Figural interpretation, says Auerbach, "‘establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first involves not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act’" (73).
This is again the retrospective logic of the series: the first term only reveals itself as first somewhere after the second has appeared. It is Paul and the Church Fathers who "reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ" (16), not the entire Jewish tradition. Both the Jewish tradition and the Church fathers are contained in that stream of historical life which moves through the former to and beyond the latter, but the temporality of that comprehension which draws them together is rather different. An eddy, perhaps, where something is moving upstream, against the overall flow it is within. Or something which leaps: "blasted out of the continuum of history," as Benjamin says in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (XIV, 253), in a thinking which involves "not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well" (XVII, 254):
no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the "time of the now" which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. (Auerbach, 255)
Benjamin calls this Messianic; Auerbach calls it spiritual. Both of them are names for temporalities. Looking back over the Jewish tradition, Paul and the Church Fathers see every second of time as the strait gate through which the Messiah’s messenger has already entered. (B, 255)
But there is also something very mundane and familiar about this figurality. It is the time of calendars, which "do not measure time as clocks do," where "it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance" (Benjamin, "Theses" XV, 253). It is also the logic of citation, where the citing text involves, fulfills and rewrites the earlier one it cites. Only now can that cited text be seen as having already involved the later text which will have come to cite it. That is what is marked by the double inverted commas above: Auerbach is quoting himself, from an earlier article: "Figura," Arch. Roman. 22, 436. Figura and "Figura" find a meaning in what is to come.
