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PART TWO

The Augustinian Legacy

in the Early Middle Ages

Adaptation, Reinterpretation, Resistance

Though Augustine's ideas conditioned Christian conceptualizations of Jews and Judaism for centuries to come, they underwent a gradual process of adaptation and reformulation that commenced almost immediately. For three prominent churchmen of the period—the Italian Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), the Spanish Archbishop Isidore of Seville (ca. 570–636), and the Frankish Archbishop Agobard of Lyons (769–840)—the Augustinian legacy could permit considerable latitude in the formulation of an ideological posture toward the Jews, and the attitudes of these men varied widely. Some investigators have preferred to understand their divergent viewpoints as gravitating between two different patristic outlooks that medieval theologians inherited from their predecessors: the intolerance of John Chrysostom, who aimed to undermine a Jewish presence in a properly ordered Christian society, and the relative tolerance of Augustine, grounded in the spirit of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, that sanctioned and ordained such a presence. Recognizing the complex ambivalence in Augustine's constructions of Jews and Judaism, however, I present the ideas of these three early medieval churchmen as rooted in his legacy, even as they departed from it in various respects. One ought not to characterize Augustine as an advocate of Jews and Judaism. The Jews per se hardly ranked high on his theological or episcopal agenda. His memorable exegesis of Psalm 59:12 entailed considerably more than “Slay them not”; as Augustine himself explained the words of the psalmist, “It was inadequate for him to say, ‘Slay them not…without adding further, ‘Scatter them.”’ And for all that the doctrine of Jewish witness proved innovative, Augustine never intended to stray from the mainstream of patristic tradition. Written at the end of his life, his Tractatus adversus ludaeos accordingly reiterates Pauline teaching on the futility of the law and the rejection of Israel, indicts the Jews of its day for complicity in Jesus' crucifixion (“whom you in your parents led to his death”), and berates the Jews for their blindness, deafness, and violent anger (saeviendo).¹ Moreover, differences among them notwithstanding, Gregory, Isidore, and Agobard all acknowledged that the Jews still had a particular role to play in the Christian economy of salvation and that their function presupposed their right to exist. Much as they had crystallized for Augustine, these prelates' constructions of the Jews continued to emerge at the juncture of biblical hermeneutic, the philosophy of history, and anthropology in their respective theologies. Pursuant to his own particular context and outlook, each of these ecclesiastical leaders preserved the metaphorical significance that the Jews had found in the Augustinian corpus: as embodiments of that which is incomplete and imperfect in the present, Christian world, and as an index of that which separates this world from its final redemption.

What, then, accounts for the distinctive developments of the early Middle Ages in our story? How did Gregory, Isidore, and Agobard adapt what they had inherited from Augustine, from other church fathers, and from Roman law to the context of a rapidly changing Christian society and culture? What allowed for the sharp differences in their Jewish policies? How, for instance, did Gregory espouse a more tolerant stance vis-à-vis the Jews without ever enunciating the Augustinian exegesis of Psalm 59:12, whereas Isidore and Agobard advocated much harsher policies and yet cited patristic precedent for maintaining the Jews within Christendom?

A helpful treatment of these issues must take note of critical developments that followed the fall of the Western empire in the cultural and intellectual history of the Latin West. Though early medieval theologians may have made few original contributions to Christian doctrine and biblical exegesis, numerous scholars have observed that their worldview was narrower, that it tended to streamline complex and ambivalent conceptions of the fathers who preceded them. Robert Markus has suggested that this amounted to “the eclipse of the ‘secular’ dimension in Christians' consciousness,”² the decline and disappearance of the intermediate realm of the saeculum that had distinguished Augustine's own mentality and had characterized the eschatology, the time-related rituals, the sacred space of holy places, and the monasticism of fifth-century Christendom. In the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, and especially in the ideas of Gregory the Great, Christian conceptions of the world began to divide sharply and more simplistically between the presently opposing realms of good and evil and to strive toward the ultimate resolution of such divisiveness: in society at large, in the Catholic Church, and within each and every individual. This tendency invariably bore upon the interpretation of sacred texts, the appreciation of Christian history, and the understanding of the human being. Militating against Augustine's guardedly positive valuation of non-Christian ideas and institutions in a Christian world, the new, medieval mentality undermined the literal exegesis of Scripture, just as it justified the study of classical sciences and texts solely insofar as they enhanced the understanding of Scripture. It abandoned the Augustinian bifurcation between secular and spiritual history. And it ceased to uphold Augustine's exoneration of the human body, as distinct from the soul, from the sinfulness of sexual desire. Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible now focused almost exclusively on its spiritual, allegorical sense. No line of demarcation between earthly and heavenly cities dominated God's plan for human history; recent political developments—the fall of the empire and the conversion of the Roman world to Christianity—might accordingly signal the imminence of the final redemption. Despite the proper subordination of one to the other, human body and soul shared in the carnality of sin. Only in concert, through disciplined self-sacrifice and divine service, could they facilitate the return of the human being to God.

What room did the new Christian mind-set leave for the Jews and Judaism? Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness had hinged precisely on that intermediate realm of independent, albeit limited, worth that one discerned in the Bible's literal sense, in terrestrial history, and in the sexuality of the human body. At the same time as early medieval churchmen inherited the doctrine of witness, the successes of the church in eradicating paganism and suppressing dissidence detracted from the testimonial value of Judaism; along with his literal reading of Scripture, “the Jew had become redundant, except as a reminder that there were real, literal Jews and a handful of pagans still left to be converted in remote corners” of the world.³ The return to a monistic conception of Christian history, one that drew no distinction between the politics of this world and the road to ultimate salvation, further undermined the Augustinian evaluation of the Jews. And a retreat from Augustine's focus on the goodness of nature in matters sexual and anthropological undermined yet another basis on which his ideas had suggested a didactic, constructive purpose for Judaism within Christendom.

In the big picture, one may not conclude that early medieval theologians disavowed the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness; we shall be exploring trends and variations in orientation that developed gradually and altered prevailing conceptions only over the course of many generations. Yet one must also acknowledge that Christian attitudes toward Jews did not remain unchanged between the time of Augustine and the High Middle Ages. Post-imperial Christendom no longer adhered to several vital presuppositions of the doctrine of Jewish witness, and this only compounded the inconsistencies and ostensive contradictions in Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. Lacking Augustine's singular perspective on the saeculum, his successors found themselves heirs to a Jewish policy that did not quite comport with their medieval conceptual framework. And sharing a view of the church as a community united in the body of Christ, Gregory, Isidore, and Agobard placed considerably less emphasis on the positive role of the Jew in their midst; instead, they aspired to a world where that Jew would no longer be necessary. One can best appreciate these early medieval prelates as struggling to reconcile their Augustinian heritage with a worldview that resisted its accommodation. Gregory made no deliberate effort to confront this tension, but his ideas expressed it nonetheless; the apparent disjunction between the relatively tolerant spirit of his papal correspondence and the unhesitating anti-Judaism of his exegetical works is therefore highly instructive. Isidore avowed the implications of “Slay them not,” but, in his new scheme of Christian Heilsgeschichte, the historical role of the Jews would soon climax in an end to their presence. Agobard, too, affirmed the traditions of Pauline, Augustinian, and Gregorian moderation; yet he intimated repeatedly that the relevance of the Augustinian outlook had been compromised, and his discomfort with it heralded more ominous developments of the High and later Middle Ages.

1. Augustine, Tractatus adversus ludaeos, esp. 7.10, PL 42:59.

2. Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, England, 1990), p. 17.

3. Robert A. Markus, “The Jew as a Hermeneutic Deice: The Inner Life of a Gregorian Topos,” in Gregory the Great: A Symposium, ed. John C. Cavadini (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), p. 10.