Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said, As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

  And they asked him saying, Master, but when shall these things be? and what sign will there be when these things shall come to pass?

  And he said, Take heed that ye be not deceived: for many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye not after them.

  …But before all these, they shall lay their hands on you, and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues, and into prisons, being brought before kings and rulers for my name’s sake.

  The final verse of this passage merits particular attention. Jesus the Jew would hardly have advanced the argument that delivering someone into prison was the same as delivering him to a synagogue. The verse is particularly significant because the author of the Gospel of Luke is also thought by most biblical scholars to be the author of the Acts of the Apostles, from which we derive so many of our impressions about the dawn of Christianity.

  Even after Jerusalem was razed, however, Roman officials continued for another two centuries to protect Jewish communities dispersed throughout the Roman world. Netanyahu’s analysis seems motivated more by the ideological position that Jew-hatred is endemic to all Western culture, or to all cultures with a history of extensive contact with Jews, than by a realistic assessment of the role of Jews in Greek and Roman culture (and vice versa). It is true that there were outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the classical world. Two of the most devastating, in Alexandria in 38 and 68, were described, respectively, by the historians Philo of Alexandria (a Hellenistic Jew) and Flavius Josephus (who had fought in the rebellion against Rome leading to the destruction of the Second Temple, was taken hostage—or, depending on one’s point of view, defected to the Roman side—and eventually became a Roman citizen). Alexandria, however, was a special case, in that Roman authorities had encountered trouble for centuries when they tried to keep the lid on simmering tensions among Jews, Greeks, and Egyptians. The trouble only grew worse when Christianity was added to the mix, and Roman officials were no more successful in stopping later Christian violence against pagans than they had been in stopping earlier attacks focused on Jews.

  Only when Christianity came into its own as a political force, and emperors as well as other Roman officials embraced the Christian faith and were subject to pressure from Christian leaders, did Jews everywhere began to experience physical peril regardless of whether they had long maintained peaceful relations with governing authorities. The question of what to do about the Jews was far more pressing than what to do about pagans for the church fathers, given that Christianity developed out of Judaism and was seen as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. These prophecies eventually had to be twisted to fit the official events of the Christian story. The refusal of faithful Jews to accept that the story of their faith ended and was fulfilled by the arrival of Jesus was a constant challenge and reproach to Christianity in a way that the unrelated beliefs of pagans could never be.

  Here Augustine enters the picture. Confessions says nothing whatever about Jews. Augustine saved his ruminations about “the Jewish problem” for his massive theological work, The City of God, which he began writing at least fifteen years after Confessions appeared. The bishop of Hippo’s unique and lasting contribution to the fate of Jews in Christendom rejected the exterminationist stance toward Judaism expounded in the writings of his contemporaries John Chrysostom of Antioch and Ambrose of Milan, the bishop and mentor who baptized him in 387. Augustine’s particular contribution to the Adversus Judaeos genre of sermons, which permeates all of the patristic writings, was his admonition that Jews should be harassed, dispersed throughout the world at the pleasure of Christian rulers, treated as constant targets for conversion, but not, in the end, exterminated. To Augustine, the physical survival of some Jews—even though they were so wrongheaded and oblivious to God’s grace as to reject Jesus as the Messiah—was necessary to attest to the truth of Christianity and its fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy. He writes:

  In fact, there is a prophecy given before this event on this very point in the book of Psalms….It comes down in this passage, “As for my God, his mercy will go before me; my God has shown me this in the case of my enemies. Do not slay them, lest at some time they forget your Law,” without adding, “Scatter them.” For if they lived with that testimony and Scriptures only in their own land, and not everywhere, the obvious result would be that the Church, which is everywhere, would not have them available among all nations as witnesses to the prophecies which were given beforehand concerning Christ.6

  In other words, if the Jews were not in every land to serve as a cautionary example and to be persecuted by Catholics, the universality of the church’s truth would be harder to demonstrate. As James Carroll observes, Augustine’s two-sided injunction—“preserve, but do not slay them”—resounds throughout Western history. “It was not only the Diaspora that provided Jewish witness to the truth of Christian claims,” Carroll emphasizes, “but the negative condition of exile. Jews came to be seen as witnesses in the very desperation of their status. They must be allowed to survive, but never to thrive…Their homelessness and misery are the proper punishments for their refusal to recognize the truth of the Church’s claims. And more—their misery is yet another proof of those claims.”7 Augustine’s formula proved deadly for Jews over the long term because “the compulsively repeated pattern of that ambivalence would show in bishops and popes protecting Jews—but from expressly Christian mobs that wanted to kill Jews because of what bishops and popes had taught about Jews. A teaching that wanted it both ways was bound to fail, as would become evident at every point in history when Jews presumed, whether economically or culturally or both, to even think of thriving.”8

  I did not encounter Confessions as most readers, absent a special interest in theology, might encounter the book in a college course on the history of religion or (today) the oversubscribed category sometimes called history of memoir. I read The City of God first, when I was around sixteen—no doubt with glazed eyes and limited understanding—because my atheism had stimulated a strong interest in the history of religion and theology. One thing I did understand, though, was what Augustine wanted to do about Jews, and that certainly prejudiced me against him by the time I got around to reading Confessions some years later.

  Though Augustine rejected extermination, he essentially believed that a people so foolish and evil as to refuse the truth claim of Christianity deserved almost every other form of abuse. Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century scholar and pre-eminent philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment, once remarked that, had it not been for Augustine’s “lovely brainwave, we would have been exterminated long ago.”9 Does a man deserve much credit, in any era, for being less brutal than his wholly brutal contemporaries? Human beings who are far in advance of their time—say, Spinoza on intellectual liberty and censorship—do deserve credit. But is there anything especially admirable about sanctioning every form of abuse short of murder to show people who disagree with you the error of their ways?

  Augustine’s prescription for the containment of Jewry within Christendom is directly related to his conviction that anyone who is exposed to the Gospels and refuses to accept them is committing the most grievous form of sin and perpetuating the evil error—not merely an intellectual but a moral error of the highest order—of choosing a life and philosophy without Jesus at its center. This conviction lies at the heart of the Christian conversion narrative—for most of European history, the conversion imperative—as a metaphorical and practical demonstration of the once-unbreakable connection between religious violence and belief in a religious truth so absolute that it is both the right and the duty of the state to enforce one faith. Augustine’s conversion story—the first to explore the process in any detail—is no exception. The City of God mee
ts Confessions in Augustine’s denunciation of deliberate rejection of God’s grace, by which he means grace and salvation through Jesus, as the ultimate sin. Paul’s story does not really count in this regard, since Scripture has little to tell us about the psychological processes by which he was prepared, before his fall off the horse, for his transformation from an enemy of those who followed the prophet Yeshua into the indispensable publicist of the greatest story ever told. Paul’s epistles tell us what he thought after being reborn in Christ after a bump on the head—not what he thought before.

  Augustine’s conversion was voluntary and heartfelt, but it holds out no help or hope for those—like believing Jews—who cannot and will not take the same spiritual path. In the Augustinian mind-set, there is only one right and happy ending to the quest for faith, and no alternative to Christianity qualifies. His unusual remedy for the offending Jewish presence in late antiquity, when the church was triumphing over other religions by using the state as an enforcer, affords powerful evidence of the closed nature of the Augustinian universe, whether cloaked in a Neoplatonic intellectual system or in Christian Scripture. In Catholic theology, there are two kinds of ignorance—vincible and invincible. Vincible ignorance is within an individual’s power to overcome; a Jew or a pagan who had been presented with the arguments of Christianity but refused to accept them would normally be considered sinful, because he had been vouchsafed knowledge of the truth and deliberately turned away. Inhabitants of countries beyond the reach of the Christian message, by contrast, would not be deemed sinful for practicing other religions, because they were in a state of invincible ignorance that could not be remedied without help from an outside source.*

  The enduring effects of Augustine’s brainwave can be perceived in the assumption, made by many of my friends, that any history of conversion in the West must be concerned largely with conversions of Jews to Christianity. The interest in conversions, forced and unforced, of Jews has deepened since the Holocaust, as the relationship between Christian theology and modern anti-Semitism has been re-examined in many countries and in the Vatican itself. Were it not for Augustine’s “harass, but do not destroy” formula, Christians and Jews would certainly have had much less to do with each other throughout the many centuries before exterminationist anti-Semitism entered the West’s historical consciousness and conscience. Moreover, many Westerners today see Christianity as the beginning of Western proselytizing and do not realize that Judaism itself, in its historical infancy, was a proselytizing religion using tactics, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible, that could sometimes be summed up as “harass and destroy.”

  One of the worst stories of forced conversion appears in Genesis, when Jacob and his family encounter a peaceful tribe in Canaan, and the son of the local ruler has sex with and proposes marriage to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah. (This bit of sex, which may well have been consensual, is treated by the Israelites as a rape, in much the same manner as the Taliban deals with consensual sex unauthorized by a girl’s father or brothers.) In any case, the men of the tribe are told that Shechem, the son of the leader, may marry Dinah only if all of the tribesmen convert by undergoing the painful ritual of adult circumcision. Here is what happened to the new converts:

  And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went out. The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister. They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field, And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives took they captive and spoiled even all that was in the house.

  —GENESIS 34:25–30

  This account of forced conversion as atonement for rape (if it was rape) is surely a first in the history of religious conversion in the West; I could not say with certainty that it is a first in the annals of rape. In any event, the horrific story of Dinah surely demonstrates that Christians were not pioneers in the use of ethically indefensible conversion tactics. What Jacob’s sons did would best be described as “bait and switch” conversion: tricking the men into undergoing the painful procedure of adult circumcision did not save their lives in the end. Jacob, it should be noted in fairness to the better angels of Jewish history, was said to have been angry at his sons for their deception. However, this chilling story illustrates and foreshadows a broader truth, ignored by Augustine, about group conversion from one religion to another. Whenever a significant number of people accept a new religious “truth” at the same time, some sort of force is apt to be involved. And there is a thin line between harassment and destruction when a politically ascendant religion is on the move in literal geographical as well as moral terms.

  •

  Even though I read Confessions long after I had read several of Augustine’s other major works, I was aware of the book as a child because I attended Catholic elementary schools. Augustine himself was a saint not much talked about in catechism class, and the sexual parts of his autobiography would have been considered highly unsuitable for Catholic seventh- and eighth-graders, but one episode—the famous story of the pears—was recounted repeatedly as a moral lesson. Augustine’s account of purloining pears that he could easily have obtained without stealing was a perfect object lesson for every teenage shoplifter.

  A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And this, but to do what we liked only, because it was misliked. Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself. It was foul, and I loved it;…I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself.10

  This sort of behavior is familiar to every teenager, not because of an innate propensity for evil, but because we all sense, from an early age, that in the presence of bad companions whom we wish to impress with our daring, most of us are willing to do things that we would never do on our own. We do such things not because we are stained with original sin—the point the nuns wished to impress on us by talking about Augustine’s pears—but because we have failed to internalize standards of behavior independent of whatever punishment, human or divine, may ensue if we are caught. (Internet bullying is a classic modern example of the phenomenon, and one that does much more harm than stealing the pears of some burgher of late antiquity.) I always remembered the story of the pears, not because I considered it the epitome or even a particularly vicious example of the evil that dwells in the hearts of men, but because it was the embodiment of immature following-the-leader. The nuns’ stories about stealing someone else’s pears as an offense against a loving God had a good deal less impact on me than my mother’s quotidian “If Rose Mary jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?”

  •

  In addition to Augustine’s complicated relationship with his mother, the girl of his dreams, the more prurient appeal of Confessions is inseparable from the author’s obsession with chastity as the key to becoming a good Christian and from his fears about vulnerability to sexual desires that he could not control. The most important aspect of Confessions, however, is unquestionably Augustine’s strong attraction to Manicheism, a major challenge to Christianity, as the answer to the theodicy question.

  Why does evil exist if the world is governed by an all-powerful, all-good, all-seeing God? Pagans did not have to ask or answer that question, because their world was not governed by one perf
ect God. In the pagan supernatural realm, the gods themselves often behaved badly, in their relations with other divinities as well as with humans. Christians did have to ask and answer the theodicy question, because—this cannot be said often enough—their world was governed by one God who could do absolutely anything.

  Manicheism, which viewed good and evil as independent forces, always in conflict, and saw the body as essentially corrupt, was one answer to the problem of evil in the dawn of the Christian era and the twilight of paganism. Augustine embraced this creed for nine years (though he was something of a follower, known as a “hearer,” rather than an active believer and proselytizer). The sect’s philosophy may be summarized in a Manichee verse: “I have known my soul and the body that lies upon it / That they have been enemies since the creation of the world.”11 R. S. Pine-Coffin, in his introduction to a 1961 translation of Confessions, considers it “incredible that a man of Saint Augustine’s intellectual calibre could have been taken in by these fantastic theories, but the Manichees’ plausible explanation of the problem of evil and his own inability to think of God except as a material being combined to win him over.”12 Why would this have been incredible to an intellectual of Augustine’s era? Why, for that matter, should the notion of a dualistic universe seem any stranger to a twentieth-century intellectual than the idea of a magnificent being capable of preventing all the disasters that afflict his creatures but endowing them with the “free will” to doom themselves and others to endless suffering? The sect was founded in the third century by Mani, a charismatic Persian preacher considered a great prophet by his followers. The spread of Manicheism from Persia throughout the known world, from the Mediterranean portions of the Roman Empire in the West to Tibet in the East, reflects the rich interchange of religious ideas facilitated by trade routes extending from Asia to the heart of the Greco-Roman world. Rome was often at war with Persia, and Manichees were often persecuted because of the Persian origins of their faith. Nevertheless, Manicheism flourished, and its outsider status (much like Christianity itself) did nothing to diminish its appeal. The Manichees belong to the group of sects broadly classified as Gnostic—some of which were Christian, and others, such as Manicheism, non-Christian in their views on a wide variety of theological matters.