Читать книгу Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie – Studienausgabe. Herausgegeben und ergänzt um Aufsätze, Primärbibliographie und Nachwort von Matthias Bormuth und Martin Vialon онлайн

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All these problems are easily resolved if you consider the figurative or typologicalTypologie interpretation of the book of Joshua which, in a constant tradition, fully developed already in the writings of TertullianTertullian, is explained or alluded to in an infinite number of commentaries, sermons, hymnsHymne, and also in Christian art. The book of Joshua, especially its first chapters, has always been one of the most popular objects of figurative interpretationFiguraldeutung; Joshua was regarded as a figure of Christ (the identity of the names Jesus and Joshua is emphasized as early as TertullianTertullian), and when he leads his people over the Jordan (just like Moses leading his people out of Egypt) he figures Christ leading mankind out of the slavery of sin and perdition into the true Holy Land, the eternal kingdom of God. Concerning Rahab, all ancient commentators consider her as a type of the church; her house alone, with all its inhabitants, escapes perdition, just as the church of the faithful will alone be saved when Christ appears for the last judgment; she found freedom from the fornication of the world by way of the window of confession, to which she bound the scarlet rope, the sign of Christ’s blood, sanguinis Christi signum. Thus she is figurafigura Ecclesiae, and the scarlet rope, like the posts struck with the blood of the Lamb in Exodus, becomes the figure of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. The conception of Jericho as eternal perdition was supported by the parable from Luke 10, 30 (a certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves) generally interpreted as a figure of the fall of Man. In the same manner, the victory gained with one and the other hand alludes to Joshua’s victory won with the help of Moses’ outstretched hands, the figure of the victory of Christ on the cross with his hands outstretched on the arbor vitae crucxae. Thus, Rahab, or the church stands, in our passage of the Paradiso, as a trophy of both victories, that of Joshua, and that of Christ; of the victory of Joshua inasmuch as Joshua prefigures Christ, and of that of Christ inasmuch as Christ is the fulfillment of Joshua (implere); both entities in the figurative or typologicalTypologie relationship are equally real and equally concrete; the figurative sense does not destroy the literal, nor does the literal deprive the figured fact of its status as a real historical event. Obviously, the last sentence of our passage, namely that the Pope has forgotten Joshua’s glory in the Holy Land, is also to be understood in a two-fold and typological manner. It is not only the Holy Land in its concrete and geographical sense which the Pope neglects by fighting against Christians instead of liberating it; he has also, for the sake of the maledetto fiore, the golden florin of Florence, lost all memory of the city to come, eterna Jerusalem. And now, the meaning of the passage has become completely clear: the first elect soul in the heaven of Venus is Rahab, a figure of the Church, that is of the bride in the Song of Songs, in love of her bridegroom who is Christ – a symbol of the highest form of love – and this view, as FolchettoFolchetto says, will satisfy the ultimate desire the star of Venus has prompted in DanteDante’s mind.