The Fig Leaves and the Man Under the Fig Tree
Old Testament: Genesis 3:7
And the eyes of them both were opened: and when they perceived themselves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made themselves aprons.
New Testament: John 1:47-48
Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him: and he saith of him: Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile. Nathanael saith to him: Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered, and said to him: Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.
The connection
St Augustine asks directly whether the fig tree in Nathanael's story signifies anything, and answers from the first fig tree in Scripture: since the fig leaves of Genesis 3:7 signify sin, "Nathanael then was under the fig-tree, as it were under the shadow of death" (Tractate on John 7.21). Christ's seeing him there is not a parlor trick of omniscience but the whole Gospel in miniature: "did we first seek Christ, and not He seek us?" The man Christ names guileless was, in the very next breath, found still sitting under Adam's tree, and was found before he knew he was being looked for.
Moral sense
Every soul has its own fig tree, the particular shade of old sin it thinks it is hidden under; Christ's word to Nathanael is His word to every soul under one: I saw thee there, before you called on Me.
Anagogical sense
Nathanael's leap from "whence knowest thou me" to "thou art the Son of God" previews the last unveiling, when the God who saw us under the fig tree is seen in turn, face to face.
The Fathers
St Augustine, Tractate 7 on the Gospel of John, sect. 21, who makes both halves of this connection himself: "In the beginning of the human race, when Adam and Eve had sinned, they made themselves girdles of fig leaves. Fig leaves then signify sins. Nathanael then was under the fig-tree, as it were under the shadow of death."
Warrant
Checked in the Greek: syke is the tree in both, the sykes whose leaves are sewn at Genesis 3:7 in the Septuagint and the syken under which Nathanael is seen at John 1:48.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 400.
