This chapter argues that the Christian “tragical conscience,” as described in the preceding chapter, was a conscience that demanded its own “cleansing” (catharsis) and clarified moral vision, which further relied on the cultivation, psychologically and existentially, of a whole panoply of tragical emotions that enriched Christian response to real-life tragedies. The assessment here of the development of a Christian “tragical pathos” draws from Martha Nussbaum’s work on the “moral intelligence” of emotions in Hellenistic philosophy and from Robert Kaster’s identification of “emotional scripts” in Greco-Roman moral philosophy and ethics. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to early Christian reworking or “re-scripting” of the classic (Aristotelian) tragical emotions of fear and pity, fear being relativized and recontextualized in relation to the superior fear of God, and pity reframed as empathetic mercy. Christian moralists, moreover, expanded the repertoire of “tragical” emotions beyond fear and pity, especially by encouraging a whole gamut of emotions of grief (lamentation, compunction, etc.) that were pivotal in Christian response to the tragic realities of sin, suffering, loss, and death.
Ways of Building of Moral Intelligence for Creativity‧Character Education
