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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The method used here for the interpretation of the first chapters of the book of Joshua does, of course, not apply only to this text, but is part of an entire system which embraces the whole of the Old TestamentAltes Testament. When Saint Paul came to the conviction that a man is justified by faith alone, not by action according to the Jewish law, and that God is not the God of the Jews alone, the character of the Old Testament was changed completely – this was no longer the law and the particular history of the Jews, because ‘all these things happened to them in figura only’: thus the Old Testament became a series of prefiguration of Christ, of his incarnation and passion, and of the foundation of the Christian Church. Saint Paul himself gave a few figurative interpretationsFiguraldeutung (the conception of figurism as such was not unknown to the Jewish tradition), and the whole system developed so rapidly that we find it completely worked out, with an incredible abundance of details, in the earliest patristic literature. You will realize that this method of interpretation involves an approach to human and historical phenomena entirely different from ours. We are apt to consider the events of history and the happenings of every-day life as a continuous development in chronological succession; the typologicalTypologie interpretation combines two events, causally and chronologically remote from each other, by attributing to them a meaning common to both. Instead of a continuous development, the direction and ultimate result of which is unknown to us, the typological interpreter purports to know the significance and ultimate result of human history, because this has been revealed to mankind; in this theory, the meaning of history is the fall and redemption of Man, the Last Judgment, and the eternal Kingdom of God. We, on the other hand, are able to explain to a certain extent every single historical fact by its immediate causes and to foresee to a certain extent its immediate consequences, moving so to speak on a horizontal plane; with the typological approach, on the contrary, in order to explain the significance of a single historical event, the interpreter had to take recourse to a vertical projection of this event on the plane of providential design by which the event is revealed as a prefiguration of a fulfillment or perhaps as an imitation of other events. In view of the facts that education and culture were almost entirely ecclesiastical up to the fourteenth century, that the conception of human history, as taught by the church, was dominated by the interpretation of the scriptures, and that this interpretation was almost entirely typologicalTypologie and based on the trilogy fall of man, incarnation of Christ, last judgment – in view of all these facts it is evident that the typological conception of history had to exert a deep and lasting influence on medieval spiritual life even on laymen. Serinons, religious poetry (lyrical and dramaticalDrama), church sculptureBildhauerkunst, that is to say the three most important means of popularizing knowledge in the middle ages, were entirely impregnated with typology. May I draw the attention of my readers to the important difference which obtains between typology and other similar forms of thinking such as allegorism or symbolismAllegorie und Symbolismus. In these patterns, at least one of the two elements combined is a pure sign, but in a typologicalTypologie relation both the signifying and the signified facts are real and concrete historical events. In an allegory of love or in a religious symbol at least one of the terms does not belong to human history; it is an abstraction or a sign. But in the sacrifice of Isaac considered as a figure of the sacrifice of Christ, it is essential, and has been stressed with great vigor, at least in the occidental tradition, that neither the prefiguring nor the prefigured event lose their literal and historical reality by their figurative meaning and interrelation. This is a very important point.