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Updated: May 3, 2025
Life prefigures itself before us as a spiritual drama in which we are, at once, the actors and the spectators. The story of living goes on perpetually. The days and the years inevitably turn the pages and open new chapters. Nothing is ever hopeless, because new combinations and groupings create new results. The forces that determine his daily life are partly with man and partly with God.
And let it be observed, directly we know that we have this great gift, and that the Old Testament history prefigures it, we have a light thrown upon what otherwise is a difficulty; for, it may be asked with some speciousness, whether the Jews were not in a higher state of privilege than we Christians, until we take this gift into account.
"All this, you see, is obscure enough. Some exegetes recognize in him the prophetic figure of the Saviour, others, that of Saint Joseph, and all admit that the sacrifice of Melchisedek offering to Abraham the blood and wine of which he had first made oblation to the Lord prefigures, to follow the expression of Isidore of Damietta, the archetype of the divine mysteries, otherwise known as the holy mass."
The dog, typical of sin, says Peter Cantor, and the most quarrelsome of beasts, adds Hugh of Saint Victor, is the creature that returns to his vomit; it also prefigures the reprobates of whom the Apocalypse speaks, who are to be driven out of the heavenly Jerusalem; Saint Melito speaks of it as the apostate, and Saint Pacomius as the rapacious monk, but Raban Maur redeems it a little from this condemnation by specifying it as emblematic of confessors.
Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England.
"The first prefigures the Saviour's Ascension by his being carried up alive to Heaven in a chariot of fire; the second typifies Jesus saving and preserving mankind in the person of the Shunammite's son. "Argument is vain," murmured Durtal, who was meditative. "The Messianic prophecies are irresistible.
The moon possesses for us a unique interest. She in all probability shared the origin of the earth; she perhaps prefigures its decay. She is at present its minister and companion.
Condorcet justly remarks on this trait, that 'goodness and even generosity are not rare sentiments in childhood; but for these sentiments to be guided by such wisdom, this really seems the presage of an extraordinary man, all whose sentiments should be virtues, because they would always be controlled by reason. It is at any rate certain that the union of profound benevolence with judgment, which this story prefigures, was the supreme distinction of Turgot's character.
Even if it be taken as a figure only, the figure is never so great as the fact it prefigures! "The land shall be drunk with blood, and its dust made fat with fatness, for it is the day of Jehovah's vengeance, the year of recompenses for the controversy against Zion." Isaiah xxxiv. 7, 8. Ps. ii. 4. "God is not mocked!" The ring-leader is first taken, not slain with the others.
It is this which makes the difference between a St. Paul and a Nero. The fall of man was only apparent; it was really a rise in life. The Garden of Eden prefigures the childhood of the human race. Do we not all go through this idyllic moral condition in childhood, learning through our errors that the only true happiness consists in self-control?
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