SYZYGY
The word syzygy is an adaptation of the Greek word meaning “conjunction”.
In astronomy, a syzygy occurs when three celestial bodies are aligned, such as the sun, earth and moon during a lunar eclipse.
In traditional Catholic exegesis, there is a syzygy correspondence between two entities, events, actions, when 1) they are not contemporaneous; 2) they bear a strong analogy; 3) and the first prefigures, signifies, or announces the second.
The first, the forerunner, is called the type and the second is called the antitype.
The Old Testament presents the types, the New Testament presents the antitypes [1]:
“The antitype not only repeats the type but completes and perfects it. […] Noah, Abraham, Moses … are “types” of Christ” (Ellrodt 1980, 38).
The syzygy principle orders history and the world, and, as such, provides the basis for the syzygy argument, which is used to establish significant links between the two “type vs. antitype” spheres. It uses the resources of structural analogy, proportion and proportionality and a variant of the progress argument, what comes before is analogous to what comes after, but has less being and substance than what comes after, in a two-state world.
A variant of the syzygy principle projects the mundane world, regarded as a type, onto the hereafter or eternal world, its antitype, where it finds its raison d’être.
The syzygy argument retains its pedagogical function, which is to give the believer an idea of future conditions: The monarch is the type, of which the Almighty Father is the antitype.
For him [man], too, He [God] has varied the figures of combinations [syzygies], setting before him first small things, and then great things, such as the world and eternity. But the world that is now, is temporary; that which is to be is eternal.
Clementine Homilies, 3rd century (disputed).[2]
Syzygy-like principles can still be used, perhaps ironically, to support a historical analysis.
In France, on Brumaire 18 (November 9th), 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup in order to establish his dictatorship. Half a century later, his nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte also seized power by force. Karl Marx commented on the relationship between these two coups as follows.
Hegel makes the observation that all great events and historical figures repeat themselves, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce […]. And we find the same caricature in the circumstances in which the second edition of the 18th Brumaire appeared.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1851[3].
The principle that “history repeats itself the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce” is a kind of inverted syzygy.
[1] This vocabulary is specific, it has nothing to do with the model / anti-model perspective.
[2] Clementine Homilies. Edimburgh: Clark, 1870, p. 38 (Homily II, Chapter XV. Quoted from www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf08.html.
[3] Brumaire is the second month of the French Revolutionary Calender, corresponding to October-November; the Revolutionary year began in the fall. “The second edition” is the nephew’s coup. Quoted from: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf. P. 5. (09-20-2013)