Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

words “we ought not to consider an allegorical narrative.”⁸⁰ Such metaphoric interpretations of past events fall well within the realm of the literal sense, because the author clearly intended them. “The narrative in these books [like Genesis] is certainly not of the genre of figurative speech like that in the Song of Songs, but of a completely historical genre, like that in the books of Kings and others of this sort.”⁸¹

      The precise change that the De Genesi ad litteram marked in Augustine's hermeneutical outlook warrants further qualification. Despite the allegorical emphasis of his earlier Old Testament exegesis, Augustine had already affirmed the reality and importance both of the literal sense and of the exposition of biblical narrative as history. Yet the unabashed identification of the literal with the historical that one encounters in the De Genesi ad litteram underscores the priority of the “literal” sense for Augustine. Although “no Christian will dare say that events should not be interpreted figuratively,”⁸² literal interpretation now takes precedence. It commandeers the lion's share of Augustine's exegetical energy, and it engages him well beyond his previously acknowledged need to establish the historical reality upon which Christological allegory and typology depend. Even in the case of the paschal lamb, so critically important a prefiguration of the crucified Jesus, Augustine acknowledged the exegete's mandate first to accept and to define Scripture's literal, historical meaning:

      He [Christ] is the sheep which is sacrificed on the Passover; yet that was prefigured not only in speech but also in action. For it is not that that sheep was not a sheep; it clearly was a sheep, and it was killed and eaten. Something else was prefigured in this actual fact, though not like that fattened calf which was slain for the banquet of the younger son when he returned [Luke 15:11–32]. In that latter case the narrative itself consists of figures, not of events with figurative significance. For the Lord himself, not the evangelist, narrated this…. The narrative of the Lord himself was a parable, in which it is never required that the things conveyed in speech be shown to have literally occurred.⁸³

      In the case of narrative intended by the biblical writer as history, however, the factual event must be expounded first, and, as John Hammond Taylor has observed, its exposition commands Augustine's definite preference. When considering the account of Adam and Eve in Paradise, the De Genesi ad litteram first contrasts the figurative discourse of Scripture (locutio figuratarum rerum) with its exposition in a literal sense (ad litteram), then such a figurative exposition (figurate) with a rightful or proper one (proprie), and finally the allegorical understanding of the text (secundum allegoricam locutionem) with its rightful one (secundum propriam). In short, figurative and allegorical contrast with literal and proper.⁸⁴ Gone is the license that Augustine had previously allowed the Catholic reader of the Bible in the early books of the De doctrina christiana; there, as long as an interpretation accords with the doctrine of the church, anything goes.⁸⁵ Here, in the De Genesi ad litteram, the objectively determined historical facts take precedence, and only when the intention of the author remains indeterminable may the exegete reach a conclusion based on faith alone. A Christian must believe that Christian faith will comport with the literal meaning of Scripture:

      If those irrationally impelled by reason of a stubborn or dull mind refuse to believe these things [in Genesis], they still can find no reason to prove that they are false…. Clearly, if those things rendered here in a material sense could in no way be accepted in a material sense and the true faith yet preserved, what other option would remain but that we understand those things as spoken figuratively, rather than impiously to condemn Holy Scripture? Yet if these things understood in a material sense not only do not impede but defend the narrative of divine eloquence more effectively, there will be no one, I think, so unfaithfully stubborn as to see those things expounded in their proper sense according to the rule of faith and yet prefer to remain in his former opinion (if perchance they had seemed to him open to figurative interpretation alone).⁸⁶

      In direct contrast to the De Genesi ad Manichaeos, Augustine's literal commentary accordingly seeks to show how everything in Genesis is to be understood primarily not in the figurative but in the proper sense.⁸⁷ Owing to Christianity's axiomatic identification of Judaism with the literal interpretation of the Bible, I shall argue below, Augustine's increasingly positive inclination to a literalist hermeneutic undoubtedly nourished the development of his conception of the Jews.

      TERRESTRIAL HISTORY

      The social historian Robert Nisbet has deemed the historical ideas of the De civitate Dei a veritable cornerstone of the Western idea of progress: “Reality for Augustine lay in the unitary human race and its progress toward fulfillment of all that was good in its being.”⁸⁸ Like his biblical hermeneutic, however, Augustine's valuation of thisworldly human experience developed over time; the two concerns influenced one another considerably.

      Although commonly agreeing that Augustine's philosophy of history changed considerably during the course of his adult life, scholars of the last half-century have struggled to define precisely when, how, and why. Some forty years ago, F. Edward Cranz linked a major shift in this dimension of Augustine's doctrine to his changing ideas on divine justice and human freedom, on grace and human will.⁸⁹ Late in the 380s, in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos and the De vera religione, Augustine translated Platonic notions of the gradual process whereby the human soul achieves philosophical perfection into his sevenfold schema of humanity's spiritual development throughout earthly history. During the next decade, however, as Augustine retreated from his belief in a human's ability to will faith in God, he replaced the seven ages of history with a fourfold division that emphasized the radical disjunction between epochs and the absolute dependence on divine grace: before the law, under the law, under grace, and the perfect peace of the final redemption (ante legem, sub lege, sub gratia, in pace). Especially in the wake of the Ad Simplicianum (To Simplicianus, 396), Augustine's earlier sense of innate progress in human spiritual history gave way to a quintessential contrast between the damned and the saved, which ruled out the possibility for any secular or political experience, even the Christianization of Rome, to serve as the vehicle for salvation. This comported well, Cranz maintained, with Tyconius's assertion of identity between Old and New Testaments, which Augustine now adopted: There is a single principle of salvation, not a series of grades that an individual—or the entire human race—ascends in turn. A stark opposition between unredeemed and redeemed, which deprived the Jewish past of the significance that it had had in Augustine's earlier notion of seven ages, now facilitated his two-tiered interpretation of human history in the De civitate Dei.90

      Much in Cranz's argument may prove correct, but his claim that Augustine's new understanding of the human condition devalued the historical importance of the Jews hardly comports with a careful review of the Augustinian corpus. Only at the end of the 390s did Augustine begin to elaborate the unique, testimonial function of the Jews in sacred history, and only in his later works—the De civitate Dei, for example— did the doctrine of Jewish witness achieve its full expression.⁹¹ I therefore believe that an alternative appraisal of Augustine's historical thought by the historian Robert Markus proves more instructive for the present discussion.

      Focusing above all on the De civitate Dei, Markus has singled out two key features of the older Augustine's philosophy of history: On one hand, Augustine posited a sharp, qualitative distinction between sacred and profane history, which emerged after years of contemplating the human condition, from a limitation of sacred history to that recounted by the divinely inspired authors of Scripture, and in the wake of the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. The Augustinian theology of disjunction between the realms of sacred and profane, Markus has demonstrated, first received clear-cut expression during the second decade of the fifth century. On the other hand, although Augustine denied Christian Rome ultimate significance in his scheme of salvation history, he likewise rejected the apocalyptic equation of Rome with the evil Babylon. Rather, he reconciled the contemporary alliance of church and empire as reflecting the imperfections of the saeculum, the locus of interpenetration of heavenly and earthly cities—none other than the present, pre-eschatological world that enshrines the essential ambiguities of human experience:

      At the most fundamental level, that of their