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.
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.
DanteDante’s mind was deeply rooted in this tradition, and I believe that not only many particular passages in the Commedia can be explained in this manner, but that the whole conception of the great poem has to be considered from this angle. It is not difficult to prove that the community of the blessed in the Empireo, in which DanteDante’s Paradiso culminates, is arranged according to a figurative pattern. Not only the world of the Christian religion, but also the ancient world is included in DanteDante’s figural system; the Roman empire of AugustusAugustus is for DanteDante a figure of God’s eternal empire, and the prominent part Virgil plays in DanteDante’s work is based on this assumption. DanteDante is not the first to subject all the material of human history to the figural conception; biblical history, Jewish and Christian, came to be seen as universal human history, and all pagan historical material had to be inserted and adapted to this framework. Especially Roman history was interpreted by Saint AugustineAugustinus and other patristic authors as a path of Christan universal history and of the plan of providence. Medieval authors followed this tradition, and very often used it for political purposes, in the long struggle between imperium and sacerdotiumimperiumsacerdotium. So did DanteDante, and most of his figures taken from Roman history are connected with his political ideas, as the following example shows.
At the foot of the mountain of the Purgatorio, DanteDante and Virgil meet a venerable old man, who, with severe authority teaches them how to prepare for the ascent, as the guardian who controls access to purification. It is Cato of UticaCato v. Utica. The choice of this particular character for such a function is very astonishing. For Cato was a pagan; he was an enemy of CaesarCaesar and the monarchy; his allies, CaesarCaesar’s murderers BrutusBrutus and CassiusCassius, are put by DanteDante in the deepest hell, in Lucifer’s mouth by the side of Judas; moreover, Cato committed suicide, a crime for which horrible punishment is meted out in another circle of the Inferno. And yet Cato has been appointed as guardian of the Purgatorio! The problem becomes clear to us by the words with which Virgil addresses him: ‘I pray you, allow my companion to enter; he is in search of liberty, that precious good you know so well – you who have despised life for it; you know it well, because death was not bitter to you in Utica, where you abandoned your body that will be so radiant on the last day.’ From these words, it becomes obvious, that Cato is a figura, or better still, that the historical Cato is a figurafigura of the Cato in DanteDante’s Purgatorio. The political and earthly freedom for which he died, was only a shadow, a prefiguration of Christian freedom from evil which leads from the bondage of corruption to true sovereignty over oneself, the libertas gloriae filiorum Dei – a freedom which DanteDante finally attains at the top of the Purgatorio, when Virgil crowns him as master over himself. Cato’s choice of voluntary death in order to avoid slavery is obviously considered by DanteDante not as a crime, but as a figura of this liberation. Of course DanteDante was inspired in the choice of Cato for this part by Virgil’s sixth book, where Cato is represented as a judge of the righteous in the netherworld (secretosque pios, his dantem jura Catonem) and he was encouraged to treat Cato in a special manner by the universal admiration expressed for him even by authors who were his political opponents. Cato was one of the classical examples of Roman virtue on which DanteDante based his political ideology of universal Roman monarchy. But the manner in which he introduced Cato and justified his part is independent of Virgil and is clearly figurative. Both forms of Cato are real and concrete, the historical and the eternal form; his function in the beyond presupposes the reality of his historical role. Cato is not an allegory nor a symbol of liberty, but an individual personality: he is raised