Review Essay

Laurence Michel claimed that because of its themes, such as “profound ambiguity in the presence of evil,” tragedy was ultimately incompatible with Christianity, which alternatively is “grounded in enthusiasm not for the natural powers of man but for the supernatural fact of redemption.” “At the root of the question of living in a vale of tears, then, there is a basic incompatibility between the tragic and the Christian view,” Michel continued, and therefore “nothing has yet come forward which can be called, without cavil, both Christian and Tragedy at the same time.” ¹ Such a position would presumably pose a problem to a book provocatively titled Christ the Tragedy of God, but its author is both aware of and up for the challenge of fruitfully relating these seemingly incongruous ideas. Thomas Aquinas taught that “in sacred science all things are treated of under the aspect of God; either because they are God Himself; or because they refer to God as their beginning and end.” ² If he was right, and theology is justly considered not only the study of God but of all things in relation to God, then conceivably no subject is irrelevant to it, including tragedy. Kevin Taylor’s book provides a sustained argument intended to persuade readers that this is indeed the case, that tragedy not only “explores areas of theological interest” but also “has influenced Christian theology in vital ways” (p. ix). That tragedy offers up many themes of interest to Christian theology is difficult to deny, especially when one considers the origin of tragic drama in Greek society, where religion and ritual were embedded in the daily life of its citizens. The origin of Greek dramatic performance at a religious festival, the Great Dionysia, presided over by the patron god Dionysus (Bacchus)—the roaming god of fecundity, vine, and mystic ecstasy—excites the expectation of encountering themes of religious and ritualistic significance in their performances, ones which the audience shared in more as participants than passive observers (as symbolized by the choruses). Religious themes such as retributive divine justice and especially the relationship between the sovereign decrees and acts of the gods (sometimes expressed through oracles, for example) and the meaningful free choices and inevitable suffering of humans abound in not only Greek drama but in subsequent tragic literature, where divine actors in the drama might be absorbed into less concrete concepts like fate. The more pressing question for Taylor concerns the vital influence of tragedy on Christian theology. This is more than “despoiling the Egyptians,” seeking to co-opt tragedy into the service of theology, or merely as illustrative of some aspect of theological truth which could be arrived at more directly and purely in Scripture. Might tragedy have something theological to teach in its own register and integrity from which even Christian theology could learn? Taylor is convinced it does, and in reading through his account, it becomes increasingly difficult to disagree with him.

Tragedy eludes a simple definition as it is expressed through many different media and subjects. It is perhaps best viewed as a genre, one with many different instantiations through the millennia (the stage, the novel, film), but one where a revolving collection of identifiable features persist, such as irony, blindness, guilt, sacrifice, contingency, instability, pity, and fate. Scripture itself makes use of the genre of tragedy as Taylor does well to show throughout his study; apparently, God is less scrupulous than Laurence Michel.

On the whole, this is a fascinating, learned, and even delightful book, one which should greatly interest theologians, literary scholars, and those with an interest in tragic theory. Admirably, it is not written exclusively for specialists and its style will not prevent even the general reader, student, or Christian from benefitting from its chapters. One strength of Taylor’s presentation is the amount of material covered. He seems at home in a diverse body of tragic content, from the Greek tragedies performed centuries before the birth of Christ to the plays of Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen, the novels of Thomas Hardy and Stephen King, and even contemporary film. Punctuating the analysis throughout are notable theorists from a variety of fields also—theologians with an interest in the subject like Reinhold Niebuhr and Rowan Williams, philosophers from Plato and Aristotle (of course) to Nietzsche and Simone Weil, and literary critics like Terry Eagleton. Certain theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar and his truly magnificent Theo-Drama volumes are constant dialogue partners throughout. Despite the wide range of notable figures and theoretical fields drawn into Taylor’s study, he is not overawed by such august company and darts in and out of these various fields and figures with relative ease, exemplifying his thesis that tragedy is a rich and underutilized resource for theological reflection.

There are many valuable observations arising from Taylor’s work in what is truly (perhaps ironically, given the subject matter) an enjoyable read. One is that despite the best efforts of the brightest reflections on tragedy throughout history, from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it is a thing finally resistant to coherence, to systematization—“significant exceptions and doubts always remain” (p. 40). Similarly, though systematization is a perennial pastime of Christian theologians, God as he has revealed himself to us in Scripture and our shared tradition is also resistant to neat classification. We have inherited “a vast and diverse canon that invites and resists a final systematization” (p. 54). This is reflected in the saying of the church fathers, Deus semper maior; or, as Tennyson wrote, “Our little systems have their day; / They have their day and cease to be: / They are but broken lights of thee, / And thou, O Lord, art more than they.” ³ Taylor says one lesson the ancient Greek tragedies teach is that “the gods always win” (p. 41). Job might feel similarly; for the Psalmist, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Ps 115:3).

One of the book’s most admirable features is the strong connection made between the intertwining of the involvement of the gods or divinely ordained fate in tragic storytelling and the cross of Christ, the centrepiece of our theology. “God’s presence even in extreme suffering” (p. 99) is one of the marks not only of ancient Greek tragedies, but of distinctly Christian theology. The “reality of the gods in moments of terrible affliction” is not ignored by these ancient dramatists, in “contrast to modernity and its secularism, where the divine is simply marginalized, ignored, or even ridiculed.” Rather, Taylor reminds his readers that “the ancients saw the world as ‘god-soaked’” (p. 100), and as Paul sought to persuade his Athenian audience in debating with the philosophers at Mars Hill, the Christian vision of the world is not dissimilar to the Greek poetic one in this regard—“In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Significantly, Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross has all the pathos of tragic drama. At the crucifixion, of all places, we see the unravelling of the apparent order of things, an event which seems to fit the Nietzschean understanding of tragedy that “traces our progression from order and disorder, from Apollo to Dionysus” (p. 49).

Space does not permit discussion of all the ways Taylor (following others before him) is able to connect tragedy and the Christian faith; suffice it to say it is difficult in the end not to be persuaded with Balthasar “that Christianity preserves tragedy,” or even with Eagleton that Christianity might be called “a tragic faith” (p. 84). Nevertheless, for all the similarity Taylor sees between tragedy and Christian theology, there is much dissimilarity too. Taylor acknowledges this at various places throughout the book, confessing “Christianity does hold to a final resolution to tragedy,” that in the end “it does all cohere” (p. 53). But what Taylor appears to give with the right hand he swiftly takes with the left, and the reading experience of repeated affirmation and denial is unsettling. Perhaps this is conforming the style of the book to his subject matter, as an enduring feature of tragedy is its inherent instability, a consequence of the contingency of the finite human situation when confronted with the enduring presence and interference of the gods. “But is theology not in the business of instability,” Taylor asks, “as it wrestles with the great mysteries of God and Trinity, Incarnation, sin, and salvation?” (p. 54). The teachings of Christ were greatly destabilizing for the religious rulers and order of first-century Judea, but at once a comfort and a balm to “sinners,” and later, to the church. I certainly felt destabilized in my reading of this book, but the hope of eventually landing on solider ground was mostly frustrated. “The Bible itself is a plural canon, conversational and dialectical with itself, suggesting that truth is not monolithic but, as Balthasar titled it, symphonic” (p. 55). This truth is worth recapturing and emphasizing today, but the voices heard in Taylor’s study are not always in harmony with one another; despite the talk of harmony, the notes sounded are often discordant. Again, this may be part of his intent or, crucially, something impossible to divorce from the nature of tragedy itself. If the former, he must be judged successful in this. If the latter, then a real obstacle stands in the path of those seeking to advance the notion that Christianity is a tragic faith. Granted, Taylor’s claim is more modest: that tragic storytelling (for all its similarity and dissimilarity to the Christian faith) is rich soil for theological reflection, a claim his study validates—the book itself is wholesome fruit grown in that soil.

I do think the obstacle to identifying tragic storytelling and the story Christianity tells too closely is an insurmountable one in the end. Taylor appears to know this, whether he comes to admit it finally or not. Again, I cannot charge him with any wrongdoing on this point, for the book sets out to mine tragic literature and theory as a rich source of theological reflection, and it delivers on this promise. The reader is instructed and possibly even delighted along the course the author charts through so many tragic figures, theories, and ideas, and their connection with and relevance to Christian theology is well established. The ultimate incongruity between the tragic and the Christian material, however, may be glimpsed in Taylor’s preoccupation with the abrupt ending of Mark’s Gospel. Mark’s account, readers may recall, ends with the discovery of the empty tomb by the women who had come to anoint Jesus’s dead body along with the angelic announcement that “He has risen; he is not here” (Mk 16:6). Instructed by the angel to go tell Jesus’s disciples and Peter specifically this good news, the Gospel ends unexpectedly and abruptly: “they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (v. 8). It is possible to sense an ambiguity on this note, one which would mix well with tragic storytelling, as the destabilized audience perpetually waits in fear for the other shoe to drop, as in tragic drama it inevitably must. Of course, God saw fit to provide the church with a Fourfold Gospel, and so this is not the only account Christians have proclaiming the significance of this event, which the remainder of the New Testament and the tradition of the church continue to unfold. Taylor shows a general uneasiness with or at least a reluctance to include in his discussion the three other resurrection accounts the Gospels record. This is to be expected, perhaps, if indeed “tragedy denies the ultimate hope and gift of the resurrection” (p. 49). But if this is true, then can the grand story of redemption Christianity tells ever be called a tragedy in the end, or Christ considered (as the book’s title provocatively suggests) the tragedy of God?

This eventually comes into focus in the book’s last and best chapter, one concerned with perception and the blindness or hiddenness on which much tragic action turns. Again, the more open and ambiguous ending to Mark’s Gospel is appealed to (p. 142), and while many readers might be sympathetic to the thought that “the resurrection is not to be understood as a magical proof-text that wards against tragic suffering”—of course, not even Jesus was spared (Lk 9:22), and a servant is not above his master in this of all things—I, at least, thought it a non sequitur that Taylor follows this with the judgement that “Christ’s resurrection itself remains irresolute and indeterminable,” and that it “cannot be approached in a way that is unambiguous, finalizing, or triumphant” (p. 145). Unlike tragedy, the Gospels do not narrate a mysterious catastrophe in the end—not even Mark’s—though if not for the empty tomb and announcement “He has risen,” they certainly would. That is why tragic storytelling, though it proves to be a rich and resonant resource for theological reflection, and intersects with Christian Scripture and teaching in illuminating ways, is nevertheless insufficient for understanding the heart of Christianity. If the dramatic march of God in history terminated in Jesus’s Godforsaken cry from the cross, or even in the bewilderment and fearful silence of the women in Mark’s ending, one might have a case for perceiving Christ as the tragedy of God. The gospel story is undeniably dramatic, containing many tragic elements, as G. K. Chesterton once also observed:

We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words. ⁴

In the tense unfolding of this swift-moving drama, the sensitive reader or listener may rightly (like the first disciples) feel shock when this relentlessly focused messiah who taught with such divine authority, who had just days before ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem to shouts of “Hosanna” like a returning king, is betrayed by one of his own men, and handed over to the local rulers to be promptly executed. History itself teeters dizzily on the edge of the gaping aporia that is the crucifixion of the Son of God. What the drama here narrates in terse, bare fashion might be properly considered ineffable; paradoxically, the tragic climax of the story told in the words of Scripture is beyond words. “There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech,” especially when, as Chesterton continues, “for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.” ⁵ There is thus plenty of fabric in the Christian story with which to weave tragic tales. But while it is possible to clothe the climatic unfolding of penultimate events in tragic dress, the drama has not concluded. And Christians, at any rate, are not permitted to pretend as if it had. Supremely because the denouement of this drama is the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead ones, it is ultimately a story which must be said to transcend both comedy and tragedy. The Christian story in fact ends not in catastrophe but in what J. R. R. Tolkien called “eucatastrophe.” In this, it may be more akin to another genre of literature: fairy story. The resurrection is the dramatic Deus ex Machina, the sudden divinely orchestrated rescue from the brink of doom, from what would otherwise be an inevitable and final defeat, and provides a crucial lifting of the heart in turning from tragedy to the hope that perhaps “everything sad” is going “to come untrue.” ⁶ The Christian story is more fairy tale than tragedy in the end because it has the distinctive mark of fairy tales, the happy ending. As most good stories are spun into sequels, perhaps Taylor might be persuaded to provide us with a sequel to his book, Christ the Fairy Tale of God? Either way, the final act of the Christian drama of redemption Chesterton alluded to is not over but ongoing. It is being played out across this age in the church, through whom the risen Christ acts (it is his body) by his Spirit to build his kingdom, and the end will not be tragic but triumphant—even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.