Peuple prophetique et nation temoin: Le peuple juif dans le Contra Faustum manichaeum de saint Augustin. By Alban Massie.

Abstract

This hefty volume, as its subtitle indicates and its bulk implies, is a highly detailed contextual analysis of the role played by the Jewish people within the theological debate between St Augustine and Faustus as that is revealed and prosecuted in the 33 books of the Contra Faustum. This means, however, not simply the role which the Jews play for St Augustine in salvation history—the topic of chapters 4 and 5 which, comprise the second half of the book. It includes the role given to the Jews within the Manichaean attack upon Catholic Christianity in late antiquity, and the negative appraisal of the Jewish prophets in a Manichaean theology of revelation. Furthermore, the first half of the book examines Augustine’s writings on the Jews before the Contra Faustum. Given the sharp criticism sometimes levelled against Augustine for his teachings on Judaism, with the grave charge that he is largely responsible for the theological foundations of later anti-Semitism, this is a welcome if cumbersome book to be read alongside Paula Fredriksen’s 2010 work, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. Alban Massie requires us to take full account of the polemical circumstances in which Augustine’s teaching was formulated: what the bishop had to argue against shaped what he argued for. Faustus presented the Jews as enslaved to the evil principle opposed to the God of Light by a religion wholly without value in arriving at the truth. Its biblical heroes were really villains whose vices were indicative of their religion. Augustine defended a positive role for the Jews in salvation history, not only, nor primarily, by defending the moral character of the patriarchs, but by arguing for the prophetic nature of their lives and laws, and of the Jewish people itself. Augustine recognized God’s blessing on Israel, through the law and the prophets, defended Jewish worship of the one God, and the role which the Jews played as witnesses to Christianity. Though Augustine also argued that the refusal of the Jews to believe in Christ constituted a moral blindness which necessarily enslaved them to sin or carnal desire, it was not the Jews but the Manichees whom he accused of perfidy.