George Steiner famously declared that ‘Christianity is an anti-tragic vision of the world’, with its hopeful message of transcendence of earthly suffering and final resurrection (The Death of Tragedy, 1961). Indeed, when all tears are wiped away (Rev. 21:4), it seems that Mother Julian was right that ‘all manner of thing shall be well’. Moreover, J. F. Worthen argued in this journal (March 1989) that tragic drama presents evil with three characteristics – incomprehensibility, ineluctability and irrevocability – all denied by Christianity; yet, following Donald MacKinnon, he then sought some common ground. Now, Paul Blowers has given us a masterful analysis, rich in detail, of how ancient Christian authors both appropriated and transformed classical tragedy in new forms of tragical vision and practical response.
First, some definitions: Blowers distinguishes between ‘the tragic’ as characterising the human condition, ‘tragedy proper’ as the artistic dramatisation of the tragic, and ‘tragical vision’ as the reception and interpretation of tragedy and the tragic. ‘Tragical mimesis’ is his term for the ‘poetic enterprise of dramatizing humanity's tragic state of being’; this zooms in on the darker aspects of life while leaving open the possibility of hope, aiming to change the audience or reader through their emotional and intellectual engagement with others’ suffering. Early Christian authors, he argues, were engaged in ‘a re-presenting of the tragic itself, not a slavish imitation of the classical tragedians’ (p. 5).
In his seven chapters, Blowers engages with much recent scholarship on tragedy, classical theatre, theories of mimesis and emotional psychology. But he carefully delineates his scope from the beginning: his project is a ‘historical-theological’ excavation of tragical perspectives in early Christianity, paying attention to the art or drama of theology too, but not tackling all the questions that might be raised by a classicist, biblical scholar, literary critic or cultural historian.
The first chapter considers the value of classical tragedies according to pagan philosophers (Plato and Aristotle) and early Christian Apologists. Typically, the latter (such as Tertullian or Arnobius of Sicca) lambasted classical theatre as idolatrous, presenting it as the devil's pomp. The high art form had admittedly degenerated into debauched spectacles, which were also increasingly overshadowed by blood sports in the arena. Later, Chrysostom would even threaten excommunication on those who persisted in attending such games and shows, the ‘satanic theatre’, instead of attending church, the ‘spiritual theatre’ (p. 29). But these criticisms were not universal, and Blowers reveals that ancient Christian authors had a complex relationship with the tragedy genre, appropriating elements favourable to moral exhortation (for example, in Prudentius, the chariot of Sobrietas runs down Luxuria!).
More importantly, there were tragical perspectives to be unearthed in Christianity's own Scriptures. Through the classical tropes of peripeteia (reversal of fortune) and anagnôrisis (raw discovery), the stories of Adam and Eve (who started it all), Cain and Abel, Jephthah and his daughter (sacrificed because of his imprudent vow), Samson, Saul and Job, take on new tragical depth. John the Baptist's martyrdom is a kind of tragi-comedy, while the treachery of Judas Iscariot is variously viewed as pitiful, greedy, well-meaning, and/or a willingly diabolical possession. On Herod's massacre of the Holy Innocents, Gregory of Nyssa comments that evil had grown to its greatest extent at the coming of grace in the Incarnation, such that evil somehow exhausts itself and proves incapable of completely swallowing up the good; we might compare this with Worthen's account of the cross as the completion of tragedy in history, and therefore its definitive limit.
Throughout, Blowers shows how patristic authors were sensitive to a range of philosophical problems, such as creaturely mortality, guilt and punishment, free will and fate, innocent suffering and malicious cruelty, and the sheer scandalousness of some biblical narratives. Exegetes typically admitted the difficulties and some even escalated the problem in dramatic verse, such as the Gallican bishop Avitus of Vienne's poem On Original Sin which stages imaginative dialogues between Satan and Adam/Eve, pre-empting Milton by over a millennium. One of the particular joys of reading this book is that it presents a panoply of lesser-known figures of the patristic era. One memorable cameo was Abraham of Quidun, the fourth-century Syrian recluse, who dressed up as a soldier to visit his prostitute niece, to rescue her of course.
Reading both biblical and biographical narratives with patristic authors places us as dramatis personae within sacred history itself. So, in Chapter Four, Blowers gets us into the skulls of Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine and how they formed a ‘tragic Christian self’ out of their own experiences. They express their own tragedies of illness, exile, bereavement, and suchlike, within a theological awareness of human fallenness and divine grace, and so universalise the soul's cosmic predicament.
Blowers shows, in Chapter Five, that these same preachers developed a Christian ‘tragical conscience’ that urged their audiences to reach out to those in need. Applying the phenomenological analyses of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion on the ‘face’, Blowers uncovers a range of patristic sources urging us to ‘see’ the faces and bodies of the ‘other’ in need, and thence to show practical mercy. But if the destitute are presented too graphically, potential almsgivers could experience revulsion and fear and turn away – a fine line for a preacher to tread. To Chrysostom's bold assertion that the poor ought to pity the rich, not envy them, Blowers adds demurely: ‘Homiletically, this was an altogether hard sell.’
A similarly thin line between tragedy and comedy is explored in the stock character of the social parasite, mocked and pitied in equal measure, and in the woes of the married or celibate life, or the situation of the ‘unbelieving’ Jews in the economy of salvation. As always, Blowers carefully marshals evidence from many authors to come to nuanced conclusions. He also avers that secular Western cultures, despite their laudable ‘awareness-raising’ campaigns and activism to relieve suffering, lack ‘a sacred moral narrative and struggle even to articulate a common mythos of global community or human solidarity’ (p. 177).
A Christian tragical conscience is not guilt-ridden, but a deeper contemplative gaze that appropriately harnesses emotions. Starting with Martha Nussbaum on the ‘moral intelligence’ of the emotions and Robert Kaster on emotional ‘narrative scripts’ that change with time, Chapter Six unpacks how emotions are structured rationally and intentionally. The Stoic ideal state of passionlessness (apatheia) still allowed for some useful emotions (eupatheiai), but Christians went much further, analysing the classical tragic emotions of fear and pity through their cognitive content. Blowers demonstrates the vitality of these Christian transformations of a tragical perspective, without imposing any final judgments on the validity of various patristic solutions.
The section on grief (lupê) is particularly powerful. Many Church Fathers wrote letters of consolation, freely admitting their sorrow in the face of tragedy, without giving way to despair. Grief should be ‘just and reasonable’, said Gregory of Nyssa, following the Apostle Paul's injunction not to grieve ‘as others who have no hope’ (1 Thess. 4:13). Yet tears of sorrow for sin are a gift from God, and in John Climacus, compunction is arguably ‘the tragical emotion par excellence’ (p. 213). The female perspectives from the Life of Macrina were welcome. In quoting her brother Naucratius's death as a ‘hunting accident’ (p. 201), however, Blowers misses an interesting divergence among friends: Gregory Nazianzen elsewhere reveals that it was a fishing incident (thêra can mean hunting or fishing), with the report of tangled nets perhaps increasing the tragic pathos: ‘that you might learn, O mortal, from this life's stage play’ (Epigram 157).
The final chapter attempts a more theological analysis, resting largely on Balthasar's theo-dramatics to argue that Christian tragical vision involves both an amplification of drama (mythos) and an intelligible though strictly limited theodicy (logos). Against Steiner's nihilistic notion of ‘absolute tragedy’, Christian tragical mimesis aims at uncovering what Balthasar calls a ‘play of freedoms’ between God and humans. These are delicate and subtle matters, and readers will differ in how they appraise both the patristic and modern perspectives offered. Blowers wisely leaves a lot of room for manoeuvre. Still, I have reservations about his downplaying the privatio boni understanding of evil as ‘a Christianized Neoplatonic view’ (p. 240), when it is ultimately grounded in the biblical revelation of God as YHWH (see, for instance, Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics, 2004).
Like Pandora's jar, after all the ills of the world have come out, Blowers discovers at the bottom a message of hope: ‘tragedy's dead-ends must ultimately be penultimate’. He even proposes hope, refined through suffering, as ‘a Christian tragical emotion in its own right’. Perhaps one lesson of this book, however, is that verbal explanations, while important, will never be enough. It is through Christian living that tragical mimesis is to be acted out, in both senses of the term.
