in which philosophers con ceived divinity coord inated with the \lla)'S in wh ich t hey imagined other aspects of realicy-maw~r, time, soul>reason>cosmos, a nd so on. God was a key term wirh in a larger, coh eren t a nd rational system o f thought. As a specialized exercise in reasoning. and as a srudy that implied an entire way of life as well as a training in particular modes o f t hought, philosophy stood to one side o f t he civic curricul um. The schools o f t he classical Greek polis had emphasized at hletics, poetry, music, mathemarics1 and rhetoric. Their purpose, eminently practical> was to t rain rh e nexr generation o f aristocra ts to lead the city, wheth er 4
4
4.!
· AUGUSTINE ASO THE JEWS
as soldiers or as statesmen. Philosophy entered in to advanced a nd specialized curricula onl)r eventually, and o nly o nce the writings of philosophers (like Plato's dialogues) had themselves acquired the starus of literar),. classics. In the lace fo u rth ce ntury B.C. E., following Alexander's conquests, chis mode of ed ucation and these forms of intellectual culture began co be exported on a large scale. Hellenism, che new international form of Greek culrure, was d isseminated precisely t hrough the social and physical str uctures of Alexander's new cities. These cities looked co the older classical polis as rheir model, and they ado pted classical Greek writings as their literary canon. Rome's enco unter wich Hellenistic culture resu lred in irs ado ption a nd adaptation of the Hellenistic curriculu m as well. As a result, ed ucated urban eli res fro m one end of the Roman world to the other shared a common litera ry culture, o riginally mediated through the Hellenistic gymnasium. ·n1e curriculu m for these young men was exceedingly stable. From one generation to th e next they read, memorized, a nd studied the great Greek epic poems and tragedies. (Romans eventually added Lati n classics such as Virgil a nd Cicero co ch is curriculu m; and well into the late empire-Augustine•s lifetime and beyond-Roman education remained in principle bilingual.) These young men were trained in fore nsic rhetoric-that is, in how to craft persuasive o ral argu ments and to discredit the arguments o f o thers-as pare o f th eir formation as future leaders in municipal and (later) imperial government. And at ch e h ighest levels, such students might advance co specialized schools offering a particular type of philosophy. Here they stud ied the wrirings of earlier masters) o r at least became acquain ted with them th rough su mmaries of or excerpts from their works. This mix of rhetorical and philosophical culture represented ch e acme of ancient education. l11ose forms of philosophical paideia rhat owed most ro Plato can properly be called monotheisr. Beneat h the multiplicity of physical existence) Platonists detected the effec ts of a single, transcendent deity, th e ultimate source of everything else. This highest god -variously called "the O ne" or "the Father" or "th e Being" or, more simply, "the god"-was irnagined in self·defin ing terms as perfect, changeless,
good, single, simple, utterly without body of any sort. He (or it) was utterly unique and uniquely self-generated. Everything else in some
sense derived from o r depended upon him; he alone derived from and depended upon onl}' himself Further, since he was absolure1y without body, he could not be represented (unlike che lower cosmic deicies) through any image: The high god, said these philosophers, co uld be rhis purely spiritual deity stood at the opposite end of an imagined continuum whose other terminus \vas the physical cosmos) the earth that stood at its center. and finally marter itself. The universe that coLL1d be perceived by the senses waS:, especially for Platonists> a sort of shadow cast by the divine world "above." The One/ the many> mindfbody, spirit/ matter> above/below> tntth/en or: All of these contrasting pairs simultaneously implied a cosmology> a moral hierarchy. and an epistemological divide. The structure of the physical cosmos itself revealed to the wise the true order of things, wherein what was truest1 best, and most "real'' visible noc co the fleshly eye buc o nly co the "eye o f che soul," that is, to the mind. To trai n the mind to '"see" these eternal verities, to
\\'llS
know them and to look beyond them to the ultimate god to which they pointed, was the goal o f this philosophy. The serenely trans.cendem high god was in no sense a "creator.''
4-l • ... UGUSTlNE AS"D THll Jl!WS
Such a function would have compro mised h is perfection, implic.ad ng h im in change by imputing to h im an act of wilL Nor could so perfect an entity be direcdy involved with the myriad irnperfeccions-andJ in· deed, the evils-that characterized experience in the realm below the moon. Matter itself, that unstable substratum of physical reality, in· d eed could seem to be the god 's cosmic o pposite: tangible, d efective, nonrational, perenn ially inclined co change and nonbeing. The in tr in sic unruliness of n1atter was heJd to account fo r much of the d ifficulry with physical existence itself. (To see matter as "bad" since god and spirit were o bviously "good'' was a temptatio n inherent in the Platonic system itself, o ne chat most Platonists strenuously attempted to avoid.)' Divine intermediaries filled in the gap between the all-good, unchanging h igh god and the p hysical universe t hat o nly a pp roximately reflected h im. Lower gods, d esignated variously as the "craftsman" (deminrge in Greek) or "world ruler" (kosmokrator) or "divine reason" (logos.)) took on the function of o rganizing and sustaining the maceriaJ universe accord ing to the p rinciples o f divine order. Stars and planecs, rhoughc co be ensouled a nd intelligent beings themselves, likewise stood between the high god and humanity, luminous witnesses to the perfection of the up per real ms. The gods o f t raditional pantheons, assorted cosmic envoys (angeloi in Greek}, still lower local divin ities called daimones (whence the English demon): All these subordinate powers helped to bind the universe togecher a nd to commun icate trut hs abou t cranscendent d ivinity to the hu man mind trained to understand their messageJ The g reat epic poems and p lays of Greek cuicure) however, relaced q uice d ifferent ideas about divinity. Literature•s gods had strong individual personaliries. As characters in stories, they constandy did things. They had bodies, which they used, occasionally with abandon. They fo rgor and remembered , g rew calm o r angry; they raged and plorced) lied and raped, and frequently behaved in ways chat o ne would not co lerate in humans. The deities of classical liceracure, in b rief, d id not o blige the moral categories of rhetoric or the meta physical categories of p hilosophy. How then could this cu ltural parri mony serve as a lite rary medium o f divine cruth?
Paidd.r: Pagd11, j t'wisb, Cl>ristian · 4.5
To spin th e stTaw of crad itional narratives in to rhe gold o f in tellectually and morally elevat ing theology, educated pagan Hellenists often availed themselves of sophisticated theories of reading. One such-grounded in rh e conviccion char rexcs held multiple levels o f mean ing-was allegory•. Alios in Greek means ''other"; agorein means "to speak." Allegory-"other-speak"- was a d isciplined techn ique whereb)' t he e nlightened reader could see rh rough what a rext merely said to what it actually meant. The u neducared might simply savor the action in ancienr raJes-Chro nos eating his children, Zeus raping Ganyrnede~ Odysseus sleeping by the cave of the nymphs. The learned few, however, could see beyond the simple or " lireraJ" meaning that was availa ble to just anyone and instead derect th e texr's lmponoid, its "undersense," and rhereb)' grasp its moral message, its eternal>lu minous t ruth. Divine cannibalism? No: Ti me (cbronos in Greek) is subdivided in to unirs. Divine ra pe? No: The soul experiences d ivine ra ptu re when it is seized by irs contem plation of the O ne. A sleeping homesick hero? No: The human soul )"arns co leave rhe physical body and coretu rn to irs t rue home in the upper cosmos. .A.s with humans, said the in tellectuals> so with te:~ts: The body of fles h was the lower, irra tional> morral part; the spirit the upper, ra tional> eternal pa rt. The flesh!)' body of the text-rh at is, the obvious narrative meaning available even co rhe un«lucared-had to be "looked rhrough " in order co grasp rhe text's ''soul/' its h igher spiri tual a nd intellectual import." Paideia d id nor produce atheists. \Vell-ooucared young men did not deny the existence of the t raditional gods> nor did they think that traditional \1/0rship was unimportant. Q uire th e contrary. Groomed by gymnasia to take their place in mun icipal councils as their cities' leaders a nd \real thy patrons 1 these men built and endowed temples and underwrote the celebrations- the games~ t he free provision o f wine, o il, and meat; t he p rizes awarded fo r excellence in dedicated competitions-through which their city's celestial patrons were hono red. As magistra tes, rh ey served as priests in their cults. Traditional piety toward the lower gods 1 like appreciation of their myths, stood o n the same cultural conrin u um as philosophy itself For the vast majority of an cient peoples, showing the gods honor was th e besr way to avoid their anger and to prorect against ill fortune. For rhose pious pa-
46 • AUGUSTIS l! AN I) THE J S WS
gans of philosophical bene, however, the traditional gods, t heir stories, and t heir cult all poi need t he way to t he O ne.
•• • plunged into lear ned HeJ · lenistic culture. They paid it the ultimate compliment and claimed t hat it was fundamentally, originally Jewish. What the Greeks got right, t hese Jews maimained-chiefly philosophy, but also mathematics, musict and astronomy-they actually goc from the Jews. Placo, some a rgued, had srudied Torah and developed his doctrines in Egypr, using a (since lost) G reek translation of th e Bib le made centuries before t he Sepruagin t. One writer dep icted Abraham as bringing civilization co the Egyptians, an argument for che greater antiqu ity of the Jews in a culture in which older was better. Hellenistic Jews forged pagan p rophecies, wherein ancient sibyls hymned Je\\~sh excellence in Homeric hexameters. O thers p resenced ··-histories": King Ptolemy sought out Jewish wisdom, commissioning O'anslations of th e Torah inco Greek for the royal library in Alexandria. Young ~·loses, in one storyt received instruction from t he wisest teachers of both Egypt and Greece, but of cou rse outstripped them all; in another, he caught mu· sic to Orpheus. jews rurned out Greek poetry in praise of t heir own culture while ascribing au thorship co t he literary heroes of the Hellenistic curriculum: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Eurip ides. (These forgeries rurn up centuries later, preserved in the texts of church fathers concerned to demonstrate ch e superiorit)' of t he Bib le to pagan culrure.) One pagan sage, Numenius of Apamea, finally conceded the point by asking, ''\X'hat is Placo hue Moses speaking Greek?"' Ingeniously, tirelessly, Hellenistic jews worked to liberate paideia from its pagan matrix. They t hus gave it a new "native" culcure: th eir own.s \'(!hen turning to their own sacred texts, however, educated Hel JEWS I N T I'IE OREEK·SPEAKING I>IASPORA
lenistic jews encountered t h e same problems that their learned pagan counterparts did when reading Homer. The first sentence of the entire collection gor things off on t he wrong foot by proclaiming," In t he beginning God made.. .. " (Genesis n). According to rhe principles of ph ilosophical paideia, either rhe god doing t he making was not the high god (since rhe high god, perfect and changdess, by definition
"did" nothing), or else he could not actually be "doing" anything. As with Homer, so with Moses: To rransmute venerable stories into philosophically elevating truths, the simple meaning of the words had to yield to spiritual understanding. Through rhe efforts and imagination of erudite Hellenisricjews, biblical theology was born. Theology in this sense-its ancient sense-was inrrinsical1y philosophical. The modern ph rase "philosophical theology" (to pur this idea another way) would be to ancient ears a redundancy. The philosophicaJ reinterpretation of sacred ancient te.'Cts defined rheology. For educated jews attracted to this project> the fact char their scriptures were now in Greek made the task of reinterpretation much easier. jews coming to the Septuagint's rendition of Moses at the burning bush discovered char rhe name of God, in Hebrew ('I am" (eh)oeb, Exodus
Jl4}, stood in their text as ho 61l, "the Being"-exacdy what anyone with a decent education, jew o r pagan) would expect as the designation of the high god. When this god established the heavens, he did so "by a word" (Psalm 33'6 RSV). The Hebrew davar ("word ") became rhe Greek logos. Forjewish readers with allegiances to Platonism and/ o r to Stoicism, framing the heavens through logos, divine rationality, made good philosophical sense. Biblical rheology comes into full flowe r in the works of Philo of Alexandria (10 o.c.E.?-50 c.E.?). An elder contempo rary of Jesus and Paul, Philo put his e:-.:tensive Greek learning at rhe service of scriptural interpretation. He saw in the Septuagint the very best philosophical thought of his age. Indeed, he referred to Moses quite simply as "the philosopher." Jn his commentary on Genesis, Philo gracefuUy conformed the offending elements of this ancient Semitic creation myth in its new Greek mode to the canons of philosophical ratio nality. The days of creation in Genesis t, PhiJo observes, cannot refer to time, since (the high) God does not act in time. Rather, ''days" refer to sequence and o rder: they are 1\·foses• way o f describing the rational process whereby God intellectuall)' conceived the universe. The actual material reaUzation of the plan, described in Genesis 2, was left to "the divine Logos/' the image of God according to which (or whom) humanity itself was made {Genesis 1:26). Of course God has no form, Philo remarks; no r is
48 • AUGUSTINE ANI> T HE J EWS
rhe h uman body godlike. The human mind is whar is made "afrer God's image and likeness.'• And who or what is this image and likeness? The divine Logos h imself, God's own Word and Reason (On the
Creatim1 2J69). Bur what abour the rest o f t he biblical creation story-the frui t tree, the wily serpent, the deceived \Voman, rhe disobedient man? "Now th ese are no mythical fictio ns such as the poets and sophists delight in;' scolds Philo. Rarher, Jewish stories (unlike, he insists, pagan sto ries) "a re mo des of making ideas visible, bidding us to resort to allegorical interpretation" (On the Ct~ation )6.157). Where the story, if read o n a simple or "literal., level, gives most offense} th e educated reader finds his clue-the invitation in a nd from the text itself-to t hink o n a symbolical or spirit ual lewl, to in terpret allegorically. (To be fai r-and Philo isn>r, here-pagan sages used exactly th is same a r gument to justi~' rerrieving p hilosophical truths fro m unsavory episodes in Greek myth.)' Genesis 2- 3, t hen, does nor relate a story a bo ut a snake deceiving the primal woman who eats fo rb idden fruit and gets her husband to do the same. Such a simple understa ndjng of th e sacred text, thought Philo, indicted o nly the ignorance of the u np hilosophical reader, not the mean ingfulness and timeless validity of scripture. Understood spiritually, as the text itself deman ded , these chapters relate the wa~· that the senses ("Eve"), perenn ially turned toward lower, earth ly things (''the serpent"), can distract even the mind ("Adam") fro m its pursuit of d ivine truth. What else should we expect from Moses, who "had atmined the very sum mir of ph ilosophy" (On the Creation 2.8)? Not o nly b iblical stories but also rraditional practices received this same sort of spiritual interpretation. The food laws, the holy days, Shabbat, the derails o f a nimal sacrifices1 the command co circumcise: Far &om being che arbitrary d irectives of a detail-obsessed deity, t hese laws symbolized profound mo ral instructions a nd commitments. Circumcision, Philo observed, spiritually understood) co nnotes th e exci· sion of pleasure and passion (a good aim fo r the wise). God does not care about festivals and seasons in themselves; these symbolize the gladness and gratitude that che soul feels toward God. To live according to rhe Law mean t to p ractice virtue, the goal of true ph ilosophy. 4
Paidtu: Pagan, j t u•lrh, Christian · 49
Some ed ucated Jews went a step further than Philo. Understand· ing the spiritual significance of the Law, they declined to enacr its "lower" o r "literal, protocols. \XIhat would be the point? After all, these commands at rheir most profound level were allegories of moral ex· cellence. O nce one grasped, for example, that rhe spiritual meaning of circumcision was self-discipline, rhen one lived o ne's commitment to the traditions of Israel by being so disciplined. Why perform a mere physical action, conforming to a literal interpretatio n of rhe com· mand, when the purpose of the command itself was to point to this higher and more itTlporrant moral truth? The allegorizing je~1·' had a good point. And Philo affirmed that these Jews did indeed grasp the more profound meanings of Jewish o bservances. Bur, he said, such people acted as if they were disembod· ied souls instead of men living in society. .A.ccordinglyt he co ncluded, they were poor philosophers because philosophy entailed not only a way of thinking but also and consequencly a way of living. "We should look o n all these outward observances as resembling the body,'' he urged, ''and their inner rneanings as resembling the soul. l t foUows that, exactly as we have to care for the body because it is the abode of the soul, so also we must arrend to the letter of the laws.., The disci· pline ofscrupulousness in matters of]ewish practice, Philo co ncluded, can o nly enable and enhance wisdom. "If we keep and observe these, we shall gain a clearer co nception of rhose things of which rhese are symbols" (Tb. Migration ofAbrabmn 16.89-93). In other words, for Philo as fo r the type of Hellenistic J udaism that he represents) true wisdom and true philosophy were not generic wisdom and generic philosophy. They were, q uite specifically, Jewish wisdom and Jewish philosophy. And these were attainable only thro ugh close reading, spir irual understanding, and disciplined adherence to jewish practice as encoded in divinely revealed jewish scrip· ture. The true identity of rhe philosopher's god, Philo insisted, was the god of Israel: bur most pagans 1 mired in their idol worship, could not realize this. Those who did, he said, and who in consequence became proselytes, did nothing less rhan recapitulate the journey of Abraham, going o ut from the idols of their fathe rs' houses to the true homeland of the One God (On d~e Special Lflws 1.9.52; On the Vittues 20.102-104).
)0
· AUGUSTINE ANI> T HE J EWS
Philosoph ical understa ndings of scripture> as we have just seen, could var)' quite significantly among jews who otherwise shared strong commitments. Both Philo and th e allegorists whom he ad dressed in J1Jl Migr(Jtion ofAbmbamJ fo r exa mple, concurred on the im portance, the sanctity, the p hilosophical depths, and the spiritual heights of scripture. Yet they neverth eless stro ngly d isagreed on the best wa)' to enact their co mmon convictions. Paul, their younger contemporary, o ffe rs a noth er imeresting comparison with Philo. Though neither as highl)' educated philosophically nor nearly as prolific litera rily, Paul too could o ffer spiritual u nderstandings of rhe Septuagint much as Philo did, convinced, as was Phi lo, that such read ings revealed the deeper sign ificance of the texc. Like Philo, Paul also saw in idolatr)' a standing ind ictment of pagan culture ch ar gave the lie to pagan claims to wisdom. "Claiming ro be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of th e immortal God fo r images" (Romans 1:22-23; fo r che whole passage, t:JS-Jl). Like Philo, Paul believed in the superio r value of his own understanding of th e Law's spir it ual meaning. Jews who understood th e Law d iffe rently from h is way1 Paul o pinedJ do not understa nd Moses at all. "That same veil [thac Moses puc over his face when bringing che Tora h down from Sinai] remains unlifred, because o nly chrough Ch risc''- che poinc of orientation for Paul's reading-"is it taken awa),., (2. Corinthians Jl4). 7
And again like Philo, Paul valued Jewish law deeply. ("The Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good"; Romans 7:12.) As a jew who was committed co a new messianic movement, Paul had vie\l.:s on t he u ltimate meaning of scripture that distinguished h im in im · porrant ways from Philo. Yet as a jew whose fi rst lan guage was Greek and whose education was in good measure Greek, Paul also had much in co mmon with Philo) not least of aU the same Greek text of the Bible. After Philo's and Paul's lifecimes, however, che Sepcuagint (and testimonia, colleccions o f excerpts from the Septuagint) began ro circulate ever more widely within commu nities t hat were increasingly independent o f diaspora synagogues. \'Ve can attr ibute this broader circula tion q uite specifically to the spread of Christianity. By che late firsc to early second century, versions of the Christian rnessage had found adher 4
PJidda: Pagan, jewis!J, Christi.w · 51
ents among the educated class of rhe Rmnan world, as becomes evident in the types o f int ra-Christian d isputes t hat we can begin to overhear in our sources. Those formerly pagan inrd lecruals who entered the Christian movernent took upon t hemselves rhe relatively recent revelations attributed to jesus. In so doing, t hese men also rook upo n themselves an intensified fo rm of t he same problem that troubled educated Jews abou t t he depiction of the god o f Israel in t he Septuagint, and that troubled educated pagans about t he d epiction of the traditional gods in t heir own literary canon {Homer> Hesiod> Euripides> and so o n). In irs starkest form. that problem was relating rhe perfect and changeless high god of p hilosophical paideia to the imperfect world o f time, change, and matter. Theology in aU three modes-pagan,Jewish, and Christian- was the specific expression of t his more general intellectual problem. All theology p roceeded by making p hi losophical sense of sacred texts. In the case o f Christianity. however, this challenge was additionally co mplicated by the fact t hat gentile Christians for a long time had few sacred texts of t heir own. Paul's letters, letters written in Paul's name, gospels (many more chan would ulrimately appear in che New Testament's collectio n), various apocalypses and revelations, and a rich assortment of pseudonymous epistles all circulated widely~ and d ifferent communities respected d ifferent textual collections. Bu r for many, perhaps most, Christian communities thro ughout most of t he second cen tury and even into the third, their fundamentaJ scriptures were those t hat they shared with the synagogue, namely, the Septuagint. This simple fact ultimately had enorn1ous consequences, social as well as t heologicaJ, for jews and for Christians-and, as we shall see, fo r pagans as well.
••• T HEOLOGY, AS W£ NOTED EARLIER, d iffers from
Other types of religioUS t hought in irs effort to be systematic. to coordinate t he various elements of its vie\VS on d ivinil)'> h umanity. and the cosmos in ord er to achieve an intellectuall)' coherent whole. To be "religious" requires belonging to some sort o f community, but to be ''t heological'' requlres an effort at systematic thought. For this reason, the core texts of t he
)l • ,\UG UST I NI! AN O THE p:WS
New Testament collection-Pau l's letters and t he four gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke,John)-are theological o nly incipiently. They commu· n icate their new message through story (the gospels) and through proclamation (Paul, too). Where they appeal to p hilosophical terms o r issues- such as rh e Gospel of)ohn's brief presentatio n of Jesus as '' logos" (John L:t-)) 1 o r Paul's naming Christ as an agent in creation (''through whom all things are a nd through whom we exist/' 1 Corint hians 8:6 RS\0-they offer no systematic reflection o n the idea. Eventually these texts will become the subject of and occasion fo r theological reflection. But even once they a ttained that status of "scrip rure" themselves- an uneven and contested process nor definitively concluded un til the era o f rh e imperial church-they were always understood in relatio n to rhe much larger, much older, a nd much more prestigious b iblical can on thar had preceded them: those Jewish scrip· cures chat eventually becarne the Ch ristian "O ld Testa ment."; \XIe catch an indirect ind ication of more a mbi tious theological reAection o n the Christian message in some of rh e later New Testament texts. In rhe writing kno\111 as 1 jo hn (probably fro m the !are first cen· rury), the author warns against ¢'false pro phets.., These prophets are o ther Ch ristians. \X' hat makes th ese Chrisrians "false/' john a rgues> is that rhey deny rhat "jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (• John ,p). "This is he who ca me by water a nd blood,jesus Christ, not with the warer o nly but wirh the warer a.nd rhe blood" (• John r6). In an other short lerter also attributed to this jo hn, the a uthor warns again against listening to these other Christians. "Many deceivers have gone o ut in to the \vorld, men who will not acknowledge the coming ofj esus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the anti-C hrist" (2jo hn 7). Why would some Christians claim that Ch rist had had no fles hly bod}'? \Vhac sort of sense \vould that make? \X'e can u nderstand what is at stake in this early d ispute, and whar compelled these repudiated C hriscians ro teach that Christ did not have fles h1 if we chink with the principles o f philosophical paideia. "High" claims a bo u t jesus occur in the very earliest srratum o f our evidence> from mid-first cen w ry: the let ters of Paul. Paul speaks of jesus as the divine and preexistent son of God, h is agent in creation> the one " through whom all rhings a re" (• Corinrhians 8:6). Before
jesus' m ission o n earth, said Paul, he \vas "in the form of God"-a claim for his divinity, surely-bur that he chen "emptied himself" and took on "the fo rm of a slave," was born "in rhe likeness of men" and "in human form" (Philippians 2:5-10). When on earth, jesus had assumed "the likeness of sinful fles h" (Romans 8:;). i>aul elsewhere describes jesus as a human being (ambropos), albeit "from heav1m" (1 Corinthians 15:49); a man born of woman, under rhe Law-char is, a jew (Galatians 4:4; Romans 9:5); a fleshly descendant in fact of King David (Romans q). Frequently at still other points, Paul speaks of Christ's blood and of his death on a cross. And he proclaims jesus' bodily-though nor fles hly- resurrection (1 Corinthians 1542-55). These assertions of Paul's seem to pull in diftt>rent di rections. His claims for Christ's elevated, eternal, superhuman qualities-Christ's divinity~ in brief-sound shocking coming fro m a jew and thus from someone whom \ve habitually identify as a mo notheist. Here1 again, the modern version of rhe co ncept-belief char rhere is o nly o ne godo bscures both Paul's meaning and his historical context. Ancient rnonotheism left scope for many gods. O nly one suprerne god was ''on top," but var ious other gods in chis divinity-congested universe ranged beneath, lower than and in some sense subordinate to rhe high god. \Vere these lower gods "demons 1? Educared pagans were con1forrable with the claim. Plutarch, an intellectual of the early empire (46 c .E.?120 C.E.?), commented char such lower divinities were fla ttered when addressed b)' the name of the higher god whom they served. And the third -cenrury Neoplatonist f'orphyry observed that demons presided over o racles, local altars, and shrines: "They \Vere regio nal deputies, not very exalted cosmic powers." In shore, for pagans, demon (Greek: daimotJ} was a synonym for "lower god."3 The Septuagint reflects chis neutral usage. Centuries afterward, however, when some jews and, later, Christians impugned the moral status of these lower gods, the rerm assum ed the negative aspect that it still has in modern English. ''The gods of the nations are daimon~sJ" sang the Psalmisr in Greek (Psalm 95'5 LXX). "What [ocher] pagans sacrifice they offer to daimones, and not to God," Paul tells his pagans, to whom he fo rbids such practices (J Corinthians 10:10). The question of these powers' moral o rientatio n to one side, however1 the point is
54 • AUGUSTINE ASO Tllll. JEWS
rhat their existence was assu med un iversally, by h ighly educated churchmen no less than by others. By the early fifth century c.E., Au· gustine could insist chat god and demon \vere merel)' in terchan geable terms. "If the Ipagan ] Platonisrs p refer to call t hese ' gods' rather than 'den1ons,' and to co un t them among chose whom Plaro their master writes a bo ut as gods created by the highest god, let them say what they wan t ... fo r then they say exactly what we Sa)', whichever word they may use for them" (City of God 9·23). People of sufficient educatio n who thought philosophicall)• about relations between levels of divinity m ight see rhese lower gods as contingent upo n the high god, meaning t hat their existence d epended someh ow o n his. Less philosoph ically inclined monotheists \vere content to assert that their own particular god was the oldest o r the h ighest o r the best god. In other words, ancient "'monotheism" easily accom modated the idea of rn ultiple divin ities, as long as a single deity stood at the absolu te pinnacle of holiness and power. Claims fo r the divinity o f various och er beings did not compromise commitment to a single h ighest being, as Paul himself illustrates. And by speaking of the preexistent son as God's agent in creation-mud\ indeed, as pagan Hellenists spoke of the demiurge o r kosmokmtor and as both pagan and Jewish Hellenists spoke of the divine logos- Pau l explicitly subord i· nated the divine Son to God the Father. \X'hat about Paul's descripcion of jesus as anthrOpos, "human"? Again, thin king with the a ncient context helps. Paul lived in a society comforta ble with ascribing divinity to special hu man beings. (Heroic figures such as Heracles had started our h uman and e nded up divine; so too, mu tatis murand is, d id rhe emperor.) j ews famo usly [Ook a d iffe rent view on this matter from that of rheir neighbors, rh e pagan majority, though Philo can speak of Moses, or of t he patr iarchs, as representations o f the divine. For moderns, Paul's assorted declarations about jesus-that he \vas a man and that he appeared in the form of a man (Philippians 2;s-8), that he was truly divine and yet he truly died-can seem to stand in tension with each other. For an cients, while these claims about jesus in particular might have seemed un usual, they were certainly not in themselves un thinkab le: The un iverse was fi Ued wirh d ivine pe rsonalities who man ifested t hemselves in a vast va-
riety of ways. And o n the evidence, Paul himself noticed no fatal contradiction. He simply described jesus as human and as divine. as heaven I)' and as historical, as having flesh and blood and as simpl)' assum ing their "like ness.·~ The Christians denounced in 1 and 2 jo hn pro bably lived at least o ne generation, perhaps two, after Paul \'(le know nothing abo ut what o r which Christian writings they would have known. \Ve do know that collections of Paul's letters were beginning to circulate and that they confused people. ("There are some things in them,'' warned a late-firstcencury Greek-speaking Christian, '' that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their O\vn destruction"'; 2 Peter J 15t6). The position that these repudiated Christians are accused of taking. however. makes sense in terms of the sorts of ···h igh •• claims for jesus' divinity that we find in Paul and in certai n passages of the Gospel of john. Undergirding these later Christian ideas about jesus' flesh, or lack of it, are the principles of philosophical paideia and the imagined architecture of the Hellenistic cosmos. This mental pict:ure of the universe, inherited fro m Greek philosophers and reinforced by ancient science, o rganized reality along averticaJ a.~ is. \XIhat was physically "up" was also morally ''good." Thus the bodies of che stars-luminous, beautiful, stable) eternal-declared their moral and metaphysical superio rity to the planets. which wandered~ just as the planets in turn were superio r to the moon itself, which altered in its monthly courses. Below the moon, matter grew chick and recaJcitranr. Flesh and blood-the co nstitutive elements of animal and thus of human bodies-were relegated to the earth, which stood at the universe•s center, where the heaviest matter had sunk. Labile both physically and morally, fles h was subject to insult and to death; susceptible to appetite, it distracted rhe mind, the highest part of the soul. How co uld rhe fleshly body possibly be the native home of the soul? Surely the soul came fro m above. (This last ide-a was extremely congenial to thinkers with allegiances to Plato.) O nce freed of its encrapment in rhe flesh, whether through sleep, spiritual ecstasy) o r final!)' death, the soul could begin its ascent through che universe, back up past the moon and on to its point of origin in the celestial realm.'0 It is this worldview that probabl)' prompted chose Christians at-
56 ·
AUGUSTINE ASO THE JEWS
racked in 1 and 2j o hn co ask a reasonable quescion: Had Chrisc at any point r-eall)' had a fles hly body at all? If Christ wer-e "from heaven,' if he were divine1 and if he asce nded back to heaven, then why suppose
chat he had really inhabited animal Aesh fo r the brief moment when he appeared o n earth? And if Christ had been "raised" at his resurrection to be seared "at che right hand of the Father''-that is to
say. in
che highesc heavens-why insist illogically (and unscientifically) char he had been in a fleshly body when he had been raised? (After all, Paul himsel f had explicidy caughc o therwise: "Flesh and blood cannot in· herir the Kingdom of God, nor can the perishable inherit the imper· ishable"; 1 Corinthians 15:so.) Such bodies, whether for humans or fo r Chrisc himself, belonged o nly in rhe realm below rhe moon. The hig her the claims for Christ's divinity. in o ther words) che less coher-
ent was the thought that he had ever actually had a body of flesh. If chose Christians who thought this way had had access
to
Paul's letters
and co the Gospel ofjohn, they could easily have found support there for their own views. Paul himself, mid-first century, does not seem to have reflected systematically o n chis aspect of the evolving Chrisrian message. But ev-
idently these later Chr istians did. Their theological understanding of Ch risc-chat he had onl)' seemed to have a fles hly body-scholars have labeled "docetic Christology" or, more s imply, "docetism." The rerm rests o n che G reek dokeo>"to appear." Docerism is "appearanceChristo logy. '' For many moderns, docetism seems an odd and even a councerinruitive idea. After fifteen centuries of Chrisrian art (and nearl)' one century of innumerable biblical movies), we are long accustomed to seeing jesus represented as an embodied human male. Ln chis formarive pe riod o f Christian theology, however, gods and their messengers, the angeloi) were not imagined as having bodies of earthl)' flesh. "Not
all fles h is the same," J>aul had observed. "There are heavenly bodies and there are earth!)' bo dies" (• Co rinrhians 15'39-40). For those later Christians who atternpted to think systematically) and thus who attempted to organize their religious assertions rationally) their belief in
jesus' d ivinicy readily im•ited the coordinating claim that jesus had neither appeared nor been raised in a fles hly body.
Docetic Christology potentially provided o ne way to coordinate a whole host of related and difficult issues: how to read t he Bible, especially Genesis: h ow ro conceptualize both God and those beings made "after h is image and likeness'' (Genesis 1:27); how to wring some overa rching consistency o ut o f Paul 's letters~ how ro imagine salvation. If t he god described in Genesis had rnade the physical universe, fo r example, how could he be rhe hig hesr god ? If rhe stories abour rhac god stood in jewish scriptures commonly known as the Law, and if Paul so frequenrly contrasred Law and gospel, how should rhe Christian regard those scriptures and rhat god ? God is spir it; fles h (as Paul frequently asserted) battles against the spirit. How then could salvation rnean anything oth er than the redemption o f the hu man spirit from t his lower cosmos o f fleshJ sin, and dead\ and its t ransfer to rhe divine realm of spirit, love, and life eternal? But docetic Ch risrology did more than provide a pl umb line for t heology and exegesis. It also implied an answer to a question o f social import. In the view of docetist Ch ristians, "Aesh '' coordinated t heologically with the god who 1 acco rd ing to jewish scriprures, had made fles h. It was a sho rt move from this positio n to a more genera] interpretive principle, namely> that jews and Judaism were also particular!)' concerned with things of the '' flesh."' These Christians, by cont rast> saw themselves as concerned wirh things of rhe '"spiri t.'' Their d ocetic Christ po inted rhe way to coherently relate the Jewish god to the revelation o f Christ, rh e Jewish Law to rhe Christian gospel, the Jewish synagogue to the Chr istian ch urch. A Chr ist with out human fles h heralded a Christianity without j udaism. T hese positions, as we shall shorcly see, characterized the rheologies of docetist Christians Iacer on, in che early to mid-second century. \X'e cannot know how many of these ideas were affirmed b)' t hose first-century Docetists whose existence we can o nly glimpse behind the polemics o f the epistles o f john in the New Tesrament. Bur they stand as the anonymous o rigins o f a strong cheologlcaJ current that courses through major C hrisd a n t hinkers in t h e second century and on to Augustine himself in t he fo urth. The young Augustine, encounterlng ph ilosophy fo r rhe fi rst rime as a gifted "undergrad uate" in the early 370s, shed his childhood faith ro adhere
58 •
AUGUSTISE AND THE JEWS
for over a decade ro the o utlawed church of the Manichees. This commu nity introduced him to the docetic Ch rist and to the anti Jewish PauL The in tellecrua] coherence of the Manichaean position, and its 4
unnerving resonance with more mainstream Chrisrian paideia with its traditions of anti-judaism, haunted him long after he recurned to the Roman church. Augustine's teachings o n Jews and judaism have the clariC)' and the power that they do in no small part because Augustine had to pitch them against the clarity and the power of Manichaeism.
• •• ETE RNITY AND HIST ORY, god
and cosmos, time and redemption, spirit and matter. Philosophical paideia d icrated the terms and the problems that intellectual Christians thought with when they tried to frame a theology. llut it also, through allegory, offered a means by which to reach answers. This was because Christian paideia, like its Jewish and pagan elder siblings, relied profoundly upon textual interpretation. The premier text was the Septuagin t. Thro ugh their applications of allegorical in terpretation, Christian thinkers could achieve an understanding of the Sepruagint which d isclosed its "true," spiri tual meaning as a revelation of Ch rist. Paul's own letters once again provide o ur earliest instance of this sort of reading. Christ was the focal point for Paul's new perspective on scripture. Once he joined the Christian movement, Paul was cer rain that his native traditions and Israel's scriptures themselves, properly understood ("acco rd ing to the spirit, not according to the letter"), actually enunciated his own current co nvictio ns. Thus) when speaking to his Corinthian community about the material support due Christian apostles, he suddenly recalled a reaching of Moses. Deuteronomy 2):4, he realized, clinched his argument. "Do I s.ay this on human auchoriry? Does not the Law say the same? For it is written in the Law o f to.~loses, 'You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading g rain', (1 Corinthians 9:4-9). Clearly, Pau] urges, the Law seeks to communicate more than just suggestions on good animal husbandry. "Is it fo r oxen that God is concerned? Does be not speak entire/} for our ow11 sake?" (v. 10). The more profound meaning o f Deuteronomy, in other words, 4
4
Paidd.r: Pagd11, j t'wi sll, Cl>ristian · 59
does not coincide with what ir plainly Sa)'S: Thar much would be obvio us ro anyone hearing the re.xt. Rather, understood spiri tuaBy, the La\v reveals a crucial trurh precisely pertinent to Paul's current situation: Christian a postles working in and for t he spir irual well-being of the community ("treading grain") should not be remained ("muzzled") from partaking of the community's materiaJ well-being. Shortly thereafter in rhis same lener>referring to Israel's wandering in the desert after leaving Egypt> Paul retrojects Christ back inro Exodus as a character in the biblical story and as an agent in lsrad•s past. The children oflsrael dran k water from a rock in the desert, Paul recounts> "and thar Rock was Chr ist/ • (1 Corinthians l0:4}. Nonetheless, Paul contin ues, some of these same Israelites later fell in to idol worship (the Golden Calf, Exodus _l2) and thence plunged in to indiscriminate eating> drinking, dancing> and idolatry's invariable companion sin , fo rnication. God destroyed them. Paul's argument assumes rhat t hese historical events did occur. But t he reason for their being recorded in scripture was in order thar the lesson be preserved fo r h is Corinthian community. "Now these things happened co them as a warning, bstt the)' w~re tvrittetl dortm for our imtruction>upo11 whom tiJe tmd ofdJe d.gf!s has come'' (1 Corinthians tO:l 1; we \\~II consider Paul1s last phrase shortly). Pa ul' s lesson here p resumes a notion of Christ's preexistence, and t he role of Christ as an actor in the foundatio nal history of Israel. Bur the reason fo r which this story was preserved in scripture, he teaches, was to serve as a clear moral warning ro Paul's gentile Christians: These Corinthians better not even think about worshiping idols again. Scholars designate t his last sort of reading l)•pology. A genre of allegory>t:ypolog)' takes a n episode o r person or image from scripture a nd trea ts it as a model or "type" (Greek tupos) rhat serves to in terpret a d iffe rent situation, understanding, or event occurring outside the frame of the original story. In the exa mple just given> the story o f the Golden Calf is a cautio nary tale. The Israelites of the generation of the Exodus serve Paul as a type of and a negative role model for the first-cent ury gentile community whom he addresses. \Ve can see Paul creating another such web of referents in Galatians 4>where he constructs a long lesson a round Abraham, Sarah and Hagar> Isaac and
60 • ... UOUSTlNE AS"D THll Jl!WS
Jshmael.]erusalem above and jerusalem below, all o riented around the poles of spirit versus fles h (Galatians 4:21-Jt. "Now these things a re being allegorized," he cues h is lisceners: v. 24). In Galatians his typology restates the message o f the entire episde: His Christian Gentiles in Galatia must not listen to other Christian m issionaries who advise them to be circumcised. In borh of these instances-with the Corinthians about ido l wor· ship, with the Galatians abour circu mcision-Paul read t he Bible rypologicaJiy as a way to situ ate h imself and h is listeners in their current context. Pauline typology d10s represents a radical updating of the Bib le and, at the same moment, a radical reinterpretation of j ewish h i.scory. The prime purpose an d function of these ancient stories, both religiously and historically, beco mes un derstanding rhe (gentile, Christian) present, which in rurn means revising older u ndersta nd ings of the Jewish past. Indeed, urges Paul, it was precisely fo r the benefit of h is gent ile Christian communities in t heir current h istorical momem chat scripture contained these texts. As he says in h is fi nal letter, Romans1 "\Vharever was written d own in former days was written for our instruction" (Romans 15:4). AJI th ese styles of "spirit ual" in terpretatlon would go on co have long lives as techn iques by \vhich to render th e Septuagin t a C hristian book. In this sense (as in others), later Christian in terpreters owed much to Paul (as, indeed, t hey would also owe much to Philo). Bu t PauJ•s situation v•.-as fundamentall)' different from that of h is later rheological heirs fo r rwo important and historica.lly specific reasons. First, Paul thought of h imself as a jew a nd he though< of his message as j udaism. And, second , Pau l was convinced char he stood o n th e ed ge of che End of ri me. As a Jew, Paul w1dersrood the "true" meaning o f scripture. He identified this with his own in terpretation o f the gospel, which he saw as co nfirming and con forming to the p romises that God had made to Israel lo ng ago through Abraham, Isaac, and jacob. We hear h im srar· ing these ideas most d early (and calmly) in h is fi nal letter, written to Christian Gentiles in Rome. "For J tell you t hat Christ became a ser· vant to the circumcised to show God's truth fulness> in order to con· fi nn the p ro rn ises made to the pa triarchs" (Romans 15:8). To be rrue to
scripture, Christ's redemption had to encompass Paul's "kinsmen by race/' his suggenoi, the Jews (Ro mans 9:3 RSV). Yet, as Paul knew, the good news of Chr ist had left many of his kinsmen un moved. Did rhis mean, then, that the word of God had failed? Impossible (9:6). What, then, was the explanation for Israel's ind iffere nce o r hostility ro Paul's message? In Chapters 9 through 11 of this letter addressed to the community ar Ro me, we hear Paul resolving rhis dilemma. Here he relies not o n reading scripture aJiegorically, bur rather o n consrruccing a g rand narrative rhat is at o nce historical-that is, set in the past-and, therefore~ also prophetic. In this g rand narrative, Paul develops a description of the ways that God has worked and will work in hisrory, choosing individ uals and natio ns to act (whether positively or negatively) as his agents, in o rder to achieve his purpose of redemption. Paul begins by seeming to narrow the field o f those enco mpassed by God's promise. He distinguishes two po pulations within Israel, those descended fro m Abraham according to the Aesh and those descended through the child of the promise, Isaac (Ro mans 9:6-9). Abraham had children by other women, but by Sarah alone he had Isaac, his divinely designated heir. And even between child ren of the same rnother- twins, no less~ and still in utero-God chose o ne brother, j acob, over rhe other, Esau, "though they were nor yet bo rn and had done nothing either good o r bad" (9:1o- 13)· What, then, of the question o f fai rness? "Is there injustice with God? God forbid!" (9:14). God, not man, contro ls history. God, not n1an, knows the djvine plan (9:J1). In pursuit of his purpose of elecrion, "so chat my name may be proclaimed in all the earth," God even hardened Pharaoh' s heart so that Pharaoh co uld not respond to rhe divine call (9:16-18). Like a porter, God shapes rhe clay of humanity as he will~ some vessels for mercy and others fo r wrath (9:19-13). All o f this controlling and choosing and shaping rests absolutely with God's prerogative, and he owes humanity no explanation. ···\Vho are you, 0 rnan, to answer back to God?" (9:20). This, urges Paul, is the way ro u nderstand the justice o f God. For now, God has evidently elected only some Jews (a mere remnan t, Romans 9:27) and some Gentiles. God can and does pick whomever he wanes to receive his mercy. He is under obligation ro no one.
62
· AUGUSTINE ASO THE J EWS
Bur Paul is commirred to a much broader vision o f redemption, and so is h is god, so he does nor leave marters here. It is true, he says, t hat in spurning t he gospel, Israel has p roven to be d isobedient and conrrary (Roman s 10:4,t8)21). Does lsrael's rejection o f God 's plan mean ch at God in turn has rejected Israel (11 :1)? "By no means!" Paul answers. T he current sit uation, he u rges) is both providentiaJ and temporary, for Israel's response to God's initiative is itseJf determined by God. For t he present, God has chosen " by grace'' only a remnan t o f Israel, just as back in t he days of Elijah he kept 7,000 men from worship ing the god Ba'aJ. So too he has currend}' ('hardened '' the g reater part of Israel, much as he once hardened Pharaoh (11:2-7, cf. 9:17 o n Pharao h). But God, explains Paul, has always intended Israel's "full inclusion" in redemption (11:12). True) the Gentiles have taken precedence with respect to the gospel, but ch is, Pau l war ns them) was not due to any merit whatsoever o n th eir parr, but solely to God•s surprising plan. "'Lest you be wise in your own conceits)., Paul cau tions h is gentiJe hearers in Rome~
I \vane you ro understand this mystery, brerhren. A hardening has co1ne upon parr of Israel, until the fuJI number ofrhe Gencfles come 1n, a11d so all Jsr.:reluttlf be saved. . . . As regards rhe gospel, rhey are rhe enem1es of God fot' )'OUr sake; bm as l'egards election t he)' a~·e belov~d for t he sake of their forefathers. For tl~ fifi; and tbe c.al.J of God are irreti()Cab/~t. j ust as you were once d1sobediem co God bur now have received metC)' because of rheir disobedience, so they have now been disobedtenr in order char, b)' rhe mercy shown ro }''OU, rhey may l'ecetve mercy. For God has consigned all men ro disobedience, dMt. be may batlf! nmt)' upcm ~u. ROMANS IJ:lj- p
RSV
Exa mining Paul in the retrospect o f h isro ry, we can sort through h is convictions, identifying those chat he would have had even if he had never encoun tered rhe C hristian movement and chose that he had specifically on account of his involvement in the Christian movemenr. And fo r clarity we label such beliefs "jl?\vish" or "Christian.'' In rerms of Pau l's own experience, however, such identifications a re a g ross anachronism 1 a nd they risk representing a f.1.lse d ichotomy. Jn his own
view, Paul was always a jew, in both phases of h is Jife. In l:1.ct-and again in his own view-Paul was always a n excellent jew in both phases o f h is life. Before receiving his call, " I advanced in Judaism beyond ma ny of nl)' own age among my people'' (Galatians 1..:14); "As to righteousness under the Law, I was blameless" (Philippians j:G). And given his own understanding of the message of Christ, he was also convinced that he was a superior Jew: chosen before birth by God himself to be an apostle to the Gentiles (Galatians Clj-16), empowered by God's own spirit to prophesy and to teach (t Corinthians L4 passim)> superior to other missionaries to an extraord inary degree on account of his fortitude in suffering (2 Corin thians u passim) and on account of his elevated visions and revelations (2 Corinthians t2.:r-s). "By the grace of God I a m what I am," Paul proclaimed, adding (wirh no false modesty) "and God's grace toward me was not in vain" (t Corinth ians
1p0). Our a nalytic disrinction between Paul rhe Jew and Paul the Christian simply does not ca rry over in to his own life. He was both> an d he saw th e message of Christ as absolutely synonymous with his native religion a nd with God's pro mises to Israel) his «kinsmen b)' race" (Romans 9:3 RSV). Paul 's convinions as a jew-that the god of Israel was both just and merciful, that his p ro rnises to Israel were irrevocable, rhat Israel's redemption was u naJrerably promised in the scriptures-might have conAicred with his co nvicrions as an apostle of Chrisr. After all, by mid· cent ury, when he wrote Romans, rh e gospel mission to Israel \liaS not meeting with conspicuous success. And Paul's convictions specifically as a Christian jew-char jesus truly \vas rhe messiah) thar he truly had been raised 1 that h is resurrection rruly heralded th e establishment o f God's kingdom-might have conAicted with his experience. After all) Christ had died and been raised nearl)' t\1/0 decades prior ro Pau1's writing his letter to Ron1e, a nd still the End had not come. But instead, through h is rereading of scripture, h is bed rock confidence in God's promises to Jsrael, and his certain ty chat the End \vas indeed at hand ("nearer to us," he cells the community in Rome, "rhan when we fi rst believed"; Romans IJ:II), Paul ingeniously resolved the tensions bet\veen his convictions a nd his experience. He understood God's plan. Because h e had seen rh e risen Christ, Paul believed that he knew what time ir was on God's dock. He was convinced ch at he lived and
Cl4 • AUGUSTIS l! AN I) THE JSWS
worked in the very last days, in histOJ')''s final generation. For this reason he could tell his community that the End of the Age had 111tud)' come upon them (1 Corinthians JO:u, quoted above). He would witness Chr i.sr·s rerurn, when "we who are alive, who are left un til the coming of the Lo rd " would be caught up with the resurrected dead to meet Christ in the air (t Thessalonianq:J) - 17). "We shall not all sleep," he tells his Gentiles in Corinth, "but we shall all be changed" (t Corinthians '5'51). Thus for Paul as for the o ther early apostles, Christ's resurrection v.ras no solitary event. Indeed, the resurrection of Christ was incomprehensible without irs co mmunal d imension. "If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised'' {t Corinthians 15:16). For Paul as fo r this first generation of aposdes and missio naries, the risen Ch rist presaged the returning Christ, the imminent resurrection of all the dead and the transformatio n of rhe living, and the establish menr of God's kingdom. True, by the time chat Pau] wrote Romans> a gap of some twenty years had opened between Christ•s resurrection and his seco nd coming. But Paul knew why: God was giving Paul a little more rime to complete his mission to the Gentiles. Soon, very soon~ Christ would retu rn. God would stop his miraculous hardening of lsraef•s heart>and everyone- the full n umber of the Gentiles and all Israel-would enter in to rhe red emption promised in scripture (Romans 11:25). The entire biblical past wast for Paul, transparent upon current events {15~). He wove his own experience in this new messianic movernent together with his understanding of Jsrael's past as presenred in script ure co produce a sing le grand narrative of redemption. His experience of Christian pagans• tur ning frmn idols and false gods to the exclusive worship of the god ofJsraelJ together with his own witness to the risen Christ, charged the present wirh eschatological significance. These events confirmed Paul in his conviction that the kingdom truly was ar hand .
••• THE KIN ODOM, J·IOWE\'ER, did
not arrive within the first generation of chis viral new messianic movement. ln consequence> its foundational prophecy-"The Kingdom of God is at hand'"- shifted meanings as the missio n spread. Scattered communities of very diverse orientation
were left to make sense o f the gospel p roclamation, of t he jewish sc riptu res on which it was based, and o f t he literary legacy o f its early years> most especially t he letters o f i>aul. As forms o f the Christian message reach erudite urban eli tes, we begin to see evidence (as wit h our anonymous late-fi rst-century Docetists) o f learned reflection on its various eleme nts. Pagan intellectuals) commit ting t hemselves to Christian ity, applied th eir t rain ing in systematic rational thought, forens ic argument, and techn iques o f textual interpretation co t hese Greek Jewish texrs. Rising to rhe challenge of finding
mean ing in t he early message, rhese men defended th eir views using all the tools a nd skills of rhetoric and all the philosophical soph istication that their educad ons had made avai lable to them. T he result was an eruption of intra-Christian rheological dispute. By comparing rhe work of t hree p rominent early gentile Ch ristian theologians-Valentinus (fl. lJO), Marcion (fl. 40), and j ustin (fl. tjO)we can gain a sense o f the issues that shaped this dispute. These men came fro m various corners of the e mpire: Va1ent inus from Alexandr ia in Egypt, Marcion from Pont us by the Black Sea, Justin from Neapolis (now Nablus) in Ro man Palestine. For a moment, all three lived in Rome. T heir common ed ucational culture and t heir shared conviction that salva tion was uniquely available through Chrisr d id not preclude birrer enm iry. All rhree theologians left behind teachings rhar contributed to t he fo rmation of long-lived, \vide-flung, and mut ually a ntagonistic churches. And their a rgumenrs esta blished poin ts o f contention t hat s haped rheological controversy fo r centuries, in their own period up ro Augustine's day and beyond. This antagonism might surprise u.s. because these men and their respective commun it ies held so much in common. Two o riginally separate strands of ancient monotheism- from t he pagan side throug h philosophy, fi·om rhejewish side through t he Bible and the lirerature o f the early Christian movement- twined together in their works. AJI t h ree theologians defined the high god philosoph ically: He was u nique, perfect, good, ch angeless, incorpo real, utterly t ranscendent, and so o n. An d th is o·anscendent deity, the)' agreed , was indeed th e father of Jesus Christ. They all asserted, further, in light o f their co mmitment to this definition of the h igh god, that the divine intelligence who had orga-
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nized the material cosmos could only be a lower god. And t his lower god, they concurred, was the creative deity described in Genesis and accive throughout the Septuagint. And, fi nally, they all three asserted that rh e Septuagint, in terpreted correctly-char is, with spirit ual understanding-provided crucial insight into Christian revelation." Despite their broad agreement, however> th ese theologians were much divided o n t\vo questio ns. One, whose ul timate source in learned t"fediterranean culrure was the Platonic p hilosophical n·adition, concerned the moral sta tus o f matter. \Vas matter good or bad? The seco nd, whose source was th e Christian message itsel~ concerned the stat us of the Septuagint. How were jewish scriptures to be read and used to gain insigh t into Christian truth? The a nswer to o ne question immediate!)' affected the a nswer to t he other. Of th ese three Chr istian th inkers, t he first, Valentinus> was the most intellectually sophisticated, the most ph ilosophically radical, and the most theologically o riginal. At our cu rrent distan ce from h is work, which was sup pressed by the fo u rth-century Roman church, we cannot sort o ut the sequence o f h is convictions. Did his reading of the Septuagint prompt h is belief that the material cosmos was evil? O r did his belief that matter was evil subsequendy inform his interpreta tion of Genesis? HO\vever he a rrived at h is convictions, th ey led Valentin us to break with o ne of the prime positions o f Ro man-period Platonism, namely, that the cosmos was good, because irs o rganizatio n reflected the o peratio n o f divine mind. Valent i nus and his followers, o n the contrary. saw the material cosmos as a barrier rather than a bridge to the realm oflig ht and love beyond. And as the Valentinian estimate of the moral status of the physical u niverse sank, so too did their opinion of the god of Genesis who had o rganized matter. Co rrespondingly, cheir opinion o f the people who revered this god an d kept h is laws-that is, the Jews-sank as well. Genesis and other books o f the Jewish Bible d id in deed reveal Christian tru th, srud th e Valenrinians; but o ne had to know how to read t hese texts with spiritual insight to arrive at this truth. Such understanding exposed the biblical god as an ignorant deity, obsessively concerned with b lood sacrifices a nd sexuaJ couplings. His d istasteful and small-minded laws related exclusively to the j ews. Yet deep within
this unelevating text lay t he long-co ncealed message o f the h igh god, revealed now co his elect by the co ming o f his son. This message imparced other, divine, spiriruaJ laws chat were in fact directed toward the enlightened Christian. Rules for how to interpret t he Septuagint> transmitted t h rough aposto lic rraditiol\ could aid rhe discerning reader in di.sringuishing these spiritual commands fro m all the oth ers in the Bible char were d irected solely to Israel according to the flesh.t1 lvtarcion a nd his fo llowers sha red with the Valeminians t he view that matcer was the defective product of the lower god described in Genesis. They arrived at this position> however, by diffe rent textual means. Valemin ian teachings had drawn on a huge, rich, a nd eclectic assemb lage o f books: t he Septuagint (pa rticularly Genesis), various gospels, apostolic letters, and a considerable volume of their own inspired writings ("a countless number!'' complained their opponent lrenaeus. Against Heresies 1.10 11). Ma rcion concentrated his interpretive efforts much more narrowly. Fo r him, what mattered most \vere the letters of Paul. The co ntrasting pairs that structured Pauline rhetoricLaw and gospel, wo rks a nd g race, fles h an d spirit, Jew and Gent ileMardo n read as absolute, antagonistic o pposites. (In his sup pressed theological work, rhe Antitheses, .Marcion compa red statements in jewish scriptures to chose in Christian writings to demonstrate what he saw as the in tr insic incompacibility o f c.he cwo.) This reading of Paul led Mardo n to fo nnulare a radically new idea. Using Paul to a ut ho rize his position) Marcion repudiated not onl)' tradit ional jewish religious practices {the "works o f the Law") but also- t his is Marcio n•s novum-rhe scriptures that enjoined t hem. Both, he said> were " Aeshly'' and rhus inrrinsically unacceptable to the true follo,ver of Chrisr. The source of rh e Septuaginr t raditions was entirely the lower, justice-obsessed god o f t he jews. Bu t (gentile) Christians, urged Marc ion, worshiped the high god, the farher o f Christ, revealed by h is son u niquely through Pau l to be an aJI-Ioving and aJI-good de icy. jewish scripcure, t hen, should be u trerly relinquished to the Jews, who in any case insisted that ic was t heirs. In its place, Marcion proposed a new, specifically Ch risrian canon: a single gospel and the letrers of Pau L But wha t about those p laces in the Pauline co rpus where Paul had
68 ·
AUGUSTINE AI': I) THE J EWS
praised rhe Law, invoking irs a uthori ty and commending irs holiness? When arguing thar women should keep silent in co mmunity, Paul had urged thar rh ey "should be subo rd inate, even as the Law says,., (1 Co rimhians 14:34). "The law is holy,'' Paul had declared, "and the commandment is holy and just and good" (Romans 7:1 2). Paul's jewish e nemies, Ma rcion concluded, had corrupted Paul's lecrers by inrrod ucing these and och er similar assertions inro later copies of them. Marcion purged these statements, which he regarded as interpo lations. Elegantly, decisively, he thereby produced both a de-Judaized Apostle and a de-ju daized Ch ristian canon, a "new,. tesrament.'l Despite their very different views on what p roperly constituted C hristian texts, bo th Valenti nians and Jvlarcionites shared a similar Christology and rhus a sirnilar idea of red emption. Since matter, thus flesh (they ag reed), was the flawed medium of the moral ly derelict god of the jews, t here was no reason t hat Christ should have put it o n when he entered history to perform his m ission o f salvation. Rather, he had only seemed to have a body: In reality, he had a ppeared in the "likeness" of flesh. (Paul's statemenc in Philippians 2:s-u len t itself readily to this view.) According ly, nothing so crude as flesh was included in hu man redemption, either. (Had not Paul himself taught chat "flesh and blood will not inherit the k ingdom o f God," 1 Corinthians tj :jO?) Christ had been raised in a spirituaJ body, and t hat was rhe same sort of"body" that t he redeemed Chr istian would have. (Th is position, roo, was based on Paul: A dead human body at burial. he taugh t, "is sown a physical body, and it is raised a spiritual body isoma pnenmatiiwn]. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiricual body"; 1 Corinthians '5'44-) Flesh was not t ruly parr o f rhe person~ rather, flesh was rhe trap set by the lo\ver god ro e nsnare t he person, whose true self was h is soul. According ly. rhe salvation of Christians would nor be achieved en ma$St"' as a historical evem . Rather, rh e individua] soul, shedding rh e e ncum brance o f fles h at death~ \vould rise rh rough th e material universe and ou t of it1 to rhe rranscendenr realm of t he Father a bove. Against the positions of rhese two t heo logians stood t heir younger conremporary,J usrin. For all h is objections to t hem, however, Justin shared rnany o f t heir views. Like Valentin us and Ma rcion)Justin delined the hig h god according co the can ons of philosophical paideia.
Paidtu: Pagan, jtu•lrh, Christian · 69
Like Valentin us and Marcion, he also asserted chat this high god was the f."her of jesus Christ. And, again like Valentin us and Marcion, he too held that the busy deity who ap(J were o bviously carnal a nd literal minded. Jn this way, through this invective> these other, repudiated C hristians (who, like thei r opponents> were themselves Gentiles) were rhetorically rendered as "Jews.., A second genre of argument d rew o n a strongly biblical motif: the idea of prophet)' and fulfillment. Christ, said these Christians, had obviously and perfectly fu lfilled the Old Testament's prophecies about the messiah. If th e Jews failed to grasp th is filet, the fa ult was their m>n. They read rhe prophets with blind eyes and wit h carnal u nderstanding. But a ll th is had also been foreseen, these Christians pointed our. The same pro phets had co nsistently lamented their people's blind C)"eS, StoO)' hearts) and stifF necks. The Jews' rejection of t he way rhar gentile Christians read these Jewish books, in brief, con fi rmed rhar t he Christians actual!)' had t hings rig hr. Isaiah and Jeremiah had said so long ago.
74 • AU G IJSTII' £ ANO THE J EWS
Third, ap pealing to a model both pedagogical and historical, theo logians spoke of progressive revelation: God's lessons to h u manity, unfolding in time, were actuned to the abilities of th e students. Jews in this view were infants, elementa ry learners. The advanced class, history had revealed, had been reserved fo r the genrile church. This last argu· ment, invoking this educa tionaJ commonplace (beginners know less than mat ure students do) corresponded nicely with the first one. Elemental")' students, understanding a text a t its narra tive, simplest level, can g rasp only its obvious 1 "bodily" mea ning; advanced students, trained in h igher levels of in terpretation, see past the obvious and inco t he text's "spir ir." 1
These talking points were nor genera ted b)' orthodox Christian theologians in a n effort to describe actual jewish contemfX'raries, t hough they could be deployed in argu ments with Jewish conrempo· rar ies. These interpretive positions are topoi, argumencs intended to persuade listeners of the speake,~'s superiority, while position ing h is opponent at a disadvantage. Such modes of argument were used broadly, mutatis mutandis> in pagan a nd in Hellenistic Jewish polemics as welL Skill in arguing, in using beiJigerent topoi co maxj mum strategic advantage-especiaJiy in courts of law-was the praccical goal of Greco-Roman rhetorical education. Arguments structured in these ways had appeared already in Paul's let ters and in the gospels. These fi rst-century authors creared t heir own "rhetorical jews)" using the fles h/spirit dichotomy co d isparage various opponents. Paul> for example> criticizes other Christian Jews as being "fleshly" because they advoc.ace circumcision fo r Christian pagans in Galatia: His own message, he insists, is the "spiritual" one. (His lecrer to che Galatians is structured around this co ntrast, whereby Pauljspir ic/grace battles against circumcising opponents/ flesh/ works.) The same rhetorical dichotomy could be mobilized against Christian pagans who were tempted to listen to Paul's opposition. ("0 foolis h Galatians! . . . Having begun with the spirit, a re you now ending with t he flesh?"~ Galatians J:t-J). The similar contrast of ..upper'' a nd "lower" also worked welL Thus, in che fo u rth gospel, John's Jesus squares off with non-Christian jews. "You are from below/' he says to his hostile auditors, ..1 am from above. You a re of this w01id [Greek: cosmos], I a m not o f this world" (John 8:23).
P.tidtia: P. Christi.tn · 75
The rhetoric of prophecy/ fulfill ment depended o n idenrif}ing or constructing congeniaJ similarities between the older and the newer message, whereby the newer message provided the interpretive framework for the o lder scripture. \Vhen Paul twins Adam with Christ, for exam ple, he uses this sort of argument: The first Adam was "a cype o f the one who was to come" (Greek t.ttpos; Romans 5:14). T he concept o f graduated revelation/education, finally, with co ntent suited to the abilities of the hearer, could blend nicely with this rhetoric•s up/down, spiri t/ flesh dichotomies. PauiJ fo r example, combines the two when chiding the argumentative Corinthians for being immature: "I fed you with milk, nor with solid food, for you were nor ready fo r it. And even yet you are not ready, for you a re srill in the fles h" (1Corinthians J:I-J). The appeal to specifically b iblical p rophecy is everp 1·here in these Hellenistic Jewish d ocu ments. Paul invokes th e principle ("Christ died fo r our sins kata t.as graphas_,. according to rhe scriptures"~ • Corinthians t):J). The evangelists, structuring their respective presentations of the life and mission of j esus upon this same conviction, d emonstrate it through narrative. lvfark's j esus resigns himself to his arrest by saying simply, " Let the scriptures be fulfilled " (Mark 14'49). Matthew in particular, over sixty times in his gospel1 explains events by saying that t hey were d o ne specifically "in order co fulfill what was spoken by the prophets'' (for example .t-.·fatthew 1:23> on Mary's virginity; 2:14, on the fligh t to Egypt: J:q, on the sla ughter of the in nocents, and so o n). Luke's r isen Christ "begin n ing with Moses and all the prophers. _. interpreted in all the scriptures the things concerning himself'' (Luke 24:27; fo r the same idea, 24:44- 47). Jo hn's jesus, uncharaccerisricall)' curt, simply o bserves, " If you IJewsJ believed Moses, you would believe me, fo r he wrote of me'' (John 5:46). Once Paul's letters and these gospels became scripture for the later gentile churches, all of these rhetorical topoi. ripe for reuse, were redeployed. 11>< targers of choice might be " false insiders" (those other gentile Ch riscians with a diffe ren t rnessage chan the speaker's) as well as "the jews" {the perennial inti mate o utsiders). By the fourth century) when the community claiming tide to the Septuagint and to the New Testamen t fo und che emperor's favor, its d ouble canon, its identity) an d irs theology were all securely in terconnected by the tough ligaments of chis polemical rhetoric.
i6 ·
AUGUSTINE AI': I) THE J EWS
This victo rious fourth -cent ury church designated itself bo th right t hinking ("orthodox") and un iversal ("catholic")- Claiming that its teachings preserved traditions going directly back to Jesus and his original followers, rhis church pronou nced itself •'apostolic.'' Singularly empowered by Constan tine,s surprising decision in 3 12) this church propagared hostile caricarures of irs defining "enemles•'-pagans, surely; also o ther Christian communities ("hererics"}; and also, with ever-increasing authority, Jews. Unambiguous condemnations o f paganism and o f its invariable (rhetorical) accompani ments, fornication and idolatq,.> stood in both testaments. T he gods and images o riginally targeted in theJewish scriptures, of co urse> had been Canaanite deities. But once the co ndemnations o f these ancient Semitic gods, rhan ks to the Septuagint, were available in Greek> they \Vere easily redeployed against a newer pantheon, the urbane gods o f Greco-Roman culture. Specifically in New Testament documents, moreover, intra-Christian diversity had also been strongly condemned. Paul had with sarcasn1 d ismissed rival Christian missionaries as "super-aposd es" (2 Corinthians n:s)~ elsewhere, he cheerfully wished geniral self-mutilation on his Christian competition {Galatians p2). Matthew's Jesus warns against non-Matthean Christians by calling them "false prophets," wolves in sheep's clothing. Matthew acknowledges that such people indeed pray to Jesus as well as work m iracles, d rive our demons}and prophesy in his name. T hey may think, therefo re, that they follow Christ. Not so, reaches Matthew. On the last day, when it will be too late, rhese people will fi nd themselves denied ent rance to God's kingdom (Matthew 7:15-23). The a urhor o f the deutero-Pauline letter J Timothy co nsigns to Satan those Christians with whom he disagrees (1 Timothy 1:.20). 2 Peter identifies Ch ristians with beliefs differen t from his o\Vn as false pro phets and false reachers: "they will secretly introduce destr uctive haereseis" (l Peter 2:t). (This G reek word o riginally meant "opin ion" o r "school of rh ought": by the fourth cenrury, it means "heresy.") To the writer o f the Johannine epistles, other Christians, quire simply, are ' anti-Christ" (1john 2:18-t9; see also 2 John 7, said specificaJJy o f d ocerisr Christians).'' Bur r.he question of the Jews was different and, in many ways, more complicated. In the earliest decades of rhe Christian movemenr, 1
non-Christian Jews had posed a particular chaJ ienge to t he new commun ity's claims to correctly understand th e meaning of God•s promises to lsrael. Paul himself was so bafAed by his co-religionists• cool response to h is message that he a ttributed their ind iffe rence o r hostil icy to nothing less t han t he direct and providential intervention o f God. God h imself, Paul explained, was hardening Israel in order to allow t he a postles more time to concentrate on turn ing t h e nations to the gospel. At a certain point-very soon, Pa ul though t-God would release lsrad from t heir deafness and th e whole world) Jew and Gen tile, would be saved (see p. 62 above). In o ther words, while acknowledging t he p roblem of his kinsmen's rejection of the gospel, Paul in his final letter also reveals a hap py solutio n. God's prophets had foretold and described Israel's disobedience long ago: It was divinely imposed, merely tempora ry, and fated co be b rief. God's steadfastness was the foundation of Paul's conviction. God had called Israel, and "the gifcs and the call of God are irrevocable" (Romans 1 1:29). By t he second century, however, d iverse gentile C hristian con11n u nities regarded Jewish indiffere nce to or contempt fo r the gospel as a perman ent condition. In so doing, they rejected as heretical t hose o ther Christian co mmun ities, whether Jewish o r gendle) that saw no conflict between Christ and rhe Law. To neu tralize a nd to delegitimate the manifold d iversity of these Jewish o r J udaizing chu rches and to address rhe standing challenge of indiffere nt o r hostile S}'nagogues, these th in kers devised various arguments to explain why Jews were in trinsically incapable o f seeing that Christians alone had correctly u n derstood th e Jewish scriptures. Ca mal a nd proverb ially stiff necked> the Jews had missed their opportunity (so went the argumen t} and f.tiled to see that t he promise of redempt io n had already passed from them to the gentile church. Or, for t hese same reasonsJews (and t hose Christ ians who imitated t hem by keeping some of t he practices asso ciated wit h Jen·ish custom) were incapab le of seeing in the Bib le•s god the clear repudiation of carnal Jewish practice. The true Christia n>in brief, should have nothing to do with "t he Jews." Bur t his polarizing rhetoric did not describe a social reality so much as prescribe o ne. The a bsence of social clar ity was what dJ·ove the eit her/o r rhetoric of t he a rgument. 4
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78 •
AliG VST lNE AS D THE JEWS
Israel according to the fles h was WillS Ismel, "old" Israel. The Christian (and gentile) church was vtrus Israel., "true'' Israel. These sorts of arguments collectively comprise a rheological temperament and a literary-rhetorical tradition that scholars label adversm Judat"'os. o r con· b(t. Judaeos, "against the jews." Arguments adwnus luMe.os served to
confirm certain constructions of gentile Christian identity against many challengers: jewish co ntemporaries 1 pagans syrnpathetic to j udaism. gentile Christian judaizers (that is 1 gentile Christians who voluntarily assumed Jewish practices)> and jewish Christians (those jews who both proclaimed j esus and who lived according ro their ancestral practices). Bur rhe extreme variety of all of the competing gentile g roups posed no less a threat to the developing sense of Christian identity. j ust as o nly one communicy could be the true Israel, so too could o nly one community be the true church. The simple face of co nfessio nal d i· wrsity compromised the claim to possessing revealed truth. Gentile Christian contestants responded to rheir in herently com· petitive circumstances by waging rhetorical war o n each ocher. Their ammw1ition o f choice was those same polemics that they had developed and also continued co use against j udaism. In this context of eru· d ire intra-Cbristiall polemic. to call a gentile opponent a ..jew/' to accuse him of chinking or acting in ways rhat this invective identified as "jewish/' was to condemn him for being "fleshly>" '' stiff necked/' "stubborn/' "malicious"-in shore, fo r being d eeply, intrinsically un Chrisrian; indecd1 for being anti-Christian. As increasing numbers of well ed ucated Gentiles joined various Christian communiries, the intensity o f learned in tra-Ch ristian debate mo unred. So did rhe antiJewish rhetoric of abuse, as these Christians ''produced the 'jews• that rhey needed'' co attack their gentile Christian rivals. Eventually1 in the course o f the second, third) and fourth centuries, these theological ar guments among different communities o f gentile Christians elevated r.he (Jdtlff'StiS ImlMos tradition into a defining aspect of o rthodox Christian identity itself.s6 4
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4 • PAGANS, JEWS, AND C HRI STI ANS I N TH E MED ITERRAN EAN C ITY
bJ Carthage the)' catJ say, '{It is dont! by the pagam; it is done by dN! ]et11s. ,, Here, u!/10~· t.:tkes part is ~1 Cbri.stia-n. AUG USTINE, SliXM O I>I'..-.·Is 17.7 (0!'-' THE I'Ol'U L•\R
OKSl:KVANC~ OF MUNIC i f'Al FEST IVALS I N J99 C . G. }
l (ey featu res of the adversus Iudaeos tradirion, as we have just seen, formed as rhe rhetorical run-off of internal battles between welleducated gentile Christian in tellectuals. But more goes in to rheology than jusr p hilosophy, and more goes inro build ing rhe identity of a community t han deciding whom co exclude. \Ve can bEn er understand t he advers.arial tradition of Christian anri·Judaism- and thus Augustine•s singular challenges to it-by co nsidering how it fit into its social conrexr. \\l har can th e Ch ristian rhetorical presentation of rheological
ideas abo ut jews and Judaism tell us about acrual relations between j ews a nd Ch ristians? Among different kinds o f Christians? How did these scriptural communities relate to che pagan majority, and how did paga ns relate to rhem? And how do social relations among all of these different anciem communities illmnine, in turn, the ideas t hat we encounter in Christian po lemics against "the jews"? Hostility berween "jews" a nd "Christians" already shapes chose first-century documents that eventually made up t he core of rhe later New Testament canon: Paul's letters and t he gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and jo hn. Difficult to remember when reading these, however, is that most of t he contestants presented in rhese writings are themselves jews. When Paul claimed thar he "violently persecuted the assembly (ekk/e. So am II Are t hey Israelites? So am l! Are rhey descendants of Abraham? So am 1! Are they servants of Christ? J am a better o ne"; 2 Corinthians ti:22-2J.) These objectsofPaul's ire appear to have been other Christian Jews who, like Paul himself, aJso worked to b ring the gospel to the Gentiles.' Paul's description of his own travails-imprisonmenrs, bearings, jewish juridical lashing, Roman bearing with rods. stoning (2 Corinthians 11:23- 27)-coheres well with the picture presented later in Acts (written probab ly c. tOO). Early Christian aposdes, Jews them· selves, seem often to have met with hostility and rejection in rhe d iaspora synagogues that provided the immediate context of their mixed urban missions. In the Gospel of Mark (written p robab ly sometime after 70 c.E.): the author skillfully foreshadows the post-resurrection gen tile mission in the cou rse of telling his story. His jesus works a sin· gle but spectacular healing in a pagan village {Mark 5); later, he agrees to perfo rm an exorcism at the request of a pagan wornru\ and he subsequendy reaches in pagan territory (Mark 7). Yet once in Jerusalem, Mark's Jesus " prophesies"' that his followers would experience harsh receptions in rhe Diaspora: "They will deliver you up to councils; atJd )'Ott u)t'll be beaten ill synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake" (Mark 1):9)- tMark's Jesus, in other words, seems sci II to envisage a Jewish Christian movement, because these synagogues mentio ned in his warning would have no jurisdiction over genrile Christians. The gospels depict intra-Jewish controversies sparked over cypi · cally Je\\ish concerns. What is the right way to worsh ip rhe god of ls·
P.:~gans,
)ellis, and Christians m thr Medilerrullt'Jtl City · 81
rael? \XIhich of his laws a re the mosc important? \\/hat constitutes keeping h is Sa bbath? In lighc of h is command ments, hmv is a person o bliga ted to treat others: parents> spouses. children , and especially the poor? In the evangelists' stories, j esus argues heatedl),. with other Jews a bo ut these questions. He debates wirh Pharisees, with Sadd ucees, with priests. with scribes. and with Jews o f no party affiliation. The)' all qua rrel about the Sabbath, abour sacrifices, abour fasting, praying, and giving chari ty properly. They quote scripture to each other an d challenge each other's au thority to interpret it. The)' exch ange accusations of hypocrisy, impiecy, and b lasphemy. The evangeliscs, in shore, present a fairly typical portrait of Jewish in teractions borh in jesus' day and in their own. All rh e noise, all the a rgu ment over scripture. all the frater nal name calling, is one o f the most unmista kably Jewish things about th e j esus movement and a bo ut its earliest literature. \Vi thin a firs t-century int ra-jewish co ntext, such argu ments would and did sound like conflicting ideas a bo ut the right way to be Jewish. That right way would be rhe way urged by rhe writer of the rext. The gospels, when we regard them as sectarian jewish literature, deny any legitimacy to any consnuction o f "lsrad" o r o f the "people of God " o r of"those fi·om Above" ac odds with their a uthors• own self-understanding. In this regard, they are much like the writings of that other near-contemporary Jewish sectarian community by the Dead Sea. (And compared ro some of the things said in the Dead Sea Scrolls about je rusalem's priests, th e gospels in fict seem almost mild.) In th e gospels, as in Pau l's letters earlier, non-Christian understandings of Judaism are disallowed if not repudiared . And much o f rhe rhetoric of rejection, a t least in the gospels, is placed in the mouth ofJesus h imself.' Do the sectarian texts of these earliest Chr istians promote nega[ive stereotypes abou t fellow jews? Unquestionably. But that is what jewish sectarian texts d o) and ch at is what polemical rhetoric does. Further, all jewish te:~ts, beginn ing with Genesis, include warts-and-aU presentations of some o f their Jewish characters. [n this sense, the gospels are no more inn·insicaiJy "anti-jewish" than is the Bib le itself. But again like the Bible irself, rhe gospels, o nce they drifted o ut o f t heir commun ities of origin into a wider genrile world, were read as a standing indicnnent and pe rpetual condemnation of jews and Ju-
82 •
AUGUSTISE AND THE JEWS
daism as such , rather than as a narrative exhortation to change from
che wro ng kind ofJudaism co the right kind ofJudaism (that is, ro the author's kind of j udaism). jewish seccarian rhetoric) shorn o f irs native context, eventually became anti-jewish rhetoric} Two historical events particularly affected the composition and in-
terpretation of the gospels. Unlike Paul's Jeerers, which Paul d iccaced at mid-century, the gospels were composed after the jewish war with
Rome in 66-73 c.E. And like Paul's Jeerers-and, also, evenrually, like che Sepruagin t itself-the gospels' readership eventually became predominam l)' gentile. The arguments that the evangelists d epict between jesus and his Jewish contemporaries) the "predictions"' of the Ternple•s destruction that they place in jesus' mouth, their presentation of priestly co mplici ty in jesus· execution and their explicit linking of this complicity to the destruction o f the Temple one generation after Jesus' death: All of these elements, once the gospels circulated outside of their communities o f o rigin, made an enduring-and enduri ngly toxic-contribution co the arsenal o f gentile Christian antiJewish invective. ·n1e longesr lived and (eventually) the most toxic of these various 4
accusations was the charge that"thej ews'' killed Christ. lts roots trace back ro New Testament texts. In Paul's letter to the Thessalonians the
charge stands chat "che Jews" killed Jesus (• Thessalo nians 1:14-16). Despice jesus' indisputabl)' Roman deathJ the evangelists place the onus
for it on the Temple priesrhood and on the people o f Jerusalem. In the canonicaJ gospels,Jesus himself names the chief priests as the culprits.
The Gospel of Matthew, held by the early church co be an eyewitness account o f these events, picks up these themes from Mark's gospel
and amplifies chem. "j esus began ro show his d isciples chat he must go ro Jerusalem and suffer many chings from rhe elders and rhe chief priests and the scribes, and be killed," Marrhew reaches (16:21). Jesus' dearh specifical ly by crucifixion-a fo rm of capiral punishment exercised in j udea exclusively by Ro mans in jesus 1 lifetime-is implied o r
explicitly "forerold" as occurring at che hand of Genriles (Macrhew 16:24: 20:19). Bur as Macrhew's Jesus fo rrhrighdy reaches and as his Passion narrative dramatically proclaims, the priests and the Passover
crowd were rhe ones rruly co blame (Macrhew 20:18; 26:1- 27, 44).
Later gospel traditions further ampli l)• this theme. Luke, uniquely~ represents Pilate as declaring rhree tin1es char jesus is innocent. "I find no crime in this manJ" Pilate says co the chief priests
and the assembled crowd (Luke 23:4). And again: " I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him" (Luke 23:t4). And again: "I have found in him no crime deserving death" (Luke 23:22). Responsibility for Jesus' death shifts accordingly.John'sJesus, speaking \virh Pilare, makes the point even more plainly: "He who delivered me to you"-rhat is> Jerusalem 1s chief priesr-"has the greater
sin" (John 19:11). Later Christians broadened the indictment to include Jews who were nor present in jerusalem at rhe time ofj esus' death. In the Acts
of the Apostles (late fi rsr to early second centu ry?), Peter addresses a crowd o f jewish pilgrims from rhe Diaspora who are gathered in
the city for the holiday of Shavuot (Greek: Pentecost). "Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth .. -)'OU cmcified and killed.. .. Let the whole house of Israel therefore know rhar God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus wbom )'OU crucified" (Acts 2:22- 2j,j6; emphasis mine). These pilgrims, presumably absent during the events of the prece ding Passover, are ''guilty" of the death o f
Jesus because-and only because-they are (non-Christian) Jews. Another second-century Christian> Melito of Sard.is, delivered an
Easter homily retelling the story of the Exodus as a clearly, as well as chose presented in the gospels' narratives- are «godkille rs/' deicides:
He who bung the ea•·tb is hanging. He who fixed the beanms bas been ji.wd. He who fostmed the tmiwrse has been fostcned to a tree. T1Je Sovereign bas been i11mlted. The god bas been mttrdemi T1Je King oflsraelhas been put to death by an Jsmelite ri!)1t h.md.'
8.J ·
AUOUSTINE ANI> T HE JEWS
The rherorical force o f all these themes, further, was enhanced by another rraumatic h isro rical event: the j udean revolt against Rome led by Bar Kokhba in 1}2-135 C.E. The immed iare ca uses of this rebellion are obscure. Its resulr was not: Had rian crushed the revolt and (ac least according to a C hristian litera ry commonplace) banned jews from Judea. The Romans now designated t his territory by a political neolo gism, "Palescine"' (a Latin fo rm of' T HE J EWS
Christo logical meanings of the ''old law,'' they now failed to u nder· stand that, t hrough C hrist and his chu rch, a '' new law·~ had been given (Tt)~pho 11- 12) . No wonder the Jewish nation was broken, scattered 1 and
powerless. A less srubborn, more p hilosophical people, sighed Justin, would ha'" seen the light long ago and joined Justin's chu rch• In real life, how traumatic fo r diaspora jews was rhe loss o f Jerusalem? In man)' ways 1 t he wound was deep. The Temple and the city had long focused the pride and the piety of the \\ide-flung Jewish nation. Both had d rawn Jews o n pilg rimage throughou t t he Roman w01id and beyond. The Temple itself had been the beneficiary of an enormous volu me o f volun tary do nations. Its sacrificial etiquecte was seen as co ntinuous since rhe days of lsraeJ•s wandering in the desert with t he tabernacle: In this sense, these sacrifices had been part of Israel's worship even before co ming into rhe Land. Descriptions of the ways that the altar functioned as the place for rhe praise, propitiation, and presence o f t he god o f Israel wove t hroughou t t he better part of the Five Books o f Moses and were t hus p roclaimed in communiry wherever Jews gathered o n the Sabbath to hear their law. Praises of the Temple were enshrined in the psalms and in t he prophets. The desire to rebuild it had fueled the hellish war under Bar Ko khba. later rabbinic traditions preserved (and expanded upon, and occasionally in· vented) the d etails of its protocols. The day of its destruction, the ninth o f Av (which usually falls in late summer), is still mourned and commemorated by a fast. In jewish liturgies and benedictio ns from that day ro this, prayers for its restoration and for the restoration of jerusalem have assumed a prominent and pennanent place.; And yet, in practical day-to-day ways, how much of a differe nce could such a loss have made? For hundreds o f years, the vast rnajoriry of Jews had lived outside of t he Land o f Israel. (East of the empire, Babylon was hon1e to a large and even more ancienr Jev.•ish community whose residence traced back ro the Bab)'lo nian exile of the sixth century u.c.E.) Generatio ns ofJews spanning three to si...: cenruries before its destruction had never experienced living in a jewish common· wealth at all and had long ago accommodated t hemselves to this fact. to.~lost o f these Jews, fo r that matter, had never laid eyes o n the Temple. The),. were already long accustomed to showing respect to their god
Pag~tns,
]e111t, dfld Christwns it1 the
M~ditt'Hdtuan
Cit)• · 87
wit hout offerings and sacrilices, because such o fferings in principle could be made only in Jerusalem. Instead, t h rough t he cycles of reading their scriptures, usually one day in seven on rh e Sabbat h, the)' had heard and learn ed abour such sacrifices. They could and d id continue to do so lo ng after t he Temple ceased to exisr.s Through t he public institution of t he synagogue and t he private instirutio n of che f.1mily, in other words, Jews throughout the world had long since devised patterns of practice char honored t heir ancestral traditio n in ways other than by making rh e o fferings mandated b)' t har tradition. Public reading of sacred stories, commun iry support for t he poor, a common calendar o f Sabbath and ho ly days that (at least notio nally) u nited jews across vast distances, th e dornestic venue of so much of Jewish observance: Thanks ro the un ique literar),. mediu m o f their traditio n- that is, t he Bib le- Jews had long since detached the worsh ip of their god from his original cu ltic site and learned how to live o n the road. Even after 70 c.E. 1 t hen, and even afrer r35, Jewish life in the Diaspora went on much as it always had. (The half-shekel Temple tax co ntinued as well, t he funds now levied against aJI Jews and d iverted by Rome to the Roma n high god, Jupiter Ca pitolimiS.} Ro man governrnent continued to respect t he long-established a ncestral practices o f its Jewish subjects, as it customar ily respected such practices of its other subject peoples. When Ro me (perhaps in the late 120s) banned the practice of circumcisio n, Jews were exempted from t he ban; slightly later} Antoninus Pius explicitly permitted circumcisio n to Jews, wh ile banning it for non-jews. Somecime between 196 and 211, t he emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla ruled that those Jews wh o served on town councils co uld exercise rh at office withou t performing "'liturgies" (those rites and ceremonies incumbent upon a councilor) t hat might "offend against t heir religio n." And finally, when in 212 the emperor CaracalJa un iversalized Roman ci tizenship, Jews (as many others) who had been cltizens of t heir own cities became, also, citizens o f the city of Rome.9 The archaeological record fo r rh e entire Ro n1an period, both in t he Diaspo ra and in the Land of Israel, bot h before Constantine and well after him) also reveals char many jewish commun icies continued
S8
· AUGUSTINE ASO THE J EWS
to thrive. Synagogue buildings are refurbished and new ones built, oc· casionally o n a g rand scale. \Vealthy pagans contin ue co support and to sponsor localjewish activi ties~ Jewish citizens cominue to ho ld offices in mun icipal and imperial government; jewish fu nerary artifacts and inscriptio ns attest to the continued roocedness and sociaJ integration o f these communities in their d iaspora setting. And as compendia of lace Roman law codes (and the occasionaJ corn ments of irate orrhodox bishops) attest, rhe legitimacy of Jewish holy books, prop· erty> and practices co ntinues to be asserted>and Jews continue co be citizens of their d ries and o f the empire, well afrer the en1pire itself was Chr istian. The rhetoric of the adn:rsus Judaeos rrad ition does not g ive us the measure of this social reality.10
••• I'IJSTO RICAL EVENT quite d iffe rent from the faiJed j udean wars against Rome fur ther stimulated th e tulwrstiS ludaeos t radition. Those traumatizedt however, were not je\\'S but Christians-or, more specificall)', ge>Jtik Christians. Beginning in the late lirst cent ur)' a nd contin uing thereafter}gentile Christians \vere vulnerab le co acts of violence. They might be denounced before civic magistrates o r cond emned to capital punishments by imperial authorities. To be a (gentile) Christian was to risk harassment and imprisonment, perhaps juridical torture, a nd even execution.11 From the late-first co the m id rhird century, the period before the imperial governmen t became formally involved , these persecutions were random, spo radic, an d local. The absolute n umber of Christians who suffered this abuse was probably not large. (Origen in 247 c. E. opined that "the n umber could easily be co un ted"; Against Celsus J.8.) After 249, beginning wirh t he emperor Declus, imperial in itiarives attempted co e nforce cultic co n formity on th e part of all Romans {except, again, j ewish Ro mans) in the effort to solicit divine protection for the empire. The Christian sense of pe rsecution deepened as the numbers of Ch ristians affected-whether t hey defied o r complied with rh e government's initiative-increased .': \Ve are so accustomed to "knowing'' that Ro me persecuted ancient A T RAUMATIC
4
Christians chat we can fail co see how odd, unpreced en ted, and anom alous such a persecutiont in such a society, actually was. Pragmatic re4
ligious pluralism had long characterized anciem Mediterranean kingdoms in general, the Roman Empire in particular. (No one wanted to have to deal with an angry god.) To understand the sources o f t his unhap py social in novation-the invention of relig ious persecution- we need to recall whac concerned ancient peoples when t hey engaged in what we thin k of as "religious" activities. Ethnicity and an tiquity; t he standing obligations co o ne's own gods; the importance of communal cult acts, of showing and being seen co show respect; t he premium placed on maintaining t he pax deonm1, the concordat between heaven and earth thar guaranteed t he well-being of cit)• and empire: These are the considerations chat mane red to them. Cult, the ancients assumed, made gods happ)'; and when gods were happy. hu mans flouris hed. Conversely, not receiving cult made gods un happy; and when gods were un hap py, t hey made people un hap py. The problem with gentile Christians, then, in t he view of the pagan majority, was not that these people were "Ch ristian," but that they were "gentile/' o r racher (renouncing the slipperiness of o ur English translations of etlmos, p. 34 above), that they were still "pagan." That is to say, the problem was t hat, whatever the new religious practices these people chose co assume, they were nonetheless, in t he eyes o f their neighbors, still obligated to their native religious practices too, and t hus co their native gods. Gendle Christians became the objects o f local resennnents and anxieties precisely because they were deviant pagans, refusing co honor rhe gods u pon whom their city's well-being depended. Jn consequence, when chings \venc wrong-as t hings rend to do-genrile Ch ristians were easily, readily blamed. As Tertullian fan1ously complained, "If the Tiber overflows co the walls, if t he Nile does nor rise to che fields; if the sky does not move o r t he earth does; if there is famine o r plague, t he cry goes up ac o nce, 'The Christians to the lion! '" (Apology 40.2). Gentile Christians did not show t heir gods their due> and hence chey incurred the resentful accusation of "at heism"-that is, of nor honoring rhe gods (as opposed to the modern meaning o f "not believing in God"). Divine anger would affect everybody. In brief, ancesrral obligation, not particular beliefs-what people did, nor what t hey thought-was what rnattered.1> Popular fear of this strange new group fed a]so on rumor1 which attributed terrible an ti-social crimes to Christians: infanticide, canni-
90 • ... UOUST lNE
AS" D THll Jl!WS
balism, incestuous sexual intercourse. Lurid accusations like t hese, as we have seen. conformed to stereotyped views o f outsiders: Erudite ethnogra ph ies had habitually faste ned .similar descriptions o n various foreign groups (see p. 26 a bove). Against Christians, such stories evenmall)' lost their force as courts of law discred ited a nd disproved them. (Chr istians, however, in their tum >co ntin ued ro a ttribuce th ese crimes to sectarian co-religionists.) O nce a Christian stood before the magisn·ate, th e matter instead t urned on showing respect both for imperiaJ au thority and fo r the mos Romanon~m, "the ancient customs of t he Romans." Would the accused defer to t he governor's request? Would he ho nor the emperor's image? \Vould she ea t meat o r sip wine offered co the gods? Man y Chr istians complied; others refused. The stalwart might end t heir days in the arena, robed as characters fro m classical mythology, executed in spectacles recalling rh e stories of th e same gods whon1 the)' had refused more convent ionally to hono r.'4 ·n1e principals in these persecut io ns, both victims and vict im izers, were Gentiles. The pagan co ntext o f their conflict-showing honor to the gods o f majority cultu re- dominates th e ancient acco un ts. Nonetheless, Christian writers found ways to implicate Jews in these incidents o f pagan ant i-Christian violence. In his Dialog~trtuitl> Tl)pho, j ustin accused the Jews o f mu rderous harassment of Christians, extending back to the crucifixion itself: "Your hand was lifted high to d o evil, fo r even when you had k illed rhe Chr ist you did not repent, but you also h ate a nd murder us" (TI)•pi>o IJJ). Tertullian characterized synagogues as "fo untai ns of persecution'' (Scorpiace tO). Origen suggested that Jews stood ac the source of popular an ti·Ch risrian calum · nies about ritual murder) cann ibalism, a nd promiscuous sex (Against Celsus 6.27). And two impo rta nt martyr stories, Pol)~arp (mid-second centUJy) and Pionios (mid-third cent ury), prominently featured villaino us jews as instigators of, agents in, or hostile witnesses to the suffe r· ings of t he martyrs. Some h istorians incline to trust the historicity of th ese accounts ofJewish hostility, since the th eme itself in martyr stories is generally so rare. O ther historians hear in t hese accusa tions the strains o f the
adwrstH Iudaoos rheto ric t ra nsposed inro a narrative key. The components of that rhetoric ap pear in nuce in Paul's letters and the gospeJs,
Pilg.ou, Jews, a11d Cl>ristians h1 tbe Meditrrrdfltan City · 91
when those au thors co mplain t hat (other) Jews do not rightly interpret scrip ture. They achieve greater polemical fo rce and co herence in the second centu ry when, as we have seen, this rhetoric was applied in service to t he problem of Christian bib lical interpretation. Gentile Christian writers used it to make the ca.se t hat t heir church, not the diaspora synagogue, best understood how to read jewish scriptures. One o f their p roofs was that th e Jews had n ever u nderstood God's word. Not only did t he Jews interpret scriptural passages as "flesh ly., religious p ractices instead o f as spir it ual prescriptionsJ but t hey also never listened to t heir own p rophets, as the pro phetic texts themselves complained . Ch ristians also appropriated late Second Temple Jewish legends a bo ut the pro phets. Embroidering on the canonical pro phets' complaints about Jsrael's resistance to their message, these later legends related tales o f t he p rophets murders at rhe hands o f t heir own recalcitrant people. Thus Isaiah ended his days sawn in half:Jeremial1 died by stoning; Ezekiel was execured by "the ruler of the people Israel"; Micah, Amos, and Zechariah all perished violently {Amos after tortu re). These t raditions, collected in the pseudepigra phic text Lillfs ofthe Prophets, e nter Ch ristian writings already in the first century. The Jews {or "Judeans") "killed both the Lord Jesus a nd t he p rophets," a problematic passage in Paul relates (r T hessalo nians 2:15). "0 jerusalem, Jerusalem, ki lling t he prophets and sroning those wh o a re sent to youl" laments Jesus in Matthew {23'}7) and Lu ke (13'34). Matthew's Jesu s) add ressing crowds gathered a t t he Temple, adds: Woe co you, scribes a nd Pharisees, hypocrlh~sl for you build rhe rornbs of rhe prophets and adorn t he monurnems o f the riglu eous, 5a)'ing, 1' (f we had lived in rhe days of our farhei'S1 we would nor have taken pare wtrh ch em in shedding rhe blood of rhe prophers.'' Thus you wlcness againsr yourselvesJ rhar }IOU are sons of chose who murdered rhe prophers. Fill up, rhen 1 rhe measUI'e of rour farh ers. You serpents, you bi'Ood of vipers. how are you co escape semence in Gehenna? Therefore I send you prophers and Wtse men and scribes, some of whom )IOU will ktll and crucify, and some you will scoul'ge in your synagogues and
9!
· AUGUSTINE ASO TH E J EWS
persecute from town co cown, char upon you may come all che righteous blood shed on earch, from rhe blood of the innocem Ab
This "n-ajJ o f blood" motif, as ~.facthew deploys it, inculpates every generation ofJews since t he second generation o f hu manicyJ associating the Jewish people with Cain. In this view, t he Jews ki lled the prophets, and finally t hey killed even Christ himself, because t hey did not wane to hear the prophets' message t hat che Law was really a coded form o f the Gospel, its true referent Christ. 1> later Christians, writing apologies and martyr stories, a pplied t his ind ictment even more broadly. They presented t heir own Jewish concemporar ies as the cu rrent manifestat io n of this long line of persecutors char now screeched from the period o f bib lical Israel u p to jesus, thence co rh e generation of t he apostlesJ and fi nally up to cheir own day. Pau l's o ut burst in 1 Thessalonian s> the various early Christian se rmons p reserved in Acts~ t he complaints of a pologists and, evenruallyJ some stories about ch e ma rcyrs aU deploy it. T his "traH o f blood" moci f loomed large in C hristian polemic> in oth er words, in pare because the theme so supported conscrucrions of Christian iden· tity. Presenting non-Christian Jews as al\rays and everywhere hostile to C hristians (includ ing chose Sepruagintal "Christians" like Moses and the prophets, whose complaints about Israel's obstinacy filled the pages of scriprure), the younger commun ity expressed irs conviction that ic was itself bo th the true Jsrael and the true church.1 ·nms we read in the Mart),.dso chat occasionally the Ch risrian partner joined the Jewish partner in his or her traditional practices. Archaeological evidence reveals rhat Ch ristians and Jews buried their dead togerher. And rhe Jewish calendar-especially the d ate of Passover relative to Easter-com in ued ro influence Christian communal celebrations, the poinred efforts of bisho ps and even o f empero rs notwithstanding.19 This is nor co claim chat "interfaith'' relations in antiquity were universally sunny: Beneath the smoke o f hostile rhetoric, some genuine fires also bumed. The stylized speech o f these literary sources, however, o r rheir poin ted ambiguity, makes clarity elusive. Celsus, a pagan observer) noted in the late seco nd century that jews and Ch ristians q uarreled u nendingly- though not as loudly and viciously, he also notes, as d ifferent Ch ristian g ro ups q uarreled with each other (Agaimt Cdsm J. f l o n Jew·s and Christians~ 5.63, on Christians who "slander o ne another with d readful and unspeakable \vords o f abuse ... fo r they utterly detest each other"). Later, in the lace fourth century and on into the fifth cenruq', repo rts o f violence perpetrated by Ch ristians against Jewish persons and property begin to accrue, as also against pagans and their holy sites and against Ch ristian mino rities ("heretics"} and theirs. Descri ptions of Jewish anti-Christian aggression also appear in that .s.ame period. Beginning in the fou rth cent ury and continuing thereafter) increasing acts of violence mar late Roman ~·tediterranean urban cult-ure. \Ve shall consider some of these episode.s more closely toward the end of rhis study:» But such violence is far from the who le picture. The gaps in o ur data notwithstand ing (for \1/e invar iabl)' k now less than we would like to know), our very var ied evidence for Jewish- Christian interactions, its broad chronological spread (fro m the second to the seventh cen· t llly and beyond), its wide geographical distribution (the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, Italy, North Africa, Alexandr ia, Asia Minor, Palestine), and the rich variety of its media (stories, lerrersJ sermonst imperial and ecclesiastical legislatio n, inscriptions, mosaics and other ar-
96 •
AUGUSTISl! AN I) THE JSWS
chaeological remains) also anest ro centuries of friendly relations benveen these communities as well. These data too must surely be considered in any historical assessn1em o f Christian reports o f active Jewish hosrilit)', especially in rhe pre-Constan tinian period. IfJews had actually played-or even been commonly thought co have played-a vigorous role in the pagan persecution of gentile Christians, then aU this other evidence of positive and long-lived social interactio ns between Christian Gentiles and jews beco mes extremely difficult to account fo r. Pagan Gentiles co ntinued to freq uent synagogues also, and Christian writers complain abo ut this as well. Terrullian in North Africa in rhe rhird cenrury and Cyril of Alexandria in rhe fifth cenrury both commented bitterly o n the inconsistency of those pagans who wor shiped borh rhe god of Israel and rheir o\Vn deities. Commod ian, a rhird -cenrury (or, perhaps, a fi fth-century) North African Chrisrian criticized Jews for allowing such behavio r on the part of sympathetic pagans, whom he mocked as "half-Jews." "You ought to tell them," he chides jewish contemporar ies, "whether it is right to worship the gods." The archaeological evidence of gen tile donations co jewish projects and specifically co synagogues sup po rcs rhe picture thar we can cull fro m this literarure: Lace Ro man pagans, like their Christian counterparts, co ntinued to find a place within j ewish communities..!! 4
\'V'hat Commodian does say, however> and what Ch rysostom>even in his most vituperative sermons, does llDt say hin t in the direction of an answer to the question of social context and contra ludaeos invective. As we have seen>scholars in the twentieth century co njectured that synagogues ran actual missions to Gentiles, both pagan and Chriscian, to persuade them to co nvert to Judaism. just as chu rches conducted similar m issions to Jews and to pagans. Jn this view, anti-jewish invective measured the heac generated between these two co mmunities by their white-hot competition for the limited "co nvert" market. But Commodian complains precisely that these North African synagogues are not tr}ing to convert interested pagans, while Chrysostom never complains that Antiochene synagogues attempt co persuade interested gen tile Christians to "become" jewsJ that is, to convert. In other words, what makes the synagogue so dangerous-or at least so very aggra\•at-
P.tgMH, jw•s, .J.nd Christi.tflS ill tlu Ah•diurrant.ttl City · 97
ing- to many Christian bishops in the fourth century c.e. is precise!)' its continuing exercise of the practice that stretched back to the Hellenistic cenruries u.c.E. Late Roman synagogues, like their earlier Helleniscic counterparts, received interested o utsiders tllitbout trying to convert them. And that openness~ precisely because it came without the demand for an exclusive co mmitment) is what acco unts for the synagogue's continuing attraction. A Gentile's participatio n in the community life o f his jewish neighbors, to whatever degree (casual and occasional presence, regular and committed interest, active philanthro py), was at his or her own discretion. That factJ and not the conjectu red mutuaJ missions, I suggest, is what explains all the pagan and Christian foot traffic through late Roman synagogues. That foot traffic in t urn accounts in part for the increased levels of learned vin1peration adtlf!rstts Judaeos in fourthcentury Christian texrs. And the lush tropes o f this vituperation, in tur n, combined with the explosion o r e:-.: p osure of"orthodox" Christian d iversity in the wake of Constantine's efforts to create unity, made for its perfervid reuse in the intra-Chrisrjan quarrels of the imperial ch urch." The exhortations of Christian leaders to their own floc ks, urging the faithful to desist from attending municipal festivals~ spectacles, and shows, make a related poin t. The structu res of urban society and those activities characteriscic of Mediterranean culture- education, governmem, recreation-were profou ndly, inrrinsicaJiy pagan. (Indeed, so important were these traditional fes tivals to urban life that Iacer Christian empero rs exasperated many of their O\vn bishops by insisting that town councils contin ue to sponsor these activities.} Jews had long ago fitted themselves into the pagan city, encouraging outsiders' in terest in and support for Jewish acrivities while participaring in majority cult ure as they would. For gentile Christians, these u rban structures (synagogues as well as baths and amphitheaters) and civic holidays were no less native chan they were for Jews. And any male member of the curial class from whatever religious or eth nic g roup would have been ed ucated within and would have reaped the benefits o f a purely pagan curriculum. Despite traumatic episodes o f earlier pagan hostility, then, and despite the vituperarion heaped upon civic
98 ·
AUG U STINE AI': I) T HE J EWS
celebrations and encertainmenrs by their own chu rch leaders, Christians1 like Jews, accommodated t hemselves co 1n ajoricy culture, evidently with much less difficulty t han some of their leaders would have liked. Thac is because majority cu1cure 1in many ways, was their culrure: AU o f these people \\'ere themselves Romans.lJ
•• • rh e continuing sociaJiz.ing among membe rs of r.hese diffe rent groups? The answer lies in part with the strong an d prevailing patterns of social and religious interactio n thar, by Augustine's rime, had shaped life in the Mediterranean city fo r nearly a millenniu m. Celebrations o f all sores- processions, co mmu nal ead ng, urban and imperial feast da)'S- were open and pub lic. Particularly in rh e eastern empire, Jewish celebrations had long n u mbered among rhese. Indeed, so strong was rh is t radition o f openness rhat rhe celebration of Christian wo rship, despite the regrets occasio naUy expressed by irate churchmen, might also be frequented by o utsiders: pagans, heretics, and jews (who would challenge the inrerpretation of Old Testament texts). Though o rthodox t heologians and bishops busily erecred rhetorical fences (as d id rheir Jewish counterparts, the rabbis) 1 the situation on the g round evidently continued to be fluid. Within these lace Roman avatars of Alexan der's imported polis, chen, and depending on whom you asked, it seems that no fences still made good neighbors.'• \XIe are unprepared to look at the evidence this way because, first of all, good relations are not what we expect co see. \Ve approach antiquity throug h the cultural memory of a millenn ium o f vio lenr Christian anti-jewish hostility1 from the massacres o f the Crusades to the d eath camps of che lasr centuq'. O ur retrospect can prompt us ro perceive Jews as segregated, perhaps even as self-segregated outsiders in t heir ancient societies, and perhaps to presuppose thar rhe traditions of an ti-Judaism so characteristic of late Roman Christian rhetoric translated) as it did in the later medieval and modern periods, into active an d generalized anti-Semitism. Similarlyt culturaJ memory enco u rages our expecration that Christians.1 gi\•en rhe choice, would avoid pagan social activities. The WNAT Accou NTS fOR
n1emory of pagan anti-Christian persecutions-preserved, occasionall)' invented, and always scrupulously cultivated by the later churchmakes ancient Ch ristians• volu ntary, indeed, insistent participation in and enjoyment of pagan ur ban culture seem deeply counrerinruitive. Yet participate the)' did: These Christians, after all, were themselves Greeks and Romans (as, indeed, were their j ewish neighbo rs also). And we are so accustomed to seeing Constantine's conversio n as the "triumph of the church"-for the very good reason that the vast majority o f writings that survive from this period belong to church fathers who presented history in this way-that we easily lose sight of the huge population e-x.tra e-cclesiam who in real life compromised and co mplicated the church's self-declared monopoly: myriad non-o rthodox Christians (including jewish Christians), Roman jews, and th rongs o f pagans who pro bably contin ued to constitute the majority of the total population throughout the better part o f the fou rth century and perhaps beyond. Orthodoxy's monopoly o f the ancient literary sources obscures this messier social reality. Ideologues of separation, the chu rch's bisho ps and theologians wrote treatises and delivered sermons that too often have been perceived as descriptions of acrual Ch risrian behavior> rather than the (perhaps wistful) prescriptions fo r behavior that the prelates would have preferred to see. When these men urged segregation on their balk)' congregations-ro shun synagogues; to avoid Jewish, pagan, and heretical convocations; to spum civic festivities with their contests and d ramas and mi me n oupes enacting w1savory scenes fro m pagan mythology-they fo ught against centuries-o ld social patterns. Their theological!)' mo tivated effort to segregate the habiruall)' mixing populations of Mediterranean cities was an evidencly unwelcome innovatio n. The threats, complaints> and laments rhat fill their sermons, together with the echoes of their effo rts that we find in church canons and in imperial legislation, all suggest that these effo rts at separatio n met with frustration much more routinely than with success.L.s Continuing positive in teractions specifically between diaspora jews and gentile Christians also had more particular contributing factors. One was the type of Ch ristianity that had "triumphed" in the
100 • ,\UG UST JNE AS D THE JllWS
fourth century and beyond. Unlike many of its various rivals, the church backed by Constantine had laid very strong and d irect claim to ch e Sepcuaginc. Those scriptures enjoining and praising che fidelity of God co Israel and of Israel co God were, as che O ld Tescamenc, pare of che ch urch's own canon, read aloud whenever the community gathered fo r worship. \Vhat Christians heard in their own services in no smaiJ way coincided with what they heard if they went to the synagogue: the public reading, in the tle1'1Jaculm; of these same texts. Jn this way, che synagogue could not be alien to visitors from the church.:ti True. the interpretation of the Old Testament was hotly contested, and that contest led directly to much of the vicuperation and venom of adtm'SUS Judaeos rhetoric. To make the O ld Testament imo a Christian book required strenuous efforts at reinterpretation, efforts that characterize the sermons and commentaries of chis period. \X'hat people in church would have heard first, however, were the biblical stories themselves. Those scriptures that che chu rch shared with rhe synagogue thus functioned as a bridge as well as a barrier between the cwo corn munities. And, ironically. some of the loudest and most articulate voices adversHS Iud(Jeos-justi n's in the second cenrury, Origen's in the chird, Jerome's in che fourch- also relied upon specifically Jewish rraditions of scriptural interpretation for their own work. Even these men learned from, and rh us in teracted with, co ntemporary jewish scholars, the better co read and to understand their own O ld Testalnenr.l7 ·n1e four canonical gospels couJd also encourage genrile Christian interest in con temporary je\l.··ish practice. In these texts, also read regular!)' in co mmunity service 1 jesus of Nazareth appeared as an obser vane Jew (Marc hew P?-•9), worshiping in synagogue o n che Sabbach a nd keeping Passover and (acco rding co Jo hn's gospel) che ocher greac pilgrimage fescivals to the Temple in jerusalem. He recited the Sbema (Mark 12:29) an d wore che prayer fringes enjoined o n Jewish males (tzit;Jot in Hebrew; kmspetia. in che gospels' G ree k; Mark 6:56}. He gave in· srructions o n how to pray in synagogue, how to keep fasts, and how to offer ac che Temple (Macchew PJ-24). He direcced h is followers o n che p roper d imensions fo r cheir phylacceries (Hebrew tefil/in; Man hew 2j:j). In community worship> first rhe gospel selectio n would be read 4
Pagans, j eu:s, and Christians in tht ,\fedJtu r.oual1 Cit)' ·
10 1
aloud and then the sermon based on the gospel would follow. As t he record of these sermons evince, t he learned priest or bishop would frequently interpret these texts in ways that vilified Jews and Jewish practice. Bu~ o n t he evidence of t hese church men's complaints~ evidencl),. the first impression on t he listener was made~ often, by the gospel stories t hemselves. Churchmen protested against their effect. ''Christ was circu mcised, t herefore you should be circumcised~" s.ay Judaizing Christians, according to a fourth-century church father. "Ch rist lived accord ing to t he Law~ t hen·tOre you should do the same" (Epiphanius~ 11Je Panarion 28.5)1). Many gentile Christians perceived jewish practice as con tinuous from the Old Testament th rough the New Testament to what they saw in t he acth•ities of their conternporary Jewish neighbors. Some justified t heir own voluntar),. observance of t hese customs and festivals by po incing precisely to the example of Christ, whose practice they wanted ro imitate. No less rhan the O ld Testament~ then> the New Testament itself could serve as a spur to Judaizing.!! The chu rch> observed Augustine, was the b ride o f Christ; bur t he synagogue was his morher (Agaimt FatlsUts t2.8; 22.39). His pit h)' remark touches on many of the reasons fo r t he persistent ambivalence of catholic Christianity toward Jews and J udaism. True, chu rch leaders routinely condemned Judaism along wit h paganism and \\~th heresy> and t heir rhetoric adventts Judaeos defi ned Jews in particular as the ultimate "'other'' against which to calibrate orthodox Christian belief and p ractice. It would be a mistake, however, in light of all this other evidence, co see t heir condemnations as a reliable measure of the actual separation of these communities or as an accurate index of a mo re general hostili ty. On the contrary: T he vitality of habitual contacts> both social and religious, bet\veen Christians and jews- as among Christians of all various sorts, Jews, and pagans- probably accoun ts for much of the shri llness and the obsessive repetitiveness o f pan·istic invective. Augustine himself certainly connibured his share co t his invective. He too, no less chan Jusrin o r Origen o r Jerome, decried jewish "obd uracy" and lamented Jewish "malice." Further, from the period of his own early schooling through to his productive years as a matu re intellectual and a powerful bisho p, Augustine moved entire!}' within a
10 2 · AllGUSTII'-t! ANO TU I! J l! W S
philosophical culture that valued the spiritual over the material, the eternal over the historical. Throughout his life, he thought within a range of theological cultures that in aJI their phases, whether heretical or orthodox, associated the Christian message with "the spirit" and che Christian construction of Judaism with "the Aesh." And all of these various Christians looked ro Paul as their premier aurhorit)' for doing so. Augustine, in short, was an unlikely revolutionary. Yet within the conrext of the adttersus Judaeos trad ition>a revolution is precisely what he achieved.
- - - - - PART TWo - - - - -
THE PRODIGAL SON Augustine the bishop bad once beetJ Augustine the ben.?tic_. atJ actitte metn.bi?Y for tuore tban a d~c:ade itt tbe church of dJ< Manichees. Ofa11 dH! aspects ofManiciMeism that had attmcJed him, Augustine later tvrot.e, its solution to the problem ofevil stood foremos~ Cosmic evil, said tbe ,o//anicbw, was lhe fault oflhe Kingdom ofDarknes~ afot~e tbat was indepwdent ofand co·etmtaltvith the good Kingdom of Light and its god. Moral evil- tbat is, sin- tvas tbe result oflhe victoty oftbis other evil entil)• wilhin tbe good individs1al. Fr..-ther, dte Manicbees idmtified lhe god oftbe Old Testammt, his a~ation, bis lmv, and bis people as lhe bistrn·ical expmsion ofthis Kingdom of Dat"!mers. AtJd tstnting to the New Testammt, tht:)' pointed especially to the letrers oftbe apostle Paul as their a11thorit)' for this view. Thus when A,.gusti1Je, shifting allefiance-s, quit tlx: Manichees for lhe c«iholic clnsrcb, more than /tis vier11 ofGod changed. His rmderst4nding ofsin «nd ofevil, his way of t~ading tire Bible, a-nd bis interpretation ofthe apostle P«ul had to cbange, too.
• ••
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5 • THE HERETI C
W1Jere does er1i/ come from? Is God confined within a bodily shape? Does be have fingmrails and hair? And catJ those men be comidet¥!d righte01u tvho had set~e~-al UJives at the same time cmd tvho killed people amf tvho offet'ed animals in sact'ifice? AUGUSn Nl! , CONrF.SSIOXS j . /,1 2
A ugust 28, 392 c.E. At age t hirty-seven, scarcely a year since h is fo rced ordination a t Hippo and a scan t five }"ears since his baptism by Ambrose back in Milan, Augustine faced the Manichaean teacher Fortunacus, his forme r colleague) in public debate. The municipal ba th was the only building large enough to hold the assemb ly gathered co watch the event: not o nly crowds from both of t he major Ch ristian factions in Hippo but also those whom Fortunatus had been ab le ro win over to his own cornmunity. Perhaps some of t he cown's remaining pagans1 intrigued>also attended; perhaps as well some of Hippo's jews. "Many people gathered/ ' Augustine•s biographer, Possidius, later commented (Ufo 6). "Some were tru ly interested, others merely curious."' The two men had knonn each other decades earlier> back in Carthage, after Auguscine had moved rhere in 371. Augustine had come from Thagaste, a n undistinguished town some 200 miles inland> to complete t he last phase of his education in rhetoric. He remained in Carthage, on and off, for a dozen years, evenrually enjoying local notoriety as an aggressive apologist and spokesman fo r his church. In time he left to pursue professionaJ advancement in Ron1e. Some people Iacer assu med rhac he had in face been chased out by t he proconsul. In 386. the imperial govern ment had taken action against t he Manichaean community, d riving t hem from t he city; and by t hat point, Augustine was well knO\vn in Carthage as a Manichee. 1
...
106 • AU was brough t up o n charges of Manichaeism and magic> and he was su bsequently executed by rh e stare. The incident, however, caused something of a scan dal. Local rivalries and factionalism seem to have had much more co do wich Priscillian's d emise than did rhe doctrinal irregularities of which he could co nveniencly and effeccively be accused. Buc his deach made a point: The possibi lity of p rosecution was real That fact seems to have been sufficient co discourage much active interest in Manichaeism o n t he parr o f the ar istocracy: It was more pruden r to commune with the church favo red by the e rnperors. Effective pe rsecud on lay over the horizon>in the fifrh and sixth cent uries when, with the weakening o f t he \Vestern Roman Empire, power pooled locally arou nd rhe figure o f che cacholic b ishop. Unlike che secular authorities, bishops scayed fo· cused on rhe hum for heretics.-! ?\'lani•s celestial twin had revealed to him that the a ncient battle between Good and Evil continued in rhe condition of rh e current world . Hoscage co che Kingdom of Darkness, panicles of light- che ac· rual substance o f the divine-were t ra pped in matter, and permeated t he physical cosmos. They collected and mingled in everything-stone, planes, animals> hum ans-and thus accounted for a un iversaJ co ndition o f su ffering. Collectively, these particles of captive godliness constit uted the divine presence in rhe cosmos, "rh e su ffe ring jesus" or the "Cross of Lighc." But through ascetic d iscipline, th is revelation continued >the light
10 8 · AUGUSTI NE ,\N'D THIO J I:WS
could be redeemed. This co nviction accounts fo r the Manichaean community's strucrure, ethics, and central ritual. Mani established a two-tier church. At its upper level was the spiritua1 elite, the "Elect'': men and women who had taken vows o f permanent celibacy, poverty, and extreme abstinence. Owning no property, mendicant, their vows requi red that they refrain from having anything whatever to d o with acquiring even the few foodstuffs permitted them: bread, vegetables, fruits. Gathering and preparing such food invariably caused pain to the plants that were harvested. The Elect could not compromise their moral purity to such a deg ree. The task of feeding the Elect thus fell to those in the church's second tier, the auditores, or "Hearers.'' These believers \vere not bound by such drastic vows. Once ada)', bo th groups would gather together fo r a symbiotic assembly ro co mmune fo r the sing le daily repast of the Elect. After shared psalms, worship, and the presentation of the meal, the audito rs retired, and the Elecr partook. Through their o\vn d igestion, they then "breathed o ut" and so liberated the light trap ped in rhis sacred food. The freed panicles of rhe Supreme Good, fo rmerly d ispersed, thus began their ascent, first collecting at the moon (whose phases evinced this process), then ascending to the sun, then passing, finally free, back to the Kingdom of Light, rhe realm of God the father ofjesus.; Augustine had been raised in a much more conventionally Christian culture. ''Sa1ted'' at birth as a catechumen, he had imbibed "the name o f Christ,"' as he later put it, wirh his mother's milk (Confosskms 1.11,17; J.4,8). Catholic rit uals, customs, and scriptures would have been familiar to him since childhood. Ironically, his catholic upbringing was precisely what prepared the way for Augustine's allegiance to Manichaeism. Augustine had arrived in Carthage shortly after the death of his father (Confessions 3-4,7)- With the financial su pport o f a wealthy home· rown pan·on, he plu nged inro a final cycle o f study before launching himself Into a remunerative legal career (3.3,6). He frequented theaters and prowled church services, looking for opportunities "to love and to be loved" (J.l1 t; 3,5). In this way, aged eighteen, Augustine entered in to a common-law marriage with a lower-class Christian g irl, who bore his
Thr Hrretic • 109
son, Adeodatus. And he pressed ahead with his legal studies, so that "rh e less honest I was, rhe more famo us J would be" (j.J,G). And th en, abruprly, everything changed . Augustine encoun tered Cicero's Hortemitts. He d iscovered philosophy. The book changed my feelings, altered my prayeo·s to you, 0 lord, and gave me a new pu rpose and ambition. Suddenly all rh e van icy I had hoped in (saw as worthless, and wirh incredibly 1mense des.re I longed for immonal wtsdom.... The book excited and inflamed me: in my ardot' rhe onI)' t hing I found Jacking was rhe name o f Chrisr. .. . Any book which lacked t his name, however well written or polished or true, could not emu·ely gl'ip me. COSF ESS IOSS _3 . 4 , 8
Turning from Cice ro, imbued with the resid ual piety of his upb ringing, Augustine next went directly to \vhat he thought would be t he repository of Christian wisdom, namely the scriptures. His vague fa miliarity with them (previously, he would have beard rh ese stories, not read them h imself) d id not prepare him for whar he fou nd. O lder now, trained ro study texts carefully and to appreciate beau tiful p rose, Augustine's new e ncounter unnerved him. He fo und read ing the Bible in tolerable. One problem was, quire simply, the way chat rh e words lay on the page. Anon)'mous rranslators had rendered the African Bible into clumsy Larin some cenruries ea.rHer, and its style was rough. lr g rated. ("lt seemed unworthy in comparison with the d igniry o f Cicero··~ Con·
fossiom 3-5,9·) \Vorse, hO\vever, were its contents. Augustine's reading of the 1-Jor· tensius had prompted h im to regard the q uest fo r God and quest for wisdo n11 ascetically a nd philosoph ically conceived, as essentially the same project. His Christian upbringing had prompted him to investi· gate r.he catholic scriprures, Old Testament and New, with this con· cern in mind. But the o ld Jewish narratives did not oblige his new sensibility. \Vhar did it mean, chat God "made" man? And what did it mean, to be in Gocl•s image? And how was one to understand the un· savory lives of the patriarchs, with cheir mu ltiple marriages and p ro·
lJO ·AUGUSTIN I! AN"l> TUll J llWS
lific progeny, their military e ngagements and their unending animal sacrifices? For that matter, why d id God require such ofi(rings? And th e New Testament presented different but equally grave problems. Its Latin was no better than t he Old Testamen t's, its con tencs no less rroubUng. The gospels d isagreed both internally and with each other. Their problems began immediately with the birth narratives themselves. Matthew and Luke, each cracingJesus' lineage, p resented mutually incompatible genealogies. Born and raised a Christian, Augustine knew that he wanted to remain a Christian. Newly awakened intellectually, he also knew t hat he could fi nd few satisfactions in th e sttperstitio of his mother's church. It was at ch is point that he encountered the Manichees. North Africa's Manichees offered a perfect solution to his quandar)'· They were Christian. ("The names of God t he Father and of the l o rd jesus Christ a nd of t he Ho i)' Spiri t . .. were alwa)'S o n t heir lips"; Confessions 3-4,10.) They had a n enlightened attitude toward religious inquiry. disavowing-unlike t he catholic church-arguments from autho rity. ("I fell among these people fo r no other reason,'' Augustine later claimed, "than that they declared that t hey would completely pur aside the intimidations of authority and instead, by pure and simple rational effort, bring to God anyone willing to hear them out"; Usejisbms ofBelief1,2.) The a us· terity of their Elect was impressive, while the ascetic co mmitmen ts of the sect resonated effortlessly \Vith Cicero's exhortatio n to Aee bodily pleasures in o rder to free the mind for h igher pursuits. And they read scripture both closely and critically, pointing out d iscrepancies (such as the d iffe rences between Matthew and Luke on jesus' genealogy) and proposing rational explanations (in this instance, that the doctrine of Incarnation was borh late an d wron~ Agaimt Faustus J.l). Susceptible to their a rguments, Augustine was impressed.') The tvlanichees probably fi rst engaged Augustine in che same way that Augustine Iacer, as a Manichee himself, engaged cath olic Christians: t hrough debate. In that context>pointing o ut various pro blems with both testaments, the Man ichees could press t heir prime theolog· ical p rinciple. God, they fi rmly maintained, is wholly and solely good. From ch is t hey moved co a reasonable axiom: The good God cannot in an),. way be a source of evil. More: Evil had to be extremely powerful, or
Tbt Herrtic ·
11 1
else God would obviously have overcome it. Thus, they concluded, evil must have an independenc existence, necessarily quite apart from t he good God. Evil actively resisted and defied God. Two opposed principles, they accordingly affi nned 1 not one sup reme principle, accounted fo r the morally m ixed u niverse a nd for man's difficult experience wit hin it. This dualist conviction informed both Manichaea n ascetic d iscipline a nd their script ural interpretation. The god of Genesis, th ey observed, had formed Aesh, making h umans '~in his image." But human Aesh clearly imposed u rges and appetites on the individual t hat betrayed its fundamental moral orientation: The Aeshly body was jew and Gentile. Here t he Man ichees rrod th ose t heological pathways marked out in the m id-second century b); Mardon•s
lJl · AUOUST I NE AN O THE J EWS
churches, which had long regarded Paul as the champion of "true"thar is, de-j udai2ed-Christianiry. Indeed, their shared views of Paul seem to artest to actual contact and communication betwee n the two communities. Nor was this resemblance lost on orthodox critics, who condemned Manichaean doctrine with po lemics first honed against Marcion.1
Finally, all these posirio ns-on the high god, on the doceric Christ, on the intrinsic evil of the Aesh, on Paul's co re message-converged on a precise po lemical point. Jn articulating their own views, the Manichees repudiated jews and judaism. For this Christian church no less than for the o thers to which it opposed itself~ "'the Jews'~ served as
a defining "Other." Bur whar jews, and which judaism? That depended on the po lemical project at hand. In their criticisms of rhe Old Testament and irs morally unappealing deity, the tvlanichees disparaged ancient Jews from the patriarchs o nward. Multiple marriages, fugitive
couplings, busy procreation, a blood-drenched cult: Seen from the per· spective of these austere ascetics, the religion o f Israel was fool.ish~ car-
nal, and indeed sacrilegious (Usefulness of8elief6,t)). Bur co ntemporary society provided Roman Manichees with a closer>bigger, and much more important target for their anti-jewish polemic: catholic Ch ristians and their church. In the name of the gospel~ the Manichees observed, Christians ever)'where had freed themselves of circumcision, Sabbath o bservance, food taboos, and aiJ
the myriad Aeshly things that the Jews' god demanded of his followe rs. \X'hy on earth, then, rerain rhe carnal jewish book? If the church is
the bride of Christ, she should be pure. But the catholic church had broken her vows. Unfaithful, she cherished letters and gifts (that is, these scripntres and their pro mises) from a lover who corrupted her
chastity- namely, the god of the jews.' This god had seduced the catholic church with his vai n pledges ("in his stone tablets he promises you gold and silver and abundance of food and the land of Canaan"). Bur the case was clear, the options mutually exclusive. One co uld accept the message either of the Old
Testament (as the Jews had done and continued to do) or of the Gospel (as the Manichees had done). To accept both, as catholic Christians did, was a sel f-indicting admission of failure. "You receive both
Tbt' Heretic • IIJ
beca use you a re only half-filled with each," observed Faustus, one of the Ma nichaean Elecr an d an o ld reacher of Augustine's. ···But the one is not completed but corrupted by t he other" (Agaimt Famtus lj.t). Nor only were such "goods'' as these-food~ material securi l)'> land-low and unspiritual in th emselves. T hey were self-evidently be· yond rh e power of this god to deliver. His promises were false, h is pow· ers broken. Faustus pressed this point by alluding to the Jews' losses in t heir wars with Rome centuries earlier: This god is impoverished and needy. He can nor pt·ovide whar he has pi'Omised. He can nor even give t hese rhings ro che synagogue> hts proper wife, who obeys him in aU things like a maidsel'vanr. \\/hat chance is there of his delivering them to you, srrangers ro him who have proudly rhrown off rhe yoke of his command· mencs? . . . Go ahead then. Srirch old dorh onto a new garment. Puc new wine in old hordes. Senre rwo masters with om pleasing either (Matthew 9:16-•7). Make Christianicy a hybrid monsrer, a cemaur neither hol'se nor human. Bur>please, leave us to serve Christ only) comem as his spouse wich rhe immoi'Cal dowry that he has given us, in imitation of the Apostle Paul who said, ('Our sufficiency is from God, who has made us able mtnisters of t he New Tesrament" (2 Corinthians n). .U:i At.....ST FAU.S'Tt.'S 1).1
Catholic Christians, Fausrus readily acknowledged, did nor live ac· cording ro Jewish Law. But in retaining che texts of jewish Law, he complained, catholics srill act and rhink as t he Jews o nce had a nd still do. They) like the Jews, venerate the Old Testament) worship its god> and crust in h is promises. The results were corrupting and carnal, for catholics interpreted even t he Christian nl)•'Steries-che coming of Christ> his resurrection, t he resurrection o f believers> final redemp· tion- in a Aeshly manner. Ca tholics held t hat Christ had been born in a Aeshly body and that he had died and been raised in this same flesh!)' body. Many believed t hat when the ki ngdom came, t hey too would be raised in rhe Aesh, and t hat th ey would celebrate with a miJie nnium o f feasting together with Christ in t he New jerusalem. Jn the mean t ime>
114 ·AUGUST IN I! AN"l> TUll J EWS
rhey regarded marriage as honorable and sexual procreation as its goal and purpose. And they not o nly permitted the consumption of wine and meat~ thev also feasted o n such carnal foods over rhe graves of ' martyrs and in celebration of the dead. In brief, catholic Christiansmisled and encouraged, no doubt, by their attachment to the j ews· books-were themselves mired in the Aesh.9
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By contrast, said the Manichees, their own holy books were untainted by association with Jewish scriptures} their Christianiry u nrouched by such carnal sensibilities. 1\ and Hellenistic jewish-Augustine began his encounter wich chis g rear p hilosophical panimony. In books six and seven of che Confession~ looking back some twelve years to chis period> he vividly recoun ted the d ra matic effects of t his sudden immersion in Milan•s cosmopolitan Christian culture. Listening to Ambrose) Augustine lea rned for the first time to th ink abou t the Old Testament allegorically or symbolically; secundum spiritum, with spir icual understanding. Bib lical passages of seemingly intraccable ca rnality, such as God's making man in his image, now yielded shin ing new trut hs. The divine "image" according to which God made Adam refe rred not to the body, Augustine now understood> but to the soul. God 1s image Ia)' in t he m ind, whose in tellectual processes, like t he divinity whom rhe),. reflected, were urterly immateriaL Thought has no spatial extension; neit h er did rhe inco rporeal God. Slowly, as Au gus cine assimilated Amb rose's .sermons, Ma nichaean materialism began to fall away. I was delighted ro heat· Ambi'Ose in his sermons ro rhe people s.aring, as if he were enunciating a principle of exegesis: "The Jwe~· kills, bur rhe spirir gi\•es life" [2 Corimhtans 3:6]. Those rexts which, taken lirerally, seemed ro conrmn pen'erse reachings) he would expound spirirually> drawing aside the mystical veiL ... Fearing a precipirate plunge, I kepr my hean from giving assem . . . . Bur from rhi.s rime on I gave nl}' preference ro [he carholic fili rh. CONFESSIONS
6.4,6 -5,7
Scripture's humble sryle, which had o ffended his eighteen-yero ld self, Augustine now saw as part of God's providential plan. Irs seeming simplicity reach ed our to t he uneducated many, while its obscUI·ities enticed the interpretive skills of the learned few. "The absurdity which used to offend me in those books . . . 1 now understood to signify t he profundity of t heir mysteries" (Confossitms 6,s,8). Read in the ligh t of Ambrosian allegory, rhe o ld Jewish texts revealed Christ a nd h is chu rch. The Manichees had it all wrong: The Old Testament, understood spiri tually, really was a Ch riscian book. Pagan metaphysics, meanwhile, began to djssolve the seeming rea-
126 · AUCiOSTII'-t! ANO TUI! J l!WS
sonableness of d ualism as an explan ation for the p roblem of evil. As he struggled co grasp th e concept of non material be ing, Augustine was able to affirm other characteristics o f the divine. The ancient feat ures of philosophical paideia's high god-perfect, immaterial, immut able, radically sta ble-began to meld with those of rhe b iblical deity. "Wirh all my h earr I believed you [God] robe incorruprible, free from injury, and unchangeable" (Conforsions 7-t,t). To affi rm God's immurabiliry, however, was to deny the old Ma nichaean e." planation fo r rhe o rigins of cosmic evil, namely, that an a utonomous Kingdom of Darkness had invaded Lighr's domain and raken caprive particles of rhe good, which now lay scattered within ic. lf God were immutable, he co uld not be subject ro invasion. Where, then, did evil come fro m? La te Placonists conceived this q uestion completel)' d iffe rently from t he ways char Augusrine could , as he lingered in t he twiligh r of h is Manichaean phase. Wedded as he was to materialist vie\vs, Augusrine though r of evil (as he rhoughr o f all orher caregories of be ing, in· elud ing divinity) as some tbing. Bu t for the Platonist, evil, because a defecr., was no thing. That is, evil d id not actually exist1 in the same way that da1·kness and silence do not "e.xist." Dark ness is the absence of light. Silence is the absence o f sound. Thus evil, too, is not a t hing but a lack, nan1ely, an a bsence of good. God is the funda mental ca use of everything t hat is. He is not the ca use of t h ings that are not. This way o f fram ing the problem o f "''il had two applica rions, one cosmic, one moral. In terms of the cosmos, if aspects o f the nat ural universe seemed corrupt, t his very corruption measured an essential good ness because only what was good to start \llith could become less so. "Things which a re liable ro corruprion are good" (Confessions J.I2,J8). 1\nd looked ar from a long enough perspective, imperfections rhar jar close up acrually conrribute to the beau ty o f rhe whole. (ihis lasr, "god's-eye" argument a bout evil and cosmic aesthetics can also be traced back to Plaro.) In terms of morals, if rhe individ ual made a poor moral choice-in specificall)' biblical language, if he sin ned-the cause of his sin was not his being overwhelmed by the material manitestation o f a superior evil force. Rather, he sinned because of a poor use of h is will> choosing to rurn from a higher good (God being rhe h ig hest good) ro a lower good. \VIry an individual would choose a lesser good was a d ifferenr
Tht Sojou.rmr · 127
question. Perhaps he lacked t he intellectual t raining to perceive the higher good, o r t he self-discipline to regulate h imself in order to choose it. In terms of t he problem ofechical evil, however, t he main point made by Neoplatonism was that the cause of sin Ia)' wit hin the self. Thinking in this way ena bled Augustine to absolve the biblical crea tor god o f respo nsibilicy fo r evil. Indeed, co chink o f him as responsible for evil in any wa)' was not o nly impious bur patently absurd: No o ne, not even God, can "make,. noth ing (Confessions 7·13,19-20,16). Buoyed by h is progress, Augustine th en ''seized the sacred writings o f your Spirit and espedally the writings of the apostle Pau l..., He saw in a new way that the t\VO canons, O ld and New1 cohered bo th with each ocher and with his new p hilosophy. " I began reading and fo und rha r all t he rruth 1 had read in rhe Plaronisrs was sta red here (i.e., in the Bible! with rhe commendation of you r g race" (7.21,27). Neoplatonism also enabled Augustine to reco nceive th e moral status of mat ter. Though unquestionably infe rior co spirit, matter in t he Neoplatonist view could nonetheless be regarded as a product of t he O ne, a sorr o f crust that fo rmed ar the outermost extremes o f divin ity, hovering o n the cusp o f nonbeing. \XIichour co mpromise co h imself a nd co h is a bsolme goodness, then, God was che ultimate source o f matter. As for ethical evil o r sin it could not be a consequence o f man's being in rhe flesh. Accord ing to rhese p hilosophers, fles h did not cause sin because, meta physically, it could not cause sin. Soul was "above" flesh in the hierarchy of being. Wh at was "below" did not determine or control what was above it. Thus, though the flesh u nquestionably importuned the soul thro ugh che senses, giving way to such promptings was never a foregone co nclusion. Sin icself was a decisiotJ. And the decisio n to sin \Vas made in the mind. Jn och er words, sin was the prerogative of soul, not body. Flesh, fo r good and for ill, mere!)' o beyed the mind's d irection. As he thoughr wirh these new concepts, Augustine felr the inrellecrual knors chat had bound h im for so lo ng ro Manichaeism loosen a nd come undone. His new convictions led h irn to embrace the teach1
ings of Ambrose's church. At this po in t, he should have moved on to ba ptism. lnsread, he lingered as a carechumen. Why? Here a third consideratio n seems to have held Augustine back. He
128 • AUOUST I Nl! ANI> T I.. E JEWS
wanted baptism to come wit h a life-lo ng commitment to celibacy. He was thirty-t\vo years old. In the late fourth centu ry> when even most clergy were married, th e church made no requi rement of celibacy> and Augustine knew this: I was still strongly bound by th e des of woman. The Aposde did noc forbid me to marry, rhough he exhorted me co something better and WI'}' much wished rhat all men were unam1ched>as he hirnself was (1Col'im hians Tt-7). Buc I was weaker, and chose [he softer op[ion, and t his single rhing prevenred me f.'Orn deciding more finnly o n orhers, so ch ar I was weary and wasted \1/ith nagging anxtedes. COA'H !SSIONS 8. 1,l
Son1e of his later ecclesiasticaJ o pponents> cri ticizing Augustine for the wa)'S that he linked h is eventual teachings o n o riginal sin to h uman sexuality, accused him of never having really freed himself from Manichaeism. His scruples before his baptism might indeed seem like a residu um o f t he Manichaean ethic, which dearly had privileged sexual renunciation. But Augustine•s meta physics had changed> a nd his (albeit wavering) resolve now d rew from rhe same source as h is new metaphysics: p hilosophy. Ambrose presented such philosophy in C hristian form> che return of the soul ro God aided by comminnent to holy celibacy. Cicero and Plorin us, t he two pagan philosophers whose works had most affected Augustine> had both urged the man who would seek after wisd om to wit hdraw from t he distractions of the senses. Renouncing sexual activity-a path t hat Plod n us himself had elected to follow-certainly went F.tr toward meeting this goaJ.~ A variety o f Christia ns, for a variety o f reasons, h ad also taught the virtues o f sexual renunciation. This ideal had roots going back to the foundational days o f the movement. In the m id-fi rst cent ury of the common erat tOr example, in h is letter to his gentile commu nity at Corinch. Paul had given temperate instructions o n sexual d iscipline within 1n arriage. If o ne member o f the couple wanted to abstain for a period> Paul had no objection, though he ca utioned that extremes of abstinence might lead to sexual temptation. '' Do not refuse each other except
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perhaps fo r a season, so that you might devote yourself to prayer; but come together again, lesr Satan ten1pt you rh rough lack of self-co nn·ol.'' Nonetheless, Paul clearly regarded coral abstinence as the higher parh. ('I say th is by way of concession, not ofcommand. J wish that all were as I myself am," rhac is to say> celibate (1Corinthians 7:1-7). Continu ing o n rhis rh eme, Pa ul reminded his commun ity of the reason fo r his teachings. ''In view of the impending distress. it is well fo r a pe rson to remain as he is.. .. I mean. breth ren> t he appoin ted time has g rown ver)' shorr.. . . The fo rm of this wo rld is passing away" (1 Corinrhians 7'25-3 1). Sexual renunciation berrer prepared rhe believer fo r the arrival of God 's kingdom, as well as for endu ring the travails rhar migh r p reced e ir (the " impend ing distress" rhat Pau l invokes here). Paul expected his generatio n to see these events. Some decades later, the writer of rh e Gospel of tvfatthew an ributed a sim ilar teaching o n celibacy ro j esus: ' There are eunuchs who have bee n so from birth, and eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs tVbo have ttldde themselves etmu.chs for tbe sake of dJe kit1gdom ofheaven. He who is a ble co receive this. let him receive it" (tvfacrhew t9:u -r2). Whatever the marital starus of the historical jesus, larer evangelists certainly presented him as sing le and thus celibate. Also. some members o f a j udean communjty ro ughly contemporary with j esus, the EssenesJ had also renounced sexual activity. Common ro aJI of t hese ancienr Jews-the evangelist Matthew> rhe Essenes, Paul, jesus- was their passionate belief that rhe Kingdo m o f God really was at hand. This apocalyptic co nviction seems ro have undergirded a nd informed rheir commit ment to sexual celibacy.s As rime continued and as C hristianity in irs var ious forms setd ed in to the broader world of Greco-Roman cultu re. rh ese teachings aJso continuedJ and \vere continuously reinterpreted. Marcion's church read Pa ul as teaching against sexual acciviry as such, a nd so permitted baprism (rhus full membe rship in rhe co mmuniry) o nly ro those who committed ro celibacy. The vigor of h is church ("spread throughou t t he whole world," as o ne o f h is orthodox critics. centu ries later, grumb led) arrests ro how many people were willing to meet h is standard. In t he same period, j ustin Ma rtyr a pprovingly relates, a young Christian in Alexandria petitioned the governor fo r permission ro be castrated 1
ljO • AIJClUSTJSt! AND THE J l!WS
(Roman law prohibited t he procedure): T his man wanted to make himself one of heaven's eu nuchs (Fim Apo!OlJ' 29). For pagan see rs and sibyls no less than for Jewish prophers, abstaining from sex had long seemed an appropriate preparation fo r serving as a medium for divine spirit; Christian reachers and prophets who sought to be vessels of the Spirit endo rsed such ren unciation as well. In b rief) man)' d ifferent theological commim1ents supported behaviors thar, from t he outside) all looked very similar. Eventually) fro m the second century onward>sexual renunciants (such as widows as well as married parrners), virgins, and celibates-both male and fema1e 1 borh itinera nt and residentproliferated wit hin very varied Christian commun ities. Asceticism, a nd sexual asceticism in particular) was practiced by Ch ristians o f all stripes-much to their mut ual irritation.' Two specific develo pments within chis general cu lt ure of con6 nence marked rhe ideal o f celibacy in Augustine's place and time. The first is the early stirrings of organ ized commun ities of celibates, what will later become monasteries. In the E.asr> charismatic individual ascetics1rh e ancho rites of the Egyptian and the Syrian deserts, were co llecting in to commun ities. Pious tourists and temporary visito rs from t he \Vest visited rh ese people and places and circulated admiring stories back home. (Augustine speaks about t he effecr of hearing the sto ry of St. Anthony's conversion to desert asceticism while he struggled to make h is own commit ment to celibacy back in Milan; Confos· .a nd certainly no less impon:ant: In t he Iacer part o f the fou rth cent u ry, spurred especially b)' the politics and policies o f rhe catholic T heodosius, Ro man elites took a serious a nd p rudent interest in aligning th emselves wit h the empero r's church. To do so was sim ply a sensib le fi rst step toward advancing o ne's prospects in government service. These elites moved coward t he church with their pagan aristocratic sensibilities intact, and these would have an important effect on western styles of communal celibacy. Ro man u pper-crust sensibilities had long been shaped by read ing and studying the great literat ure and p hilosophy of the classical past. Reti rement from the world to improve the soul by reading elevating books thar exercised rhe mind: This was rh e aristocratic ethic of otium
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lib