Sacramental Language

Extract

We use the word figure in many ways. We speak of figure-skating, of cutting a figure, of a fine figure of a man, the fuller figure, a figure of fun, figuring things out, figures of speech and being good with with figures. These are all current senses. In the past, figure has had other meanings. When, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Mistress Ford encourages Mistress Page to ‘scrape the figures out of your husband’s brains’, she does not mean that he has been worrying about the mortgage, but that his head is full of mistaken ideas or fantasies.

Figure comes from the Latin figura. In 1944 the German literary critic Erich Auerbach published an influential article entitled Figura. He showed the wide range of meanings that figura has in classical Latin, and how these developed further in Christian usage. Fran the earliest records, figura could mean ‘the shape of a thing’, just as we now speak of a person’s ‘figure’. But it could also mean a shape representing something else. Sculptors, for instance, make figurae of human beings; in our dreams we see figurae of people who are dead.

Christian writers developed this second sense in a new and important way. For them, figura could refer to an object or event belonging to a particular point in time that represented something in the future. For Tertullian, Isaac, Joseph, Moses are all figurae of Christ²; the marriage of Adam and Eve is a figura of Christ and the Church³ (Theologians are familiar with this way of looking at history, though we usually call it by a word of Greek origin, typology.)