Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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.

      CHAPTER 2

      Gregory the Great

      Between Sicut Iudaeis and Adversus ludaeos

      If Augustine stood on the precipice overlooking the end of late antiquity, Pope Gregory the Great, more than any other single individual, led the Latin West into the Middle Ages. In the history of Christianity, Gregory's literary career and pontificate (590–604) mark the end of the patristic period and the entry of Roman Catholicism and its church into a patently different phase in their development. From the perspective of most medieval Christian readers of the Bible, for example, Gregory was the first of the great master-exegetes, “le premier des maîtres.”¹ In matters ecclesiological, Walter Ullmann has suggested that Gregory's ideal conception of a properly ordered Christian society, his “societas reipublicae christianae…, is the prophetic vision of medieval Europe.”² And, in the political history of the West, the complexities of Gregory's relations with Byzantium and the Germanic kingdoms of Europe depict him as having traversed a new frontier. Conscious of change and continuity in the image of Rome, and ever sensitive to the role of the church as the primary institutional heir to the Western empire, he evidently moved beyond the perception of Latin Christendom espoused by Emperor Justinian several decades before him—that is, as completely subject to Byzantine imperial control—but did not yet express that of Charlemagne two centuries later—that of a rightly distinct political entity.

      Gregory's role as a trailblazer extends to our story as well. As one modern historian of the papacy has confirmed, “With respect to the Jews, as with everything else Pope Gregory touched, he is a founder of papal tradition, one of those great men who work for the future as they respond to the turmoil of the present collapse.”³ In the unfolding history of Jewish-Christian relations, Gregory blended Augustinian theology and principles of Roman law into policies that figured significantly in medieval canon law for centuries to come.⁴ At the same time, he reformulated traditional motifs of Adversus ludaeos theology in a manner that seemed to accord entirely neither with the singular features of Augustinian doctrine nor with the norms of his own administrative policy. Students of Gregory's teaching concerning the Jews have typically differentiated between the executive rulings of his papal correspondence and the doctrinal pronouncements of his biblical commentaries, as if the pope's actions diverged from his theological principles in the Jews' regard. Although I seek to harmonize the various tendencies in Gregory's outlook as much as possible, the generic distinction between correspondence and commentary provides a convenient basis for a review of his instruction.⁵

       SICUT IUDAEIS

      During the thirteen and one-half years of his pontificate, Gregory addressed the subject of the Jews and their communities in more than two dozen letters, which divide readily among several chief concerns. Although many scholars have reviewed the specific circumstances and legal ramifications of Gregory's decrees, we reconsider them here for their ideological underpinnings—that is, for their perceptions of the Jewish condition and purpose in Christian society.

      Responding