Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (39 page)

As this tradition took hold in the minds of Christians, it brought along what Fredriksen calls a "trail of pseudo-Augustinian anti-Jewish writings that grew in its wake."
³²
It was not only the Diaspora that provided Jewish witness to the truth of Christian claims, 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 "backs" must be "bent down always." 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.

The legacy of Augustine's teaching on the Jews is a double-edged sword. On one side, against Chrysostom and even Ambrose, it requires an end to all violent assaults against synagogues, Jewish property, and Jewish persons. Jews are henceforth exempt from the Church-sanctioned, state-sponsored campaign to obliterate religious difference. Polytheists will disappear from the Roman world because they were given the choice to convert or die. Jews could have disappeared then, too. "Judaism endured in the West for two reasons," Jacob Neusner writes. "First, Christianity permitted it to endure, and, second, Israel, the Jewish people, wanted it to. The fate of paganism in the fourth century shows the importance of the first of the two factors."
³³

It is not too much to say that, at this juncture, Christianity "permitted" Judaism to endure because of Augustine. "His teaching on the special place of Israel and the Jews in the economy of Christian redemption," Fredriksen writes, "...protected Jewish communities in Europe for centuries."
³⁴
As the eighteenth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn put it, but for Augustine's "lovely brainwave, we would have been exterminated long ago."'
³⁵
In contrast to other possibilities of the era, his attitude is deeply humane, and indeed implies a critique of the by then triumphant Constantinian ideal, embodied in Constantine's sword. In this passage from
The City of God,
there is more than an implication of critique of what the imperial Church, the Christian empire, has put in place: "But think of the cost of this achievement! Consider the scale of those wars, with all that slaughter of human beings, all the human blood that was shed ... a man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without heartfelt grief, is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling."
³⁶

On the other side, Augustine's relatively benign attitude toward Jews is rooted still in assumptions of supersessionism that would prove to be deadly. The "witness" prescription attributed to him—Let them survive, but not thrive!—would underlie the destructive ambivalence that marked Catholic attitudes toward Jews from then on. Ultimately, history would show that such double-edged ambivalence is impossible to sustain without disastrous consequences. For a thousand years, 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. Such a teaching that wants 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. This is the legacy that haunts the Catholic Church into the twenty-first century, a perverse legacy from which, despite the twentieth-century's jolts, the Church is not yet free.

"Allow me this, I beseech you," Augustine prayed in the fourth chapter of his
Confessions,
"to trace again in memory my past deviations."
³⁷
So he did, throughout the book. And so do we here. There is a kind of tracing through deviation in such an understanding, requiring as it does a direct look at abject failure—abject
Christian
failure. It also requires a restored sense of longing,
Christian
longing, for another way. What could more sharply prompt in Christians such a wish for forgiveness and redemption than this story? Are we reduced to gratitude for the day when one of us found a way, through a jury-rigged theology if ever there was one, to justify the cry "Do not slay them!"? Yes, we are.

22. The Seamless Robe

Y
EA, DOGS ARE
round about me; a company of evildoers encircle me; they have pierced my hands and feet." The words are from Psalm 22, and we recall the way the first, grief-struck friends of Jesus, gathering in something like a healing circle, had found consolation and meaning in such passages. The stunning loss of Jesus and the shocking violence of his death at the hands of the Romans were somehow mitigated by the way the beloved old Scriptures could name such an unspeakable experience. "I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them."
¹

We saw in an earlier chapter how, over a period of years in the immediate aftermath of the death of Jesus, a Passion narrative was constructed, and how many of its details were drawn not from events as they actually happened—the scattered followers of Jesus would have known little about such details—but from the Scripture passages that they were reading together in those early circles. And we just saw, in Augustine, how that blurring of "history remembered" and "prophecy historicized," in Crossan's terms, had come to form the supersessionist prophecy-fulfillment structure of Christian attitudes toward Jews.

A detail drawn from Psalm 22 for use in the Passion narrative has special poignancy for our story now. As we saw, that psalm was the source of what we read in the Gospel of John: "When the soldiers had crucified Jesus they took his garments and made four parts, one for each soldier. But his tunic was without seam, woven from top to bottom; so they said to one another, 'Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.'"
²
By the time the Gospel of John was written, at the end of the first century, it is likely that no one was still alive who had firsthand knowledge of how the Passion story had been composed, that the account was, in some large measure, the product of "prophecy historicized." And it was then, in response to pressures from "the Jews," that the crucial interpretive flip occurred, with the claim that the Passion narrative was "history remembered."
³
Thus John says about the throwing of the dice for the Seamless Robe, "This was to fulfill the scripture. 'They parted my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.' So the soldiers did this."
⁴

If the Old Testament prophesied it, and if the New Testament fulfilled it, then how could the Jews deny the claim made in the name of Jesus? We have seen how this essential concept of Christology—Christ as fulfillment—stands, in Ruether's phrase, at the "left hand" of Christian Jew-hatred. In the conflict between the Church and the Synagogue, every detail of the Passion story can be turned into a debating point, even the shirt of Jesus. Its seamlessness was a proof of his Messiahship. And how in the world did his mother weave such a thing anyway?

We saw how the legend of Saint Helena's discoveries in the Holy Land served the purpose of her son's campaign to Christianize the empire, and indeed, for centuries, the univocal solidarity of Christendom was based on the veneration of relics associated through her with Jerusalem. So relics were a bridge not only in time but in space. Not incidentally, Helena's discoveries—the True Cross, the instrument of deicide long hidden by Jews; the Magi, as far-off witnesses to what nearby Jews denied—sharpened the conflict between Christians and Jews. As the Scriptures of Israel were used in the first and second centuries to "prove" Christian claims, so were Helena's discoveries in the fourth century—and for centuries afterward. What matters here is that she is remembered as finding not only the True Cross and the corpses of the Three Kings, but also that miraculously woven robe, which in John's reading was itself proof that the Jews were wrong. And what did Saint Helena do with that robe? She brought it back, right then, to her beloved hometown of Trier.

The story, as still recounted by tour guides today and hinted at in Trier's tourist brochure,
⁵
says that Helena donated her palace to the young Church, and that it was leveled, to be replaced immediately by the first great Christian edifice in the north of Europe, constructed to enshrine the Seamless Robe. Another view suggests, as we saw, that the palace, where Crispus was living, was leveled on Constantine's order as part of his attempt to obliterate the memory of the son he murdered. Ultimately, the palace was replaced by the sibling churches that stand there today: the
Liebfraueti-kirche,
that small thirteenth-century gem, perhaps the first Gothic church in Germany, whose cruciform rotunda is a sort of religious womb, and the much larger, more imperial cathedral, dating in part to Helena's fourth century, but mainly to the eleventh. The cathedral was built to house, and still houses in its sanctuary, the sacred Seamless Robe of Jesus. The tradition developed that the relic was kept hidden from public view, and today it rests behind the high altar in the
Heiltumskammer,
a kind of enclosed tabernacle from which a mystical light glows, but to which no one is admitted.

The hidden Robe was put on open display only three times in the twentieth century, each time for a period of weeks. One of those, as it happened, was in August and September of 1959. The archbishop had ordered the Robe's display, inviting Catholics to give thanks to God for the finally achieved recovery from World War II—that year, the restoration of heavily bombed Trier was complete. It was only in writing this book, and traveling to Trier again not long ago, that I remembered that 1959 display was the occasion of my youthful visit to the town. At last I understood that my mother, my brothers, and I were there to see the Robe of Christ, and to give thanks. For a long time, in my mind, I associated my glimpse of the Robe—it was a brown tunic, suspended above the altar as on a clothesline, looking to my willfully irreverent eye like a soiled extralarge T-shirt—with the German Passion play to which I referred in Part One. I assumed I had seen that Passion play here. But in August and September?

I had a distinct memory of a costumed Jesus bound hand and foot, wearing that very robe. I remembered Pilate turning away to wash his hands. I remembered Pilate's face, contorted with disgust at the Jews who wanted Jesus dead. I remembered Judas, the hook of his nose, his hands clutching at coins. All these images had fed my hatred of those who'd killed my Lord. When I tried to plumb those memories, returning to Germany recently, I learned that the Passion play tradition had not taken hold in the Rhineland. Holy Week services included the usual readings of Passion texts, but rarely as dramatizations. As for the display of the Robe in Trier, there would perhaps have been observances recalling the Gospel references to the garment, but no Passion play, and not in summer. Yet I was certain that I had seen the death of Jesus enacted in Germany. And I had seen the Robe.

This was true, but not in the way I first thought. My research trip took me back to Wiesbaden. The American enclave is still there, although now it bases the U.S. Army instead of the Air Force. The housing development, with its school and chapel, was spanking new in our time, but now, essentially unaltered and surrounded by the showy opulence of German prosperity, it has the neglected feel of public housing. Atop a hill that is still called Hainerberg is the tidy shopping center, now the PX, but in our time the BX, the base exchange. It is a small strip mall worthy of any midcentury American suburb. There was the snack bar where we hung out after school, a Burger King now, but otherwise just as I remembered it. And across the parking lot was the Taunus Theater, the movie house named for the nearby mountain range. The Taunus! One of the military's perks in postwar Europe was a steady flow from Hollywood, movies for a quarter, and I had been there every Friday and Saturday night.

I realized that I had seen that supremely detached but, compared to the Jews, benign Pontius Pilate on the screen of the Taunus Theater, probably with my girlfriend at my side, instead of my mother. The scene was not from a Passion play, as I'd thought, but from a costume epic starring Richard Burton. Pontius Pilate was played by Richard Boone, later famous as the cowboy carrier of a business card that read "Have Gun, Will Travel." Now I understood that I associated that film, in my memory, with the tunic in Trier because it was
The Robe.
I recently rented the video, described on its case as "an awesome, uplifting Biblical blockbuster." It says everything about the quality of filmmaking that
The Robe's
two Academy Award nominations were for costumes and set decoration. "Richard Burton stars as the Roman centurion in charge of the crucifixion, Marcellus Gallio," the promotional copy said, "who wins the Robe gambling at the foot of the Cross—and whose life is changed forever by it." Marcellus, naturally, embraces the truth to which the Robe testifies, the truth that the Jews in the movie reject. Once again, Roman virtue—the Passion play theme as carried forward by Hollywood—stands in contrast to the stiff-necked recalcitrance of Jews. The Robe was thus fixed in my mind as a symbol, and in my memory as a madeleine, of Jewish evil.

Not long ago, I stood alone in the rear balcony of the Trier cathedral, where I had stood in 1959 with my mother for our viewing of the Robe. (We'd been shown to that spot as VIPs. It had offered a clear view above the crush, across the length of the nave toward the suspended tunic.) At last I could recognize in my own experience the foundational human flaw of faulty memory—how I had displaced one image of the Robe (Richard Burton's) for another (Saint John's). In this I myself had recapitulated the tragic pattern of this narrative.