The truly religious man and tragedy
Every day, on my blog, I post a “thought for the day.” Usually, it is something said by someone born on that date. On April 26, for instance, the quote was from Ludwig Wittgenstein, born on April 26, 1889: “For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”
I’ve thought about this a good deal since I posted it, and have come to the provisional conclusion that it demonstrates considerable insight into the nature of the truly religious man but noticeably less into the nature of tragedy.
The truly religious man — who may not necessarily be a regular churchgoer — leads a life grounded in faith and hope. His outlook is fundamentally life-affirming. I use the somewhat clunky term “life-affirming” because I do not want to suggest that such a man is simply an “optimist” who has somehow convinced himself that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
No, the fundamentally religious stance toward life is to rejoice in it on precisely its own terms. John Hall Wheelock puts the matter quite simply:
Was it not worth it to be born,
To have felt this sun, to have drawn this breath!
Is life not worth the price of death!
Wheelock also says, in another poem, that
… the nature of things is tragic
And meaningful beyond words, that to have lived
Even if once only, once and no more,
Will have been-oh, how truly-worth it.
Now it may seem at first glance that if Wheelock’s outlook is truly religious — as I think it is — then Wittgenstein is simply and entirely wrong. But I don’t think that is the case. Wittgenstein correctly understands that the truly religious man sees things differently. But he incorrectly assumes that this involves a failure to recognize the tragic, whereas it is precisely the tragic that the religious man sees differently.
Thanks mostly to Aristotle, the term tragedy is generally thought to refer to the downfall of a great man brought about through a flaw in his character. Cast in the crudest terms, it is a story with an unhappy ending. Dante called his great poem Commedia (it was Boccaccio who tacked on the Divina) because God’s creation must necessarily resolve itself in harmony.
Nevertheless — and Aristotle notwithstanding — the Greek plays that gave us the notion of tragedy did not exactly end unhappily. True, Oedipus the King ends with the high and mighty ruler of Thebes self-blinded and driven into exile. But that is only the beginning of the story. The conclusion takes place in the grove at Colonus where the fallen monarch, having achieved enlightenment through suffering, is for all practical purposes assumed into heaven. The myth resolves itself in harmony.
The keyword in all of this is meaningful. The nature of things is not merely tragic. It is also, as Wheelock says, meaningful. And not merely so. It is “meaningful beyond words.”
To separate the tragic from the meaningful is to misunderstand both, and to not merely think this, but to have a deep-seated faith that it is so and live accordingly, is what it means to be truly religious. Absent that, scripture, tradition, and ritual together amount to nothing more than St. Paul’s sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Such a faith, of course, also stands directly counter to a purely naturalistic and mechanistic view of life and the world — which, like it or not, comes down to thinking that everything at bottom is a fluke and will play its ineluctable causal way out to eventual entropy.
As for me, I prefer to hope that Julian of Norwich is right, and that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
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Let’s not overlook the reasons for Oedipus’ tragic fall in OEDIPUS REX. To risk oversimplifying the reasons, consider only this: the gods had ordained a particular fate for Oedipus, and–in spite of his own attempts to outsmart the gods and avoid the fate–Oedipus’ life actually fulfilled that fate; however, the tragedy occurs when, against everyone’s advice (Tiresias, Jocasta, Shepherd, Chorus, etc.) Oedipus is determined to discover the truth about the late king’s murder, which actually involves his hubristic belief that only Oedipus can solve the problems of Thebes. Thus, the fullness of truth–especially as it involves human understanding of the inexplicable ways of the gods–can be dangerous. In other words, when humans aspire to Divine wisdom (i.e., seeing themselves as equal to or unaffected by the Divine), tragic outcomes are sometimes hard to avoid.