Aquinas and the Jews

3. People of the Promises, People of the Law

3. People of the Promises, People of the Law Praecepta veteris legis vitalia sint, non tamen vitam habcnt in seipsis, sed intantum dicuntur vitalia inquantum ducunt ad Christum. —Super Evftngdium lohannis 5.6 For Thomas Aquinas, Christ is the axis of history. Prior to his Incarnation, only those events that prefigured or prepared the way for him had lasting importance; since his Resurrection, the spread of the Gospel and thedevelopment of Christian doctrine have been the dominant themes. Everything else—the migration of peoples, the rise and fall of empires—either draws meaning from some connection with the drama of salavation history or else is trivial, merely profane. This conception of history explains the importance of the Jews in Aquinas's thought. He saw Jewish history as falling into two vast eras— the time under the Law and the time after the Law—with a crucial hinge in between: the period A.D. 30-70, from the beginning of Jesus' public ministry to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalemby the Roman Emperor Titus. In each period, Aquinas believed, the Jewswere an instrument of God's will and a means of his revelation. Under the Law, their life and worship was a sign of God's righteousness and a symbol of what was to come, and their history set the stage for the Incarnation. Then, in rejecting and crucifying Jesus, the Jews inadvertently fulfilled the words of the prophets and effected the sacrifice which made possible the salvation of the Gentiles. Finally, their homelessness and miseryafter A.D. 70—a divine punishment for their role in the Crucifixion—gives mute testimony to the justice of God and the truth of the Christian message. In this chapter and the two that follow we will analyze each stage of Aquinas's schema in turn: first,his views on the Jews' covenant relation with God, the nature of their Law, and their development as a holy people; next, their role in the Crucifixion and the nature of their guilt and punishment; and lastly the status and function of Jews in a Christian society. People of the Promises, People of the Law 39 Like Paul, Aquinas traced the origins of the Jewishpeople to the patriarch Abraham. They are his descendants secundum carnem—"according to the flesh"—and their increase and their conquest of Canaan fulfilled the divine promises of countless descendants and a chosen land. But for Thomas, the Abrahamic covenant was at once too narrow and too general to constitute the Jews as afopulus. On the one hand, God promised Abraham a son whose descendants would dwell in the land to which God had led him. This was sufficient to make him the founder of a family or a tribe, but it was hardly enough to constitute a "people." Conversely, Aquinas (again following Paul) believed Abraham was more than the father of the Jews; he was the ancestor of all men of faith. In his view, the prophecies which were specifically fulfilled in the history of the Jews—the vast increase in population and the conquest of the Holy Land—constituted only a portion of what was promised. He argued that the incarnation of Christ and the establishment of a universal religion were also contained implicitly in the Abrahamic covenant. Thus Abraham is asmuch the fatherof Christians as of Jews.1 For Aquinas, the Law constituted the essential identity of the Jews as a holy people, set apart and consecrated to God. This follows from his Augustinian definition of apopulus as a group that is numerous, free, and guided by a body of lawordered to the common good.2 To him it wasclear that the Jews did not obtain this status until the great theophany on Mount Sinai. Prior to their descent into Egypt, Abraham's progeny were too few in number to form a truepopulus. In Egypt their population increased, but as long as they remained slavesthey could not become God's people in the full sense, for they could not receive the divine Law until they had been liberated from Egyptian rule. The Exodus was necessarynot only as afirst step toward the promised conquest of the Holy Land, but also so Israel could receive the Law and become a covenant people.3 Thomas subsumes everything in Israelite history—the promises to Abraham, the Exodus, the giving of the Law, the conquest of the Holy Land, the rise and fall of the Davidic monarchy—under the divine plan that culminated with the...