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Christian Theology and Tragedy Theologians Tragic
Literature and Tragic Theory 1st Edition Kevin Taylor
(Editor) Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Kevin Taylor (editor), Giles Waller (editor)
ISBN(s): 9780754669401, 0754669408
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.66 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english
Christian Theology and Tragedy
Theologians, Tragic Literature
and Tragic Theory

Edited by
Kevin Taylor
Giles Waller
 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND TRAGEDY

Christianity can never turn its back either on tragedy or the tragic; not if it wants to
face the world squarely. The tragic all too evidently occurs and tragedy meditates
upon it - raising metaphysical and theological issues in its wake. This remarkable
collection of essays stages imaginative dialogues between voices, characters and
situations across two and half millennia of writing. And out of the conversations
created, as theological and philosophical reflection engages literary studies and
biography, comes a dazzling cross-fertilisation of thought and feeling. I have never
encountered a collection like this. It offers original and profound deliberations on
issues riddling human histories and sounding the mysterious depths of the human
condition itself.
Graham Ward, Professor in Contextual Theology and Ethics,
University of Manchester, UK

Can notions of a final and complete redemption, so central to Christian conviction,

be reconciled with the tragic vision and its acceptance of the irretrievability of
certain kinds of failure? The complexities involved here are not just theological,
but also involve themes central to literature, philosophical anthropology, and the
history of ideas. This excellent collection, by scholars belonging to a variety of
intellectual traditions, casts a new light on this question, while eschewing the
temptations of an easily gained clarity. It will certainly be a point of reference for
subsequent discussions of this topic.
Kenneth Surin, Professor of Literature and Professor of Religion
and Critical Theory, Duke University, USA

Drawing together leading scholars from both theological and literary backgrounds,
Christian Theology and Tragedy explores the rich variety of conversations between
theology and tragedy. Three main areas are examined: theological readings of a
range of tragic literature, from plays to novels and the Bible itself; how theologians
have explored tragedy theologically; and how theology can interact with various
tragic theories.

Encompassing a range of perspectives and topics, this book demonstrates how

theologians can make productive use of the work of tragedians, tragic theorists
and tragic philosophers. Common misconceptions – that tragedy is monolithic,
easily definable, or gives straightforward answers to theodicy – are also addressed.
Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to both the theological and literary
fields.
 Ashgate Studies in Theology,
Imagination and the Arts
Series Editors:

Trevor Hart, St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Jeremy Begbie, Duke University and University of Cambridge, USA
Roger Lundin, Wheaton College, USA

What have imagination and the arts to do with theology? For much of the modern era, the
answer has been, ‘not much’. It is precisely this deficit that this series seeks to redress. For,
whatever role they have or have not been granted in the theological disciplines, imagination
and the arts are undeniably bound up with how we as human beings think, learn and
communicate, engage with and respond to our physical and social environments and, in
particular, our awareness and experience of that which transcends our own creatureliness.
The arts are playing an increasingly significant role in the way people come to terms
with the world; at the same time, artists of many disciplines are showing a willingness to
engage with religious or theological themes. A spate of publications and courses in many
educational institutions has already established this field as one of fast growing concern.
This series taps into a burgeoning intellectual concern on both sides of the Atlantic
and beyond. The peculiar inter-disciplinarity of theology, and the growing interest in
imagination and the arts in many different fields of human concern, afford the opportunity
for a series which has its roots sunk in varied and diverse intellectual soils, while focused
around a coherent theological question: How are imagination and the arts involved in the
shaping and reshaping of our humanity as part of the creative and redemptive purposes of
God, and what roles do they perform in the theological enterprise?
Many projects within the series have particular links to the work of the Institute for
Theology Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews, and to the Duke
Initiatives in Theology and the Arts at Duke University.

Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon

Seeing the World with the Eyes of God
Clemena Antonova, with a preface by Martin Kemp

Redeeming Beauty
Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics
Aidan Nichols

Faith, Hope and Poetry

Theology and the Poetic Imagination
Malcolm Guite
Christian Theology and Tragedy
Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory

Edited by
KEVIN TAYLOR
Pfeiffer University, USA
GILES WALLER
University of Cambridge, UK
First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller 2011
Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Taylor, Kevin.
Christian theology and tragedy : theologians, tragic
literature and tragic theory. -- (Ashgate studies in
theology, imagination, and the arts)
1. Tragedy--History and criticism. 2. Religion and
literature. 3. Theology in literature.
I. Title II. Series III. Waller, Giles.
809.9'162-dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christian theology and tragedy : theologians, tragic literature, and tragic theory / [edited by]
Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller.
p. cm. -- (Ashgate studies in theology, imagination, and the arts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6940-1 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9704-6 (ebook)
1. Tragic, The--Religious aspects--Christianity. 2. Tragedy--History and criticism. 3.
Theology. I. Taylor, T. Kevin. II. Waller, Giles.
BR115.T73C47 2011
261.5'8--dc22
2011009817

ISBN 978 0 7546 6940 1 (hbk)

ISBN 978 1 3155 7191 1 (ebk)
 With much love and gratitude to our parents,
Tom & Faye Taylor and John & Jeanette Waller
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Contents

Notes on Contributors   ix

Introduction   1

Part I: Theology and Tragic Literature

1 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy   15

Ben Quash

2 Tragic Sacrifice and Faith: Abraham and Agamemnon Again   35

Jennifer Wallace

3 Primo Levi and the Tragedy of Dante’s Ulysses   53

Vittorio Montemaggi

4 ‘Thee thither in a whirlwind’: Tragedy and Theology in

Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens   75
Robin Kirkpatrick

Part II: Theologians and Tragedy

5 Freedom, Fate and Sin in Donald MacKinnon’s Use of Tragedy   101

Giles Waller

6 Simone Weil: Force, Tragedy, and Grace in Homer’s Iliad   119

Adrian Poole

7 Hans Urs von Balthasar and Christ the Tragic Hero   133
Kevin Taylor

8 The Tragedy is in the Pity: C.S. Lewis and the Song of the Goat   149
Michael Ward
viii Christian Theology and Tragedy

Part III: Theology Engaged with Tragic Theory

9 Participating in the Tragedy: Emplotting the Dionysian in Christian

Thought   167
Craig Hovey

10 Tragedy, Contingency and Atonement: Waiting for Godot

and Jesus of Montreal   181
Larry D. Bouchard

11 Sacrifice and the Tragic Imagination   199

Douglas Hedley

12 Tragedy Without Evasion: Attending [to] Performances   213

David S. Cunningham

Conclusion: Tragedy, Theology and the Discernment of Cries   233

David F. Ford

Bibliography   241
Index   255

An earlier version of Adrian Poole, ‘War and Grace: The Force of Simone Weil on
Homer’, first appeared in Arion 3rd series, 2.1 (Winter 1992): pp. 1–15. Reprinted
with permission.
 Notes on Contributors

Larry D. Bouchard is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University

of Virginia, teaching religion and literature, interpretation theory and modern
religious thought. His publications include Tragic Method and Tragic Theology
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989) and Theater and Integrity: Emptying
Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion (Northwestern University Press, 2011).

David S. Cunningham is Professor of Religion and the Director of the CrossRoads

Project at Hope College, Holland, Michigan. Some of his works that address
theology and tragedy include Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith Through
Literature and Film (Brazos Press, 2002); Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Literary
Meditations on Suffering, Death, and New Life (Westminster John Knox Press,
2007); and the forthcoming Theatre to the World: Toward a Dramatic Doctrine of
Revelation (Eerdmans).

David Ford is the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge

and the Acting Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme. His publications
include Christian Wisdom (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Shape of
Theology (Blackwell, 2007).

Douglas Hedley is Reader in Hermeneutics and Metaphysics in the Divinity

Faculty at the University of Cambridge, as well as a fellow and tutor at Clare
College, Cambridge. He is currently working on a trilogy on the religious
imagination.

Craig Hovey is Assistant Professor of Religion at Ashland University in Ashland,

Ohio. He is the author of Nietzsche and Theology (T&T Clark, 2008), To Share in
the Body (Brazos, 2008), and Speak Thus (Cascade, 2008).

Robin Kirkpatrick is Professor of Italian and English Literature in the Department

of Italian at the University of Cambridge. He has written a number of books on
Dante and on the Renaissance, and his new verse translation of the Commedia
with notes and commentary has recently been published by Penguin.

Vittorio Montemaggi is Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature at the

University of Notre Dame. He is the co-editor of Dante’s Commedia: Theology as
Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
x Christian Theology and Tragedy

Adrian Poole is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. He is the

author of the introduction to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Penguin,
2005), Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005) and
Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Blackwell, 1987).

Ben Quash is Professor of Christianity and the Arts in the Department of Theology
and Religious Studies, King’s College London. He is the author of a number of
articles on Hans Urs von Balthasar and theological aesthetics, and of a number
of books, including Balthasar at the End of Modernity, co-authored with Lucy
Gardner, David Moss and Graham Ward (T&T Clark, 1999); Theology and the
Drama of History (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Introducing Christian
Ethics, co-authored with Sam Wells (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

Kevin Taylor received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (Peterhouse).
He is an adjunct lecturer at Pfeiffer University and Belmont Abbey College, and
an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church.

Jennifer Wallace is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, an official fellow of

Peterhouse and the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge
University Press, 2007).

Giles Waller studied at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, for his undergraduate

degree in Divinity and is currently a PhD student there under David Ford. His
dissertation is on the tragic aspects of Luther’s theology.

Michael Ward is the chaplain of St Peter’s College, Oxford. He is the author

of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford
University Press, 2008), a work which became the subject of the BBC 1 television
documentary, The Narnia Code (2009). He is also the co-editor, with Robert
MacSwain, of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
 Introduction

‘Christianity’, wrote Donald MacKinnon, ‘can provide men with a faith through
which they are enabled to hold steadfastly to the significance of the tragic.’1
This statement may seem surprising. Surely Christianity, with its emphasis on
redemption, on the ‘sure and certain hope’ of the resurrection, is inimical to
tragedy, with its endings in despair or dusty death? It has often been assumed,
and less frequently cogently argued, that there must be some sort of inherent
antagonism or opposition between Christian and tragic ‘worldviews’. One could
cite many examples of this, but it is perhaps Richard Sewall who puts the point most
forcefully: ‘In point of doctrine, Christianity reverses the tragic view and makes
tragedy impossible.’2 Such assumptions seem to rest on monolithic understandings
of tragedy – or a hypostasized notion of ‘the tragic’ – and an equally caricatured
‘Christianity’. On this view, Christian theology is presented as a naive escapism.
Earthly sufferings, like those of Christ, are negated or rectified by a compensatory
heaven,3 or rendered philosophically or theologically coherent in theodicies. This
is just the sort of theology to which MacKinnon was opposed. Similarly, one has to
pass through a great deal of selective interpretation to arrive at a view of tragedy as
straightforwardly nihilistic. The chapters in this volume show that, far from there
being an inherent antagonism between Christian theology and tragedy, they share
at the very least areas of profound mutual concern: the experience of suffering,
death and loss, questions over fate, freedom and agency, sacrifice, guilt, innocence,
the limits of human understanding, redemption and catharsis. We might even press
this further, and maintain with MacKinnon that an attentiveness to tragedy is vital
to a properly disciplined Christian theology and that, by the same token, Christian
theology can be a way of vouchsafing the true significance of tragedy. With the
breakdown of these caricatures of Christianity and tragedy, new possibilities for
conversation are opened up.

1
Donald MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), p. 134.
2
Richard Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959),
p. 50.
3
See, for example, the great I.A. Richards, whose pronouncement on this might
be taken to be paradigmatic of this view: ‘Tragedy is only possible to a mind which is
for the moment agnostic or “Manichean”. The least touch of any theology which has a
compensating Heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal.’ The Principles of Literary Criticism
(London: Kegan Paul, 1924), p. 246.
2 Christian Theology and Tragedy

Definitions and Resistance

Tragedy is a contested genre; according to one famous critic, a ‘dead’ one.4 There are
certainly disputes and confusion over what might meaningfully be called ‘tragedy’.
In grasping for a definition, many theorists have attempted to identify an ‘essence’
of tragedy, what Terry Eagleton, in a chapter aptly named ‘A Theory in Ruins’,
refers to as a ‘hunt for the Holy Grail of a faultless definition of the subject’.5 With
great satirical relish, Eagleton punctures a whole host of definitions and theories
of tragedy, concluding that ‘no definition other than “very sad” has ever worked’.6
Attempts to reduce one’s account of tragedy to a normative essence – for example
the notion that for a work to be tragic it must end in despair – frequently founder on
the obstinate resistance of particular works. A great many works that are habitually
accorded the status of tragedy do not end straightforwardly in despair, Aeschylus’
Oresteia being perhaps the primary example. George Steiner is one such critic
whose attempts to isolate ‘authentic’ or ‘absolute’ tragedy,7 a tragedy that is free
from ‘contamination by hope’,8 distil an essence of tragedy that is bound to be seen
in conflict with Christian theology, ‘contaminated’, as it must be, by some kind
of hope. David Cunningham in his chapter for this volume identifies just such a
manoeuvre in the recent critique levelled by David Bentley Hart against the ‘tragic
theology’ of Donald MacKinnon and Nicholas Lash.9 A procrustean and narrowly
drawn theory of tragedy is adopted, and then demonstrated to be in opposition
to theology. Such an approach closes down meaningful conversation between
tragedy and theology because it prematurely sets the terms of the conversation
within narrowly confined, and often rather tendentious, concepts of tragedy and
theology. The chapters in this volume aim to pursue a series of richer and more
varied conversations, alive to the diversity and complexity of both tragedy (and
theoretical accounts of tragedy) and theology. Indeed, this is one of the strengths of

4
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).
5
Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
p. 5.
6
Eagleton, p. 3.
7
George Steiner, ‘Tragedy, Pure and Simple’ in M.S. Silk, ed., Tragedy and the
Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 534–47,
and George Steiner, ‘“Tragedy,” Reconsidered’, in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 29–44.
8
‘Where the axiom of human estrangement, of survival itself as somewhat scandalous,
is attenuated, where it is blurred by concepts of redemption, of social melioration (an
old-age home for Lear), where messianic intervention is harnessed, we may indeed have
serious drama, didactic allegory of the loftiest sort, lament and melancholy (the Trauerspeil
analyzed by Walter Benjamin.) But we do not have tragedy in any absolute sense. We have
contamination by hope …’ Steiner, ‘“Tragedy,” Reconsidered’, p. 32.
9
See pp. 215–28. Cunningham’s is one of several chapters in this volume to engage
directly with Hart’s critique.
 Introduction 3

a collection of contributions, as opposed to a monograph on the subject: a plurality

of approaches, readings and theories can be heard. The authors in this volume
develop varied and non-prescriptive understandings of tragedy and theology and
their points of connection. The effect is not that of a single epic narrative voice,
but of the multiple, occasionally dissonant voices of drama.
Theories about tragedy and the tragic have existed from shortly after the
genre’s origins, dating back to Plato and Aristotle. The medieval period was
relatively silent on tragedy, apart from some scattered references in Chaucer
and Dante.10 The Renaissance and its rediscovery of classical tragedies see the
beginnings of a renewed interest in tragedy and the hedging it about with a wealth
of complex theories. It is Elizabethan England that produces not only the great
tragedies of Marlowe and Shakespeare, but also an interest in tragic theory (as
Robin Kirkpatrick’s chapter shows).11
The tendency to make generalizations and hypostases out of tragedy is
not new. It dates at least as far back as German Idealism, whereby ‘the tragic’
became a cipher for the Kantian antinomy between nature and freedom.12 With
Friedrich Schelling the philosophical reception of tragedy begins to calcify into
a ‘tragic worldview’, which reaches its zenith with Schopenhauer, for whom
tragedy discloses existence itself to be a crime – an insight that occasions a kind
of sublime resignation. Adrian Poole observes that it is Hegel who ‘turns tragedy
into Tragedy’.13 The theological implications of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s
philosophical crystallizations of tragedy are discussed by Douglas Hedley and
Craig Hovey in this volume.
And yet tragedy resists such reductions and generalizations. Indeed, the
very resistance of tragedy to an adequate and totalizing general theory might be
taken to be one of its key features. The descriptive failure of tragic theory might,
Jennifer Geddes claims, tell us something about the tragic itself: ‘that there is
something about it which ruptures our very ability to see clearly, state concisely,
think neatly, know completely’.14 In encountering tragedy, especially on the stage,
we are always confronted with a particular character, embodied by a particular

10
For a history of reflection on tragedy during this period, see Henry Ansgar Kelly,
Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
11
See pp. 75–100.
12
For a discussion of the post-Kantian philosophical reception of tragedy, see Miguel
Beistegui and Simon Sparks, eds, Philosophy and Tragedy (London: Routledge, 2000), and
Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002). As Szondi points out, Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is a ‘poetics’. It is not until
Schelling that the philosophical ‘idea’ of the tragic is developed.
13
Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 61.
14
Jennifer L. Geddes, ‘Religion and the Tragic’, Literature and Theology 19.2 (2005):
p. 98.
4 Christian Theology and Tragedy

actor. Narratives and experiences of suffering cannot easily be wrenched from

their dramatic context and extrapolated into general theories or maxims. As Simon
Goldhill reminds us in an essay on the subject: ‘Every character in an Athenian
tragedy who thinks he can escape from the specific family into which he was born
discovers, like Aeschylus’s Eteocles, that the curse of the family never leaves.’15
This concern for particularity as opposed to the universal is shared by Christian
theologians emphasizing the contingent historicity of the Incarnation.
Of course even failed, partial or inadequate theories (such as we might term
Nietzsche’s or Hegel’s) can be of great value. That tragedy is ultimately resistant
to conceptual definition and broader theory does not put an end to the discussion.
Rather than seeking a rigid definition or essence of tragedy, many critics are
content to discern a loose affiliation between works which share characteristics
and sensibilities. Donald MacKinnon, whose work is central to this volume, uses
the Wittgensteinian notion of a ‘family resemblance’ between tragedies.16 It may
be that not all works that we would wish to term ‘tragedies’ share a single, unitary
feature, but are rather connected by a series of overlapping characteristics. Thus
one could readily object to the statement ‘All tragedies must end in despair without
hope or reconciliation.’ There are some works that we would wish to regard
meaningfully as tragedies that do not meet this criterion, not least among which
is the Oresteia. Ben Quash’s chapter in this volume is particularly illuminating on
what we might take to be characteristic of tragedy, stating: ‘At the broadest level,
the tragic may be summarized as the woundingly “embroiled” character of human
action.’17 Eschewing procrustean definition, Quash outlines a series of ‘marks’ of
the tragic which summarize what we might take to be key characteristics that
demarcate the ‘family resemblance’ of tragedies:

It is said to delineate the irreconcilability of private and public obligation (the

manifold ways in which human beings who try to be ‘We’ find they can only be
collections of ‘I’s). It holds before us the irreversibility of time. It holds before
us the permanence of loss. It highlights the bitter irony that so many instances
of human greatness harbour the flaws that are precisely their destruction.
Above all … it shows us to be the prisoners of dungeons of our own making:
our capabilities turned to culpabilities. But it also shows us to be prisoners of
dungeons not of our own making (made instead by the gods, for example): held
to be culpable even when we have no capability.18

15
Simon Goldhill, ‘Generalizing About Tragedy’, in Felski, Rethinking Tragedy,
p. 60.
16
Donald MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars (Collins: The Fontana Library,
1969), p. 42.
17
See p. 15.
18
See p. 18 this volume.
 Introduction 5

Interpreting Tragedy

From Aristotle onwards, tragedy has been regarded as the most elevated and
prestigious of art forms. Its diction is lofty, its protagonists noble. An aristocrat
among literary forms, it is concerned with royal houses, those set apart from the
common lot, whose fate has ramifications for a city, people or kingdom. But with
the nineteenth century there was a shift in sensibility, form and subject matter.
With the rise of the bourgeoisie, tragedy was democratized, such as in Büchner’s
Woyzeck. For critics like Steiner, this is what sounds the death knell of tragedy;
an elitist, patrician form cannot survive the passage into commonplace bourgeois
culture intact. For Terry Eagleton, however, bourgeois modernity and democracy
do not so much dissipate tragedy as universalize it:

Tragedy, that privileged preserve of gods and spiritual giants, has now been
decisively democratized – which is to say, for the devotees of gods and giants,
abolished. Hence the death-of-tragedy thesis. Tragedy, however, did not vanish
because there were no more great men.19

After Freud, we are all tragic protagonists, formed by the pity and fear of Oedipus.
Just as the sort of person considered worthy of the status of tragic subject has
broadened, so have the forms of tragedy. For all but the conservative purist, the
novel is a form capable of tragedy, from Melville and Hardy to Faulkner and
Toni Morrison. Many critics are now willing to speak of various forms of non-
dramatic tragedy. The visual arts present us with images that might reasonably
be termed tragic, a locus classicus of theological discussion being the Crucifixion
from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Film is another medium that
is increasingly being analysed in terms of tragedy; Larry Bouchard’s treatment
of Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal in this volume shows the rich potential of
such an engagement. What of documentary photography? Or contemporary news
media, so quick to describe events as tragic? Here the boundary between art and
life is blurred.20
‘Tragedy’ is a technical term, denoting a particular artistic genre. But it has
become a commonplace label to describe all too common experiences and events:
the death of a child, terrorist atrocities or the death of young soldiers in Afghanistan,
cast in terms of tragic sacrifice, as Jennifer Wallace discusses in her chapter in this
volume.21 The era in which tragedy as an art form has supposedly died has seen
more than its share of catastrophic suffering in world wars, genocides, famines,
terrorism, natural disasters and political oppression. The legitimacy of using

19
Eagleton, p. 94.
20
For a discussion of the tragic potential of documentary photography and other non-
dramatic forms, see Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 158–88.
21
See pp. 35–52.
6 Christian Theology and Tragedy

the term ‘tragic’ to refer to real-life events has been disputed by many critics,
especially those eager to preserve its aesthetic precision for a literary genre. As
Eagleton reminds us, the use of ‘tragedy’ to refer to real life is figurative: ‘Tragedy
begins as art, which life then imitates’, but these artistic resonances may then drop
out of the term altogether: ‘The word thus progresses from art, to life with an echo
of art, to life.’22
When engaging with tragedy, how are theologians to negotiate the tensions
and slippages between literary discussions at a formal level, and the sort of
discussions of tragedy that have seemingly very little to do with literature? Larry
Bouchard, in a particularly rich and sophisticated monograph on the relationship
between tragedy and theology, begins with the premise ‘tragedy is a method of
enquiry into the tragic’.23 Literary and other artistic forms of tragedy represent and
interrogate human experiences of suffering. Even though it may be in the idiom
of another culture’s moral imagination, unless artistic tragedy is seen as in some
sense mimetic of human experiences, there can be little point in theologians taking
an interest in it. A rigid separation between tragic literature, philosophical tragic
theory and tragic experience is likely to be too clear-cut, and there are bound to
be slippages between these categories. Nevertheless this collection is organized
roughly with this division in mind, separating tragic literature from tragic theory,
with a third grouping for how particular theologians have dealt with the problems
of tragic literature and experience.

Theology and Tragedy

Just as critics who assume an inherent antagonism between tragedy and theology
have operated with truncated concepts of tragedy, so they have caricatured
Christian theology in terms of a naive or bland optimism. There are undoubtedly
forms of Christian thought and practice that do exclude the insights and reflection
offered by tragedy. However, it is one of the claims of this book that, particularly
in our present historical moment, theologians ignore these insights and modes of
exploration at their peril. For centuries Christian theologians have wrestled with
what David Ford has termed ‘the dark mystery of evil and the bright mystery
of goodness’.24 In his conclusion to this volume, Ford makes an urgent case for
the renewed theological reception of and engagement with tragedy. In the wake
of the immensity of suffering seen in the twentieth century, tragedy can aid in
the development of a theology that does justice to the realities and power of sin,
suffering and evil.

22
Eagleton, p. 14.
23
Larry Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama
and Religious Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 1.
24
David Ford, Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), p. 77.
 Introduction 7

Properly oriented Christian theology is begun, continued and refreshed in

reflection on Scripture, and the Bible is rich in what Ben Quash identifies in his
chapter as ‘tragic tropes’. The narratives of the Fall, of the Old Testament’s Saul,
of David’s political and familial crises, of Job, Samson, Judah, Jephthah, of the fall
of Israel and Jerusalem, the despairing poetry of the Psalms and Lamentations, the
figure of Judas Iscariot and the Passion of Christ: these are but some of the elements
that might be considered under the rubric of ‘biblical tragedy’. The Bible has been
a rich source of tragic material for artists and dramatists, from Racine’s Athalie
(the reprehensible Old Testament queen) to Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Thomas
Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (which retells the King Saul and David
saga). There has been a theological interest in tragedy from the early Christian
centuries. Clement of Alexandria extensively quoted the Attic tragedians, noting
with approval how the pagan Euripides hints at humanity’s innate relationship
with heaven (fragment 935). The early Hebrew tragedian, Ezekiel the Tragic Poet
(circa the second century bc), was called a ‘poet of Jewish tragedies’ by Eusebius
(Praep. Evang. IX.28); and Boethius, as well as his tragic image of the Wheel of
Fortune, refers to the Incarnation as a ‘tremendous tragedy’.25 Another work to
deploy Euripides to theological ends is the Greek Christos Paschon (also known in
Latin translation as the Christus Patiens), long attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus
but possibly a Byzantine work of the twelfth century. This renders Christ’s final
hours as a tragic drama, assembling lines from Euripides and placing the Hebrew
women at the cross as the Greek chorus.26
This theological interest in tragedy has grown in the twentieth century,
doubtlessly influenced by the Holocaust and the century’s horrific wars and
genocides. The most extensive theological engagement with tragedy has come
from the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988). Kevin
Taylor examines Balthasar’s claim that Christ is the ‘heir to all tragedy’ in Chapter
7. Following Balthasar, the Scottish Anglican philosopher and theologian Donald
MacKinnon (1913-1994), in a remarkable series of essays and lectures, carried
out an intensely searching and unflinching interrogation of theology in the light
of tragedy; his work is treated by Giles Waller in Chapter 5. Through his years of
teaching in Oxford, Aberdeen and Cambridge, MacKinnon exerted an enormous
influence over a generation of leading British theologians, and has been largely
responsible for renewed interest in engagements between theology and tragedy.

25
‘At si noua ueraque non ex homine sumpta caro formata est, quo tanta tragoedia
generationis? Ubi ambitus passionis? Ego quippe ne in homine quidem non stulte fieri puto
quod inutiliter factum est’ (But if flesh had been formed new and real and not taken from
man, to what purpose was the tremendous tragedy of the conception? Where the value of
His [long] Passion? I cannot but consider foolish even a human action that is useless).
Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, ch. 5, Loeb Classical Library, pp. 105–6.
26
For a discussion of the manuscript history of this text, see André Tuilier, ed.,
Gregoir de Nazianze. La Passion du Christ: Tragedie, Sources Chrétiennes, 149 (Paris:
Editions du Cerf, 1969), pp. 75–116.
8 Christian Theology and Tragedy

Published in 2003, Terry Eagleton’s monumental study Sweet Violence: The

Idea of the Tragic has reignited interest in the theological dimensions of tragedy,
as a special issue of the journal Literature and Theology in 2005 dedicated to
theological responses to Eagleton’s work attests.27 While there is no single chapter
in the present volume devoted to Eagleton’s work, the frequency of references to it
across a range of contributions at least gestures towards its significance.
For both Balthasar and MacKinnon, Christian theology has fallen too much
under the sway of the victory won by the philosophers over the tragic poets. An
attention to tragedy recalls us to the particular, a particularity hallowed by the
entrance of the divine into the contingencies of human history. Such a theology is
unlikely to be naive or escapist. And yet both incarnational theology and tragedy
share a mysterious quality. Tragedy, like the skandalos of the Cross, is what most
demands, and yet simultaneously most resists, theoretical and abstract explanation.
This is a dynamic that this collection of chapters sets out to explore.
‘Tragic theologies’ like those of Balthasar, MacKinnon and Lash have their
theological detractors, most notably John Milbank and David Bentley Hart. Their
critiques are addressed in a number of the chapters in this volume, and in some
detail by Ben Quash (Chapter 1) and David Cunningham (Chapter 12). Milbank
and Hart are quite right that theology must never be ‘reduced’ to tragedy; nor can
its basic terms be determined by it. Theologians must be wary, as MacKinnon
saw, for all of his unflinching attention to the questions posed by tragedy, of
making an idol of the darkness, of a ‘certain sort of self-indulgent wallowing
in the beastliness of things’.28 The charges of embracing a pagan tragic fatalism
or of endorsing a ‘sacrificial order’ that is at odds with Christian hope must be
continually borne in mind by theologians engaging with tragedy. In the desire
to take the depths of human suffering with utmost seriousness, theologians must
resist a Schopenhauerian resignation in the face of this suffering.
But tragedy is not, as Hart has charged, merely the confirmation of a violent
order, a sort of theodicy that justifies the status quo. Rather, it frequently articulates
an impassioned protest against that order. ‘There is a world elsewhere’, says
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (3.3.167), signifying something beyond the present
action, setting and strictures. Adrian Poole takes this as part of tragedy’s exploration
of imagined spaces, be they offstage or only evoked in the mind; tragedy tends to
operate in the borderlands, the spaces betwixt and between.29 Along these lines,
tragic literature can be seen as a protest against present conditions and a yearning
for another, better place – far from a tragic acceptance of fatalism, but nor is it a
naive optimism. Such a protest can be made against various objects: circumstance,
fate, an event, the cosmos itself or the nature of human existence. Coriolanus’
remonstrance is against the actions of his native city, which has forgotten him and

27
Literature and Theology 19.22 (2005).
28
Donald MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: A&C Black, 1957), p. 238.
29
Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987), p. 166.
 Introduction 9

his protections. Eustacia’s cry, in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, is
against her entrapped existence and the entangled plot of human passions: ‘O, the
cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world!’30 The irrationality and even
immorality of the world is a biblical problem as well, found in Ecclesiastes, Job
and parts of the Psalms.
‘Betwixt and between’; the Christian experience of the world is one of
ambiguity, in the ‘middle of the journey of our lives’, ‘lost’, like Dante, ‘in a
dark wood’ of sin, waiting for grace. George Steiner, in a celebrated passage of
Real Presences (a passage that is rather more hospitable to the notion of Christian
tragedy than his Death of Tragedy), evokes the image of Holy Saturday, ‘the
longest of days’.31 We wait, between the memory, trauma and despair of Good
Friday and the expectant hope of Easter. The experience is neither one of nihilism,
nor one of bland optimism. It is one in which we learn the difference between
optimism and hope, in which we are only able to hope for the best by confronting
the worst. As Hardy enjoined, ‘Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it
exacts a full look at the Worst’ (‘In Tenebris II’).

The Goals of this Book

This collection of chapters ranges widely over a series of conversations between

theology and tragedy. Our aim has been to bring together theologians with an
interest in literature, and literary scholars with an interest in theology, and to
invite them to reflect broadly on a cross-disciplinary theme. While the resulting
contributions traverse the disciplinary boundaries of literary studies and theology,
their emphases might be thought to be more ‘conceptual’ than ‘historical’. The
primary focus is not the ‘role of religion’ or the identification of religious themes
in the work of a particular author, but rather the broader theological insights that
emerge from an engagement with tragedy.
In approaching such a diverse set of interactions, there are inevitably missing
figures and neglected topics; one could never hope to be comprehensive of such a
massive topic. Instead, the studies engage three major fields of intersection between
theology and tragedy: tragic literature and specific tragic works, theologians
who have examined tragedy, and tragic theory. The boundaries between these
categories are naturally porous, so that some of the chapters move back and forth
through these three larger categories. The chapters cover an enormous span of
time, seeking to do justice to the immense diversity of tragedy, from its Attic
origins to its Renaissance and modern forms, and its importance for theoretical

30
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet, Oxford World’s
Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 341 (bk 5, ch. 7).
31
George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say? (London:
Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 231. For an evocative theological discussion, see Nicholas Lash,
‘Friday, Saturday, Sunday’, New Blackfriars 71.836 (1990), pp. 109–19.
10 Christian Theology and Tragedy

and philosophical thought. In our selection of material the primary focus has been
on literary tragedy, without, Larry Bouchard’s treatment of Jesus of Montreal
excepted, much treatment of visual, operatic or filmic arts.
The first section tackles the interaction between theology and tragic
literature, and encompasses the discussion of Scripture, Agamemnon, Dante and
Shakespeare. In Chapter 1, Ben Quash discusses four biblical characters and
corrects the misprision that tragedy is alien to the Bible. Outlining a tragic theory
that is attentive to the particularities of history, Quash develops a response to recent
theological critiques of ‘tragic theology’. Jennifer Wallace traces the significance
of Kierkegaard and tragic sacrifice in relation to Agamemnon and modern-day
military sacrifice (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3, Vittorio Montemaggi looks to Primo
Levi’s interest in Dante as inspiration for thinking about friendship and love in
ways that might contribute to the articulation of a Christian theological response
to tragic suffering. Shakespeare’s often neglected play, Timon of Athens, is used by
Robin Kirkpatrick to discuss tragic theory in the Elizabethan era and to tackle the
significance of Job (Chapter 4).
Our second grouping of studies delves more specifically into the ways in which
particular theologians have interacted with the concept of tragedy. Giles Waller
looks to Donald MacKinnon as a theologian who constantly returned to readings
of tragedy in ways that determinatively shaped his metaphysics, ethics, philosophy
of history and Christology (Chapter 5). Simone Weil’s interest in tragedy has not
received the attention it deserves, an omission that Adrian Poole corrects as he
examines Weil’s concepts of violence, necessity and grace in relationship to The
Iliad (Chapter 6). Kevin Taylor traces Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological use of
tragedy as a prefiguring of Christ and the Cross (Chapter 7). C.S. Lewis’ interest
in both prosaic and literary tragic suffering, as a Christian and literary scholar, is
explored by Michael Ward (Chapter 8).
Our final section looks more specifically to theology engaged with tragic
theorists and theories. Craig Hovey explores Nietzsche and finds that his interest
in human life as celebratory and affirming surprisingly resonates with Christian
conceptions, especially in contrast with the tragic ‘sermon of death’ (Chapter
9). The problem of contingency in tragedy and theology is discussed by Larry
Bouchard (Chapter 10) through a reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and
Denys Arcand’s film Jesus of Montreal. Douglas Hedley re-examines the topic of
tragic sacrifice in relation to the recurring questions of the religious interpretation
of tragedy, and the moral and aesthetic problem of taking pleasure in tragedy,
ranging over the post-Kantian philosophical reception of tragedy (Chapter 11).
In Chapter 12, David Cunningham examines the implications of developing a
more performance-based approach to the theological engagements with tragedy,
addressing recent critiques of the theological uses of tragedy. David Ford concludes
by tracing vital themes throughout the chapters, pointing to the significance of the
interaction and engagement with tragedy for future theology, and interrogating the
topic as a whole under the symbolic aspect of the anguished, human cry.
 Introduction 11

We have greatly benefited from the range of scholars who have participated in
and furthered this collection. A special thank you is due to David Cunningham and
to Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, who made invaluable comments on this introduction
and the project as a whole. In addition, the interest and support of our editor, Sarah
Lloyd at Ashgate Publishing, has been indispensible. She was willing to converse
with two graduate students on this topic and its possibilities for publication several
years ago and has seen it through with much patience, and to her we are most
grateful.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 PART I
Theology and Tragic Literature
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 1
Four Biblical Characters:
In Search of a Tragedy
Ben Quash

Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!)

The dungeon of thyself
Milton, Samson Agonistes (ll.155–6)

Is there a tragedy in the Bible? It is a contested question. This chapter goes in search
of what I will call ‘tragic tropes’, with the help of four of the biblical characters
who might most plausibly claim to be tragic figures. The first three of these are
Judah, Samson and Saul. I will critically assess the literary force of their stories
in dialogue with some specific theories about tragedy (all of them theologically
informed). I will ask whether the category of tragedy is at all appropriate to such
narratives, and then ask what figural relationship, if any, Christian theology might
see between these narratives and the story of Jesus in the Gospels. The chapter’s
treatment of the scriptural canon will thus – to some extent – be indebted to pre-
modern modes of reading the Bible figurally.
Invoking the category of tragedy – whether, as here, in the context of theological
discourse or else in terms of literary theory or of some other philosophical
framework – presses one to give it some kind of definition. At the broadest level,
the tragic may be summarized as the woundingly ‘embroiled’ character of human
action. The details of what that means and how Christians are to interpret it are
worked out in markedly different ways in contemporary theological debate. But
a paradigmatic form of this ‘embroilment’ which many of the biblical narratives
can be read as illustrating (as we shall see) is indicated in the words from Samson
Agonistes quoted at the head of this chapter: the way in which it is possible for
human beings to be the often unwitting perpetrators of their own enslavement;
to so far tangle themselves up that they cannot undo the knots or cut through the
meshes they have made. In particular, this embroilment often takes the form of a
warping of what we intuitively regard as the natural relation between capability
and culpability – and at two levels. Relatively easy to understand are the occasions
when our power to make moral decisions and follow them through (our capacity
for the good) finds itself confounded, vitiated and becomes even – to our surprise
– a decisive agent in the overthrow of our aspirations. Our moral capability can
even kill us in such cases. Much more darkly disorientating, though, are the
occasions when we appear to have no power at all to make moral decisions in
the first place, but still seem held to account. We discover a culpability that never
16 Christian Theology and Tragedy

knew capability. In both cases what we assumed were the normal mechanisms for
translating action into a creditable reward for our labours seem wholly lacking and
we stand helpless before the undoing of our selves. This is what Christian tradition
has described with its category of sin. It is what was at stake in Augustine’s battles
with the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians of his day.1
Ample recognition of this warping in the exercise of human agency there may
be both in the Bible and in the doctrinal legacy of Christian thought. However, my
eventual claim will be that the traditions of Christianity are neither of two things.
They are not straightforwardly tragic (because the divine Son had to die a human
death on the cross, for example); but nor are they untragic (because of Christianity’s
hope in the resurrection, for example). My view is that rather than stopping short
of tragedy, circumventing tragedy or resting with tragedy, Christianity’s doctrines
embrace and heighten tragedy when it is understood in a certain way. They do so
in order simultaneously to acknowledge tragedy’s full power to disrupt, disturb
and destroy – making people the dungeons of themselves – and also to let it mean
more than itself. Far from being anti-tragic, and concerned with the evasion or
denial of tragic experience, I will argue that the Christian narrative (including both
Old and New Testaments) is about a full entry into such experience, in order then
to suggest it might have a ‘beyond’ – thus refusing to make an idol of the tragic
moment. But, to repeat, this requires a particular understanding of what tragedy
is, and articulating such an understanding is one of the tasks of the chapter, to be
worked out as we proceed.
The title of this chapter deliberately echoes that of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921
play Six Characters in Search of an Author. In a work that provoked extreme
reactions at the time, Pirandello offers his audience the confusing spectacle of two
companies of actors encountering each other: a human cast in rehearsal for a play
and a body of characters who are not quite human. A stage direction suggests,
for example, that these latter might wear masks, with holes cut for eyes, nose and
mouth. They seem condemned eternally to re-enact a somewhat archetypal but
mesmerizing set of dramatic relations (guilt, vengeful anger, contempt, sorrow).
We learn that the author whose mind produced them never gave them embodiment
in an actual play and so they are doomed to roam the earth looking for someone
who will make them real. But when they act out their ‘parts’ for the benefit of the
professional actors in the cast, and when the cast then renders them back again, an
undecidability opens up about whether one is more truthful or ‘real’ than the other.
Pirandello writes in the notes to the play:

1
A recent discussion of this issue which makes use of the categories of capability and
culpability is Susannah Ticciati, ‘Augustinian Inscrutability and Pelagian Precipitousness’,
unpublished paper given at a Systematics seminar in Cambridge in 2009. I am indebted to
discussions with her for the development of these categories.
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 17

The playing […] by the ACTORS will appear from the very first words as
something completely different from what was played before, without its
having, even in the slightest degree, the air of a parody.2

The divergence provokes the character called the ‘Father’ to exclaim in reaction
to the efforts of the cast:

[T]hey play our parts well […] But when they act … To us they seem to be doing
something quite different. They want to be the same … And all the time they
just aren’t.3

Part of what the play achieves is a questioning of whether a clear division between
the cast as genuinely human and the characters as fictional ciphers really holds.
Pirandello plays with our conventional categories here, fielding the terms ‘real’ and
‘natural’ against each other in an ironizing move. He describes the six characters
as ‘unchangeable creations of the imagination and, therefore, more real and more
consistent than the ever-changing naturalness of the ACTORS’.4 But at the same
time as this idealist rhetoric conjures for us a realm of the ‘unchanging’ and the
‘consistent’, the play conveys the unavoidable historicity of action, and quietly
suggests that such historicity may be the real ‘reality’. Each performance must
be different. The performances may ‘want to be the same’, but ‘they just aren’t’.
No performance can be the same as another – and the moment the actions even of
the supposedly ‘unchangeable’ characters are placed onto a stage, they become
part of a historical series and susceptible to change, just as the performances of
the actors are. This is a play that exposes the location of all personal identity
in a process of historical flux, and thus the frailty of such identity. No one fully
inhabits his or her character. Even the characters are dispossessed of their ‘ideal’
ownership of who they are – and thus become more like the actors from whom
they regard themselves as distinct, at the exact moment that the actors enter ‘non-
parodically’ into a rendition of their story in which they, the ‘natural’ actors,
become characters.
Taken as a whole, this play – like Pirandello’s other works – both shows us the
uniqueness and the limitation that go with our historical finitude. Our actions are
not generalizable; other people would play our parts differently. But at the same
time, the play suggests hauntingly that no action in any of our own lives is purely
ours either. We depend on others to write the plays in which we might play a full
part (discovering what may in fact remain forever unwritten), and our attempts
to play some sort of part anyway may involve us adopting all sorts of inherited,
conventional, archetypal or otherwise unwilled forms of behaviour which mean

2
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Frederick May
(London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 45.
3
Pirandello, p. 48.
4
Pirandello, p. 6.
18 Christian Theology and Tragedy

that we can never neatly say afterwards that we were ‘just ourselves’ when we
acted. Moreover, each action we undertake immediately floats free of us, and
becomes subject to what others will make of it.
Pirandello’s play helps us to set out certain fundamental issues for this chapter.
It will be especially helpful later on for the attention it draws to the category of
historicity, for although a wish to do justice to history is a uniting one for all the
theologians we will look at (in particular, Hart and Hart’s foils, as we shall see),
the question of how best to do so is one of the key points of contention between
different attitudes to the tragic in modern theology. This seems a good moment to
turn to outline these differing attitudes.

In Search of a Tragic Theory

As is often said, and amply recognized in this book as a whole, there is a bewildering
array of ways in which tragedy is conceived and defined. It is said to delineate
the irreconcilability of private and public obligation (the manifold ways in which
human beings who try to be ‘We’ find they can only be collections of ‘I’s). It holds
before us the irreversibility of time. It holds before us the permanence of loss.
It highlights the bitter irony that so many instances of human greatness harbour
the flaws that are precisely their destruction. Above all, as we noted at the outset,
it shows us to be the prisoners of dungeons of our own making: our capabilities
turned to culpabilities. But it also shows us to be prisoners of dungeons not of our
own making (made instead by the gods, for example): held to be culpable even
when we have no capability.
In the face of this concatenation of ‘marks’ of the tragic, which are rarely all
applicable at once, various recent and contemporary Christian theologians can be
found discussing tragedy in the service of articulating their theological positions.
Some are broadly for accommodating a tragic sensibility in Christian theology,
and include Donald MacKinnon, Nicholas Lash, Rowan Williams and Paul Janz.
Others are firmly against it, most notably in recent years David Bentley Hart
(drawing on John Milbank; although Milbank retains a more sensitive appreciation
of what literary tragedy seeks to convey – and why Christians might attend to it
– than Hart’s somewhat dismissive approach does). We will look at both sides in
what follows. As I have hinted already, one of the remarkable things in the midst
of this apparently robust difference of opinion is the joint commitment to history
from both sides. MacKinnon, Lash, Janz and others – in their various ways – say
tragedy is historicizing. Hart says tragedy is de-historicizing, and that only belief
in the resurrection gives us a truthful appreciation of history, and a truthful way of
living in history.
Janz’s book God, the Mind’s Desire will, for our purposes, serve well as
an example of the first position, not least because he works out his position in
careful dialogue with MacKinnon and thus represents his concerns too. The main
affirmation Janz wants to make of tragedy is its capacity to check the hubris of
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 19

‘idealism’ in its various forms. By idealism he means the claim that the empirically
known world is a mind-dependent reality. He traces the history of rational and
empirical enquiry in western thought, noting its ambition in most cases (Kant is a
notable exception) to achieve a ‘finality of resolution’ about the material it deals
with, a resolution achieved in the medium of the thoughts it thinks. His eventual
aim is to challenge this use of reason in its assimilation of God’s transcendence
to an abstract (and therefore conceptual, and therefore really immanent) notion
of ‘beyondness’. While presenting itself as an acknowledgement of world-limit
or radical alterity, this sort of abstract transcendence always remains a moment
within thought, and is therefore always secretly still a sort of resolution of
transcendence. The tragedies of human experience meanwhile (to which literary
tragedy, or ‘tragedy-as-discourse’, is at its best a faithful witness) present us with a
different kind of finality: ‘the radical inversion of any finality of resolution sought
for in rational and empirical enquiry’.5 He goes on to write:

[This is] instead utterly a finality of non-resolution, a sheerly intractable, non-

negotiable, empirically and morally indefeasible finality that ‘stumps’ every
conceivable theodicy, rationalization or apologetic strategy.6

While tragedy is not in any way a model for representing God’s transcendence
(‘for transcendence by definition admits of no representative model’7), it is
nonetheless instructive or illuminating in the way it delivers to us the idea that
there can be a different sort of finality, which thought genuinely refers to but yet
does not comprehend. The tragic, and with it the problem of evil, is the site at which
human experience meets as real (and not as a conceptual conundrum), a finality
of non-resolution. Otherwise, human action is always a work of comprehension
or resolution. Thus:

Orientation to the tragic – to the sheerly discontinuous in human life – allows

us to project our questioning to the transcendent like no other form of discourse
because it gives us factual, tangible examples in real empirical human
experience, of the finality of non-resolution that we must encounter in the
transcendent.8

A tragic sensibility is therefore a propaedeutic to a properly theological orientation

to transcendence. And the key thing here is that this tragedy-moved orientation to
real transcendence returns us more fully to history. The love of God is not some
timeless, ultimate coherence theory, not a supremely authoritative resolution, not

5
Paul D. Janz, God, the Mind’s Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 174.
6
Janz, p. 174.
7
Janz, pp. 175-6.
8
Janz, p. 175.
20 Christian Theology and Tragedy

‘the grandest, all-embracing holism’. All of these are fundamentally ahistorical

notions: leaps out of history to a fictive God’s-eye view. But ‘the “referent” we
seek for theological discourse will be found fundamentally nowhere else than in
the empirical history of God-with-us’.9
David Bentley Hart writes from a radically different starting point: the
ontological priority of peace, as celebrated in Milbank’s reading of Augustine’s
City of God. In this perspective, difference (even the violent differences of a fallen
order) must always refer back to its created potential as the coding of reality for the
sake of harmony. Any attempt to make tragic experience a fundamental feature of
creaturely life is a sort of idolatry. Tragedy must be relativized. In a framework of
committed hope, Christianity will refuse to absolutize specific examples of tragic
failure (even when aggregated) in the service of an unshakeable, dogged theory
of the human lot as only suffering and finitude. To be in the middle of history
also means to be in a position to be surprised by it – and tragedy is not surprising,
according to Hart. Tragedy is what world-weary minds have come to expect all too
readily, and sometimes to venerate. Much more truly surprising is the resurrection
– a genuine novelty irrupting within history as the disclosure of history’s good
origins and glorious end. Hart thus argues against turning the statement ‘it was
ever thus’ into the claim ‘it must ever be thus’. Christianity is equipped with a
capacity to question the tragic ‘givens’ of situations or world-descriptions with
which it is presented. As Milbank says, and Hart agrees, the Church can hold on
to ‘the possibility of atonement, and an atoning process’ even when faced with an
‘“academically precise” tracing of catastrophe’ in world history.10
Hart takes his argument even further. He claims that a concern with tragic
experience (especially tragic experience that is modelled on the Attic tragedies)
usually indicates a whole way of life and thought: a tragic world-view, a tragic
aesthetic, a desire to propagate ‘tragic wisdom’.11 He argues that these perspectives
and commitments are intrinsically antipathetic to Christianity’s own. And they are,
paradoxically, a sort of consolation to those who hold them: ‘the most narcotic
metaphysical solace of all’.12 Why? Because a tragic outlook defers all attempts to
understand the origins of evil, and to answer ultimate questions about the moral
intelligibility of the universe, and looks simply for an accommodation with evil’s
perceived nature. It is in a sense a sort of cosmic pragmatism, claiming a ‘realism’
that knows how the world goes, even if it does not know why. It sees the world’s
basic logic as a sacrificial one, and then sets about making whatever offerings
need to be made to keep the existence’s violences in balance, precisely by joining

9
Janz, p. 180.
10
John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997), p. 248.
11
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 374.
12
Hart, p. 375.
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 21

in with it and working with its forces. The wisdom tragedy imparts is one of
‘accommodation’:

resignation before the unsynthesizable abyss of being, a willingness on the part

of the spectator to turn back towards the polis as a refuge from the turmoils of a
hostile universe, reconciled to its regime and its prudential violences, its martial
logic.13

Hart objects to a particularly British tradition of theology which (by turning to

tragedy) has attempted to ‘make its uncertain way in the darkness of history,
through the ashes of the death camps and over the icy wastes of the gulags’ rather
than to cordon them off and evade their challenge.14 His objection is that these
tragic theologies eternalize a tragic ‘moment’ in their concern to treat tragic
experience with full seriousness. The crucifixion in particular (taken to include
the agony of Gethsemane and other events of the Passion sequence) becomes not
so much a contingent event as ‘the most inward meaning’ of history – even of
Easter. The resurrection is seen ‘to confirm, complete, or eternalize the crucifixion
(rather than vindicate the crucified over against a world order that crucifies and
mystifies its violences by way of a myth of chaos)’.15 Hart vehemently opposes
this reintroduction of the ‘same old tragic wisdom’ by Christianity’s back door. He
argues that the only ground for Christian protest, for rebellion against the hungry
gods of sacrifice, for faithfulness to the infinite worth of the individual victim is
‘to have the mad audacity to desire back what is lost, not as inward consolation,
but in the concrete exteriority of the gift’.16 Death will always be part of a dark
economy with pretensions to exhaustively define the world; the resurrection,
meanwhile, serves no economy at all – it simply surprises, and does so wholly
on its own terms. Death is an economy which God’s infinity can pass through as
though it were nothing at all, breaking its limits as it does so. Evil is thereby shown
to be incidental: ‘the superscribed text of a palimpsest, obscuring the aboriginal
goodness of creation’.17
Part of the reason it is not easy to adjudicate between Hart’s dismissal of ‘tragic
theology’ and the attempt by Janz and others to find lessons in it is that each
side is working with a significantly different understanding of what tragedy is.
For a start, as we have seen, Hart’s definition of tragedy relies heavily on the
ancient Greek, pagan model of tragedy (and he tends to subsume all theological
talk of tragedy under this definition, seeing Shakespeare’s tragedies as virtually
only proto-romances on account of their Christian character).18 On this basis, he

13
Hart, p. 383.
14
Hart, p. 375.
15
Hart, p. 389.
16
Hart, p. 390.
17
Hart, p. 384.
18
Hart, p. 387n226.
22 Christian Theology and Tragedy

sees tragedy as a place of contemplative repose – actually, therefore, as offering a

too-easy finality of resolution in Janz’s terms. Tragedy is nested within a sacrificial
logic. But his desire to show how ‘all the sober verities by which we measure the
nature of the world, our common lot, and our place in the order of things’ is in fact
‘overturned and inverted’ in Christ is, paradoxically, precisely Janz’s concern (as
it is also Lash’s and MacKinnon’s). It is a concern to safeguard the finality of non-
resolution that lies in worship of the transcendent God of love and election. This
implies that there is not only a difference of opinion here about how to achieve a
shared goal (‘the resurrection gets you there better than tragedy does’, Hart might
say); it implies a serious misreading by Hart of the intent behind much tragic
theology. And the mistake lies in assuming that what the tragic theologians in
question mean by tragedy is what Hart has defined specifically Attic tragedy to
imply.
The claim tragedy has on theology’s attention, for Janz, is rooted in its refusal
to submit to ‘the classifying authority of reason’:

To demand a rational resolution to tragedy, or to allege a general or theoretical

solution to the problem of evil, ignores the sheer particularity of tragedy and
evil and violates the integrity of the private human undoing within which
the tragedy really, empirically unfolds, by treating this theoretically and
abstractly.19

To recall the problematics of Pirandello’s play, ‘classifying reason’ will prefer

‘characters’ to historically embedded agents. The integrity of individual
humans is just what Hart wants to preserve too. But Janz’s is not a case for
anything like ‘resignation’ in the face of the ‘undoing’ of persons, any more than
Lash’s or MacKinnon’s were, and Hart would be wrong to suggest as much. It
is an insistence that no kind of false ‘holism’ be allowed to take the edge off
theology’s concern with empirical history and what God has done (and is doing)
there. Hart’s fielding of a tragic world-view against a Christian world-view may
itself be far too neat a play of ideal forms, in common with Milbank’s pitching
of Nietzschianism against Augustinianism. It conjures for us a comprehensive
and consistent vision of God’s reconciliation of all things, of redemption and
hope. But I would hazard that it has considerably less interest in tracing this
form in the empirical history of God-with-us. Janz, by contrast, has a definition
of tragedy that is not a ‘world-view’ at all (Attic or otherwise) but rather an
interest in the intractabilities of empirical history. These may not be susceptible
to mental or moral resolution on this side of the eschaton, but they nonetheless
merit the Christian’s closest attention as places where God may be encountered.
Just as a quick footnote claiming that King Lear is ‘really’ about the resurrection
will not deal with Shakespearean tragedy in all its delicacy and detail, neither
can the presently unassimilable material of human suffering be set aside too

19
Janz, p. 201.
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 23

quickly in service of a polemic about modern post-romantic decadence and

therapy-fixation. This is not because it cannot be hoped that this suffering will
be transformed beyond all our imagining in God’s final redemption of all things;
there need not be any eternalization of suffering here. It is that this eschatological
hope is not to be possessed in thought. It is not a conceptual answer to any
problem. It works itself out in the present in some other form – in the Church’s
practices of prayer, protest and praise, maybe.
It is Hart’s claims for the ‘meaninglessness’ of the crucifixion, however,
which most sharply illustrate his low view of the empirical detail of Christ’s
history. In this regard, Hart’s model is the polar opposite of Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s (which may well go too far the other way). Balthasar believed that
the Christological heart (the ‘secret’) of all human suffering, even as gestured
to in the Greek tragedies, is that it can be transmuted into a free act of offering
through willed acceptance of it. The cross takes on importance as the consummate
expression of this free-willed embrace of the world’s worst. Hart, by contrast,
thinks there is no meaning at all to be discerned in the cross, inasmuch as it is
a political accident. The idea that one should accept it voluntarily smacks, once
again, of resignation to him, and as we have seen resignation is in his view the
ultimate mark of a tragic consciousness. It is a mark of the ‘old order’ which
Christ sweeps aside. ‘[T]he resurrection occurs apart from the crucifixion’, he
asserts.20 What is vindicated is not the crucifixion but the crucified one.
What I propose to do is to suspend judgement on this stand-off between
Hart and the tragic theologians (of whom Janz is such a recent representative),
in order to return to it at the end of the chapter. This will enable our return to
be informed by an encounter with biblical narrative – including the accounts of
Christ’s crucifixion in Scripture. But I will simply note that Hart’s anxiety not to
give the event of crucifixion itself any meaning (as distinct from the obedience
of the Son which is enacted there) is hard to reconcile with a great deal of
material in New Testament texts and in subsequent devotional and theological
tradition that celebrates the particularity of this event, in its empirical detail, as
a singularly important mode of God’s action for us and amongst us: the cross
as instrument of our redemption. Of course it is not the cross alone that signals
this redemption, aside from empty tomb and risen body. But to say that it is the
‘inner act’ of obedience not the ‘accidental detail’ of the cross that really matters
is to put a paper bag or a cloth mask over the face of the cross; to make its
historical particularity no proper object of careful Christian meditation. And if
the historical particularity of the cross is not worthy of such attention, then how
is one to safeguard the importance of the other empirical particularities of Jesus
Christ’s history?
The empirical particularities of the story of God-with-us are recorded in
the Bible. The Bible narrates this as history (however much it may seem to fall
short of the criteria of historicity we moderns place upon it). If there are, in its

20
Hart, p. 391.
24 Christian Theology and Tragedy

contours, tropes or narrative patterns which carry the marks of intractability

and unassimilability that Janz calls ‘tragic’, then these will present an important
challenge to Hart’s dismissal of tragedy (even though Hart might welcome them
on other terms as having a positive, ‘un-Attic’ historicity). It is to the Bible we now
turn, in the final section of this chapter, to ask the question with which we began:
Is there a tragedy there?

Four Biblical Characters

In this section, we will begin by tracing the outline of three Old Testament stories
that might plausibly claim to be tragic in character, but will note in our progression
from one to the next an intensification of the claim to be showing us something
tragic: to be showing us human agents ‘made the dungeon of themselves’. Having
reached the agonizing depiction of a good man disappearing into the void that
we find at the end of Saul’s story, we will turn to our fourth character, Jesus, to
see how his story might affect our reading of the earlier ones.
Before we do so, however, we might place before ourselves Pirandello’s
play once again, as a salutary reminder that human dramatic ‘characters’,
like biblical ones, ought never to be treated in idealist mode as unchangeably
consistent ‘types’. This is an important lesson for any attempt to read Scripture
figurally, and not only for one that seeks to talk in terms of tragic tropes.
As we have seen, there is an idealist temptation to look for unchanging forms
in historical process (or in written texts) – forms which are either recurrent, or
appear as an eternally valid archetype at a single definitive moment. In both
cases such forms can be deployed as the measure or judge of all the other lesser
forms or renditions around them. The instinct to find ahistorical ‘character
types’ in the scriptural narratives may be like trying to put paper bags over the
particular faces of actors in those stories, in order the better to discern the purer
patterns of relation or of action that they express, and then map these forms
of relation onto earlier and later ones in a display of the patterned nature of
history. In some Christian arguments, the purest form of patterned relation is
found in the story of Christ, which then yields a template for shaping all other
events. This may be a reassuring patternedness, replete with the evidences of
God’s providential care. Or it may – especially under the influence of a tragic
sensibility – be a horrifying display of the fact that all people are condemned
to have the sins and sufferings of their human lot visited again and again on
them in each new generation. Even Christ’s story will be seen as confirmation
of the lamentable discontinuity and pain that must attend all creaturely life.
This, as we saw in discussion of David Bentley Hart’s work, may provoke a
quite unchristian attitude of resignation in the face of the eternal recurrence
of an idealistically conceived tragic fate. In neither case – patterns reassuring
or patterns horrifying – will history be properly appreciated for its capacity to
generate the unforeseen.
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 25

A historicizing outlook, meanwhile, will seek not archetypes but rather

the unpredictable appearance of exceptions and novelties which drive forward a
historical process of interpretation and action. Moreover, it will be concerned to
emphasize the irreducible particularity of each character in his or her constantly
unfolding contexts. Even when one’s actions are not wholly one’s own, but are
heavily determined by other factors, each character retains a uniqueness which may
not be effaced. No one historical agent can ever be assimilated to another without
residue. History does not repeat itself. And in this there is the ground of a sort of
dignity for persons: the shapes of people’s lives, and any meaning that attaches
to them, are so historically embedded that paraphrase is a virtual impossibility,
and generalizing them will usually be a violence to them. Or, to put it another
way, drawing from John David Dawson’s important discussion of Christian figural
reading, one may not produce a ‘free-floating meaning pattern’ that is no longer
intrinsically connected to the medium in which it has its expression,21 and in
this case the medium in question is the lives of human persons in history. In that
expectation, we turn to the first of our characters.

Character 1: Judah

Judah is ‘made the dungeon of himself’ as part of a trajectory of learning. He

escapes the dungeon to live in a better way than before.
There is a version of the theology of tragedy that we have not looked at yet in
this chapter, because its definition of tragedy is so removed from any we have been
working with. It is what we might call an ‘Irenaean theodicy’ view, in which tragic
narratives are defined first by the degree of suffering and trial they manifest, but
are then read in the expectation that they will show individuals ‘growing’ morally
or spiritually as a consequence of their experiences. This approach is discernible
in the work of Clemens Sedmak, the Catholic moral theologian, who is inclined
to argue that even the most unpleasant human circumstances offer the opportunity
for growth in virtue. Such a position says that the tragic genre does not rule out the
possibility of self-improvement in the face of certain sorts of suffering.
Sedmak finds in the figure of Judah – Joseph’s brother – just such an exemplar:

Judah, so it is claimed in the genealogies which we encounter in Matthew

chapter 1 and Luke chapter 3, is one of Jacob’s sons and a forebear of Jesus.
He is therefore of central importance for Christian salvation history, but also
for the Jewish tradition, as a forefather of David. A glance at the genealogy of
Jesus allows a deeper insight into the lineage through which salvation history is
traced and recounted, and it is noteworthy who appears here. A genealogy gives
information about the past, tells of roots and belonging, gives one purchase on
one’s identity. The identity of Jesus is bound up genealogically with the figure

21
David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 14–15.
26 Christian Theology and Tragedy

of Judah. Traces of Judah’s life are displayed between chapter 29 and chapter 49
of the Book of Genesis. We learn about success granted in the midst of fateful
entanglement.22

Judah is complicit in the deed whereby Joseph is sold into slavery, and his father’s
heart broken. Despite being a voice for clemency, and persuading his brothers to
sell Joseph rather than kill him, he cannot assert an honest agency for himself apart
from their collective crime, and he is responsible (and thus culpable) along with
the rest of them for their betrayal of Joseph and their subsequent lies about it. He
later undergoes trials and sufferings (including the loss of two sons, and public
shame at the hands of his daughter-in-law for his vow-breaking), and eventually,
when reunited with the disguised Joseph, he faces the apparent catastrophe that
Benjamin, the surviving ‘favourite’ son of Jacob (whose safety he has personally
guaranteed in a desperate attempt to save the whole family from famine), is to
be kept imprisoned in Egypt while the rest of the brothers return. In the face of
this, Judah pleads to be allowed to give himself up in Benjamin’s place – above
all out of love and concern for his father, and in evident sense of guilt for the past
misdeed of betraying Joseph. At this point, Joseph reveals his true identity and all
the brothers are reconciled, weeping upon each other’s necks. Judah, as Sedmak
notes, goes on to be the founder of the tribe which will become the Jewish nation,
and out of which Jesus will come.
In reading this as a story with the marks of tragedy, Sedmak sees this also as a
story full of lessons. He sees Judah as a figure whose sufferings teach him lessons
– and us by extension. For example, his unprepossessing beginnings (as a mere
fourth son; as the son of the wife Jacob loved less) do not have to define him: he
is part of a bigger history. His fate may be caught up inextricably with the fate of
others (his family), so that he is never a wholly free agent – and his actions may
have multiple and unforeseeable consequences (some good, some bad: Jacob’s
decline, and Joseph’s rise from slave to vice-regent), but he has room for inner
growth in the light of his experiences. He learns compassion; he learns to be self-

22
Alois Kothgasser and Clemens Sedmak, Geben und Vergeben. Von der Kunst neu
zu beginnen (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2008), p. 33. The translation is my own, and the original
German reads as follows: ‘Juda ist ein Sohn des Jakob und ein Vorfahre Jesu, der in den
Stammbäumen, wie sie in Mt 1 und Lk 3 zu finden sind, angeführt wird; er ist also von
zentraler Bedeutung für die christliche Heilsgeschichte, aber auch – als Vorfahre des
David – für die jüdische Tradition. Der Blick auf den Stammbaum Jesu lässt tief blicken,
es ist bemerkenswert, wer hier angeführt ist, in welcher Linie die Heilsgeschichte verfolgt
und erzählt wird. Ein Stammbaum gibt Auskunft über Herkunft, erzählt von Wurzeln und
Zugehörigkeit, gibt Anhaltspunkte für Identität. Die Identität Jesu wird im Stammbaum mit
der Gestalt des Juda verbunden. Spuren des Lebens von Juda sind zwischen dem Kapitel
29 und dem Kapitel 49 des Buches Genesis aufgezeichnet. Wir lernen über geschenktes
Gelingen inmitten schicksalshafter Verstrickung.’
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 27

sacrificial and to go beyond the borders of himself, ‘making himself smaller so

that another may be greater’.
But I am inclined to view this story as less tragic than Sedmak does, precisely
because it is so tractable to moral resolution and instruction. And the ‘Irenaean’
approach it seems to underwrite seems questionable, especially if there is an
implication that all the characters in biblical narratives could be given a similar
treatment. The desire rapidly to assimilate loss to a greater good refuses either
to take evil or in fact goodness seriously. Goodness becomes a function of our
powers of ‘making sense’ and ‘moving on’ rather than being something manifested
supremely on the cross – something which properly elicits from us penitential
mourning as well as gratitude (this being why, perhaps, Christian worship includes
grief within its joy).
If Judah’s story is one in which initial culpability leads smoothly to a later
growth in moral capability, then it is not well described as a tragedy. It is too much
of a morality play. So we now turn to ‘the Heracles of Hebrew story’,23 Samson, to
see how the shape of his narrative compares.

Character 2: Samson

Samson is ‘made the dungeon of himself’ because of a weakness in his otherwise

heroic make-up, which renders him abject. He only ‘escapes’ the dungeon by his
own death: in one final explosive act of retributive justice.
Samson’s story is one of wit, ingenuity, personal and religious discipline,
courage and immense strength. While in the paraphrases of many Christian
sermons and Sunday school classes he is remembered as just a brawny barbarian,
close attention to the biblical text reveals a magnificently attractive figure: wily
and energetic. But his powers are yielded up (by his own action) in an act of
foolish trust which he has narrowly avoided twice before, having apparently
learnt nothing from his near escapes (we will not in this context call them ‘close
shaves’!). The prostitute Delilah – a Philistine – persuades him to believe that he
can convince her of his love for her only by disclosing the secret of his strength,
and when at length he yields and tells her it is his uncut hair, she cuts it off in his
sleep and hands him over to waiting soldiers. His eyes are put out and he becomes
a slave in the house of his enemies. Only when in time his hair grows again does
his strength return. When brought for sport before the jeering, feasting Philistines
in their temple, he is vouchsafed the opportunity to pull down its supports and to
bring the whole edifice crashing upon their heads in a final act of service to Israel’s
God.
Milton famously made of this tale the nearest thing that English literature has
to an Attic tragedy: ‘the only tragedy in English on the Greek model that can be

23
Douglas Bush, introduction to Poetical Works, by John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 513.
28 Christian Theology and Tragedy

ranked with the ancient originals’, as one commentator puts it.24 This is true right
down to its concern with the ‘three unities’, and its use of a chorus to comment
upon and react to the action. But in doing so, he changed the complex, canny and
passionate figure into a man of ‘sensitive conscience, integrity, and piety’. Any
assumption that Milton saw a natural place for the tragic in a Christian perspective
needs to be cautioned by a reminder that for him in his time (as for Sedmak
today) tragedy was an educative and improving literary genre – not a register of
the non-resolution in human experience. Remarking in his commonplace book
on Lactantius’ hostility to drama, he asked: ‘For what in all philosophy is more
important or more sacred or more exalted than a tragedy rightly produced, what
more useful for seeing at a single view the events and changes of human life?’25

Tragedy, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest,
moralest, and most profitable of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle to
be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and
suchlike passions, that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind
of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.26

Having said that, Samson is not Judah, and, in choosing to work with the story of
Samson, Milton set himself more stringent challenges than many biblical figures
would have given him. He does not seek to remove the terror of the Samson
story. What he does do is achieve ‘at a stroke the only kind of irony that is at
once compatible with a Christian outlook and as potent as any to be found in
tragedy anywhere’ – namely, he makes ‘the way of repentance and restoration,
the way back to God, also the way that leads inevitably to the catastrophe …’.
The moralizing aspect of Milton’s work lies mainly in the fact that he shows the
‘necessity’ which links Samson’s salvation and victory with his death not to be the
arbitrary imposition of an overruling Power, but instead ‘the outcome of Samson’s
conduct – of his sin and of his subsequent repentance’.27
Although he becomes the victim of it, Samson’s failure is not an externally
imposed one absolutely beyond his control: Milton’s play recognizes this truth and
relays it. He makes his own destiny, and is given one last terrible opportunity to
make something more out of that destiny when all seems lost. His failure comes to
something, even though it is not a return to responsible and productive historical
life as Judah’s is.
We can say that his is a culpability which deprives him – almost – of capability,
leaving only one last desperate capability before none is left to him at all. There is

24
Bush, p. 513.
25
John Milton, Complete Prose Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953),
vol. 1, p. 491.
26
Milton, Poetical Works, p. 517.
27
A.S.P. Woodhouse, ‘Tragic Effect in Samson Agonistes’, University of Toronto
Quarterly 28 (1958): p. 220.
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 29

something of a tragic shape to this, but (as Milton knew) also a sort of resolution –
in heroic mode – which is not tragedy in the Janzian sense we have been exploring
in this chapter so far. It is nearer to tragedy than Judah’s story, but it has a little too
much of the heroic folktale about it to justify the appellation. Samson goes out,
we might say, in a blaze of glory; making his own sacrificial amends for his own
personal failure.
Nevertheless, we may at least say that Samson’s story qualifies the optimism
of Judah’s story. If Samson retains the moral capacity to make a difference to his
fate, through the exercise of a magnificent, self-assertive choice, it is nonetheless
a singularly constrained choice.

Character 3: Saul

Saul is ‘made the dungeon of himself’ by the withdrawal from him of his own
election, for which he is only obscurely responsible (if at all). In the wake of this
rejection by God, he pitifully lends himself to the process by which the rejection’s
consequences are played out. Mainly (and unlike Samson), it seems that Saul’s
dungeon was built by God.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, working with the terminally ill, observed a man, dying
of leukaemia, saying in utter disbelief: ‘It is impossible for me to die now. It can’t
be God’s will, because he let me survive when I was hit by bullets just a few feet
away during World War II.’ Kübler-Ross draws this conclusion:

Since in our unconscious we cannot perceive our own death and do believe in
our own immortality, but can conceive our neighbour’s death, news of numbers
of people killed in battle, in wars, on the highways, only support our unconscious
belief in our own immortality and allow us – in the privacy and secrecy of our
unconscious mind – to rejoice that it is ‘the next guy, not me’.28

Saul comes to be defined almost totally as ‘the next guy’ to another person. If we
read only the story of David in 1 Samuel we find a classic literary prototype. He
is a sort of male Cinderella visited by his fairy godmother, Samuel: chosen from
his lonely spot on the hillside when forgotten by the world. David’s story evokes
our sympathy inasmuch as he is someone who wins against the odds. There is a
particular appeal to heroes who are first the underdog and then make good. But
there is a problem with the David story, precisely on account of Saul. Saul is
another and different underdog who can be glimpsed slinking off as David enters
the scene, and in the worst condition imaginable: ‘The LORD said to Samuel
… “I have rejected Saul as king over Israel”’ (1 Samuel 16:1). It is especially
disconcerting that the proximate cause of Saul’s rejection is his moderation of
a divine command to commit genocide in conflict with the Amalekites. The
temptation to ignore Saul’s plight and simply to rejoice in David’s success may

28
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 28.
30 Christian Theology and Tragedy

suddenly seem like a naive act – like assuming that dying is something ‘the next
guy’ does, not me. It is to identify with the success story and distance oneself
wholly from the tragic failure. If we can imagine Saul himself asking, like the
wartime survivor, how it is possible that he can be rejected now, given that he
was elected once, then we may find an uncomfortable possibility attending every
thought of our own election.
Saul thus makes the narrative picture of David’s ascendancy a great deal more
complicated. After all, Saul has been the hero of much of 1 Samuel’s account
so far. He too has been anointed, and his handsomeness recorded, in a way that
is hardly different from David. And if our sympathies are with Saul, then what
are we to do with our natural inclination to identify with the success story of
David, with which his story is replaced? What are we to do with our attachment
to Saul as he slides into fitful and murderous irrationality, self-doubt, indecision,
superstition, fear and – finally – suicide? What are we to do as he becomes the
dungeon of himself, in self-fulfilment of the prophecy of God against him?
Uncomfortably, this narrative of substitution is one in which Saul has little
room for manoeuvre, virtually no room for moral growth or repentance, and
no heroic act to mark his ending. His condition is, we might note, strikingly
reminiscent of that of Pirandello’s ‘characters’. He is given a role, but then denied
(by the divine author) any opportunity to play it. It is taken away from him and
given to another. So he is a king without kingship. He can be imagined saying of
David something like what the Father says of the actors in Six Characters: ‘He
plays my part well, but to me he seems to be doing something quite different’ (Saul
killed his thousands, but David has killed his tens of thousands [1 Samuel 18:7]).
This substitutionary narrative is one of extreme desolation in its inscrutability,
especially given that it also has the air of such inevitability. Saul connives in his
decline, but all the time seems really to have no other options available to him.
Whereas Samson can make at least something out of his darkest hour, Saul has
no such opportunity. The non-resolution of Saul’s story is far greater than in our
previous two cases.
This is, then, a tale we might really call a tragedy. Saul has nowhere to go; no
good ending. It may be that, like Pirandello, the divine author has made him in
order to deny him his identity just for the sake of making a point (a point in this
case, perhaps, about the sinfulness of Israel’s demand for a king). But that makes
Saul’s actual life even more of a nihil.
What is curious, in the light of this, is that the wider narrative does not milk
all the tragic potential this story might in fact hold. And this raises the question –
which David Bentley Hart might well second – of whether the Old Testament is
particularly interested in tragic themes at all. In narrative terms, Saul is ultimately
made to be instrumental in a tale about David, and even more than that about
God’s purposes for his people. The real focus of the tale (increasingly so) is the
light-on-his-feet new king and his coming dynasty, whose triumphs are given
just a bit of added lustre by their Sauline counterpoint. Saul’s tragic dignity, if
that is what it is, is constantly interrupted and often rendered farcical by David’s
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 31

jaunty interventions, by the arriviste’s small humiliations of his precursor. There

is something almost matter-of-fact about the report of Saul’s death, and then the
story moves on with barely a backward glance. Saul is consigned to the back
catalogue of history. Saul’s story is very nearly a tragedy, but it is in the end a
stepping stone for a narrative whose confident trajectory is evidently assumed to
be more important than he is.
Nevertheless, his story lays down a marker for something disturbing: the
apparent reality of culpability without capability – a rejection that he could not
have helped and can do nothing about. He shows us that there may not always be a
heroic way out – that the way to the rubbish dump of history may be unmitigatedly
ignominious.
In this respect, we may say that Saul’s story qualifies the heroism of Samson’s
story, just as Samson qualified the optimism of Judah’s.

Character 4: Jesus

It is the condition of culpability without capability which is the mark of original

sin, in a Christian perspective. If Jesus enters any dungeon, it is this one: a dungeon
not of his own making, but nevertheless absolutely one of his choosing.
I said in the opening section of this chapter that Christianity embraces tragedy
in order to ‘let it mean more than itself’, that the Christian narrative (including both
Old and New Testaments) is about a full entry into such experience, in order then
to suggest it might have a ‘beyond’. But how, on Christian terms, might tragedy
be allowed to do these things? Construed as Hans Urs von Balthasar construes
it, tragedy not only signals some significant aspect of the human condition or
of human experience. Rather, it signals (by analogy) something to do with the
divine life, in which any loss, distance or alienation experienced by creatures
is incomprehensibly exceeded (and yet at the same time given its highest form)
by the self-othering of the Trinitarian Persons; their pouring out in a donation
in which it is not adequate or possible to draw the distinction between abjection
and generosity. This is not the denial or ‘overcoming’ of tragedy. Its fullness and
fierceness are fully endorsed in the super-charged sensibility of Christian thought
about its dynamic, particularizing, self-donating God. Godly life, in Christian
terms, is hyper-tragic, not untragic.
In terms of Jesus’ story, as witnessed to in the Gospels, this is played out not
as a sort of reassuring solution to the problem of unresolved lives, characters
without an opportunity to play their part, or actors reliant on borrowed words
and gestures. The story of God-with-us is not a benignly holistic picture of how
all of history would look if you could see it all at once. It is, we may say, a story
not of holism but of reconciliation, which is shown to be particular and bloody.
The New Testament gives a great deal of status to exactly this blood – not as the
epiphenomenon of a political accident, but as a divine gift to humanity. This is
one of the respects in which Hart’s claim to be ‘more biblical’ than the tragic
theologians he opposes does not ring true; he barely touches upon Scripture at all
32 Christian Theology and Tragedy

in his 20-page discussion of tragedy, and thus never confronts texts and metaphors
which make Christ’s wounds, his blood and the cross itself heavily significant –
more central, it should be said, than the empty tomb, of which Hart makes a great
deal. The Gospels do not seek to set in reverse the story of intensification towards
tragedy that we have told in the figures of three Old Testament characters (and we
might have added others to them: Hagar, Tamar and Dinah, for example). Judah
may be read as a figure of Jesus in his self-offering for another, his intercession,
and his founding of a new people. Samson may be read as a figure of Jesus29 in his
victory out of humiliation, his descent into hell and defeat of the powers of evil.
But the story of Jesus’ redeeming work does not make the story of Saul readable as
more like that of Judah or Samson. It does not rewind the tape when we reach the
brink of Saul’s void, and find some new configuration (of culpability in relation
to capability, for instance) that makes Saul’s case seem less desolate. It does not
take away the particularity of Saul’s case – his uniqueness at a point in the biblical
history – by dressing him in a generic mask. All this would be once again to efface
him, and in a more pernicious way than the blunter, healthier, more matter-of-fact
consignment of him to history’s rubbish dump that may be the mark of a non-
Christian reading.
Not taking away the particularity of Saul’s case is a first way of being
responsible to him. It is a form of respect for his uniqueness – a status which
Pirandello’s play tests, and which Jesus’ careful facings of particular people in
particular circumstances seems to embody all the way through his earthly ministry
(and even after the resurrection).
But out of this first way of taking Saul seriously – by insisting on the uniqueness
and unsubstitutability of his story – there opens a second way in which he can be
taken seriously in light of Jesus’ narrative. It is not just that the Gospels implicitly
honour his case (as they do every case) by refusing to tidy it up into some larger
narrative solution; they seem to re-open his case.
The honouring of unique cases is accompanied in Jesus’s story by teachings
and actions which insist on the preciousness of each particular bit of creation. All
creation is of the deepest concern to God the Father, who will not let a sparrow
fall without noticing it (Matthew 10:29). The death of Jesus on the cross mirrors
this sort of love. And if the redemption of the whole of creation (which may be
affirmed without necessarily invoking a doctrine of apocatastasis) is in view in the
Gospel narratives, then no particular part of it can automatically be regarded as
outside that redemption – and we are certainly not in a position to say so.
So the figure of Jesus allows a new question to be asked of Saul (just as it does
of all the other characters in the Old Testament). His face comes before us again.
If Jesus himself goes into the void, in which those who are held culpable without
capability are held fast, then maybe we have to relate to this man who seemed to
have been dealt with in historical terms as ‘a failure’. We may have to find a new
way to be responsive to him, though the outlines of our relation to him may remain

29
C.S. Lewis seems to have done this with his image of the shaven Aslan.
 Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy 33

obscure, frightening, unresolved. This is not a thinning out of the tragic force of
Saul’s story in its Hebrew Bible context; it is a heightening of it. Where before it
was possible to say simply ‘that’s how it was’ or ‘it had to be that way’, we now
have to ask a question: ‘did it have to be that way?’ or ‘will it remain that way’?
Who and where is Saul now, and how do we stand with him? He is no longer just
a far-off figure from a far-off time; he has been brought near again.
If Samson qualified the optimism of Judah’s story, and Saul qualified the
heroism of Samson’s, then Jesus qualifies the nihilism of Saul’s story.30 His story
unsettles the assumption that any human life – after it has been and gone – can be
regarded simply as if it had never been.
This is at base an affirmation of Hart’s concern to take the resurrection
seriously as the breaking open of what we thought was forever closed. But we
are not given the final answer to these questions about how Saul and all the others
who have seemed ‘good for nothing’ may be restored to capability, for in the end
the answer lies in Janz’s genuine (and not ideal) transcendent: the freedom of
God, which creatures can only discern in a creaturely way, in the empirical matter
of history. The answer to the question ‘what about Saul?’ lies in the freedom of
God, just like the answer to the question ‘what lies between the dead Christ and
the resurrected Christ?’ It is what Janz calls this ‘impossible continuity’31 between
the crucified and risen Christ that ‘protects the love of God from portrayal as
the supreme authority of resolution, as the grandest, all-embracing holism, as the
ultimate coherence theory, as the highest “necessity”’.32

[W]hat we encounter most fiercely and tragically, in … the cross, is not first of
all the love of God, but rather the unbridgeable distance and strangeness of the
unconditioned freedom of God, without which the love of God would not be the
love of God.33

It is in this way that Christianity (at its best, which is to say its most responsible)
does not evade the actual challenges to interpretation presented to it by the
experiences we habitually call tragic. It does not round off their jagged edges into
some reassuring shape that will comfort us. On the contrary, it looks all the harder
at them, in all their angularity and discomfiting resistance to assimilation.
It does so in the hopeful expectation that there is more, not less, to them than
meets the eye.

30
That is not to impute nihilism to the broader story into which Saul’s is woven, but to
draw attention to the specific negation of Saul which Saul’s particular story seems to end in.
31
Janz, p. 179.
32
Janz, p. 179.
33
Janz, p. 179.
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more have you to expect, Antony?” exclaimed he, “Fortune robs you
of the only blessing which made life dear.” He commands his
freedman Eros to slay him; then, unfastening his cuirass, he
addresses this last adieu to Cleopatra: “O, Cleopatra! I do not
complain that thou art taken from me, since in a moment I shall
rejoin thee.” Eros, meanwhile, has drawn his sword, but instead of
striking Antony, he stabs himself. “Brave Eros,” said Antony, seeing
him fall dead at his feet, “you set me the example!” and, thrusting
the sword into his breast, he sinks fainting upon a couch.
In a few minutes he recovers consciousness. He calls and
entreats the slaves, the soldiers, to put an end to him, but none dare
to comply, and he is left alone, howling and struggling on the couch.
Meanwhile the queen has been informed of the fact. Her grief is
bitter and profound—the more bitter that it is mingled with remorse.
She must see Antony again; she commands that he be brought,
dead or alive. Diomedes, her secretary, hastens to the palace.
Antony is at the last gasp, but the joy at hearing that the queen is
not dead revives him, and “he rises,” says Dion Cassius, “as if he
might still live!” Slaves bear him in their arms, and, to hasten their
movements, he utters entreaties, invectives, threats, which mingle
with the death-rattle. They reach the tomb; the queen leans from a
window of the upper story; fearing a surprise, she will not have the
portcullis raised, but she throws down some ropes, and commands
them to be fastened round Antony. Then, aided by Iras and
Charmion, the only ones she has allowed to enter the mausoleum,
she begins to drag him up. “It was not easy,” says Plutarch, “for
women thus to lift a man of Antony’s size.” Never, say those who
witnessed it, was a sadder or more pitiful sight. Cleopatra, with arms
stiff and brow contracted, dragged painfully at the ropes, whilst
Antony, bleeding and dying, raised himself as much as possible,
extending towards her his dying hands.
At last he reached her, and they laid him on a bed, where she
long held him in a close embrace. Her grief spent itself in tears, in
sobs, in despairing kisses. She called him her husband, her master,
her emperor; she struck her breast, tore it with her nails, then again
casting herself upon him, she kissed his wound, wiping off on her
face the blood that flowed from it. Antony endeavored to calm and
console her, and entreated her to care for her own safety. Burning
with fever, he begged for a drink, and swallowed a cup of wine.
Death was rapidly approaching. Cleopatra renewed her lamentations.
“Do not grieve,” said he, “for this last misfortune; rather congratulate
me for the blessings I have enjoyed in my life, and the happiness
that has been mine in being the most powerful and illustrious of
men; congratulate me on this, that, being a Roman, none but a
Roman has conquered me.” He expired in the arms of Cleopatra,
dying, as Shakspeare says, where he had wished to live.
When Octavius heard of Antony’s death, he despatched
Proculeius and Gallus with orders to seize Cleopatra before she could
have time to kill herself. Their calls attracted the attention of the
queen; she descended and began to parley with them from behind
the portcullis. Deaf to the promises and protestations of the two
Romans, Cleopatra declared that she would only surrender if
Octavius would agree by oath to maintain her or her son on the
throne of Egypt; otherwise Cæsar should have but her dead body.
Proculeius, espying the window which had admitted Antony, left his
companion to converse alone with the queen, and, finding a ladder,
placed it against the thick wall, and thus entering the tomb, he
descended the staircase within and sprang upon Cleopatra.
Charmion, turning at the noise, exclaimed: “Unhappy queen, thou
art taken alive!” Cleopatra snatched from her girdle a dagger which
for some time she had carried in order to kill herself, but Proculeius
seized her wrist and only allowed her to free herself after being
assured that she had no other weapon and no suspicious phial about
her. He then resumed the respectful attitude demanded by the rank
and misfortunes of the royal captive. He assured her she had
nothing to fear from Octavius. “O, Queen,” said he, “you are unjust
towards Cæsar, whom you would rob of the noblest opportunity of
exercising clemency.”
Her treasures and her person in the power of the Romans,
Cleopatra felt herself without the means of defense. What availed it
that Cæsar left her her life, since henceforth she desired only to die?
The only favor she asked was to be allowed to pay funeral honors to
Antony. Although the same request had already been made by the
captains of his army who had served under Antony, Octavius,
touched with compassion, granted the prayer of the Egyptian.
Cleopatra bathed the body of her lover, adorned and armed it as for
a last battle, then she laid it in the tomb which she had built for
herself and in which she had vainly sought death. After the
obsequies the queen was conducted, by order of Octavius, to the
palace of the Lagidæ. There she was treated with every attention,
but she was, so to speak, never lost sight of (a prisoner forever
watched).
The terrible emotions through which Cleopatra had passed, the
intense grief which overwhelmed her, above all the wounds she had
inflicted on herself during the death-struggle of Antony, brought on
an inflammation of the chest, attended by a burning fever. In this
illness she saw the hoped-for death, and to hasten her deliverance
she refused for many days all medical treatment and all food.
Octavius was informed of this, and he sent her word that she must
have forgotten that he held her four children as hostages, and that
their lives should answer for hers. This horrid threat overcame the
resolution of Cleopatra, who then consented to be properly cared for.
Octavius meanwhile felt he had cause for disquiet. What if the
pride of the queen overpowered her motherly instincts? what if the
horror of gracing as a captive his approaching triumph should decide
her to a self-inflicted death? Doubtless she was well guarded, but
what negligence or what treason might he not fear? Besides, though
without arms or poison, might she not induce the faithful Charmion
to strangle her? “Now Octavius,” so says Dion Cassius, “conceived
that the death of Cleopatra would have robbed him of his glory.” He
resolved, therefore, to see her. He knew he possessed sufficient self-
control not to become entangled, and believed himself sufficiently
skillful to keep the queen uncertain of the fate to which he destined
her.
 Cleopatra was no longer deceived as to the pretended
sentiments of love with which, according to Thyreus, she had
inspired Octavius; of this we are assured by Plutarch. Since the
emperor’s arrival in Alexandria he had not even expressed the
intention of seeing her, and the harsh treatment, the rigorous
seclusion, and the savage threats which she had to endure from him
did not certainly indicate a man in love. Can it be said, however, that
the prospect of the unexpected visit of Octavius aroused in
Cleopatra, desperate as she was, no glimpse of hope, no fugitive
vision of a throne, no last enthusiasm? that from her beautiful eyes
shot no ray of half-seen triumph?
The queen, scarcely convalescent, was in bed when Octavius
entered. She sprang from the couch, though wearing only a tunic,
and knelt before him. At the sight of this woman, worn out by fever,
emaciated, dreadfully pale, with drawn features, eyes sunken and
red with tears, bearing on her face and breast the marks made by
her own hands, Octavius found it hard to believe that this was the
enchantress that had captivated Cæsar and enslaved Mark Antony;
but had Cleopatra been more beautiful than Venus he would not
have been her lover. Continence was not among his virtues, but he
was too prudent and too clever ever to sacrifice his interests to his
passions. He urged the queen to return to her couch, and seated
himself near her. Cleopatra began to vindicate herself, referring all
that had passed to the force of circumstances and the fear she felt
of Antony. She often ceased speaking, interrupted by her choking
sobs; then, in the hope of moving Octavius to pity (of seducing him,
some say), she drew from her bosom some of Cæsar’s letters, kissed
them, and exclaimed: “Wouldst thou know how thy father loved me,
read these letters.... Oh! Cæsar! why did I not die before thee!... but
for me you live again in this man!” and through her tears she
essayed to smile at Octavius. Lamentable scene of coquetry, which
the wretched woman no longer could or knew how to play.
To her sighs, her moans, the emperor made no reply, even
avoiding looking at her and keeping his eyes fixed on the floor. He
spoke only to reply, one by one, to all the arguments by which the
queen sought to justify herself. Chilled by the impassibility of this
man, who, without being at all moved by her misfortunes and her
sufferings, was arguing with her like a schoolmaster, Cleopatra felt
that she had nothing to hope. Again death appeared as the only
liberator. Then she ceased her pleas, dried her tears, and, in order
completely to deceive Octavius, she pretended to be resigned to
everything, provided her life was spared. She handed him the list of
her treasures, and entreated him to permit her to retain certain
jewels that she might present them herself to Livia and Octavia in
order to secure their protection. “Take courage, O woman!” said the
emperor as he left her. “Be hopeful; no harm shall happen to you!”
Deceived by the pretended resignation of Cleopatra, Octavius no
longer doubted that he would be able to exhibit to the Roman rabble
the haughty queen of Egypt walking in chains before his triumphal
car. He had not heard, as he left her, the last word uttered by
Cleopatra, that word which, since the taking of Alexandria, she had
incessantly repeated: Οἰ θριαμβεúσομαι! “I will not contribute to his
15
triumph.”
A few days after this interview, an intimate companion of
Octavius, taking pity on such dire reverses, secretly revealed to
Cleopatra that the next day she would be embarked for Rome. She
asked to be allowed to go with her women to offer libations at the
tomb of Antony. She was borne thither in a litter, being still too weak
to walk. After pouring the wine and adjusting the crowns she kissed
for the last time the sepulchral stone, saying: “O, beloved Antony, if
thy gods have any power—for mine have betrayed me—do not
abandon thy living wife. Do not let thyself be triumphed over, by
making her at Rome take part in a disgraceful show. Hide me with
thee under this earth of Egypt.”
On her return, Cleopatra went to the bath; her women arrayed
her in her most magnificent robes, dressed her hair with care, and
adjusted her royal crown. Cleopatra had ordered a splendid repast;
her toilet ended, she was placed at the table. A countryman entered,
carrying a basket. A soldier of the guard desiring to see the
contents, the man opened it and showed some figs; and, the guard
exclaiming at the beauty of them, he offered them some to taste.
His good nature lulled all suspicion; he was allowed to pass.
Cleopatra received the basket, sent to Octavius a letter she had
written in the morning, and was then left alone with Iras and
Charmion. She opened the basket and separated the figs, hoping to
be stung unawares but the reptile was asleep. Cleopatra discovered
it beneath the figs. “There it is, then!” cried she, and began to rouse
it with a golden pin. The asp bit her on the arm.
Warned by the letter of Cleopatra, Octavius sent in haste to the
apartments. His officers found the guards at their post, ignorant of
what had occurred. They forced the door and beheld Cleopatra, clad
in her royal robes, lying lifeless on her golden couch, and at her feet
the corpse of Iras. Charmion was still alive; leaning over Cleopatra,
she was arranging with her dying hands the diadem around the head
of the queen. A soldier exclaimed in a voice of wrath: “Is this well
done, Charmion?” “Yes,” said the dying Charmion, “it is well done,
and worthy of a queen, the descendants of so many kings!”
Octavius put to death Cæsarion, the son of Cæsar and
Cleopatra, but he was merciful to the dead body of the queen.
Granting the mournful prayer she had made to him in her last letter,
he permitted her to be buried beside Antony. He also granted
honorable burial to the faithful slaves, Charmion and Iras, who had
accompanied their mistress to the world of shadows.
By her suicide, Cleopatra escaped contributing to the triumph of
16
Octavius, but failing her person he had her effigy, and the statue
of Cleopatra with a serpent wound about her arm was borne in the
triumphal procession. Does it not seem that the statue of this
illustrious queen, who had subdued the greatest of the Romans, who
had made Rome tremble, and who preferred death to assisting at
her own humiliation, had by her death triumphed over her
conqueror, and still defied the senate and the people on the way to
the Capitol?
 We can easily conceive of Cleopatra as a great queen, the rival
of the mythic Semiramis, and the elder sister of the Zenobias, the
Isabellas, the Maria-Theresas, and the Catharines; but, in truth, only
those queens are great who possess manly virtues, who rule nations
and compel events as a great king might do. Cleopatra was too
essentially a woman to be reckoned among these glorious
androgynuses. If for twenty years she preserved her throne and
maintained the independence of Egypt, it was done by mere
womanly means—intrigue, gallantry, grace, and weakness which is
also a grace. Her sole method of governing was, in reality, by
becoming the mistress of Cæsar and the mistress of Mark Antony. It
was the Roman sword that sustained the throne of the Lagidæ.
When by the fault of Cleopatra the weapon was broken, the throne
tottered and fell. Ambition, her only royal virtue, would have been
limited to the exercise of her hereditary government if circumstances
had not developed and exalted it.
Knowing herself weak, without genius and without mental force,
she reckoned wholly on her lovers for the accomplishment of her
designs, and it too often happened to this woman, fatal to others as
to herself, to retard the execution of these, dominated, as she ever
was, by the imperious desire of some entertainment or some
pleasure. This queen had the recklessness of the courtesan; women
of gallantry might have considered her their august and tragic
ancestress. She only lived for love, pomp, and magnificence;
wherefore, when her lover was slain, her beauty marred, her wealth
lost, and her crown shattered, she found, to face death, the
masculine courage which had failed her in life.
No, Cleopatra was not a great queen. But for her connection
with Antony, she would be forgotten with Arsinoë or Berenice. If her
renown is immortal, it is because she is the heroine of the most
dramatic love-story of antiquity.
 FOOTNOTES
1
Cicero to Atticus.—In this letter, dated from Brundusium,
June 14, 706 A. U. C., Cicero speaks of the long sojourn
of Cæsar at Alexandria. There is thought to be much
trouble there, “valde esse impedimentum.” This
“impedimentum,” of which Cæsar makes no complaint,
was Cleopatra.
2
If this were true, Cleopatra would have been as fatal to
Cæsar as she afterwards became to Antony.
3
We must not judge Antony wholly by the passionate
attacks of Cicero. Plutarch quotes a number of clever
retorts of this brave and excellent soldier; and, in
another order of ideas, his letter to Octavius and
Hirtius, from which we find long extracts in the “Third
Philippic,” is the work of a skillful politician as well as a
model of wit.
4
A curious inscription, discovered in Alexandria by M. C.
Vescher, is as follows: “Antony the Great, the
Inimitable.”
5
Pliny, IX. 35. The legend is not so much of a myth as it
appears. Pliny relates that Octavius, having found the
second pearl in the treasury of Cleopatra, had it cut in
two, and with it adorned the ears of the Pantheon
Venus.
6
Another incident, also related by Plutarch, says that
Antony sometimes sought relaxation from the excesses
of the “Life Inimitable” in more tranquil pleasures, such
as angling. Vain even in trifles, and mortified if he
caught nothing, he had fishes attached to his hook by a
diver. The trick did not escape Cleopatra. The next day
she had a salted fish fastened to his hook, which the
triumvir drew gravely from the water amid shouts of
laughter. From this time Antony renounced angling.
7
Appian says positively that Antony was in love with
Octavia.
8
Like all the Ptolemies, the last of the Lagidæ was a great
builder.
9
Antony also made a gift to Cleopatra of the 300,000
manuscripts of the library of Pergamos, to replace a
part of the volumes burned at Alexandria.
10
Thirty-five drachmæ were given to each legionary, and a
less sum to every soldier.
11
The Egyptian, says Florus forcibly, demanded as the
price of her favors, the Roman Empire from a drunken
emperor: “Mulier ægyptia ab ebrio imperatore pretium
libidinum Romanum Imperium petit.”
12
These verses were written after the battle of Actium, 31
B. C., but they no less indicate the sentiments of the
Romans at the commencement of the war. If this
indignation and hatred obtained with such violence
after the victory, what must they have been in the very
hour of danger? Lucan says: “This woman, the reproach
of Egypt, the fatal Erinys of Latium, incestuous
daughter of the Ptolemies; who made the Capitol
tremble with her sistra.”
13
It therefore seems probable that it was in the autumn of
32 B. C. that Antony must have married Cleopatra.
14
Dion says that Cleopatra betrayed Antony at Alexandria,
as at Pelusium, and that she sent him word of her
death that he might be urged to commit suicide, and
his body given up to Octavius. Once for all, we take for
authority Plutarch, who seems much more worthy of
credit. The taking of Alexandria was on August 1, 30
B. C.
15
The peculiar force of this verb in the passive form
cannot be fitly rendered in a translation. It is, word for
word, “I will not be triumphed.”
16
Cleopatra died the 15th of August, 30 B. C.
 Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when
a predominant preference was found in this book;
otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were
retained.
Table of Contents added by Transcriber and placed
into the Public Domain.
Page 53: “the war of Persia” was printed that way.
Page 65: “ἐρω.μένην” was printed with the period.
Page 103: “Οἰ θριαμβεúσομαι” was printed that way.
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