COMMENTS
Aspects of Tragedy,
Ancient and Modern
George A. Panichas
IN THE ANCIENT WORLD the perimeters of
. tragic vision and experience were clearly
established and recognized. One could
be quite clear as to the meaning of trag-
edy and the manifestations of tragic ex-
perience and tragic heroism. One could
readily comprehend the noble stature
and the transcendent realm of tragedy.
One could, in short, measure oneself
against the larger, universal background
of what constitutes tragedy, as rendered
by an Aeschylus and a Sophocles in,
respectively, an Agamemnon o r an Oe-
dipus. A certain greatness, immensity,
and exceptionality surrounded the tragic
dimension, even as tragedy connoted
something greater than immediate life,
from which, of course, it emerged and
the reality of which it reflected to a
heightened, ultimate degree. An epic
poem like Homer’s Iliad is fraught with
tragic meaning and destiny, its heroes
immense, even overwhelming in their
tragic circumstances and predicament-
in their fatedness (moira). Their tragic
qualities help to place their tragic expe-
rience on the highest level of moral sig-
nificance. The tragedy of Achilles, like
his shield, depicts what is astonishing
and enormous in consequence, trans-
GEORGE A. PANICHAS is editor of Modern Age.
He has edited, most recently, In Continuity:
The Last Essays of Austin Warren (1996).
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human and superhuman. His suffering,
no less than his weakness and sin
(hamafia),overshadows everything else
in the epic tragedy of the Iliad. His de-
mise, unalterable, dramatizes tragic les-
sons in wisdom and insight for those
who discern the spectacle of his glory
and destruction. A monumental essence
radiates in his every act and gesture, in
his heroic praxis and doxai. In associa-
tion with Achilles, what is terribly hu-
man attains its highest measure of worth.
The line of descent and connection
from Achilles to Agamemnon to Oedipus
to Antigone to Medea is one that dis-
closes a kind of spiritual angst, at once
terrifying and redeeming. In these tragic
figures and in the dilemma of each hero’s
agon, we recognize the deeper parts of
our extended selves in the undulant pro-
cess of purification and expiation. In
their pathos we perceive our own-and
we take note of the redemptive context
of reverence. Their tragedy helps us to
understand our limits, our limitations.
Such tragedy, at once humane and hu-
manizing, helps us t o encounter and also
to measure our humanity. It enables us
to perceive, even if from a distance,
what is called, in Hellenic contexts, a
“vision of the agathon”as a dimension of
a “divine paradigm,” and always against
the background of those “unwritten laws”
that Sophocles describes in Anfigone:
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“Theimmortal unwritten laws of Heaven,/
They were not born today nor yester-
day;/ They die not; and none knoweth
whence they sprang.” Ancient tragedy,
it can be said, has its ground of being in
these “laws,” these first and last prin-
ciples, the urche and fefos of all human
experience and meaning. This is tragedy
of transcendence, as it were, with its
informing metaphysic in relation to hu-
man nothingness (“I count your life as
equal to zero,” the Chorus cries in Oedi-
pus Rex) and also, in the end, to the
suffering which also brings a cleansing
self-recognition-a kind of grace at the
edge of redemption in the country of the
spirit: “Submit,you fool. Submit. In agony
learn wisdom,” as Aeschylus declares in
Prometheus.
Ancient tragedy is, thus, the experi-
ence of transformation (not “transfigu-
ration” in the later Christian sense), en-
acted in the contexts of what Goethe
terms the “divine worth of tones and
tears.” That, too, Greek tragedy has, in
its unique way, a religious center, even,
that is, a spiritual essence, is an incon-
trovertible fact. For the Greek tragedi-
ans, as teachers of virtues, were deeply
involved with religious questions-ulti-
mate questions revolving around man’s
worth and destiny,-with some super-
human power (fheos), and with man’s
fate. “The Greeks of the sixth and fifth
centuries,” writes Werner Jaeger in
Puideiu (1939-1944), “had long been
brooding on the great religious problem:
why does God send suffering into the life
of man?” The Greek tragedians, hence,
stressed the eternal fact that man must
not forget his unconscious and yet tran-
scendent ties to the unwritten laws and
his need for reverence (eusebeiu) for the
unknown, the mysterious. Their trag-
edies, in effect, provided a dramatic in-
terpretation of life, both moral and spiri-
tual in principle. And these tragedies,
more specifically, focused on some he-
roic figure-some superior being-in
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whom some fateful problem was to be
enacted, particularly the great religious
problem of suffering and sin, of punish-
ment and expiation. “Behind all suffer-
ing,” G. Lowes Dickinson writes in The
Creek View of Life (1896), “behind sin
and crime, must lie a redeeming magna-
nimity.” A Greek tragedy, by becoming a
“moving sculpture” and “a sleep of mu-
sic,” also was to become a study of Man
(unfhropos), finally transporting the au-
dience to a world of higher reality and
permanence from the material world of
terror and flux.
Clearly, ancient tragedy contains a
humanistic orientation: that is, a fervent
and consummate preoccupation with the
nature of man, his predicament and his
fate. Man, in short, is the center, though
that center has its added metaphysical
dimension, its added center, in the uni-
verse (in the cosmos), so that to concen-
trate solely on the first center to the
neglect of the second center breeds ar-
rogance, insolence, impiety, overween-
ing pride-hubris. Aeschylus’s Agamem-
non depicts precisely this centeredness
of the self and images its destructive
process when he walks on the purple
carpets reserved only for the Gods and
thus courts punishment and doom itself.
He glorifies what Simone Weil calls “the
empire of might” (in all of its conse-
quences) as it collides with the “justice
of Zeus,” and with the “law of measure”
(“nothing in excess,” to recall the Greek
warning). Greek tragedy also becomes a
drama of discrimination, seeking as it
does to present itself as a mode of ex-
plaining the world-the human condi-
tion-and knowing it. In Sophocles this
form of tragedy-of tragic discrimina-
tion-affirms man’s greatness in the face
of cruel adversity; affirms man’s heroic
capacity within the scope of a heroism of
dignity, which constitutes, for the an-
cients, true humility and final redemp-
tion. Sophocles, in this respect, is a tragic
poet of order, reverence, proportion,
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above all, of sophrosyne, the supreme
Hellenic virtue.
Attic tragedy records the disorder of
eros and the yearning for order; it
records, in effect, the constant collision
between gravity and grace, between dis-
equilibrium and equilibrium, between
nothingness and being, between cour-
age and nihilism. Tragedy, of its very
nature, must bear “the burden of vision”
for eternity itself. It should not go unno-
ticed that ancient and modern tragedy
do have a connecting link in Euripides,
the perturbing Greek dramatist who, as
Jaeger was to observe, “discovered the
soul in a new sense-who revealed the
troubled world of man’s emotions and
passions.” Unlike Aeschylus a n d
Sophocles, Euripides confronted t h e
cold, hard face of reality as he saw it;
showed fierce understanding of what he
saw; and fiercely condemned those con-
ditions t h a t h e exposed. Indeed,
Euripides has been described as a dra-
matist who had a “modern mind,” the
first of the moderns; Aristophanes, in
fact, charged that Euripides taught the
Athenians t o “think, see, understand,
suspect, question everything,” and no
words better prophesy the “modern tem-
per” than these.
That, too, Euripides belonged essen-
tially to a destructive analytical spirit,
that he took things rebelliously, that he
reflected an age of movement and transi-
tion, that he echoed the sophistic spirit,
that all truth is relative-it is this soph-
ism that Plato equated with intellectual
and moral anarchy: these aspects of his
thought and dramatic achievement an-
ticipate the modern age and what Tho-
mas Hardy specifies as “the ache of
modernism.” In Euripides we have a pro-
phetic glimpse of the crisis of modern-
ism in the destructive forms of disorder,
discontinuity, disinheritance: of a mod-
ern world that is “a broken center,” when
as Rilke declares, “the world ...passed
out of the hands of God into the hands of
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men.“
Walter Pater cogentlysummarizes our
modernity when he writes: “Modern
thought is distinguished from ancient by
its cultivation of the ‘relative spirit’ in
place of the ‘absolute.”’ This modernity,
pervasive and irreversible, spells the
“doom of orthodox sophrosyne^,” which
signifies the law of measure. The Rus-
sian poet F. 1. Tiutshev (1803-1873) regis-
ters the modern predicament when he
writes in his poem “The Abyss”:
Behold man, without home,
orphaned, alone, impotent,
Facing the dark abyss; ...
And in this strange mysterious night
he sees and knows a Fatal heritage.
The “fatal heritage” that Tiutshev
speaks of in his poem is also that which
Matthew Arnold, in his poem “The
Scholar Gypsy,” associates with “this
strange disease of modern life/ With its
sick hurry, its divided aims.” William
Butler Yeats, in “The Second Coming”
(1919), also underlines the ravages and
the desperation of such a heritage of
fatal consequences in modern life:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world.”
In his book The End of the Modem
World (1956) Romano Guardini declares
that “Man has no place-absolutely no
place-in the universe,” words that em-
body not only the essence of modernity
but also its tragic essences that culmi-
nate in the modern waste land that T.S.
Eliot renders. The sustaining and redeem-
ing principles of conservation and cor-
rection espoused by Edmund Burke, as
well as the disciplines of continuity inti-
mately connected with these, have been
superseded, or contravened, by what
the philosopher Michael Polanyi calls a
“positivistic empiricism,” or as he fur-
ther observes: “...[the] idea of unlimited
progress, intensified to perfectionism,
has combined with our sharpened skep-
Fall 1997
ticism to produce the perilous state of
the modern mind.”
Human meaning, then, is “reduced to
the condition of things,” reduced, in ef-
fect,to a concern with “the idea of man ...
[as an] administrative number,” without
a past and without memory, when, as
Samuel Beckett declares, “it is not for
man to act, but to be acted upon: man
can only despair of hope, can only not
wait or wait.” Spiritual inertia, which
results from this process of cruel reduc-
tionism in a pluralist society, leads t o a
malaise that afflicts human existence
and that adopts, for example, the belief
that, in Simone Weil’s words, “matter is
a machine for manufacturing good.”Such
a belief plunges modern man deeper
into Plato’s “Cave of Illusion” and re-
nounces the redemption that resides in
humility, perhaps the highest spiritual
quality to be found in the “tragic sense of
life”: “Without humility, all the virtues
are finite,” Simone Weil further states.
“Only humility makes them infinite.” In-
deed, humility is the omega-point of a
metaphysics of tragedy-of tragic mean-
ing, experience, destiny. It is a paradigm
of tragedy, which if it is scorned or repu-
diated leads precisely to the annihila-
tion of the tragic spirit that makes trag-
edy non-tragic in modern life; in short,
transforms tragedy into paradox, which
thrusts one “beyond tragedy,” that also
signalizes “the death of tragedy.”
Nicola Chiaromonte, the late Italian
social critic (1905-1972), is much to the
point when he writes concerning the
nihilism and violated principles shaping
and finally destroying human meaning
in modern civilization: “The sickness of
our times is egomania. It renders the
individual radically impious and makes
him ignore everything that does not serve
his immediate objectives (which never
extended beyond the limits of his own
lifetime), thereby denying all that is inef-
fable, secret, and arcane in the world-
the ‘divine’ inherent in all things and in
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every impulse of the spirit.” Impiety,
that which for Virgil constituted an ulti-
mate discordance found in furor irnpius,
is a major part of the disorientation in
modern life that breaks and diminishes
the patience and magnanimity that in-
here redemptively in genuine tragic ex-
perience as it depicts the search for
order of the soul. “No-more’’ and “Not-
yet,”Heidegger’s “doublenot,”nowmake
the tragic sense a “senseless fatality”;
the so-called modern hero is just “any-
body,” just another “sleep-walker’’ in
“kosmos Kafka,” for whom “eternity is
replaced by endlessness” and who
bleakly gives us news, as Kafka would
have it, of “the abandoned world” in
which he lives.
In the modern age, which one critic
terms “an age of bad faith” commencing
with August 1914, when the Great War
broke out, tragic vision and experience
undergo a radical change-a devaluative
pulverizing process in which what for
the ancients is noble, elevated, and he-
roic now becomes trivial, minimal, and
common. A modern victim’s tragedy
lacks stature or grandeur, and is often
one that underlines avictim’s grotesque-
ness, meaninglessness, rootlessness, his
absurdity, his non-being. In the modern
world in which the idea of transcen-
dence has neither place nor meaning
tragedy itself is a victim of what Eric
Voegelin calls “existential deformation.”
If in ancient tragedy a tragic hero is
shrouded in a world of mystery, pos-
sesses a noumenal quality of human
worth, has a standard of character in an
ascending pattern of development and
meaning, in modern tragedy a tragic fig-
ure is identified by demystification and
by dehumanization, by lostness and root-
lessness. His world, in a sense, has no
universal frontiers and is reduced in its
physical and spiritual horizons; that is,
it is a localized, non-ontological, non-
organic world in which man himself is
reduced, or neutralized, or denatured; a
381
disinherited, displaced person, a s it
were, and, indeed, a non-person con-
signed to a “cancer ward,” or exiled,
forever, to a Siberian gulag, the modern
forms of tragic fate in “the heart of dark-
ness.” These are our conditions of mod-
ern tragedy, or better our pseudonyms
of tragedy.
In the ancient world tragedy contained
and was nourished by the “religious
sense,”that is to say, by the elements of
piety and humility, by an intuitive ven-
eration of “the idea of the holy,” of the
sacred logos as opposed to the profane
impulse, by an intuitive pull towards the
transcendent as opposed to the present
and the nominal. Sophocles’s Oedipus at
Cofonus is perhaps the most vivid illus-
tration of the religious sense and of the
religious acceptation in a tragic context.
Oedipus, now an exile and wanderer,
recognizes his moira-‘‘ln suffering 1was
born.” “The sap of earth dries up,” he
confesses almost abjectly. “Flesh dies,
and while faith withers falsehood
blooms./ The spirit is not constant from
friend to friend, from city to city; it
changes, soon or late.” His end, in a
scene that is perhaps grander than any
in Greek tragedy, we view the aged and
blind Oedipus disappearing into a sa-
cred grove-“And the place is holy.”
Oedipus now encounters the “mysterium
tremendum”:
...suddenly a Voice called him, a terrify-
ing voice at which all trembled and hair
stood on end. A god was calling to him.
‘‘Oedipus! Oedipus!” it cried, again and
again. “It is time: YOU stay too long.” He
heard the summons, and knew that it was
from God.
Oedipus passes fromthe human world
to the divine-to ”holyground.” His end,
his disappearance into the divine un-
known, into the divine otherness, em-
phasizes the religious sense as it con-
joins with the tragic sense, each deepen-
ing and enhancing the other in relation
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to the huge cosmic mystery, wondrous
in its breadth and depth.
This religious sense, in its Hellenic
constituents, should not be forcibly
amalgamated or confused with the reli-
gious sense in its Christian contexts.
Oedipus’s tragic passion and fate, what-
ever their religious feeling and pull, must
be differentiated from the Passion and
Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reli-
gious dimension of Greek tragedy re-
volves around moral struggle, but it is
obviously removed from the Christian
vision of redemption. Greek tragic he-
roes are finite beings even in their reli-
gious nobility, whereas a Christian tragic
hero (as in the fiction of a Dostoevsky) is
a creature of freedom, sin, guilt, and
salvation. Greek tragedy venerates the
transcendent, in its awe and sanctity,
but it is teleological in its experiential
qualities of pity a n d t e r r o r . T h e
eschatological character of the Chris-
tian religious sense must not be ig-
nored-that subsuming religious sense
that has its ultimates in the coming of
Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and
the Last Judgment. Both Greek tragedy
and modern tragedy are anchored in
time, in chronos-in measured time that
has a beginning and ending; that has
boundaries at once temporal and spa-
tial. For the Christian, on the other hand,
all tragedy ends in grace, attains its
finality, its telos, in ultimate time, in
kairos, in that time, to kairo ekino: in
divine time that is timeless and that
fuses beginnings and endings, endings
and beginnings. For the Christian, trag-
edy ends not in the heroic suffering of
the Greeks or in the perverse skepticism
of the moderns, but in Revelation. “For
those who have faith to trust in the
revelation that is the Christ,” Preston T.
Roberts, Jr., writes in a masterful essay,
“A Christian Theory of Dramatic Trag-
edy,”“evil,sin, thedevil, death-in short
all that is cursed, wretched, and miser-
able about this life-becomes redeem-
Fall 1997
able in principle and redeemed at cer-
tain points and moments in fact.”
Modern tragedy, having increasingly
repudiated the religious sense that radi-
ated in and even renewed ancient trag-
edy by endowing it with a metaphysical
yearning, registers the nothingness, the
“nameless, ultimate fear, a horror of the
completelynegative,”that Dr. F.R. Leavis
perceives in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
(1 922):
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the garden
AFter the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant moun
tains
He who was living is now dead
The Political Sermons
of Samuel Johnson
Andrew Sandlin
THESUSTAINEDPOPUWTY of eighteenthcen-
tury luminary Samuel Johnson derives
primarily from his intelligent and witty
conversation recorded in the classic
biography by James Boswell; from the
quaint, prejudiced definitions appear-
ing in his English dictionary, the first of
its kind; from his unique and sometimes
condescending literary criticism; and
from his sage, practical advice written
ANDREW SANDLIN,an ordained minister in the
Nicene Convenant Church, is editor of the
Chalcedon Report and the Journal of Chris-
tian Reconstruction.
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We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
It can be said that modern tragedy is
the tragedy of experiencing “the agony
in stony places” and yet learning nothing
from this tragic experience: or of hear-
ing the “ou-boum”(“utterly dull”) which,
in E. M. Forster’s novelA Passage to India
(1924), merely states, now and forever,
in this world and in all worlds, “Every-
thing exists, nothing has value.” Forster’s
words evoke the import of tragedy in the
modern world even as they severely
constrict the boundaries of tragic vi-
sion. This constriction signals not only
the crisis of modernity but also the trag-
edy of modernity as we live and experi-
ence it in t h e “antagonist world.”
in the Rambler, the Idler, and the Aduen-
turer.
Johnson, though, wrote more than
dictionary definitions, literary criticism,
and practical essays. He was a leading
poet of his generation, and an accom-
plished playwright. He even produced
an edition of Shakespeare’s plays. But he
was no ivory-tower scholar oblivious of
the social and political issues of his day.
His reputation as something of a political
progressive is partially deserved (he
clamored for penal reform, but, con-
versely, disdained the cause of the Ameri-
can colonists). Donald Greene reminds
383