Interpretación figural e historia: Reflexiones en torno a figura de Erich Auerbach

this article examines the german philologist erich auerbach's (1892-1957) analysis about the figural interpretation, a christian medieval hermeneutics in which both the historical and the veiled sense of the encarnation's previous facts coexist within a configuration that links horizontally past, present and future (like escathological expectations) in a plot underwritten by a transcendence that connects "vertically" the occurence to the divine plan. the auerbach's discovery of this kind of interpretation, different from symbolic and alegorical ones, was first introduced in his article "figura" in 1938, turning out crucial for both his argument for the particular type of literary realism in dante's work (to whom he previously has devoted a book), and his later assessment about the changes in western literature ways of representation. but besides the interest that this would have for the literarature history in general, and for the auerbach's work in particular, it implies a question that reaches different aspects of the christian medieval history in a wider sense and, furthermore, the reflectiveness on the different conceptions of temporality that encouraging the thought over the same materials of historian's work.