The Tragic Vision

There is a . . . tragic law which controls the historical process, the law that ordains that human greatness utterly fall . . . . That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message of the prophet to the nations of the world. They are all subject to the law of tragic self‑destruction…….³

Although it will be argued here that this close correlation of the Christian with the tragic view of life is unwarranted, we must recognize that there is in it a measure of plausibility. The two views are at least united in what they oppose. They both resist the unrealistic assumption that goodness always triumphs, or that it at least will triumph with the aid of more extensive education and a higher standard of living. Both are constrained by the facts of experience to acknowledge that life may confront a person not with a choice between good and evil but with a choice between the lesser of two evils; that to try to put a lofty principle into practice may result in more harm than good; and that in order to preserve one's own integrity one may have to forfeit one's life. Hence believers in the "tragic vision," together with adherents of the Christian faith, have made common cause against the sentimental illusions of a more credulous age. The former complain with Sophocles: "Strange, that impious men, sprung from wicked parents, should prosper, while good men of generous breed should be unfortunate! It is not right that heaven should deal so with men." The latter exclaim with the prophet: "Spoiling and violence are before me, and there are those that raise up strife and contention; therefore the law is slacked and judgment doth never go forth. For the wicked doth compass about the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceedeth" (Habakkuk 1:3‑4).

It is quite possible, however, for two allies to unite for defensive purposes against a mutual foe without necessarily having anything positive in common. Once the enemy has been defeated, erstwhile comrades‑in‑arms may discover that their respective philosophies of life are incompatible.

During twenty‑five years of their joint attack upon a delusive optimism, Christianity and the tragic view of life had little time for critical scrutiny of each other. Now that the

battle is over, however, irreducible differences between them are beginning to emerge, and I shall here attempt to show that, although both prophet and tragedian raise a similar, anguished question, their respective answers to it are, for the most part, mutually incompatible.

The tragic view of life derives ultimately from the philosophy known technically as gnosticism or mysticism, often spoken of as typically "Greek," but in fact quite common throughout the world. Its primary premise can be formulated in various ways, but the simplest is probably Hegel's version: "The truth is in the whole." From this quite plausible axiom, the entire theory of tragedy logically evolves. It implies, first, that an adequate philosophy of life must not only include everything, but must also affirm everything. It must not suppress any aspect of reality simply because some particular moral code finds it offensive or ignoble; it must not disparage any human emotion or action simply because some find it unpleasant or shocking. Conversely, it must not prefer other aspects of life simply because they are accounted "beautiful" or "good." This would unduly elevate a mere part at the expense of the whole. In short, if the truth is the whole, then reality is neutral, not partisan. It knows no good or evil, for the "good" is always partisan. The "good" will tolerate no opposition: although it may acknowledge the existence of evil, it denies to evil the right to exist. [The distinction between good and evil, consequently, is truth's worst enemy.] As an eloquent spokesman for this view has said:

Only that which is "beyond good and evil" is real . . . . The moral good has a bad origin, and its bad origin pursues it like a curse .⁵

Life as it is actually lived, however, presents a striking contrast to this ideal of neutrality. Flesh‑and‑blood men are always

partisan. The moment they stop speculating about ultimate truth and engage in the business of day‑to‑day living, they cannot help taking sides. He who attempts to remain neutral simply capitulates by default to one side or the other. In short, life as we know it contradicts the ideal of absolute neutrality. If the truth is the whole, then it is mocked by the rough and tumble of this world, where justice struggles against injustice, good is pitted against evil, and each side insists upon unconditional surrender.

Nor is this active partisanship accidental to human existence, a defect which might conceivably be overcome in the course of time. Rather, life itself appears to depend upon the interplay of polar opposites which, though contrary to each other, are equally necessary to earthly existence‑light and dark, wet and dry, long and short, male and female, reason and emotion, positive and negative, mind and matter, all the famous "pairs of opposites" by which philosophers describe finite existence. The Chinese group all these warring opposites under the two primary headings yin and yang, and regard the conflict between them as integral to life itself. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus reached much the same conclusion when he said that the most fundamental law of existence is strife.

This is the lowest common denominator of tragic philosophy, the clash of neutral, irreconcilable opposites which, considered in the light of ultimate truth, are equally valid. As one contemporary writer puts it, "Tragedy occurs wherever the powers that collide are true independently of each other."⁶ Or, as another critic says, "The tragic conflict is not merely one of good with evil, but also, and more essentially, of good with good."⁷

Tragic writers differ chiefly in their respective ways of conceiving the clash of antinomies which constitute human life.

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To mention one rather surprising example, Sigmund Freud interprets his psychoanalytical data by incorporating them into tragic philosophy. He postulates two co‑eternal, equally valid forces, the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction:

The meaning of evolution . . . must present to us the struggle between . . . the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself out in the' human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of . . . ⁸

And quite consistently with tragic philosophy, Freud often (though not always) refused to take sides with the life instinct against the destructive instinct.

Another common version of tragic philosophy narrows its focus from the cosmic scale to human nature itself and discovers there a bundle of irresolvable contradictions. It finds, for example, that human nature is a composite consisting of "vitality and form"; that is, the rational, structured element which makes for order, restraint, and obedience to law versus the dynamic, vital impetus to break out of tedious normality and stultifying convention in the name of creative novelty. The tension between these two aspects of human nature has, as we shall subsequently notice, been a frequent subject of tragic plot.

Still another way of conceiving this built-in dilemma (and one which is much in vogue among cotemporary existentialists) sees tragic conflict as a necessary consequence of human freedom. Every exercise of freedom involves the individual in a decision for some particular aspect of reality at the expense of another. He cannot help being "for" one facet of reality and against its opposite. Intellectually, he may realize that both sides have a legitimate status in the context of ultimate reality. But his human freedom involves him in the agonizing necessity of choosing between them. As one of the prophets of

existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, puts it, "Man is condemned to be free."

Finally, among the more sophisticated philosophers of the tragic, like Plotinus or Schelling, the very existence of separate, discrete individuals is itself sufficient to set up a tragic conflict. The perfect harmony of ultimate reality is disrupted simply by the emergence of independent entities, each pretending to the perfect unity which properly belongs only to "the whole."

Such are the principal variations on the theme of tragedy as the fatal conflict between incompatible and equally valid forces. As one proponent of tragedy says:

Tragedy means a conflict between polarities, but it need not necessarily be a conflict between good and evil . . . . True depth of tragedy would become apparent when two equally divine principles come into conflict . . . . the greatest tragedy is suffering caused by the good, not by evil, and consists in our being unable to justify life in terms of the distinction between good and evil . . . . The most tragic situations in life are between values which are equally noble and lofty.⁹

It is now clear why literary critics are so careful to distinguish tragedy from the morality play. A morality play teaches an object lesson by depicting the triumph of goodness and the punishment of evil. Tragedy, however, portrays the downfall of the man who heroically embodies some great (though morally neutral) ideal or power. To view his demise in terms of good and evil is to step outside the tragic frame of reference.

In a morality play, moreover, the villain is wicked because of free choice, not by necessity; it is always possible for him to turn from his evil ways and be saved. The dominant theme of tragedy, however, is that of necessity. The hero marches along a predetermined path to inevitable doom (nemesis).

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Few tragic authors are willing to draw this logical conclusion from the fatalism inherent in tragic theory, and many actually do borrow, for dramatic purposes, the freedom which their philosophy denies. What this proves is not that tragic theory provides for freedom, but rather that few writers are able to follow the theory with consistency.

Some of Shakespeare's plays, for example, are certainly more tragic than others. Caesar, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet are more consistently tragic, since they minimize the moral element and contain an undercurrent of fatalism. But Othello's jealousy and Lear's blindness are more like avoidable sins which entail the hero's destruction only because he gives in to them. Shakespeare's ambiguity only accentuates that of every tragic writer. Most of them dilute their tragic philosophy with a mixture of common sense. Shakespeare's inconsistency is more pronounced because his common sense was reinforced by his Christian heritage.

The philosophical stage setting for tragic drama is now complete. It consists of two shifting backdrops: the ultimate perspective of the detached observer, of the aesthete, in which all differences cancel each other out and in which no discord is possible; and the finite perspective of the man of action, in which strife and contradiction are the rule. The poet Hölderlin based his poem "Song of Destiny" (Schicksalslied) on this contrast between the imperturbable serenity of the "ideal" world and the intrinsic strife and tension of earthly existence.

Some tragedians, like Aeschylus, appear to believe with Hölderlin that the "ultimate perspective" actually corresponds to another, ideal world with a separate existence of its own. With Sophocles the characters are allowed to question this, though at their peril; by the time of Ibsen the "perfect realm" has become more of an ideal of the mind; and with contemporary existentialists like Kafka or Sartre, it has dwindled to

the point where, though not really real at all, it still serves as an intellectual perspective from which to judge and condemn the conditions of human existence.

Regardless of whether a transcendent realm of being does actually exist, the basis of the tragic view of life, from Aeschylus to Sartre, is this double perspective. It provides the clue to understanding the technical term hybris, which is the mainspring of tragic action; it accounts for the ambiguity which surrounds tragic guilt; and it explains how hybris and guilt lead inevitably to the hero's downfall, or nemesis.

Hybris, generally translated by the misleading term "pride," is that in human nature which causes a man to upset the metaphysical equilibrium, and thereby to set in motion a chain of consequences that inexorably precipitates his own doom. Hybris may take one of two different forms. Either the hero treats some segment of reality as though it were the whole (in philosophical terms, he "absolutizes the relative"), and thus calls down upon himself the vengeance of ultimate reality; or he strives consciously to introduce absolute perfection into this merely relative world which, by definition, cannot stand perfection, and thus he inexorably exacts the death penalty.

The first of these two kinds of hybris is the more common. The hero's unqualified affirmation of some merely partial good necessarily brings him into collision with other facets of reality which, in the light of the whole, have a rightful place in the total scheme of things. He thus trespasses against the axiom, "the truth is the whole." But this no man does with impunity. He must expect to be overwhelmed by an equal and opposite reaction.

A favorite tragic theme is that of the hero who, in order to preserve his own personal integrity, or in the name of emotional honesty, expresses some inordinate and illegitimate passion which can neither be indulged without transgression nor

suppressed without hypocrisy. This is in fact an instance of the supposedly inevitable conflict between vital energy and rational form. In order to do justice to his own feelings, the hero is obliged to break the law. As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, "Greek tragedy declares that the vitality of life is in conflict with the laws of life . . . . the tragic hero simply undertakes to break the laws in order to express the full dimension of human existence."¹⁰ Phaedra, for example, bears unflinching witness to her passion for Hippolytus. But she thereby flouts the accepted canons of propriety, and must pay the price.

Tragic hybris is thus necessarily ambiguous. It is both a transgression and a virtue, an arrogant defiance of the metaphysical status quo and a heroic protest against its constrictions. Whether the hero can properly be called "guilty" depends entirely upon which perspective one takes. From the ultimate perspective, he ought not to make such presumptuous claims on behalf of one aspect of reality. But from his own finite perspective, his deed is positively praiseworthy. It affirms the good as he sees it, whether this be the redress of injustice (Hamlet), loyalty to family (Antigone), or emotional honesty (Lady Macbeth). Spurning the counsels of prudence or expediency so freely offered by the Greek chorus, the hero discharges the unique obligations which circumstance has laid upon him. Hamlet, though lamenting that he should be born to set the times aright, defies the prudential pleas of family and friends until he has avenged his father. "Tragic guilt" is, therefore, an ambiguous concept. The hero is "guilty" from one perspective, but not from the other. This explains why one tragic writer can say that "guilt in the larger sense is identical with existence as such,"¹¹ while another can say that there is no guilt whatever in the tragic scheme of things.¹²

The same double perspective applies to the second kind of hybris. The hero is caught in a conflict, not between warring

aspects of finite experience, but between finite existence as such and the claims of a "higher," divine realm. His doom is the consequence, not of the inordinate pursuit of some merely limited good, but of a titanic attempt to comprehend the total good, to actualize the divine realm itself on the worldly plane. This kind of hybris is represented in Greek mythology by the story of Bellerophon. Having slain the chimera, he attempts to storm heaven itself on his winged steed Pegasus, but is, of course, destroyed in the attempt. Such titanic daring cannot help but evoke the spectator's admiration, but it also contravenes the very conditions of human existence.

The prototype of the heaven‑storming tragic hero is, of course, Prometheus. Because he has stolen the civilized arts of heaven and brought them down to men, he is sentenced to eternal torment. Tragic philosophers have a formula to express Prometheus' dilemma: finitum non capax infiniti; that is, the finite cannot bear the infinite. From one point of view, Prometheus has done a sublime thing. By striving after the impossible, he has borne witness to a far nobler truth than the mere finite world can tolerate. He shows his devotion to this loftier ideal by his indifference to the consequences of his act. But he thereby also commits a double offense: an offense against the infinite for having drawn it down to the profane level; and an offense against the finite by trying to make it the vehicle of a perfection which it cannot bear. His nemesis is both his punishment and his glory:

Either to live in error, or to grasp the truth and die of it . . . that he [man] can carry his human possibilities to their extreme and can be undone by them with his eyes open ‑ that is his greatness.¹³

Hybris, whether in the form of an inordinate pursuit of some merely finite goal, or of the suicidal aspiration toward

the infinite, is not the avoidable character‑defect of egotism. It is part and parcel of human nature as such, the necessary counterpart of man's creative capacity as a rational creature. In such a frame of reference, every human act is at once creative and destructive at the same time. Hence, the common practice among tragic writers of hyphenating the two words, as in the following statement: "Real demonry . . . occurs only in connection with a positive; sustaining, creative‑destructive power."¹⁴ As another contemporary puts it:

The basso continuo of the Promethean drama is thus given: the inevitability of trespassing .... Human suffering is . . . the inevitable concomitant of the equally inevitable wrongdoing ... inevitable, because without, Prometheus' theft the human race would have perished . . . .Human consciousness, and its consequence, human action, are as such . . . a sinful aspiration and rebellious trespass.¹⁵

If the fulfillment of man's creative powers constitutes an offense against the gods, and if all the arts of culture are guilty thefts, then the higher the aspiration, the greater the transgression.

R. J. Z. Werblowsky, in a brilliant analysis of this aspect of tragedy, has given his book the significant title Lucifer and Prometheus. He shows conclusively that within the tragic world‑view Lucifer and Prometheus are really the same symbol under different names. On the one hand, Prometheus is the bearer of light; on the other, he is the devil. This ambiguity is contained in the very name "Lucifer" itself, which literally means "bearer of light," just as does the German word for Lucifer, Lichtträger. From this ambivalent attitude toward human cultural achievement, one can draw either of two conclusions. One may conclude that, since all civilization is the result of hybris it is an invention of the devil, a theme which haunts tragic literature. In Werblowsky's words: "Civilization

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and culture, which are human consciousness, resourcefulness and power in action, inevitably take on the character of hybridic trespass."¹⁶ Or, alternatively, one can conclude that it is man's glorious destiny to go on to the limit of his creative capacities, even though eventually he will bring the whole cultural edifice crashing down around his ears in a cataclysmic Götterdämmerung. This is the mood of Blake, Byron, Nietzsche, and the romantic school generally. Their attitude toward human creativity is, "Though this be evil, make the most of it." Their frank advocacy of evil is perfectly illustrated by the following passage:

The responsibility for evil exalts man instead of humiliating him .... The idea . . . of the fall is at bottom a proud idea and through it man escapes from the sense of humiliation."¹⁷

Since the entire theory of tragedy involves a double perspective, it follows that the tragic effect depends upon the cooperation of the spectator. He must be willing to hold both perspectives before him in a kind of tension. He is asked both to take seriously the hero's prowess and eventual demise, and at the same time to remain aware that all such partial, one-sided concerns are ultimately invalid. He continually teases himself with the common‑sense meaning of guilt and goodness, even while he knows them to be ultimately transcended.

The spectator thus becomes part of the act, deliberately maintaining a conscious ambivalence. The moment he relaxes the tension between the two perspectives, the tragic effect dissolves If he adopts the finite perspective to the exclusion of the ultimate, tragedy becomes either a morality play or a picture of unrelieved frustration. If he relinquishes the finite in favor of the ultimate perspective, and allows himself to view the hero's world sub specie aeternitatis, he realizes that the whole play is really "much ado about nothing." Tragedy is

thus converted at a stroke into comedy, and the drama becomes a farce.

Perhaps this explains why the great Greek tragedians were expected to follow their serious dramas with a riotous satyr play, which often burlesqued the grave personages of the preceding tragedy. It is therefore not surprising to find Socrates contending at the conclusion of the Symposium that comedy and tragedy are based upon the same fundamental principle -- a thesis recently taken up again by Richard Kroner. The point is illustrated beautifully, though perhaps not intentionally, by the Spanish philosopher Unamuno in his book The Tragic Sense o f Life. He begins by ringing the customary changes upon the self‑defeating character of all human existence. By the time he has reached his final chapter, however, his earlier, fatalistic mood has undergone a transformation. He concludes:

The greatest type of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make one's self ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.^l8

There is thus an inner logic which leads directly from the tragic to the comic. The tragic effect requires of the spectator a constant flirtation with two perspectives at once. The person who declines to wear these bifocal lenses may, with Unamuno, discover in even the greatest tragedy a suspicion of the ridiculous.

This consciously induced ambivalence holds the secret to the spellbinding effect which tragedy has exerted upon millions of its adherents. The spectator's mind is brought to a standstill by the constant flickering of perspective, and he watches in helpless fascination as the hero contrives his own doom. Devotees of tragedy are fond of urging the prospective convert to "enter sympathetically into the tragic experience":

"We must respond from the depth of our own soul if we are to feel the enthusiasm of that [tragic] philosophy."¹⁹ What this really constitutes is an invitation to maintain a schizophrenic oscillation between the two perspectives, and thereby to become a party to one's own hypnosis. The following quotation is an example of such an indirect invitation:

This is the vision of a great and noble life: to endure ambiguity in the movement of truth and to . . stand fast in uncertainty . .²⁰

Because of its cultivated ambivalence the tragic attitude has been described as a mixture of doubt and "faith":

Tragedy, therefore, cannot exist where there is no faith; conversely, it cannot exist where there is no doubt; it can exist only in an atmosphere of skeptical f aith.²¹

What this writer means by "faith," however, is a far cry from what the Christian means. It is the knowledge, from the ultimate perspective, that everything happens in accord with a universal law of compensation, that the hero's suffering is really only the necessary restoration of the metaphysical balance. This saving knowledge is the basis of the claim by its adherents that tragedy provides them with a kind of religious deliverance. According to one devotee, it

cleanses us of all that in our everyday experience is petty, bewildering, and trivial‑all that narrows us and makes us blind ....

This tragic knowledge . . . is also a way for man to transcend his limitations . . . . When man faces the tragic, he liberates himself from it. This is one way of obtaining purification and redemption . . . . Deliverance within the tragic . . . liberated man by letting him see through the tragic as through a glass to the unspoken and unutterable depths of life . . . .

In and through this knowledge, the whole man is transformed.²²

Although this brand of salvation includes the catharsis of pity and terror, even these emotions depend ultimately upon knowledge. They are the product of tragic insight, not of personal involvement. They are emotions of detachment and aesthetic distance, to be savored by the connoisseur for their psychological effect. Pity and terror are, as Aristotle observed, merely purgative, the emotional accompaniment of the knowledge that the hero's suffering and defeat are intrinsic to finite existence.

The spectator's advantage over the hero consists in this superior insight, attainable only from the ultimate perspective and possible only to an observer. Conversely, the hero's downfall is due to ignorance, to the one‑dimensional point of view imposed upon him by the necessities of action. Action requires decision, judgments of good and evil, as though all these merely finite distinctions had ultimate significance. In taking them seriously, as he must, the hero loses his grip on the ultimate perspective. As one contemporary writer puts it, "All life‑force stems from blindness."²³

This inevitable ignorance exposes the hero to frustration and despair. The observer, however, since he enjoys a vantage point above the strife, does not share these emotions. He understands them as the inexorable consequence of life lived on the finite plane (that is, in action), and this knowledge gives him immunity to the depths of anguish and defeat exhibited on the stage:

When we watch tragedy, we transcend the limits of existence and are thereby liberated. Within the knowledge of the tragic the striving for deliverance no longer signifies exclusively the urge to be saved from anguish and misery. It also signifies our

urge to be delivered from the tragic structure of reality by transcending that reality.²⁴

In some cases, like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, the author tries to make his hero play both roles, protagonist and observer, at the same time. Though a fiercely committed man of action, Ahab nevertheless philosophizes about the destiny which has already assigned to every man his appointed end, and which will have its way despite them all.

Moby Dick anticipates the existentialist version of tragedy. Since, according to the existentialist, men are essentially finite and nothing more, he renounces the spectator's role as untrue to the "human predicament." The way to live "authentically" is to plunge into action, while renouncing all illusions that the action has any significance. Whereas, in tragedy of the traditional kind, the spectator is a man of action who is enabled by the theater temporarily to escape his finite conditions, the existentialist is a congenital observer. The harder he plays at being a man of action, the more obvious it becomes that this is strictly a role. He remains his own voyeur, saved from the impact of defeat by the knowledge of its ultimate meaninglessness.

Because the heart of "salvation by tragedy" is this special kind of knowledge, it makes no difference that the spectator knows in advance how the tragic narrative will end. In fact, it is preferable that he should know it. For knowledge is timeless, and the more thoroughly he knows every step of the plot, the more he acquires the feel of a timeless perspective. The successive stages of dramatic action unfold, not as a surprise, but as the inexorable march of a foregone conclusion.

Although he understands and even appreciates the hero's courageous defiance, he watches with something of the detachment with which he might watch a fly fall prey to the spider.

He does indeed identify with the victim sufficiently to derive a vicarious sense of dangerous living. From his transcendent level of understanding, however, he can afford a sardonic smile at the feverish preoccupations of mortal men, secure in the knowledge that the truth, after all, is the whole.

So much for the analysis of the tragic view of life. The remainder of this chapter will compare it with the biblical. The full development of biblical philosophy has had to wait until recent times, when the contemporary work of such writers as Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, Abraham Heschel, Gregory Dix, Claude Tresmontant, John Bowman, G. Ernest Wright, and others has not only established it as a respectable metaphysical alternative, but has also shown that at nearly every point it stands in flat contradiction to tragedy.

The mainspring of tragic philosophy, for example, is the double perspective. But biblical philosophy acknowledges no such convenient pretext for equivocation. Throughout the Bible there runs a single criterion of both truth and goodness, equally applicable "on earth as it is in heaven." This is the philosophical significance of the concept of God as Creator. It contradicts the tragic notion that the relation of God to the world is properly expressed as that of the infinite to the finite, the absolute to the relative, or the timeless to the temporal. Whereas tragedy regards this present world as the negation of the "divine," the Bible asserts that there is no necessary incompatibility between it and the very nature of God himself. He has upset the calculations of the tragic philosopher by creating the kind of world in which he can be quite at home. Even if the Old Testament accounts of God's walking on the earth are not historically true, the point remains that he is the kind of God who could do so, if he chose. And in the New Testament, he did so choose. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The spatial, temporal, physical

conditions of human existence were proven to be not the negation of the divine but the expression of his will.

Men therefore need not apologize for applying all‑too‑human conceptions to God. As William Poteat has shown in a penetrating recent essay,²⁵ the relation between God and the world can be described with a common language and within a single philosophical perspective. The same words which apply peculiarly to human beings, as distinct from the rest of creation, are the very words which provide the clue to the nature of God: will, purpose, responsibility, intelligence, the discrimination of good and evil, forgiveness, love, even chagrin. From a Greek point of view, such a claim would appear as the height of hybris, a presumptuous attempt to arrogate divine honors to mere men.²⁶ Intellectual issues, of course, are never settled by resort to moral epithet. The person who prefers to consider the question on the moral level, however, may well ponder whether it is more "prideful" to allow God the freedom to create the kind of world the Bible describes, or to insist a priori that he must not. Within the biblical context, true humility consists not in the indiscriminate depreciation of man and his capacities but in acknowledging that God's mind is unreadable and his actions full of surprises: "How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord . . . ?" (Romans 11:33‑34); "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord" (Isaiah 55:8).

The Bible does recognize a discrepancy between certain facts of life and the will of God. But this discrepancy is moral, not metaphysical. It is a disparity between life as it often is, and life as it could be and ought to be. The biblical understanding of the conflicts and calamities of existence is therefore completely different from the tragic. Whereas the latter sees them as the inevitable consequence of the clash of equal and

opposite forces, the former regards neither the conflict as inevitable nor the forces as neutral. For the Bible, conflict is not integral to life, but adventitious to it. The many "pairs of opposites" are not necessarily at war with one another. While vitality and form may at times be at cross purposes, they do not necessarily conflict. When they do, it is because of the dislocation of God's plan for the world, and not because of any inherent necessity. As Reinhold Niebuhr has aptly said, "Life is thus not at war with itself. Its energy is not in conflict with its order."²⁷

In holding that human disaster need not happen, the Bible takes a far more serious view of it than tragedy, which either capitulates in resignation or exhausts itself in futile protest. The Bible also takes disaster more seriously in another respect, in the frank and unequivocal acknowledgment of it as evil. Where tragedy tends to call one and the same event both good, from one perspective, and evil, from the other, there is no trace of such ambivalence in the Bible. Evil is constantly called by its right name, and is not finally merged with the good in an alleged ultimate unity of things. In contrast to the notion that evil is really good in disguise, so common in tragic philosophy, the Bible's constant refrain is the seriousness and significance of the choice between them:

Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good (Romans 12:9).

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live (Amos 5:14).

Test all things; hold fast to that which is good (I Thessalonians 5:21).

Follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God (III John 11).

There is, of course, a certain reserve about men's ability always and accurately to detect evil. "Judgment is mine, saith the Lord." There is also an appreciation of the fact that in the complexities of life good and evil may, as Reinhold Niebuhr has repeatedly pointed out, become so intricately intertwined that any given act or situation may be compounded of both. But tile Bible never confuses the creative with the destructive. Its retort to tragic ambiguity is, "Woe to them that call good evil and evil good" (Isaiah 5:20).

Since life is a battleground not of equal opposites but of good and evil, salvation is to be found in exactly the kind of life which, on the tragic view, is doomed to folly and defeat. Instead of cultivating the aesthetic insulation of the detached observer, the Christian engages in a life of active partisanship on the finite level. For God himself is decidedly partisan in human history: "I am the Lord . . . that frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish" (Isaiah 44:24‑25). The life‑and‑death question is, therefore, not whether to take sides, but which side to join:

Behold, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live .... But if thine heart turn away, so that thou shalt worship other gods, and serve them, ye shall surely perish (Deuteronomy 30:15, 19, 17, 18).

Life's deepest questions thus find their answer not in speculative theory or aesthetic ecstasy but in allegiance to God and alignment with his purposes. Instead of the splayed consciousness induced by the tension and ambivalence of tragedy, the Christian hopes for a personality unified through its focus upon the only possible source of unity, the will of its Creator.

Thus far the biblical interpretation of life bears a certain

resemblance to the morality play. The theme of both is the freedom of men to align themselves with the forces of either good or evil, and the ultimate triumph of good. Within limits, the Bible, like the morality play, sees in the disasters of history a certain degree of poetic justice. For one thing, since all men become involved in the perpetuation of evil, there is none who can claim total innocence: "Whom the Lord loveth, he also chasteneth." In the second plate, there will one day be a time of reckoning and a last judgment, when injustice will be redressed. Thirdly, even in the short run, the apparent success of the unrighteous may be accompanied by a gnawing inner anxiety and torment, while the man who fails by worldly standards may still possess those inner resources which are not for sale.

But here the similarity between the Bible and the morality play ends. The Bible does not define goodness in terms of moral "do's" and "don't's," but as allegiance to the Creator. The moralist's rule book is simply an abortive attempt to construct an external facsimile of the quality of life that results from this allegiance. "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent" (John 6:29). Hence the destruction which the sinner brings upon himself is not meted out with the vindictiveness of a moralistic censor, nor, for that matter, with the dispassionate impartiality of tragic destiny. Rather, heaven itself is grieved at the loss of a single soul: "I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matthew 9:13); "More joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons" (Luke 15:7).

The Bible is able to take the more compassionate attitude toward the sinner because, though he sins voluntarily, he has also been deceived. He allows himself to be hoodwinked by false promises. The classic instance, of course, is Eve's con-

versation with the serpent. She lets herself be persuaded that the serpent's account of the forbidden fruit is true, rather than God's. Though she is responsible, she has also been victimized. Hence the close correlation between deceit and sin (see Hebrews 3:13; Romans 7:14), and hence the designation of the devil as the "father of lies" (see John 8:44; Revelation 12:9, 20:10). The Bible chronicles the pathetically similar devices by which the devil has repeatedly persuaded mankind to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Thanks to this concept of self‑induced ignorance, the Bible abounds in scenes of dramatic irony somewhat comparable to those of tragedy. Oedipus ignorantly pronounces a curse upon himself; in the role of judge, he is obliged to condemn himself; his very wisdom leads him into blindness, both figurative and literal. The Bible matches this with the ringing words of Nathan to King David, "Thou art the man!" There is also a poignant irony in the words by which the high priests seek to justify their liquidation of Jesus: "It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people .... If we let him alone . . . the Romans shall come and take away both our place and ration." Of course, one man did die for the people, though not in the sense they intended, and the Romans still came and took away their place and nation.²⁸ At the trial of Jesus, it is quite clear who is really on trial. And when Pilate asks Jesus his famous question, "What is truth?" the truth is standing directly before him, but he cannot recognize it.

There is, however, a significant difference between tragic and biblical irony. In both cases, irony is the result of ignorance. But in tragedy, this ignorance is the inevitable consequence of the human condition, of the hero's involvement in the necessities of action. For the Bible, it is due to willing self‑deception, and therefore affects only the person who forsakes the Lord. From the biblical point of view, the

CHAPTER 1 EDMOND La B. CHERBONNIER

Biblical Faith and the Idea of Tragedy

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