Tragical Pathos

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.

Tragical Mimesis and Biblical Interpretation II

This chapter, following on the last, expands to other case studies of dramatic interpretation and tragical mimesis in patristic exposition of tragic narratives in the Bible beyond Genesis, in Old and New Testaments alike. The horrific story of Jephthah’s fateful vow and the “sacrifice” of his daughter (Judges 11), perhaps the best single example of tragedy in the Hebrew Scriptures, vexed its patristic interpreters by its ostensive moral senselessness and resistance to theological redeemability. The flawed character of other tragic heroes such as Samson and King Saul added to the hermeneutical perplexity, while the story of Job was largely taken as a testament of pious endurance of tragic circumstances. The New Testament meanwhile presented, to its patristic interpreters, the proto-Christian “tragic heroics” of the Holy Innocents and John the Baptist, and the “tragic villainy” of Judas Iscariot and Ananias and Sapphira, each story prompting its own questions about freedom, determinism, and divine justice. Early Christian interpreters consistently put forward and even amplified the elements of tragedy in these stories in order to educate their own audiences in confronting irrevocable evil and suffering.

Excavating Tragical Perspectives in Early Christianity

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the monograph by establishing the paucity of actual works of early Christian tragedy, but also the growing Christian recognition of the power of tragedy to convey the vulnerability of the human condition and the subjection of all creation to what the Apostle Paul himself called an existential “vanity” or “futility” (Romans 8:19–23). The Christian reception and reworking of tragedy, however, stood at the end of a long evolution of tragedy and of its role in Greco-Roman civilization, which included strong philosophical criticism of the genre (Plato) and vigorous defense of its cultural utility (Aristotle). Christian polemicists against pagan theatrical art seized on the antecedent philosophical criticism but also developed their own, and included tragedy in their condemnation of the immorality, seductiveness, and irreligion of all pagan entertainment and “spectacle.” Yet Christian thinkers began their own rehabilitation of salvageable elements of tragedy as a literary, rhetorical, and dramatic artform. Some found noble and even theologically enriching passages in the ancient tragedians. Others looked, however, to free the genre to Christian appropriation, and to develop uniquely Christian forms of “tragical mimesis” for the edification of their audiences.

Epilogue

The Epilogue picks up on a problem running throughout the earlier chapters, that of the fundamental compatibility of Christianity and tragedy, and the claims of some critics (especially George Steiner) that they are utterly incompatible because of the Christian gospel’s ebullient hope of transcending tragic suffering. Various early Christian theologians, however, being fully aware of pagan philosophy’s largely negative assessment of the moral utility of hope, touted hope as an altogether virtuous emotion if refined by sobriety and realism about the compromised state of human existence. Hope thus qualified not only as a “theological virtue” alongside faith and love but as a tragical emotion in its own right, serving to guard against spiritual or eschatological triumphalism on the one hand, and deep despair over existential tragedy on the other.

Tragical Conscience

This chapter investigates yet another frontier of tragical mimesis in early Christian literary culture: the retraining of the Christian moral conscience to envision human existence in its graphically and concretely tragic dimension. Christians were to be educated in sustained awareness that they were a part of the same “vanity” to which all of creation had been subjected, a crucial discipline of which was the sympathetic contemplation of specific groups in their social and cultural foreground that lived under a seemingly constant tragic yoke. The bulk of the chapter concentrates on four such groups consistently brought to Christians’ attention, particularly by episcopal preachers. First were the indigent and diseased, whose suffering played out a tragedy into which all Christians were being called as dramatis personae engaging Christ himself through the poor. Second were social parasites, society’s “tragic comics” whose antics and theatrics in striving to make a living from more fortunate patrons tested Christians’ ability to overcome revulsion with compassion. Third were married people and ascetics/monastics: marrieds because the institution of marriage was a symbol of the tragic vulnerability and volatility of even the most intimate of human relationships, and ascetics/monastics because their religious vocation parodied both the tragedy and the comedy of human existence. Fourth were “unbelieving” Jews, long conceived in Christian eyes as the bearers of the tragic legacy of rejection of Jesus as the Christ.

The Tragic Christian Self

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.

Tragical Mimesis and Biblical Interpretation I

This chapter moves straightaway into the first, and foundational, form of early Christian tragical mimesis, the interpretation of tragic (and tragic-comic) biblical narratives. “Dramatic” interpretation was not a method all its own but drew upon both literal and figural reading of the scriptural texts, and focused on mimetic re-presentation of the narratives in ways that highlighted and amplified their tragic elements. It served a primarily “contemplative” mode, or theôria, of reading tragic narratives, conducive to a tragical vision of sacred history. The chapter turns to some case studies of tragical or dramatic interpretation of the primitive tragedies in Genesis: the precipitous fall of Adam and Eve and their recognition thereof; and the tragic sibling rivalries of Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau. Attention is given to the specific Aristotelian elements of tragedy (plausible or realistic plots; characters’ fateful miscalculation, or hamartia; reversal of fortune, or peripeteia; discovery, or anagnorisis; pathos, et al.) which patristic exegetes discerned in these stories. Mimetic or dramatic interpretation enhanced these elements all the more as means to draw audiences into the cosmic significance of the narratives related to moral evil, the legacies of sin and death, the fear of determinism, and the justice and providence of God.

The Theological Scope of Early Christian Tragical Vision

This last full chapter confirms, first of all, that tragical vision and mimesis constituted a theological artform in early Christian literature, whereby literary, rhetorical, and dramatic artistry were vital to the eminently theological interests of patristic tragical visionaries and not mere artifices. The “theodramatic” interpretive paradigm of the modern theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar is introduced as a lens through which to reevaluate the compatibility of theology and tragedy in early Christian authors. Other modern Christian tragical visionaries besides Balthasar are also brought into “conversation” with patristic interpreters of the tragic character of creaturely existence, in an effort to demonstrate the theological intelligence and accountability of early Christian tragical mimesis in its various forms, and to highlight the criteria by which “the tragic” has come to be identified in the Christian tradition. It is shown that patristic interpreters often played up human experience of intractable evil and “fateful” suffering in order, paradoxically, to enhance the depths of the divine wisdom and providence operative in creation. Tragical mimesis ultimately integrated “dark” comedy in dramatizing the “folly” of the economy of salvation.