SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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Fortunate Fall,
borrowing the phrase from Isaiah, has called the
"small moment," that desperate awaiting of the fateful outcome when
all seems in doubt.
Buried in the Old Testament there are tragic dramas, particu–
larly the very Greek story of Saul and his "bloody house" in the
books of Samuel, but the later priestly theology has imposed its
in–
stitutional conception of the sacrificial animal without blemish on the
earlier
hybris
stories, and revised such obvious tragedies
.as
Jonah
and Job, the former into a curious redemptive comedy that concludes
on the parable of the gourd, the latter with an ending that begs all
its questions and blandly returns all Job's earthly property twofold.
On the basis of a theology where the only sins are disobeying God
or worshiping rival gods, and the consequences of those are never
in doubt, no agonistic form is possible, and the Judaic tradition has
produced nothing like a tragic or dramatic literature.
Building on this tradition, Christianity too seems incompatible
with a tragic literature, as Weisinger among others has shown. The
great Christian drama of the Passion cannot be tragic because the
perfection of Jesus eliminates
hybris
or any shortcoming, neither
pity nor terror in Aristotle's sense is possible because of our inability
to identify our own flawed human nature with the image of perfect
goodness suffering absolute injustice, and the final victory is always
certain. Drama with a human protagonist, insofar as it is Christian,
cannot be tragic, since the issue has been settled once and for all
by the victory of Jesus in His Incarnation, and His Atonement makes
all subsequent private atonement unnecessary for the Christian, who
needs only some combination of Faith and Grace to participate in
the antecedent act. Dante properly recognized this in identifying his
great poetic drama as a divine comedy. Where tragic possibility
is
reintroduced in Christian history it is invariably repudiated as heresy,
the Manichaean belief that the issue has not yet been finally settled,
denying Incarnation its victory, or the Pelagian repudiation of Origi–
nal Sin, obviating divine Atonement.
Nor have the great Oriental faiths produced anything we could
properly call tragedy. Since their common sacrificial figure, as Wil–
liam Empson has pointed out in
Some Versions of Pastoral,
is not
the Western Dying God, typified by Jesus on the Cross, but an an–
tithd.it'al
image
ctf
The
Siacere
Man at One
with
Nature,
typified
