News

Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, by Paula Fredriksen, Doubleday, 488 pages, $40

“Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it lazy.”

This is the Roman poet Juvenal in his Fourteenth Satire , mocking Jewish law. “Since their fathers abstained from pork, they'd be cannibals sooner/ Than violate that taboo. Circumcised, not as the Gentiles,/ They despise Roman law, but learn and observe and revere/ Israel's code, and all from the sacred volume of Moses/ Where the way is not shown to any but true believers,/ Where the uncircumcised are never led to the fountain.”

Juvenal denigrated Judaism to exalt Roman custom. But he lived in a Roman society that tolerated and respected Jewish ancestral custom, as it did all ancestral custom. Paula Fredriksen of Boston University, a specialist in ancient Christianity's social and intellectual history, knows this well.

Although she recently wrote two award-winning books on the historical Jesus, many decades ago, Fredriksen studied and translated the Latin commentaries of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) on the Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans.

She now returns in Augustine and the Jews to explore where Augustine differed from the mindset Juvenal typifies.

Fredriksen teaches us that the real complaint of such Romans was not with regular, affable Roman Jews, because their synagogues were open to pagan participation (and vice versa, as Jews enjoyed pagan urban culture).

The complaint, rather, was with newfangled Christian Jews creating social instability. Early Roman emperors persecuted Christians, not traditional Jews, because – by turning synagogue-friendly, born-pagan Gentiles away from their ancestral gods, into becoming proselytes “led to the [Christian baptismal] fountain” – Christians were visibly disrupting the Roman social order of ancestral piety. As Juvenal indicates, what a Roman did was what mattered; “true belief” was an idle question. As that Roman Pontius Pilate famously said, “What is truth?”

Fredriksen's brilliant and persuasive book highlights this unique cultural context, one counterintuitive to us because of later Jewish history. Accordingly, she demands that scholars rethink their picture of Augustine. Augustine is at his most Augustinian, she argues, whenever he is thinking about Jews. Especially as Augustine thinks about them in the way I call, with French religious philosopher Rémi Brague, “the Roman way.”

Augustine did so within the cultural matrix Rome inherited from the husk of Alexander's universal empire: a diversity of peoples, with a practical tolerance for the plurality of gods and local cults. Here, the daily index of piety was ethnic loyalty to ancestral practice. Sure, Juvenal needles Jews, but precisely because their flourishing under Rome testifies to the beneficial tolerance of universal Roman law.

So too with Augustine, Fredriksen writes, and the (for us) counterintuitive gap that existed between anti-Judaic rhetoric and the Roman reality of his day. Gentile and Jew were both members of the same pagan society, ruled by the same Roman law. Augustine rebuked a fellow bishop who was trying to cheat a Jew out of his property. Roman law would have none of that. Jews owned property. They sat on city councils. The idle rhetoric of “anti-Judaism,” trickling down from the educated class, was not to be taken literally.

Such rhetoric can be traced back to educated Hellenistic Jews, who invented biblical theology. They learned how Greeks subjected literature (Homer and Greek tragedies) to rational analysis. With similar allegorical interpretations, Jews aimed to make philosophical sense of their scriptures. There, Moses and the prophets rhetorically rebuked fellow Jews for various failings. Interpreting this “anti-Jew” rhetoric was an intra-Jewish heritage, its tropes analyzed in the context of debates interpreting Jewish texts and traditions.

When Christians invented “Christology” (reading the Jewish scriptures in a new allegorical mode, as about Christ), they operated within this same rhetorical tradition. They used rhetorical Jewish stereotypes to attack the interpretations of rival Christian sects. Fredriksen observes how Christian “orthodoxy” was defined in heated debates with “heretics” over textual interpretation. Frequently, debate was about who was the real Christian (with the correct, “spiritual,” allegorical interpretation) and who was the “Jew” (reading the text “literally”).

Christian theological debate continued along these familiar lines until a true intellectual crisis in the 390s. Faustus, the Manichaean heretic, had shrewdly co-opted the rhetoric of “anti-Judaism” (that Hellenistic baggage, pagan and Jewish), which had been part of intra-Christian debate to date. He ruthlessly deployed every anti-Jewish cliché in the book, in order to cleverly reinterpret Jewish and Christian scriptures so as to condemn Jew, pagan and Christian, as all equivalent, all thinking literally.

Fredriksen opines that Augustine's genius was at its most “innovative” and “revolutionary” when he broke through to a “creative” understanding of how, contra Faustus, Christians must recognize the divinely sanctioned historical witness of Jews: Judaism does not challenge Christianity but, by divine will, bears to the pagans a constant witness about the redemption of the flesh. Centuries-old rhetorical contrasts about the legalistic “literalism” of “Jews” were transcended as Augustine rose to the historic occasion and explained things better. He summed up Christian teaching in a classic way, a way that has resounded through the centuries: an anti-Manichaean, pro-Jewish affirmation of both spirit and flesh.

Unfortunately, Fredriksen thinks it is unhistorical and anachronistic to assign the same positive understanding of Judaism that Augustine articulated to Paul, the other Apostles and Jesus. She thinks, rather, that Christian “orthodoxy” is a shifting and arbitrary fiction, Roman imperial power officially deciding the winners in history's debates. But this is as nonsensical as saying that anything true in her book is to be regarded as true only because she gamed the system and got tenure.

Remarkably, for someone so sensitive to anachronism, Fredriksen's blind spot is a modern rhetorical dichotomy: exalting innovative individual revolution at the expense of continuity. Historian Paul Johnson (in The Birth of the Modern ) wrote best of this “cult of the divine genius,” Beethoven being the first “creative” personality widely prized as such. Hence it is anachronistic to assess Augustine's significance in this modern way – as a “self-confident” and “creative” revolutionary – when he himself would recoil from being pitted against his tradition.

Still, by emphasizing, together with Augustine, the mysterious hermeneutic key of Judaism, Fredriksen makes a substantial contribution to understanding Augustine's historical development. How ironic, then, that her greatest shortcoming is to be like those disruptive Christians whom cranky Romans such as Juvenal resented – too fond of revolutionary innovation, and not ancestrally Jewish enough.

But Augustine, in a truly Roman spirit, transcends every clichéd rhetorical dichotomy. As with his epochal appraisal of Judaism, he shows us a better way, one that openly included foreign ideas, such as aqueducts, and, fostering them, propagated universal civilization in a bigger and better way – the Roman way.

C.S. Morrissey teaches medieval Latin philosophy at Redeemer Pacific College.