I do not need to emphasize that this book is less about documenting a record of Jewish-Christian relations than about imagining ways of thinking of new and rich temporalities that are not bound to the rigidity of supersession. Indeed, the book is about the risk of thinking about “unhistorical” temporalities—ones not about divisions between then and now, but about passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, in-betweenness.2 These unhistorical temporalities that do not use time as a utilitarian resource to ground identity are temporalities that can never be one.
Typology Never Lets Go
Let me exemplify the key terms of my argument through scrutiny of a graphic artifact. Figure 1 reproduces a page from the earliest printed version (1480/81) of the medieval textbook version of the Bible known as the Glossa ordinaria. By the time printers set the type, manuscript versions of the Glossa ordinaria had already been circulating in this standardized layout for over three hundred years. Beryl Smalley, the pioneer explorer of the Bible as a medieval schoolbook, reminds us that the Glossa had an afterlife well into the Counter-Reformation.3 Later in this introduction, I shall have more to say about the formal innovations worked out in the mid-twelfth century for graphic presentation of the Bible textbook. For now, I simply wish to draw attention to the center block of the page figured here.
Figure 1. Genesis 17, Biblio cum glossa ordinaria Walafrida Strabonis (Strassburg, 1480), p. C. Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.
Twelfth-century scribes and later printers reserved this space for the biblical text, in this example, verses from Genesis 17, in which God makes a covenant with Abraham. Another text, called the interlinear gloss, hovers above the Bible verses. For medieval students, this gloss worked like an exegetical grid. It coordinated key terms and figures selected from the text of the Old Testament with what Christian exegetes considered to be their figural fulfillment in key terms and figures of the New Testament. We can see, for example, that over the words of the Old Testament announcing the covenant of God with Israel in the lower right-hand corner of the text block—hoc est pactum meum quod observabitis inter me et vos et semen tuum post te (this is my pact which you will observe between me and you and your seed after you), the interlinear gloss inscribed the supersession of this covenant: circuncisio vetustatis est depositio (the old circumcision is deposed) and coordinated the figure of Abraham with Christ as his figural fulfillment. These interlinear glosses, given their privileged placement directly over the Old Testament text, functioned as pedagogical maps to what is known as medieval typology or figural thinking.
Christian typology posits the theological supersession of the Christian Church over Israel. Christians believed that the New Testament superseded the Hebrew Bible and redefined it as the Old Testament. Exegetically it maps the figures of the Old Testament onto their fulfillment in the New Testament. Since the Glossa ordinaria was developed as a schoolbook—indeed, in 1179, Pope Alexander III ruled that the Bible should not be taught without the Gloss—it had the effect of standardizing the kind of typological thinking expressed in the interlinear gloss. This is not to deny changing interpretative traditions, or other textbooks subsequent to the Glossa ordinaria, or even radical disagreement about the value of glossing in the twelfth century. Smalley has rehearsed these debates in her indispensable work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, and more recently Philippe Buc has elaborated on them in his L’Ambiguïté du livre. For my purposes it is precisely the mundane power of textbook typology in such mechanical graphic layouts that is interesting. All the more so, since, as we shall now see, typological thinking continues to lure contemporary critical theorists, especially in their efforts to rethink historicism.
Scholars have regarded typological (also known as figural) thinking as one of the great achievements of late antique and medieval scriptural exegesis.4 In his essay “Figura,” written in Istanbul in 1944, Erich Auerbach traced the development of a specifically Christian form of figural thinking out of the recognition that “The Old Testament, both as a whole and in its more important details, is a concrete historical prefiguration of the Gospel” (44). He valued figural thinking because it supposed two events, Old and New, as historical—the historical Moses is a promise of the historical Christ who fulfills the figure of Moses. He contrasted the richness of such figural thinking with what he saw as the modern view of historical development: “whereas in the modern view the event is always self-sufficient and secure, in the figural interpretation the fact is subordinated to an interpretation which is fully secured to begin with: the event is enacted according to the ideal model which is a prototype situated in the future and thus far only promised” (59). As Auerbach formulated his study of figural thinking, a circle of French scholars around the Jesuit Henri de Lubac were also reviving medieval figural thinking as a resource for interpreting the Bible. De Lubac considered the relationship between the two Testaments as primary to exegesis and bemoaned historians who spent “vast storehouses of learning in vain” (224) because they failed to attend to the discontinuities between the Old and New Testaments: “the history of revelation also offers the spectacle of discontinuity that has no equal” (234). Both Auerbach and de Lubac insist on the supersession of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible as central and distinctive to early Christian exegesis (in contrast to contemporary pagan and Jewish strands of figural thinking) and agree that Christian typology provided a productive and open-ended framework for interpretation.
This scholarly rejuvenation of medieval exegetical studies in the 1940s and 1950s profoundly influenced postmodern theoretical debates forty years later. Hayden White and Fredric Jameson, in particular, used Auerbach’s vision of medieval figural thinking to champion new forms of historicism. Like Auerbach and de Lubac, White and Jameson envision figural thinking as a way of escaping from modernist notions of history based on rigid chronologies, notions of progress, and other forms of ahistorical thinking. Jameson’s famous dictum—“always historicize”—is based on and draws its power from a figural move. Medieval figural thinking becomes with Jameson the figure of promise that his historicism fulfills. Yet, the richness of figural thinking so advocated by Auerbach, de Lubac, White, and Jameson constitutes for other scholars its unsettling historical problem. Michael Signer, for example, has concentrated on the interlinear glosses of the Pentateuch, as standardized in the Glossa ordinaria, because of their wide dissemination in the schoolbook. He argues that these glosses need to be apprehended as an institutionalized medium promoting anti-Judaism in the twelfth century. The close and repetitive graphic coordination of the names of Old Testament prophets with those who supersede them in the New Testament, coupled with their negative rhetoric of supersession, rendered the interlinear gloss as a form of graphic and rhetorical substitution for the Old Testament verses over which it was inscribed.
Jeffrey Librett, whose work considers the effects of Christian typological practices on Jewish-Christian dialogue, focuses on the figural process of doubling so cherished by Auerbach. Librett agrees with Auerbach that the distinctive aspect of Christian figural thinking is the supersessionary fabrication of texts of the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament so that it (the Old Testament) might stand as prefiguration to the fulfillment of the New Testament. This supersessionary move produces Jews as the figures for the literal truth of Christians. However, it is never that simple, as Librett carefully shows. The fulfillment of a figure, say the Incarnation as the fulfillment of the Mosaic Law, can always also itself become prefiguration, in this case the Incarnation