Christian Theology and Tragedy

Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory

Kevin Taylor, Giles Waller, Kevin Taylor, Giles Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317166597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

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.

PART I
Theology and Tragic Literature

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 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 un tragic (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:

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 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 ‘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 no...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Theology and Tragic Literature
• Part II: Theologians and Tragedy
• Part III: Theology Engaged With Tragic Theory
• Conclusion: Tragedy, Theology and the Discernment of Cries
• Bibliography
• Index