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E211: British Literature to 1760 Typology, by Al Drake / Vicki Silver Alfred J. Drake | 423 UH | TW 12:45-1:45 | ajdrake@ajdrake.com The Old Testament containes [Christ] in the Hieroglyphics of Sacrifices, and Types, and Ceremonies; the New, in legible and ordinary characters. (from John Stoughton's Choice Sermons, 1640, quoted by C. Patrides.) Typology is an interpretive method developed early in Christian history; its purpose is to relate the events of the Old Testament to the events of the four gospels, i.e. the New Testament. (The basic problem that the Church fathers faced was this: how does one relate a series of texts that speak of god within a militaristic, nationalist setting to the gospels, which describe a god and a Christ who do not seem to fit easily within the older context?) Typology is based upon an idea that one can trace all the way back to Genesis--the idea that the whole world is the work of god and that he spoke the world into existence. If the world came into being as god's act of language, then, would not the world, and all that happens in it, stand in need of interpretation as a symbol? Together, Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri give us a concise, if incomplete, account of the typological method. Aquinas says that there are four levels of meaning to be drawn from certain statements in the bible: These levels are: 1) the literal or historical level, which is simply the event itself. 2) the allegorical level, which relates the literal event to events in the New Testament. 3) the moral level, which explains the abstract moral lesson to be drawn from the literal event. 4) the anagogical level, which relates the literal event to heavenly things. It should be noted that the literal meaning is crucial to the interpreter. Aquinas insists that the bible is a true record of real events. As he says in the Summa Theologica, "it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense" (Adams 117; Critical Theory Since Plato). The spiritual significance of an event presupposes that event's literal validity. Only through interpreting the true, literal event does one arrive at its spiritual significance. Dante applies this method not only to the bible but to literary works as well. He, too, says that a work is polysemous; that is, he says that it signifies on more than one level. In his system, a work may be read on at least four different levels of meaning. Here is Dante's "fleshing out" of the basic method of typology: "When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judea became his sanctification, Israel his power" (Psalms 114:1-2). For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us. (Adams Critical Theory Since Plato 121, Revised Edition) To sum up, I shall refer to C. Patrides' note on typology in his edition
of George Herbert's The Temple: according to Patrides, the first purpose
of typology is to confirm that historical events are non-recurring
and irreversible--i.e. that Christ changed history; its second purpose
is to confirm that historical events imply providential design--i.e.
to show that the created order progresses in accordance with god's
will; and its third purpose is to confirm that historical events are
meaningful "only in so far as they are seen to relate to the advent
of Christ." (from The English Poems of George Herbert. ed. C.A.
Patrides. London, J.M. Dent, 1974. 26.) by Vicki Silver, UC Irvine From The Cambridge History of the Bible (eds. Ackroyd and Evans): [P]rophecy is for Origen a very important link between the two testaments. Its confirmatory value works both ways. The fulfillment of prophecy in the life of Jesus is not only important evidence for the reliability of the New Testament in the assumption which it makes about his messiahship and his divinity; it is not only the truth of the New Testament which receives support from the fact of prophecies fulfilled. The fact of their fulfillment is valuable confirmation also of the Old Testament in which the original prophecies are contained. Before the coming of Christ men might well have had reservations about the divine inspiration of the Old Testament. But Christ's coming has served to "confirm for us the message of the prophets" (2 Peter 1.19, NEB). The concept of the fulfillment of prophecy is therefore both valid and important. But fulfillment in a direct and literal sense is only a very small part of it. Origen makes his point clearly in general terms in the Contra Celsum: "Many prophets foretold in all kinds of ways the things concerning Christ, some in riddle and others by allegories or some other way while some even use literal expressions." Literal fulfillments of prophecy do exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule. If the prophetic link between the two testaments was to be developed with the degree of thoroughness which the Church required, it could only be done with a large-scale use of figurative or allegorical interpretations. But the Old Testament does not consist only of prophecy, even in the more extended meaning which that term bore in Origen's day. Legal enactments, historical narrative and wisdom literature had also to be shown to be wholly consistent with the teaching of the New Testament. As we have already seen in relation to the Law, this could only be done very incompletely at the level of the literal meaning. Here figurative or allegorical interpretations were even more necessary if the apparent conflicts between the ideas of the two dispensations were to be overcome. Modern scholarship has tended to draw a firm line of distinction between typological and allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament. The line has not always been drawn in the same way by different scholars, even where they are fully agreed about its crucial importance. The features would generally be regarded as necessary components of a properly typological interpretation. In the first place, it takes seriously the Old Testament law or the historical event in question as a word or act of God directly intended for and appropriate to its original historical setting. Secondly, the further meaning to which it points, that of which it is a type, must have a real connection with the initial but lesser meaning or purpose which it had in its original historical context. A typological interpretation of the Exodus, for example, is one which sees it as a real act of divine rescue of Israel out of Egypt and which also sees it as a type of Christian baptism because that too is an act of divine rescue, though a rescue of a fuller and more perfect kind. To ask whether Origen's interpretation of the Old Testament is primarily typological or allegorical, commonly though it is done, is to ask the wrong question. . . .However variable his judgments about the lesser, preliminary meaning of some parts of the Old Testament, the deeper meaning is always the full Christian meaning. Whether it involves the reversal of the apparent literal meaning or the fulfillment of it as an incomplete image, the true meaning will always be the meaning of the Christian gospel. . . .we do not have to think of reconciling two Testaments or of showing them to be complementary to one another. At that level they are not two at all but one. There is only the one truth of God, which is eternal and therefore ever new. The expressions of that truth in the Old Testament are hidden and obscure. But we must say more than that those expressions hint at the full truth or look forward to it. The eternal truth of God is the true meaning of every passage of the Old Testament. When Moses gave to the Jews their laws of circumcision and Passover, of new moon and Sabbath, he knew that the real meaning of what he was saying and doing had nothing to do with human bodies and the death of lambs but rather with the human heart and the sacrifice of Christ. John says that "the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1.17). For Paul, Christ's relation to the law is primarily that of grace, that of redeeming man from an alien power; for Origen, Christ's relation to the law is primarily that of truth, of making intelligible what was always the law's true meaning and purpose. For a thoroughgoing Platonist like Origen, this had to be so. The phenomenal world of historical occurrence might have a certain measure of significance; but the ultimate reality must belong to the changeless truth of the transcendental realm. Typology as a method is expounded in Paradise Lost: 11.315-54; 12.147-51; 12.238-44, 285-314. Types of Christ/ Types of Antichrist Abel (11.429-60) > Cain Sons of Seth (11.556-97) > Sons of Cain Enoch (11.638-710) > Giants Noah (11.712-902) > Patriarchs (12.13-78) > Nimrod Abraham (12.105-51) > Jacob (12.151-63) > Moses/Aaron (12.169-244) > Pharaoh Joshua (12.260-67) > David (12.319-30) > Disciples (12.485-507) > Prelatical Church (12.507-50) All the types of Messiah are fulfilled, as both Michael and the narrator take care to point out, in Jesus (12.285-314, 356-71, 386-466), their antitype. More particularly, Adam himself is the type of Christ, that "one greater man" of PL 1.4. This mode of "figural," or prefigurative, reading applies to women (Eve/Mary), and to events (for example, the covenant with Noah anticipates the covenant with Abraham, with Moses, and finally with the New Covenant embodied in Christ's passion and resurrection) or actions (Moses' bringing the Israelites out of Egypt foreshadows Christ's universal redemption of man). Still more pertinent to seventeenth-century history and literature, prefigurative reading applies to seventeenth-century persons and events. So Nimrod, in all likelihood, is a type of Charles the First, if not of Charles the Second as well. The Civil War enjoyed numerous expressions in both Testaments, but none are mentioned in Paradise Lost itself.) Perhaps the best example of supra-gospel typology appears in early American literature. America, as conceived by the Protestants who made it their home (I refer to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in particular), was at once New Eden and New Jerusalem; the migration itself became an analogue to exodus, to baptism, and to purification of the church. In the hands of Cotton Mather, the governor of the colony, John Winthrop, became the new Nehemiah, or "Nehemias Americanus." For seventeenth-century ideologues, reformers, and sectaries, typology becomes a method of reading not only scripture, but secular history and current events. By comparison with Mather, Milton articulates only the most accepted and orthodox correspondences in Paradise Lost. (Note: Samson is a type both of Adam and Christ; cf. Milton's Samson Agonistes.) From The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (Rogers and McKim): [Saint Clement and other patristic Apologists] felt the central Christian task to be to show the unity of the Old and New Testaments, and they argued that Christ fulfilled the predictions of the Old Covenant and thus provided its unity with the New. The basic interpretative tool the Apologists used was typology. They had inherited that tradition from rabbinic Judaism. For the rabbis, Israel's redemption in the messianic age was foreshadowed in every detail by Israel's redemption from Egypt. The early Christians read in the New Testament Gospels Christ's presentation of himself as the fulfillment of events predicted by the prophets, and purposes foreshadowed by Jewish institutions. Typology was neither literal exegesis concerned only with the past historical events themselves, nor allegorical exegesis which treated past happenings only as symbols to be spiritually interpreted. Rather, typology stressed the historical interrelationship of a past event as promise and a later event as fulfillment. The underlying assumption was that God had deliberately designed this relatedness as part of the Divine plan. This kind of typological interpretation of the Bible was a common factor in all early Christian exegesis. It was used by all biblical interpreters, including the Apologists, and was not confined to any one school of thought. From The Puritan Origins of the American Self (Bercovitch): For the seventeenth-century Puritan, exemplum fidei
denoted a type of Christ; and what he meant by type pertained equally
to biography and to history. In its original form, typology was a hermeneutical
mode connecting the Old Testament to the New in terms of the life of
Jesus. It interpreted the Israelite saints, individually, and the progress
of Israel, collectively, as a foreshadowing of the gospel revelation.
Thus Nehemiah was a "personal type" of Jesus, and the Israelites'
exodus from Babylon a "national type" of His triumphant agon.
With the development of hermeneutics, the Church Fathers extended typology
to postscriptural persons and events. Sacred history did not end, after
all, with the Bible; it became the task of typology to define the course
of the church ("spiritual Israel") and of the exemplary Christian
life. In this view Christ, the "antitype," stood at the center
of history, casting His shadow forward to the end of time as well as
backward across the Old Testament. Every believer was a typus or figura
Christi, and the church's peregrination, like that of old Israel, was
at once recapitulative and adumbrative. In temporal terms, the perspective
changed from anticipation to hindsight. But in the eye of eternity,
the Incarnation enclosed everything that preceded and followed it in
an everlasting present. . . Patristic hagiography, for instance, resonates
with the figuralism of church liturgy (e.g., the flight from Egypt
in the Holy Saturday sacrament of baptism). Later developments tended
to reinforce the method. When after Constantine the call to martyrdom
lost its practical value, writers turned increasingly to the passion
as figura. Saint Christopher, they explained, was not literally crucified,
but "we call him a martyr anyway because, on his miracle-working
way to heaven, ‘he carried the cross of Christ continually in
his heart.'" This tendency grew rapidly after the Reformation.
Typology recommended itself to the Reformers as an ideal method for
regulating spiritualization, since it stressed the literal-historical
(as opposed to a purely allegorical) level of exegesis, and then proceeded
to impose the scriptural pattern upon the self, in accordance with
the concept of exemplum fidei. For these and similar reasons, typology
became a staple of Protestant writings, including even the Character
genre.
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