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Relationships between Christians and Jews, mostly what the former have done to the latter, make a complex and often ugly story. Why is that? Need it have been so? I've been reading an interesting essay (in the form of a book review) on the issue. It examines what one of my favorite religious thinkers, the always interesting Saint Augustine, had a lot to say about it. A lot, as it turns out. He wanted reconciliation, and he thought Christians had a warped few of what Judaism was. From the essay:
". . . what went wrong, and how did Augustine attempt to put it right? . . . Christians of the second and third centuries were caught in the grip of a peculiarly late-antique high-mindedness. They strove for the spiritual. Worse than that, they believed strongly in progress. They looked to a bright future, freed from the weight of the past. For them, history was junk. And the worst junk they could imagine was Judaism. Here, they thought, was a religion irreparably locked into the material world. . . . Its worshipers remained locked into the past, through nostalgia for a temple whose destruction by the Romans had declared Judaism as a whole to be passé."
. . . none of this image of Judaism bore any relation to the real thing. It was an image of "rhetorical Jews" generated by anxious debates among Christians about how much of their own bodies they could accept and how much of the weight of the past might be allowed to linger in their own present. High-mindedness, when combined with a heady faith in progress toward better things, is not always the best recipe for tolerance of the ways of others. When Constantine unexpectedly became a Christian in 312, it was this image of a squeaky-clean Christianity, committed to the spiritual and purged of the past, that drew the attention of a crowned revolutionary. The past could be junked. Judaism and paganism alike could be declared, by imperial fiat, to belong to the dust heap of history."
Augustine took a different view of history. The past is always with us and can't be transcended or wished away. This seems a commonplace sort of view to me, but apparently Christians of the time abhorred the deep rootedness in the past they saw in Judaism. Augustine argued against that misperception. Again from the review:
"The history of Israel and of its institutions acquired a new majesty in [Augustine's] reading. They were like a mighty poem that unfolded across the centuries. The lived experience of Jews under the Law might seem mysterious and even alien to human judgment; but what was certain was that the life of the people of Israel had never been either trivial or disgusting, as so many "spiritual" Christians . . . were tempted to believe. Even in the present, Jews should be left alone to practice their ancient faith. Against so many of his contemporaries, 'Augustine insisted that Jews were not a challenge to Christianity but a witness to it.' Jews and Judaism could never be put into the past. In an age in which so much of previous history was being flattened by Christian intolerance, they were to continue to stand out, protected by the aura of their own, God-given past."
Augustine's was the minority viewpoint -- how differently history would have turned out if his had been that of the majority.
". . . what went wrong, and how did Augustine attempt to put it right? . . . Christians of the second and third centuries were caught in the grip of a peculiarly late-antique high-mindedness. They strove for the spiritual. Worse than that, they believed strongly in progress. They looked to a bright future, freed from the weight of the past. For them, history was junk. And the worst junk they could imagine was Judaism. Here, they thought, was a religion irreparably locked into the material world. . . . Its worshipers remained locked into the past, through nostalgia for a temple whose destruction by the Romans had declared Judaism as a whole to be passé."
. . . none of this image of Judaism bore any relation to the real thing. It was an image of "rhetorical Jews" generated by anxious debates among Christians about how much of their own bodies they could accept and how much of the weight of the past might be allowed to linger in their own present. High-mindedness, when combined with a heady faith in progress toward better things, is not always the best recipe for tolerance of the ways of others. When Constantine unexpectedly became a Christian in 312, it was this image of a squeaky-clean Christianity, committed to the spiritual and purged of the past, that drew the attention of a crowned revolutionary. The past could be junked. Judaism and paganism alike could be declared, by imperial fiat, to belong to the dust heap of history."
Augustine took a different view of history. The past is always with us and can't be transcended or wished away. This seems a commonplace sort of view to me, but apparently Christians of the time abhorred the deep rootedness in the past they saw in Judaism. Augustine argued against that misperception. Again from the review:
"The history of Israel and of its institutions acquired a new majesty in [Augustine's] reading. They were like a mighty poem that unfolded across the centuries. The lived experience of Jews under the Law might seem mysterious and even alien to human judgment; but what was certain was that the life of the people of Israel had never been either trivial or disgusting, as so many "spiritual" Christians . . . were tempted to believe. Even in the present, Jews should be left alone to practice their ancient faith. Against so many of his contemporaries, 'Augustine insisted that Jews were not a challenge to Christianity but a witness to it.' Jews and Judaism could never be put into the past. In an age in which so much of previous history was being flattened by Christian intolerance, they were to continue to stand out, protected by the aura of their own, God-given past."
Augustine's was the minority viewpoint -- how differently history would have turned out if his had been that of the majority.
