This chapter capitalizes on a substantial body of recent research on the literary and rhetorical construction of “lives” (especially “holy lives” in hagiography) and “selves” (moral subjects and agents) in the late-ancient Greco-Roman World. It explores a whole other form of tragical mimesis in early Christian literary culture, namely, the rhetorical and theological profiling of the Christian self as a “tragic self,” a self consciously aware of its own finitude, mortality, and vulnerability to tragic circumstance. The bulk of the chapter closely examines three powerful autobiographical profiles of the tragic Christian self articulated by three of the most prolific late-ancient Christian authors: Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. While each writer, especially Gregory Nazianzen in his autobiographical poetry, rhetorically reconstructed his own life as an unfolding tragedy, each also developed an objective profile of the tragic Christian self that could apply more broadly to Christian experience of life in the flesh. Though these writers all revere the goodness and beauty of creation, and the integrity of the imago Dei, and though they fervently assert the providence and wisdom of the Creator, there is neither naïvety nor quixotism about the arena of creation in which life is lived, endured, enjoyed, the arena where confrontation of evil and suffering is endemic.
Introduction to T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World