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PARTISAN REVIEW
by the Buddha under the Bo tree, no Passion is possible, and there
can be neither struggle nor victory. Lacking our characteristic West–
ern philosophy of change, the great Oriental faiths seem to lock
man in a permanent dualism, which does not become resolved in
time, but has always been transcended in a higher unity pre-existent
in the blinding moment of eternity.
I would submit that the great tragic literature of the modern
world has escaped divine comedy by being only nominally Christian,
and in fact deeply heretic at key points. Shakespeare may be Chris–
tian in
Measure for Measure
and
The Tempest,
but
Lear
and
Mac–
beth, Othello
and
Hamlet,
are Christian only in their insistence on
the radical imperfectibility of man. They exist in a Manichaean and
Pelagian universe where the Incarnation has never happened and the
Atonement consequently did not come off. In this universe proud
man is locked in mortal struggle with the inner forces of evil, and
must win through to some private redemption and true-seeing by
means of his own suffering, with no otherworldly allies. The great
tragic novels like
Karamazov
and
Mob y-Dick
are similarly Mani–
chaean and Pelagian, with Jesus appearing in person in the first
to hear from the Grand Inquisitor the failure of his Incarnation, and
Ahab in the second striking through the mask of the Christian Atone–
ment, and finding his own sacrificial atonement, a Pelagian man–
god, in the consubstantial mystery of immolation with the great whale.
The rise of rationalism, whether in its characteristic eighteenth–
century form as mechanical determinism or its characteristic nine–
teenth-century form as optimistic perfectibility, killed the tragic pos–
sibility that had coexisted with Christianity as pagan survival and
Christian heresy. Francis Fergusson has defined the tragic rhythm of
action in
The Idea of a Theater
as the movement from "Purpose"
through "Passion" to "Perception" (acknowledging his debt to Ken–
neth Burke's
upoiema," upathema," <<mathema").
Taking, as Aristotle
did, Sophocles'
Oedipus Tyrannus
as the archetypal tragedy, Fergus–
son has discussed later dramatic literature as the hypertrophy of one
or another phase of the larger cycle. In his terms, the rationalist
world of mechanical determinism would permit no Purpose because
we can have no free will or choice, no Passion because suffering be–
comes meaningless where we "understand" all and forgive all, and
no Perception because no increase of self-knowledge could come
