UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation is an investigation of the logic of supersession in the Christian tradition, especially the way that supersession is articulated and enacted in the figural interpretation of scripture in the Latin West and the afterlives of figural interpretation in modern philosophies of history. ‘Supersession’ is a word that describes the Christian doctrine that God’s covenant with the Jews is fulfilled in the Christian gospel, such that, by its inheritance and actualization of the promises of the so-called Old Testament, the Christian church claims to have assumed the sacramental and eschatological vocation of God’s chosen people. Supersession means, minimally, that Christians are the ’true spiritual Israel,’ and has for many decades been closely—and rightly—associated with anti-Judaism and with the perils of antisemitism. This work investigates the historical genesis and structure of the logic of supersession by way of Erich Auerbach’s pathbreaking study of the Latin term figura, in which Auerbach shows how figura gained the unprecedented and powerful sense of ‘historically real prophecy’ in the Latin Church fathers, especially Tertullian of Carthage and St. Augustine of Hippo. This work aims to show that figural interpretation and the logic of supersession place the Christian tradition in a peculiar double-bind. For, in order to confirm the truth of the gospel, Christians must affirm the truth of Judaism and Jewish scripture. Without the prophetic, historical truth of Judaism, the proper, eternal truth of the gospel is exposed to grave danger. Christians must love what they hate and hate what they love, namely, their erstwhile co-religionists, Jews.

Figural interpretation and the logic of supersession also give rise to a unique concept of history as a promissory totality, governed by providence and bounded by an eschatological horizon. This study attends to the contradictions generated by the conjunction of history and eternity in the historical consciousness of the Latin West, especially the paradoxical love-hate for the very world in which the Christ appeared, and to which the Christ delivered the eternal gospel. The first chapter, “The Logic of Supersession,” sets the stage for the argument by introducing the reader to the basic concepts, problems, sources, and methods of the dissertation. The second chapter, “Figural Interpretation,” offers a close reading of Auerbach’s landmark essay “Figura,” and shows how figural interpretation was a decisive weapon in early Christian polemics against Jews and heretics both. The third chapter, “History and Universality,” considers the implications of Auerbach’s later work, Mimesis, and draws out some of the consequences of Auerbach’s theory of figural interpretation for contemporary scholarship on the history of Christianity. The fourth chapter, “Eschatology and Secularity,” takes up the work of Karl Löwith, especially his Meaning in History, to stage a discussion of the paradoxes generated by the logic of supersession in the uneasy conjunction of secularity (or worldliness) and eschatology. The fifth, and final, chapter, “The True Religion,” explores the afterlife of the logic of supersession in the thought of G.W.F. Hegel, especially the way that Hegel endeavors to ‘save’ the truth of Christianity by staging the supersession of Christianity in and through the absolute truth of the philosophical Idea.