Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in the Novels of Thomas Hardy 9781472551214, 9780567216250

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for Jenny

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Abbreviations CP

James Gibson, ed., Thomas Hardy: The Collected Poems numbers reference not page numbers but poem numbers

ET

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology in the format of volume.page e.g., ET3.24 signifies Explorations in Theology volume 3, page 24

GL

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics in the format of volume.page e.g., GL3.332 signifies The Glory of the Lord volume 3, page 332

JO

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

MC

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

RN

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

TD

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory in the format of volume.page e.g., TD2.44 signifies Theo-Drama volume 2, page 44

TDK

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik [German edition] same format as above

TDU

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

References to The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure follow the model of Shakespearean citation of section.chapter.page number. Hence, 5.3.21 indicates part 5, chapter 3, page 21. As The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d’Urbervilles are without sections, their format follows the simpler chapter. page number (thus, 22.281 indicates chapter 22, page 281). Owing to its numerous printings and editions, references to Thomas Hardy’s The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy include the most specific date possible, along with the page number in the current scholarly edition.

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Acknowledgments A desire to write on theology, secularism, literature, and piety of the Victorian era became, as most all manuscripts do, something different: an examination of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological use of tragedy in light of Thomas Hardy’s novels. In many ways, some of those original issues returned, under different guises and points of view, and I suspect this is common as well. An interest in Thomas Hardy’s use of tragedy in his novels, along with Ben Quash’s work on Balthasar, Hegel, genre, and tragedy, led to important questions and considerations; the work of Terry Eagleton and Erich Auerbach filled in the rest. It has required delving into Balthasar, Hardy, and the immense field of tragic literature and theory, and it has been greatly rewarding. My deep gratitude is to my doctoral supervisors, Ben Quash and Jeremy Morris, as their insights, close readings, generous time, and calm guidance of this work in its various stages were invaluable. My thesis examiners, Karen Kilby and Alison Milbank, also provided encouragement and helpful analysis. Michael Ward, Jason Fout, and Simeon Zahl provided corrections, helpful comments, and friendship; Giles Waller provided the same, along with a kindred scholarly interest and many helpful conversations. My father Tom Taylor made important corrections, along with a parent’s pride and love. The libraries of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and Tyndale House provided wonderful places to work, and First Baptist Church of Albemarle, NC, also furnished me with workspace. Finally, I must give a hearty thanks to Ralph Wood, in whose undergraduate classes these larger questions of theology and literature, and theology and genre, first began, and his ongoing mentoring has been inestimable. And finally, and most deeply of all, I must express my gratitude to my wife Jenny, whose loving support, unstinting work on two continents, and readiness for another adventure amidst much uncertainty made this financially and emotionally possible. It is to her that this work is, with much love, dedicated.

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Introduction

This is a book about Hans Urs von Balthasar’s use of tragedy within his theology, and how his misconstrual of the tragic novel suggests particular problems within his theological vision. The argument is that some of the features of the tragic novel can be an asset to theological reflection, and four seminal novels by Thomas Hardy are explored as a foil to Balthasar. Theology and novels are quite different things, obviously, with theology being a conceptual and analytical discipline, and the novel being a fictional and narratival one. This does not stop us, however, from a theological examination of the novel, much as Augustine did with Plato, and Clement of Alexandria did with Homer and Euripides. Christian theologians ought to plunder the Egyptians (i.e., borrow from pagan thought when it is useful), St Augustine argued, and my goal is similar: lessons can be learned from the novel to aid modern theological reflection, and this can be done without a facile elision between the two modes of thought. The argument here is that the tragic novel is a particularly important encounter for modern theology, since it addresses the problems of contingency, God, and suffering in such a profound way. The novel is something dramatic, narratival, contingent, perspectival, and modern, and these are elements that can be useful to the theological imagination in the twenty-first century. Theology has a tendency toward the conceptual and epic—that is, grandiose statements that are completed, impartial, and distanced from the intricacies of existence, action, and history. This is ironic, since so much of Christian faith and belief, in the Bible and theology, is narratival and contingent. That the creeds and scriptures trace a particular history around specific peoples and persons, following a narratival shape, points to something highly particularized, despite theology’s conceptual necessities. We cannot escape history, that is, the Kantian time and space in which persons experience reality and construe meaning. Contingency cannot be

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Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in Hardy

avoided, noted Donald MacKinnon, and “it has been very often (though not exclusively) in the medium of imaginative literature that the questions which refuse to be answered in terms of a facile teleology have persistently intruded themselves.”1 Christian theology has the unenviable task of working within an expository, argumentative discipline while holding to its narratival core of Heilsgeschichte. Yet the narratival is precisely how human existence moves as well. The 2009 Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, for example, addressed the problem of internet passwords, and the reality is that humans simply cannot easily remember free-associating codes. We require passwords that mean something, that are related to an important word, story, or connotation. We live historically, which is say in meaning and in story, and not in data, principles, or epic distances. Insofar as Christian theology is, and should be, related to the nature of Christian existence, the need for some sort of narratival, dramatic awareness becomes obvious. Human lives are more like a narration’s plot, with a beginning, middle, and end, along with a setting and conflict, than they are like conceptual exposition. All the world’s a stage, and we engage in word and act, action and reaction, and interaction with others; we live within certain contexts, places, and languages that form the backdrop for our performances. Theology, in its overly conceptualized moments and eras, has done Christianity a disservice by floating disconnected to lived human lives, as well as recent historical events and challenges. The Bible is a book largely descriptive and narrated with a sense of plot, epically charting creation’s beginning, middle, and end, as it progresses through a history that is selfreferential and chronological. To look to literature is, in a sense, to rob the Egyptians of something that was Christian from the beginning: a sense of human action, emplotment, and mission that can easily slip past theology’s rationalistic constructions. This book looks to the tragic novel as a particular literary form that offers a locus of theological issues: suffering, contingency, tragedy, sacrifice, drama, guilt, sin, perspectivism, punishment, loss, redemption, God, and human action, to name only some of the more obvious points of contact. Although the two disciplines of theology and the novel are wildly different, they can still be in conversation with one another and share common interests. 1

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Donald MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1979), 193–4.

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Introduction

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Questions and answers can be posed. This is not to equate these two modes of thought, or to covertly declare novels as theology or vice-versa. Instead, it is more a process of recognition, of seeing in the modern tragic novel what is already present within theology, only overlooked or misunderstood. It is a Platonic remembering of what was forgotten or obscured by other conceptions, but true nonetheless. Herein lies the theological usefulness of the novel. The novel, despite its many permutations into romance, fantasy, history, and so on, is something that can be tragic. For many, this is somewhat selfevident, but it is a debated point among certain scholars. Purists argue that tragedy can only take its ancient form of tragedy, or its Renaissance form of five acts. The novel, for them, is something too modern and prosaic (both in content and style) to express tragedy’s depths. This issue will be discussed in detail in Chapters 1 and 2, but at this point suffice it to say that this book assumes that novels can be tragic. In its tragic form, the novel offers something most peculiar and challenging to theology: a narratival form that is modern, yet still expressive of tragedy.

Conversation partners This book is about many things (as most books are), yet they all cohere in the work and writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar. In a sense, these topics are his, for they reflect his diverse interests and readings, which ranged from literature to philosophy and theology, from Hegel to Thornton Wilder. Philosophical theology, studies of saints, systematic theology, and brief works on Christian topics for laypersons all came from his wide-ranging knowledge and interests. It is his breadth of scholarship itself that invites a willing exploration and application of his ideas, especially in the area of the tragic novel, of which he was rarely appreciative. His judgments and misjudgments regarding tragic literature and theology are the purview of this book. Balthasar is an unusual mixture of orthodoxies and heterodoxies, of the classical and the modern. Scholars from various disciplines have noticed this tendency; Oliver Davies, for example, examines his philosophical theology and notes his “paradoxical combination of the traditional and the postmodern.”2 2

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Oliver Davies, “Von Balthasar and the Problem of Being,” New Blackfriars 79, no. 923 (1998): 15.

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He can elide between the two quite nimbly, so that the reader (no matter how astute) is left, in the midst of Balthasar’s larger vision and thoughts, rather unaware how far one has strayed. This is the concern of Alyssa Lyra Pitstick’s critique of Balthasar found in her 2007 book Light in Darkness, and it is doubtless a partial reason for his fervent reverence by such a diverse group of theologians and Christians, including Popes, evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. His traditional beliefs regarding the Cross, the Church, and the Resurrection are accompanied by his unusual thoughts on gender (expanded to even within the Trinity), Christ’s own experience of his mission, and Holy Saturday. Pitstick critiques Balthasar’s unusual idea of Christ’s descent, and she notes that there have been few critical examinations of his particular approach to this doctrine.3 Similarly, a critical examination of Balthasar’s literary aesthetics is rare (although there have been many appreciative expositions of Balthasar’s aesthetics). Pitstick’s book also evinces the recent interest in engaging with Balthasar on a more critical level, and Ben Quash’s Theology and the Drama of History, along with Karen Kilby’s Von Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction, has joined in an engaged critique of Balthasar that was mostly missing from previous Balthasarian studies. It is important to engage his work with the serious debate that it deserves. His creativity, marked by his marriage of orthodoxy to traditional Catholic beliefs with unconventional theological explorations, deserves a rigorous exploration and consideration. My method for examining Balthasar is by way of pairing him with someone quite his opposite. Can Balthasar account for and accommodate someone quite different, a writer who represents a challenge to his assumptions? Thomas Hardy, although he preceded Balthasar by three generations, offers just such a complex confrontation; Hardy was modern in orientation, agnostic in belief, and primarily a tragic novelist by trade.4 Hardy’s use of classical and Shakespearean tragedy also provides a bridge between Balthasar’s dramatic interests and the novel. This conversation is enabled, in part, by Balthasar’s

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Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent Into Hell (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 4. Hardy was, of course, an accomplished poet as well, and I will reference his poems where such citations are illuminating. His novels, however, form the stronger challenge for Balthasar, so they will remain my primary focus.

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Introduction

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strong literary orientation; Balthasar himself, as a Germanist, often defined his own starting place as literature and Goethe.5 The connections Balthasar himself makes between theology and literature, and especially theology and tragedy, invite this widened discussion. Tragedy is a vital element in his thought, as Chapter 1 will argue; yet despite his interests in tragic literature, he consistently overlooks the tragic novel. There is an agenda in Balthasar’s theology that resists modern, prosaic tragedy, especially in the form of the novel, and this is exactly what Hardy wrote. “So Hardy is that rare figure, a tragic author of the Victorian age,” Terry Eagleton succinctly states.6 His bourgeois novels and nonaristocratic characters operate from a perspectivism and protomodernism, as Chapter 4 argues; his work is precisely the kind of tragic literature resisted by Balthasar, and thus demands an encounter. How does Balthasar’s exclusion of the tragic novel reverberate within his theological aesthetics? In many ways, Hardy stands as a test case for a Balthasarian approach to theology and literature. Additionally, Hardy is significant because he raises pertinent religious questions for the modern era, as Nathan Scott comments: . . . [T]he testimony that is formed by the writings of Thomas Hardy . . . is a profoundly religious testimony, even if it does not offer a conventional and “orthodox” solution to the religious problem. Indeed, one suspects that none of the “solutions” to that problem which may be fashioned in our own day will be relevant to the dislocations of the age, if they are uninformed by a deep knowledge of what the world appeared to be like to the author of The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure.7

Beyond these concerns, there are notable, if circumstantial, connections between these two figures. Balthasar cites Hardy once with approval, though it is an oblique reference from another source; in a footnote Balthasar makes reference to comedy and tragedy’s strange transmutability and quotes Hardy: “If you look beneath the surface of any farce you see the tragedy; and, on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see

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Ed Block Jr., “Balthasar’s Literary Criticism,” in Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 221. Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 202. Nathan A. Scott Jr., “Hardy and the Victorian Malaise,” in Craters of the Spirit: Studies in the Modern Novel (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 69.

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the farce.”8 Their socio-economic backgrounds are quite dissimilar, as the Anglican, English Hardy preceded the Catholic, Swiss Balthasar by 65 years and came from a low bourgeois background, while Balthasar himself comes from an “old patrician family in Lucerne.”9 Yet there are some odd, shared similarities: both were the sons of builders; each has been characterized as idiosyncratic in his literary style;10 both were outside the mainstream, with Balthasar never holding an academic post and Hardy always perceived as from a backwater part of England (“Good little Thomas Hardy,” Henry James infamously sneered); they both loved the theater;11 and they both sought to control their literary estates, even after their deaths.12 Why choose Hardy over another novelist? Truthfully, there are others besides Hardy who would have sufficed, who are prosaic, perspectival, and modern in precisely Hardy’s way. Yet none of them would have raised the questions quite as powerfully as Hardy does. Standing as he does within the English tradition, he offers a form of the novel that is realistic, but also tragic and modern. George Eliot, for example, is simply not as pointedly tragic; her moral humanism is not as challenging as Hardy’s bleaker and more agnostic vision. He is the prime conversation partner for Balthasar, for he reflects that peculiar genre of the English realistic novel (despite the problems such a sweeping generalization incurs), the many strengths of the genre of the novel, and the modernistic tendencies that so troubled Balthasar. In order to pair Hardy’s novels with Balthasar’s theology, we must first begin by seeing how tragedy was a significant part of Balthasar’s thought (Chapter 1), 8

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Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prolegomena, trans. Graham Harrison, vol. 1 of Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 445n67; Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, reprinted and corrected (Baskingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 224 (15 October 1888). David Moss and Edward T. Oakes, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. Stephen Fields, “The Beauty of the Ugly: Balthasar, the Crucifixion, Analogy and God,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 2 (2007): 176; Lawrence Jones, “Thomas Hardy’s ‘Idiosyncratic Mode of Regard’,” ELH 42, no. 3 (1975): 448. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211. “Balthasar stipulated that no manuscript or part of a manuscript of his should appear after his death. ‘Everything which is truly important I have published myself [wrote Balthasar].’ ” Angelo Scola, Hans Urs Von Balthasar: A Theological Style of Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 13. Hardy sought to control his image after his death by ghost-writing his own biography, published under the name of his second wife, and destroying his notes and notebooks. Michael Millgate, introduction to The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, reprinted and corrected (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), x.

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Introduction

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and yet how he operated from a self-limiting definition of tragedy (Chapter 2). This limited understanding of tragedy is seen in his low regard for the novel, though his objections prove unsound when read against Hardy’s The Return of the Native (Chapter 3). Balthasar’s restrictive approach to tragedy and the novel reveals other problems in his thought, specifically his understanding of common reality (Chapter 4, in an examination of The Mayor of Casterbridge), perspectivism (Chapter 5 and Tess of the d’Urbervilles), and ignoble suffering (Chapter 6 and Jude the Obscure). This is not to reduce each of these novels to a peculiar principle or lesson—in reality, each chapter’s reading can be applied to the other novels under discussion, as these are themes in Hardy (and other tragedians as well). Rather, each novel best exemplified certain key issues under examination, and that is why I have paired them as I have. All these areas are particular strengths of the tragic novel, and they significantly benefit Balthasar’s theology. These novels suggest the problems within Balthasar’s narrow understanding of both tragedy and the novel, and within his larger theology. To read Hardy and Balthasar together is to grapple with Balthasar’s interests by way of contrast, to understand him precisely through what failed to motivate and interest him. This kind of theological conversation was commended by Karl Barth: For me it would be a canon of all research in theological history, and perhaps all history, that one should try to present what has engaged another person, whether in a good way or a less good, as something living, as something that moved him in some way and that can and indeed does move oneself too; to unfold it in such a way that even if one finally takes some other route, the path of this other has an enticing, or, if you like, tempting attraction for oneself. Disregard of this canon, I think, can only avenge itself by rendering the attempted historical research unprofitable and tedious.13

It is the goal of this book to explore profitably, and hopefully without tedium, why tragedy moved Balthasar, and to critically examine his chosen route by way of the other path of the tragic novel.

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Karl Barth, Letters 1961-1968, ed. Jürgen Fangmeier, Hinrich Stoevesandt, and Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), 234 (letter 239).

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Balthasar and Tragedy

But it is Greek tragedy, and not Greek philosophy, with which the Christians primarily entered into dialogue, that forms the great, valid cypher of the Christ event, central to human history, by enclosing and transcending all previous cyphers within itself. —Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, volume 4 Tragedy informs Balthasar’s work in a vital way, though this fact has been largely under-appreciated in the scholarly literature on Balthasar. This is due, partly, to the fact that most examinations of his literary criticism focus on his aesthetics or dramatics as a whole, and not on the particular genre of tragedy. His unusual and innovative theological use of tragedy is often uncritically accepted within his larger ideas about literature, Christ, and drama. Additionally, tragedy is something that informs Balthasar’s work in the background, appearing in various places throughout his writings but rarely addressed directly. His style is meandering, so the topic of tragedy tends to appear in various places throughout his work.1 This characteristic of Balthasar’s writing is evident in his treatment of tragedy; it was something integral to his work, yet scattered throughout and at times discussed obliquely. This chapter will trace Balthasar’s interest in tragedy through his various writings in order to understand why he prized it as something worthy of theological exploration. The next chapter will examine more closely his understanding of tragedy and what constituted its definition, as well as how he evaluated tragedy after the Greek classical era. 1

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Gerard O’Hanlon describes how “as always in Balthasar, one notes the tendency for much important information about any particular topic to be scattered almost at random through the entire corpus of his writings and not to be confined to any specific locus.” Gerard F. O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. Also see Lucy Gardner’s discussion of the Virgin Mary in Balthasar, and how it is difficult to examine the topic directly, as Balthasar discusses Mary in only “a relatively small number of texts and sections of text.” Lucy Gardner, “Balthasar and the Figure of Mary,” in Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 65.

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Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in Hardy

It is ironic that the important role of tragedy in Balthasar’s thought has been unappreciated by scholars, for he has given the most concentrated theological attention to tragedy except for Hegel.2 Balthasar was greatly influenced by Hegel, so their similar interests in tragic drama should not be a surprise. Both thinkers were greatly concerned with aesthetics and art, and they placed tragic drama at the pinnacle of human art. Art was a vital way of understanding God, and it could also be a vehicle for divine revelation. Balthasar’s extensive use of tragedy shows, in itself, its importance to his thought. He uses the concept of tragedy in multiple ways—as ontic and historical experience, as a genre, and as a philosophical concept—and he employs it throughout much of his theology. The word tragedy, it has been noted, carries three distinct meanings. It can be a human experience of sorrow and loss, such as an unfortunate incident or a catastrophe. The word tragedy also refers to a literary genre, as in the works by Aeschylus and Shakespeare. It can also be the philosophical and literary theory of how literary tragedies function, as well as their significance as a worldview and meaningful artistic expression. Balthasar does not directly reference these three meanings of tragedy, but he does work within all three areas. For example, a philosophical discussion about “the meaning of being” leads to results that are “tragic,” and a discussion of Hinduism is surprisingly followed by The Ring of the Nibelung, Aristotle, Hegel, and the temptation to fly from “the overwhelming weight of frightful, ineradicable tragedy.”3 Tragedians appear in all the volumes of the Glory of the Lord, except one,4

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Other notable explorations would include P. T. Forsyth, Donald MacKinnon, Simone Weil, Reinhold Niebuhr, David Ford, and Ben Quash. A study of some of these theologians is found in Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller, eds, Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilogue, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 23, 26–7. Only the last volume, GL7, lacks references to tragedians or tragedy. The first volume references Aeschylus (GL1.262) and Racine (GL1.93). Volume two includes Corneille (GL2.16) and Shakespeare (GL2.17). Volume three makes use of Shakespeare (GL3.356), the Greek tragic chorus (GL3.356), Racine (GL3.507, 512) and Corneille (GL3.173, 425–6, 435, 456, 469, 507, 513, 515). In volume four is Balthasar’s lengthy examination of tragedy in the classical world (GL4.43–168) and cites Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides throughout, as well as Shakespeare (GL4.75, 104), Grillparzer (GL4.45), Corneille (GL4.104, 132, 143), Hofmannsthal (GL4.143, 146), and Racine (GL4.75, 104, 132). Volume five notes Euripides (GL5.252, 332), Aeschylus (GL5.280, 281, 284, 297, 308), Shakespeare (GL5.14, 143, 153, 182, 269, 271, 281–2, 297, 352, 395, 410, 519), Sophocles (GL5.213, 281, 299), Grillparzer (GL5.279), and Racine (GL5.153, 279). Balthasar sets the beauty of particular medieval saints as within a sense of Christian tragedy (GL5.48–140), a holy apatheia, or “‘tragic’ patience in the face of the obscure destiny decreed by God” (GL5.50). GL6 references Aeschylus (GL6.288), Agamemnon (GL6.113), Shakespeare (GL6.107, 113), Euripides (GL6.288), and Sophocles (GL6.107), as well as discusses Saul (GL6.106–7, 226–30) and David (GL6.105–14) as tragic figures.

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and all the volumes of the Theo-Drama.5 Tragedy as a concept occurs in most of the volumes of the Theo-Drama, conveyed in either existential6 or generic7 categories. Despite the difficulty of Balthasar’s scattered discussions on tragedy, his approach to the genre is consistent and discernible. The primary volumes that feature tragedy are volume one of the Theo-Drama, where Balthasar vaguely defines tragedy, and volume four of The Glory of the Lord, which examines tragedy in the ancient world. In addition, much of Balthasar’s thought on theology and tragedy is presented in a more systematic way in his essay, “Tragedy and Christian Faith” (1965), which appears in the third volume of Explorations in Theology. Thus a vital thread in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is tragedy, in its varied meanings—as an art form, as a theory, and as the human existential crisis. He consistently explores and references tragedy throughout his writings, often approaching theological issues and Biblical passages through a tragic lens. Balthasar has read deeply tragic literature and pondered its insights, and he has been greatly influenced by it. As Christian theology has borrowed from Greek philosophy, so Balthasar borrows and shapes his theology according to tragedy. This is not to argue that this is the only influence on Balthasar, or that it forms a sort of Ariadne’s thread to his work. Rather, it is to argue that tragedy forms a vital element of his thought, as he finds that it has a revelatory power regarding human existence and God. Yet, in the end, Balthasar’s particular approach to tragedy—that it must be dramatic in form and aristocratic in content—has serious and problematic ramifications for his theology, as the following chapters establish. 5

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In TD1 there is a lengthy excursus on Shakespeare (TD1.465–80) and commentary on various modern tragedians (TD1.177–244, 324–42, 413–23). TD2 features Aeschylus (TD2.95n2, 420), Sophocles (TD2.24n, 384), Euripides (TD2.197, 385n101), and Shakespeare (TD2.28). TD3 includes Shakespeare (TD3.528, 535); TD4 references Shakespeare (TD4.112–13, 299, 304), Racine (TD4.113), Sophocles (TD4.300), Euripides (TD4.224, 267, 300), and Aeschylus (TD4.112, 115). TD5 includes Aeschylus (TD5.142n2), Hofmannsthal (TD5.294n17), and Reinhold Schneider (TD5.233n16). Tragedy as an existential crisis, “the tragedy of finitude,” falls in TD1.369–413, 429; TD2.37–45; TD4.96–7; and ET3.393–400; in addition, tragedy becomes part of Christian existence in GL5.48– 140 and ET3.402–11. Tragedy as a problem for God punctuates TD5—see TD5.191–94, 269, 299, 508. In addition, Balthasar comments on historical tragedy, as he holds that the Cross is a greater tragedy than Auschwitz. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Credo: Meditations on the Apostles’ Creed, trans. David Kipp (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 97. TD1 includes a discussion on defining tragedy (TD1.424–64), the question of Hegel and the future of tragedy (TD1.54–88), and the horizon of meaning and images in tragedy (TD1.70–9, 314–23). TD2 includes a discussion on Greek theater as myth and ritual (TD2.45–51) and Hegel’s notion of tragic drama as a unity of lyrical and epic (TD2.53–62).

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Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in Hardy

Tragedy’s revelatory nature Balthasar is theologically interested in tragedy because it is deeply revelatory about the nature of the world. Plato also thought the Greek poets were powerfully insightful, and it is for this reason that Plato thought they should be exiled from his vision of the Republic. Balthasar, however, finds their acuity as something to be admired and even used theologically. The power of tragedy’s insights, in fact, leads him to make the rather surprising statement that it alone “forms the great, valid cypher of the Christ event” (GL4.101).8 Few commentators have picked up on the rather revolutionary nature of this claim.9 By examining Balthasar’s interest in tragic drama, we can discern three areas of tragedy that pique Balthasar’s theological interest: human existence as dramatic, the existential truths that tragedy reveals, and the participative distance of humanity from God.

The dramatic nature of existence First, Balthasar approaches Being itself as inherently dramatic, as if the medieval transcendentals required the addition of drama. Drama is at the root of all of Balthasar’s thinking; “it is a basic Christian requirement that existence should represent itself dramatically” (TD1.22). At the center of Balthasar’s “theological triptych”—his aesthetics, dramatics, and logic—lies

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“Aber die griechische Tragödie, und nicht die griechische Philosophie, mit der die Christen vor allem dialogisiert haben, bildet die große, gültige Chiffre des Menschheitsereignisses Christus . . .” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Dritter Band/ ErsterTeil: In Raum Der Metaphysik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965), 94. Aidan Nichols spends less than ten pages on the topic, moving quickly to comedy so that Balthasar does not sound too gloomily tragic; “At the same time, this tragedy must be filled (though Balthasar does not put it quite like this) with the atmosphere of comedy . . .” Aidan Nichols, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Dramatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 38, 54. Francesca Murphy spends two pages on the topic, and criticizes Balthasar for failing “to imagine that Christ had any comical precursors.” Francesca Aran Murphy, Christ the Form of Beauty (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 157–9. Ben Quash discusses tragedy and MacKinnon, but with an eye to history and Balthasar’s anti-epic agenda, and not as a conclusive factor in his work. Ben Quash, Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 85–118. Kevin Mongrain makes no mention of tragedy in Balthasar. Kevin Mongrain, The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs Von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002). Ed Block Jr. comes the closest, yet his is only a four page discussion that mostly focuses on ET3.391–411, and not the way tragedy is a factor throughout the aesthetics and dramatics. Block Jr., “Criticism,” 216–20. As a parallel to Balthasar, Donald MacKinnon conceives of Christ as a consummate tragic story; Christ’s victory is the most tragic thing in the world, except for defeat. Donald MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 131.

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the five-volume Theo-Drama, where drama forms an extended metaphor for his theological development of the revelation of Christ.10 Drama as a mode of human existence, and theological reflection, is paramount; as Ben Quash summarizes, “[t]heology is done not outside or above the drama of Christian living, it is itself part of the drama.”11 D. C. Schindler’s contention is that, for Balthasar, drama is more than a new metaphor or hermeneutics; “drama is the expression of the structure of Being.”12 It is an approach to human existence that is relational to others and to the divine, along the lines of Buber’s “I-Thou” model. Drama is such a deep category of being for Balthasar that it extends even into heaven and the Triune God. The infinite spaces, both within the Trinity and between God and humanity, highlight the fact that drama is part of Being. Our lives in God and in eternity must, therefore, somehow be dramatic. “All this goes to show that existence in God—who will remain for all eternity the ‘mystery laid bare in holiness’ (Goethe)—will be no less full of tension and drama than earthly existence will with its obscurities and its freedom of choice” (TD5.410). The dramatic nature of God as Trinity is, for Balthasar, evinced in Christ’s prayerful dialogue of forgiveness with the Father: “Father, forgive them,” to which the Father responds.13 Drama exists within the Father’s begetting of the Son, forming the basis of God’s dramatic relationship with Creation: On the contrary, it is the drama of the “emptying” of the Father’s heart, in the generation of the Son, that contains and surpasses all possible drama between God and a world. For any world only has its place within that distinction between Father and Son that is maintained and bridged by the Holy Spirit. The drama of the Trinity lasts forever . . . (TD4.327)

Balthasar has established a deeply dramatic, nonstatic understanding of existence for both God and human beings,14 which tragic drama expresses well. 10 11

12

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Block Jr., “Criticism,” 216. Ben Quash, “Real Enactment: The Role of Drama in the Theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar,” in Trevor A. Hart and Steven Guthrie (eds), Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition, 13. D. C. Schindler, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation (New York: Fordham, 2004), 19. Balthasar, Credo, 90. His concern for dynamism can perhaps be seen as a rejection to the “sawdust Thomism” of his Jesuit training. Moss and Oakes, Introduction, 2.

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Tragedy’s existential truths The second reason for tragedy’s power of insight (and thus theological usefulness) is that it reflects the existential reality of human life, where existence is open-ended and uncertain. Drama, like life and liturgy, is narratively temporal, lived in medias res, as Dante’s Divine Comedy begins.15 Drama is interested in the concrete individual who is freely part of a larger story, where life is “involving, particular, social, and anticipatory.”16 We take our place onstage dramatically in the world’s drama of history; “all the world’s a stage,” according to Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2.7.139). From such a perspective, human action and history are profoundly linear and unrepeatable, as drama’s performances—each one being different in performance and reception—make clear.17 Human actions, understood dramatically, have a larger significance and plot, especially in tragedy; as Balthasar boldly states, “Only tragedy equates the unattainable absolute Good with a concrete course of action . . .” (TD1.414). In its decisive moments, tragic time is especially “super-charged” and meaningful, Ben Quash argues.18 Drama provides a natural mode and corrective to theology. For Balthasar, the genesis of tragedy is in the turbid reality of human existence. Existence is fraught with impasse, as the Attic tragedians reveal in what Balthasar sees as three primal, tragic conditions: humans are torn between their desire for an absolute Good in an evanescent world, are caught between conflicting ethical choices (as Orestes, Hamlet, and Antigone experience), and act within the pervasive guilt of sin that mars human actions (ET3.393–5). The third condition’s sense of a culpable yet inescapable guilt, Balthasar observes, profoundly hints at the theological understanding of sin. “Guilt is present, therefore; its existence is not denied; but it transcends the individual alone, without thereby excusing him fully” (ET3.395). The genius of Greek myth and the theater is this inevitability of guilt that adumbrates Christian sin. “Man needs once again to encounter the mystery of an

15

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“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” or “midway in the journey of our life” (Inferno 1.1). Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. Charles S. Singleton, 2nd printing, with corrections (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3. Quash, Theology, 37. Quash, “Enactment,” 13–14. Ibid., 20.

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incomprehensible but ever-present guilt in the relationship between heaven and earth” (TD1.435). These are universal, existential realities, and they make drama universally understandable, since it reflects human life’s tensions and conflicts (TD1.17). “If, however, the state of brokenness is a fact of our experience . . . the essential lines of existence are not only incapable of being perfected but cross over one another and make existence a contradiction” (ET3.391–4). Drama’s potency is revealed in its ability to reflect, from a distance, these tragic existential conditions, inviting us to consider the existential reality of being human. Anyone who knows anything about the theatre understands it as a projection of human existence onto a stage, interpreting to itself that existence which is beyond it. Since existence recognizes itself in this interpretation, it can (in a privileged moment) realize that it is playing a role in a larger play. (TD1.20)

Notable, however, is that Balthasar does not include the tragic sense of waste, of meaninglessness, of prosaic, ordinary suffering—the failures, loss of ideals, and grinding repetitions that characterize more modern forms of tragedy and the novel. This perspective of tragic existential conditions is not unique to Balthasar. The need to explain tragedy’s universal comprehensibility, appeal, and continuing influence leads many theorists to develop similar approaches to tragedy.19 It is present in Hegel, for example, where life becomes collisional. Charles Taylor observes that Hegel also read Greek tragedy as rooted in life’s circumstances: “ This [tragic necessity] for Hegel is the way Greek consciousness came to awareness of the deep contradictions in its life-form.”20 It is life’s oppositions and conflicts that lead to its tragic reconciliations and healings. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion famously describes

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For example, F. L. Lucas comments that “by Tragedy, I think, we imply also something fundamentally true to life. It need not be the whole truth, but it must be true.” F. L. Lucas, Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics (London: The Hogarth Press, 1946), 53. Jennifer Wallace affirms that, “Tragedians have traditionally used the pattern and order of aesthetic form in order to test whether such order exists in the world they represent . . .” Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, Cambridge Introductions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life places the foundation of tragedy in the contradictions of human life, especially between the desire for immortality and the knowledge that we are mortal. Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 32. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 502.

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how tragic heroes must, like Balthasar’s second tragic condition, choose between rival goods. The heroes introduce “. . . an element of division . . . and the higher, really interesting element of division, so far as Spirit is concerned, is that it is the moral powers themselves which appear as divided and as coming into collision.”21 The sense of pervasive, inevitable guilt is present as well in Hegel. Taylor is again instructive as he indicates how an action incurs guilt for Hegel: Here we come close to another basic Hegelian theme. To act, in the sense of effecting some important change on the world outside is necessarily to incur guilt. . . . [T]his constitutes a kind of defiance of the universal, and hence incurs guilt.”22

MacKinnon similarly notes the “deep exploration of responsibility, justice, guilt, that we find for instance in Electra or in Hamlet.”23 We can add a fourth universal truth to these three existential truths about tragedy, that Balthasar understood tragic suffering to be something universally applicable to all people. There is an existential reality to human suffering, which is something we can pity and sympathize with. It makes tragedy a universal genre, something all people can relate to and understand even if the play is set in a radically different era and culture. The trials of Philoctetes, the agonizing losses of Lear, and the secret hidden from Oedipus continue to move people precisely because loss is something we all experience and comprehend. Thus tragedies new and old continue to be performed, and they remain vehicles for the spectator to reflect on existence and suffering. Such tragic, existential conditions persist, and actually increase, for the Christian. Balthasar wants to undo the damage that a naïve approach to Christianity, theology, and tragedy has done—a sense of triumphalism that is unrealistic and even dangerous. Tragic existence is not annulled by Christ, as theology, history, and experience show. The religious life, as well the revelatory power of tragic drama, resists the “mastering and abolition of the fundamental contradictions of existence” (ET3.397). The impermanence of the good, its powers of contradiction as we are caught between rival goods, and the problem 21

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G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:263. Taylor, Hegel, 174. MacKinnon, Borderlands, 101.

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of opaque, persistent guilt continue in the lives of Christians. The power of evil remains, as the fates of the martyrs portend. Perceiving Luther from such a tragic point of view, Balthasar contends that the Christian lives in a deeper tragic status, under the law and yet also under election (TD1.429). Simul justus et peccator becomes a deeper, more intricate tragedy for the Christian than Greek or Hebrew tragedy, because the Christian is a sinner and failure to the uttermost feeling and depth (ET3.403). “The Christian is exposed to this situation of being torn; and what other name than tragic could one find for this, if one looks back to the Greek stage?” (ET3.406). Reinhold Niebuhr argues in a similar theological vein, that the “Christian faith consequently does not defy the tragic facts of human existence by a single victory over tragedy; nor does it flee the tragedy of temporal existence into a heavenly escape. These forms of the Christian faith are deceptions.”24 Niebuhr argues that, instead, it is modernity that ignores the ineradicability of evil and tragedy; “[m]odern man does not regard life as tragic . . . that man’s life remains self-contradictory in its sin . . .”25 MacKinnon is in deep agreement here: . . . [W]hatever the Christian religion may bring to men, it does not offer them anything that can easily be represented as a “solution of the problem of evil” . . . [O]ne could claim that Christianity, properly understood, might provide men with a faith through which they are enabled to hold steadfastly to the significance of the tragic, and thereby protect themselves against that sort of synthesis which seeks to obliterate by the vision of an all-embracing order the sharper discontinuity of human existence.26

For Balthasar, all of this is placed within a theological nexus. The drama of our lives, including its sense of tragedy, is heightened for the Christian as God’s larger drama comes into view (TD1.69). To participate in God’s drama invites interpretation, performance, and variation, so that it is not epic or oppressive, but dynamic and extemporaneous; to assume a role is to find a vocation, after

24

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Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (London: Nisbet and Co. Ltd, 1938), 20. Niebuhr, Tragedy, 18. MacKinnon, Problem, 134–5. Much of this sounds of Heidegger as well. “In short, [for Heidegger] tragedy teaches us that, whether in success or failure, we should be open to the complex nature of being, to the diversity of ways of being that make-up [sic] the world in addition to one’s own way, making one’s way difficult, risky, and uncertain, but not unworthy.” Robert S. Gall, “Toward a Tragic Theology: The Piety of Thought in Heidegger and Tragedy,” Literature and Theology 7, no. 1 (1993): 26.

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all (TD3.263).27 Like a melody or rhythm, a harmonia mundii, it invites endless new settings and harmonies while still retaining its recognizable features.28 For Balthasar, this tangled, sinful, yet redeemed tragic existence is operative even in history and institutions. The church, for example, is pulled between the powerlessness of the saint and the right use of political power, and between its external forms of control and order and the subjective obedience to God that is folly and weakness (ET3.407). Church history is filled with the evidence of the church’s hubris in its alliance with oppressive political powers, to the point that the Inquisition and executions of Jan Hus and Joan of Arc are more tragic than anything Antigone faced (ET3.407). The church’s external, worldly form leads it tragically to claim a power and finality it does not possess—this is God’s alone—or to align itself with destructive forces of politics, secularism, and domination. At times, the forces are so interwoven that they cannot be untangled, as Balthasar admits about the Reformation (ET3.408). Similarly, MacKinnon holds that the tragic elements within Christianity are proved by events such as the history of Christian anti-Semitism, the rise of the Nazi party, and the Holocaust.29 For Reinhold Niebuhr, history was tragic in Roman Catholicism’s support for feudalistic economic practices that continued well into the twentieth century.30 Balthasar, along with other theologians who have explored tragedy theologically, holds that this tragic existentialism affects humanity, history, and institutions.

Our participative distance from God For Balthasar, a third powerful theological insight of tragedy is its awareness of the human relationship to the divine. It presciently and properly conceives of this relationship as a participative distance. That is to say, there is distance between God and humanity (between the infinite and the finite), and God’s creatures exist through a participation of God’s true Being. There is neither 27

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Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 364. As he notes, “Doctrine directs us toward fitting participation in the drama of redemption, but not by offering detailed blueprints of behavior. New situations and new problems require improvisation, not rote memorization. Doctrine’s direction is often indirect” (363). David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 275. MacKinnon, Problem, 130. Niebuhr, Tragedy, 32–3.

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a dissolving unity with, nor a chasmic separation from, the Divine, but a proper, freeing, and enabling distance. The relation to the divine is not one of close identity, which would reduce persons to puppets—automatons of God—or gnostic fragments of the Monad, which would destroy our particular individuality. An immediacy to God could even become demonic, as David Bentley Hart points out; one element of Orthodox thought defines hell as the closeness of God’s sublime glory without the gift of proper distance.31 Instead, God’s distance permits an authentic relationship of love between the Creator and the creature. As Balthasar argues regarding creation, “. . . it implies that the creaturely ‘other-than-God’ is plunged into the uncreated ‘Other-in-God’ while maintaining that fundamental ‘distance which alone makes love possible’” (TD5.105).

Homer’s pre-Christian genius For Balthasar, the revelatory power of the Attic tragedians is rooted in Homer’s great genius regarding the nature of the divine distance. Homer was the first tragedian, Aeschylus and Aristotle both note (GL4.44).32 His innovation, Balthasar feels, was the creation of a sphere of genuine human encounter with the transcendently divine. This understanding is noted in Hegel, who wrote: But in Homer the gods hover in a magic light between poetry and actuality; they are not brought so closely to our minds that their appearance could strike us as an entirely everyday affair, and yet neither are they left so vague that they could have no living reality in our eyes.33

Homeric heroes are not gods incognito, but true humans who live and act freely within the reality of the gods whom they encounter. Odysseus himself states

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Hart, Beauty, 272. Simone Weil’s statement is similar: “For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun . . .” Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987), 32–3. She too argues for a necessary distance from God, rooted in God’s renouncement of God’s Infinity in creating the finite. “The religions which have a conception of this renunciation, this voluntary distance, this voluntary effacement of God, his apparent absence and his secret presence here below, these religions are true religion, the translation into different languages of the great Revelation.” Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 88 (“Forms of the Implicit Love of God”). Steiner writes, “But the Iliad is the primer of tragic art.” George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 5. Also, Plato states that Homer was the first teacher and writer of tragedy (The Republic, bk. 10, lines 596–8). Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1074.

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in the Odyssey (16.187), “no god am I.”34 Humans are not divine in Homer’s “god-soaked” world (GL4.50), but neither are they autonomous, for humans live in dependence on the gods. One writer notes the “tender intimacy” seen in the human relation to the gods, between Odysseus and Athena, and in the Iliad.35 The gods are powerful, terrifying, and inscrutable, yet ultimately necessary and beneficent. They are not an “It,” but a relational “Thou.” The Greeks and the Bible share a common truth: “the clear parallel between the biblical and the Greek notion of the human, from Homer to the tragedies: in both cases we see man interpreting himself against the background of God” (GL6.105). Balthasar titles this Homer’s double doctrine: our ineradicable separation from the gods and their divinity, yet our dependence on those gods for truth, beauty, and goodness—that is, our participative distance to God. But even in these changed times [i.e., modernity], the old Homeric double doctrine still remains valid: a primal opposition, an unbridgeable distance between gods and man—and man’s complete devotion to the gods. . . . In tragedy, man acts against the background of the god . . . (GL4.102–3)

The mythic worldview connects with Christianity in important ways. Myths about gods allow for a cosmos that includes divinity, Murphy concludes,36 and Keith Ward makes a similar claim as he contrasts the divine and personal world of the Iliad with modernity’s loss of poetic imagination.37 Similarly, Newman, Coleridge, and Farrer possess imaginations still stirred by God’s presence in the world—“completely bathed in the ancient and mediaeval tradition”—as the Continent’s interest in symbolism was not (GL5.354). The gods may be troubling and unpredictable in the ancient world, but from a Balthasarian perspective, this is a better vision of the world than modernity’s bleakness and meaninglessness. There is, therefore, either a “graceless tragedy” or a “tragedy under grace”: “we are brought to ruin either by meaninglessness or by the God ‘who shatters kindly what we build and brings it down upon our heads’” (TD1.121, quoting Eichendorff ). Humanity finds itself, in tragic drama, exalted before the gods and in dialogue with divine glory, according to

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Louis Roberts, The Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs Von Balthasar (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 63. Roberts, Aesthetics, 63. Murphy, Christ, 15. Keith Ward, God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 4–6.

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Balthasar (GL4.155). Homer’s genius influenced the Attic tragedians toward this “Homeric double doctrine.”38 Balthasar perceives a parallel insight in the Hebraic tragedies of the Old Testament: the daughter of Jephtha, Samson, Jeremiah, Job, and Hagar (ET3.398), as well as Saul and the “classical tragedy of David, which in sheer quality competes with Sophocles and Shakespeare” (GL6.106–7). The brilliance of a tragedian like Racine is he draws on both Jewish and Attic sources to compose his tragedies. Both these contexts, Hellas and Israel, develop an authentic sense of tragedy that reveals the same existential reality of humanity: “the parallel situation of man, who is fully affirmed even in his whole finitude, mortality, and questionable character” (ET3.399). This sense of distance is foundational in God’s relationship to God’s creation and chosen people. It is true with God’s covenant with ancient Israel, “which presupposed absolute distance.”39 Distance constitutes freedom and authentic love, even within the Trinity, where there is “the eternal separation in God” (TD4.327) and the Spirit who “maintains the infinite difference” between the Father and the Son (TD4.324). God’s grace is not irresistible or destructive of human freedom; rather, it respects the freedom of the creature. We are truly human, perfected and free, when we are embedded within the distances in the Triune God. The importance of the freedom of the creature within the freedom of the Creator is, for Vanhoozer, Balthasar’s main dramatic premise.40 The nature and distance of creaturely freedom was one of Balthasar’s critiques of Barth—his actualism, “with its constant, relentless reduction of all activity to God the actus purus, [which] leaves no room for any other center of activity outside of God.”41 Distance and identity must be maintained. As Balthasar quotes Hegel, tragedy displays “the divine, as it enters the world and individual action, yet neither losing its substantial character in this reality nor finding itself turned into its opposite” (TD1.57). The wonder of tragedy is this proper understanding of a sustaining distance between God and humanity. If God is distantly present, there is a creaturely participation in God that bridges the chasm and avoids a dialectical dualism between God and 38

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Weil similarly connects the Iliad, Attic tragedy, and the gospels. Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1981), 180–3 (“The Iliad: Poem of Might”). Balthasar, Epilogue, 30. Vanhoozer, Drama, 49. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 105.

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Creation. It is God who grounds and makes possible meaningful, free human actions; again, we need God. It is only via our participation in God and God’s beauty, truth, and goodness—which is a true, real, existent beauty42—that there is a place for human existence and freedom. Without God’s sustaining distance, we fall prey to totalities and a “new monadology” (TD1.191), which can take many forms: a secretive Gnostic union of the spirit with the Divine and opposed to the flesh, the philosophical concept of Being of which humanity and God are subsets, or a Hegelian negation into the totalizing power of the Absolute Geist (TD1.85). Totality for Balthasar can also have political forms, such as modernity’s fascisms or communism that would subsume the individual to the collective. This distance from the Divine is properly conceived as participative and based on God’s beauty, which is the source of all created beauty, and is ever magnetically drawing us toward God’s true Being. “God differs infinitely from created beauty not by being utterly alien to it, but by being infinitely more beautiful,” counters Hart.43 This is an ontology of distanced participation, a dependent independence. We are wholly other from God, as finite creatures at an immeasurable distance to an infinite Creator, yet this distance is a creative and participative one. Without God, humanity dissolves into oppression, meaninglessness, and the loss of particularity, and for Balthasar this typifies the modern era—hence his antimodern task. The Enlightenment loss of the Divine was an “anthropological reduction” (GL5.291). Modern tragedy has explored the problem of human suffering without the divine, and thus not only removed the possibility of tragedy’s healing, but also the ground of authentic tragic art. Without God, art devolves into visions of nihilism and oppression, either of the self or the state. As with the Old Testament’s Job, to truly plumb the reality and 42

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Hart argues that the beauty of creation is a true, real beauty, not to be confused with the Kantian sublime that is “nowhere in the things of sensibility . . . but only in the mind . . .” Hart, Beauty, 45. The beautiful must be real if it is to be good and true, Francesca Aran Murphy argues. Murphy, Christ, 31. Similarly, John R. Betz argues that the common theme of modernity and postmodernity is “. . . the beauty of being disappears, because it is ultimately an illusion . . .” John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One),” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (2005): 371. Francesca Murphy, God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7–8. George Steiner argues that any coherency of language, and thus literature, depends on the assumption of God’s presence. Art encounters the other and a real, external world “out there” (while acknowledging the inherent difficulties in defining that external reality in any simplistic way). George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 3. Hart, Beauty, 300. Hart’s aesthetics is thoroughly rooted, he confesses, in Balthasar’s work. Hart, Beauty, 29.

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mystery of our sufferings and tragedies requires an acknowledgment of God’s existence. Balthasar has found three revelatory insights in tragic drama that connect to theological concerns: the dramatic nature of reality, the existential truths of finitude, conflict, and guilt, and the participative distance humanity lives in relation to God. The question remains, however, if Balthasar has rightly conceived of modern tragedy’s questions and presuppositions, which is the argument of the next chapters.

Tragedy and God A natural response is to question how tragedy and God can go together. Is tragedy not the questioning of God’s reality and goodness? Do not God and religious faith remove the sense of life as being meaningless, the saturninity of tragic defeat? Is tragedy not inimical to God, a nihilism that questions God’s reality or the meaningfulness of existence? In truth, this understanding of tragedy is more caricature than reality, more a reflection of our past tragic century and modern sensibilities than the wide diversity of tragic literature.44 Terry Eagleton labels this framework as “posttragic,” where existence is bleak, lamentable, and culpable, a Schopenhauerian wretchedness that demands “self-immolation.”45 It is tragedy divided from religion and religious understanding, the wisdom of Silenus that it is best not to have been born. George Steiner calls this “absolute tragedy,” a rare art form where “human life is a fatality.”46 This is tragedy as theodicy, as protest, but it is not representative of all tragedy or tragic theory, for there is an immense diversity of tragic literature. Eagleton helpfully notes that the post-tragic theory is only one among many; it identifies “one kind of action” while dismissing all others as inauthentic.47 Like all attempts at defining tragedy, it fails. “Tragedy itself provides no answers to theodicy questions,” observes John McDowell.48

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Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller, “Introduction,” Christian Theology and Tragedy, 1–11. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 9, 70. George Steiner, “A Note on Absolute Tragedy,” Literature and Theology 4 (1990): 147. Eagleton, Violence, 9. J. C. McDowell, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 20.

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If the post-tragic interprets tragedy as theodicy, challenging God or the world’s goodness, then Balthasar approaches tragedy from the obverse. For him, tragedy is not a challenge to God or the meaningfulness and goodness of creation; rather, authentic tragedy indicates the human reliance on God, Balthasar’s third reason for tragedy’s revelatory power. Traditional tragedy has always included the gods, Steiner observes.49 Hegel too defined tragedy as concerning God (Geist) in the ethical struggle between conflicting forces of the Divine, ending with their reconciliation; an overarching horizon, Geist, is always present within true tragic drama (TD1.71).50 The power of authentic tragedy is its refusal to be atheistic, even in the depths of human suffering and evil; it can be religious at life’s extremes. Tragedy actually needs God. Sophocles, Balthasar writes, “. . . had but one vision of man: silhouetted against the night-sky of an infinitely sublime and distant god, one who yet through his distance proclaims his presence” (GL4.122). Rather than denying God, authentic tragedy exhibits God’s relationship to humanity as one of loving affirmation. For Balthasar, the classical world assumed a personal and active understanding of the divine, “the primal experience of loving common humanity . . . the god is ‘for me’” (ET3.23).51 The resurrection, while good news, does not reduce human existence to a facile comedy. Comedy is not tragedy plus time, as Woody Allen once quipped, in the sense that a happy ending undoes and erases tragic suffering. This is not an ending that prevents future tragic suffering or makes human suffering unimportant. Balthasar is thinking of Christianity not so much as a comedy with a dark middle section, as we might imagine it to be (such as in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale), but rather a classical tragedy with a restorative ending (as with Hamlet, with the entrance of Fortinbras). Though tragic dramas vary immensely, most premodern tragedies (and many of the modern ones as well) end with some sense of restoration. As Raymond Williams observes, “. . . most of the great tragedies of the world end not with evil absolute, but 49 50

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“. . . [I]n essence, tragedy is a questioning and an enacted testing of theodicy.” Steiner, “Note,” 153. G. W. F. Hegel, Schriften; Zur Politik Und Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Georg Lasson, vol. 7 of Sämtliche Werke, 2nd, rev. edn (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), 381. Peter Szondi notes Hegel’s argument with Kant and Fichte’s “rigid opposition” of the universal and the particular, which he seeks to overcome with a sense of identity and reconciliation. Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 15. Balthasar cites Szondi with approval (TD1.72; TD2.45). Rodney A. Howsare, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Protestantism: The Ecumenical Implications of His Theological Style (Edinburgh: T&T Clark International, 2005), 60–1.

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with evil both experienced and lived through.”52 Fortinbras bursts in to save the kingdom at the end of Hamlet, and even Lear’s kingdom and memory will be preserved in the future. Oedipus is eventually apotheosized in Oedipus at Colonus, Prometheus is Unbound, and Orestes is judged as innocent by Athena. The thought that all tragedies end in meaninglessness, abject suffering, and death is simply not true. Neither is Christianity a facile escapism from the dark realities of human existence. Both Christianity and tragedy are deeper and richer than their common mischaracterizations. It is for these reasons that Balthasar, along with other theologians like Donald MacKinnon, Ben Quash, and David Ford (among others), can point to the tragic elements within Christianity. Although notoriously difficult to define, tragedies are not simply worldviews of dark pessimism and atheism, as many reductively think today. Rather, tragedy is a genre that explores boundaries of meaning, inviting our attempt to rationalize them even as they resist any final, complete understanding. It is a much more unstable genre than many realize. Tragedy has manifested different emphases in its history, and currently the emphasis tends toward the nihilistic. But tragedy has a longer history than the past centuries and the influence of Schopenhauer and others, who point to life as being inherently tragic; such a notion would have seemed bizarre to Shakespeare, Calderón, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. It is in this premodern sense that Christianity is tragic for Balthasar: not that it is meaningless or Schopenhauerian, but that it acknowledges suffering, irony, and loss, while holding to a final, apocalyptic restoration. The scriptures themselves lend weight to Balthasar’s argument, as the book of Revelation is hardly a comic resolution to the Bible’s dark moments of Saul’s madness, David’s familial evils, parables of bridesmaids and wedding guests shut out of the feast, and Judas’ betrayal. The gospel ushers in not an immediate resolution—in fact, it may actually usher in more tragedy as the Christian struggles with evil, Providence, suffering, and martyrdom. Tragedy’s connection to God is historical, for tragic drama has its roots in worship of Dionysus, Balthasar points out. To put it laconically, we need God, and the Greek Dionysian worship makes real this theological truth

52

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Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 60.

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for Balthasar. Attic tragedy operated within divine worship as a part of the Dionysian spring festivals (GL4.102); Helen Gardner notes that Attic tragedy “embodied religious conceptions and exemplified the relation of men to the gods.”53 Performances were given not only for humans but, in a sense, also for the gods as they gazed down into the open amphitheater. Attic tragedy, in a bit of Balthasarian hyperbole, can be a type of gracious sacrament, as the audience participates imaginatively in a drama that exalts God and humanity (ET3.397). This is the truth of the medieval mystery play, which is the Christian modification of Attic tragic performance (GL4.101). For Balthasar, the reality of God is not opposed to tragedy. In fact, God actually makes tragic drama possible. Without God’s freeing distance, humanity slides into absurdities, solipsisms, and oppressions. The modern era, which had liberated itself from the reality of the divine (“I had no need of that hypothesis,” Laplace quipped in reference to God), has found itself only more oppressed politically and within the self. Now the individual is lost in a milieu of meaninglessness, unable to connect to the good and true, or to others. It is with this understanding that Balthasar argues that Catholicism and the church will actually preserve and enable tragedy. All true tragedy relates to the divine; it requires the divine for it to be a free exploration of human existence. Here he is more optimistic about tragedy’s future than Hegel and other classicists, though his is a restrictive understanding of what constitutes true tragedy (as the next chapter will argue).

Dionysus over Plato The theological power of tragedy extends beyond its revelatory insights. Its form is also admirable as it is, by definition, more attuned to historical, human existence. Insofar as tragedy relates to the world of myth and the gods, it reflects a vision of life that is narratival, historical, and sacred. The mythic world of Homer has a deeper relationship to theology than the later Greek philosophy, for Homer’s world was intimately conceived along with the divine. Plato, as he 53

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Gardner, Religion, 38. There is recent research that disputes the worshiping nature of the Dionysian festivals, arguing that they were more political and social than religious, however. Wallace, Introduction, 10.

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stood at the transition from the mythic to the philosophical world, wrote his great philosophical works as dramatic dialogues, thus preserving an element of the mythic, dramatic world in his larger rational vision. Balthasar contends that the insights of Greek philosophy are actually derivative; they descend from the miraculous insight of tragedy and its mythic world. In many ways, he wants to fuse mythology and philosophy together, though it is mythology that remains truer and deeper.54 Philosophy shares with tragedy a concern for humanity’s relationship to the transcendent, but delimited by rationalism. Thus, Balthasar remarks, Plato “began as a poet and to the end deeply loved the poets,” but Plato found them now unnecessary since “tragedy had been carried over from the stage into reality” (GL4.167–8). Plato had, of course, exiled the tragedians from his Republic (The Republic, bk. 10). The real handmaiden to Christianity is, therefore, not Greek philosophy but Greek tragic drama. This is an alteration of Hegel’s system, where art matures into religion and is then superseded by philosophy.55 In contrast, Balthasar condemns philosophy as monological, or in conversation only with itself and its own criteria. . . . Can the light of reason bring the radiance and the glory of myth within its purview? Initially the answer is in any case negative. Reason which inquires about being as a whole is a “monologic” act. . . . In place of the daring of the [mythic] heart there is [philosophical] knowledge which keeps itself to itself. (GL4.156)

Philosophy may be born of the Homeric mythic world, yet it operates without mythic tragedy’s vitalizing dependence on the divine (GL4.156). Authentic drama can speak of God through faith in a way rationalism cannot; “faith reaches backward and forward for an ultimate horizon of meaning that is not accessible to rationality” (TD1.358). Thus it is no surprise that modern philosophy is focused on idealism and human apperception; it is parsimoniously self-absorbed in its rational enterprises. Balthasar appreciates

54

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Howsare argues for a mediation in Balthasar between mythology and philosophy. Howsare, Balthasar, 60–1. But the sheer amount of Balthasar’s work in aesthetics and dramatics—twelve volumes—in comparison with the three volumes of the Theo-Logic, argues for mythology’s preeminence in Balthasar’s thought. In addition, Balthasar boldly states that it is tragedy, and not philosophy, that is theology’s true conversation partner (GL4.101). Diogenes Allen, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 233. Allen comments that Hegel means no denigration by this ranking, but it is a ranking nonetheless.

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and uses philosophy, yet he is aware of its rational limitations. The problem for Balthasar is philosophy follows modern tragedy’s monadic-idealist trajectory, where human life is autonomous, lonely, and meaningless. For Balthasar, Christian faith should never be a desiccated scholasticism, but something that elicits performance and action in imitation of God’s great acts. “Both tragedy and the Passion have the same basic nature: they are act. Reality is action, not theory” (TD1.66). Philosophy, for him, “inevitably takes the Hegelian ‘Long View’ of historical humanity. It envisages humanity in its universal ‘essence’ . . .” summarizes Murphy.56 In contrast, it is Socrates’ sense of vocation, his daimonion, that, as for great tragic heroes, actually motivates (TD1.355). Philosophical rationalism for Balthasar is another totality, after all. It seeks to escape the world of history and particularity into transcendent rationalism or Platonic forms. Philosophy often escapes God’s participative distance, and with its “claim to totality” (GL4.164) it denies the distanced God or human finitude. Without that distance, creation folds into a simple divine identity. The truth of the Greek tragedians that Balthasar clings to is their refusal to escape the world via its negation, as in Platonic idealism or Stoicism, “the transcending of the a posteriori in an a priori vision . . .” (GL4.164). The Attic tragedians resist an easy human identity with God; instead, Attic tragedians value the particular, the personal, and human actions even in their tragic losses. Lived human life is best represented in concrete persons and their actions, as with Oedipus’ disastrous striving for the truth, or Orestes’ desperate flight from his family’s inescapable guilt. In the Christian gospels, Christ weeps in Gethsemane because, as a particular human being, he too fears death. Greek tragedy and Christian faith both care deeply about the particular, as opposed to the philosophical universal. Balthasar notes that with the birth of philosophy is the “contempt of that which exists in finitude, which is declared to be nonexistent (Parmenides’ ascension in the chariot of the Muses, Heraclitus) . . .” (ET3.318). In contrast is Homer’s mythic world that reflects the moral problematics of human life. Philosophies can themselves become totalities if their stance is contemptuous toward finitude. Examples are found in Plato’s eternal forms, Nietzsche’s 56

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Murphy, Christ, 162. Hart also comments how, with Plato’s world of forms, there is “ideality’s defatigation in time and matter.” Hart, Beauty, 38. The later Platonic tradition, as in Plotinus and Augustine, tended “to turn away from the external, material world . . . to etherealize the Christian life.” Allen, Philosophy, 89.

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embrace of Dionysian dissolution, and Hegel’s overpowering, historical Geist. These and other philosophies proclaim that reality is derivative and ultimately illusory. Balthasar’s point is that for the tragedians, the world is not illusory, not something we escape because it is derivative (ET3.318). There is not a truth hidden higher or elsewhere, as in a Platonic, Parmenidean, or Gnostic framework. Nor is suffering a mere illusion. Greek tragedy takes the problem of suffering seriously, which is not denied as mere appearance or a stumbling-block to happiness, but a place of revelatory power. The potency of Greek tragedy is found in light’s revelation even in the darkest darknesses; the power of God is such a power that it can overcome even God-abandonment.57 Darkness and death can be the occasion of revelation. “That is the valour of the unshielded heart, which philosophy will lack, and which stands in a direct relation to Christ” (GL4.103). Philosophy’s astigmatism is due to its lack of stigmata, we might say, a failure to embrace lived human reality and its tragic sufferings. In contrast are the philosophers who suffer tragedy for their beliefs: Socrates, Aristotle’s friend Hermias, Seneca the Younger, Boethius, and Kierkegaard (ET3.392–3). Philosophy’s truths are proved in tragedy’s “valour of the unshielded heart,” a life lived in the shadow of suffering and even martyrdom in the Good’s greater light. “The greatness of tragedy is that it achieves such a moment of transcendence [i.e., when the absolute is unveiled] in decision and judgment powerfully and explicitly.”58

Christ the true tragic hero Tragedy has powerful, revelational insights into human reality as one lived dramatically, existentially, and in distant relationship to the divine; it also exceeds philosophy as something lived and narratival (i.e., lived chronologically and not analytically). Balthasar, however, still sees tragic drama as going further: it also functions as a foreshadowing of Christ and Cross. Christ crucified is, for Balthasar, the tragic hero par excellence.59 He is the true form vaguely perceived 57

58 59

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“. . . [T]he God-Man can surrender himself to God-abandonment, without resigning his own reality as God, because, as God, he is as interior to the world he has made as he is superior to it.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), 81. Schindler, Balthasar, 320. Taylor, Kevin, “Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Christ the Tragic Hero,” in Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller (eds), Christian Theology and Tragedy, 133–48.

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in Greek and Hebrew tragedy; Christianity follows “the trail that was lost ever since the demise of ancient tragedy . . .” (TD2.49). This allows us to see clearly that Jesus Christ is the heir of all the tragedy of the world, that of the Greeks as well as that of the Jews, that of the so-called unbelievers as well as that of the so-called believers. And he enters upon this inheritance, not merely through a victorious act of surpassing them, something that would (so to speak) overcome the tragedy of men through a more untragic tragedy of the Son of God, but first of all by entering within the form of suffering of all of humanity and sharing in this suffering, as it has been revealed to us in the ultimate contradictoriness both of Greek existence and of Jewish existence. (ET3.400)

Balthasar is careful here, for he is not arguing that Christ annuls or replaces ancient tragedy, although Christ does surpass them. Christ transcends (in a Hegelian manner) both Greek and Hebrew tragedy, which means he exceeds them in a way that includes them, without obviating their ongoing relevance— tragic existence, that is, continues. Christ reveals the true melody, “the real peripeteia—Christ’s suffering on our behalf ” (TD1.106), to which the ancient tragedies were hinting and grasping; they follow in a polyphonic way Christ’s true melodic form (even though they precede that form historically). Christ enters the tragedy of the Welttheater to overcome it, yet not in a way that dissolves God’s distance or removes the ongoing nature of dramatic, tragic existence. Christ’s form—meaning his life, death, and resurrection—fulfills ancient tragedy by exceeding it both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, he is purely innocent, born without sin or tragedy’s pervasive familial guilt. His suffering extends even into the emptiness of hell, a state of nonbeing—death is not an escape from his suffering, but an entrance to a new kind of suffering, his nonexistence until God raises him from the dead. “All the horrors of world history will never equal what, at Golgotha, was the abandonment of God by God, but they all are taken up into this and preserved there.”60 Qualitatively, Christ differs in his unique hypostasis, his person of two distinct natures (human and divine). Greek tragedy might have featured a god entering the play, but not monotheism’s the one God; “Christ, the Son of God, is not just

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Balthasar, Credo, 97.

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any incarnation: he is the sole incarnation, revealing God’s whole mind” (TD1.319). Christ consummates tragedy, both the literary and the existential, as he has entered the world stage. Yet this does not annul God’s distance from us, or our finite freedom. “Christianity alone provides a new approach: God has become man without ceasing to be God” (TD2.45). Tragedy continues to exist, as an experiential reality and a meaningful art form. Christ’s singularity is supported by Balthasar’s marshaling of Hegel: For Hegel, all drama (pre and post-Christian) is evaluated by the Christevent, who appears as an individual who takes on the destiny of the world’s guilt (an extrinsic guilt to him) and dies to be transfigured, to restore unity of ethical. (TD1.72)

Modern tragedy will be authentic insofar as it reflects Christ the tragic hero, echoing the genius of Attic and Hebraic tragedy as, for example, Racine did. The ramifications for Balthasar of Christ’s status as the true tragic hero of the world are significant. Tragedy is deeply theological and revelatory, for now it can be read as reflecting the Cross and Christ’s god-abandonment. Rowan Williams observes that underlying Balthasar’s theological vision is Christ’s abandonment on the Cross, his terrible, absolute distancing from God, so that “the cry of dereliction from the Cross is a communication of the selfhood of God . . .”61 Christ’s death even mysteriously reveals the Trinitarian life. Balthasar writes, “In this context, Jesus’ death, even his most bitter death in abandonment, is the pure expression of his eternal, trinitarian life” (TD5.252). The distance within the Trinity contains even this primal abandonment and distance (TD5.257). Christ’s fate of God-abandonment, as the true tragic hero, is unsurpassable qualitatively; thus Christ circumscribes all human suffering, for he has always gone further and deeper. The deepest human suffering must follow his form, even for characters such as Odysseus, who for Balthasar is a man of sorrows (GL4.54), and David as an Ecce Homo (GL6.133); Odysseus and David both prefigure Christ. This literary interpretation raises serious questions, which later chapters will explore. Balthasar is careful to remain Christocentric in his exploration of Christ as a tragic hero. Christ defines and fulfills true tragedy, not vice-versa. He is 61

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Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and the Trinity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37.

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aware of a dangerous version of natural theology here, which would delimit the Cross to a humanly conceived tragic drama. Hart’s prohibition is that “theologians refrain from tragic readings of the gospel.”62 His position is that Christianity should not fall prey to a reduction to tragic conventions and themes, and he criticizes some modern theologians like Donald MacKinnon of such reductions.63 For Hart, tragic theology actually lessens “the pathos, terror, joy, or beauty of the gospel story. . . . [It] merely obscures the horror and the novelty of the gospel story behind a set of quite powerful, but still inadequate, dramatic and religious conventions [of Attic Greek drama].”64 Is Balthasar guilty of such a critique? No, Balthasar evades Hart’s proscriptions because he defines Christ’s tragic form as the basis for all tragedy, and not viceversa. Christ remains the true criterion for tragedy’s form, “the norm of every real and possible drama” (TD2.83).65 That is to say, Balthasar’s approach values tragedy for its Christian depths, not vice-versa, and his Christocentrism would satisfy Hart’s concerns regarding tragedy and theology.

Human suffering Balthasar also had pastoral and personal interests in tragic suffering. As a Catholic priest and theologian, he wanted nothing to be outside of Christ and God’s loving presence. Thus the problem of suffering required consideration— especially the kinds of ironic and horrific sufferings found in real and literary tragedies. How could these be accounted for within Christian theology? Balthasar had devoted himself and his work to his friendship with Adrienne von Speyr, and he was not only her confessor but also personally transcribed her powerful visions of Christ’s sufferings. She became seriously ill, suffering from a heart attack, diabetes, blindness, and then dying of intestinal cancer. Balthasar’s friendship with her, as well as being her spiritual mentor and confessor, was a grueling encounter with human suffering. As a theologian, he wanted to make theological sense of human tragedies in light of Christ’s own 62

63 64 65

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David Bentley Hart, “Article Review: Response From David Bentley Hart to McGuckin and Murphy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 1 (2007): 100. Hart, Beauty, 380–3. Hart, “Article,” 99. Nichols, Myth, 54.

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tragic suffering and the presence of God for all sufferers. This led him to look to Greek tragedy as a genre that explored terrible agony while also looking to the divine, and this seemed deeply Christian to Balthasar. The problem of human suffering remains a perennial theological topic and question, and the genre of tragedy is an apt way to theologically engage it. The glory of Athens is its development of tragedy as something both religious and pitiable—even Christian. That human suffering is displayed so openly, so unbecoming and painful, yet unremoved from the presence of the gods or the duty of the city to offer such suffering a refuge and welcome is a profound Christian symbol, for Balthasar. It echoes of the parable of the Good Samaritan, where vulnerability and helplessness call for mercy. Any pragmatism or political opportunism is cast aside in the Christian approach, which values pity and mercy above all things. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, such pity is the basis of divinity and its glory, as well as the founding of the city itself. As Terry Eagleton asks: Oedipus, broken and blinded, stands before Colonus. As he once returned an answer to the Sphinx, so his presence now poses a question to the nearby city of Athens. Is it to gather this unclean thing to its heart, or cast it out as so much garbage? . . . Can it bring itself to pity what it fears? He [Theseus] knows that by making this obscene thing into the cornerstone of the polis, a great power for good will inevitably follow.66

A genius of the Greeks is this awareness of pity, that one cannot cast away a supplicating suffering without repercussions. From The Persians to The Suppliants, Prometheus Bound to Philoctetes, there is this Christianly pity for the beggarly and hopeless. The threat is, as Simone Weil notes, that the begging for mercy comes not from the sufferer but from God, and to ignore the sufferer is to offend God.67 It is not hard to hear the echo of Christ’s words about separating the sheep from the goats according to the welcoming of the stranger, the sick and the comforting of prisoners (Matthew 25:31–46). It was the pity of Bilbo Baggins for Gollum that, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, ends up saving the world’s third age. It was pity that motivated Prometheus (Prometheus Bound, line 123) yet left him unpitied. 66

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Terry Eagleton, “Commentary,” in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 346. Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 1998), 71.

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The influence of Hegel Balthasar is not the first theologian to have such a high regard for tragedy. His interest in tragic drama was also shaped by one of his primary influences, Hegel. Hegel, as Quash observes, “. . . accompanies von Balthasar’s thought everywhere in his trilogy.”68 MacKinnon commented how Balthasar “continually refers to Hegel,”69 and he is heavily dependent on Hegel throughout his dramatic theory, aesthetics, and theology; Hegel has already appeared, by necessity, in this chapter, because Hegel is one of Balthasar’s primary conversation partners. On one level, Hegel’s influence on Balthasar is not surprising, as Hegel’s influential philosophy was innovative in its theological use of aesthetics. His was the first aesthetics to hold poetic drama as the queen of the arts, unlike other philosophers, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who preferred music’s discarnate nature.70 Hegel felt that “[b]ecause drama has been developed into the most perfect totality of content and form, it must be regarded as the highest stage of poetry and of art generally.”71 He valued drama for precise reasons: its external representations, reflecting Geist’s recognition of itself as incarnated; its use of individuals and their inward subjectivities (since individuals are Geist’s incarnations); and its progressively unfolding telos that reflected Geist’s unfolding self-understanding.72 Drama unites abstract inner feelings and ideas of the spirit with concrete acts, persons, and words; “speech is alone the element worthy of the expression of spirit.”73 Drama manifests Geist’s rational truth through conflict that effects reconciliation and unity.74 These themes—drama’s externality, the individual in relation to others, progressively unfolding plot, the rational, linguistic nature of thought, and the regard for religion’s relationship to art—are all shared in Balthasar’s high estimation of tragic drama. 68 69

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Quash, Theology, 12n20. Donald MacKinnon, “Some Reflections on Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Christology With Special Reference to Theodramatik Ii/2 and Iii,” in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 170. Quash, Theology, 13. Hegel comments, “. . . [M]usic must, on account of its one-sidedness, call on the help of the more exact meaning of words and . . . it demands a text which alone gives a fuller content to the subjective life’s outpouring in the notes.” Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:960. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1158. Quash, Theology, 13. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1158.

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Balthasar does not accept Hegel carte blanche, however. Hegel on the whole is more dismissive of Renaissance tragedy than Balthasar. Hegel condemns Shakespeare as too circumstantial and trivial in his high tragedies,75 and he argues that Spanish and French tragedies are too subjective and passionate, so that Geist is portrayed as parochially limited. Spanish drama, for Hegel, lacks the Greek plots’ sense of objective necessity, or it remains too obsessed with narrow senses of honor and rigid Catholicism.76 Corneille and Racine create tragedies manqué due to fractured characters who act not of their own resourceful strengths and unity of self, but from indecisiveness and the influence of others.77 Hegel finds Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1674) and Esther (1689) to be too provincially French in their reconception of ancient plots, which is too limited a vision of Geist’s universality.78 Balthasar is willing to “criticize Hegel’s view of the possibility of a (post-)Christian, ‘romantic’ theatre,’” (TD1.67), because, contra Hegel, Catholic theology preserves authentic tragedy (TD1.70). Both Hegel and Balthasar agree that the proper moral horizon for tragic drama has been lost, but unlike Hegel, Balthasar holds that this does not annul its possible future or the return of grand heroes. Unlike Hegel, Balthasar sees a future for tragic drama where it can successfully reconstruct the requisite horizon of meaning and grand protagonist (TD1.75–8). For Balthasar, God’s sustaining distance in the midst of tragedy’s extremes is a possibility for modern tragedy as much as the classics. If Balthasar disagrees with elements of Hegel’s thought, there is still an ongoing Hegelian adaptation and influence at work in Balthasar.79 Balthasar differs from Hegel in esteeming the Baroque period, yet it is for arguably Hegelian reasons that he does so; the Baroque is, after all, a period of classicism and absolutism that strenuously followed the Greek example, rejecting any stylistic mixing or bourgeois commonness. He may resist Hegel’s final system and conclusions, yet he freely adopts many of his concepts and judgments. Most of all, Balthasar borrows from Hegel to develop his notions of tragedy 74 75 76 77 78 79

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Ibid., 2:1162. Ibid., 1:594. Ibid., 2:1227, 1176. Ibid., 1:241. Ibid., 1:266–7. Quash is quite correct in pointing to the complexity of Hegel’s influence on Balthasar. There is both an “anti-Hegelian agenda” in Balthasar, and the ongoing adoption and use of Hegelian thought in his work. Quash, Theology, 12n20. Mongrain’s approach lacks Quash’s subtlety. Mongrain, Thought, 225n1.

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and drama. His definition of tragedy in volume one of the Theo-Drama, for example, is heavily influenced by Hegel. “The criterion here is the concept of reconciliation,” writes Balthasar (TD1.425), echoing the Hegelian “feeling that tragedies should have conclusions which have in them the element of reconciliation.”80 Balthasar has also borrowed from Hegel the use of the categories of “lyric” and “epic,” with drama as the higher union of them both (TD2.55–7).81 Balthasar adopts these categories for his theological concerns. The epic in Hegel is the bird’s-eye view of history and action that sees all as completed.82 Theologically, Balthasar employs the epic as a critique of the Eucharist as a Zwinglian memorial (TD2.54–5), and of systematized theologies and creeds that speak of God in the third person.83 Opposed to the epic category is the lyric, which is the expression of the subjectivity and inwardness of the individual (TD2.55). This category is concerned with feelings and single events, moods, and thoughts; it is the aria within the opera’s epic recitatives. Balthasar borrows Hegel’s lyrical mode to analyze the quietist believer who experiences the Eucharist as an inner reality and God as a “Thou.”84 These modes find their unity only in the higher resolution of drama (TD2.57). The authentic acting subject, therefore, is the one who conjoins the external and internal, and Balthasar locates this in the apostolic witness and the scriptures themselves.85 To be a witness for Christ is inherently dramatic, a higher unity of both the lyric and the epic, and good theology will similarly be attuned to the lyricism of the Spirit and the epic of dogma and history, as well as the problems of infinite and finite freedom (TD2.62). Balthasar may be more optimistic than Hegel about the future of authentic tragedy, yet a patrician despair characterizes both thinkers. If Balthasar is more optimistic about modern tragedy, it is only slightly. Hegel, he writes, “has a particular interest in showing that the whole age of art has now come to an end. But is he not basically right? There is much in us that would tend 80

81 82

83 84 85

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G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 2:267. Quash, Theology, 41–6. Massimo Fusillo shows that this definition is inherently problematic; in the past, it has meant precisely the opposite of which Hegel argues. Massimo Fusillo, “Epic, Novel,” in Forms and Themes: The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 38. The Hegelian approach to the epic is what Balthasar appropriates, however. Quash, Theology, 41–2. Ibid., 44–5. Ibid., 45.

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to agree with him” (TD1.67). Balthasar remains sympathetic to Hegel; even if he qualifies this pessimism greatly. Like Hegel, he can find few authentically tragic works in the twentieth century. Balthasar has put Hegel to good use and profit. The point of concern is the deep imprint that Hegel has made on Balthasar that spills over into his aesthetic judgments. Hegel’s influence on Balthasar is not an issue in and of itself, of course; Christianity has a history borrowing philosophical concepts to express itself. What is questionable is whether Balthasar has appropriated Hegelian aesthetic prejudices, resulting in theological problems. “Hegel’s view of drama touches the nerve of our endeavour . . .” he himself observes (TD1.50), and he freely marshals Hegel to his aid, as when he argues that Christ is the tragic clef to all tragedy (TD1.72). It is problematic that, when Balthasar engages in close readings of literary texts, he betrays a certain Hegelian Procrusteanism. Quash gently notes: But there is a compromised strain to his readings, which suggests that from time to time the Hegelian debts he owes assert themselves, or else that he imposes an alien set of concerns on his material: in short, that he succumbs to a form of “theoretical reduction”.86

Quash observes that despite Balthasar’s attempts to resist Hegel’s epic oppression of individuals—that individuals are expressions of larger ethical forces—he falls prey to a similar tendency. Tragic heroes, submitting themselves to the divine will by renouncing their own wills, look rather similar in both Hegel and Balthasar. Balthasar’s overall goal of showing how Christianity underlies the great Western works rapidly becomes reductive, and Quash finds this true in his readings of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Calderón.87 Hegel’s shadow looms large over Balthasar,88 raising the question of whether Balthasar’s theological and aesthetical project, like Hegel’s, misjudges the novel and its concerns for the modern, the prosaic, and the particular—as the following chapters will argue.

86 87 88

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Ibid., 137. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 22, 22n31. Hegel is often a foil for Balthasar. Ben Quash, “A Critique of Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Theological Dramatic Theory With Special Reference to the Thought of Hegel” (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1998), 6.

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Summary Balthasar had strong reasons for his particular interest in tragedy in its many forms. His love of literature and Greek drama naturally led him to meditate on tragedy and how it might connect to a theological aesthetics. His philosophical interests made him aware of the tragic theories of Hegel and others, and his pastoral background left him attuned to the problems of human suffering. In truth, no other theologian besides Hegel has so richly and deeply engaged with tragedy as Balthasar. He has thoroughly digested an astonishing range of tragic material—from Aeschylus to Dostoyevsky—and sought to make theological sense of it. Balthasar presents a strong and cogent argument for the importance of tragedy for theology. He conceives of tragedy as expressing vital truths regarding human freedom against history’s background, humanity’s relationship to the divine, the dramatic nature of existence and God, and Christ as the true inheritor of the tragic genre. Tragedy excels even philosophy in its mythological and revelatory power, and it relates to the existential realities of being human, where the good is ephemeral, contradictory moral claims can be placed on a person, and there is an unavoidable opaque guilt to our actions. Through all this, Balthasar shows an astonishing literary engagement and knowledge. Hegel’s presence leads us to ask how Balthasar’s theology has been shaped and determined by Hegel, as well as to what assumptions underlie his aesthetics and dramatics. Balthasar claims to not have an a priori definition of tragic drama, but to approach the genre phenomenologically (TD1.17) and read literature without preconditions.89 Yet he clearly does have an agenda and operative theory at work, discernible in his literary preferences and judgments; he, like Hegel, valorizes classic tragic works that are aristocratic in subject and expression. Balthasar’s understanding of tragedy demands a closer inspection, which is the purview of the next chapter. To engage his theological aesthetics and dramatics in conversation with a tragic novelist whose vision of tragedy is so very different—prosaic, perspectival, and ignoble—is the goal of this book and the concern of Chapters 3 through 6.

89

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Quash calls Balthasar a “theological phenomenologist.” Quash, Theology, 29. Murphy notes Balthasar’s “revealed phenomenology.” Murphy, Christ, 144.

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Balthasar’s Limited Conception of Tragedy

Tragedy is a vital factor in Balthasar’s theology and writings. It not only forms a particular locus for important theological themes: suffering, providence, the place of reason, ethics, and the Passion, but is also a way for Balthasar to explore his literary interests and the genius he finds in the ancient Greeks. This chapter looks more closely at Balthasar’s operative definition of tragedy, especially as it functions in his literary judgments. Why did Balthasar valorize the Greeks, Renaissance, and Baroque dramatists so much, yet condemn most modern tragedies? Why did he find modern tragedy hopelessly oppressive, despite its modern freedoms? To answer these questions, we must look at how Balthasar defines true tragedy, as well as how he sees modern tragedy as having devolved from its purer origins. The concern of this chapter is that a close examination of Balthasar’s operative approach to tragedy reveals certain problems with his definition. Upon examination, Balthasar’s limited definition and approach to tragedy are problematic, as they cripple his theological and aesthetic vision, so that he cannot rightfully account for or encounter modern tragedy or the novel, as the following chapters will argue.

Balthasar’s criteria for authentic tragedy Balthasar does not offer an extended, formal definition of tragedy. It is simply not something he directly addresses. This partly reflects his style, which is not systematic but more scattered and flowing. Important themes, such as Christ’s descent, the role of Mary, gender, and tragedy, are discussed in various places in his writings—to the chagrin of scholars and commentators, who would prefer clearer and more direct discussion of these topics. Balthasar’s omittance of a direct discussion of tragedy also represents a more literary and

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phenomenological approach, which attempts description from within the experience of tragic drama instead of from an analytical beginning. In many ways, Balthasar wants tragedy to be an experience instead of a ratiocination. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith” (ET3.391–411), for example, he opts to leave the word “tragedy” untouched and look at the experience itself, its history and reality. In the Trilogy, he discusses tragedy at various points of the seven volumes of the Glory of the Lord, but only stops to offer some sort of definition in volume one of Theo-Drama (and even then, it is two-thirds of the way through the volume). Yet Balthasar’s basic definition of tragedy in volume one of the TheoDrama does provide a very useful orientation point. Based on this definition, along with his other writings on tragedy and his sources, it is not difficult to characterize his defining approach to tragedy. His understanding of tragedy will, naturally, impact his readings of specific tragedies and his preferences for certain kinds of tragedies. This chapter will trace out Balthasar’s operative definition for tragedy, as well as how he applies it to certain eras of tragic drama. As a classicist, he prefers the Greeks, Shakespeare, and the Baroque figures of Calderón and Racine above all other tragedians; in addition, the future of tragic art remains dim, as only the glory of the past can effect a true renewal of tragic drama. Balthasar begins his definition of tragedy with a typology of Albin Lesky, whose criterion is the Hegelian theme of reconciliation (TD1.425). Lesky, Balthasar argues, traces three types of tragedy: situational (where the tragedy is reconciled within the oppositions itself, as with the Oresteia), transcendent (where reconciliation is impossible without the reality of a higher, transcending level), and absolute (where the oppositions remain irreconcilable). These types all revolve around opposition and reconciliation; emanating from Hegelian philosophy, the question becomes the level of opposition and the possibility of resolution. The third position, absolute tragedy, is tragicism, where the oppositions are completely hardened so that tragedy—and thus human life— remains irreconcilable and absurd. Life is at war with itself, and only a vision such as Camus’ can find meaning in its struggles. With the first category of situational tragedy, the opposition finds its own resolution, as when Athena casts the final vote in the Oresteia. The divine has intervened, but it has been part of the tragic plot from the beginning, and merely changes the pieces on the board to effect a final resolution.

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It is the second category, transcendent tragedy, that Balthasar is most interested in. It is amorphous, in a sense, and can become a kind of tragicism itself. It can take the form of idealism and Romanticism, where the tragic hero is able to transcend through his own abilities, effecting his own selftranscendence from the situation. Or, it can be a deus ex machina, a genuine expression of the Cross, where God, from the outside, intervenes and effects a resolution by entering the tragedy and redeeming it from within. It is here that Balthasar envisions Christian tragedy and even the Cross, as a place where the tragedy seems irresolvable and hopeless, yet yields an ultimate resolution. These kinds of tragedies resonate powerfully with Christianity, where only death and resurrection can overcome the unstoppable forces of evil, sin, and death. The path of redeeming the tragic vision, of finding a place for it in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, is to navigate between nontragedy and tragicism, a denial of tragic existence and a glorying in it. Methodologically, he is distinguishing between false and true oppositions, oppositions that lead to defeat and absurdity versus ones that enable a transcendence and final resolution. In the face of many who see all tragedy as a form of tragicism, as well as those who deny Christianity the depth (because it is naive or escapist) to richly interact with tragedy, Balthasar finds a third way. Instead, he argues for the many tragedies that effect reconciliations and the possibility of Christian tragedy and tragic experience.

Reconciliations, God, and heroes The influence of Hegel is strong, and we can see why. For Hegel, tragedy evoked a final reconciliation, a sense of hope and transformation despite catastrophe and terrible loss. The oppositions, as with Antigone, lead to a higher resolution in the face of self-justified forces. It is not a vision of life as ultimately absurd, opposed to itself, or hopeless. Tragedies that were ultimately absurd or hopeless Balthasar called Pantragismus, where the oppositions are irreconciliable, as he saw in the works of Hebbel, Schopenhauer, Büchner, and finally the theater of the absurd. It is Hegel’s concept of tragedy being capable of reconciliation that Balthasar finds so very useful, from a theological point of view. Yet neither is this definition of tragedy ignorant of life’s catastrophes and intrinsic oppositions. It does not resolve them in a utopian dissolution or escapism, but

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in a direct encounter with the tragic threat. The reconciliations do not dissolve the oppositions, but reorient them within a higher unity, as Hegel had argued earlier, and it is this concept of reconciling tragedy that Balthasar is framing as particularly Christian. In addition to including oppositions and reconciliations, authentic tragedy will explore the question of God. Ultimately, as discussed in Chapter 1, tragedy requires the presence of the divine. Balthasar’s concern is for God’s sustaining reality; it is our participative distance from God that makes human freedom and meaningfulness possible. Without God, humanity and tragic art are left to devolve into empty idealism. Instead of Christianity being tragedy’s death-knell, as some have argued (since Christian themes of Providence, radical grace, and Heaven would seem to obviate the threat of tragedy), it is Christianity that creates the preconditions for the flourishing of tragic art. Since it is the question of the human relation to the divine that is the great theological question (especially in the areas of suffering and Providence), this is the primary opposition that must be dealt with. Tragedy will also have protagonists of great stature, who represent the divine and political realms, figures of greatness in whom a people, city, or nation will rise and fall. They represent the reality of God and an absolute reality before which all actions take place. It is only with the modern era that tragic heroes have lost their greatness, devolving into common persons who only represent the most basic human realities. Without the political and divine dimensions, their actions have little consequences and their problems are only part of remediable social realities. Tragic heroes no longer struggle with the grand problems of fate, destiny, and sacrifice, but with the more bourgeois crises of economics, poverty, and social class. For Balthasar, these latter problems are simply not oppositional enough to be true tragedy; for true tragedy to flourish, the oppositions must be significant but not totalizing.

Tragedy after the Greeks One can see, from these defining elements of tragedy, where Balthasar’s aesthetic preferences lie: Attic tragedies, Shakespeare, and the Baroque playwrights. These are tragedies that grapple with the great themes of sacrifice,

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destiny, Providence, and passion through the actions of representative, aristocratic heroes. The greatness of the protagonist’s stature permits the furthest fall, and the final resolution points to a vision of life not pan-tragical but ultimately redemptive. There is the possibility of the divine presence, even if the divine is a cause of the catastrophe. The setting is a premodern one, where God was still a cultural, political, and ontological reality, instead of simply removed from the equation. Balthasar is a true classicist, preferring the works of the ancients over contemporary works; in fact, he thinks the best future for contemporary tragedy is through imitating the great works of the past. The greatness of the Renaissance and Baroque periods is its Christian recovery of the Greeks and Greek tragedy, so that it could be fused with Biblical tragedy into a wondrous unity. The classics and the past are what inspire Balthasar; his taste is ever for the pre-Enlightenment. Theologians are surrounded by “. . . the greatest images . . . Greek tragedy, by Dante and Calderón, and repeatedly by Shakespeare . . . Only that which is highest and purest can help us: through looking on it, we shall be healed . . .”1 Balthasar himself put this in practice in his study of early theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, and in his attack on modern philosophy and literature as hopelessly immanent in Die Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele.2 Balthasar’s highest regard for Attic tragedy is paralleled by his deep estimation of the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Elizabethan England and seventeenth century France and Spain—Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, and Calderón. Balthasar consistently cites Shakespeare, more than any other tragedian, throughout his work, his “infallible grasp of what constitutes right action” (TD1.478). The Baroque is a period of great classicism, nobility, structure (especially in France’s extolling of Aristotelian strictures for proper tragedy), and Counter-Reformation Catholicism. It is a theatrical era, where the “image of life as theatre is . . . omnipresent in the Baroque age. . . . [I]t is one of the Baroque’s defining characteristics and even its supreme sign,”

1

2

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Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 173. Alois M. Haas, “Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s ‘Apocalypse of the German Soul’: At the Intersection of German Literature, Philosophy, and Theology,” in David L. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, 53.

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comments Aidan Nichols.3 So it is not surprising that Balthasar finds this era so palatable and authentic in its tragic dramas; he rhapsodizes that: This is why the Baroque is the apogee of the drama: the period between Shakespeare and Calderon, when the old image of the world, in which the earthly is still understood as a symbol of the grace of the Incarnation, has freed itself from the mediaeval immobility of Thomas and Dante, enticed into a dynamic event where the world itself has become a drama . . . the resolution of all the tragic tensions under the sign of the forgiving grace, the proximity of the theater and the Eucharist (the primal drama in the world): only in its shadow is it possible to play, to bind and loose aright.4

Notable for Balthasar is that the Baroque stands close to “the old image of the world” but beyond the “medieval immobility.” The Baroque still perceives the world as enwrapped in the divine, but in a dynamic and existential sense that was previously lacking. Peter Szondi observes that the central concern of the Baroque is that the world is a stage,5 and Balthasar delights in Baroque theater’s self-awareness, which conveys his sense of theo-dramatics and life’s inherently dramatic qualities. Balthasar also venerates the literature of the Baroque period because of its classicism and aristocratism. Along with George Steiner,6 Balthasar feels that true tragedy is pre-eighteenth century and rooted in the Greeks; the Baroque was the last great era of authentic tragedy. His predilection, in classic and modern tragedy, is for those who pined for the ancien régime, like Reinhold Schneider and Racine, and he notes that Schneider and Paul Claudel are “a continuation of Baroque tragedy” (TD1.173n20). Erich Auerbach comments how Racine’s tragedies often feature a tragic hero who “abandons itself to its princely passions. . . . [H]e has so strong an awareness of its princely rank that it can never be without it.”7 The Baroque was, after all, a period rife with royal absolutism and exalted princely personages, where the king was the social center of the court, town, and nation—Balthasar is drawn to this highly representational era, leaving him resistant to modern tragedies. 3 4

5 6 7

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Nichols, Myth, 25–6. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 69. Szondi, Essay, 66. Steiner, Death, 3. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, 50th anniversary edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 374–5.

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Balthasar and tragedy’s future Balthasar, as Chapter 1 traced, sees Christ as fulfilling all tragedy and the tragic form itself. Does this annul any future for tragedy? Can new tragedies still be written, or are we left to merely perform the tragedies of the past? Balthasar is not so pessimistic, but instead presents a hopeful future for tragedy. The revelatory power of tragic drama, after all, remains. The human drama continues, and we are all called to our roles on the worldstage; to hold otherwise would obviate the reality of tragic experience and the relevancy of tragic art. Here Balthasar diverges from Hegel, who did see tragic drama as being surpassed by religion and ultimately philosophy. Balthasar’s traditional, classicist bent is evident, however, in that future tragedy must always look backward. Because Christ has fulfilled all pagan and Christian tragic works, contemporary and future works must, therefore, look backward to him, as Shakespeare and the Baroque tragedians did. Because this glory belongs only to a “mythic” person (that means one who in his fate has been formed, raised up and brought low by god [sic] in a representative way), who has been raised to the highest degree of suffering, there is therefore no possibility of creating and staging a tragedy in the highest sense after Christ, who has performed this role to its perfection. (GL4.104)

Tragedy must change after the Crucifixion.8 Stage tragedies will now only truly be tragic as they participate in Christ’s tragedy. It must always function as an echo of Christ’s tragedy, whether as a foreshadowing—as in the Greeks and Hebrews—or a reworking of those ancient tragedies, like Racine and Shakespeare did. This is not necessarily reductive, however. The form of Christ— his life, death, and resurrection—invites endless variation and comparison. It is an analogy that invites a reworking of itself in varying particularities, settings, and eras. Just as Mary’s Magnificat has been set to numerous musical settings, so Christ’s pattern invites such re-settings, from King Lear (ET3.404) to adaptations of Alcestis. For Balthasar, Christ’s true form is endlessly repeatable and incarnational, inviting localization within many cultures and art forms yet classic in shape and mimesis. Such a vision of art is not imprisoning, for 8

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Block Jr., “Criticism,” 218.

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repetition can mean creative variation. Hart trenchantly describes this sense of beauty: “Analogy differs and defers, as a style of rejoicing . . . a rhetoric of peace, a ‘portrayal’ of the infinite,” and Nicholas Boyle agrees that literature “can make analogues of revelation that can illuminate and affect the whole of our life.”9 Yet Balthasar has a very strict understanding of the functioning of analogy and analogs—to be truly tragic, they must be Attic, Hebraic, or patterned on Christ. Such imagination is demanded even of the theologian, and the wellspring remains the past, in spite of history’s changes: This return [to the past] will be beneficial, but only on one condition: that he [the theologian] understand [sic]well that history, far from dispensing us from creative effort, imposes it on us. . . . There is never a historical situation that is absolutely similar to any of the ones that preceded it in time.10

As a true classicist, Balthasar finds the oldest is the best, and successive great works shape and re-form the glories of the earlier ages. His taste and prescription remains aristocratic, classic, and traditional, leading him to attack modernity and reduce tragic literature’s immense diversity. The Baroque was an era of strict classicism and artistic flourishing, and Balthasar recommends a modern version of such a sense of imitation. It is not surprising that he values how the Greek myth of Iphigenia, as a Christ-like story of self-sacrifice for someone else, is incarnated in modern times by writers such as Wilder and Faulker (TD1.392–400; TD4.502). True tragic drama requires the divine and the classicist approach, which follows the ancient patterns. This pattern can naturally look to Christ the true tragic hero. Such a future for authentic drama may break some aspects of tradition, such as the need for five acts or poetic verse (TD1.78), but it cannot be reductively modern or prosaic. It is precisely Balthasar’s patrician literary tastes, his a priori opposition to the modern and the ignoble, which needs questioning.

Balthasar and modern tragedy Balthasar condemns almost all modern tragedies for their religious impercipience, their refusal of human life lived in God’s affirming presence. Troubling 9

10

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Hart, Beauty, 311; Nicholas Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004), 127. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 10.

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for Balthasar is the tendency of writers since the Renaissance to venerate forces beyond the Christian and religious. Writers who embrace such an atheist humanism always look outside of God for salvation, either in a recovery of a classic tradition, or “the reduction of revelation through logic to a speculative doctrine of God” (GL5.247). Balthasar rejects any humanism without God, such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, a Bildungsroman that he notes lacks any place for religion (GL5.410). This is symptomatic of the modern turn to an “innerworldly humanism” that is secular, scientific, and bourgeois. “Neither that heaven-directed gaze of foolishness prevails here, nor the thrust of a transcendent eros. . . . [This] is the dissolution of an immanent anthropology which in its enclosed dialectic must increasingly have recourse to forms of perversity . . .” (GL5.410). The turn to humanism and a life without God becomes the incurvatus in se, where Balthasar would, perhaps, locate Thomas Hardy (as other English writers of roughly his era, Scott and Dickens, are lumped together, GL5.410).11 Balthasar reads Beckett as precisely a writer who aptly expresses the absurd into which the modern world has naturally devolved. Thus, for reasons unknown, Endgame’s Hamm cannot stand up while Clov cannot sit down, and this is modernity’s final, absurd state. Beckett shows modernity’s meaninglessness, where human action separated from its proper Divine horizon becomes self-annihilating (TD1.75). A mutation taken by modern tragic drama’s devolution is individualistic idealism, the lonely “monad” existence of the individual. Ibsen is, for Balthasar, an example of such tragic drama, where human beings exist as “idealist monads.” They are defined solely by themselves and their individual totalities, and they must perform alone, without metaphysical accretions. “Now man himself is the audience before whom he acts” (TD1.203); “he [Ibsen] portrays the actor on the world stage who now coincides with the playwright/director” (TD1.206). The modern tragic condition consists of monadic heroes doomed from the beginning, as Brand and Peer Gynt, who negate themselves in their desires and idealities. “They are the face and obverse 11

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Similarly, Bonhoeffer wrote, “The movement that began about the thirteenth century . . . towards the autonomy of man . . . has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God’.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, enlarged edn, 2nd printing (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1973), 325 (8 June 1944).

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of the same thing” (TD1.205), existing without a horizon of meaning or social place. There is no true community from which they are expelled, as occurs to Oedipus, for they were alienated from the start. For Balthasar, this disease is a result of modernity’s loss of the Absolute. Humanity conceived without God is left as “monads” of idealism, lost in self-reference.12 Modernity leads to nihilism and loneliness, and Balthasar analyzes how Ibsen’s mature plays are “tragedies of autonomy” (TD1.210). His later plays despair because any foundation for hope is compromised by guilt (TD1.208). The constant symbol in Ibsen is the empty, worthless upward movement; people climb heights only to fall (TD1.211), as with the hero of The Master Builder. For Balthasar, Ibsen is indicative of modernity’s loss of God’s participative, innervating distance, as Beckett devolves even further into nihilism. Modern humans, in the absence of God’s participative distance, can fall not only into a false idealism of the individual, but also into the idealism of the state. Balthasar uses the Marxist dramatist Bertolt Brecht as a frequent conversation partner. Balthasar faults Brecht for his reduction of the individual to an agent of the cause. Brecht’s tragedies often concern the individual (as Mother Courage) whose identity is lost, dissolved into the larger argument against circumstances and the call for change (TD2.93). Mother Courage is a tragic dilemma that is eradicable by society; social or drawing-room tragedies are not truly tragic for Balthasar because they are socially remediable (TD1.330). Such puppetry, for Balthasar, is Idealism at its worst, present from Enlightenment through late Romanticism. Following the Hegelian elements of Marxist thought, Brecht is oppressive toward his characters. He tends to make his dramas part of an unfolding truth, an instance of the economic universal, so that characters in such epic plots become tragic pawns of a coercive worldspirit (TD2.48). Balthasar’s belief is that without the Absolute, there is no foundational basis for meaningful human action; politics then become pointless. He references Hegel’s belief that, without the corporate dimension of the political, the private becomes meaningless (TD1.74). The modern political collective, as Marxism or fascism (themselves descended from a Hegelian epic idealism), reduces the

12

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Such an analysis indicates how Balthasar would have approached Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, where Jude sees the ghostly figures of Christminster and even becomes like a ghost himself. Sue remains to Jude a “disembodied creature” (JO 6.6.244), “a fay, or sprite” (JO 6.3.353), as Jude from age eleven has “continued to wish himself out of the world” (JO 1.5.31).

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individual to a puppet, destroying free and meaningful human actions. Social meliorism, no matter how noble or well-intentioned, is destructive when aligned with the epic. Thus Balthasar writes: From above, the individual appears as one element within the history of a nation or of mankind, within a cosmic evolution. Whether in the terms of Idealism, Naturalism or Socialism, the individual with his tragedy becomes the expression of particular “conditions” that “are not as they should be” and prevent men from being good (Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht); if at all possible, these conditions should be changed. . . . [T]he projection of these ideals onto the stage destroys the drama of existence. (TD2.40)

Despite these strong critiques of Brecht’s work, Balthasar does feel that some of Brecht’s works do succeed as tragedies; his wide literary knowledge does permit exceptions to his general dislike of modern literature. The initial version of Brecht’s play The Measures Taken, Balthasar comments, reveals the individual caught between the ideal of a redeemed humanity and a political order that demands sacrifice; its success, Balthasar analyzes, is due in part to the Marxism that makes absolute demands on the individual (TD1.84). He evidences respect for Brecht as one who has struggled with Christianity and the limitations of Marxism. “There is surely no writer of the modern period who has conducted a more beautiful dialogue with Christianity than Bert Brecht . . . no one who has conducted a more trenchant dialogue” (ET3.458). One of his last plays, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, features a judge in whom Balthasar sees strong Christological nuances. Balthasar also appreciates how Brecht has a strong sense of service and missio within Marxism (TD1.329; TD2.33), as Balthasar does within his own theology. Such works are exceptions to Balthasar’s reading of modern tragic drama. To him, modernity cannot find tragedy’s proper key, for it has lost the requisite understanding of God’s peaceable yet sustaining distance. It thus ineluctably falls into absurdism (Beckett), idealism (Ibsen), or collectivism (Brecht). Without the vitalizing relationship of God’s meaningful horizon, such art lapses into Beckett’s solipsisms, the lonely self of Ibsen’s idealism, or oppressive political structures;13 creation becomes a Gnostic reality, what Hart terms a 13

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Terry Eagleton notes this friction within the Romantics, who find the same dilemma between the human subject and nature. If the subject finds union with nature, then a foundation is secured that dissolves his or her freedom; if the subject rebels against nature, then the freedom gained has no foundation. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 332–3.

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“‘univocal’ ontology.”14 Balthasar himself notes the irony of the twentieth century: its inability to create aesthetic tragedy is accompanied by actual suffering on a monumental scale. For him, modernity has proven unable to create tragedy, despite its immense history of tragic suffering. The modern era is one of meaningless prosaism, in both its existence and its preferred literary forms, and is without the vitalizing presence of God or classic drama. It is thus no surprise that Brecht later edited many of the tragic elements out of The Measures Taken and Mother Courage so that the Marxist moral would more effectively work on his audience (TD1.85). In contrast, authentic tragic conflict is not absolutized into a nihilist pantragicism or idealism (as Ibsen and other modern writers do), but retains oppositions and human action within a horizon of meaning. True tragic heroes are flawed but still grandly representative—kings, generals, princesses, and gods. The divine is not removed or negated in Attic and RenaissanceBaroque tragedy, but a distant presence with whom, like Jacob, they wrestled. Modern tragedies, in contrast, fail these standards. They overwhelmingly deny meaning to human actions, as their protagonists struggle with their own identity and significance. They are unable to manifest their wills and desires upon an uncaring and incoherent cosmos; they fall like the Master Builder or fail like Jude Fawley. Passions are absurd, meaningless, or destructive. That said, Balthasar (in his unsystematic method and widely-read interests) does make some exceptions to particular modern works that he does find authentically tragic, such as Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Kafka, and Malraux. These rare works remain, however, exceptions in his larger condemnation of modern tragedy.

Tragedy’s indefinition Through Balthasar’s dispersed analysis and commentary on premodern and modern tragedy, his consistent approach and definition can be formulated. Balthasar represents a certain segment of tragic theory that is classicist and aristocratic, which holds that the tragedies of the ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Baroque have set an inviolable pattern for true tragedy

14

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Hart, Beauty, 301.

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where noble protagonists suffer from tragic oppositions. This is a common approach found in C. S. Lewis, George Steiner, Hegel, A. C. Bradley, and countless others, and has provided rich interpretations of many tragic works. Yet there are potent reasons to reject such an approach to tragedy. For one, it has to discount many commonly accepted tragedies to achieve its analytical clarity. Death of a Salesman, Clarissa, Timon of Athens, Medea, The Bacchae, even Philoctetes (who suffers from an ignoble wound and an unheroic spirit) are hardly stories of representative, aristocratic figures who nobly fall from grace in a clearly ordered aristocratic world. The threat of bestial abandon and madness is far too close in The Bacchae to fit into such a narrow understanding of tragedy. The epistolary nature of Clarissa removes it from properly dramatic (and even novelistic) tragedy, and Death of a Salesman might be drama but of a decidedly modern, bourgeois kind. Regarding the tragic art form, a comprehensive definition has proven impossible, without omitting swaths of tragic works.15 The truth is that every theory or definition of tragedy fails on a comprehensive level. Eagleton names his first chapter “A Theory in Ruins,”16 and in it he proceeds to demolish all such theories as ineffective. Most definitions, as many have observed, idealize one play or group of plays as canonical, judging all others by their criteria. Thus Aristotle holds up Oedipus Rex as the defining standard for tragedy, even as A. C. Bradley works from Shakespeare. Tragic theory’s attempt to make rational sense of this genre began with Aristotle. He was the first to sketch a tragic theory, but his seminal pages are brief and disputed.17 He located the operative element of tragedy in the tragic action (Poetics 1449b:36) made in error (1453a:16). Philosophers since have proffered varying theories on the tragic: Schelling, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Goethe all made theoretical porrections to the field.18 Tragic 15

16 17

18

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There are numerous eras of what might be termed “tragic flourishing”: ancient Greece, Eliabethan England (Shakespeare and Marlowe), Baroque classicist France and Spain (Calderón, Racine), and the last two centuries’ move into tragic novels (Hardy, George Eliot, Henry James, Arthur Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov, for example). Most definitions of tragedy are reductive toward the whole canon, with only a clutch of exemplary tragedies in hand. I. A. Richards, for example, rather stunningly calls the Attic dramas “pseudo-tragedy” in comparison with Shakespeare. Eagleton, Violence, 7. Hegel’s preference for the Greeks meant King Lear suffered “baseness.” Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:222. Eagleton, Violence, 1–22. Terms such as catharsis elude precise definition or an understanding of Aristotle’s intent. Aristotle’s text spans some twenty-six pages, but Gerald F. Else spends 365 pages explicating them. Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1957), 203–568. Szondi, Essay, 7–43.

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theory matured with Hegel, who was the first comprehensive tragic theorist who sought both to define and valorize it at the apex of his aesthetics.19 For him, tragic drama was precisely the great synthesis of necessity and individual freedom found in ethical collisions. Tragic theory, therefore, has often oriented itself toward Aristotle’s mistaken actions, or in Hegel’s collisional forces, both being modes familiar to Balthasar. Some two millennia after Aristotle’s first attempts to theorize tragedy and what makes it tick have resulted in no discernible agreement among scholars. Instead, various camps have evolved that argue for traditionalist, modern, post-tragic/nihilistic, or NietzscheanDionysiac criteria. It is for this reason that scholars such as Eagleton and Adrian Poole simply refuse to define tragedy. Prima facie, this seems unacademic and nonrational. How can one work with something that remains undefinable? Yet this is the reality of tragedy—its indefinition. Tragedy is precisely the boundary places, the places without definition or clear conceptualization: areas of madness, suffering, extremes, irony, unpredictability, and uncontrollable passions. It is something that in its nature resists definition, and instability is one of its hallmarks. Poole puts it trenchantly: Tragedy teaches us that the objects of our contemplation – ourselves, each other, our world – are more diverse than we had imagined, and that what we have in common is a dangerous propensity for overrating our power to comprehend this diversity. . . . [T]ragedy is intrinsically hostile to generalization. The experiences which tragedies represent are such as at one and the same time most urgently demand and resist explanation.20

Tragedy, as Poole is stating, simultaneously invites and resists our conceptualizations. It is a slippery concept and word. Its meaning is desultory, from the pathos of human frailties—the car accident or the cancer diagnosis—to dramas of Promethean rebellion, tales of madness and extreme suffering, or the noble acceptance of a doomed fate. It can mean an art form, a theory about tragic art forms, an ontic experience, or a worldview, or a combination of these. Comprehensiveness remains impossible, but this does not preclude

19 20

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Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61. Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 1–2.

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meaningful statements about the genre; rather, statements about tragedy must always be provisional and aware of being undermined by the genre itself. The power of tragedy is its investigation into precisely these problems, the places of terrible loss and suffering, sometimes self-caused and sometimes unintentional and even purely innocent. Tragedy has no systematic answers to the problems of human suffering and evil, but it does delve deeply into these painful areas. Human tragedy and suffering are a part of human existence, an ongoing threat to our flourishing. Balthasar addresses tragedy, in part, because of its enormous power and applicability. That human existence can be tragic is not something Balthasar avoids; actually, it is something he pursues and heightens. Tragedy is not to be escaped or denied, but acknowledged and examined to find its ultimate healing. For him, encountering tragic drama can be a vehicle for reflecting on our own performances and sufferings, as well as the reality of God’s presence. The suffering of Christ reveals his own tragedy, which he endured to ultimately redeem all other tragedies; his is the true tragedy of the world. Even the common notion that tragedies must conclude with an unhappy ending (a presumption that Balthasar rightfully resists) proves unsustainable, because the extensive tragic canon contradicts such an a priori definition. Some tragedies actually end happily or with a final doom avoided, as Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, Prometheus trilogy, and Alcestis; Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris; Racine’s Berenice (in which no tragic events ever properly happen); and the Old Testament’s Job all evince. Many tragedies may end sadly but with a final, restorative justice, as with Fortinbras’ restoration of normality at the end of Hamlet, or with Racine’s Athalie where the nefarious queen dies. Tragedy is an unstable, surreptitious genre, provoking exceptions to every attempt at an immutable tragic identity. Should the definition focus on the effects of tragic drama on the audience—its pity and fear—or identifiable formal characteristics of the genre, or the sense that life is somehow inherently tragic? Eagleton expresses the final, honest frustration of the critic: “ The truth is that no definition of tragedy more elaborate than ‘very sad’ has ever worked.”21 21

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Eagleton, Violence, 3. Cheryl Exum also notes the lack of consensus for a definition of tragedy. J. Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2.

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In truth, most literary critics who examine tragedy operate under the assumption that the particular work under examination is tragedy. Few commentaries on Hamlet begin by establishing that it is authentic tragedy; rather, they assume it is tragedy as they analyze it. Critics assume that Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine wrote tragedy, despite the immense diversities among their works; Shakespeare largely omits the Greek oracles and sense of fate, even as the Greeks lack the Shakespearean fear of death, sin, and judgment. Tragic theory is not something proven and recreated with every work of literary criticism, but rather something assumed, explored, and negotiated. Such is the nature of tragic literature and its criticism.

Balthasar’s limited definition It is to Balthasar’s benefit that he does not set out a lengthy and systematic definition of tragedy. He is much more interested in tragedy’s effects and usefulness than in anatomizing it, and he displays a tremendous breadth of knowledge of particular tragedies from many eras. He also has clear and interesting critiques of much modern tragic drama. Yet he has an implicit definition of tragedy that favors premodern works over modern ones, and his sense of clarity refuses to acknowledge tragedy’s troublesome diversity and indefinition, which ultimately blinds him to the reality of modern, ignoble, and prosaic tragedy. Balthasar’s main orientation reflects the concerns of traditional tragic theory, which valorizes aristocratic, ennobling suffering over everyday pathos. Raymond Williams, however, questions this patrician approach to tragedy that etherealizes tragic art as a separate category from common tragic experience, creating a separation of styles and expression—the sublime from the ordinary. Tragedy has become, in our culture, a common name for this kind of experience. . . . a mining disaster, a burned-out family, a broken career . . . Yet tragedy is also a name for a particular kind of dramatic art . . . This coexistence of meanings seems to me quite natural, and there is no fundamental difficulty in both seeing their relations and distinguishing between them. Yet it is very common for men trained in what is now the

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academic tradition to be impatient and even contemptuous of what they regard as loose and vulgar uses of “tragedy” in ordinary speech and in the newspapers.22

Williams’ student, Terry Eagleton, expanded his mentor’s thesis to a more comprehensive dismantling of “traditional tragic theory’s mandarin disdain for modernity and the common life.”23 Eagleton observes the tragic reality in “the form of the sheer dreary persistence of certain hopeless, obscure conditions,” the insight of bourgeois tragedy “that the heroic often is commonplace.”24 This is, in addition to Aristotle’s hamartia and Hegel’s collisional ethical forces, a third approach to tragedy by way of circumstantiality. It is a tragic sense common to the modern novel in its depiction of ignoble conditions,25 what Middlemarch calls “that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency.”26 An attention to the common and lowly is, as Chapter 4 will argue, a very Christian concern rooted in the Bible itself. It is therefore ironic that Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is immune to any such suggestion that the common and circumstantial might be significant theologically. This question is developed in Chapter 6, in relation to the problem of ignoble tragic suffering, unacknowledged in Balthasar’s theology, but observable in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Balthasar is willing to consider the relationship of Christianity and tragedy. The Cross is a tragic event not glibly undone by the Resurrection and there are tragic narratives in the scriptures themselves. Such considerations have been suggested in the past by such works as the medieval Christus Patiens (or Christus Paschon) that directly borrows Euripidean lines and a Greek Chorus to portray Christ’s passion,27 and Milton (Samson Agonistes) and Racine (Athalie, Esther) who wrote tragic drama directly from Biblical narratives. Balthasar is interested in tragedy and its usefulness to theology, but only certain types and readings of tragedy. He remains safely in the traditionalist camp of reading tragedy, which is ironic since so much of the Biblical narratives are prosaic 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Williams, Tragedy, 14. Eagleton, Violence, 16. Ibid., 2, 10, 74. Ibid., 201. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 189 (ch. 20). James A. Parente Jr., “The Development of Religious Tragedy: The Humanist Reception of the Christos Paschon in the Renaissance,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 351–68.

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and plebeian—kings who begin as shepherds, and apostles who are obscure fishermen. Such a deep understanding of tragedy (and theology and the Bible, for that matter) goes a long way to undoing Balthasar’s limiting and antimodern tendencies that truncate his aesthetical vision. My argument questions this limited, patrician canon of Balthasar’s as something symptomatic of larger problems in his work, evincing an aristocratism and antimodernism that create problems for a theology intended to be comprehensive. Looming over Balthasar’s insights is his predilection for aristocratic, classic tragedy that resists modernity, the novel, prosaic reality, and ignoble suffering. Balthasar’s aristocratism and antimodernism are deeply problematic, as they scorn the fullness of art and human existence, the ignoble depths and commonplace realities, which the novel so ably displays, so that Balthasar’s theology is hampered by a limited, patrician vision, as the subsequent chapters will argue. Balthasar wants to be inclusive in his theological and aesthetic vision, yet he remains uneasy in his relationship to modernity and modern theology. The Balthasarian prejudice is, as Balthasar stated, “Modern is something Christ never was, and, God willing, never will be,”28 and it informs his work greatly. This prejudice of Balthasar is evidenced in his patrician attitude toward the novel, which has become the dominant literary art form and is so wedded to the modern era. What might he have missed in his casual dismissal of the genre? What would a tragic novelist such as Thomas Hardy yield for a Balthasarian aesthetics, especially for today? A close reading of four Hardy novels (The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure) suggests problems in Balthasar’s understanding of tragedy and larger theology. The result is a critique of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and theo-drama where it is antimodern, antiprosaic, and repressive; the concern of this book is that Balthasar’s classicist approach has blinded him to possibilities within the novel that are not only suggestive but actually vital to his theological interests.

28

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Peter Henrici, “Hans Urs Von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life,” in David L. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, 36.

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Balthasar’s Critique of the Novel and The Return of the Native

The mysteries of human nature surpass the “mysteries of redemption,” for the infinite we can only suppose, while we see the finite. —Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson The previous chapters established Balthasar’s theological interest in tragic drama, arguing that it is a vital part of his theology and aesthetics even though his definition of authentic tragedy is limited and problematic. This chapter explores Balthasar’s reasons for rejecting the novel as a vehicle unworthy of true tragedy, and then examines closely a particular novel as a measure of his critique. Thomas Hardy’s sixth published novel, The Return of the Native (1878), will function as the specific test case. Can this novel, with the help of literary theory, repel Balthasar’s attack on the novel genre? If so, what does this indicate about Balthasar’s literary hermeneutics and theology? What is at stake in Balthasar’s valuation of drama over the novel within his aesthetics? The conclusion drawn is that Balthasar’s classicism, as it rejects a full recognition of the diversity of tragic literature, results in an insufficient theological engagement with modernity or with the fullness of human experience. In the end, his vision of God’s glory—the goal of the seven volumes of The Glory of the Lord—suffers without a more extensive understanding of the world and its polyphonous reality, and his disregard for the novel is ironic as it has unique contributions to make in a Balthasarian theological aesthetics.

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Balthasar and the novel Balthasar does not develop an overt theory of the novel as he does of drama. The novel appears in his theology sporadically, often as part of a critique of modernity, or as a support for an argument he is making; it does not stand on its own terms or enter Balthasar’s use of tragedy. There are casual references here and there to novels, such as Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey—which is cited as a “beautiful example” of the mystery of Providence (TD2.44)—and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which yields an illustration of the inscrutability of the self (TD1.484). Balthasar seems to approve of William Faulkner, Kafka, and Malraux as exhibiting part of the “tragic dimension,” though marred by “fatality” (TD1.435). His most referenced novelists, however, are Dostoyevsky and Bernanos, yet they have no real place in his vision of theodrama and tragedy. He primarily uses Dostoyevsky in his presentation of the holy fool in The Idiot (GL5.189–90), which exemplifies the modern transition of the saint as a holy fool for Christ (GL5.143).1 In the end, such novels as The Brothers Karamazov are examples of modernity’s self-referential solipsism, which “must always presuppose whatever it is negating and thus entangles itself in the fatal contradictions of an Ivan Karamazov” (TD1.75). None of these writers plays a major part in Balthasar’s approach to classic tragedy; it is the Attic tragedy alone that is the “the great, valid cypher of the Christ event” (GL4.101). As Nicholas Boyle comments, a “disdain is to be found in Balthasar” for the realistic novel.2 Balthasar may have high regard for Georges Bernanos, as evidenced by his monograph on Bernanos and the afterword he wrote for his novel La Joie (Die Freude),3 but not as a major factor of his theological aesthetics. Bernanos remains, for Balthasar, part of the strongly aristocratic, ancien régime. Balthasar has scant interest in nonaristocratic heroes or the genre of the novel, and his distaste underlies his rejection of modernity and modern tragedy. “It is clear that for Balthasar novelists are 1

2

3

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Balthasar does use Dostoyevsky often as an exposition of Soloviev (GL3.279–352). He also enjoys the common reference to the Grand Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov as an example of the church’s gospel accommodated to human needs (GL1.569–70; GL3.177). Nicholas Boyle, “‘Art,’ Literature, Theology: Learning From Germany,” in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. Robert E. Sullivan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 107. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996); ET3.461–70, which reprints the afterword.

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Schriftsteller, not Dichter [that is, a hack writer versus a true artist],” is how Boyle puts the problem.4 To understand Balthasar’s dislike of the novel, we must return to Hegel. As stated in the first chapter, Hegel overshadows much of Balthasar’s work. “Ich habe von Hegel viel gelernt,” Balthasar is quoted as having said,5 and Hegel appears throughout his trilogy.6 Balthasar saw his own theo-drama as, in a sense, the completion and repair of Hegel; his is the aesthetic theory for which Hegel was searching.7 Throughout his work, Balthasar expresses a consistent understanding and objection to the novel, and especially the realistic novel, that echoes Hegel’s. He often reflects Hegel’s proscriptions regarding the novel as an artistic form. This adaptation of Hegelian prejudice is not surprising; as Balthasar has embraced Hegel’s preference for drama, so he adopted Hegel’s patrician dismissal of the novel for what they both saw as its epic, undramatic nature.

The novel as bourgeois epic and lyric subjectivism Like Balthasar, Hegel did not have a theory of the novel.8 Still there is a discernible condemnation of this modern genre; for Hegel, it was a devolved, bourgeois form of the ancient epic. Modern society, too complex for the epic form, means the novel, according to Stephen Bungay, is the “partial, subjective epic which gives a particular, limited view of society.”9 Hegel himself writes: But it is quite different with romance [“Roman,” better translated “novel”], the modern popular [“bürgerliche,” meaning “common, bourgeois”] epic. Here we have completely before us again the wealthy and many-sidedness of interests, situations, characters, relations involved in life, the wide background of a whole world, as well as the epic portrayal of events.10

4 5 6 7

8

9 10

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Boyle, “Art,” 108. “I learned much from Hegel.” Quash, “Critique,” 1. Quash, Theology, 12n21. “. . .[T]he basic problem of that theo-dramatic theory for which Hegel was ultimately searching and which forms the ultimate horizon of the present work. . .” (TD1.69). Quash, Theology, 40. Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, reprinted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 163. Bungay, Beauty, 163. Hegel, Lectures, 2:1092–3. The translation’s emendations are traced by Fusillo, “Epic,” 32.

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For Hegel, with modernity “there is opened up in the domain of epic an unlimited field for romances, tales, and novels. . .”11 The problem with the epic, for Hegel, is that it is an inherently undramatic genre, with a false sense of distanced perspective and completion. It “frames” reality, as Quash describes it, seeking to circumscribe persons and experience in a larger theme from an artificially neutral and distanced perspective.12 This defining approach has become foundational and definitional for today. Lukàcs would later develop, along Hegelian lines, a Theory of the Novel, leaving the novel, as a devolved, “bourgeois epic,” to be considered a derivative and inauthentic genre.13 Balthasar echoes these Hegelian concerns regarding the novel as epic and undramatic. Balthasar’s dislike for the framing, epical nature of the novel is evidenced in a disparaging paragraph about the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. He condemns Balzac as an “epic writer” because, in Balthasar’s opinion, he reduced his characters and their rich individualities to their destinies; Balzac views his characters solely for their destinies, as viewed from a high terrace (TD1.272–3). This is the epic, undramatic view and the oppression of the epic writer, who surveys and commands his or her characters, as Brecht subjected his characters to his larger Marxist plots (TD2.93). A properly dramatic writer, in contrast, enters imaginatively into all his or her disparate characters, allowing them freedom and creativity within the narrative (TD1.276). For Balthasar, the novel fails the dramatic mode, oppressively controlling its characters’ freedom in the epic style. Balthasar mostly criticizes the novel, however, for being too lyrically subjective or idealist. The novel, like modernity, can be paradoxically both too lyric and too epic.14 Without the higher unity of drama, there is a pattern of alternation between distance and interiority, of epic and lyric, as shards of an earlier cohesion; it happened in theology as well, when it became either “scientific” and without prayer, or “affective” and empty except for an “unctious [sic], platitudinous piety” (ET1.208). The same is true of the novel. “It [modernity] was in this way responsible for the parallel decline in Christian 11 12 13

14

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Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1110. Quash, Theology, 41–2. Fusillo, “Epic,” 32–3. Confusingly, however, Lukács defined the epic as “all-embracing,” arbitrary, and open (38), a modification of Hegel’s view that the epic is encompassing through its sense of closure and finality. Fusillo shows how the genres of epic and novel have historically been variantly open or closed genres, depending on an era’s interpretations and the influence of Aristotle (38–9). Quash, Theology, 48–9.

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art, which threatens to disintegrate into a ‘modern’ realism devoid of awe and reverence [the epic], and on the other hand into a romanticism remote from reality [the lyric]” (ET1.208). The novel invites a deep subjectivism, an idealism that results in an undramatic epic, like Ibsen’s lonely monadism. Drama’s vital, objective, and adjudicative detachment is lacking in the subjectivity of the novel, which “so wallows in fatality that it ‘lacks the detachment necessary for theatrical presentation’” (TD1.435).15 Modernity, in its soulless materialism, has lost drama’s higher unity, as evident in the modern novelists: This [modernity] begins to celebrate its ‘scientific’ triumphs in the incipient study of psychology, of sociology and evolutionary history, while it overruns the field of art with its novel of bourgeois realism: from Scott to Dickens, Thackeray, Galsworthy, Freytag and Keller to Fontane and Thomas Mann, from Balzac via Stendhal and Flaubert to Zola, from Pushkin to Tolstoy and Hamsun, in all of whom we see man within a milieu, an environment, nature, world, and how he grows into or out of these, both involving and extricating himself. Neither that heaven-directed gaze of foolishness prevails here, nor the thrust of a transcendent eros. . . . What is initiated by Stendhal in his Tentation de Saint Antoine, continued by Rimbaud and Lautréamont and taken to excess by Thomas Mann and more recent writers, is the dissolution of an immanent anthropology . . . (GL5.410)

For Balthasar, the novel establishes an accommodating, empty, atheistic, and bourgeois idealism, unable to extricate itself toward a meaningful, dramatic horizon; in search of a dramatic tension it natively lacks, it creates perversities. Deeply and confusedly ingrained in prosaic reality, it cannot admit the clarifying, judging presence of the Divine—a critique similar to Hegel’s condemnation of the “many-sidedness of interests” of the novel.16 Modern literature lacks a proper sense of telos, as Balthasar indicates with a quotation from Hegel: it is “. . .bound to fall into a prosaic realism of ordinariness, ‘imitation of nature,’ of existence in its immediacy and fortuitousness, which ‘raises the question whether products of this kind can be called works of art at all’” (TD1.63–4). Balthasar has indeed “learned much from Hegel.” Humanity in its milieu is a sign of lonely immanence, without the vitalizing presence of the divine. 15 16

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Balthasar here is quoting Jean-Marie Domenach, Essai (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1092.

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For Balthasar, the subjectivism of the novel eschews historical action and participation in God’s divine drama. German idealism, as well the English and French novel and Protestantism, reveals the withdrawal from history and responsible action in the world. They are symptomatic of the modern, bourgeois inwardness. This critique is present in Tragedy Under Grace, Balthasar’s close treatment of his friend and fellow Roman Catholic, the tragic dramatist Reinhold Schneider. Closely quoting Schneider, Balthasar, like him, lambasts this kind of undramatic withdrawal, blaming the Reformation and German idealism (citing Kant, Fichte, and Lessing) for the denigration of historical action and abdication into an internal realm. “ Thus this whole epoch [German idealism] passes by the historicity of Christ and of his Church too, diverting their essential substance into a suprahistorical ideality.”17 For both Schneider and Balthasar, a focus on interiority goes hand in hand with a rejection of divine order, and results in a loss of a dramatic, and theo-dramatic, vision. The result is the impossibility of tragedy’s potent depths, because transcendence becomes impossible without an outer focus on action and a great chain of being. Balthasar notes that “there is no more place in this worldview [Protestantism, or German idealism], with its explicitly bourgeois character, for a king and for the divine ordering that is posited with him, for genuine tragedy. . .”18 Schneider and Balthasar connect aristocracy and the great chain of being with dramatic action and the sacred. In Schneider’s judgment, England is an “island kingdom” that separates itself from the medieval, sacred understanding of kingship (perfected under Alfred the Great), resulting in reason and power being separated from the “spiritual foundations” of faith and king.19 The “apostasy from the real Christian task” is when the divine basis of earthly power that should produce Christian mission and action is lost, “when the state was relativized as merely the work of men,” and faith became an absolute Protestant realm of grace.20 An irreparable loss occurred with modernity’s inward focus on the self; relativity and bourgeois elements were introduced into a vision 17 18 19 20

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Balthasar, Tragedy, 163. Ibid. Ibid., 99–100. Ibid., 107.

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of sacred catholicity, divine ordering, and dramatic action, which nearly precludes authentic tragedy. We can even wonder whether this earlier constellation of forces—for example, a feudal society and a monarchical power representing and making present a transcendent, divine lordship in the world—was not the precondition for genuine tragedy, no longer attainable in a purely democratic age. This was the view of Reinhold Schneider. (TD1.302)

Schneider, along with Balthasar, resisted the modern and egalitarian. The novel remains, for the most part, a suspect genre, with its cultural and historical significance so clearly connected to the growth of the middle class and modern, bourgeois values. It is, therefore, a genre hopelessly subject to either bourgeois idealism or the epic oppression of the self.

Blurred generic distinctions Balthasar’s attack on the novel as epic and idealist weakens at times, however, as he admits to an occasional hermeneutical uncertainty. His confident condemnation falters when he considers powerful writers such as Kafka and Dostoyevsky; his wide range of readings forces him to admit that there are dramatic possibilities in epics and novels. . . . [W]hen it is poetically presented, of course, the theodramatic dimension does not have to be clothed in the external form of the drama. It can just as well be expressed in epic form (Milton) or in that of the novel (Dostoyevsky’s The Devils). (TD2.168)

He allows for the dramatic power of epics by Dante and Bunyan, as well as derivative works based on these authors. “Two continuations of Bunyan’s epic show how narrative can pass over into drama: first, the bitter satire of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad (1843) [a short story in the collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)] . . . and then C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce (1946), where the interplay between hell and heaven is openly portrayed in terms of a dramatic decision on man’s part” (TD2.168–9). Balthasar has realized here, briefly, the wealth of variety in literature, and it testifies to his wide range of literary knowledge.

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Unfortunately, this suggestive insight is one Balthasar fails to pursue. It may remain theoretically true that epics, novels, or modern plays, poetically presented, can encapsulate the sense of theo-drama he envisions, but Balthasar leaves this as an unexplored speculation. In his meandering way, he moves on in this volume of the Theo-Drama, establishing the stage and dramatis personae of his argument with no further reference to the issue of genres that blur, or the dramatic possibilities of the epic or the novel. Problematically for Balthasar and Hegel, there are strong doubts as to the meaningful distinctiveness of the epic genre.21 Many examples of literary works exist that question such easy generic boundaries. Closet dramas were written not for dramatic performance but for solitary reading, such as Seneca’s tragedies, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and Goethe’s Faust, for example. Paradise Lost, often regarded as the last truly epic work,22 was originally conceived by Milton as a drama, and Of Mice and Men was called a play-novelette by its author, to function as both a novel and a script for a play; it became both. Hardy’s novels have often been dramatized and with much success, at times adapted for the stage by the author himself. Similarly, T. S. Eliot comments that Ibsen and Chekhov surprisingly create poetic effects through their use of prose.23 Even Aristotle notes that epic poetry and tragedy had similar early practices regarding the length of time (Poetics 1449b). The Hegelian diagnosis that the novel is a derivative of the ancient epic form is hard to substantiate historically, since the Princess of Clèves (1678), the first century BC Chaereas and Callirhoe, and even elements of Homer’s Odyssey all have novelistic qualities such as secularism, individualism, the isolated protagonist, and a sentimental, private inwardness.24 Ironically, definitions for the novel and epic genres flip-flopped amid Renaissance literary disputes, coming to mean their opposites.25 For the early English novelist Samuel Richardson, the epic genre was something to be attacked. As Ian Watts comments, The epic’s false code of honour, like that of heroic tragedy, was masculine, bellicose, aristocratic and pagan: it was therefore wholly unacceptable to 21 22 23 24 25

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Fusillo, “Epic,” 40–1. Ibid., 35. Steiner, Death, 306. Fusillo, “Epic,” 36–7. Ibid., 38.

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Richardson, whose novels are largely devoted to attacking this ideology, and replacing it by a radically different one in which honour is internal, spiritual, and available without distinction of class or sex to all who had the will to act morally. . . . There is much else in Grandison, as well as Pamela and Clarissa, to support the view that Richardson’s novels are the climax of a long-standing movement in Christian and middle-class apologetics against the glamour of the pagan and warrior virtues.26

There are reasons to doubt the novel’s connection to the epic, as early novelists like Defoe and Richardson began to suspect.27 A more defensible quality of the novel is its power of adaption. Recent critics have argued, along the lines of these blurred categories of genre, that the novel has a peculiar ability to absorb other modes of fiction. It is the contention of Frank Kermode and Eagleton that novels are inherently adaptive of other forms and genres.28 Classical, Aristotelian properties of tragic drama, such as anagnorisis, peripeteia, and the unities (time, place, and action) can all be incorporated elements of a novel. Miguel de Cervantes, cited by many as the first novelist, lists the many facets the novel can include, such as “epic, lyric, tragic, or comic, and all the moods the sweet and winning arts of poetry and oratory are capable of . . .” As early as 1748, Richardson’s postscript to Clarissa suggests the possibilities of the novel as tragedy, and Hardy’s comment was, “No person who has a due perception of the constructive art shown in Greek tragic drama can be blind to the constructive art of Richardson.”29 Dramatic effect can be achieved through the novel for Hardy, and he questions the Grundyists who respect the tragic classics but not in the novel form. Why the ancient classic and old English tragedy can be regarded thus deeply, both by young people in their teens and by old people in their moralities, and the modern novel cannot be so regarded; why the honest and uncompromising delineation which makes the old stories and dramas lessons in life must make of the modern novel, following humbly on the 26

27 28

29

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Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 244. Watt, Rise, 240. Eagleton, Novel, 1, and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 128. Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 122 (“The Profitable Reading of Fiction”).

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same lines, a lesson in iniquity, is to some thinkers a mystery inadequately accounted for by the difference between old and new.30

The relationship of drama and the novel is clearly complex. In fact, Hardy commented that it was the theater in his day that was undramatic, and not the novel. In his analysis, the staged drama had declined due to an overfixation on actors and props instead of “the presentation of human passions,” while “the novel affords scope for getting nearer to the heart and meaning of things than does the play . . .”31 The thought that the novel might be dramatic was rampant in Hardy’s era, as Jeanette King argues. The thesis of her book, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel, is that a literary transition took place in the middle of nineteenth century England from the primary mode of tragic drama to the genre of the novel, as the novel directly emulated and replaced the former one. Shakespeare, who included low characters and comic elements amid his high tragedies, was a powerful influence on the novelists for making the common capable of tragic seriousness.32 King argues that the authors she examines—George Eliot, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy— have all, to some extent, modulated classic, tragic drama into a new key.33 In the end, literature cannot be as neatly categorizable and diagnosable as Balthasar would like. All this suggests that strong generic distinctions, along with Hegel’s judgment of the novel, are neither helpful nor accurate. Yet it remains to be seen if Balthasar’s specific valuations for drama, as well as criticisms of the novel, have any traction with a specific tragic novel. If the novel is not epic and can evince elements of drama, can it also exhibit the specific qualities of drama that Balthasar regarded so highly? Balthasar’s primary interest in drama, Quash summarizes, is as “an art form [that] is uniquely positioned to manifest complex, pluriform, multiply interpreted truth in changing

30 31

32 33

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Hardy, Writings, 131 (“Candour in English Fiction”). Hardy, Writings, 139 (“Why I Don’t Write Plays”). Jeanette King notes that no serious plays were produced in nineteenth century Britain (besides the classics) until George Bernard Shaw. Jeanette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 36. King, Tragedy, 6. King, Tragedy, 14. King’s book strangely omits the differences in the genres of novel and drama, as well as Auerbach’s seminal exploration of the tragic and the common, Mimesis. She also problematically reduces Hardy’s novels to the triumph of a Schopenhauerian tragic sense of life (4), which is precisely what they are not.

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circumstances. It is involving, particular, social and anticipatory.”34 The reality is that, with its powers of adaptation, the novel lends itself remarkably well to these qualities. A close reading of The Return of the Native will establish if the novel can be “involving, particular, social and anticipatory,” and thus capable of Balthasar’s theological goals for tragic drama, as well as resisting his critiques.

The Return of the Native There are several reasons for the choice of The Return of the Native as a conversation partner for Balthasar’s thought. For one, it has a particularly strong, Janus-faced status as a hybrid of the novel and the classical tragedy, and it can therefore react to both Balthasar’s objections and his valuation of drama. Hardy is an apt novelist to pair with Balthasar for an exploration of his theological aesthetics and literary hermeneutic, because he is a writer who is prosaic, tragic, and what we might call “proto-modern,” whose work anticipates many of the modern, twentieth-century trends in the novel.35 The rise of modernity, science, perspectivism, skepticism, the novel’s dominance over the theater, and a marked social mobility for the middle class are all elements in Hardy; further, his work remains a pervasive influence in English literature. As a writer in the midst of a literary transition, he can provide material to mark the novel’s classical and modern traits, and thus explore what Balthasar has overlooked and rejected. The novel concerns the hamlet of Egdon Heath and the twin, intersecting tragedies of the two protagonists Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. Eustacia is young, passionate, and impetuous, and she desperately wants to escape her lonely life on the heath for a cosmopolitan life of wealth and importance. Her affair with Wildeve, the local tavern owner and libertine, has complicated Wildeve’s engagement to Thomasin. When the native son, Clym, returns from exotic Paris, her hopes seem realized as they fall in love and marry. 34

35

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Quash, “Enactment,” 30. Quash concludes that the drama surpasses the novel according to Bakhtin’s criteria, since the drama is inherently dialogic in a way that the novel is not. This does not contradict my argument, however. It still remains that novels are dramatic in a way that Balthasar failed to understand, and possess qualities useful to a theological aesthetics. Margaret R. Higonnet, introduction to The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Simon Gatrell, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xxiii.

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Wildeve proceeds to wed Thomasin, much to the dismay of her admirer, Diggory Venn. Yet Clym has returned permanently to his home on the heath, with the intent of starting a local school to improve the life of the hamlet, and not to enable Eustacia’s escape. Clym, becoming blind with his studies in preparation for the school, is reduced to furze-cutting for their survival. In her despondency, Eustacia and Wildeve renew their affair. Eustacia incurs the enmity of Clym’s mother, Mrs Yeobright, and a misunderstanding leads to Eustacia’s role in Mrs Yeobright’s death on the heath—a fact she keeps secret from Clym. When Clym learns Eustacia’s secret, they separate. Eustacia’s attempt to flee the heath leads to disaster, as she and Wildeve drown in Shadwater Weir. The cause of Eustacia’s death is left open ended so that it can be interpreted as either an accident or a suicide.36 Clym attempts to save them but fails, though he himself is rescued by Venn. In Hardy’s original ending, alluded to in his much discussed 1912 footnote (RN 440), the novel was to conclude here, like an Elizabethan five-act drama. Venn, Hardy states in the footnote, exits the heath in disappointment, without Thomasin.37 At the urging of his publisher, however, Hardy added a sixth section to the novel that featured Venn marrying a widowed, yet stoic Thomasin, with the morose Clym becoming a field preacher of moral encouragement.

The grand, allusive setting of the heath Balthasar’s concern for the dramatic is its emphasis on persons, human actions, encounters, dialogue, and history. Borrowing the Hegelian concepts of drama, lyric, and epic, he resists philosophical idealism and escapism by an attention to the particular and the finite. How might these concerns be addressed in Hardy’s The Return of the Native? Does this novel fall prey to Balthasar’s charges of bourgeois epic or subjective idealism, or does it resist such charges? 36

37

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This point is debated in Bruce K. Martin, “Whatever Happened to Eustacia Vye?” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 619–27. Hardy’s admission that the sixth book was added at the behest of the serial publisher has tantalized many a critic. Many yearn for a “purified” text that would excise the final section as was Hardy’s intent, which they feel is consonant with the “bitter despair and tragedy” of the first five books. Richard Benvenuto, “The Return of the Native as a Tragedy in Six Books,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26 (1971): 83, 83n21. Benvenuto concludes, however, that Clym’s final fate is sufficiently harrowing and ambiguous as to achieve the novel’s original goals (92–3). Millgate, however, calls the words of the footnote “unfortunate,” as Hardy is dissembling his own ambivalence about the narrative’s ending—why not correct the text in later printings? Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (New York: Random House, 1971), 141. I will engage with the final form of the text, rather than speculating on something non-extant.

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The first striking element of The Return of the Native is its setting: the hilly, alien terrain of the heath. It is a grand, allusive location for the narrative, providing a vivid, vital, and memorable context for the entire novel.38 In his first chapter, Hardy describes it as one might a stage drama before the entrance of the actors. It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities . . . (RN 1.1.11)

This is a place of “tragical possibilities,” a grand backdrop for the novel’s action and characters. As many a critic has noted, it functions within the novel as something like a character itself.39 The heath is a powerful, fearful location for the novel’s action, looming over all of the characters, their actions, and their fates. It has a sense of timelessness with its natural paganism and heath-en dwellers, a place anterior and resistant to the veneer of Christianity laid upon it. Its autumnal bonfires predate the name of Guy Fawkes night. New paths through the heath cannot be created, but rather the same old paths followed; it is not conducive to history, only an acquiescence to its ways. In this sense, it is a place of testing for the characters of the narrative. Those who resist it (Eustacia), who disrupt the lives of the heath-folk (Wildeve and Clym), or who traverse it foolishly unequipped (Clym’s mother), all suffer. It causes three deaths and the final misery of Clym. A place “aroused to reciprocity” (RN 1.1.11), the heath can be generative if obeyed but destructive if transgressed.40 It can be “accordant with man’s nature” as Thomasin, Venn, Clym, and the heathcroppers evince; they cross its myriad trails with ease, though Eustacia cannot; Venn and Clym survive the stormy weir when Eustacia and Wildeve perish.

38

39

40

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As part of Hardy’s later unifying strategy of Wessex, Egdon Heath features in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the short story “The Withered Arm” (1888). Millgate notes that a close analogy is with the moors of Wuthering Heights. Millgate, Career, 131. Over thirty years ago, Ian Gregor wrote, “It is a routine gesture by now to refer to that ‘vast tract . . . Egdon Heath’ as ‘the chief character in the novel’. ” Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 81. Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 56.

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The heath’s epic grandeur is also allusive and classic. It creates a place powerfully reminiscent of grand past works—Shakespeare most notably and overtly. Michael Millgate argues that Shakespeare is present in the novel to a greater degree than either Aeschylus or Sophocles.41 As Adrian Poole observes, “Some parts of this world’s elsewhere are more habitable and visitable than others. . . . But tragedy is concerned with the high-risk places, where the prospects of survival and return are minimal.”42 And similarly, Jan Kott observes that tragedy has always included a natural landscape as an active part in the action.43 The large number of allusions to classical geography, histories, legends, and literature gives the heath an aura of classic tragedy, dignity, and meaning, as John Paterson traces. “ Thus the domestic landscape of Wessex is everywhere transfigured by the heroic landscape, real and imaginary, of an older and grander civilization.”44 This grandness of the tale increases the tragic effect and tenor of classic tragedy. Balthasar called for modern tragedy to mimic the premodern classics, and in this sense the heath is a Balthasarian setting. Balthasar highly regarded Shakespeare, of course, and the heath alludes importantly to Shakespeare. The original ending to the novel would have concluded with book five, paralleling the Elizabethan five-act tragic drama. Mrs Yeobright’s wandering on the heath echoes Lear’s, including the shelter of a hut (these elements will reappear in The Mayor of Casterbridge). Her final journey is accompanied by a type of fool, the child Johnny Nunsuch. The novel’s climactic evening storm reflects the thunderous night storm that dominates much of the middle of King Lear, and both storms are supernatural and anthropomorphic.45 The heath is the otherworldly place where Macbeth encounters and later seeks out the witches, a liminal and dangerous place as Egdon Heath can be. Poole observes, “The heaths in King Lear and Macbeth give substance to this state in which man is unstated and unhoused, out 41 42 43 44

45

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Millgate, Career, 131. Poole, Shakespeare, 167. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1991), 105–6. John Paterson, “The ‘Poetics’ of the Return of the Native,” Modern Fiction Studies 6, no. 3 (1960): 215. In King Lear, “One minded like the weather, most unquietly” (3.1.2), and “. . .things that love night/ Love not such nights as these” (3.2.41–2). In addition, Macbeth features an unnatural eclipse, that “. . .the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,/Threaten his bloody stage” (2.4.5–6). The storm blows Clym’s gate open and shut “as if the invisible shapes of the dead were passing” (RN 5.8.344). The anthropomorphism is, as is typical in Hardy, decidedly overt: “Never was harmony more perfect that between the chaos of her [Eustacia’s] mind and the chaos of the world without” (RN 5.7.340).

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of himself. . . . a state into which men can regress and collapse.”46 Hardy’s 1895 preface to The Return of the Native shows that he was conscious of the Shakespearean allusions; he states that the heath of Wessex was possibly the setting for the original, eponymous King Lear of Wessex.47 The influence of Shakespeare is deeper than the allusive, however; Jeanette King argues that the imprint of Shakespearean tragedy on English novelists like Hardy was considerable.48 Impercipience, a favorite Hardy word,49 is rampant and thwarting of human desire, and ultimately begets tragic disaster. The theme of impercipience, which thwarts Eustacia and Clym, is Shakespearean as well.50 Clym’s blindness is both Oedipal and Shakespearean, and his “dreams, dreams!” (RN 3.5.198) are part of the larger tragic action. The grandeur of past tragic masterpieces is present in The Return of the Native by way of rule, allusion, and imitation. Hardy follows classical, Aristotelian strictures for his tragedy in several ways. The heath provides the unity of place that is a hallmark of classical tragedy, and Hardy consciously described his observance of Aristotle’s three unities of time, place, and action.51 The first five books of the novel span a year and a day, beginning on Guy Fawkes night, in Egdon Heath.52 Aristotle’s concern that tragedy focus on flawed actions, or hamartia (Poetics 1453a:16), is fulfilled in various ways: the mistakes in marriage partners by all the principal characters, Eustacia’s unintentional shutting out Mrs Yeobright on the baking heath, and Eustacia’s renewal of her affair with Wildeve, all lead to the narrative’s descent and catastrophes. The feelings evoked from these losses evoke the Aristotelian effects of pity and fear (eleos and phobos). Hardy knowingly 46 47 48

49

50

51

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Poole, Shakespeare, 167. Higonnet, introduction, xxi, and Hardy’s 1895 preface (RN 415). King, Tragedy, 6. The cultural knowledge of Shakespeare in England is part of the rationale behind Poole’s reading of Greek tragic themes besides Shakespeare. Poole, Shakespeare, vii–viii. See, for example, “The Impercipient” (CP 44), which describes his inability to find faith in the midst of a cathedral service of worship. By way of a few examples: Lear’s blindness to his daughters and to the disguised Kent; Gloucester’s to his sons, and his literal blindness later; Othello to Iago’s machinations; and the thanes to Macbeth’s true nature. “The unities are strictly preserved [in The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall], whatever virtue may be in that. (I, myself, am old-fashioned enough to think there is a virtue in it, if it can be done without artificiality. The only other case I remember attempting it in was The Return of the Native.)” Hardy, Life, 456 (15 November 1923). Hardy also notes, with his map for The Return of the Native: “Unity of place is so seldom preserved in novels . . . But since the present story affords an opportunity of doing. . .” Hardy, Life, 125–6 (30 September 1878). Although this technically breaks Aristotle’s precept of twenty-four hours (“a single revolution of the sun,” Poetics 1449b), it is a set time span that Hardy and others interpret as sufficiently Aristotelian.

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alludes to these effects when he describes how Mrs Yeobright’s death left the young Johnny Nunsuch doubtful whether it was “something to pity or something to fear” (RN 4.6.278). Clym’s anagnorisis of Eustacia’s role in his mother’s death (RN 5.2) is clearly classical, echoing Oedipus’ realization of his true parentage, as his blindness and survival of the catastrophe echo Oedipus Rex. Peripeteia, the plot turn that reverses intentions and leads to tragic effects, is present in the misguided attempts of the novel’s protagonists. Eustacia’s goal of escaping the heath via her marriage to Clym leads to her further ensnarement, even as Clym’s lucubrations to establish his school lead to his blindness and failures. Hardy’s interest in the Greeks was constant, from this early novel to his Homeric epic poem, The Dynasts. “Hardy never lost sight of the importance of the ‘action’ to the making of a poem in prose or verse. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle were unwithdrawing presences in his imagination . . .”53 Balthasar, as a thorough classicist, would approve of this level of classical imitation, since for him one path of authentic modern tragedy is to imitate the classic works of Greece and the Renaissance-Baroque. The argument that the novel, a genre with inherent adoptive abilities, can mimic the structure of tragedy is well-attested, particularly in relation to Hardy. King concludes that The Return of the Native is a bridge between the classic and modern forms of tragedy,54 and other literary critics agree. Dale Kramer surmises that Hardy has updated, transposed, and enlarged the classic form of tragic drama within the ambiguities of fiction.55 John Paterson analyzes that Hardy, while not creating a “formal and structural parallel with Greek tragedy”—whatever that might be—did succeed in “a reasonable artistic equivalent.”56 Most likely it is this particular novel that Jennifer Wallace is considering when she comments, in her introductory book on tragedy, that “Thomas Hardy’s novels might reasonably be termed tragic, in that he attempted to impose a classical tragic structure upon the non-classical landscape of Wessex.”57

53

54 55 56 57

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William E. Buckler, The Victorian Imagination: Essays in Aesthetic Exploration (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), 353. King, Tragedy, 105. Kramer, Forms, 49. Paterson, “Poetics,” 215. Wallace, Introduction, 168.

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Although the novel is not without its critiques,58 the critical approbation remains strong. The heath remained a favorite Hardy creation for D. H. Lawrence, and Hardy’s contemporary Charles Kegan Paul, along with A. Edward Newton, called it Hardy’s masterpiece.59 Margaret Higonnet argues that it is with this novel that Hardy matured as a novelist who could work with more complex settings and characters that augur the modern novel.60

The deep attention to the particular Yet Egdon Heath is a location that, for all its timelessness and epic grandeur, is also thoroughly localized within Hardy’s imagination of Wessex and his bourgeois characters. It is not a universalized epic, but a specific locale of time and place, as the novel form often is. “ The novel is the form in which history goes all the way down,” remarks Eagleton,61 and Watt observes that the novel, from its genesis, is anti-epic; it arose as a modern form where the intellectual milieu rejected any sense of immaterial universals.62 There is a historical, lived narrative to be told here, a story of certain characters and their relationships with a beginning and ending. Further, it is a bourgeois story, not of kings or aristocrats, but a poor yet financially independent group of people, their loves, and their attempts at flourishing. Borrowing Eagleton’s pun, it shows tragedy’s transition from the martial to the marital.63 It is also a tragic prose that is thoroughly contextualized. It is part of England and Wessex, where the people use a dialect and preserve their customs of Guy Fawkes bonfires, reddlemen, mumming plays and dances, and occasional witchcraft. 58

59

60

61 62

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Millgate, Career, 130. Millgate goes on to criticize the novel for its over-ambitions, as it strains to make this Wessex locale and characters reach the classic heights he desires (131). Ian Gregor similarly observes, “There is a huge ambition behind The Return of the Native; in some ways a greater ambition than behind any other of Hardy’s novels, with the exception of Jude.” Gregor, Web, 35. Dale Kramer calls the novel Hardy’s most imitative, overt tragedy, but also his least successful. Kramer, Forms, 48. Higonnet, introduction, xi. Millgate, Career, 123, and A. Edward Newton, Thomas Hardy, Novelist Or Poet? Privately printed, 1929), 11. Andersen ranks it, with Tess of the d’Urbervilles, as Hardy’s best novels. Carol Reed Andersen, “Time, Space, and Perspective in Thomas Hardy,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 9 (1954): 194. Higonnet, introduction, ix–ix. Ian Gregor’s comment is similar, that with this novel Hardy “reveals himself as a major novelist.” Ian Gregor, “Hardy’s World,” ELH 38 (1971): 110. Eagleton, Novel, 3. “Modern realism, of course, begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses; it has its origins in Descartes and Locke . . .” Watt, Rise, 12. Eagleton, Violence, 178.

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Hardy had returned to near his birthplace to compose this novel that is, at times, strikingly autobiographical: it concerns a native son, his homecoming, and his mother’s dissatisfaction at his marriage. It reflects not only Hardy himself, but the world of Wessex,64 with its dialect, people, and customs, such as the ancient November bonfires, the mumming plays of St George, the local industry of harvesting the heath’s furze, and the witchcraft use of wax effigies. This is not a setting that is easily translatable to another place or time, but localized to a pre-industrialized society in potential contact with new ideas found dangerously close in the urban Budmouth, Paris, and London. Hardy’s fiction, Raymond Williams realizes, reflects his particular era, where “education is tied to social advancement within a class society, so that it is difficult, except by a bizarre personal demonstration, to hold both to education and to social solidarity. . .”65 Clym’s return home, his search of a renewed solidarity, is the hinge on which the tragic plot turns—can the native truly go home again? Hardy and his personal history are related to both Clym and the novel’s narrator, for they all share in this liminal status between belonging and education; the narrator’s troubled status is especially evident in his style and literary comparisons. He alludes, for example, to Gracian (a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit), and then in the following sentence uses the word “breeches” (RN 3.1.166). This uneven style, the particular customs described, the setting and dialect, and the sense of incipient change, all reflect the specific, historical changes of Hardy’s era and the novel’s profound ability to contextualize, historicize, and particularize, over against drama’s lesser specificities. There is a serious regard here in The Return of the Native, and thus in the realistic novel, for place and time, a sense of meaningful structure where persons live, love, and seek to flourish. This is a novel that has adapted the Hegelian and Balthasarian categories of epic and lyric. There is a gravitas here, a tragic seriousness in the setting of these common folk as they subsist on the heath’s furze, which deepens these concepts. These particular persons are

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Hardy developed the idea of Wessex as a unifying element for all his novels after the composition of The Return of the Native, though later revisions to this novel include Wessex as the larger locale of the narrative. Nancy Barrineau, explanatory notes to The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Simon Gatrell, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xxx–xxxi. Raymond Williams, The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), 104.

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treated with respect and individual attention, as is always the case with Hardy. Similarly, Eagleton discerns how, in Moby-Dick, ordinary characters and their work are given tragic dignity by Melville’s polished, Shakespearean language,66 and the same stylistic analysis can be made of The Return of the Native. John Paterson states: By the sheer and almost systematic accumulation of allusions to the geography and history the legend and literature, of classical antiquity, he [Hardy] evoked the large and heroic “world” out of which Greek tragedy came and, by so doing, fixed the otherwise purely local action of the novel within a frame of reference that gave it dignity and meaning.67

And all of Hardy’s work, including his poetry, could perhaps be summarized in this way. He consistently wrote of his home, of stories and legends he heard and researched, in the dialect he knew as a child. Although he spent much time in London, he built his permanent home in the Wessex, where he was born and he helped in part to create, and it was there he died and his heart was literally buried (the rest of his body was entombed in Westminster Abbey). His work is infused with his sense of place and of home, of being both a native son and an educated, professional, and successful outsider. He was a writer of realism, albeit a realism in his own unique and unusual style.

The particulars of the novel Particulars, in terms of location, persons, words, and actions, are a feature of the novel as they are of the drama. In fact, particulars are even more “particularized” in the realistic novel than in the drama, because the novel is able to richly contextualize and describe elements in a way the drama simply cannot. Many dramas can be set in different historical eras, as Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians are recast in modern dress and situations. Balthasar objects to such “artificial modernization” (TD1.302), yet it is a commonly accepted practice, if rejected by classicists such as Balthasar. Many realistic novels, however, cannot be translated in any such fashion. It is this quality which Auerbach prizes so highly when he examines Stendhal’s 1830 novel,

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Eagleton, Violence, 180. Paterson, “Poetics,” 215.

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Le Rouge et le Noir (The Scarlet and the Black)—its deep particularity and historicity mean it is essentially untranslatable into any other milieu or setting. To comprehend this novel, one has to understand the politics and social crises of the Bourbon restoration, the fear of another Revolution and any religious or political talk, which forces the aristocracy into such a fearful boredom (and thus enabling the protagonist’s ascension). The novel can “only be understood in terms of the actual historical moment.”68 Similarly, The Return of the Native is set in its own particular place, time, customs, and language, and could not easily be transmuted to another setting. Balthasar’s rejection of the novel blinds him to the possibility that novels actually excel over drama in regard to the particular and the historical. At their best, they feature a denseness in subject matter, description, and characterization that the drama cannot rival. The fabric of humans in their environment can be portrayed in a rich, polyvalent way, with conversations, points of view, and the layers of existence described from multiple perspectives. The impact of historical changes and forces can be shown in a thicker, more implicit manner than the speech-acts of the stage. In comparison, dramas are remarkably spare in their ability to display this rich a tapestry; Henry James observed that, in many ways, the complexity of the novel appropriately reflects the intricacies of modern life,69 and Hegel had pronounced something similar.70 George Henry Lewes argued that his era’s civility, its rejection of heroic adventure and tragic evils, demanded a new form for tragic literature. For him, the Victorian period presented a subtlety of passion and action that is better emulated by the novel or poetry than stage drama.71 Dramas, however, stress speech and act, and they create a dynamic sense of God’s actions and human responsiveness. “Reality is action, not theory” (TD1.66), and the drama presents this in its very form. The theater is suited, as Quash comments, “for giving expression to the ways of God . . . the beauty of an action.”72 But the novel too revolves around actions, words, and persons, and powerfully expresses particulars and contexts. It can achieve, in this area

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Auerbach, Mimesis, 455–6. Henry James, The Tragic Muse, ed. Philip Horne, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 54–5 (ch. 4). Bungay, Beauty, 163. King, Tragedy, 11. Quash, Theology, 37.

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of description and setting, something the drama cannot, the problem that, as Balthasar realizes, “the good which takes place in God’s action really is affected by the world’s ambiguity and remains a hidden good” (TD1.19). The novel can be particular, dramatic, and oriented around praxis. Balthasar, by rejecting both the novel and modernity, has rejected these complexities for the straightforwardness of ancient drama, where life was act, passion, and expression. The realistic novel, in this sense, deepens the qualities Balthasar so esteems: the particular, the historical, and the classic literary precedents. It is not a genre that, by definition, wallows in epic totality, but is instead capable of being lyrical, dramatic, anticipatory, involving, and social, as this chapter argues.

The lyrical characters and the novel’s polyphony On such a classic and particularized stage Hardy presents his characters and their lyrical perspectives and moments. The novel will revolve around Clym’s return to his home, which engenders his and Eustacia’s oppositional and destructive desires. Her deep desire to be loved is, like the novel’s image of a moth to a flame, consuming and deadly. She is a tragic heroine in her great passion and great depths of feeling; “Don’t you offer me tame love, or away you go,” she says to Wildeve (RN 1.9.82), even as the narrator comments, “To be loved to madness—such was her great desire” (RN 1.7.69). She fulfills Edith Hamilton’s criterion for tragedy: a protagonist who, with the capacity for great feeling, is caught in catastrophe.73 King notes that in Hardy, characters cannot find a suitable environment for their passions, what T. S. Eliot called an “objective correlative.”74 Eustacia is forced to live as a commoner despite her desire for greatness and passion, and living in this liminality on the heath is part of her tragic situation. Clym’s problems are similar—he has grand plans and hopes, so that his mother warns him, “Your fancies will be your ruin, Clym” (RN 3.2.172). He has ennobling, missionary-like aspirations; he tells his mother, “I want to do some worthy thing before I die” (RN 3.2.172). He is compared to St Paul by Eustacia (RN 4.6.272), and, like the apostle to the

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“Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly. . . . if only the small and shallow are confounded, tragedy is absent.” Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (London: Dent, 1930), 146. King, Tragedy, 103.

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Gentiles, Clym is a sacrificing ascetic with a mission of enlightenment. Both Eustacia and Clym are “too unyielding” (RN 3.6.209), as tragic heroes often are. She refuses to concede her hopes and passions, even as Clym doggedly pursues his calling to everyone’s disaster. This is a thoroughly perspectival and polyvocal work, where various characters are entered subjectively but no one point of view dominates in Balthasar’s sense of subjectivism. Clym and Eustacia are fundamentally opposed to one another: “ Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym” (RN 3.2.171). Clym and Eustacia have found precisely the worst person to marry, and this proves true for Tess and Angel (Tess of the d’Urbervilles), as well as Jude and Sue (Jude the Obscure).75 The common ground of the heath could potentially unite Clym and Eustacia,76 but the obverse proves true; it is the wrong place, as they respond to it in completely opposite ways. Like the tree plantation near their home, they are battered and mangled by their storm, while the impassive heath, in contrast, remains undamaged, “made for such times as these” (RN 3.6.205). This deep polyvocalism is also evidenced by the scholarly dispute over the question of the novel’s true protagonist. The book opens with Eustacia, but closes with Clym, spending roughly equal time in attending to their narratives. Like other Hardy novels (Jude the Obscure and The Woodlanders) and many classic tragic works, it is an ensemble tragedy of multiple protagonists, characters, and a web of relationships. Kramer compares their opposing points of view, which are the most rigid contrasts of all Hardy’s novels, to those of Creon and Antigone.77 Robert Stallman traces the many plot and power inversions of the novel;78 mutually destructive, incompatible perspectives will be a theme of Hardy throughout his novels. It is difficult to argue that this is a work of oppressive epicism. There is no grandly epic, moral judge, center, or conclusion in the text that oppresses the reader, and the ending remains ambiguous on several levels—the meaning of 75

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As Hardy writes in the short story, “The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid”: “Contrasting colours heighten each other by being juxtaposed; it is the same with contrasting lives.” Thomas Hardy, The Withered Arm and Other Stories, 1874–1888, ed. Kristin Brady (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 170. Kramer, Forms, 56. Ibid., 50. Robert W. Stallman, “Hardy’s Hour-Glass Novel,” Sewannee Review 55 (1947): 283–96.

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Eustacia’s death, the traumatizing of Clym, and the happiness of the re-married Thomasin. The characters are wildly different and fully developed, from the passionate, reckless Eustacia, the clever and stoic Venn, to the circumspect, missional Clym; it is a book that has an “uncertainty of the source of tragic authority.”79 Hardy himself, on an essay on reading fiction, indicates the foolishness of reading fiction for translucent moral instruction. For those who do so: They should be informed that a writer whose story is not a tract in disguise has as his main object that of characterizing the people of his little world. A philosophy which appears between the inverted commas of a dialogue may, with propriety, be as full of holes as a sieve if the person or persons who advance it gain any reality of humanity thereby.80

No clear moral judgment dominates Hardy’s work in an oppressive, epic way, beyond the reader’s sense that recognizes the moral waste of tragic destruction. “He [Hardy] rejects the central focus implying an absolute truth that we find in many realist nineteenth-century novels, in order to tell his tale instead from multiple competing perspectives,”81 concludes Higonnet. Nor is this an extended journey into a solitary monadism, as Balthasar accused many modern works; rather, this is the novel as “a container that embraces several ranges of reality,” where the protagonist is dissonant with his or her setting.82

Bakhtin and the dramatic novel A powerful response to Balthasar’s charge of the novel being epic or inwardly subjective can be found by drawing on the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work also helps to illuminate Hardy’s fiction. This advocate for the novel reversed the Hegelian approach to the novel as epic, pointing instead to its dramatic and polyphonic possibilities. For Bakhtin, the novel is not a genre of epic conclusions and cyclopean finalization, but something polyvocal and unfolding. The epic for Bakhtin is closed-ended, determined, and 79 80 81 82

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Kramer, Forms, 64. Hardy, Writings, 115–16 (“The Profitable Reading of Fiction”). Higonnet, introduction, xxvi. Fusillo, “Epic,” 36.

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decidedly without loopholes—hardly a fitting description of a good novel. Bakhtin expressly finds loopholes in the possibilities of confession, selfunderstanding, and even the presence of God, in the novels of Dostoyevsky.83 This loophole is specifically unclosed, creating uncertainty about the self and inviting dialogue and even transformation. Everyday speech is something ever being refashioned, reinterpreted, and engaged in dialogue. For Bakhtin, life itself is inherently dialogical and discursive, engaged with the other.84 Good novels are polyphonic and not monologically epic;85 they are “preeminently a dramatic vision.”86 Rather than dismiss the novel as bourgeois and epic, he elevates it to a sublime vehicle of truth and carnivalesque reality. Perspectivism saves the novel from any accusation of monologism, and Hardy is the embodiment of a perspectival novelist. Hardy’s perspectivism, from his characters to the styles of the narrator, evokes Bakhtin. Hardy’s lack of coherent philosophy—his “series of seemings” (JO 3, preface)—is, as Collins writes, “an excellent example of Bakhtin’s concept of ‘polyphony.’ ”87 Thus, he is an apt novelist to explore in relation to Balthasar’s prejudice that the novel is epic and univocal. This understanding of perspectival polyphony is vital to understand the heath itself. Its epic nature is not in the Balthasarian sense of an oppressive totality and univocity, reductive of the individual. It is rather a faceless place, strangely open to perspective and interpretation. When Thomasin traverses the heath in the climactic stormy night, it is a different experience from Eustacia’s terror: To her [Thomasin] there was not, as to Eustacia, demons in the air, and malice in every bush and bough. . . . Egdon in the mass was no monster whatever, but impersonal open ground. (5.8.349)

Clym too finds Egdon’s barren loneliness to be friendly and genial, to Eustacia’s surprise (RN 2.3.115). He identifies thoroughly with his home; “Clym had been so inwoven with the heath in his boyhood that hardly anybody could look upon 83

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Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 233–5. Quash, “Enactment,” 25. Peter Slater, “Bakhtin on Hearing God’s Voice,” Modern Theology 23, no. 1 (2007): 5. Quash, “Enactment,” 25. Deborah L. Collins, Thomas Hardy and His God: A Liturgy of Unbelief (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 11. Ricoeur similarly valued polyphony, especially within the Bible’s varied genres and questions of inter-textuality. Boyle, Sacred, 65.

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it without thinking of him” (RN 3.1.166). Meanwhile, Eustacia’s passionate resistance to the heath will destroy her, Mrs Yeobright, and her sometimelover, Wildeve. It can be a place of contentment, or a place of violence. This perspectivism of the heath, its openness to interpretation, is also present in the narratorial perspective, which in Hardy can change its distance, much as the camera’s eye zooms in and out. The Return of the Native’s second chapter describes a road through the heath (RN 1.2.13). With the entrance of a vehicle, which contains the jilted Thomasin accompanied by Venn, the narrative begins; the “single atom” of the vehicle becomes two characters of the story. Later, as Mrs Yeobright dies from heat exposure on the heath, her gaze focuses on an anthill: “In front of her a colony of ants had established a thoroughfare across the way, where they toiled a never-ending and heavyladen throng. To look down upon them was like observing a city street from the top of a tower” (RN 4.6.278). This change in perspective—from close-up to distant—occurs in the narrator’s ironic descriptions of the characters, as in the rhapsodic “Queen of Night” chapter (RN 1.7.66).88 The novel’s very framework is defined by this motile perspectivism that places the cosmic perspective of the heath behind the family drama of the Yeobrights and Eustacia.89 Nor does the presence of an overt narrator dispel the perspectivism of Hardy. The polyvocalism is only increased by the narrator, who remains a sensate, perceiving presence alongside, and not above, the reader in all of Hardy’s novels. Characters’ lyrical subjectivity may be entered into on occasion, but the narrator also observes from afar, offering comparison and rumination upon the characters’ actions or personalities. Grossman writes of Hardy’s narrators, “He [the narrator] simultaneously desires to remain unnoticed and to play a part in the action. An observer’s hidden presence on the scene invests a power (omniscience, at first) in the onlooker.”90 Additionally, Hardy’s uneven style also makes the narrator’s presence nonoppressive and even conversational. There are Hardy’s infamous, selfconscious references to art and history, as when comparing Eustacia’s lips to the “cima-recta, or ogee” (1.7.67), which are often thought to be Hardy 88 89 90

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Gregor, Web, 86. Gregor, “World,” 98–9. Julie Grossman, “Thomas Hardy and the Role of Observer,” ELH 56 (1989): 636.

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being pretentious or wantonly academic.91 Gregor contends, however, that such allusions “have a dramatic function rather than a descriptive one. They are employed as means of altering the reader’s response, so that he is kept moving . . . from a dramatic to a contemplative mood, and then back again.”92 Thus, we are made aware of the presence of the narrator and his multiple ways of narration: lyrical expression, agrarian description, scholarly comparison, the historical sweep of the epic. The styles and modes of expression in Hardy remind us of the restless, mediating, perceiving narrator who accompanies us through the tale. Hardy’s style, along with his limited narrator, illustrates powerfully Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as polyvocal. Sounding like many Hardyan critics, one commentator on Bakhtin summarizes: The whole truth is not what is seen by some hypothetical, ideally placed observer. Observers are participants. The whole truth is heard momentarily by historical agents who address each other and their world in ways that make a difference.93

Balthasar shows no knowledge of Bakhtin. But in response to Bakhtin’s sense of polyphony, his concern is for a horizon of meaning within the larger tragic drama. This is the sense of moral compass and transcendence, where theology and literature intersect. “There must be one clear conscience on the stage–or at least one which deliberately renounces the acknowledged higher value–so that the spectator can grasp the hierarchy of values” (TD1.418). Christianity is, in transcending, Hegelian fashion, a “stepladder of admissible truths.”94 This topic will be more fully addressed in Chapter 5, but it is important to briefly mention it here, in relation to Balthasar’s critique of the novel. On this point, the novel falls prey to Balthasar’s critique. The Return of the Native has no clear-cut figure of this kind of ethical prerogative. The final section of the book, concerning Clym, Thomasin, and Venn, reflects an opaque ambiguity that omits any clear perspective or answers. If Clym has to learn to live with the tragedies of his life, he is also maimed and tormented in a way that is resistant to any such a lesson. His preaching is received more as a sympathy for 91

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Critics Claire Tomalin, John Bayley, and Terry Eagleton all fault Hardy’s uneven elements and style. Terry Eagleton, “Buried in the Life: Thomas Hardy and the Limits of Biographies,” Harper’s Magazine (November, 2007): 91. Gregor, “World,” 89. Slater, “Bakhtin,” 9. Balthasar, Epilogue, 15.

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the story of his life and tragic losses, than for his actual message (RN 6.4.390). Benvenuto observes that, “Book six is a harrowing picture of high aspirations corrupting themselves, and Clym’s fall is denied the relief or emotional refuge of traditional tragedy, in which a destructive passion is allowed to spend itself. We witness, as though this were all he had left, Clym’s diminishing.”95 Even the final wedding—perhaps a parody of the typical comic or pastoral ending—is slightly ambiguous, as Thomasin seems more resignedly accepting of Venn than reciprocating of his love for her. There is, Higonnet notes, a “satiric edge to this happy ending.”96 These uncertainties of interpretation, solace, and clear resolution mark the novel as polyphonic in a disturbing way. For Balthasar, it is part and parcel of the novel’s subjective idealism that it cannot allow for a horizon of meaning, a direct sense of transcendence, of God’s transcending reality. Yet few would find tragedy so neatly objective as Balthasar and Hegel might wish it, nor so consistent. Tragedies have proven, in the history of criticism, ever fecund and elusive of a static conceptual meaning. As Poole comments about classical tragedy: “ Tragedy teaches us that the objects of our contemplation – ourselves, each other, our world – are more diverse than we had imagined. . .”97 Eagleton points out that with Shakespeare there are no oracles or gods, as in the Greeks, nor is there some moral necessity to the hero’s suffering.98 King Lear has perpetually frustrated those who seek a clear, moral point of view—it greatly offended Samuel Johnson, and was infamously revised to omit Cordelia’s death in his era. Tragedy as a genre remains far from the neat, tidy, and objective experience that Balthasar seems to perceive. His reading of tragedy, as an objective and conscionable genre, is not accurate, and suggests problems in his hermeneutics and theological positions. In the end, Balthasar’s desire for objective judgment for the theologian is unrealistic, for no one—as Hardy knew—stands outside of the perspectivism of human life and experience. The reader of The Return of the Native (and all of Hardy’s fiction, for that matter) is not presented

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Benvenuto, “Return,” 92. Benvenuto is operating more from tragic theory than actual tragic works; the uncertain, painful exile of Oedipus at the end of Oedipus Rex is hardly an ending of “relief or emotional refuge.” Higonnet, introduction, xxiv. Poole, Shakespeare, 1. Eagleton, Violence, 66–7.

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with such a horizon of meaning, but instead left among these numerous, and adverse, desires and perspectives. This modern, perspectival approach is not a lapse into nihilism or agnosticism, however. Bakhtin, despite his rampant perspectivism, still held out for the possibility of the divine within the polyphonic novel. He detected this in his concept of the “third voice” present within Dostoyevsky’s dialogue.99 A character’s desire for perfect understanding, the presence of an external, affirming background within dialogue, a sense of individual judgment and affirmation, the loophole within a point of view, and the place of personal confession are all elements Bakhtin uses to draw a sense of unifying, divine presence beyond finite, human perspectives.100 It is when, as Bakhtin says, the “hero’s word about himself is not only a word with a sideward glance; it is also, as we have said, a word with a loophole.”101 There is a place for the divine, and for a sense of judgment, within the polyphonous novel, without Balthasar’s recourse to a clear horizon of meaning. One of Balthasar’s concerns is the lack of adjudicative distance in the experience of reading a novel. The “theatre’s intrinsic function” is “to to be a place where man can look in a mirror in order to recollect himself and remember who he is” (TD1.86). Existence must be mirrored (“speculari,” as Balthasar puts it) to reveal its inherent dramatic nature, along with illuminating Christianity’s inherent dramatic structure—there is a coherence here for Balthasar. Staged drama features a literal separation of boards and audience, from which the spectator can perceive and discern, much as God will judge our performances on the world-stage. In distinction, a passage of Charles Dickens can be profound, but “the sum of all these mysteries [described by Dickens] will not reveal to us the secret of the human being” (TD1.484). In contrast, the action of a performed play confronts the audience with their existential reality, the question of their roles and their mission on the worldstage. “As the action proceeds, man realizes his two inseparable functions, that is, being both a spectator and an actor in the play of existence” (TD1.308–9). The novel, from Balthasar’s theodramatic viewpoint, has no such literal distance between stage and audience; it remains subjectively attached to the 99

Slater, “Bakhtin,” 8. Ibid., 8–10. 101 Bakhtin, Problems, 232–3. 100

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prosaic and the multifaceted nature of human life. This is a denial not only of the novel’s polyphonic and dramatic qualities, but of the narrator and reader as well. In contrast to Balthasar’s reductive understanding, the reader must imaginatively enter the various characters, who may be from completely different cultures and eras; does Balthasar really think the reader of a novel cannot separate herself from the text? There is always a distance that must be traversed via the imagination to read a novel. “We surrender ourselves imaginatively to the narrative, at the same time as another part of our minds appreciates that this is simply makebelieve,” comments Eagleton.102 For C. S. Lewis, literature’s wondrous ability is to enter objectively into another person and world; “Literature as Logos [the plot or story] is a series of windows, even of doors.”103 The literary reader approaches good books without the expectation that they will fulfill subjective fantasies (what Lewis terms “castle-building”), but expand one’s horizons imaginatively and dramatically. Erich Auerbach’s work comments on the judging perspective of both narrative and reader. His example is Madame Bovary, which reveals Emma’s subjective feelings about her marriage to the reader through her judging, loathing perception of her husband.104 The reader of Hardy’s work is required to traverse many distances between narrator, characters, allusion, and evocation of the imaginative geography of Wessex. As Hardy comments, “If endowed with ordinary intelligence, the reader can discern, in delineative art professing to be natural, any stroke greatly at variance with nature. . .”105 The reader is aware of the distances between herself, the characters, the setting (which may be another place and time completely), nature, and narrator. The novel is not an oppression of either subjectivism or dogmatic epic, but a perspectival and dialogical art form.

Hardy’s dramatic unity of epic and lyric The novel does not only possess a sense of epic narration and setting, an attention to the particular and the contextual, and a strong lyrical perspectivism, but also drama’s possibility of a higher unity. In a vital sense, 102

Eagleton, Novel, 13. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 138. 104 Auerbach, Mimesis, 485. 105 Hardy, Writings, 114 (“The Profitable Reading of Fiction”). 103

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Hardy has also achieved a semblance of Balthasar’s and Hegel’s definition of drama as the union of the epic and the lyric. He has placed and contrasted freely acting protagonists on this epically cosmic stage of the heath, so that they are defined by the heath, even as they freely transcend it. As Higonnet observes in her introduction to The Return of the Native, “[r]omance and passion enter an entirely new perspective of long duration and process, set against the grand intensity of the moment.”106 It is the sublime, impassive heath that makes the passionate Eustacia stand out in such bold relief; for both her and Clym, it becomes “the thrill of the void that enlivens contingency. . .”107 The dramatic narrative creates subjects who freely act against their background. Eustacia chooses to be against the heath, defying its norms and expectations, even as Clym steadily defines himself in an abject idealism and ultimately a decreation. This unity of lyric and epic is seen in Hardy’s aesthetics, which reveals the uneasy relation between humanity and nature. Nature possesses an alterity that jars our human perspective, as its otherness resists and is shaped by our human point of view. This leads to Hardy’s famous anthropomorphisms, where the heath has a “lonely face” (RN 1.1.11) and, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Angel finds the fire and fireplace fender to be grinning with “irresponsibility” (TDU 35.227). Humanity perceives reality anthropomorphically precisely because of our inescapable perspectivism, which sees nature as an otherness that is conditioned by the human sense of meaning and expressiveness. Hardy’s realism and depiction of nature is ever defined by an incessant humanism; it is always the human that creates the narrative interest and the tragic effects. George Levine observes, “Value is human; it does not inhere in nature. . . . For art unabashedly projects consciousness upon raw experience . . .”108 Humanity remains part of nature, yet also free, passionate, and capable of tragedy; “Humanity appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble,” Hardy titles a chapter of The Return of the Native. Hardy’s realism dictates, however, that the human is always defined in relation to his or her environment; the human is never extracted from his or her complex 106

Higonnet, introduction, xxiv. Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 602. 108 George Lewis Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction From Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 235. 107

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setting of nature, society, and circumstance. Humanity may differ from nature, but they also imbue one another. Some critics have faulted The Return of the Native for the incommensurate relation between the subjects and the context of the heath,109 yet this is precisely Hardy’s argument. Humanity is ever defined yet immeasurable against the cosmos and its context, in our strange maladaptation to our setting. The dramatic unity of epic and lyric of the human against nature is restless and unstable, yet pervasive and perduring. Humanity and especially specific persons have an importance and dignity whatever their social status, when the genre of the novel gives them such attention. Gillian Beer’s seminal work on Darwin and the Victorian novelists called this Hardy’s search, within a Darwinian world, for the “scale for the human.”110 Hardy is especially interested in the span of the individual life, she notes, more than George Eliot or Dickens;111 he is taking measure of the free, dramatic, and acting subject against his natural, epic background. She concludes, “These laws [of nature] cannot be comprehended within a single order. In Hardy’s novels all scales are absolute, but multiple. So he includes many time-scales, from the geological time of Egdon Heath to the world of the ephemerons.”112 For Hardy, Beer notes, being human means living according to these varying time scales, as well as being caught between them, and how they can turn painfully oppressive.113 The human belongs in its historical, physical, and particular context—there can be no realistic imagining of any other situatedness, after all—even if the proper scale of the human, its precise place and connection, is unknown and beyond our perspectival limitations. These are free, full persons, acting against a realistic and epic backdrop. In such a vision, the human being stands within nature yet is strangely maladapted to it, potent with desire, related to nature via evolution (Darwin having greatly influenced Hardy), yet tragically ephemeral. Hardy noted the possibility of human maladaption in the universe—“the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal 109

Gregor, Web, 99, and John Paterson, “An Attempt At Grand Tragedy,” in R. P. Draper, ed., Hardy the Tragic Novels: A Casebook, 107. 110 “The two major emotional and creative problems which evolutionary theory forced on Hardy were to find a scale for the human, and a place for the human within the natural order.” Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 252. 111 Beer, Plots, 239. 112 Beer, Plots, 240. Andersen makes similar points about Hardy’s style, which can shift from the ethereal clouds to the microscopic forms of life; they are metaphors that expand or shrink the perspectives on human life. Andersen, “Time,” 197–8. 113 Beer, Plots, 254.

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conditions,” he wrote.114 Here Hardy and Balthasar can agree. Balthasar also held that humanity is an enigmatic being, physical and spiritual, and riven with tragic contradictions. Such a thought is, of course, classically Christian, going back as far as Augustine’s cor inquietum, that humanity “exists as a limited being in a limited world, but his reason is open to the unlimited, to all of Being.”115 Yet for Balthasar there is a theological answer—a life lived with God in Christ—which Hardy cannot conceive. In Hardy’s novels, dramatic effect is heightened in the way the tragic causation is always left inscrutable. Does the origin and fault lie with Clym, or with Eustacia? There is an element of the grotesque in The Return of the Native, as is common in Hardy,116 that acts as a possible (if improbable) cause of Eustacia’s death. Yet Eustacia also dies because of her insistence at escaping the heath, her bad marriage to Clym, her misunderstandings with Mrs Yeobright, her inability to co-exist with the heath and its community, and her lack of sensible self-preservation (RN 5.7.341); she is in a “gloomy corner into which accident as much as indiscretion had brought this woman . . .” (RN 4.3.249). There are other factors as well, such as social opprobrium and the poor choices of others, and perhaps an element of fate at work in her tragedy; Eustacia, sounding like a traditional tragic hero, faults fate and Heaven for “devising such tortures for me” (RN 5.7.341). As Eagleton observes about Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “It is not easy to say who was responsible for killing the horse [an early and determining event in the novel], since Hardy is aware that no action is ever entirely one’s own. . . . Hardy is well aware that countless people are involved in the simplest action.”117 Interestingly, Balthasar values such artistic imprecision in tragedy, as it subverts subjectivism or remediable social structures. In the classic tragic dramas he values their complex sense of causality, the opaque relationship of human freedom and determination.118 Humanity remains both responsible 114

Hardy, Life, 227 (7 April 1889). Scola, Balthasar, 18–19; Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 112. 116 Richard C. Carpenter, “Hardy’s ‘Gurgoyles’, ” Modern Fiction Studies 6 (1960): 227. Also, James F. Scott, “Thomas Hardy’s Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 17 (1963): 363–80. 117 Eagleton, Novel, 203. 118 MacKinnon concurs: “No determinist could write an effective tragedy, could achieve the sort of deep exploration of responsibility, justice, guilt, that we find for instance in Electra or in Hamlet.” MacKinnon, Borderlands, 101. King, Tragedy, 32. 115

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and guilty, within the larger matrix of determining fate or the gods. Balthasar calls it an irresolvable, contradictory “opaque guilt,” which prevents either clear culpability or exoneration, and leads to the Christian sense of original sin (ET3.394–5). This kind of causal inscrutability is present in The Return of the Native. With such an opaque causality at work, as valued and espoused by Balthasar, the novel is not a work of epic idealism, or remediable social tragedy, but of dramatic potency. The Return of the Native, it can be concluded on the basis of Balthasar’s reasons, is a thoroughly dramatic work. Through its grand and allusive setting, it offers an epic stage on which to enact the lyricism of its protagonists. It is a dramatic union in that the lyric is played directly on and against this epic setting without an inherent oppression, message, or framing. It is also a novel that refutes Balthasar’s and Hegel’s critique of the novel as inner subjectivism through its Bakhtinian polyphony of characters and perspectives—including even the narrator. The Return of the Native also fulfills Balthasar’s dicta regarding modern tragedy being imitative of its classic precedents; it imitates and alludes to Greek and Shakespearean tragic works, and makes use of Aristotle’s unities and the tragic tropes of hamartia, peripeteia, and anagnorisis. It remains to establish how the novel also achieves the two dramatic qualities of Balthasar’s theo-dramatics as discerned by Quash: the sense of involving and anticipatory time, and the nature of the social experience of dramatic performance.

Involving and anticipatory tragic time Tragedies deal particularly with chronology and effects, as actions have unintended results, and secrets and the past resurface. Poole observes how “in a broad sense, tragedy always deals with toxic matter bequeathed by the past to the present.”119 Similarly, in reference to Aristotle’s unity of time, Romilly states: “There is no tragedy that does not deal with time . . . [Tragedy] has to follow the experiences and emotions of the characters in their very continuity.”120 Time that is ever-flowing makes human actions vitally significant, if irretrievable once done. Quash calls this tragedy’s heightened 119 120

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Poole, Introduction, 35. Jacqueline de Romilly, Time in Greek Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 6.

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sense of time as “super-charged.”121 Tragic time is experienced as involving and participatory, “unframeable” in its nature;122 there is not a closed finality to tragic time that would, in the nature of epic, make its characters wholly determined. The question remains: is such a sense of tragic, involving time translatable into the novel? The sense of temporality is certainly present in novels, which relate events, actions, and dialogue as drama does, but with the additional wealth of context and description that it can provide. Tragedy’s concern for time finds a partner in the novel, where time is a particularly strong factor. Ian Watt comments that the novel is concerned with time as particular and significant, unlike philosophy’s interest in the timeless. He quotes E. M. Forster, that the portrayal of “life by time” is a distinctive quality of the novel, over other genres’ concern for “life by values.”123 The novel, he argues, is interested in a slower, more minute time-scale, representative of how life is experienced and opposed to timeless stories or truths; its concern is for representing life experienced temporally, “a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives [romance] on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure.”124 Quash observes, in considering Bakhtin’s contributions to the theory of the novel, that “there is a marked similarity with von Balthasar’s interest in the ‘linearity’ of drama.”125 Hardy’s world is struck by time, and the calamities of his novels are caused by the untimely incidents of events and characters.126 Time in The Return of the Native is involving and progressive, to the point of ineluctable dissipation. Eustacia carries around an hourglass, obsessed with its “representation of time’s gradual slide away” (RN 1.7.71). In the glow of her early passion with Clym, she points to the hourglass as she remarks, “See our time is slipping,

121

Quash, “Enactment,” 20. Also, Eagleton, Violence, 91. Quash, Theology, 36. 123 Watt, Rise, 22. Watt also cites Northrop Frye’s statement that “the alliance of time and Western man” is a primary quality of the novel over other genres. 124 Watt, Rise, 22. 125 Quash, “Enactment,” 24. 126 Lewis B. Horne, “The Darkening Sun of Tess Durbeyfield,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 13 (1971–72): 302. Note as well Hardy’s poem “A Broken Appointment” (99), which Claire Tomalin chose as the title for her recent biography, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (London: Penguin, 2006). 122

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slipping, slipping” (RN 3.4.195). Passion remains ephemeral and a prisoner of time. Eustacia echoes Hardy’s beloved Shelley: And towards the lodestar of my one desire I flitted like a dizzy moth . . . (“Epipsychidion,” 219–20)

And the imagery of fire and moths figure powerfully in the novel. They are a signal of rendezvous between Eustacia and Wildeve. Eustacia desires love and death; “[t]o be loved to madness—such was her great desire . . . a blaze of love, and extinction” (RN 1.7.69). Time means that, for idyllic passion, “the quality of finiteness was not foreign to Eden” (RN 4.1.233). Time clips Cupid’s wings, so that Eustacia is left to realize, “Yet I know that we shall not love like this always. Nothing can ensure the continuance of love. It will evaporate like a spirit, and so I feel full of fears” (RN 3.4.193). Time is involving not only through its ephemerality, but through its cataclysmic interventions. The past invades and forms the novel at crucial junctures. “ The past, as usual in Hardy, refuses to be repressed,”127 and the return of the past is a common theme of tragic drama. The most immediate example of this is through the revelation of Eustacia’s secret hamartia: she was the direct, if unintentional, cause of Mrs Yeobright’s death on the heath. Eustacia’s renewed affair with Wildeve, after she marries Clym, completes the tragic knot. The past has already impacted Clym, whose desire to return to his past home ends his prosperous Parisian life. At the novel’s sorrowful ending, he retreats into the past, which “seized him with its shadowy hand” as he walks the heath alone (RN 6.1.367), aware of his mother’s absence; “she was almost a presence there, now as always” (RN 6.4.388). This is characteristic of Hardy, for whom time is never past, but seemingly ever resurgent. If anything, Hardy’s style is criticized for its over-use of time,128 his mechanized over-plotting (sometimes attributed to his architectural background) that is hardly an interior lyrical subjectivism. Hardy’s novels were, of course, subject to the demands and nature of serial publication of his day, which required frequent plot-turns and cliffhangers. His plots could be over-wrought, but they were not undramatic and subjective, as Balthasar describes the genre of the novel. 127 128

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Eagleton, Novel, 200. Andersen, “Time,” 192.

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If time in the novel is involving in its progression and cataclysms, it is also anticipatory. Frank Kermode’s seminal The Sense of an Ending is helpful in tracing the novel’s sense of apocalyptic closing. His work reveals the apocalypticism of fiction, which reflects the human need for crisis and endings; his image is of the ticking clock, whose constant sounds humans imagine as “tick” and “tock,” or a beginning and an ending.129 The novel is defined by its endings consonant with beginnings and the reader’s expectations, apocalypticism, indeterminacy (what he calls the “middest”), hope for the expected ending, and peripeteia—all elements Balthasar values in drama. It is hard to call the genre epic, in the Hegelian sense, from Kermode’s point of view. Part of Kermode’s argument is that it is real life that is truly epic—successive events without fiction’s artificial crises, determinisms, and endings. Thus, fictions and plots possess an inherent distance from reality. Novels always feature “an escape from chronicity,” a move away from reality where time is chronos, to a sense of time as meaningful, or kairos.130 He argues that every novel, even those we might term realistic, must be distanced from reality, as they imagine events in terms of the plot’s anticipated ends, its ticks and tocks, rather than reality’s monadic tick. No novel can avoid being in some sense what Aristotle calls “a completed action.” . . .They have a fixation on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause. Novels, then, have beginnings, ends, and potentiality, even if the world has not.131

Novels are, for Kermode, both involving and anticipatory. There is a sense of progression and ending built-in to the genre itself. Hardy’s novels achieve a specific kind of anticipation and irresolution that is very much like Quash’s description of “unframeability.” In his fiction, the final fate of characters and a resolving sense of happiness is undetermined, and the deaths of his protagonists remain often ambiguous and always hidden. There is an irresolvability to Hardy’s novels, as he refused to “cheer his readers up” like most of his contemporaries did with their novels’ endings.132 In The Return of the Native, the ending is uncertain; it concludes with a marriage 129

Kermode, Sense, 44. Ibid., 50. 131 Ibid., 138. 132 Eagleton, Novel, 202. 130

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of uncertain happiness—a common theme for Hardy—and a future for Clym and Thomasin that is unresolved. Similarly, The Mayor of Casterbridge ends with Elizabeth-Jane mulling her father’s legacy, her own increase in fortunes, and her less than ideal husband. Is it an ending of muted hopefulness, or final pessimism? The last scene of Angel and ‘Liza-Lu in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is similarly debated as to its possible sense of melioration.133

Drama’s social nature The final category for Quash’s analysis of Balthasar’s theo-dramatic theology is drama’s inherent social aspect. Plays require many persons to create the performance as well as an audience, who, like a congregation, share together in a common experience. Balthasar relishes the original religious setting of Attic tragedies, comparing it to the Eucharist and the medieval mystery plays (TD1.105).134 In contrast, reading is a solitary act—leading, no doubt, to Balthasar’s judgments for its subjectivism and lack of adjudicative distance. It is undeniable that dramatic performance is inherently social in a way the reading of a novel is not. Yet it does not follow that this makes the novel a wholly individualistic or subjective experience. There are good reasons to show that the novel has a social, communal aspect proper to it, and is not an act of individual escapism. It is Nicholas Boyle’s argument in Sacred and Secular Scriptures that literature and novels are deeply social because they work from our shared language. Building on Ricoeur’s thought and quoting some of his works, Boyle notes how “a whole world—the world of the text—is being ‘proposed’ or ‘manifested’ to us as something to which we belong or in which we are rooted. . .”135 Wittgenstein’s insight that language is shared meaning means that literature’s language is itself communal and universal. Literature is never solitary, for neither is language. For Boyle, Lévinas’ understanding that all language involves ethical demand introduces the possibility that all language is inherently theological. Balthasar himself notes the importance 133

Gregor, Web, 196. Helen Gardner, however, exposes just how unlike the theater and religious worship is; the failure of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which attempts to cross this divide (and some modern theater, where actors are embedded in the audience, attempts this as well), shows how resistant the comparison is. Gardner, Religion, 40. 135 Boyle, Sacred, 70. 134

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of language as a divine gift that creates community and the possibility of God (GL5.631–4); language constitutes both the individual and his or her self-expression, and the individual’s part in a larger shared community.136 Further, Jennifer Wallace protests that the human body is by definition involving and communal; since characters must have bodies, there is an inherent basis of common humanity.137 Particularly apt, therefore, are realistic novels that attempt to communicate some vision of shared human reality; such works naturally resist our personal subjectivities and solitudes. Realism must exhibit some element of plausibility, voices George Levine,138 what Hardy and other Victorian writers termed vraisemblance.139 This shared reality creates a communal experience for all those who read prose, and especially for those who read and share specific works together. Secondly, literature does not allow easy differentiations between staged dramas and prose. Some dramas were written with little intention of performance, while some novels can be easily dramatized. Shakespeare is more commonly studied in written form than in performance. Drama and written literature blur in ways that make a pure argument for drama’s sense of community difficult. Additionally, Balthasar himself strangely fails to fully hold to a performative perspective of drama. He has little interest in actual performances themselves, elaborating instead on drama as literature and written scripts when he examines particular texts. This is odd, for, in some ways, scripted, literary dramas fail to achieve his stated goals and definitions. His ideal Christian life, lived in the community of the Church under the Spirit, is one of “pure consent; self-abandonment; loving obedience” in a manner adopted from Hegel.140 It informs his deeply problematic concept of gender and women, where femininity means receptivity, the disponibility of the Virgin Mary, who is the pattern for the true Church and true discipleship.141 It is also how he envisions Christ’s obedient earthly life: “It would be better to compare him [Christ] to an actor playing a part for the first time, receiving it by inspiration, 136

Quash, “Critique,” 32n37. Wallace, Introduction, 110. 138 Levine, Realistic, 11. 139 Hardy, Life, 239 (5 August 1890). 140 Quash, Theology, 72. 141 Corinne Crammer, “One Sex Or Two? Balthasar’s Theology of the Sexes,” in Edward T. Oakes and David Moss, The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 98. 137

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scene by scene, word by word.”142 Christ’s pattern thus is followed by the Christian: “The disciple must follow in the footsteps of Christ, living as he did in time: open, trusting, without care, without preconceived plan, without anticipating the Father’s will, but believing, hoping, and loving both God and men.”143 Such a radical sense of obedient receptivity, however, sounds more like improvisational theater than scripted, literary drama. Quash makes the suggestive comment that “improvised drama will realize this possibility [of drama’s anti-epic, plural voices] even better than scripted (authored plays being that bit nearer to novels). . .”144 Khovacs notes Balthasar’s “reluctance to take on the liveness of the theatrical act (preferring instead to abstract from the wealth of dramatic literature formal categories for his theological project).”145 In other words, Balthasar’s project would achieve a greater coherency if he focused more on performed dramas or even improvisational drama than literary, written dramas. Yet his focus is clearly on the written words of dramatic literature, and not specific performances; here there is dissonance between his goals and their implementation, which suggests that their division is not so straightfoward. The novel can, after all, be suitably dramatic. If Balthasar has already compromised some of his argument for drama’s superior sociality by engaging with drama as written literature, then an expansion is naturally invited into other forms of written literature. He has, in this sense, already opened the possibility of a literary approach beyond dramatic performances. If we can attend to drama as literature, why not also the novel? Would it not profitably expand his etherealized theological and aesthetical vision? Balthasar may make use of the categories of an author, a director, a cast, and an audience on a conceptual level (TD1.268–304), but similar categories can readily be established for the novel; Bakhtin, for example, discusses the author, the hero’s self-consciousness, the narrator, and the hero’s world, as elements of Dostoyevsky’s novels.146 Engagement with the novel, whose qualities have important contributions to a theological

142

Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, 2nd edn (London: Sheed and Ward, Inc, 1963), 33. Balthasar, History, 117. Quash, “Enactment,” 30. 145 Ivan Patricio Khovacs, “A Cautionary Note on the Use of Theatre for Theology,” in Trevor A. Hart and Steven R. Guthrie, Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Theology, 33. Oddly, Balthasar was aware of this issue in Hegel. “Hegel wished plays to be only performed, not printed to be read . . .” (TD1.66), although Balthasar goes on to refute this point. 146 Bakhtin, Problems, 47–9. 143 144

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aesthetics, is wholly possible within Balthasar’s larger Theo-Drama—least of all as an engagement with modernity, particularity, rich contextualization, and prosaic reality. This examination and attention to The Return of the Native has revealed the problems in Balthasar’s condemnation of the novel. Balthasar’s objections to the genre, like Hegel’s, are unfounded, and the novel actually embodies quite well many of the reasons he esteems drama. It is not epic nor lyric, oppressive or abdicating, for its characters or reader. The novel has its own peculiar strengths, such as its attention to the particular in a way that is superior to drama through its detail, context, and setting. It can achieve a potent union of epic and lyric—in some ways, a more profound union, since it can more deeply unify the two categories through rich contextualization and historizing. Watt concludes that “the novel is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment.”147 From Bakhtin’s perspective, there is a polyphony present in the novel that makes it richly perspectival and far from a sense of subjective idealism. Its sense of time is anticipatory and involving. If its shared social experience is less than the experience of a performed play, it is nonetheless imbued with a social aspect. Balthasar himself has confused written and performed dramas, suggesting that the two genres have deep connections. This is not to argue that novels or dramas are fungible, for each of them has strengths and inadequacies; but it is to argue for the rich diversity of tragic genre and literature that demands acknowledgement, particularly within a theological aesthetics. As Balthasar admits, there is a “tragic dimension” to the novel (TD1.435), but it is deeper, more dramatic, and more suggestive than he has allowed. The full theological implications of Balthasar’s classicism and misjudgment of the novel remain to be seen, as well as the process of repair. Balthasar’s missteps here reverberate throughout his theology in problematic ways. As Quash notes, “There is a good deal at stake here for a theo-dramatics that seeks to follow von Balthasar’s lead but avoid his mistakes.”148 What else has Balthasar misjudged or reacted to with patrician disdain? This larger question is the preoccupation of the rest of this book. 147 148

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Watt, Rise, 17–18. Quash, Theology, 166.

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4

The Mayor of Casterbridge and Prosaic Reality

How can we distinguish the imaginary from the real in the spiritual realm? We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace Only there is no escape from contingency. —Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology Balthasar, misconceiving tragedy and its wide diversity, has, like Hegel, misprized the novel and its dramatic possibilities and unique contributions to a theological aesthetics. This miscalculation indicates larger problems within his theology; he has not allowed theologically a place for the contingent or the modern. This chapter focuses on how Balthasar’s patrician dismissal of the novel means a rejection of both modernity and common, prosaic reality. A disregard for what Hardy terms “the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality”1 is, in fact, incoherent with a properly conceived Christian theological vision. In contrast, the attention to reality in its prosaic, common dimensions informs the realistic novel and especially Hardy’s tenth novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). A close reading of this work leads to theological conclusions regarding tragedy and the importance of the ordinary, offering an important corrective to Balthasar’s theological vision.

1

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Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 383 (ch. 56).

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Balthasar’s aristocratic taste The evidence for Balthasar’s patrician tastes is striking. His family background is from an “old patrician family in Lucerne,”2 hence the “von” in his name. His aristocratic leanings for traditional tragic drama, its royalty and castles, are overt and clearly stated. “Neither the middle class, worried about wellbeing, nor socialist utopian dreams of an untragic future, can create tragedy,” he writes (TD1.435). True dramatic art can never relate to “the boredom and lack of fulfillment that characterize everyday life [“die Langeweile und Unerfülltheit des Alltags”]” (TD1.313). Nicholas Boyle observes, in his analysis of Balthasar’s aesthetics, that “Balthasar has little interest in the low style . . .”3 Balthasar partially blames the drama’s final loss of form on the unseemly, populist, and comic elements that crept into medieval mystery plays (TD1.106). When Balthasar reads literary works, he reads them precisely through these lenses. He studied Goethe for most of his life, beginning with Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (The Apocalypse of the German Soul, 1937–39), and as a Germanist, he claimed to have chosen Goethe as his starting point (in contrast with philosophy, as Rahner did with Kant and Fichte, according to Balthasar).4 Yet Goethe reveals a disinterest in everyday life, context, and social life, as Auerbach critiques him; Goethe, he complains, has a “personal dislike” for social forces, economics, and nonaristocratic culture.5 In Balthasar’s reading of Shakespeare, it is the aristocratic images of king and duke that interest him most as parabolic images of the merciful, suffering God (ET3.404), rather than Shakespeare’s curious use of plebes among his tragedies. In an exploration of the novels of Georges Bernanos, Balthasar remains focused on the representative figures of power, “the priest and the saint,”6 to the neglect of characters and contexts. Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper, a work Balthasar cites frequently and translated “at least five times,”7 speaks of King Philip II’s need for a viceroy in the Americas, and the wording

2 3 4 5 6 7

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Moss and Oakes, Introduction, 3. Boyle, “Art,” 108. Block Jr., “Criticism,” 221. Auerbach, Mimesis, 446–7. Balthasar, Bernanos, 263. Henrici, “Balthasar,” 14.

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is strongly representative and absolutist, receiving no critique from either Balthasar or the play itself: THE CHANCELLOR. Let there be over there a man to personate Your Majesty, one only over all, invested with the same power. THE KING. And whom shall We choose to be Ourselves over yonder? . . . In like manner, when I took Spain to wife it was . . . to provide her with intelligence and unity, and to feel her entirely living and obedient under my hand, and myself in the fashion of the head, which alone comprehends what the whole person is about. For ‘tis not the mind which is in the body; the mind which contains the body wraps it round about.8

Political and ecclesial absolutism Balthasar’s aristocratic hermeneutic is not only observable in his literary preferences and judgments, but also in his theological system and statements. For him, the aristocratic connects politically, ecclesially, and culturally, and political and ecclesial absolutism are deeply connected with true tragic art. It is the Church, with its absolute claims and catholicity, that empowers a possible future for authentic drama. The “dramatic interplay” that Hegel saw as completed in the classical era can be maintained if drama is rooted in “the depth and breadth of Catholic dogma” (TD1.68). Calderón’s genius depended on Aquinas, much as Sophocles built on Homer (TD1.69). Balthasar can thus conclude, “[w]here Hegel announces the end of drama . . . new possibilities of drama open up from the angle of a Catholic theology” (TD1.69–70). The church and its “absoluteness” stand against modernity and the loss of true drama, as Balthasar writes of Reinhold Schneider: Over and above all revolutions and democratizations, the Church, both in her content and her form, continues to represent the absoluteness of the eternal, divine plan; and this absoluteness, even where it is resisted and vehemently combated, remains the indispensable foil and counterpoint against which genuine drama can arise and catch fire [“woran echtes Drama sich einzig,” solely where authentic drama can still ignite itself (TDK1.109)]. 8

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Paul Claudel, The Satin Slipper: Or, the Worst is Not the Surest, trans. John O’Connor and Paul Claudel (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931), 26–7 (day 1, scene 6).

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Reinhold Schneider—in deliberately anti-modern language—has put it this way: . . . Thus all Shakespeare’s royal plays end with the restitution and reconfirmation of the crown . . . The tragic dramatist needs to show the highest degree of organizing ability, of inner order, and that means, quite simply, that he cannot be a revolutionary. . . . There is no such thing as a revolutionary tragedy; the very term is a contradiction. (TD1.119)9

For Balthasar, true tragedy, political absolutism, ecclesial authoritarianism, and Christianity are all inherently connected, and dramas that deviate from this sense of hierarchy must either recreate it or lapse into absurdism; the latter is revealed in Shaw and Sartre, as the former is in Schneider (TD1.120). We find Balthasar exalting especially the Catholicism of Racine and the Baroque era, calling it (perhaps with a tinge of hyperbole) “the apogee of the drama.”10 Erich Auerbach takes a different view, however, pointing to the Baroque’s self-absorbed obsession with absolutism and hierarchies of power, which along with its focus on emotion he censures as “anti-Christian.”11 The era’s classicism and especially Racine, he notes, omitted both the mysterious and the mundane.12 For Balthasar, there seemingly can be no social life, no community, without a great chain of being with its nobles and royalty; to deny aristocracy is to deny community and a final meaningfulness. It is the representative nature of aristocracy, which includes the more mundane classes within itself (as, say, Creon represents all of Thebes), that is necessary to achieve literary significance and meaningfulness. Balthasar references Hegel, as usual; “. . . as Hegel rightly remarks, the frameworks of earlier tragedy and great drama always had considerable political implications: destiny that is purely private cannot aspire to be of ultimate interest” (TD1.74). Such an aristocratic approach to tragedy overlooks the common reality of the unheroic and the plebeian, precluding bourgeois desires and failures as an inauthentic basis for tragedy.

9 10 11

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Balthasar’s block quotation is from Reinhold Schneider, Macht und Gnade (Insel, 1946), 27–8. Balthasar, Tragedy, 69. Auerbach, Mimesis, 390–3. By self-absorption, Auerbach means cultural self-obsession, so that the Baroque tragic dramas, even those staged as in ancient Greece, all looked and felt like the court of Louis XIV. Auerbach, Mimesis, 381–3.

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Balthasar’s approach to tragedy, as it ties political and ecclesial absolutism to aesthetics and theology, narrows his aesthetical vision and resists a genuine encounter with modernity. True tragedy is premodern and found in classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces, and never in modern works that examine the circumstantial, domestic, or the revolutionary aspects of human life. In contrast, Raymond Williams has grasped tragedy’s immense diversity and is willing to explore its modern incarnations, even in revolution and modernity’s diverse forms. He takes precisely the counter position from Balthasar and Schneider regarding the possibility of tragedy and revolution. “. . . I know also that the revolutionary societies have been tragic societies, at a depth and on a scale that go beyond any ordinary pity and fear. . . . I do not see how anyone can still hold to that idea of revolution which simply denied tragedy, as an experience and as an idea.”13

A dislike for the common The damning passage of Balthasar’s aristocratism, however, comes in his categorization of the novel as modern and atheistic, precluding God’s vitalizing, transcending presence. Neither Idealism, where the self defines reality according to itself, nor Romanticism, where nature is conceived as all-comprehensive (GL5.408), can include the possibility of the Divine. He thus concludes that Goethe’s use of myth within “the innerworldly humanism of Bildung” is “almost wholly devoid of religion” (GL5.410), which initiates the modern devolution into the bourgeois, the novel, and the loss of God: This [modernity] begins to celebrate its “scientific” triumphs in the incipient study of psychology, of sociology and evolutionary history, while it overruns the field of art with its novel of bourgeois realism: from Scott to Dickens, Thackery, Galsworthy, Freytag and Keller to Fontane and Thomas Mann, from Balzac via Stendhal and Flaubert to Zola, from Pushkin to Tolstoy and Hamsun, in all of whom we see man within a milieu [my italics], an environment, nature, world, and how he grows into or out of these, both involving and extricating himself. Neither that heaven-directed gaze of foolishness prevails here, nor the thrust of 13

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Williams, Tragedy, 74. He defines revolution as the establishing of human order that completely includes “the full humanity” of all classes of people (77).

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a transcendent eros. . . . What is initiated by Stendhal in his Tentation de Saint Antoine, continued by Rimbaud and Lautréamont and taken to excess by Thomas Mann and more recent writers, is the dissolution of an immanent anthropology which in its enclosed dialectic must increasingly have recourse to forms of perversity in order to awaken any kind of tension. (GL5.410)

Balthasar is not directly attacking common experience here, but making a larger theological point regarding human life conceived as without selftranscendence or God. Yet the passage vitally points to Balthasar’s operative tastes—his dislike of ordinary and modern “man within a milieu.” This aversion is both aesthetic and theological; he scorns the common while condemning its lack of transcendent telos, its basic secular orientation as life without God. The apparent threat is one of falling into a wholly prosaic world. Balthasar marshals Hegelian quotes to his aid to prevent this slide “into a prosaic realism of ordinariness, ‘imitation of nature,’ of existence in its immediacy and fortuitousness, which ‘raises the question whether products of this kind can be called works of art at all’ ” (TD1.63–4). He remains a thorough classicist, for whom authentic tragedy “has always called for a certain ‘dignity’ in the doomed character; he must fall from a ‘significant height’” (TD1.434).14 Balthasar, like Hegel, sees a historical waxing and waning of tragic art, which peaked in an earlier historical era. Such patrician disdain for the prosaic is not unusual. Hegel divided German history into three eras that corresponded to the Persons of the Trinity, leaving Bertrand Russell to quip: It seems a little odd that the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost should have begun with the bloody and utterly abominable atrocities committed in suppressing the Peasants’ War, but Hegel, naturally, does not mention so trivial an incident. Instead, he goes off, as might be expected, into praises of Machiavelli.15 14

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Balthasar here is quoting Albin Lesky, “Zum Problem Des Tragischen,” in Gesammelte Schriften: Aufsätze Und Reden Zu Antiker Und Deutscher Dichtung Und Kultur, ed. Walther Kraus (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1966), 215. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection With Political and Social Circumstances From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 765. Biser comments that Hegel approved of the French Revolution’s ideal of freedom, but not of its methods or use of “popular agitation.” “There can be no doubt that there is a conservative side to Hegel’s historicism.” Frederick C. Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 294.

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Such a characterization could also be made of Balthasar, who makes similarly surprising (yet telling) omissions. There are modern critics who also define tragedy as aristocratic. George Steiner, in his seminal The Death of Tragedy, comments that there is nothing democratic in the truly tragic vision of political courts and ambitions.16 And similarly, C. S. Lewis argues that classical tragedy intentionally passes over the details of what people ate, wore, or their different ways of speaking, because “[t]ragedies omit the clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much real misfortune and the prosaic littlenesses which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity.”17 This is the traditional, aristocratic opinion that real life is meaningless, pitiful, undignified, and marked by the emotion of pathos, while authentic tragedy is inherently meaningful, pure, and grand— they are, therefore opposed to one another. It is in this vein that Reinhold Niebuhr writes: The word tragic is commonly used very loosely. It usually designates what is not tragic at all but pitiful. In true tragedy the hero defies malignant power to assert the integrity of his soul. . . . This tragic level of life is an achievement of the few. Most men perish in weakness, frustration and confusion. We weep for them; but in our tears there is no catharsis of “pity and terror” such as Aristotle regards as the proof and consequence of true tragedy. There is pity but not terror. The novels of Thomas Hardy are replete with these pitiful figures.18

Niebuhr’s comments reflect a typical patrician point of view and contrasts common pity with rarefied cathartic pleasure. Hardy creates pathos, not tragedy. This is precisely Balthasar’s point of view. The problem, however, is that such tidy distinctions are more a case of eisegesis than actual examination of tragic art, as Terry Eagleton observes: “For most pieces of tragic art behave exactly as though tragedy were indeed a matter of actual experience, rather than some purely aesthetic phenomenon.”19 Niebuhr seems to realize this problem, as he goes on to modify his statement three pages later, noting that the “genuinely tragic is curiously compounded with the pitiful.” 16

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Steiner, Death, 241, 194. “The history of the decline of serious drama is, in part, that of the rise of the novel” (118). Lewis, Experiment, 59, 81. Niebuhr, Tragedy, 156. Eagleton, Violence, 17.

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Balthasar’s only allowance for the mundane is when he steps outside of literature and aesthetics and into existentialism. Authentic tragic art may be rare and aristocratic, but the experience of tragedy is universal; as mortal creatures, we all experience how goodness is impermanent and even conflicting, and this knowledge is what tragic drama encourages us to reflect upon as its spectators. The existential tragedy of simply being human applies to everyone, yet Balthasar withdraws from the full implications of such a concept. Christ heals the tragic human condition by entering and overcoming it in all its tragic suffering (ET3.400), but here Balthasar returns to his classic imagery and patterns of thought. He does not develop the notion that Christ enters the fallen human condition in the sense of its circumstantial, common, and ignoble qualities; for Balthasar, it is rather in the heroic and classic mode of Prometheus, Iphigeneia, Jephthah’s daughter, Hercules, and Samson. He continues to think in terms of representative, aristocratic figures, and not in terms of a serious regard for the common. The human is affirmed by the divine, but in heroic, kingly, and representative figures. Balthasar neglects the sense of the human in a context that is ordinary, common, and ignoble—on its own terms, without a higher person as its representative—and the possibility that Christ has also entered and healed this dimension as well. For him, the divine affirms the human creature, but not in the deep, ignoble, and quotidian aspects of human existence; Christ enters and overcomes tragic human life, but Balthasar fails to see that this entails even the circumstantial and the dross. The good is never something hidden or difficult to perceive, but rather something clearly presented onstage. To see it as mired in the circumstantial is simply not part of his imagination or perception.

Balthasar’s antimodernism Balthasar’s resistance to modernity is overt and observable, clearly noted by scholars and one of the reasons he is often labeled a “conservative” theologian (even though such labels are rather unhelpful). His aristocratism is part of his larger theological project, and his approach has a historical basis. Until the beginnings of the modern age and its democratic sensibilities, traditional tragedy had been limited, in both its analysis and practice, to nobles and kings.

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One of the key moments for modernity was the French Revolution,20 which Balthasar himself recognizes: “The French Revolution undoubtedly signifies the change to the modern era” (TD1.409).21 Balthasar, however, does not permit any notion that modernity has widened tragedy’s diversity. One of the seismic shifts of modernity, both in politics and prose, is that the great chain of being no longer holds sway. Egalitarianism means that there is a new equality, a self-authentication for each person. A premodern understanding of representation, where the fate of the king is the fate of his people,22 is no longer necessary; now, all people, the noble and the ignoble, are significant and suffer tragedy on their own terms. As Eagleton summarizes, “With democracy, things are different. . . . The only qualification for being a tragic protagonist is that you are a member of the species.”23 Hardy’s similar conclusion is that “the peer and peasant stand on much the same level; the woman who makes the satin train and the woman who wears it.”24 George Eliot and Hardy recognize that tragic suffering is present beyond the grand palaces—on small farms and unmarked streets; the destinies of the small are absolute in and of themselves.25 The example of this modern understanding is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, where the turn is to the individual, the desire for self-fulfillment and prosperity, and the problems of work, economics, and family life. For Hardy’s era, these forces are only heightened with Darwinism, where all creatures, human and animal, now share a radical kinship that erases aristocratic distinctions between high and low; “in the proto-modernist text of evolution, classical hierarchies are alarmingly undercut,” jibes Eagleton.26 Humanity’s origin in the animal kingdom levels the playing field and forces any notion of a great chain of being into a reactionary position. 20

21

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This is obviously a huge issue in historiography, and impossible to cover here. Modernity is impossible to date in regard to its beginning—possible beginnings are the American Revolution, the Tudors, Luther, Gutenberg, Descartes—or even its ending. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis (New York: Free Press, 1990), 3–9. Regardless, the French Revolution is a common source of modernity, and is undeniably vital in modern egalitarianism. It was the historical circumstance that “gave rise to modern tragic realism based on the contemporary,” notes Auerbach. Auerbach, Mimesis, 458. Howsare states that Balthasar would locate modernity’s beginnings with the “radical Aristotelians” of the High Middle Ages, the via moderna, but he gives no citation or evidence for this statement. Howsare, Balthasar, 44. Williams, Tragedy, 50. Eagleton, Violence, 94. Hardy, Writings, 122 (“The Profitable Reading of Fiction”). Eagleton, Violence, 90. Ibid., 91.

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Balthasar’s antimodern position is clear. As early as the writing of his dissertation, Balthasar had sought to refute, according to one scholar, “how far modern philosophical and poetic creativity as a whole can grasp the movement of transcendence.”27 He valorizes the Attic Greeks, Corneille, Shakespeare, de Vega, and Racine for their social sense of the body politic in empires, courts, or republics. Tragedy is at its best when classical, traditional, and aristocratic; it cannot commingle with bourgeois values and commonness. “No baroque tragedy is conceivable—whether Spanish, French, German or English— apart from the aristocratic ethics of representation (and hence of ‘honor’)” (TD1.356–7). In his treatise on Reinhold Schneider, Balthasar finds nothing questionable in the triumphalism of the Teutonic Knights who engage in “the gradual subjection of the earth to the law of the Cross and of culture . . . For the West was born of the spirit of chivalry . . . [which] breathes the Christian soul into the secular feudal system.”28 There is doubt in Balthasar and Schneider if tragedy is possible without a royal court: We can even wonder whether this earlier constellation of forces—for example, a feudal society and a monarchical power representing and making present a transcendent, divine lordship in the world—was not the precondition for genuine tragedy, no longer attainable in a purely democratic age. This was the view of Reinhold Schneider. (TD1.302)

The image of humanity in the Old Testament, for Schneider and Balthasar, is focused on the kings and the quintessentially tragic story of King David (GL6.109). Balthasar’s attention is rarely on the people of Israel and the communal covenant, but rather on the images of the king’s representative covenant with God, and the prophet who is the moral compass to the king. “A king represents the divine order of the world; in his person God’s presence

27

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Alois M. Haas, “Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s ‘Apocalypse of the German Soul’: At the Intersection of German Literature, Philosophy, and Theology,” in David L. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, 53. Balthasar, Tragedy, 247. Similarly, in The Satin Slipper, there is the triumphalism by King Philip II of Spain: “That had I but one throw, it was the duty of the most Catholic King to try to crush Cranmer and Knox and nail to her rock that cruel Scylla, that harpy in human guise, bloody Elizabeth. I have done my task . . . I now worship God on every side a perfect rampart around my faith.” Claudel, Satin Slipper, 244 (day 4, scene 4). The play concludes with a call to battle the Turks: “You know you heard how all Asia once more is beginning to rise against Jesus Christ; there is a smell of camel over all Europe. There is a Turkish army round Vienna . . . It is time for Christendom once more to fly bodily at Mahomet; he will see the medicine we will make him take, him and the King of France, his ally!”, 299 (day 4, scene 10).

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in the world is concentrated” (GL6.118). For both Balthasar and Hegel, the social and political worlds dissipate when the traditional representative tragic hero becomes the modern prosaic protagonist (TD1.74). Hegel’s fear, Quash notes, is “the anti-social entrapment by private interests,”29 which are inimical to society, politics, and Geist, and Balthasar is clearly in this camp. The “inner stature and distinction of a soul” in a “tragedy of common life (the bürgerliches Trauerspiel)” threatens to be “silted up,” Balthasar warns (TD1.434).

Bourgeois realities Balthasar’s aristocratic, antimodern position, however, must deny the new social forms that are created in modernity,30 for society was hardly annihilated by recent social and political transformations. Rather, the middle class has its own public spheres and social history, Eagleton argues; he is left to ask, is Middlemarch actually more private than Macbeth?31 Modernity does not, ipso facto, lead to individualism. In reality, plebeian culture, with its oral and written sources, forms a mode of resistance—and a conservative one at that— to the changes wrought by modernization and capitalism.32 For Raymond Williams, it is this new social consciousness that developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the novel explores; the nature and meaning of community are precisely what is debated in the work of authors like Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, and Hardy.33 Hardy’s fiction, for Williams, reflects the ambiguous but real social mobility of the nineteenth century, with the changing pattern of country life of that era.34 For Balthasar, however, there is simply no interest in a common tragedy that attends to the human only on its own merits; as Auerbach comments about the premodern point of view, “a tragic situation revolving about the virginity of a middle-class girl is an absurdity.”35 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

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Quash, Theology, 132. Williams, Tragedy, 50. Eagleton, Violence, 87. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 8–9. Williams, Novel, 9–15. “It was the establishment of a position in human experience which was capable of judging—not incidentally but totally—the very society that was forming and changing it” (15). Williams, Novel, 102. Auerbach, Mimesis, 329.

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Balthasar’s reactionism resists any notion of bourgeois tragedy: It is true, of course, that neither the middle class with its concern for wellbeing, nor socialism, which dreams of building a future (“and the future will not be tragic”), is able to create a tragedy. While the novel, from Dostoevsky to Faulker, from Kafka to Malraux, exhibits the continued existence of the tragic dimension, it so wallows in fatality that it “lacks the detachment necessary for theatrical presentation”. (TD1.435)36

There is a conceptual possibility here; Balthasar will admit there is a kind of “tragic dimension” for the novel. But it is clearly a derivative and insufficient presence for Balthasar, and he quickly negates it (“it so wallows in fatality”).

Modernity and the novel If the novel’s origins are, like modernity’s, impossible to date,37 its rise and dominance are clearly tied to the rise of the middle class and the modern era. Auerbach observes, “The frequent emphasis on the contrast between ‘artist’ and ‘bourgeois’ must not lead to the conclusion that nineteenth-century literature and art had any other soil than that of the bourgeoisie. There simply was no other.”38 The novel’s connection to modernity is seen in its concern for individual experience; similar to Descartes’ philosophical method, the novel’s “primary criterion was truth to individual experience—individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.”39 Unlike classical and Renaissance art forms, the novel in its beginnings was a genre without formal conventions or customary plots. Defoe and Richardson, in contrast to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, are among the first great literary writers who did not derive their plots from history, past, previous works, or mythology.40 Any sense of a settled social world is now discarded for the transitional, the complex “social confusions

36

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Balthasar does not provide a citation for these quotations; presumably it is from the previous and subsequent quotes from Jean-Marie Domenach’s Le retour de tragique (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Prototypes have been identified as Pamela (1740), Tom Jones (1749), Don Quijote (1605), Princess of Clèves (1678), Chaereas and Callirhoe (first century BC), and even Homer’s Odyssey. Fusillo, “Epic,” 36–8. Auerbach, Mimesis, 504. Watt, Rise, 13. Ibid., 14.

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and contradictions . . . [of an] openly acquisitive society . . .” that are present even in Jane Austen’s reasonably stable world.41 There is no longer a clear hierarchy of being, a static world where class and morality are inherently connected. Social classes can now mix in surprising ways, and social and economic improvements are possible—although they may prove ambiguous and destructive as well, since new forms of exploitation and oppression are also now possible. With the rise of the middle classes, printing, and literacy, there is a natural interest in bourgeois characters, struggles, and plots. The genre of the novel is, in particular, suited for the middle class with its interest in the material, suspicion of metaphysics, interest in the self, and belief in historical progress.42 The aesthetic perspective, Levine notes, has shifted with the English realistic novel, so that “fiction should shift its focus from the extreme to the ordinary . . .”43 The ordinary, the bourgeois, and the modern are elements against which Balthasar forms a reactionary position, leaving his theological aesthetics sharply classical, antimodern, and lacking in comprehensiveness. The range of human experience, including prosaic reality on its own terms, is not within his vision; he does not explore the ignoble depths of the human condition, its modern forms, or the theological possibilities of the novel.

The realistic novel One of the more important and popular forms of the novel is the realistic novel. The category of realism, like most such labels, is both problematic and useful. Some have defined it as a fiction that evokes a sense of verisimilitude, the “air of reality” as Henry James termed it; Eagleton laconically calls it “calculated contingency.”44 Levine points to how realism is “. . . the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to description of similar experience in non-literary texts of the same culture. . . . [The] describing directly not some other language but reality itself (whatever that may be 41 42 43 44

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Williams, Novel, 21. Eagleton, Novel, 11. Levine, Realistic, 17. Eagleton, Novel, 10.

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taken to be).”45 This goal of describing reality in its fullness and conditions already shows a greater breadth than Balthasar’s aristocratism, which would limit art to hierarchies of being and noble, representative figures. Realism, in contrast, attempts to describe the depths, circumstances, and ignobilities of life for common people on their own terms; in this regard, it is a more direct encounter with the fullness of Creation. Yet, on the other hand, for all its reaching for reality itself, realism remains a genre of fiction and thus, by definition, unreal. It remains the purview of the literate author and reader, for the truly ignoble cannot directly present themselves to us but only through the mediation of the author. Nor can realism mean, in a naïve sense, a direct representation of the real world, for all reality is conditioned by perspectives and interpretations. Hardy, for example, evokes a strong sense of realism in Wessex, yet this is not a naturalism but the contrivance of art. Hardy is aware of this, as he indicates in his reference to the paintings of the mature Turner: “The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer. . . . The exact truth as to material fact ceases to be of importance in art.”46 If Hardy displays realism, he also displays what some critics call an antirealism,47 especially through his use of the grotesque, coincidence, and irony.48 As Norman Page describes it, Hardy’s style is a “rejection of representation or ‘realism’ in favor of a highly, even eccentrically personal vision.”49 This points to the fact that any proper sense and use of realism must be hedged and nuanced, as Levine does: “. . . it is always on the verge of another realism: the recognition that the reality it most adequately represents is a subtly disguised version of its own desires . . . its awareness of its own unreality.”50 Neither is Hardy’s antirealism a kind of straightforward social history. His work does not parse into facile accounts of industrialization, of city versus country (though these are certainly elements in his works), as he is so often read. 45 46 47

48

49

50

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Levine, Realistic, 8. Hardy, Life, 192 (January 1887). Norman Page, “Art and Aesthetics,” in Dale Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, 38, and Linda M. Shires, “The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” in Dale Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, 148. Frederick Karl observes how Hardy evokes a level of surreal, anti-realism with his imagery of a fair, fortune-tellers, and the haggish furmity-woman who resembles a Fate from Macbeth. Frederick R. Karl, “‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’: A New Fiction Defined,” Modern Fiction Studies 6 (1960): 198–9. Page, “Art,” 38. Hardy himself writes of the “idiosyncrasy of the artist.” Hardy, Life, 239 (5 August 1890). Levine, Realistic, 15.

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It is not a peasantry versus industrialization, as Eagleton is painfully clear: “Hardy did not write about peasants, for the excellent reason that hardly any existed in the England of his time.”51 Laurence Lerner notes, as many others have, that “the agricultural depression of his own time plays little part in Hardy’s fiction, and quite clearly none at all in The Mayor . . .”52 There is a historical vagueness in The Mayor of Casterbridge setting, so a precise dating—whether it is before or after the repeal of the Corn Laws—is impossible.53 Social trends such as trade unions, native to Dorset via the Tolpuddle Martyrs (1833, seven years before Hardy’s birth only a few miles away), get no mention in Hardy’s Wessex. Hardy evokes a time and place of his memories and history, yet it is not accurate historically or sociologically; it remains somewhere between realism and symbolism, as one critic comments.54 The realistic novel is not so much a work of verisimilitude or history, as a kind of fiction that thoroughly contextualizes the narrative’s time and place. It is where, as George Eliot writes, “there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”55 Realism, Levine notes, places the narrative within its prosaic setting. “. . . [Realism has a] tendency to see all people and things within large containing social organizations and, hence, its apparently digressive preoccupation with surfaces, things, particularities, social manners.”56 Plot and characters are defined by their histories, geographies, and social setting; existence in its immense variety is presented with a sense of context, sincerity, everydayness, and accuracy. It is very much interested, contra Balthasar, in “man within a milieu.” Nor is the novel an individualism run rampant, as Hegel and Balthasar criticized, because social history and milieu are vital to the novel. This sense of contextualization is one of the realistic novel’s greatest strengths. Ian Watt holds that “the novel is surely distinguished from other genres and

51

52

53 54 55

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Eagleton, “Buried,” 91. And, similarly, “First, we had better drop ‘peasant’ altogether. Where Hardy lived and worked, as in most other parts of England, there were virtually no peasants . . . Outside his writing he was one of the many professional men who worked within this structure, often with uncertainty about where they really belonged in it.” Williams, Novel, 100–1. Laurence Lerner, Thomas Hardy’s the Mayor of Casterbridge: Tragedy Or Social History? (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 81. Lerner, Mayor, 82. D. A. Dike, “A Modern Oedipus: The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Essays in Criticism 2 (1952): 171. George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 45 (ch. 3). Levine, Realistic, 15.

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from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment.”57 Hans Frei takes realism to be: . . . [T]he narrative depiction is of that peculiar sort in which characters or individual persons, in their internal depth or subjectivity as well as in their capacity as doers and sufferers of actions or events, are firmly and significantly set in the context of the external environment, natural but more particularly social. Realistic narrative is that kind in which subject and social setting belong together, and characters and external circumstances fitly render each other.58

This again points to the fact that the novel is not an epic genre that is distanced from its subject matter, as misjudged by Hegel and Balthasar, but rather a narrative form that is deeply wedded to location, history, and human existence. It is also clear that the realistic novel is not an escape into some form of idealism or monadism (as found in Ibsen), where the self is the only concern. One of Balthasar’s critiques of modern literature is that it wallows in selfhood without a sense of community or the divine. But in reality, the realistic novel is very much concerned with environment and milieu—even more than drama, for realistic novels can develop a level of circumstantial detail far beyond drama. Nor is it fair to accuse the novel of wallowing solely in selfhood, as a good many concentrate on relationships, actions, histories, and particular settings. With Hardy, there is a repeated struggle of characters within their familial and social relationships, as well as with the past, their hopes for the future, and their relationship to their work. There is always a cast of characters with Hardy (sometimes making the primary protagonist hard to identify), and any accusation of a solipsistic obsession on the self proves unfounded. Realism often attends to the common elements, the lowly and ignoble aspects, of human existence. Eagleton observes that realism is ever “wedded 57

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Watt, Rise, 17–18. For Raymond Williams, realistic fiction is where “[e]very aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of the general life, yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.” Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 274. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (London: Yale University Press, 1974), 13.

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to the common life.”59 Premodern tragedy, in contrast, dealt only with nobles and aristocrats in whom the lower classes participated through a great chain of being;60 now the nonaristocratic can be present directly in its own context. This means, for example, that in Hardy’s world of Wessex—a “complex social and environmental organization,” one critic terms it61—customs and dialect are direct parts of the scene and characters. As Raymond Williams summarizes it, Hardy’s writings are an “attempt to describe and value a way of life with which he was closely yet uncertainly connected, and the literary methods which follow from the nature of this attempt.”62 The domesticity of Wessex pulses with the same energy and emotion of European palaces, Hardy reasons.63 Hardy, as a man of his time and class, reflects the Victorian and bourgeois uncertainty of social place and relations, and so his protagonists are neither noble nor poor, but somewhere precariously between.64 He modernized the notion of tragedy, so that it could be all too typical, defining it as “a gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions . . .”65 This dimension of human existence holds no interest for Balthasar, for his theological vision is too ethereal to encompass it.

Biblical realism Furthering Balthasar’s problems is realism, as a focus on the common and its context, is a deep part of Christianity and the Bible. If realism in the novel is modern, it is also ancient and Biblical. Hans Frei’s innovation, based on Auerbach, was to approach the Bible as realistic prose. The scriptures are best understood as literature that is meaningful, historical, and reflective of physical and social reality.66 Realism for Frei became the world of the Biblical 59 60

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Eagleton, Novel, 4–5. It should be noted that classic tragedy has dimensions of the prosaic and ignoble as well, such as Philoctetes’ unheroic, “rankling wound” (Philoctetes, line 7), or the sad figure of Io in Prometheus Bound. It is the ignobility and circumstantiality of a simple, misplaced handkerchief that undoes Othello, and not a great battle or struggle. Eagleton, Violence, 98. This dimension of classic tragedy remains small in comparison to modern tragedies and the novel, however; regardless, neither manifestation receives attention from Balthasar. Simon Gatrell, “Wessex,” in Dale Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, 19. Williams, Novel, 101. W. J. Keith, “A Regional Approach to Hardy’s Fiction,” in Dale Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches, 38. Millgate, Biography Revisited, 30. Hardy, Life, 123 (April 1878). Boyle, Sacred, 58–9.

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text, the church’s approach to the Bible before modern Biblical criticism, and the hermeneutic of Karl Barth. “Such a realistic narrative reading was, Frei maintained, not only the way Barth read the Bible, but the dominant way of reading Scripture through the first seventeen hundred years or so of the Christian tradition,” analyzes one commentator.67 Frei thus writes: The realistic novel, in which history-likeness and history prey on each other in mutual puzzlement concerning the reality status of each and their relation . . . is, from the perspective of the rule of faith and its interpretive use in the Christian tradition . . . the coherence between linguistic or narrative and real worlds rendered in the Gospel stories.68

For Frei, this sense of realism is vital to Christianity and the Bible. A “. . . realistic or history-like (though not necessarily historical) element is a feature, as obvious as it is important, of many of the biblical narratives that went into the making of Christian belief.”69 Nicholas Boyle expands Frei’s work to make sense of all literature, both sacred and secular. Boyle, by exploring Ricoeur and Lévinas (along with Frei and Auerbach), argues for a similar sense of literary and Biblical realism whose words “tell us truths about things.”70 Boyle argues that the Bible evokes a “complexity of realism”71 through its use of varied genres and discourse; by examining Ricoeur he finds a basis for a polyphonic style in the Bible’s varied genres and figural imagery, much like Bakhtin.72

Hardy’s Biblical realism If Balthasar is unattuned to the realistic and novelistic elements of the Bible, Hardy is. Scholars have long noted how Hardy was deeply imbued with Biblical imagery, narrative, and form. In Hardy’s personal habits, he proved to be a lifelong reader of the scriptures, dating psalms and, in good Evangelical habit, 67

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Helpfully pointed out here is that the success of the claim to render the “real world” is unimportant, merely that the claim is made. This avoids a charge of objectivism against Frei, who was smart enough to dodge such a bullet. William C. Placher, introduction to Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, by Hans Frei, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7. Hans W. Frei, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch Or Will it Break?,” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 66. Frei, Eclipse, 10. Boyle, Sacred, 76–7, 128. Ibid., 62. Boyle, Sacred, 65; Slater, “Bakhtin,” 2.

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marking scriptural passages.73 Hardy had learned Greek and read the New Testament in its original language, along with the Authorized Version, and his extensive knowledge of the Bible has led one critic to argue that Revelation is the proper background to reading Jude the Obscure.74 This powerful influence of the Bible on Hardy is evidenced in The Mayor of Casterbridge itself and its many direct, Biblical references: Cain, Job, Jacob, Nathan, Abraham’s family, Psalm 109, David’s hiding place in the Adullam cave, and Saul’s raising of Samuel’s ghost, for example.75 Hardy’s rampant use of Biblical imagery, terms, and allusions is consistent throughout his short stories, novels, and poems. The influence of the Bible on Western culture and Victorian culture, in subject matter and style, was immense, and Hardy was not unusual in this respect. Stephen Prickett notes how, for the Victorians, Europe was dominated by the narrative past of the Old Testament.76 More than just a repository of imagery and references, Hardy had great respect for the Bible as an artistic work, and approached it as an aesthetical model. His prose remarkably echoes this sense of Biblical polyphony and realism. “His only genuine predecessor in anything like the same complex simplicity—poetry and prose, fable and history, paradigmatic model and experimental form—had been the vernacular Bible, which may have been his unconscious model . . .” describes William Buckler with some exaggeration.77 Five days before completing The Mayor of Casterbridge, he wrote: Evidences of art in Bible narratives . . . Their so-called simplicity is, in fact, the simplicity of the highest cunning. And one is led to inquire, when even in these latter days artistic development and arrangement are the qualities least appreciated by readers, who was there likely to appreciate the art in these chronicles at that day? . . . But in these Bible lives and adventures there is the spherical completeness of perfect art. And our first, and second, feeling that they must be true 73

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Norman Vance, “George Eliot and Hardy,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elizabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 484. Norman Vance, “Secular Apocalyptic and Thomas Hardy,” History of European Ideas 26, no. 3–4 (2000): 201–10. Julian Moynahan, “The Mayor of Casterbridge and the Old Testament’s First Book of Samuel: A Study of Some Literary Relationships,” PMLA 71 (1956): 123–8. Stephen Prickett, “Poetics and Narrative: Biblical Criticism and the Nineteenth Century Novel,” in The Bible and European Literature: History and Hermeneutics, ed. Eric Osborn and Lawrence McIntosh (Melbourne: Academia Press, 1987), 86–7. Buckler, Imagination, 350.

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because they are so impressive, becomes, as a third feeling, modified to, “Are they so very true after all? Is not the fact of their being so convincing, an argument, not for their actuality, but for the actuality of a consummate artist who was no more content with what Nature offered than Sophocles and Pheidias were content?”78

The cunningly simple aesthetic of the Bible is an apt description of Hardy’s own peculiar style.79 This is not to argue that Hardy’s aesthetic was wholly determined by the Bible, or that his style may be reduced to the Biblical precedent, but to point to the stylistic similarities. The Bible’s diverse genres, as Ricoeur, Bakhtin, and Boyle have observed, co-exist within a larger canonical whole; similarly, Hardy’s prose is not uniform but strikingly uneven. He reads, at times, like a ballad-writer, a social observer and chronicler, or someone from Oxbridge—all within the span of a few pages, and to some critics it compromises his overall unity and style.80 His novels were panned by some, including the influential F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, in part for their uneven, erratic qualities.81 Others, however, have admired his ability to remain provisional and variegated. Raymond Williams refers to Hardy’s two styles in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, an educated Latinate and an unconscious localism, and Donald Davidson points to the underlying sense of folk ballad beneath his modernism.82 One critic describes how the many genres that make up Tess of the d’Urbervilles, such as classical tragedy, realism, melodrama, ballad, polemics, and comedy, seem to continuously 78 79

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Hardy, Life, 177 (Easter, 1885). The great stylist Henry James famously sneered at Hardy as a writer with his phrase, “good little Thomas Hardy.” Buckler turns this about nicely, commenting that James’ statement “is the misguided but wholly understandable judgment by one of the great literary formalists on one of the great literary casualists . . .” Buckler, Imagination, 350. Gregor, Web, 25. Peter Widdowson, “Hardy and Critical Theory,” in Dale Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, 76. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Jospeh Conrad (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 23. Zabel perceives the incongruities in Hardy’s fiction as reflective of the author himself. Morton Dauwen Zabel, “Hardy in Defense of His Art: The Aesthetic of Incongruity,” The Southern Review 6 (1940): 125–49. Raymond Williams, “Wessex and the Border,” in The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 204. Interestingly, Williams argues that the “consciously educated” voice is more authentic, because it engages with real persons instead of the cultural trope that rural oddities serve as urban entertainment. For Donald Davidson, the educated voice is more precise than the abstract crudities of Hardy’s regional voice. Donald Davidson, “The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy’s Fiction,” Southern Review 6 (1940): 164. Lawrence Jones also notes, “His highly idiosyncratic diction, with its mixture of formal and informal, concrete and abstract, scientific and folk terms, is an exact expression of his vision. The voices of the analytic naturalist, the sympathetic humanist, the lover of the strange and grotesque – all are there in the diction, as are the long and the close view, the abstract pattern and the concrete detail.” Jones, “Mode,” 448.

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question one another.83 Robert Heilman expresses his surprise at how “the imperfections accompany excellences that one would hardly expect” as Hardy moves between directness, manqué oratory, and successful allusion.84 Hardy’s self-written biography, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited and published under the name of his second wife, Florence Hardy), also reveals an uneven style of diary entry, narrative, rumination, self-defense, and quotation. His admixture of allusions, narratorial comment, description, narration, and lyrical arias echo the Bible’s own canonical mélange of poetry, history, prophecy, epistles, gospels, narrative, and apocalypse. Both Hardy and the Bible remain inclusive, nonuniform, polyvocal, and idiosyncratic. Hardy also shares with the Bible an interest in unheroic, nonaristocratic protagonists—the unknown Abram, the shepherd boy David, the prostitute Rahab, Moses the murderer and poor speaker, and the fishermen and tax collector who comprise the Apostles are similar to Hardy’s ignoble protagonists. Both Hardy and the scriptures evince a realism focused on common protagonists within their historical and social contexts. This sense of prosaic realism is a genre not addressed by Balthasar, which is ironic since it factors into the scriptures themselves; Balthasar’s interests, however, remain decidedly aristocratic and dramatic, unwilling to discover these theological possibilities of realism and the novel. With The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy’s interest and respect for the Biblical aesthetic have extended to an actual appropriation of a Biblical narrative as a basis for one of his novels; informing this particular novel is the Biblical tragedy of King Saul and David.85 Like Balthasar, Hardy has realized that there are elements of tragedy within the scriptures, as have some modern Biblical scholars.86 Overtly imitating a Biblical narrative, Hardy has met one

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Shires, “Aesthetic,” 156. Robert B. Heilman, “Hardy’s Mayor: Notes on Style,” Nineteenth Century Literature 18 (1964): 328. Moynahan, “Mayor,” 119. Henchard, like Saul, is moody, lonely, suicidal, older, and personally attached to a younger man, with whom he finds himself at odds and then supplanted, much like Saul’s relationship was to the young David. Henchard invokes the supernatural by consulting a wizard, echoing Saul’s desperation that takes him to the witch of Endor. Robert Tannehill, “Israel in Luke-Acts: A Tragic Story,” Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985): 69–85; Exum, Tragedy, 16–41. Williams writes an opposing view, arguing against Exum that Saul is not a tragic figure. Peter J. Williams, “Is God Moral?: On the Saul Narratives,” in The God of Israel, ed. Robert Gordon, University of Cambridge Oriental Publications, vol. 64 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 175–89. Northrop Frye called Saul “the one great tragic hero of the Bible.” Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 181.

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of Balthasar’s criteria for effective modern tragedy: it should transpose the classics into a different situation and milieu, as Racine did (ET3.398). Yet Balthasar would doubtless condemn the prosaism of the novel—its bourgeois characters’ ignoble concerns for commercial success and social advancement, and its setting in a plebeian town like Casterbridge. He cannot include such persons and setting in his theological aesthetics.

The Mayor of Casterbridge A close reading of The Mayor of Casterbridge provides an exploration of prosaic, bourgeois, and tragic reality that illumines Balthasar’s aristocratism and narrowed theological aesthetics. The novel follows the worldly rise and fall of the intemperate, irascible, yet heroic Michael Henchard. The first chapter describes his drunken sale of his wife and daughter to a sailor named Newson, a real-life transaction noted by Hardy and historians.87 The next day, after failing to recover his family, Henchard takes an oath of abstinence. When Susan and the child return eighteen years later, after Newson’s supposed death at sea, she finds a transformed, teetotaler, and successful Michael Henchard: he has become a profitable grain and agricultural dealer, as well as the town’s mayor. Henchard, however, is facing a crisis in a crop of bad corn, and he hires the young Scotsman, Farfrae, to help rehabilitate the grain. Reunited with Susan, he remarries her but keeps their past and his paternity of their daughter Elizabeth-Jane a secret. Trouble brews when Henchard’s former lover, Lucetta, becomes rich and moves to Casterbridge, ostensibly to marry Henchard, and his falling out with Farfrae worsens the situation. At Susan’s death, Henchard tells Elizabeth-Jane that she is his child. Ironies redound, however, when he learns that she is actually Newson’s daughter, his own having died long ago; things worsen when Farfrae becomes his competitor in the corn and grain business. Farfrae painfully comes to replace Henchard in many areas: he 87

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In early 1884, Hardy began reading the local Dorchester newspaper archives from 1826, and there found a report of a wife-selling, as well as Prince Albert’s passing through Dorchester in 1849. Millgate, Biography Revisited, 231. One historian finds evidence of 300 such cases. Thompson, Customs, 408. He notes that though Hardy omits the usual “ritual features” of the custom, there is the sense of “the general popular consensus as to the legitimacy of the transaction and as to its irrevocable character – a conviction certainly shared by Susan . . .” (405).

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woos Lucetta and marries her, crushes Henchard’s business, becomes the mayor, and even buys and moves into his foreclosed home. Henchard finds some happiness in a seed shop business, and comes to love Elizabeth-Jane as his own. Lucetta dies when her affair with Henchard is revealed to the town, which revels in a skimmity-ride that humiliates her.88 As in many Hardyan plots, crucial characters surprisingly return, and this proves true of Newson, who did not die at sea after all. Despite Henchard’s attempts to keep the truth a secret, Elizabeth-Jane learns the truth of his paternity and, feeling betrayed, she abandons Henchard. Farfrae has been secretly courting Elizabeth-Jane, and they marry. The narrative ends when a repentant Elizabeth-Jane seeks out Henchard, finding that he has died in a shack on Egdon Heath and has left only his final will and testament; the novel concludes with Elizabeth-Jane pondering these events, as well as her own future. Henchard’s tale—his “life and death”—has been “a story of a man of character,” as the novel’s full title runs. J. C. Maxwell observes that many have described this work as Hardy’s best novel, especially his least favorable critics,89 and for Millgate it is “this most shapely of Hardy’s major novels.”90

Classic elements There are elements of classical tragedy, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, and these classic resonances would garner Balthasar’s approval. Critics have long noted, for example, Henchard’s parallels with both Oedipus and Lear;91 Henchard is, like Oedipus, thoroughly defined by the city and eventually exiled—the skimmington ride served precisely such a purpose of exile from a community92—and like King Lear the prized love of a 88

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This historical custom is now generally termed “rough music” in England, corresponding to practices in Italy, France, Germany, and the United States; it consists of cacophonous ridiculing, possibly accompanied by complex rituals, of individuals by a community for violating its norms. Thompson, Customs, 467–70. The event could lead to death, either through humiliation, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, or through suicide (488). J. C. Maxwell, “The ‘Sociological’ Approach to the Mayor of Casterbridge,” in Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor, Imagined Worlds, 225. John Holloway also calls it Hardy’s best work, for its “economy and integration.” John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Archon Books, 1962), 288. Millgate, Career, 225. Dike, “Oedipus,” 169–79. The connections with Lear are obvious: the central father-figure and his disturbed relationship with his daughter, the father’s renunciation of the daughter, the father learning to love, and the heath and its shelter are among the most obvious parallels. “The intention of rough music . . . was, exactly, to ‘drum out’ the victim(s) from the neighbourhood.” Thompson, Customs, 488.

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daughter becomes an essential part of the plot. Unity of place is created by the stage of Casterbridge, unity of action around the focus on Henchard’s life and death (which is the novel’s subtitle), and unity of time is present in the temporal shaping given by Henchard’s twenty-one year vow of abstinence.93 The public and private are connected in him, but in a mysteriously opaque way. Henchard mirrors Casterbridge, much as Oedipus was connected to Thebes, so that his polluting secret metastasizes within the larger community.94 It echoes Adrian Poole’s observation about Sophocles: “The coherence of the great Sophoclean characters is bound up with the coherence of the world they inhabit, and with the formal coherence of the play which represents it.”95 Not only classical, the tracing of Henchard’s rise and fall in worldly fortune reflects a medieval approach to tragedy through its implicit theme of the wheel of Fortune.96 And the novel’s conclusion, with Elizabeth-Jane’s summarizing focus on life’s little and infrequent pleasures, sounds like a theme of medieval, Boethian tragedy, which Raymond Williams describes as avoiding the sin of “trusting to Fortune in the sense of seeking worldly success at all.”97 The sordid, rustic characters, such as Longways, Cuxsom, and Coney, play a role strangely choral as they comment on events and persons.98 There is a nearly singular focus on Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, his personality and self-destructive tendencies, that is unusual in Hardy’s novels. Henchard’s disaster is his own doing, in many ways, as Millgate summarizes it: “Self-made, Henchard is also self-destroyed; if he feels pursued, it is essentially

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Millgate, Career, 232. Dike notes the “continuity between what is hidden in Henchard’s past and in the past of Casterbridge itself,” the latter being the town’s Roman and revolutionary past. Dike, “Oedipus,” 68. Paterson also observes a spiritual rapport between Henchard and Casterbridge. John Paterson, “The Mayor of Casterbridge as Tragedy,” in Albert J. Guerard, Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, 102. He also connects the theme of immorality disturbing the social order in Hamlet and King Lear (106). Poole, Shakespeare, 59. Kramer, Forms, 71. Kramer unconvincingly extends this argument to the point that even Farfrae’s downfall is hinted in the text (80). Williams, Tragedy, 22. Elizabeth-Jane becomes the voice of a chastened wisdom who has learned to survive, and even flourish, in a threatening world. It has been noted that Elizabeth-Jane is very similar to Hardy himself, in background, history, and temperament. The narratorial voice is most closely identified with her in the book, and she espouses very Hardyan comments. Pamela Dalziel, introduction to The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xxvii. It is not Henchard but Elizabeth-Jane who is the “novel’s nearest approach to the distinctively Hardyan voice and point of view. . . . [S]he alone steadily learns and grows in the course of the narrative, achieving through quiet suffering a kind of disillusioned yet compassionate understanding that the reader comes to recognize and accept as wisdom.” Millgate, Biography Revisited, 237. Millgate, Career, 232.

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himself that he cannot escape.”99 His hamartia, the sale of his family, combines with his own intemperate nature to form his moral flaws, spiraling into the kind of inevitable, tragic conflict preferred by the Hegelian literary critic A. C. Bradley.100 Along these lines, Paterson reads the novel as thoroughly classical in its focus on a grandly heroic persona who, in his passion, pride, and aspirations, transgresses the moral code and is duly punished.101 If the narrative tends toward this kind of logic in Henchard’s personal, inner destruction, however, the true causation still remains opaque,102 which is one of Balthasar’s criteria for authentic tragedy (ET3.394–5). The Mayor of Casterbridge is ambiguous regarding the culpability of Henchard’s self-destructive nature.103 Is Henchard tetchy, selfish, and vain, or honorable and generous? To what extent is he responsible for his losses? The narrative is inscrutably provisional, so that Henchard’s image remains ambivalent, resulting in an uncertainty regarding Henchard’s grand passions and culpability. Bad luck and circumstance are factors in his downfall as much as his hamartia and distemper; the weather undoes both his public celebrations (MC 16.98) and his corn crop (MC 27.177), and Elizabeth-Jane’s paternity (MC 19.117), the return of the furmity-woman (MC 28.187), and Newson’s survival (MC 43.288) are unwelcome surprises. Thus, there are present woven elements of Greek, Biblical, Hegelian necessity, and medieval tragedy, through allusion, imitation, theme, or structure. These are all elements that Balthasar would find commendable.

Classic elements made prosaic Yet other factors would mar Balthasar’s interest in the book as a work of tragic literature. For one, it is thoroughly set among bourgeois hopes of progress. Henchard follows this pattern to the letter, as his impoverished entry 99

Ibid., 227. Lerner, Mayor, 59. 101 Paterson, “Mayor,” 96. Paterson’s interpretation, while beguiling, proves problematic. There is little indication in the text of a cosmic opprobrium for Henchard’s selling of his family, and Lawrence J. Starzyk openly disputes Paterson’s interpretation. Working from an existentialist understanding of tragedy, Starzyk points to Henchard’s inability to find unity of self or manifest his will in the world. Lawrence J. Starzyk, “Hardy’s Mayor: The Antitraditional Basis of Tragedy,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 596–9. Another who takes Starzyk’s position is Frederick Karl, who notes that Henchard is “one who tries to impose his will upon an antagonistic or indifferent world . . .” Karl, “Mayor,” 210–11. 102 R. P. Draper, “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Critical Quarterly 25 (1983): 62. Draper notes that Henchard’s fall is caused by three kinds of forces: cosmic, social, and personal. 103 Karl, “Mayor,” 199. Karl interprets Henchard as unconsciously self-destructive as Freud defined it (198), so that Hardy’s alienated protagonist is “in some ways the English prototype of the twentiethcentury’s isolated hero” (212). 100

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into Casterbridge is improved by good luck, work, and teetotalism, into a prosperous business and political life. Henchard’s concern, as a successful man, is that his daughter Elizabeth-Jane also undergoes “improvements,” though hers are gendered toward language, reading, handwriting, and manners (MC 20.121–3). Henchard’s lover Lucetta becomes, literally, nouveau riche through an inheritance, and Susan too sees a rise in worldly fortune after her return to Casterbridge. Yet the rise in wealth and esteem also involves the threat of loss, as Henchard and Lucetta come to experience, and as Elizabeth-Jane realizes in the novel’s conclusion. In the bourgeois world of the marketplace there is the persistent threat of competition, and Farfrae comes to replace Henchard in business and politics with his acuity, use of technology, good fortune, and more stable disposition. Farfrae, like Henchard, becomes self-made, creating and consolidating his own economic power.104 It is a novel dominated by a solitary protagonist’s prosaic desires for commercial success and domestic happiness, which would not be to Balthasar’s liking: There is the invincible power of a milieu, for example, social misery and limitation, whence no escape is possible (Büchner’s Woyzeck; the tragedies of bürgerlich life . . . We have spoken of middle-class (bürgerlich) ethics; the ethos of a hero can be, and mostly is, influenced by tribal or group modes of thought, by a social morality. (TD1.356).

Such an “invincible milieu” is not conducive to human freedom when it becomes “explained at the horizontal level, by history, psychology and anthropology” (TD1.358). Secondly, if Hardy has borrowed classic tropes, he has shaped them in decidedly bourgeois and prosaic ways. One example is Hardy’s use of the story of Saul and the witch of Endor (1 Sam 28). In the Bible, Saul consults the witch so that he can speak with the dead prophet Samuel to find out what he should do, now that God no longer communicates with Saul (1 Sam 28:3–25). Balthasar points to the painful, tragic irony of Saul, that his very piety—he was the one who expelled witches from the land (1 Sam 28:3b)—forms “a part of his tragedy that he ultimately goes to inquire of a witch, because God no longer answers him in any way” (GL6.229). This is proper classical tragedy in a Balthasarian sense, as King Saul struggles with God, political expediency, 104

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Kramer, Forms, 71.

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the authority of the prophet, and the comprehension of his own destiny. Even Macbeth’s witches are concerned with the fate of the kingdom and its future king. In contrast, Hardy consciously alludes to the witch of Endor from 1 Samuel, for example, but he casts it in a thoroughly mercantile setting. Henchard, who “felt like Saul at his reception by Samuel,” consults the seer Fall to learn “what is the harvest fortnight to be?” (MC 26.174). Henchard is worried less about fate and God than about his crops, his finances, and his place in the community, and seeks to outdo Farfrae by consulting the wizard. He appears “now habited no longer as a great personage, but as a thriving man of business” (MC 9.55). We are again in the world of bourgeois, and not the patrician, and for Balthasar this is modern literature’s devolution, as “it has to borrow the aura of ancient myth . . . [moving historically] from ‘true tragedy’ via parody to social criticism. . . . ‘Consequently middle-class people lack the necessary height from which to fall’ [quoting Schopenhauer]” (TD1.76). Present in the novel is Hardy’s perennial interest in work and human creation. There are extensive descriptions of the carrefour, “like the regulation Open Place in spectacular dramas,” where “[f]armers, merchants, dairymen, quacks, [and] hawkers” conduct business daily (MC 24.155). Farfrae introduces a horse-drill to the surprised farming industry of Casterbridge (MC 24.156), and a major plot point turns on the purchase of grain futures in advance of unknown weather and yield (MC 26.175). Hardy knows the value of work done together, be it the music of the Mellstock Quire of Under the Greenwood Tree, milking cows in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or sheep-shearing in Far from the Madding Crowd. Work and social history become of increasing importance in the novels after The Return of the Native,105 and Hardy gives particular attention to things created, shaped, and worked by human hands. “Work and desire are very deeply connected in his whole imagination,” comments Williams.106 This is a commercial, bourgeois world that is far different from Balthasar’s aristocratic courts and palaces; it values the environment and work of plebes that developed in the modern era, although this is a place of risk, change, and the threat of loss, and a new rivalry between generations.107 105 106 107

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Gregor, Web, 109. Williams, Novel, 117. Thompson notes that modernity means the erasure of the apprentice relationship between successive generations. Thompson, Customs, 14. Thus Farfrae needs no knowledge of skills from Henchard, only an opportunity.

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The reality is that The Mayor of Casterbridge is thoroughly situated in the bourgeois world of Hardy’s home and youth. This novel was a special turn to realism for Hardy after The Return of the Native, which was a self-reflective, hypothetical work that explored a road he had not taken108 on a largely imaginary landscape Millgate calls “a desert tract of pre-civilisation.”109 The following three novels after The Return of the Native (The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, and Two on a Tower) are among Hardy’s lesser works that failed to engage his rich memories and experiences of Wessex life.110 With The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy returned to a rich, tragic narrative set in Dorchester (renamed Casterbridge within the novel). Hardy’s ongoing relationship to his own home and background form this narrative of Henchard and Casterbridge. The novel was written as his new house, Max Gate, was being built outside of Dorchester, marking Hardy’s conclusive return to his home. It focuses on a single protagonist and his thoroughly developed urban setting, the “town and down” (MC 14.86) of Dorchester that Hardy had known his whole life, and in which he had worked as an apprentice architect. Henchard is inextricably part of his time and place, as was Hardy himself. This particular work also marks the initial concept of Wessex as a unifying geographical place for all Hardy’s prose; he would later issue all his novels and short stories under the serial title, Wessex Edition.111 From a specifically literary point of view, the chief significance of the move to Dorchester lies in its implicit confirmation of the centrality of Wessex to Hardy’s imagination. . . . Now, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to pick up lost Wessex threads, Hardy returns to his native countryside and to the town which supplied that countryside’s focal point . . .112

108

Millgate, Biography Revisited, 187. Millgate, Career, 131–2. Egdon Heath may be based on the heaths near Hardy’s homeplace, but its community and livelihood are fictional. 110 “A Laodicean and Two on a Tower are among Hardy’s weakest books,” notes Millgate. Millgate, Career, 198. Regarding The Trumpet-Major, the “novel has generally been regarded as slight.” Millgate, Biography Revisited, 197. Hardy divided his novels for the Macmillan Wessex Edition of his work into categories with “the effect of separating the major from the lesser works” (437): The Trumpet-Major and Two on a Tower were placed in the secondary “Romances and Fantasies,” and A Laodicean in the tertiary “Novels of Ingenuity”—neither garnering a place among the “Novels of Character and Environment.” 111 Millgate, Biography Revisited, 437. 112 Millgate, Career, 203–4. Similarly, Gatrell notes that it is with The Mayor of Casterbridge that Wessex first “becomes the focus of a circle of previous fictions . . . [and] a single historical and topographical context.” Gatrell, “Wessex,” 25. 109

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The novel’s focus on Henchard is only rivaled by Casterbridge itself and its developed social setting and thoroughly contextualized narrative. A strength of the novel, in contrast to drama, is this ability to create such deep layers of context—precisely what Balthasar failed to see when he resisted “man within a milieu.” J. Hillis Miller begins his seminal study of Hardy by stating: “Nowhere in Hardy’s writings is there a description of an originating act in which the mind separates itself from everything but itself. His self-awareness and that of his characters are always inextricably involved in their awareness of the world. Almost every sentence . . . is objective.”113 Casterbridge is very clearly based on the real town and past of Dorchester,114 yet Hardy’s concerns run deeper. Millgate observes, “But Hardy’s chief concern is not so much to enumerate the town’s visual features—topographical, architectural, archaeological—as to evoke the precise texture of its social and economic life.”115 Henchard’s relationship to the town, his many social roles as politician, businessman, father, husband, and lover, collide, revealing that his inability to negotiate these various roles is part of his downfall. Henchard’s position in the town remains, as for nearly all the middle class protagonists in Hardy, decidedly precarious. It is a work thoroughly grounded in realism’s contextualization and modern economic threats.

The mixing of high and low styles Shakespeare Hardy’s attention to the quotidian as a significant dimension of human existence has important precedents. The English realistic novel’s concern for the prosaic finds an important model in Shakespeare, whose work consistently attended to the common elements of physical reality.116 Shakespeare notably features comic, unheroic figures in the midst of his serious tragic dramas. These figures interacted and commented on the play’s events, such as the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. Additionally, Shakespeare’s focus in his tragedies 113

J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1. 114 “In terms of topography, of history, of social and economic realities, it is easy to recognize everywhere in the presentation of the fictional town the lineaments of the actual town in which it was being written . . .” Millgate, Biography Revisited, 233. 115 Millgate, Career, 222. 116 Auerbach, Mimesis, 313.

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on poetic justice, sin, evil, characters, individual responsibility, and free will’s relationship to determinism are all important themes to Victorian novelists.117 These similar emphases in Shakespeare and the Victorian novelists, in contrast to the classical interests in peripeteia, hamartia, and tragic situations, lead Jeanette King to ask, is not English realistic literature directly descended from Shakespeare?118 Balthasar’s turn away from the novel and its nonaristocratic elements is discernible in his approach to Shakespeare. If Balthasar approves of prosaic figures, it is for comic purposes, and to him the comedy and tragedy are “finely balanced” in Shakespeare (GL5.153; TD1.444, 470). Yet his focus is ever on Shakespeare’s aristocrats, to the neglect of the rustics. The humorous figures only provide a bas-relief to the main characters; “Shakespeare’s kings and great lords reflect something of this mythical greatness [of ancient tragedy], which is apparent particularly when they mix with the world of lesser people and fools” (TD1.76). The common has a derivative existence. Shakespeare’s genius is that he can point to the ethical in “his harlot, pimp, and trickster characters,” despite their “sphere” of “moral squalor” (TD1.478). The highest art, however, is aristocratic: “. . . the pathos of a king who falls from power (to humiliation, prison or death) is a far more impressive theme than the portrayal of a private destiny. This is because the king represents the divine order and authority in the world. It is a favorite subject of Shakespeare” (TD1.400). Balthasar may appreciate these comic elements, but Hegel had a distaste for Shakespeare’s lowly figures. Hegel admires Shakespeare and praises him highly, but he is also critical of his subjectivity and circumstantiality, which lack the larger ethical necessities of the Greeks (that so naturally aligns with Geist’s universality). Hamlet’s seeking of justice is too personal and idiosyncratic,119 for example, and Lear’s “baseness” is a spectacle of madness rather than noble harmony.120 Hegel dislikes Shakespeare’s dissolute elements of Romantic art that place noble people and places besides ignoble ones.121 Balthasar has a higher regard for Shakespeare, claiming his own view is “totally different from Hegel’s” (TD1.69), yet he too fails to focus on the significance 117

King, Tragedy, 6. Ibid. 119 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:225. 120 Ibid., 1:222. 121 Ibid., 1:594. 118

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of the lowly prosaic in Shakespeare’s great dramatic tragedies. Balthasar, rather, disagrees that Shakespeare’s art lapses into Romanticism’s interiority (TD1.63–9), and concentrates instead on Shakespeare’s kings and palaces as worthy representations of tragic literature. Shakespeare’s use of prosaic reality echoes in Hardy’s work, as is common with so many English writers. Far from the Madding Crowd is often called by critics a “modified pastoral.”122 In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Susan’s demise is followed by the humorous news that Christopher Coney has dug up the pennies, used for weighting her corpse’s eyes, and spent them at the pub (MC 18.112). Henchard’s catastrophes take place among the concerns of work and life, social improvement, hay-ricks and crops, economics and futures pricing, and the business of running a seed-shop. Hardy, Williams claims, focuses more on these ordinary elements of work and life, than any other major novelist since capitalism began.123 The contiguity of high and low styles can also be seen in the social striations within Casterbridge. There are two bridges for suicidal contemplations, one for lowly shameless and the other for the professional class (MC 32.206–7), even as there are three inns, for the monied, the careful, and the disreputable (MC 36.237). Chronologically, the visit by Prince Albert is followed by the bawdy and parodying skimmity-ride. Realistic narratives, Frei observes as he cites Auerbach’s Mimesis, have the quality of contiguous styles, so that “the sublime or at least serious effect mingles inextricably with the quality of what is casual, random, ordinary, and everyday.”124 Grasping Hardy’s admixture of high and low and rejecting it, D. H. Lawrence accused Hardy of consistently punishing his exceptional, aristocratic characters due to his “bourgeois morality.”125 The similarity of The Mayor of Casterbridge with Shakespeare can be seen beyond its attention to the prosaic, however. Paterson argues that The Mayor of Casterbridge is a particularly traditional tragic work, and that it is Hardy’s most Shakespearean, and thus most effective, tragic novel.126 The conclusion to 122

Michael Squires, “Far From the Madding Crowd as Modified Pastoral,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 3 (1970): 299–326. 123 Williams, “Wessex,” 211. Gregor agrees, noting that Henchard cannot be imagined beyond his work, town, and era. Gregor, Web, 114. 124 Frei, Eclipse, 14. 125 “Starting with the bourgeois morality, Hardy makes every exceptional person a villain, all exceptional or strong individual traits he holds up as weaknesses or wicked faults.” D. H. Lawrence, “Hardy’s ‘Predilection D’Artiste’, ” in Albert J. Guerard, Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, 48. 126 Paterson, “Mayor,” 91–2.

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the novel presents a low-key denouement worthy of Shakespeare, as ElizabethJane, after Henchard’s death, is left to ponder it all, salvage the results, and restore a sense of order. Like Lear, Henchard is forced to accept his mistakes and arrogance, and he learns to love and regain his humanity, albeit too late.

High and low styles and Christianity In contrast to Balthasar, Auerbach finds a deep significance in such usage of lowly figures in tragic literature. Shakespeare’s use of comic rustics in his dramas, along with his blurring of the comic and tragic genres, indicates an intentional confluence of high and low styles, the aristocratic with the ignoble. Auerbach argues that the ancient world had separated high and low styles from subject matter, so that common reality was never portrayed with the seriousness of tragedy, except in the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and the realistic novel.127 Shakespeare’s greatness, for Auerbach, is his resistance to antiquity’s separation of styles, as he instead followed medieval, Christian England’s culture, which permitted a contiguity of the serious with the common.128 This commingling of high and low makes Shakespeare’s tragedies impossible to schematize, because they are all experiments with genre and the common elements of both comedy and tragedy. This admixture of comedy and tragedy is, for Auerbach, both profoundly realistic and human,129 as are the Biblical texts that evince similar generic difficulties.130 Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, of course, remain solely aristocratic, and he does not treat his ignoble characters with tragic seriousness131—Balthasar is quite right in this regard—yet what Balthasar neglects is how Shakespeare willingly allows the high and low to be contiguous in a profound way. Balthasar’s only comprehension of the lowly comic in Shakespeare is where it serves to highlight the more weighty tragic, and not the simple fact that it is there at all. 127

Edward W. Said, introduction to Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach, 50th anniversary edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), xiv–xv. 128 Auerbach, Mimesis, 312–13. Auerbach reads a scene from Henry IV, part 2, (2.2.1–15) as a satire of a strict separation of styles. 129 Auerbach, Mimesis, 327. 130 There is academic dissension regarding Job as a comic restoration or tragedy, and tragic irony balances many of comic elements within the Bible. Frye, Code, 73, 196–7. Further disturbing the generic waters, Francesca Murphy reads David’s dynastic troubles as political “black comedy.” Francesca Aran Murphy, The Comedy of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 144. 131 “He [Shakespeare] does not take ordinary everyday reality seriously or tragically.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 328.

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The theological point, missed by Balthasar in his inattention to the novel and prosaic realism, is that such an admixture of high and low styles is deeply Christian. The Biblical narratives are a wealth of such contiguity between high and low, which results in a serious regard for the lowly. The Incarnation of the Son takes place, after all, in a stable’s feeding-trough—and the Incarnation itself, for that matter, is a deeply humbling moment for God to take on human flesh. Christ’s plebeian birth and existence, and more so his horrific enthronement on the Cross, make him a poor example of the classic tragic hero. The Bible’s rude style, in contrast to the classical standard of Cicero, left both St Augustine and Jerome with an initial distaste for Christianity.132 St Augustine realizes the mixture of noble and ignoble in a sermon: “So the fisherman left his nets, the fisherman received grace, and became a divine orator. . . . And so now the fishermen’s words [i.e., the gospels] are read, and the necks of orators are brought down.”133 Gregory of Tours expresses the irony with a question: “But why should I be ashamed of my lack of culture, if our Lord and Redeemer, to destroy the vanity of worldly wisdom, chose not orators but fishermen, not philosophers but peasants?”134 Christ’s cry of dereliction is not aristocratic but rather an utter lack of refinement in its sheer awfulness. Peter’s betrayal of Christ is indicative of the Bible’s willing exaltation of the common and ignoble, and is inconceivable in its ancient milieu, as Auerbach realizes. “A scene like Peter’s denial fits no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for [classical] tragedy, politically too insignificant for history . . .”135 Classical practice expressed a need to “keep aloof from life in its present realities, if he [the poet] wanted to avoid the low style of satire or comedy . . .”136 This aloofness is exactly Balthasar’s position, as he places himself at a patrician distance from common reality. The prosaic world is not, of its own right,

132

St Augustine, The Confessions, bk. 3, ch. 5, ¶9; Jerome, Letters, Letter 22, ¶30. My thanks to Ben Quash for noting the Augustine reference and Augustine, The Confessions, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1997), 80n.18, for the Jerome reference. 133 Augustine, Augustin: Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies on the Gospels, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 6 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 377 (Sermon 37, ¶12). 134 Auerbach, Mimesis, 93 (Auerbach’s translation). Gregory of Tours, S. Gregorius Turonensis, Fredegarius Scholasticus, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 71 of Patrologiae Latinae (Parisiis: 1879), 911, “De Virtutibus Sancti Martini Episcopi,” §996. 135 Auerbach, Mimesis, 45. 136 Ibid., 58.

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worthy of serious attention. The Biblical model, however, resists “any aesthetic separation of the realms of the sublime and tragic on the one hand and of the everyday and real on the other . . .”137 Poesy, prose, and the prosaic all belong together. Behind this lurks, as Auerbach concludes, a theological concern for the ordinary: The true heart of the Christian doctrine—Incarnation and Passion— was . . . totally incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles. Christ had not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans; he moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk of Palestine . . . Nevertheless, all that he did and said was of the highest and deepest dignity, more significant than anything else in the world. . . . And the most moving account of all was the Passion. That the King of Kings was treated as a low criminal, that he was mocked, spat upon . . . it completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base.138

Boyle expresses some surprise that Balthasar has no knowledge of Auerbach’s landmark work, Mimesis, especially as it shares many of his same goals in The Glory of the Lord.139 Moreover, Auerbach’s open exploration of all of Western literature, including modern prose, points to a diversity and comprehensiveness outside Balthasar’s parochial judgments. A proper theological aesthetics must, like the Biblical canon, Auerbach, and Boyle, reflect the fullness of creation and aesthetics. Yet Balthasar resists such a theological vision, narrowing his vista instead to an aristocratism, hierarchy of being, and classicism. The scandal is that Balthasar not only overlooks this Christian commingling of high and low, but he actively resists it. He skirts close to an anti-Christian position, as any aristocratic aesthetics does, when there is disdain of the lowly concern of “man within a milieu” (GL5.410). As Auerbach comments, “Rigid, narrow, and unproblematic schematization [of styles] is originally completely alien to the Christian concept of reality.”140 Schematization is precisely that to which Balthasar leans. His theological aesthetics is unable to embrace the 137

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 72. 139 Boyle, “Art,” 108–9. 140 Auerbach, Mimesis, 119. 138

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fullness of reality on its own terms, its noble highs and ignoble lows, or an aesthetics that “differs and defers, as a style of rejoicing.”141 Balthasar does not allow for a serious regard of quotidian reality, redeemable on its own terms and worthy in its bourgeois dimensions; such a vision is jettisoned along with the rest of modernity. Ironically, however, this serious encounter with the common is actually Biblical and, in this sense, ancient.

The triumphal tragic realism of The Mayor of Casterbridge It remains to be seen precisely how tragic realism’s sense of bourgeois reality can be redeemable on its own terms. With The Mayor of Casterbridge, there is more than a Shakespearean mixing of the aristocratic and the common; here they are fused together and inextricably linked. This is evident in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the death of Michael Henchard. Henchard, like Lear and even Christ, dies in the wasteland outside of the city. His written will, found by Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae, states his desire to be utterly forgotten:142 That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. & that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remember me. To this I put my name. (MC 45.309)

The prosaic is at work here, both narratively and literally. Within the narrative, this final testament marks Henchard’s acceptance of his failures. He is, as Hardy names a character in Our Exploits at West Poley, the Man who had Failed.143 Many tragedies feature humiliation, of course, but Henchard’s is inextricably tied to his historical era and his prosaic world. His is a bourgeois downfall, 141

Hart, Beauty, 311. Compare Hardy’s later poem about Tess, “Tess’s Lament” (CP 141), “I would that folk forgot me quite,/ . . . I’d have my life unbe.” And similarly, in the Apocrypha, “But of others there is no memory; they have perished as though they had never existed; they have become as though they had never been born” (Sirach 44:9 NRSV). 143 Thomas Hardy, Our Exploits At West Poley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 3. Both Henchard (“the departure of zest for doing,” MCB 44.297) and the Man who had Failed (“a want of energy”) find themselves too aged and weary to renew their conquest of life. Hardy, Exploits, 78. 142

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the failures at both business and family; Henchard lost his commercial battle with Farfrae, as he lost his lover Lucetta and the love of his step-daughter Elizabeth-Jane. He has suffered communal censure and permanent disgrace in the skimmington ride. The prosaicism of Henchard is evident in his written will with its arresting, painful misspellings, such as “murners” and “flours.” His request to be forgotten is especially painful, since his final plea to Elizabeth-Jane was precisely not to be forgotten: “Promise not to quite forget me when—[Newson returns]” (MC 43.290). His small hope for Elizabeth-Jane’s love is finally renounced in his death, so that Henchard’s is a painful, ignoble loss, matched by his squalid death and illiterate will; it is as if Cordelia had spurned Lear after he had pinned all his hopes on her. Nor does the reader want to forget Henchard, a character explored and followed for the length of the novel. Henchard has accepted, sacrificially and wearily, nature’s law of supersession—for Elizabeth-Jane’s father to return, he must disappear. The world is zero-sum; there is no profit without cost, no improvement without denying someone else, in a Darwinian, capitalist world. It is the realization of one of the boys in Our Exploits at West Poley: “I perceive that it is next to impossible, in this world, to do good to one set of folks without doing harm to another.”144 Henchard’s will expresses “that no man remember me.” This is, ironically, what the novel, as an entire action, does not do, as it is his story, the “Life and Death of a Man of Character,” as the subtitle reminds us. It is his singular presence, to the diminishment of all the other characters, that remains inscrutably grand even in his lowly death. The novel ends with Elizabeth-Jane, like the reader, pondering these events and the person of Henchard. As Lerner observes, “. . . our last glimpse of him [Henchard] sums up so much of what he stood for, with such concentrated power, that to watch him going on would be an anticlimax.”145 His final image is a character of dignity, if not kingly like Lear’s then with its own grandeur nonetheless. “For Henchard life has been tragic, but never at any time has it lost its dignity . . .” observes Gregor.146 Richardson’s heroine Clarissa could only be rewarded in heaven, the author himself states,147 and 144

Hardy, Exploits, 33. Lerner, Mayor, 65–6. 146 Gregor, Web, 128. 147 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), 1498 (Postscript). 145

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the same thing can be said of Henchard. Henchard’s will is so evocative in its commanding acceptance of his pained bourgeois losses and destruction, that it is precisely an exaltation of prosaic lowliness, a serious regard for the lowly. The narrative ends with Elizabeth-Jane’s survival and prosperity, her final “equable serenity” (MC 45.309), as well as the retelling of Henchard’s story; “the art that has meditated on death has created life,” as Williams concludes about Doctor Zhivago.148 Henchard’s prosaic, bourgeois life has been superseded, yet he remains ultimately irreplaceable. Hardy illustrates this in two important ways. Whittle, a former employee, had been humiliated by Henchard during one of Henchard’s apoplectic moments. It is surprising, after such an incident, that Whittle is the one who has cared for Henchard in his poverty and death. But Whittle’s reason is simple; Henchard had given coal and food to Whittle’s poor mother. “. . . [Y]e wer [sic] kind-like to mother if ye were rough to me, and I would fain be kind-like to you” (MC 45.308). “It is ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’, presented with total dramatic simplicity and conviction,” Gregor trenchantly puts it.149 If Henchard is intemperate, he is also generous, especially when contrasted to Hardy’s other revelation, that Farfrae was too tight-fisted to pay for a more extensive search for Henchard (MC 45.307). Both these insights occur precisely around the discovery of Henchard’s will, connecting narratively the losses with his grandiosity. In a feat of narrative prose, Henchard becomes irreplaceable precisely as he is completely superseded by others. Yet his triumph is meager and ignoble, for only the poor man Whittle knows of Henchard’s charitableness, and only the reader is given a sense of Farfrae’s stinginess. It is not an aristocratic triumph but a plebeian one. As in many other tragic works, Henchard’s death is somehow both a negation and an affirmation, a loss and a veneration. In this midst of this lowly death is a strange triumph and resurrection. Jennifer Wallace’s statement about Oedipus is applicable, that in “Oedipus’ case, the gods and the polis confirm his simultaneous shame and worth.”150 There can be, as Eagleton argues, a strange,

148

Williams, Tragedy, 172–3. Gregor, Web, 127. 150 Wallace, Introduction, 19. 149

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unpredictable confluence of victory and defeat, of loss and triumph, even in tragedy: But there is a difference between the belief that suffering is precious in itself, and the view that, though pain is generally to be avoided as an evil, there are kinds of affliction in which loss and gain go curiously together. It is around this aporetic point, at which dispossession begins to blur into power, blindness into insight and victimage into victory, that a good deal of tragedy turns.151

Eagleton’s discussion includes reflections on Christ, whose Gethsemane despair becomes an unforeseen renewal and healing.152 Similarly, Poole develops the idea of “forceful grace” in The Agamemnon (line 182), which points to the possibility of violence being not only destructive but also mysteriously creative.153 Samuel Richardson rejected the calls for Clarissa to survive her eponymous novel, instead calling his heroine’s death, “The supposed Tragical (tho’ I think Triumphant) Catastrophe.”154 Many tragedies point to such strange mixtures of triumph and loss, sacrifice and victory, and The Mayor of Casterbridge is no exception. Williams finds that the “whole novel” of Doctor Zhivago, its complete action, is a Christ-figure where sacrifice yields to new life,155 and this too sounds like The Mayor of Casterbridge, as Henchard disappears to insure Elizabeth-Jane’s happiness. “‘He could not help thinking of Elizabeth’ [MC 44.296] – that is the dominant mood of the penultimate chapter, everything else takes its bearings from that,” summarizes Gregor.156 Both Doctor Zhivago’s Yury and Henchard suffer a total defeat that is simultaneously victorious, a death that becomes a kind of resurrection. Thus does Doctor Zhivago end with one of Yury’s poems that could also speak for Henchard: “I am conquered by them all/And this is my only victory.”157 This strange confluence of victory and defeat is the nature of the Cross, precisely where a defeat becomes a victory that denies neither 151

Eagleton, Violence, 36. Ibid., 37. 153 Adrian Poole, “War and Grace: The Force of Simone Weil on Homer,” Arion 2, no. 1 (1992): 8–9. Reprinted, with revisions, in Taylor and Waller, eds, Christian Theology and Tragedy, 126–7. 154 T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, “The Composition of Clarissa and Its Revision Before Publication,” PMLA 83, no. 2 (1968): 424. 155 Williams, Tragedy, 167–9. 156 Gregor, Web, 125. 157 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1958), 496 (“Daybreak”). 152

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tragedy nor comedy, the world’s violence nor the possibility of triumph, even amidst the lower echelons of reality. It is this mystery that Balthasar overlooks when he focuses on drama at the expense of prosaic reality, on aristocracy to the ignorance of other forms of life and tragic loss. A theological aesthetics, if it is to be complete, must encounter these forms as well. Man in his milieu is not to be despised, for this is precisely where and how much of life is lived. If Balthasar writes that “the central issue in theo-drama is that God has made his own the tragic situation of human existence, right down to its ultimate abysses . . .” (TD2.54), then we are left feeling that Balthasar himself has not really done so; he has failed to follow human existence down to its prosaic reality. Rather, he actively resists it in an aristocratic, antimodern way. Balthasar is strangely too optimistic and yet not optimistic enough. His optimism is that Christ, as the true tragic hero, inherits, supercedes, and finally meliorates all tragedy (TD1.429). Yet his optimism is thin and unrealistic, due to its omission of the modern and the common. His definition of tragedy is stringently patrician, resistant to certain kinds of “abysses,” and dissolving of “man within a milieu”; there is no sense that, as for Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, “even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them.”158 Balthasar’s vision is emptily optimistic, with an intention of being universal yet being finally dismissive of vital forms of human existence. Balthasar’s position is also, ironically, not optimistic enough. He cannot allow the bourgeois elements of reality their own tragedies and triumphs, even though the quotidian is a deep element of both the Bible and Christianity. He enters the depths of the Fall only by way of Christ’s suffering on Holy Saturday,159 only in the sense of representation and an aristocratic chain of being—the pain of kings and generals, and those with the weight of the world in their hands—and not in terms of the common, human experience of tragedy on its own terms. As Boyle concludes, “Life does not have to be shown as having a discernible purpose in order to be shown as capable of being forgiven: it only has to be loved enough to be worth representing, and worth the labor of understanding that goes into enjoying the representation.”160 158

Herman Melville, Redburn; White-Jacket; Moby Dick of The Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 1289 (ch. 106). Balthasar, Mysterium. 160 Boyle, Sacred, 133. 159

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Balthasar cannot envision a victory mixed with tragic waste and loss that is bourgeois or repetitive, or thoroughly engage a modern novel as a form worthy of theological examination. He has no interest in realism, no awareness of the prosaic tendencies of much of the Bible, no genuine encounter with modernity on its own terms, but rather an aristocratism that limits his theological voice. For Hardy, the heights demand the depths: “Who holds that if way to the Better there be,/it exacts a full look at the Worst” (“In Tenebris II,” CP 137); otherwise, it is not a genuine encounter with the fullness of human reality. Balthasar, however, recoils from the worst, unless conceived in an aristocratic, poetic sense as a prelude to Christ’s experience of Godforsakenness. He thus fails to engage fully with prosaic reality or modernity, and the result is his theological aesthetics remains narrowly etherealized. A theological aesthetics fails if it does not engage the theological implications of the novel and “man within his milieu.”

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Literary criticism is language about language . . . To say this is to put in question certain habitual metaphors . . . among these are all those visual metaphors which set the critic over against the text as a spectator who surveys the literary work as a scientist is sometimes thought to survey the thing he investigates, dispassionately and objectively. The critic, moreover, does not possess a power of looking from the outside in a sovereign view which sees all the text at once as a spatial design. —J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire . . . [A] narrator within a fiction must be precisely that – within the fiction, a clearly fictional narrator, a character among characters. —Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love Life might be simpler if we only had one eye, like the Cyclops. —Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example This book has examined Balthasar’s preference for drama over the novel as suggestive of larger problems within his theological aesthetics. There is a literary misprision, an aristocratic hermeneutic in his readings, that is symptomatic of bigger issues in his theology. He judges the novel and prosaic reality incorrectly, leading us to ask where else his tendency to etherealize takes him astray. This particular chapter examines more closely Balthasar’s sense of analytical distance, informed by his interest in drama and operative in his hermeneutical approach to texts. Prima facie, one might think that an objective distance would enable the freedom and objectivity of both author and reader, as Balthasar does; one is not mired in the action but able to observe from afar with a clear, rational

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point of view. Problematic for Balthasar’s theology, however, is that this sense of distance is actually dominating, epic, and nondramatic, and thus negating of his goal for his theodramatics. This is ironic, since he intends to create something involving and dramatic, as opposed to the more rationalistic forms of systematic theology. Yet Balthasar’s continual stress on the spectator of a drama, and a spectatorial position for his theology and anthropology, distorts his vision. The modern novel, with its sense of perspectivism and involved narrator, provides a way of repair; the nearer distances and overt narrator within the Hardyan novel are, in reality, more freeing and dramatic. The sense of the modern, realistic novel yields a more appropriate theological shape, therefore, because of this freedom, and because it is more thoroughly modern, provisional, and wary of “ambitious metaphysical construction.”1 This is evidenced, after an examination of the important, yet enervating, role of distance in Balthasar’s thought, by a close examination of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Distance in Balthasar The distance of the theater Operative in Balthasar’s work is a deep concern for distance as the space that constitutes identity and freedom, both the freedom of the Divine Persons and human freedom. Such a distance is constitutive of true, freely given love, the “fundamental ‘distance’ which alone makes love possible” (TD5.105). In his famous image of the mother and child, Balthasar comments on the experience in which “distinction slumbers in the unopened unity of the grace of love” (GL5.616). Tragic drama’s ingenuity is that it reveals precisely this loving, distant yet present, God. “Sophocles . . . had but one vision of man: silhouetted against the night-sky of an infinitely sublime and distant god, one who yet through his distance proclaims his presence” (GL4.122). The distance that makes freedom, love, and gift possible runs through the Trinity as well, where there is “the eternal separation in God” (TD4.327), an “infinite distinction between the Divine Persons” (TD5.395). The possibility 1

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MacKinnon, Problem, 145.

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of drama within the Trinity, Balthasar notes, is shown in Christ’s prayer of forgiveness spoken as dialogue: “Father, forgive them,” to which the Father responds.2 Even Christ’s atonement respects this distance, so that “nothing godless is imported into God and, on the other hand, man’s freedom is not overridden by a drama within the Godhead . . .” (TD2.194). Balthasar is ever vigilant to maintain “. . . the freedom possessed by God and man . . . they must be allowed scope to act in this way or that” (TD3.14); “. . . there must be an interplay, in the liberation of man . . . between the gratia sola, on the one hand, and man’s creaturely freedom, on the other—a freedom that has not been eradicated by sin” (TD4.318). Balthasar’s theological concern is the traditional theological problem of God’s sovereign freedom and its relationship to human freedom.3 Distance is one way he addresses this issue, because for him it guards the freedom and identity of humanity and the Godhead. Thus, distance and drama exist within the Trinity, between God and the world, and between human persons. For Balthasar, this distance enables identity, freedom, gifting, and love. The wonder of the stage, for Balthasar, is that it re-presents this distance for our consideration and self-realization. “. . . [T]he spectator [zuschauer] is invited to fashion [or, “to perform in the direction,” “in Richtung . . . vollziehen” (TDK1.244)] his life along the lines indicated by the play’s solution; at the same time he is free to distance himself [davon absetzen] from it critically” (TD1.264). The goal of the stage is to invite us to contemplate on life, its meaning, its telos, and the fact that we all have parts to play and roles that can become vocational and missional. The drama has a deeper significance beyond the aesthetic, which is the existential, and it provides a parenthetical place from which to observe and contemplate the dramatic nature of life. It calls into question life’s meanings and goals—Existenzverwirklichung, a “realization of existence” (TDK1.244) and a Klarheit des Entscheids, a “clarity of decision” (TDK1.392). The cleverness of Balthasar’s system is that he has linked these two sections of his trilogy (Ästhetik und Dramatik) via the concept of a worldstage, which unites the theaters of stage and life (TD1.19). Aesthetics and dramatics meet in existentialism: “Who am I?” (TD1.481). “Nowhere is the character of existence demonstrated more clearly than in stage drama . . .” 2 3

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Balthasar, Credo, 90. Vanhoozer, Drama, 50.

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(TD1.17), so that “it is a basic Christian requirement that existence should represent itself dramatically” (TD1.22). This sense of watching and judging a play is eschatological, adumbrating God’s Last Judgment on our own performances (TD1.424). The literal distance between stage and audience, therefore, is something that protects the reality and independence of creaturely existence. It invites us to watch the performance, yet we are free to ignore it, close our eyes, or leave the theater itself. The stage embodies judgment, self-examination, and freedom, through its free spaces where love and freedom are possible. The rift between stage and audience preserves the spectator’s freedom, who is invited (eingeladen) to consider the play as more than just a play, which drama manifests in both content and method. Unlike other artistic forms, Balthasar points out, the action of the stage “is not narrated,” which for him is advantageous (TD1.17). For Balthasar, the novel lacks these distances and spaces where reflection and judgment can occur; it lacks “the detachment necessary for theatrical presentation,” and wallows in “ideologies” (TD1.435). Such a judgment, however, is naive and unfair, for the novel has its own objective, fictional distances, especially as it is a product requiring imagination—how else can I, a twenty-first century American male, enter Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century feminine and English world? A gap remains between the reader and the text, though Balthasar seems unaware of it. The larger question, however, is whether distance truly constitutes freedom. In a Newtonian universe, perhaps distance could mean a certain objectivity for observers, who can view without perspective. Kant’s Copernican revolution, however, established that viewers play a role in perception; now, objects are impacted in our process of knowing them.4 Along these lines, modernity sees the world quite differently from the pre-Kantian epistemology, and is highly suspicious of any claim of distanced objectivity. In a modern world, there are no longer any unmoved observers. MacKinnon critiques Balthasar for this omission; “[t]he concept of receptivity is one Balthasar surely needs, and through Kant.”5 4 5

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Allen, Philosophy, 208. MacKinnon, “Reflections,” 173. MacKinnon’s criticism is directly at Balthasar’s exploration of Christ’s self-knowledge, receptivity, and understanding of “the hour.”

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It is, ironically enough, the problem of epical completion, which Balthasar sought to oppose with his use of drama, but to which he has actually fallen susceptible. The epic makes claims of a final comprehension where the individual is subsumed to the larger plot; it is precisely the critique that he makes of Balzac, where individuals are “only protuberances of the universal totality” (TD1.273). Balthasar sought to escape such epic tendencies, but through the use of distance in his hermeneutics he has reintroduced the problem. It is aggravated by his reactionism to modernity. For modernity, any sense of distance—the theater seats that remain safely offstage, as it were—is illusive. There is simply no human point of view that is not part of the action, no Godlike vista that can compass the drama from a neutral, safe place. Only God can compass the world: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that therein is: the compass of the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1, Coverdale translation). The result is that Balthasar’s use of distance, which was meant to be freeing and objective, is in reality oppressive. The goal of preserving freedom becomes its obverse, and is evident in his mechanism for transcending from aesthetics to theology: the concept of the “horizon of meaning.”

The horizon of meaning For Balthasar, a drama’s ethical and existential significance must be discernible by the distanced spectator, and authentic drama presents the good in a comprehensible way through “its horizon of meaning.”6 He employs this concept in various ways and places, but especially in volume one of the Theo-Drama. There must be one clear conscience on the stage—or at least one which deliberately renounces the acknowledged higher value—so that the spectator can grasp the hierarchy of values [Wertordnung]. . . . Even if the author himself seems to be unsure about his hero’s conscience, he must ultimately reveal the norm, in the hero or in some other character [“antagonist,” Gegenspieler], according to which the spectator can get his 6

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For convenience and consistency I will use this term, though Balthasar gives it different forms: “geistigen Horizonts” (“spiritual horizon,” TDK1.66), “hegelsche Horizont des absoluten Geistes” (“Hegel’s horizon of absolute Spirit,” TDK1.65), “Rahmen” (framework, TDK1.67), and “wirklichen, transzendenten Horizont” (“actual, transcendental horizon,” TDK1.298).

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bearings . . . this is the compass direction—in the primal forest that is the world—in which the invisible and absolute Good is to be sought. (TD1.418; TDK1.391–2)

The dramatist reveals his or her play, which “is, as a cipher for the total meaning, ultimate . . . . and within the polyphony of the action it says precisely what the poet has to say” (TD1.273). The spectator, seizing the horizon of meaning, can pare away the “foreground meaninglessness” in order to “look for signs of a hidden meaning” (TD1.317). Drama “points toward the intention of the author, and beyond him to the horizon of meaning whatsoever” (TD1.314). It is this larger meaningfulness that invites our contemplation and final participation (TD3.534). This ein lauteres Gewissen, “one clear conscience,” is the moral compass of the drama, so that the illumined good is present, shaping the drama toward the moral and, ultimately, the theological. The meaningful horizon is, in the end, theological, as it brings us to question the reality of our own lives before the overarching reality of God. It may even be present in its absence, in a via negativa, as the good is renounced or opposed by an antagonist (Gegenspieler). Macbeth, we might say, reveals the absolute horizon by his terrible moral departure from it. The truth of other religions and cultures is found in their awareness of this absolute horizon, as with the Eastern concept of maya or in the literature of classical Greece. The importance is that there develops a separation of . . . an imaginable, absolute sphere from a graspable, phenomenal form. This attempt attains its most supple moment when a “fate” hovering in the background distinct from the gods is distinguished from the world of the gods themselves . . . and it is in this latter world of the gods that man encounters the sphere of the absolute.7

This concept of the horizon of meaning is, as Balthasar himself states, thoroughly rooted in Hegel. It is, in fact, hard not to hear Hegel here, with the positing of antithesis (the distance) and a reconciling synthesis (the horizon of meaning), as well as the desire for Geist’s ethical clarity. Balthasar marshals Hegel as he develops the horizon of meaning, citing Hegel’s definition of tragedy; for Hegel, tragedy “consists in ethical nature detaching its unorganic nature . . . [and] sets it up over against itself [as Fate, 7

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Balthasar, Epilogue, 25.

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Schicksal] and, by acknowledging it in struggling against it, is reconciled . . .” (TD1.71).8 In this definition, Balthasar discerns, Hegel presupposes that there is a concrete, absolute “divine idea of ethics, encompassing the community and the individual” ( TD1.71), which is Balthasar’s model for the horizon of meaning. Hegel too assumes the audience’s distant and objective viewing of the tragic drama, as Balthasar quotes him with approval: the “reflecting moral person like the spectator, external and uninvolved . . .” (TD1.56). That this sense of distance, with its transcendence through the ethical, is thoroughly Hegelian, Balthasar freely attributes. It becomes part of Balthasar’s larger “stepladder of admissible truths,” which the Christian standpoint develops in relationship to exterior truths, as they ascend into God’s final aletheia.9 A good example of Balthasar using this mode of interpretation is in regard to Shakespeare, whom he wants to read through the meaningful, moral horizon of forgiveness. He casually divides Shakespeare’s works into “periods with regard to the theme of forgiveness,” as forgiveness is humanly present in the early historical/royal plays, receding but still present in the middle period of the tragedies, and then dominant in the third phase of the romances (TD1.466). In the final era, “. . . human forgiveness becomes so transparent, revealing the underlying quality of grace in of [sic] Being as such . . .” (TD1.466). Such a scheme, however, glosses over the problem of systematizing Shakespeare, whose tragedies defy easy classification or thematization.10 Balthasar makes no mention of the fact that there are “problem plays” in the Shakespearean corpus; even the romances (that are neither wholly tragic nor comic), for him, are only “so-called ‘romances’” (TD1.466). The problem is that forgiveness in Shakespeare is much more turbid and resistant to any clear horizon of meaning than Balthasar would have it. If forgiveness is a Shakespearean theme, there is also the thorny problem of forgiveness being a vehicle for punishment, as in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice.11 It is hard to find a theme of forgiveness, present or absent, in Othello 8 9 10

11

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Hegel, Schriften, 381. Balthasar, Epilogue, 15. Wallace, Introduction, 44–5. Wallace notes that the problem with the “problem plays” is that, technically, there are so many, even Hamlet. Wallace, Introduction, 57.

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or King Lear; those who forgive seem to suffer the most cruelly, leading to what one critic refers to as Shakespeare’s “nihilism.”12 Ben Quash, in tracing Balthasar’s epic tendencies, critiques his approach to Measure for Measure, which Balthasar reads as “a Christian mystery play” (TD1.470). “But the problems of the play resist such simplification,” Quash tersely responds, pointing out how the Duke’s providential power is worrisomely “manipulative.”13 Yet Balthasar thinks this Duke who forgives all is Christlike in his reappearance, judgment, and mercy, making it “perhaps the greatest parable of Christian literature” (ET3.404), and it is his presence and perspective that form the horizon of meaning for the play, as the Duke utters, “I find an apt remission in myself ” (5.1.494). “. . . [T]he duke in Measure for Measure is the eternal God who strides incognito in history through the sin of the world . . .” (GL4.104). Balthasar extends this theme of forgiveness beyond Shakespeare. This image of the judge, Balthasar approvingly notes, is heightened in the figure of Azdak in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (one of the few Brechtian dramas Balthasar finds authentically tragic); Azdak is a Christ-figure, a persecuted and suffering judge, “the image of a scorned and suffering righteousness” (ET3.457). This overarching meaningfulness, this hovering horizon of Hegelian Geist, is how Balthasar evaluates non-Christian religion and literature. For him, the creation of a distance between the absolute and the finite is the beginning of Christianity and Christian theology. Once this distance is bridged, as Balthasar reads literature and the pagan classics, then there is a natural consonance with Christian faith, and it is the horizon of meaning that makes this hermeneutical approach work. It is on the basis of the horizon of meaning that Balthasar and Hegel dismiss modern tragedy and the novel. Neither genre has this vitalizing, teleological distance, or a horizon of meaning to achieve an ethical synthesis. [W]e must assert that dramatic action is ultimately only meaningful when seen against the background of a given, absolute meaning [“Vorgabe 12

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“Current critical reception of the play [King Lear] and recent performances have consequently stressed the nihilistic, theological bleakness of the play, rather than any signs of hope for divine grace.” Wallace, Introduction, 54. Gardner calls Othello “a tragedy without meaning,” and comments how neither King Lear nor Othello “end with any interpretation of what we have seen.” Gardner, Religion, 87. Quash, Theology, 141. The play’s use of a “bed trick” as a resolution to the drama only raises more moral difficulties, he observes, so that the moral questions raised remain glossed and unanswered.

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absoluten Sinnes,” TDK1.68] . . . Existence must founder in the upheaval of revolution where there is no horizon of meaning (Büchner’s Danton) just as, in the private realm too, when every protective norm is explicitly withdrawn (Woyzeck), existence is bound to perish. “Society” as such cannot replace the horizon of meaning . . . (TD1.74)

Without the ethical transcendence this horizon creates, the audience is left wholly immanent and with no hope of ascension. This is the problem of modernity, which has lost the horizon of meaning, and is thus left in what Hegel calls the “many-sidedness of interests.”14 Balthasar invokes Hegel directly: “Thus the whole Hegelian horizon of absolute Spirit also disappears, which alone could provide a background for the theatre’s action; it gives way to the horizon of human plans and designs” (TD1.70). Balthasar is clearly antimodern here. His antiperspectivism is motivated by a fear of an opaque immanence clogged by the reductions of psychology, sociology, and ideology. This is evident in modernity’s focus on solitary characters, Balthasar argues, mimicking philosophy’s turn to the self that results in a moral horizon made opaque with a monadic inner conscience and personal ideals (TD1.419). Ibsen, he laments, has no “criteria of truth” (TD1.203) or “yardstick” for dramatic action or meaningful human action (TD1.213). Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children remains “difficult to decipher,” and virtues seem relative against “the all-embracing milieu of the war” (ET3.445–6). Here the “vault of heaven is present, overarching, in many plays of the modern period, but it is an obscured, distorted, ultimately powerless, annihilated heaven, misinterpreted as man’s demonic antagonist” (TD1.422). It applies to the classics, as well, as Balthasar finds when he looks at Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where “the whole horizon from which the light of decision was to break forth can be obscured . . . all compasses can seem to lead astray” (TD1.420). For Balthasar, Troilus and Cressida obscures ethical judgment in an opaque and unwelcome way, resulting in a clouded and provisional horizon of meaning—and, for Balthasar, the telos must never be undercut or obscured. These inherent problems, which are present particularly in modern tragic drama, are worsened in the novel. The novel suffers not only from a polyphony

14

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Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1092–3.

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that largely erases any sense of a horizon of meaning, but also from the lack of the theater’s contemplative distance from stage to audience, which enables the spectator’s vital, existential meditation. It is the safe, contemplative, unmoved distance of the spectator from the drama itself, along with a clearly presented horizon of meaning, that makes Balthasar’s transcendent motions possible. The theological benefit Balthasar draws from this horizon of meaning is that it becomes the palimpsest of the Divine, so that he can argue that “[a]ll post-Christian drama can be regarded as a fragment of a drama that presses toward the Christian horizon” (TD1.321).15 This horizon of meaning works quite well, of course, with traditional tragedy’s focus on kings and aristocracy, where the chain of being is overtly present, and not the “petit bourgeois setting of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” (TD1.385).16 “The hero of ancient tragedy, as a king, a song of a god or a titan, was a direct manifestation of the divine world . . . [Unfortunately] the image of the ‘hero’ was eroded by psychology” (TD1.76). Transcendence, via the horizon of meaning, leads to God for both Balthasar and Hegel, and it is Balthasar’s contention that, for Hegel and himself, the absolute horizon is ultimately Christ (TD1.72). It is also, ultimately, Trinitarian and soteriological, as it can echo the gracious gift and nature of God; “. . . this horizon is illuminated from within in Christian theo-drama and expands to the proportions of the all-embracing ‘event’ of the economic Trinity. Now the all-encompassing reality is not a pitiless destiny but grace and forgiveness” (TD3.534–5). Tragic drama preserves distance, freedom, and divine approbation. Distance is embraced without being dissolved in the totality of the Divine, and without the loss of either the finite or the Infinite.

The oppression of an objective and distant view The problems with Balthasar’s systematic use of a “horizon of meaning,” from a literary point of view, are fairly obvious. Few literary critics would 15

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Although Balthasar’s theological vision points to the Christian basis of true tragedy, he does recognize that other horizons of meaning are possible. A Weltannschaung like Marxism can function quite well, for example (TD1.84). Eagleton also argues that both Christianity and Marxism can be tragic, more out of a realistic encounter with the ordinary than an ethical worldview. Eagleton, Violence, 40. This is a bit of a gloss by the translator, as Balthasar does not use this French phrase. “In der untersten Gesellschaftsschicht wird heir ein Motiv entfaltet, das sich in der kleinbürgerlichen von Arthur Millers «Death of a Salesman» (1949) wiederfindet . . .” (TDK1.360; “in the lowest social class a motif is unfolded, which finds itself in the lower-class of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . . .”).

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welcome such a breezy approach to the interpretation of literature; for them, close readings of texts resist the clear, univocal identity of a “moral compass.” Protagonists are not so simply identified as the moral compass, because they resist such labels as much as they invite them. For example, if Lear is the suffering father from the parable of the Prodigal Son, as Balthasar holds— “Lear is the ultimately dispossessed eternal father” (GL4.104)—he is also foolish and self-centered, pushed to insanity at Cordelia’s death and dying of a broken heart. Additionally, in King Lear there are Cordelia and Kent, who serve as moral compasses through their loyalty and devotion. Quash’s critique is that Balthasar’s epic eagerness for the Christian theme of self-sacrifice is a “special pleading” on Balthasar’s part.17 It is an example of Balthasar’s epic tendencies, as he subsumes characters to his analysis and the horizon of meaning that he discerns—which is the opposite of his stated intentions for his theo-drama. Of further concern is that this horizon is always identified with a person, with the “one clear conscience on the stage” (TD1.418). It is this person who points to the play’s horizon of meaning and import, leading to its larger ethical system and, in the end, the Divine. It is hard not to hear Hegel again here, who associated specific persons with the action and identity of Geist; his valorization of drama is for its use of human characters who express inner feelings, outer actions, and speech worthy of spirit.18 The difficulty is that such an identification of the horizon with a particular person is terribly limiting of the total play itself—the plot, staging, setting, and ideas that all inform it in its entirety. It is a reduction of the complete tragic action to a single person, his or her sufferings, instead of the experience of tragic literature as a whole; it is to look for the Christ-figure in a literary work, instead of reading the work as a whole. In reality, there is a larger tragic action at work, involving far more than a single protagonist. Yet Balthasar is willing to vivisect and dessicate the Gestalt of literature, slicing it up in his theological eagerness. Balthasar’s literary hermeneutic is, in many ways, surprisingly unsophisticated. It is the problem of the distanced spectator itself, ironically enough, that creates the need for a Hegelian horizon of meaning. Distance requires connection, which Balthasar achieves by finding a meaningful horizon. 17 18

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Quash, Theology, 138–40. Hegel, Lectures, 2:1158.

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Yet both are illusive and unnecessary. Balthasar’s approach reflects his antimodernism that is unwilling to engage fully in modernity’s perspectival assumptions; instead, it spans the gaps it itself creates between spectators and performances, between readers and literature. To require an overarching meaningfulness is an artificial and unhelpful theological approach to literature, especially as it is reductive of literature’s riches. A modern, nuanced, and perspectival theology has no need for a horizon of meaning, for it can freely interrogate, reject, and sanction other perspectives and narratives. Notions like the horizon of meaning, the distanced gulf between spectator and performance, and the adjudicative power of the audience are terribly misleading. To separate the spectator from the stage, when in reality all the world’s a stage—including the audience—is ultimately false. Balthasar hedges here, at times. At one point he says the play “cannot be exhaustively described from outside the play . . . from an apparently uninvolved ‘outside’ realm . . .” (TD2.173), but he then breaks this dictum and does start from such an “outside,” the place of the seated spectator in an auditorium, playbill in hand, before the play begins. The position is one of illusive distance, of a spectator uninvolved in the dramatic performance itself. But if a theo-drama is to truly be a world-drama, no such distance between creatures is permissible; any possible distances are much smaller and more ambiguous than Balthasar permits. For him, the spectator has a privileged point of view of the play. It is this spectatorial position that, he holds, must judge the play and the moral compass against the Good (TD1.452). Yet such a privileged perspective is one that must ultimately be judged as finalized, comprehensive, and epic. In reality, our judgments are always “from the middest,” as Frank Kermode terms it,19 fragmentary and opaque; we are not given the privilege of an aperspectival view. The spectator cannot watch distantly and aloofly, meditating on the significance of the tragic action with time and history stopped, as it were, yet Balthasar’s approach to drama leads precisely to this antimodern illusion. It is in friction with the overall goal of a theo-drama that imagines theology, like human experience, as performative and unfinalized. A recurrent strain in Balthasar’s writing is just this friction between his distancing mode and theological nisus. At times Balthasar describes a fluidity

19

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Kermode, Sense, 9.

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and uncertainty, an openness in his theological vision that is nontotalizing. “People [i.e., spectators of a drama] are continually stepping from the auditorium onto the stage to join in the action, and ultimately there is no such person as a pure spectator: everyone has some part to play” (TD3.534). There is “a singleness of meaning that can come only from God. . . . It is a case of the play within the play: our play ‘plays’ in his play” (TD1.20). “In theo-drama, furthermore, man is startled out of his spectator’s seat and dragged onto the ‘stage’; the distinction between stage and auditorium becomes fluid, to say the least” (TD2.19). These asides are quickly muted however, so that the insight is destroyed: “Thus we cannot rush blindly into the ‘performance’ but must first try, in this volume, to reach a standpoint from which we can proceed to the dramatic action” (TD2.19). Must we? Or is the performance already ongoing, and unstoppable, with no standpoint available for such observations? Problematical for Balthasar is that, somehow, he wants there to be no true spectator, yet at the same time he evokes a sense of the distant, objective, and judging spectator. The viewer is seemingly without a perspective or context, which is out of sync with drama’s clashing perspectives. In the end, all the world’s a stage, even for the audience, and there is no caesura from which to calmly and logically examine things. All creatures perform and are judged, and any sense of uninvolved watching is specious; all is perspectival, including the audience, yet Balthasar’s hermeneutics and system defeat this realization through the creation of a distance that is ultimately illusive. Such a distance, with no sense of perspective or conditionality, is ultimately God’s alone.20 Only God can see things outside of any sense of involvement, prejudice, and temporality. In reality, the human perspective is never distant, never objective or uninvolved. A truly objective view is possible only for God. The inability to grasp the absolute horizon, or its center, is the reality of perspectivism, and its significance is only alluded to on occasion in Balthasar’s theology. At times he does sound more modern and perspectival: Christianity is “one option among many,” and it must “seek to establish its credibility” without being “so ‘compelling’ as to vitiate the act of free faith and free self-surrender.”21 In his work on Gregory of 20

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Karen Kilby notes how Balthasar writes from an impossibly transcendent position. Karen Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2012), 151–2. Balthasar, Epilogue, 15.

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Nyssa, he comments, “ There is never a historical situation that is absolutely similar to any of the ones that preceded it in time. Thus there is never a historical situation that can furnish us with its own solutions as a kind of master key capable of resolving all the problems that plague us today.”22 Balthasar acknowledges this veracity himself, stating that divine revelation is never translatable into “any neutral truth or wisdom that can be ‘taught’ ” (TD1.16). Such realizations ultimately result in retreats, however, as when he discusses Christianity and the horizon of meaning. After referencing “the unique horizon that man himself cannot construct” (TD1.321), his next paragraph confidently holds that “[a]ll post-Christian drama can be regarded as a fragment of drama that presses toward the Christian horizon.” The Christian center is something he is confident about, and it is available to the careful reader or spectator. Balthasar has, in this regard, defeated one of his own aims, because he has become epic here. The epic possesses the distanced view that sees the whole, closed and finalized, without the sense of lived reality that is “in the middest.” The epical sense is what is created in these removed watchings of the uninvolved dramatic spectator, who is, for Hegel and Balthasar, a “reflecting moral person . . . external and uninvolved . . .” (TD1.56). The spectator, misguided by the distance from the stage, is led into a false, removed sense of objectivity that is exactly against which Balthasar has been inveighing. A dramatic view means dynamism, involvement, and closeness, not a false, distanced aseity. Yet Balthasar wants to “establish the standpoints of the ‘characters,’ rather as one arranges the pieces before a game of chess and takes account of the way in which each piece ‘moves’ ” (TD2.18), as if the game has not already begun and is always in process. He wants a clear moral perspective to be present to offer the theological, moral, and divine way out of the drama, as well as to offer the Christological form. Literature, however, is murkier than such theological clarity allows, and as its history of interpretation evidences. This false sense of distance invades Balthasar’s authorial self-awareness as well, as it did for Hegel. Neither thinker addresses his own position within his magisterial theological visions, but instead hovers above the system as a whole. One of Hegel’s early critics, for example, noted

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Balthasar, Presence, 10.

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that Hegel’s philosophy fails to acknowledge the Kantian point that human experience is, by definition, limited.23 Balthasar does not reference his own position as theologian from within his theo-drama who mediates among the drama, the horizon of God, and the spectator, but rather presents it all as simply something ex nihilo. Such an epic tendency from a theologian so avowedly anti-epic is surprising and ironic, but the charge has been laid against Balthasar before. Quash launches a strong critique, that Balthasar has subsumed individuals— the saints—to an ecclesial model of Marian disponibility, rather than freely identifying the Christ form in fresh and unlimited transpositions.24 His image of Mary is static, embracing his concepts of Eucharist and the Church; she is “understood in a priori terms, as the condition for all eucharistic encounter and participation.”25 These unchanging forms are complete, epic, and undramatic, and they infect Balthasar’s theology throughout. The problem is that, as Lucy Gardner comments, the “. . . ‘Marian watermark’ can be detected throughout his massive theology and clearly forms a significant aspect of his work . . .”26 Even the mostly gentle essays in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar cannot avoid critiquing Balthasar’s oppressive and troubling notions regarding gender. Man remains the normative way of human existence, so that “woman in Balthasar’s theology lacks substance, subjectivity, and a voice of her own.”27 Gardner concludes that “it is tempting to wonder whether his theology must, as it were, stand or fall today by the accuracy or acceptability of its account of sexual difference in which woman appears to be always second, receptive, responsive, never first.”28 For Balthasar, all humanity is in a sense feminine and receptive, like Mary. Yet the male still has priority, and this essentialist problem is “not very satisfactorily modified” by the derivative 23

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“As a result, [F.A.] Lange concludes, Hegel’s philosophy fails to appreciate Kant’s critical point that human experience is limited: ‘The great relapse of Hegel compared with Kant consists in his entirely losing the idea of a more universal mode of knowing things than the human mode of knowing them.” Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 30. Quash, Theology, 188. Also see Kilby, Balthasar. Quash, Theology, 190. Gardner, “Mary,” 64. Crammer, “Sex,” 102. Crammer cites Loughlin, who criticizes Balthasar for his sense that gender unity “is finally and only male,” which extends to humanity as well as the Trinity itself. Gerard Loughlin, “Sexing the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 79 (1998): 20. Gardner, “Mary,” 77.

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response of the female, as Rowan Williams comments.29 Balthasar’s tendency is toward the epic and monologic, and not the dramatic, as he intends. Balthasar’s notion of objective distance creates a situation that it is decidedly not free. The cyclopean distance that was to yield freedom is actually oppressively monocular. His goal of a kind of existential objectivity for the spectator leads to a false sense of completion, which is destructive of particularity, context, and freedom. Ironically, a closer and more subjective view is actually more freeing, for it remains nonepic and uncompleted. It is the willingness to engage as one perspective among many that has a greater sense of freedom. This does not mean nihilism, for perspectives are still meaningful and capable of being disproven. Hart is a good example of a willing theological perspectivism; the beautiful, Hart proclaims, “is always situated in perspectives, vantages, points of departure . . .”30 Theology can never prescind itself from reality and the struggle for the good, as Balthasar himself is aware. Yet there is precisely this hovering tendency in Balthasar, and it is connected to his patrician and Hegelian tendencies that so abjure the modern novel. What Balthasar needs, overall, is a sense of a narrator who participates in the drama. The narration that he obliquely condemns (TD1.17) would actually repair his epic tendencies, relate to literature in a less univocal way, and better engage with modernity. These problems of distance, perspectivism, and freedom are best understood by way of contrast with Thomas Hardy’s twelfth published novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).This particular novel establishes the importance of a perspectived narrator, whose position of closeness with respect to the narrative and reader grants more freedom than any sense of distanced objectivity. The sense of Hardy’s narrator aids Balthasar’s theology in being less distanced and undramatic.

Hardy’s narratorial closeness in Tess of the d’Urbervilles If perspectivism is taken as a given, then the place of the narrator must be one of another, accompanying perspective. The narrator may have a privileged place—he knows the story’s end, expressing it in the past tense 29 30

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Williams, “Balthasar,” 45. Hart, Beauty, 19.

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as Hardy does—but is still limited, responsive, and modally variable. This is precisely the type of narrator one finds in Hardy’s novels: close, observing, and involved, a perspective that functions as an accompanying point of view for the reader. It is especially true in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, making it an excellent conversation partner with Balthasar on these issues of distance, freedom, and the narrator. The novel describes the life of Tess, the eponymous heroine who suffers “the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love” (TDU 42.281). The news that her impoverished family is descended from the old aristocratic family of the d’Urbervilles, along with the death of their family horse (which is their sole means of income), sends Tess to seek help from the wealthy Stoke family, who has bought into the d’Urberville name. The 18-year old Tess is raped or seduced (this issue will be discussed later) by the roguish Alec Stoke-d’Urberville. Tess attempts to escape that defining event and the futile promise of her aristocratic lineage by leaving home, and her new life at Talbothays dairy leads to a painfully happy romance with Angel Clare. After much vacillation, she marries him without confessing her tragic past. Angel, a seemingly progressive thinker, proves to be traditionalist in sexual mores; when Tess does confess her great secret on their wedding night, he abandons her. Left to fend for herself, Tess begins a pilgrimage of field labor and encroaching poverty until she re-encounters Alec, to whom she becomes a mistress to save herself and her family from destitution. Angel’s eventual return and repentance prove to be too late (an early working title for the novel being, Too Late, Beloved!), and his reappearance catalyzes Tess to kill Alec. The lovers briefly evade search parties, spending a brief idyll in a vacant mansion, yet Tess is captured at Stonehenge for the murder of Alec. Tess is hanged for Alec’s murder with one of Hardy’s more infamous conclusions, “the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess,” and Angel is seen departing with Tess’ younger sister, ‘Liza-Lu (TDU 49.397). This particular novel remains, perhaps, the most-read and popular of Hardy’s novels. Millgate declares it “unmistakably his finest novel,”31 and Casagrande comments that it had the greatest impact on subsequent modern

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Millgate, Career, 263.

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novelists.32 Helen Gardner names it, along with The Mayor of Casterbridge, as among a handful of authentic modern tragedies.33 Tess is a thoroughly rich and developed character, and her powerful presence goes far to explain the novel’s enduring influence. She possesses great depths of feeling—Edith Hamilton’s sole definition of tragedy34—as when she is described as “deeperpassioned” than the other dairy maidens (TDU 21.138), as well as being selfrecriminating, fiercely proud, loyal to her family, and independent. Unlike classical tragedy, however, she is opposed by social and economic forces, in addition to the more classical oppositions of an enemy, the self, and choice. She is similar to Hardy’s other tragic protagonists, who echo traditional tragedy as well as elements of modern tragedy. Tess is a character who, as many critics have noted, thoroughly entranced Hardy (as did Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead). Gregor goes so far as to call Hardy’s connection to Tess as one of love.35 Millgate quotes a letter where Hardy writes, “. . . I have not been able to put on paper all that she is, or was, to me,” and Shires calls the narrator “Tess’s third suitor.”36 The narrator, we find, interjects at Tess’ seduction-rape that she “was in the hands of the spoiler” (an allusion to Judges 2:14), and rather erotically speaks of “this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer,” asking why “. . . there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive . . .” (TDU 11.74).37 The epigraph for the novel is apropos, a quote from The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1.2.115–16, “Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed/Shall lodge thee.” Famously, in the final correcting of the proofs of Tess of the d’Urbervilles before its publication, Hardy inserted this Shakespearean quote along with the subtitle: “a pure woman.”38 The novel had become, for him, deeply personal; he was more than Tess’ creator, for now he was her advocate. “Nothing is more remarkable in the novel than the extraordinary passion with which Tess is described and justified . . .” writes Millgate.39 32

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Peter J. Casagrande, Tess of the D’urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty, ed. Robert Lecker, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 117. Casagrande also states that Tess of the d’Urbervilles is often considered to be Hardy’s finest novel (17). Gardner, Religion, 93. Ted R. Spivey, “Thomas Hardy’s Tragic Hero,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 9 (1954): 182. Gregor, Web, 203. .Millgate, Career, 267; Shires, “Aesthetic,” 155. “Even the narrator, erotically fascinated with her, seems ambivalent about a sexual Tess.” Kristin Brady, “Tess and Alec: Rape Or Seduction?,” in R. P. Draper (ed.), Hardy: The Tragic Novels, 160. Millgate, Biography Revisited, 293. Millgate, Career, 268.

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Within the novel itself, love is at times portrayed as bordering on divinization and worship, as Tess imagines Angel as her “divine being” (TDU 32.202) and looks at him “with her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them . . . as if she saw something immortal before her” (TDU 31.192). Tess too is “one of those classical divinities” (TDU 33.212). If the splendor of beauty is inherently attractive, as Balthasar argues in The Glory of the Lord (GL1.32–3), then Hardy’s relationship to his creation is of such an enraptured quality. There is a narratorial closeness in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where the narrator is conditioned by events as are the other perspectives. Hardy is famous for the strangely observing, judging role of his narrators, who view the events along with the reader and offer comments, judgments, or insights. “He [the narrator] simultaneously desires to remain unnoticed and to play a part in the action.”40 Hardy emphasizes sight among the physical senses; people are always watching, seeing, and spying one another,41 including the narrator and even animals. “As she looked round Durbeyfield [Tess] was seen moving along the road,” is how we are first introduced to the heroine (TDU 2.14). The book ends with the “gazers,” Angel and ‘Liza-Lu who watch for the flag signaling Tess’ execution (TDU 59.397). Hardy’s gazing, unlike Balthasar’s uninvolved spectator, is part of the action; there is no caesura here for contemplation at a safe distance.

Narratorial uncertainties This viewing narrator remains, like all perspectives, limited. The person of Elfride Swancourt, Hardy’s heroine from A Pair of Blue Eyes, is discernible “only to those who watched the circumstances of her history,”42 yet like The Mayor of Casterbridge’s Michael Henchard we can never see her wholly.43 Hardy’s restless perspectivism means that subjectivity is always undermined by other, competing points of view, even for the narrator. The narrator may know the story’s complete arc, but there are things still unknown and hidden; his view remains limited. The narrator is not a mediator nor a “dramatised 40 41 42

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Grossman, “Hardy,” 636. Miller, Distance, 7. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Alan Manford, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1 (ch. 1). James R. Kincaid, “Hardy’s Absences,” in Dale Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches, 209.

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consciousness,” but “a distinctive presence existing alongside the characters, undergoing the same experiences as they undergo, reflecting upon them as they do.”44 This limited perspective among a panoply of other points of view is consonant with classic tragedy, as Poole describes it: It is not just that tragedy makes room for different kinds of eloquence; it is the differences between voices that makes the space for tragedy. No one voice can monopolize the diversity through which tragedy composes a coherence out of the pain and mystery and incoherence of “it all”.45

This is a far cry from Balthasar’s criterion of a moral compass from which to adjudicate a drama; such a norm creates (along with the horizon of meaning) a false coherence that genres such as tragedy ultimately resist. For Hardy’s narrators, who do not monopolize in an epic fashion, some things remain unknowable and imperceptible. Hardy’s narratorial eye, for example, leaves death-scenes off-stage, so that we are never given directly the deaths of Hardy’s tragic heroes. Eustacia drowns unseen in the weir, leaving scholarly debate as to whether it was a suicide or accident, while Henchard dies with only his feebly magnificent hand-written will to speak of his calamitous losses. Knight and Smith arrive to woo Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes, only to find that she has already died.46 Although we are present for Jude’s death-bed scene and the surrounding cacophony of words, it is “arrestingly undwelt on” by Hardy, who moves instead to events outside and Arabella’s flirtations.47 For Tess, her death is only indirectly witnessed by Angel and her sister from afar, as they see the black flag is hoisted that signals her execution. Hardy’s narrator in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is without an omniscient distance that can see all in an epic completion. He remains uncertain about some elements of his own narrative, and this is evident in two major scenes of the novel: Tess’ rape-seduction, and her execution, neither of which do we experience directly. The nature of Tess’ sexual encounter with Alec is debatable. The event was revised significantly by Hardy, and has thus provided grist for scholars, although a consensus seems to have evolved that it was a 44 45 46 47

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Gregor, Web, 31–2. Poole, Shakespeare, 87. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 346. Eagleton, Novel, 238.

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blurred “rape-seduction.”48 William Davis notes that English law at the time would have considered Tess’ lack of consent (she is asleep) to be rape, but he argues for a second stage of seduction enabled by Alec’s sexual mastery, as Tess remains at Tantridge for several weeks.49 Mary Jacobus’ essay, “Tess’s Purity,” argues for a devolving portrayal in the revisions from Hardy’s original manuscript, where Tess is sexual and seduced, to his later revisions that make Tess more pure and Alec (and Angel) more dark.50 Hardy himself seems somewhat unsure of the proper portrayal of that night, and he tinkered with the issue, trying to clarify it while suiting the Grundyism of some of his readers. As a critic summarized his redactions, “Hardy’s original portrayal of Tess shows more physical familiarity between Tess and Alec before her loss of virginity in The Chase . . . [Hardy’s] emphasis on Tess’ victimization, increased in the later stages of the manuscript.”51 Clearly it is a complex situation that includes the issues of Tess and her family’s nearimpoverishment, her physical beauty, Alec’s rapacious history and economic power over her, and some level of violence. Throughout these difficult issues, Hardy’s narrator is not oppressive nor subjectively hegemonic, as the polyphony of voices, responses, and opaque causations establish. Nor does the narrative wallow in subjectivism or invalidate the reader’s own capacity to judge and interpret. Instead, Hardy’s realism recognizes the complexities of life and the opacity of events. Furthermore, the narrative style contributes to a sense of uncertainty. The narrator communicates in an uneven style that contributes to the limited and personable presence of the narrator; it is provisional, incomplete, human, and at times judging. As one critic comments, “His method is not to blend together the disparate constituents of the fiction but to leave them—individual,

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“It is in the end impossible to ascertain precisely what happened during that September night on The Chase . . .” and the narrator remains ambiguous about it, as is Tess’ “interior monologue.” What is significant is that the sexual relationship continues for some weeks afterwards. Brady, “Tess,” 162–3. Davis’ essay summarizes that H. M. Daleski, Ellen Rooney, Kristen Brady, Juliet Grindle, and Simon Gatrell all describe the relationship and event as ambiguous. Jr. Davis, William A., “The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual Assault,” Nineteenth Century Literature 52 (1997): 221. Jacobus points to the palimpsest of the early seduced Tess, who was transformed into the later “near-rape” narrative, so that “[l]ike Milton, Hardy has produced two versions of the fall . . .” Brady, “Tess,” 328. Davis, “Rape,” 229. Mary Jacobus, “Tess’s Purity,” Essays in Criticism 26 (1976): 318–38. Brady, “Tess,” 158–62. Brady adds that the narrator, unsure of Tess’ sexuality, withdraws from her at the critical moments of her life (160).

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identifiable—in permanent suspension. If there is incongruity, Hardy himself is not disturbed by it.”52 In regard to the famous final paragraph of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Gregor observes how: . . . Hardy, true to his practice, makes his conclusion multiple in emphasis. . . . [The second sentence] shifts from metaphysics to history. . . . These two sentences are followed by two others which indicated contrary possibilities. . . . For him, it is the four sentences taken together which constitute a human truth, by catching in varying lights, flux followed by reflux, the fall by the rally; it is this sense of continuous movement which suggests that the fiction which records it should be described as “a series of seemings”.53

Nor does a provisional point of view preclude the ability to make judgments or condemnations, as when the narrator plangently philosophizes at Tess’ seduction-rape. Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen and marked and coveted that day by the wrong man, and not by a certain other man . . . In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. . . . Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. (TDU 5.43–4)

The narrator is inserting himself overtly here, judging that Alec is “the wrong man” and Angel the right one. He is intimately involved and watching the narrative, but not from one of Balthasar’s false, offstage distances. There is no place here for a mapping of the dramatis personae of the playbill before the performance begins, as Balthasar does for volumes two and three of the Theo-Drama. Hardy’s narrator is not a spectator in the audience before a play, but part of the drama itself, as it unfolds. This closeness of the narrator, who is involved within the tragic narrative as an accompanying perspective, does not mean a disorienting subjectivism as Balthasar would have it. Instead, the obverse is true: such a presence remains strangely freeing and permissive. 52 53

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Millgate, Career, 278. Gregor, Web, 196–7.

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The narrative remains open and incomplete as it progresses, what Quash calls “unframeable,”54 because of this narratorial propinquity. Hardy’s perspectivism, seen in the multiple perspectives in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, reflects a modern point of view. It forces a provisionality in his work that Balthasar, with his distances and horizon of meaning, is thoroughly lacking. Hardy reflects the Kantian realization that perception is always interpretation, as it is shaped unconsciously by the self.55 Hardy wrote, “We don’t always remember as we should that in getting at the truth we get only at the true nature of the impression that an object, etc., produces on us, the true thing in itself being still beyond our knowledge, as Kant shows.”56 Similarly, “Nature is an arch-dissembler. . . . nothing is as it appears.”57 Thus, as Millgate comments, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is filled with a “multiplicity of lightly invoked frames and patterns . . . [and a] wider range of referents— mythological, biblical, and literary as well as historical and sociological . . .”58 The novel lacks an objective viewpoint because, as a modern genre, there is no such objectivity. In the modern era, no distance is truly objective, since there is no outside point of view in a Kantian, Darwinian world. This perspectivism of Hardy means that any sense of organizing patterns remain “multiple and contradictory.”59 They refuse us a coherent view by not holding to any one set of order exclusively. “If the imagery of a green world that suffuses the Talbothays romance is idyllic, it is also anti-romantic,” comments Higonnet.60 Hardy’s perspectivism applies to the narrator as well as the characters, however. In Hardy and in his peculiarly modern way, the narrator’s reading is “only as sharp and fitful as our own.”61 “Unfixing points of reference is ‘the ruling passion’ of Hardy’s ‘whole mind,’” Buckler argues in describing Hardy’s uniqueness in his Victorian era.62 An omniscient view is

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56 57 58 59 60

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Quash, Theology, 36. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” is that “[i]nstead of the subject changing in order to know objects [as in traditional philosophy], it is objects which are affected by the subject in our processes of knowing them. . . . We see things in space and time because space and time are forms of our sensibility.” Allen, Philosophy, 208. Hardy, Life, 261–2 (1 July 1892). Hardy, Life, 182 (21 December 1885). Millgate, Career, 269. Kincaid, “Absences,” 202. Margaret R. Higonnet, Introduction to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Tim Dolin, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2003), xxxii. Gregor, Web, 32. Buckler, Imagination, 354.

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impossible for anyone, including the narrator, who remains part of the action. Tess’ tragedy is not an immersion into subjectivity, as Balthasar might have interpreted the work, but her presence is one among the many perspectives and voices of the text. The reader is never wholly distant, but rather intimately related to literature and even, in a sense, in a posture of waiting,63 as Miller comments in regard to Hardy and the larger issues of literary criticism: The critic, moreover, does not possess a power of looking from the outside in a sovereign view which sees all the text at once as a spatial design. To understand the text he must be inside it. . . . [T]here is no escape outside the text . . . The critic adds his weaving to the Penelope’s web of the text, or unravels it so that its structure threads may be laid bare, or reweaves it, or traces out one thread in the text to reveal the design it inscribes, or cuts the whole cloth to one shape or another.64

Miller’s helpful image is of Penelope at her loom, weaving and reweaving as she awaits Odysseus’ return. She sits in proximity to the loom, closely reworking the shroud’s design again and again, but never from a distance or with a sense of epic completion or encompassment. Criticism is an act of weaving and reweaving texts, a sensitivity to meaning even as texts resist a final, univocal meaning or horizon of meaning; Hardy himself uses the image of a weaver in The Dynasts. A perspectival approach is part of the role of the literary critic, yet it is rare in Balthasar. Balthasar’s approach, in contrast, is distant and univocal, and distinctly antimodern. Tragedy’s sense of mystery, however, will not admit such an easy monologism, and it actively resists rational systematizations. Poole, in describing classic tragedy, puts it potently: Life might be simpler if we only had one eye, like the Cyclops. . . . Part of the peculiar pleasure and pain of tragedy derives from the derangement of coherence, the “common focus,” our inherent bias towards monocularity.65

Balthasar has misread both classic tragedy and the novel. His desire for a horizon of meaning, an inherent and transcending telos, leads him into 63

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Simone Weil describes schoolwork as a spiritual exercise, as the reader waits, listening, upon the solution, which forms one in the habits of prayer. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. . . . In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to out in search of it.” Weil, Reader, 49–50 (“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies”). Miller, Distance, xiii. Poole, Shakespeare, 60.

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monocularity, which is problematic if tragedy is about disparities and “the derangement of coherence.” Thus, when he reads Calderón, he cannot resist slipping into the univocal interpretation: “Like everything else in Calderon’s great hall of mirrors, this [free will] allows of analogous forms and stages, but at the decisive level, the Christian level, all ambiguity is shed” (TD1.366).66 The ambiguities and polyvocalism of literature becomes blanched and uniform within Balthasar’s strictures. His hermeneutics misjudge the novel, rejecting its perspectivism as being undramatic, untragic, and unmeaningful, when it is rightly an inheritor of the tragic tradition. The polyvocal is precisely what is celebrated by Blake, as opposed to science and univocalism: Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me . . . May God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep!”67

Tragic fatalism Although Hardy is perspectival in his approach and style, many are often left with a strong sense of tragic fatalism in Hardy. Is not Hardy an oppressive writer, famous for his gloomy novels? In reality, Hardy’s saturninity does not dominate his work exclusively, but permits other points of view. This is the immense benefit of a provisional, perspectival approach. There are many characters in his novels who achieve a happy contentment not available to his protagonists: the dairy owners (the Cricks), Tess’ parents, the Clares, Abel and Elizabeth-Jane (The Mayor of Casterbridge), the Dewy family (Under the Greenwood Tree), and Grandfather Candle (The Return of the Native). In Hardy’s most celebrated poem, “The Darkling Thrush” (CP 119), there is precisely the possibility of an unperceived joy. The funereal mood of the first two stanzas is interrupted by the third, when the thrush sings, “In a fullhearted evensong/of joy illimited.” Hardy’s choice of the word “evensong” is interesting, of course, since it suggests church worship and praise, giving the poem a religious connotation that is repeated in the last stanza with 66

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“. . . aber auf der entscheidenden Stufe, der chistlichen tritt Eindeutigkeit hervor” (TDK1.342): “but at the decisive stage, the Christian, the unambiguous (or plainness) steps forth.” Blake, in a letter to Thomas Butts (22 November 1802). Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of William Blake, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 46.

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“carolings” and then the penultimate line of “blessed Hope”—with the noun emphatically capitalized. The narrator’s response in the fourth stanza is one of rational incomprehension, for there is “little cause for carolings” on earth, “Afar or nigh around,” so that he is left to wonder at whether there is “Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/And I was unaware.” A similar position is taken with “The Impercipient” (CP 44), where the narrator “. . . must feel as blind/To sights my brethren see” regarding God, providence, and heaven. It is, in an ambiguous way, an unwelcome position, “O, doth a bird deprived of wings/Go earth-bound willfully!” Hardy finds tragedy to be his more common mode, as he writes of life’s incongruities, mishaps, and ephemerality. Yet sadness is not the only truth, as Hardy shows in his novels and poetry. There is the possibility of joy for some, Hardy knowingly records his watching a Salvation Army girl’s elated midnight dance on Stinsford Hill.68 Hardy is regretful at his own inability to perceive a blessed Hope, yet allows for its possible existence. He resented “the standard complaint about his sombreness of tone” even at the age of 85, bothering to tabulate his poems for his penultimate collection, Human Shows; according to his estimation, only two-fifths of the poems were tragic or sad, with the remaining three-fifths being reflective, amorous, or comic.69 For Balthasar, closeness means an oppressiveness, either to subjectivism and the individual, or to a group collective. Along these lines is the common misperception that sees tragedy, and especially Hardy’s tragic works, as expressing a fatalism. This notion of a malevolent providence is often termed the “Immanent Will,” Hardy’s name for one of the forces at work in The Dynasts, the “President of the Immortals” from the ending of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or even the “King of Dahomey.”70 Thus, T. R. Henn condemns Hardy—and Romeo and Juliet, for that matter—for his sense of malignancy that makes tragedy meaningless.71 Albert Guerard refers to Hardy’s “bio-philosophical determinism.”72

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Hardy, Life, 278 (4 February 1894). Hardy set this as a poem, “On Stinsford Hill at Midnight” (CP 550). Millgate, Biography Revisited, 518–19. Lerner, Mayor, 47. T. R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London: Metheun, University Paperbacks, 1966), 41. He furthers his mistake by stating that “. . . the Wessex novels leave an idealized impression of an ancient and stable world rather than an accurate almanac of Dorset.” Albert J. Guerard, Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 33.

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Similarly, Sarah Nicholson argues for the sense of malign purpose of Providence in Hardy’s novels, especially in relation to the suffering of women.73 Not only does such an interpretation make Tess—and all women, for that matter—into helpless victims, but it is an inaccuracy of Hardy that much Hardyan criticism corrects. This idea of a total, malign Fate is the classic mistake of reducing the entire tragic action to one element, as Raymond Williams argues. Death, destruction, and evil are only one element of the larger, total action in a tragic work; such a focus on a transcendent evil can only result in complacency and an end to experience, Williams concludes.74 To lapse into tragic inevitability is to fail to see the true depth of tragedy, which not only confirms disorder but also its resolution and struggle for a new order. The acceptance of tragic fatalism results in an enervating distance, as Williams contends: “[E]levating ourselves to spectators and judges, we suppress our own real role in any such action . . .”75 Distance is not appropriate in a careful consideration of tragedy, be it a tragic fatalism or a discerning of a horizon of meaning. Instead, “[w]e have to recognize this suffering in a close and immediate experience, and not cover it with names.”76 Tragic fatalism is also a misreading of classic tragedy, which similarly places this one element within a larger canvas of forces. For example, Aeschylus’ concept of Moira, like the Immanent Will of The Dynasts, possesses melioristic hope of moral progression.77 Blame for Lear’s sufferings may lie with the gods, as Gloucester says: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport. (4.1.37)

But this is clearly not an adequate summary of King Lear. Neither is the phrase, “the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport 73

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Sarah Nicholson, “The Woman Pays: Death and the Ambivalence of Providence in Hardy’s Novels,” Literature and Theology 16 (2002): 32. Williams, Tragedy, 55–9. MacKinnon also comments that “in any drama, it is the total action that is to supply the sense.” MacKinnon, “Reflections,” 171. Balthasar himself notes that “Shakespeare is very often at pains to show that, after some great tragic action, life goes on . . .” (TD1.408). Williams, Tragedy, 83. Ibid. Apollo P. D. Valakis, “The Moira of Aeschylus and the Immanent Will of Thomas Hardy,” The Classical Journal 21, no. 6 (1926): 433. Valakis notes Aeschylus’ vision of the moral progress of the gods, as the Erinyes become the Eumenides and Zeus befriends Prometheus (435–6), which parallels Hardy’s evolutionary meliorism. Samuel Hynes draws a similar conclusion. Samuel Hynes, “The Dynasts as an Example,” in Albert J. Guerard (ed.), Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, 173–4.

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with Tess” (TDU 59.397), an adequate of the whole narrative of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The narrator’s condemnatory conclusions, such as those regarding the President of the Immortals, are often grasped out of their context, as if such sententiousness exists outside the full narrative, or represent Hardy himself. It is the same mistake of thinking that the Resurrection obviates any sense of tragedy within Christian theology—a prescission of the part for the whole action. Hardy is an author who ever relied on “multiplicity and incongruity.”78 It is for these reasons that modern critics now see little Schopenhauerian influence on Hardy’s work.79 A complete determinism simply will not do at all, either for classical tragedy or Hardy. “No determinist could write an effective tragedy, could achieve the sort of deep exploration of responsibility, justice, guilt, that we find for instance in Electra or in Hamlet,” writes MacKinnon.80 Eagleton too holds to something more inscrutable than fatalism regarding freedom and responsibility; “If all the lifeboats have been launched, why not just have a drink in the bar? . . . [I]t is the fact that tragic action is not inevitable that sharpens our sense of outrage.”81 True fatalism remains mostly untenable for tragic literature, since it must deny all freedom and hope (and thus the possibility of conflict). Arthur Mizener’s conundrum is that his strong Schopenhauerian fatalism leads him to condemn Jude the Obscure for its melioristic moments, few as they are.82 For Mizener, any sense of hope precludes authentic tragedy, yet most tragic works have some hopeful elements and some sense of restoration. Williams puts it well, that “. . . most of the great tragedies of the world end not with evil absolute, but with evil 78 79

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Shires, “Aesthetic,” 147. Robert Schweik, “The Influence of Religion, Science, and Philosophy on Hardy’s Writings,” in Dale Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, 69. The interest in Schopenhauer and Hardy’s determinism marks an early phase in Hardyan criticism, which has now passed through at least two additional phases. Ian Gregor, “What Kind of Fiction Did Hardy Write?,” Essays in Criticism 16 (1966): 290–1. Millgate humorously threatens to “award maximum demerit points to any critic who ventures to mention Schopenhauer,” there should be a “moratorium on studies of Hardy’s ‘philosophy,’ ‘thought,’ or ‘view of life.’ ” Hardy simply did not produce a coherent, distinguished philosophy. Michael Millgate, “Hardy’s Fiction: Some Comments on the Present State of Criticism,” English Literature in Transition 14 (1971): 232. MacKinnon, Borderlands, 101. Eagleton, Violence, 103–6. Eagleton quotes Bertolt Brecht: “This man’s sufferings appal me because they are unnecessary” (106). Arthur Mizener, The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 56–7. In contrast, Dennis Taylor admires the “curious moments of charity, or mercy, in Jude the Obscure . . .” Dennis Taylor, introduction to Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Dennis Taylor, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 1998), xxxii.

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both experienced and lived through.”83 Evil, the hero’s destruction, and irreparable actions are, Williams argues, part of a larger, complete action, and we are mistaken if we take one element for the whole.

Hardy’s complex causations A common mis-reading of Hardy is to assume that his fatalism means a lack of freedom for his characters; they are mere puppets within a larger plot. Hardy, however, evinces in his works a notion of a complex causality, and he remains provisional in his view and judgment. There is never a solitary villain or sole cause in Hardy’s novels, because personalities, choices, circumstances, one’s actions, the actions of others, the natural order, and fate weave the tragic effect; “. . . Hardy is aware that no action is ever entirely one’s own.”84 Hardy himself refused such accusations of determinism and fatalism, and his novels are rife with the factor of human responsibility.85 Benjamin Sankey comments that Hardy’s tragedies place the fault not with fatalism, but with common, personal weaknesses, which become tragic within the complex webs of events and forces.86 Randomness, circumstance, and a sense of fatalism conflate together to form the whole arc of the tragedy. Gillian Beer concurs that for Hardy, “. . . the question of the source of the plot (in the clinic of the head, in the chaos of the universe) cannot be redeemed.”87 It is precisely this sense of opaque causation that Balthasar valorized in classic tragedy, as it provides a powerful analogy to the human state of guilt, freedom, and original sin, and Hardy develops this same sense of causal uncertainty in his novels. Opaque causation is especially evident in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where it is impossible to properly assign the blame in her catastrophe. As early as Chapter 2 we are told the legend of the beautiful White Hart, who is killed 83 84 85

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Williams, Tragedy, 60. Eagleton, Novel, 203. “Nor is it true that Hardy was a fatalist, a charge he was quick to rebuff. (He described himself as an ‘evolutionary meliorist’).” Eagleton, “Buried,” 92. Gregor too notes that many of the tragic incidents in The Return of the Native result from “the folly of the participants.” Gregor, Web, 92. Benjamin Sankey, “Hardy’s Plotting,” Twentieth Century Literature 11, no. 2 (1965): 93, 166. Beer, Plots, 240. “The events that had, as it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour of this day showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind Circumstance,” writes Hardy in one of his short stories.“Fellow Townsmen,” in Hardy, The Withered Arm and Other Stories, 18741888, 126. The Return of the Native, in particular, is concerned with falsifying a sense of cosmic inevitability, according to Gregor. Gregor, Web, 105.

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despite having been spared by the king (TDU 2.12–13) and obviously presages Tess’ fate. Yet it is Tess’ choices and inability to tell Angel her secret—“And I’ll give you my reasons to-morrow – next week” (TDU 28.177)—that also form her tragedy, as do the moral prudery and poor choices of Angel. Critics agree, noting that blame for Tess’ doom can be apportioned to Tess, society, religion, heredity, the Industrial Revolution, Alec, Angel, and the sun and stars.88 Waldorf comments that it is impossible to speak with certainty regarding Tess’ responsibility for her sufferings; there is no clarity how or why her fate is inevitable, despite the narrator’s comments about her doom.89 Her ancestry furthers the uncertainties. She may be suffering punishment for possible crimes of her aristocratic ancestors (TDU 11.74), but there are also her own flashes of aristocratic pride, courage, and temper that further her troubles. “I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!” she says (TDU 35.232). Even her mother’s rural, physical beauty has a part to play, as it attracts the attention of Alec and Angel, becoming one of the sources of her tragedy. Reading Hardy as believing in a literal, maleficent Immanent Will is quite simply a misrepresentation. Hardy’s sense of opaque causality, of the mysterious, polyvocal elements in the “great web of human doings,” as well as his own scientific beliefs are much richer than such facile readings. “. . . [I]t is hard to believe that Hardy literally believed in the President of the Immortals, any more than he believed in the Archangel Gabriel,” quips Eagleton.90 He realized and never abandoned the paradoxical problem of “reconciling Freewill and Omnipotce [sic],” as he margined on Paradise Lost.91 Hardy himself refuted the allegation that he operated out of any sense of philosophy or malevolent Prime Mover. In my fancies, or poems of the imagination, I have of course called this Power all sorts of names—never supposing they would be taken for more than fancies. I have even in prefaces warned readers to take them only as such—as mere impressions of the moment . . . no doubt people will go on thinking that I really believe the Prime Mover to be a malignant old 88

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Tony Tanner, “Colour and Movement in Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” in R. P. Draper (ed.), Hardy The Tragic Novels: A Casebook, 212. Additionally, Casagrande notes that Tess’ catastrophe is not from a tragic fall but poverty, a drunken father’s mistake, one lover’s lust and another’s idealism, and “her own murderous passion.” Casagrande, Tess, 16. Leon Waldoff, “Psychological Determinism in Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” in Dale Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, 135–7. Eagleton, Novel, 203. Millgate, Biography Revisited, 122.

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gentleman, a sort of King of Dahomey—an idea which, so far from my holding it, is to me irresistibly comic. . . . I have no philosophy—merely what I have often explained to be only a confused heap of impressions, like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show . . .92

Hardy never produced a cogent expression of his own personal philosophy, and many critics take him at his word. Ian Gregor, for example, takes “a series of seemings” as a theme for all Hardy’s work,93 and other critics make similar comments: The hideous ironies which make Hardy’s stories and poems so often tales of “It might have been!” . . . are not the product of “some mean, monstrous ironist” . . . Things happen as they happen, and only man, with his desire that events should correspond to some abstract idea of justice, or to some providential or human design, finds them ironically cruel.94

And, with his usual insight, Millgate analyzes the “inconsistency” and “juxtaposition” of the narrator’s many philosophical comments in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, arguing that they are not genuine themes or patterns but only “notations of the immediate context” that intensify the moment.95 Rather than sources of a philosophy of tragic fatalism or a coherent Hardyan belief system, they remain only partial observations. Hardy’s narrator, therefore, does not parse into a simple moralism or fatalism. In a manner congruent with Balthasar’s sense of opaque causation and with classic tragedy, causal ambiguities are present in his tragic novels. There is a freedom available here to the narrative, the reader, and the narrator; all is not known, finalized, or squared. Hardy’s narrator is, unlike Balthasar’s falsely distant spectator, closely participative in the text. His closeness points to the inherent perspectivism of the novel, which freely permits variant viewpoints within the narrative, and it is precisely this kind of narrator that is missing from Balthasar’s theology. Balthasar’s theological perspective is, in the end, impossible from a human point of view.96 92 93 94

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Hardy, Life, 439–41 (19 December 1920). Gregor, Web, 33. Miller, Distance, 77–8. “It is not true that actions in Hardy are shaped by some iron determinism; but it is true that men and women can, so to speak, determine themselves. They can act so as to paint themselves into a corner from which there is no escape.” Eagleton, Novel, 200–1. Millgate, Career, 271. Kilby, Balthasar, 151.

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The Christian possibility Hardy’s ruthless perspectivism means, not an epic oppression of endless subjectivism, but a freedom that permits other points of view, to even doubt himself and his own doubts. This is evident nowhere more than in Hardy’s depiction of religious belief. Hardy, when read within the entire tragic action of his novels and his perspectivism, is capable of “doubting his own doubt.”97 His narrators allow for multiple views, even ones that suggest realities beyond his own agnosticism. Hardy has usually been portrayed as a stereotypical Victorian agnostic or even atheist. For example, Hardy’s poem “God’s Funeral” is used as the title and opening chapter of A. N. Wilson’s book on Victorian unbelief.98 Many critics leave their comments about Hardy and Christian faith at this unambiguous level.99 Yet such a depiction evinces more about modern scholarly assumptions than Hardy himself, who was much more nuanced than such facile interpretations. In reality, Hardy was furious at being labeled the “village atheist” by Chesterton in The Victorian Age In Literature,100 and he refused an entry in A Biographical Dictionary Of Modern Rationalists on the basis that he was “rather an irrationalist than a rationalist.”101 “Few agnostics present such vexed and contradictory attitudes towards the sacred as Hardy . . .” comments one critic.102 The Victorian period was not only a time of honest doubt, but also honest faith, as Timothy Larsen has argued, so that it “is time to reintegrate faith positively into accounts of Victorian thought.”103 97

Casagrande, Tess, 26. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (London: Abacus, 2000). 99 “Considered, then, as Christian allegory, Jude is a terrible indictment of Christianity . . .” Norman Holland Jr., “ ‘Jude the Obscure’: Hardy’s Symbolic Indictment of Christianity,” NineteenthCentury Fiction 9 (1954): 57. The Return of the Native is an “anti-christian argument” showing “the disadvantage of the Christian point of view and . . . the substantial advantage of the pagan,” and Hardy’s last two novels “record in specific terms his quarrel with the Christian order of things.” John Paterson, “The Return of the Native as Antichristian Document,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 14 (1959): 127. “But Hardy’s representations of religion were most profoundly influenced by his loss of faith in Christian dogma.” Schweik, “Influence,” 55. 100 Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? Hardy’s Religious Biography and Its Influence on His Novels (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 1. “. . . Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.” G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.), 143. 101 Pamela Dalziel, “The Gospel According to Hardy,” in Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. Keith Wilson (London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 3. 102 Mary Rimmer, “‘My Scripture Manner’: Reading Hardy’s Biblical and Liturgical Allusion,” in Keith Wilson (ed.), Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, 32. 103 Timothy Larsen, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 253. 98

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This is not a baptism or co-opting of Hardy as a closet Christian, of course. He remained a highly critical and agnostic, if not atheistic, author. Hardy typically reveals a great pessimism about Christianity and the institution of the church, and he often exposes religiosity’s temptations toward the hypocritical or desperately naive. Both Alec and Jude the Obscure’s Arabella, for example, undergo evangelical conversions, but then fall into tergiversation, and Sue’s influence leads Jude to renounce his natural faith and theological interests. It is clear, in The Return of the Native, that the church has no impact on the natural paganism of the heath and its folk;104 Christian practice and faith prove to be ineffective against primordial, ineradicable beliefs or in matters of everyday living. Schweik notes how “Hardy from time to time portrayed Christianity as a transient and ineffectual creed based on dubious legends no longer believed.”105 Witchcraft, sorcery, and the grotesque are always potent options for the people of Wessex.106 Furthermore, many Christian figures are depicted in his fiction from hypocritical to condemnatory. The sign painter of Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a cruel passion for painting “horrible,” condemning scriptures on public spaces (TDU 12.79–81), and the parson who refuses to baptize Tess’ dead, illegitimate child is clearly a cowardly hypocrite (TDU 14.96–7). Elfride’s vicar father in A Pair of Blue Eyes is an innocuous tartuffe, who chuckles at offensive jokes without sharing them,107 and is relieved to not have to say daily prayer for a guest.108 In Wessex, Christian faith is often hypocritical, unimportant, or momentary. Hardy’s attitude was shaped by his reading, intellectual experiences, and milieu. Hardy was in his twenties and living in London when he appears to begin doubting his Christian faith,109 after experimenting with Tractarianism

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Paterson, “Antichristian,” 125–6. Schweik, “Influence,” 57. 106 Witchcraft features significantly in The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the 1888 short story, “The Withered Arm.” Susan Nunsuch, Henchard, and Gertrude Lodge all turn to sorcery in moments of crisis. Hardy had a “taste for the extraordinary, the melodramatic, and even the macabre.” Millgate, Career, 265. Hardy admitted to often believing “spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, &c., &c.” Hardy, Life, 400 (1915). 107 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 20 (ch. 3). 108 “To tell you the truth [said Rev Swancourt] . . . we don’t make a regular thing of it [morning prayer]; but when we have strangers visiting us, I am strongly of opinion that it is the proper thing to do, and I always do it. I am very strict on that point.” Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 35 (ch. 5). 109 Hands, Preacher, 31. Hands’ argument is that, at this point in his life, Hardy was something of an evangelical, and his evangelical friends may have contributed to his doubts (29). An evangelical sermon by Hardy, dated 24 October 1858 (when Hardy was eighteen), corroborates Hands’ argument. Dalziel, “Gospel,” 8–9. 105

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and Evangelicalism.110 Darwin and science pointed, for him, to a “provisional view of the universe,” and he described himself as an early “acclaimer of The Origin of Species” who was drawn to Essays and Reviews’ “ The Seven against Christ.”111 As Eagleton comments, “If Hardy was an atheist, it was because he did not think the universe added up to an integrated scheme any more than his novels did. There was no grand narrative to the world . . .”112 Hardy’s challenge to Christian faith was strongly intellectual, as he remained agnostic regarding God or any kind of aperspectival human possibility. Dogma seemed an impossibility, and he expressed a desire for a church that was creedless, an “undogmatic, non-theological establishment.”113 Until this doubt, Hardy had desired to take holy orders and become an Anglican clergyman.114 Hardy, however, reveals a more nuanced approach to Christianity and religion than a wholehearted rejection or lampooning; despite his criticisms, he retains a Christian sensibility. His relationship to Christianity is multifaceted and opaque. He possessed an intellectual agnosticism, but critics have observed Hardy’s enduring emotional attachment to religion.115 This is due, in part, to the enormous role religion played in the Victorian era.116 Hardy clearly had an astonishing command of the Bible, and his library shows regular reading and digestion of Scripture.117 He had a lifelong love of liturgy and Christian worship, having described himself as nonintellectually “churchy,”118 with “an acute emotional susceptibility to the music and rituals of the Church of England . . .” as Millgate observes.119 The solution to the problem of Hardy’s 110

P. W. Coxon, “Thomas Hardy’s Atittude Towards Christianity,” in Dimensions: Literary and Theological, ed. D. W. D. Shaw (Fife: St. Mary’s College, 1992), 35. 111 Hardy, Life, 214 (February 1888), 158 (16 February 1882), 37 (1860–61). 112 Eagleton, “Buried,” 92. 113 Hands, Preacher, 99. 114 Hardy says, at the age of 25, that he “could hardly take the step [of ordination] with honour while holding the views that on examination he found himself to hold.” Hardy, Life, 53 (23 August 1865). He already has doubts about Newman’s Apologia (50–1, 2 July 1865). 115 Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 91. 116 “Throughout the Victorian period, however, it was assumed that a man’s religious life was so intimately bound up with his social existence and behaviour that to ignore it was to sacrifice a major insight into the influences forming a man’s character.” Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 2. 117 Vance, “Eliot,” 484. Schweik notes that “his fiction is saturated with biblical allusions. . . . [I]n some novels they form patterns that obviously play important roles.” Schweik, “Influence,” 56. Rimmer points to how, in the novels and for Hardy himself, “biblical knowledge is praiseworthy.” Rimmer, “Manner,” 23. 118 Hardy, Life, 407 (7 March 1917). 119 Millgate, Biography Revisited, 41.

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burial was to inter his body in Westminster Abbey, but to place his heart in the graveyard of his Stinsford parish church—a gruesome if not inappropriate division of the multifaceted author. If a mental rejection is part of Hardy’s attitude to Christianity, then there is the further nuance that many elements of his “churchy” intellectual ideas remain as well, as Dalziel argues.120 She comments on a recovered evangelical sermon by a young Hardy, and concludes that though he lost his belief in God, he did not cease to believe in merciful love; his central concerns of “the law as curse, on suffering, and on the saving force of love,” dating from his evangelical period, were static throughout his life.121 His novels, as Chapter 4 argued, reflect a Biblical tragic realism. More potently, Hardy rejected a Nietzschean attack on Christianity as a slave morality, instead hewing to the Christian virtues of charity and loving-kindness.122 If anything, as Vance comments, he indicts the universe for its lack of Christian qualities as much as he indicts Christianity and the church.123 Despite his avowed agnosticism, elements of Christian loving-kindness remained a concern of Hardy throughout his life and work,124 and his judgment of World War I was that it was “an absolute negation of Christianity.”125 His “ambiguous anthropomorphism” denies any human centrality in cosmos, but he always esteems human values, especially mercy and kindess.126 Dalziel’s conclusion is that, in many ways, Hardy “remained throughout his life profoundly Christian, not only culturally and emotionally, but also ethically and even to some extent theologically.”127

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Dalziel, “Gospel,” 7. Ibid., 13, 15. 122 Vance, “Eliot,” 490. 123 Ibid., 492. 124 “‘Loving-kindness’ was one of Hardy’s favourite words, and it is a feeling which we find suffusing many of his poems. Few poets have shown so much sympathy for the sufferings of others. Like an evangelist he wanted his work read . . .” James Gibson, introduction to Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, by Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), xxxv. Hardy was somewhat sympathetic to Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, yet he disagreed profoundly with them as well. “Just as Schopenhauer’s claim to take a detached view of life was foreign to Hardy’s engaged concern for the suffering humankind and higher animals, so was von Hartmann’s celebration of an Unconscious evolving at the expense of untold human pain.” Schweik, “Influence,” 70. 125 Thomas Hardy, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88), 5:72. 126 Beer, Plots, 252. 127 Dalziel, “Gospel,” 14. 121

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Christianity and the Clare family Within the context of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy’s portrayal of Angel’s parents is poignant and arresting. Millgate notes how the Clares are based on Hardy’s knowledge of Rev Henry Moule’s large, evangelical, and largely devout family, with whom he was friendly his whole life.128 If most of Hardy’s parsons are insincere or hypocritical, Rev Clare and his wife are a stark contrast. Mr Clare is a genuine enthusiast and believer. “One thing he certainly was – sincere,” notes the narrator (TDU 25.158). He and his wife are merciful and generous to a fault, making them otherworldly and strict. Mr Clare, the narrator comments, “had to the full the gift of charity” (TDU 44.301). When Tess fails to meet Mr and Mrs Clare and, instead, overhears Angel’s hypocritical brothers, the narrator makes a rather surprising judgment as Tess departs. . . . [S]he went her way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life [italics mine] was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases . . . [and this] might have recommended their own daughterin-law to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love. (TDU 44.301)

The next moment in Tess’ life creates a new irony, as she reencounters Alec as a reformed evangelical preacher. His conversion has come about through Mr Clare’s preaching and turning the other cheek, yet like Clare’s sons the message has not been genuinely adopted by Alec. These two scenes and persons, placed in proximity in the narrative, invite comparison. Alec is a tragic surrogate for the kind mercy Tess would have received from the Clares; such authentic charity is, however, impossible for him. Hardy does qualify his portrayal of the Clares. They are alien, even slightly inhuman, because they are without the natural desires that define so many of Hardy’s characters. In a revealing scene, the Clare sons are left to wait for their parents, “the self-denying pair,” in order to eat the family dinner. Mr and Mrs Clare have not yet returned from “coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners . . . their own appetites being quite forgotten” 128

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Millgate, Biography Revisited, 67, 422.

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(TDU 25.160–1). Angel has brought mead and black puddings, which are gifts from the dairyman and his family, and is expecting them all to enjoy this food for their family meal. Angel is disappointed, however, that instead it is “a frugal meal of cold viands,” and not the dairyman’s black-puddings with their “marvellous herbal savours” (TDU 25.161). The Clares had already taken the black-puddings to the children of a sick man, and the mead had been deposited in the medicine chest for future medical need. Angel is put off, especially as he fears how to tell the dairyman’s wife—“a kind, jolly sort of body,” in contrast to his own abstemious family (TDU 25.161)—when she asks how the gifts were enjoyed. Mr Clare “lucidly” instructs him to tell the truth, presumably because one must always tell the truth, even at the cost of hurting the feelings of the dairyman and his wife. This is a strict yet sincere family, almost inhuman in their dispassion for worldly pleasures, yet starkly generous and caring. Their children, like Samuel’s sons in the Old Testament, have not inherited the parents’ authentic religiosity; the ordained ones are pompous and self-absorbed, and Angel is a muddled mix of liberalism and prudery. Their portrayal, along with Alec’s brief Evangelical conversion, makes it “the only novel which captures the flavour of this period of spiritual excitement [late 1850s],” according to Jay.129 It is a positive if difficult portrayal of an authentic Christianity, placed within a novel where Christianity is hypocritical, oppressive, or superstitious. Once again, Hardy’s provisionality is at work, and here it permits a kind of authentic and respectable Christian living, even if it is painfully self-denying. The Clares embody the charity and kindness that Hardy so valorizes, and prove to be a kind of Christian exception. For Hardy it is the cosmos itself which lacks Christian or humanistic values; the cosmos, if we were to apply the ending of The Dynasts, must learn human values, “till It fashion all things fair!” (The Dynasts 3.10.110). Hardy’s ideal life for humanity is, in the end, a secularized form of the Sermon on the Mount.130 His hopes for some sort of human and historical meliorism, rooted in Christian values, prove baseless in the face of World War I. With Europe at war, Hardy became despondent, as his meliorism seemed unfounded.131 129

Jay, Religion, 118. Mizener, Sense, 58. 131 Millgate, Biography Revisited, 458. Hardy’s “kind heart melted,” however, when he was later able to host German prisoners of war at his home (471). 130

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Hardy remains unwilling to wholly dismiss Christianity, as it informed his emotions and even his thoughts. To the end, “. . . Hardy did not advance any substitute for the religious faith he had lost,”132 nor did he engage in “the general smear campaign tactics usually employed.”133 Yet neither did he seek to completely dismantle or disprove it, holding that religion “must be retained unless the world is to perish.”134 The presence of this “Christian possibility” in Hardy’s novels shows that the form of the novel is neither epic nor subjective, but provisional, polyphonic, and dramatic, in a Bakhtin sense; it is not oppressive but strangely permissive, precisely in the lack of illusive distance that Balthasar is so interested in constructing. Life remains “in the middest,” not falsely objective and aperspectival. Hardy’s narrator and ruthless perspectivism show that the novel can admit to a plurality of views, as well as the possibility of Christianity.

Balthasar’s undramatic Theo-Drama Balthasar’s theological goal for the volumes of the Theo-Drama is “to show how theology underlies” the phenomenon of the theater, “and how all the elements of the drama can be rendered fruitful for theology” (TD1.9). The stage-drama, as life lived in “the middest” with free persons (lyric) in dramatic union with the plot (epic), is what makes the authentic drama of world history. His intention is one of movement, uncertainty, and provisionality, and the goal is for a less epic, more dramatic, and more provisional theology. The reality that there is a last act and conclusion to the theo-drama of the world forces the theologian to be less certain and uninvolved, more the theologia viatorum he alludes to in his final volume (TD5.508). Drama being Balthasar’s nisus, it is disappointing how his implementation remains flawed. The model of the removed spectator watching a performed stage drama has misled Balthasar, for it has granted him a sense of objective spectatorship that is inconceivable. He is closer to a dramatic approach 132

Schweik, “Influence,” 58. Jay, Religion, 121. 134 Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 562 (Apology to Late Lyrics and Earlier). Along with religion being requisite was also the need for “rationality” for the world’s survival, as the quotation concludes. 133

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when he speaks of a perspectivism, that God’s truth is manifested plurally, in the “Christian theologies and world-pictures of the highest rank . . .” (GL2.13). This pluralism rightly originates in God’s fullness, whose revelation overwhelms (GL2.14). It is in this kind of pluralism that Radical Orthodox theologians such as Milbank and Hart willingly work.135 Balthasar mars his theological drama, however, when he characteristically steps backward to achieve an objective vista, thus failing his intended dramatism. He slips into a static mode, even as he intends for dynamism: “We must devote ourselves to this apparently ‘static’ problem first, before turning explicitly to the dynamic action. As we have said, however, nothing is purely static in theo-drama . . . We must once again circle around this point of departure” (TD2.18–19). Balthasar’s unexamined authorial distance, which is without a sense of narratorial perspective, contributes to the problem. Like a spectator within his own theology, he views the theological vistas as complete and comprehensive, with little sense of perspective or authorial self-awareness. Balthasar, troublingly, does not delineate his own role as the author-theologian within the theo-drama.136 He seems simply to have not considered the issue, or to have assumed a rather Hegelian sagacity on the matter. This is ironic, since the recent century has been one of intimate awareness of the problems of perspective, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, and points to the ultimately antimodern orientation of his work. The absence of a self-conscious narrator leaves his encompassing theological aesthetics, The Glory of the Lord, without being fully formed by his goal of an enraptured beauty or theo-drama. Aesthetics and dramatics are meant, as Balthasar indicates, to be interrelated; “Thus, right at the heart of the Aesthetics, the ‘theological drama’ has already begun” (TD1.15). Glory is meant to transport us, to be personal and close, yet the volumes are distanced, didactic surveys of beauty’s form in its subjective and objective evidence (GL1), the presentation of beauty in theological styles (GL2–3), metaphysical beauty in antiquity and modernity (GL4–5), and God’s glory in the Old and

135

Milbank begins with, “If my Christian perspective is persuasive . . .” and proceeds to argue for theology as a true meta discourse. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1. Hart’s book has a similar start: “. . . Is the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals, and upon which it depends, theologically defensible?” Hart, Beauty, 1. 136 Kilby, Balthasar, 151–2.

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New Testaments (GL6–7). There is no sense of an enraptured narrator at work here, as with Hardy’s sense of deep love for Tess (who remains a figure of inexpressible wonderment to Hardy),137 but rather a distantly observing rationalist. The question of Balthasar’s place and position is especially evident in The Glory of the Lord, volumes two and three. In these two works, he sets forth how God’s glory is evident “in the most diverse ways” of human life (GL2.13). Volume two is dedicated to five clerical “styles” (“Fächer der Stile”), and volume three describes seven lay theological styles. Balthasar is interested in those who made historical contributions and understood revelation as historical and contemporary (GL2.15). As Karen Kilby has noted, what is odd in these volumes is how Balthasar is strangely unaware and unacknowledging of his own position within this presentation of various styles. He is aware of the “fascinating dialogues” across the centuries between these various theologians, how one might complement and complete another (GL2.22), yet where is he among them? He himself knows that “such dialogues form together no overall system; for how should man be able to attain an overall perspective on the revelation of the living God? All that develops is a full orchestra . . .” (GL2.22). The unanswered question is, who is he, as the presenter of this system that is unattainable, whose midpoint in God is ultimately inscrutable, and yet who ultimately relates a “panoramic view of Western metaphysics” (GL4.14)? It is surprising that Balthasar does not explore the role of the ancient chorus in Greek tragedy. He mentions it (TD1.311), but makes little use of the concept. This is unfortunate, since the chorus achieves many of his goals quite admirably.138 The Greek chorus is onstage, never illusively distant or uninvolved. It interacts with the drama, taking part in events, watching, and commenting, yet always provisionally and without an epic view. The chorus is a better analogy for the theologian or, for that matter, the human person who is perceiving the play. Unlike the seated and distant spectator, the chorus is involved and participates in the drama. It is the closest dramatic analog to 137 138

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Millgate, Career, 267. Ricoeur, for example, identifies the spectator with the chorus, instead of Balthasar’s horizon of meaning. “Through the spectacle the ordinary man enters into the ‘chorus’ which weeps and sings with the hero; the place of tragic reconciliation is the ‘chorus’ and its lyricism.” Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 231.

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the novel’s narrator, but Balthasar’s lack of authorial self-awareness means the issue is never apparent. In developing his definition of theo-drama, Balthasar holds that there is no external point of view; the believer must be a witness, a martyr who gives his or her whole existence, to be part of God’s action (TD2.57). It is philosophy that so often encourages an inhuman rationalism, a cool distance beyond where life is lived in commitment and potential sacrifice. Yet in these volumes of The Glory of the Lord that discuss theological styles, he hovers within his own system, sui generis. Hegel’s astigmatism is similar; he too evinces the problem of defining his own role within his philosophy and the evolving, selfknowledge of Geist—and Hegel is present throughout Balthasar’s theology. Quash’s judgment is that Balthasar’s theology of drama is most potent when he discards an overt use of Hegel.139 A crucial problem for both Hegel and Balthasar is that there is no modern sense of perspective or narrator within their respective works. Balthasar valorizes drama for its immediacy of speech and action, unmediated through a narrator (TD1.17), yet it is precisely this lack of narrator, this illusive distance, that fuels Balthasar’s epic tendencies in his omniscient presentation of his twelve theological styles. His sense of distance has marred his work and vision, so that Balthasar’s form does not match his content. The problem extends into the Theo-Drama as well. In volume two, Balthasar himself admits that it “would be wearying to take up the methods of theological aesthetics once again,” which would mean attending to history, the relationship of the finite and the infinite, and then the drama of the Bible (TD2.10)—a comprehensive surveying of the material. Despite his comment of a wearying return, it is precisely this method of objective distance that he takes up again with volumes two and three. The form jars with the content and his nisus of a dynamic theo-drama, which is “the dynamism of the event” (TD1.16). In these volumes Balthasar sets forth the dramatis personae with the imagery of “the theatre program with its list of characters” (TD2.18), developing a theological anthropology, as well as the nature of finite and infinite freedom. His goal is to recreate the sense of being a spectator to a play, who might read the program before the curtain rises. Yet this fails to cohere

139

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Quash, Theology, 87.

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with the awareness that “nothing is purely static in theo-drama” (TD2.18), and in the end his form, with its didactic setting forth of persons, is far from matching his goals or content. Volume one of the Theo-Drama is similar as it tediously sets forth trends in modern theology, objections to the creation of a theo-drama, and the richness of the dramatic resources, which is far from the expected beginning of a truly dramatic theodramatics. It is only with volumes four and five of the Theo-Drama that Balthasar finally creates a coherence between form and content, so that the dynamism he has aimed for is finally reached. These volumes are starkly different from the other volumes of Balthasar’s theology. Rather than a staid depiction of twelve “Christian theologies and world-pictures” in volumes two and three of The Glory of the Lord, there is a sense of conflict, direct engagement, and provisionality. Volume four of the Theo-Drama is cast from the start under the book of Revelation (TD4.15), with its imagery of war and redemption, culminating in “The Battle of the Logos” (TD4.427). There is a plot that resolves itself in the Cross yet, in another sense, remains unfinished. It is a “tension [that] is so explosive that it was bound to burst into flame in the conflagration of the action; accordingly, we begin this volume ‘under the sign of the Apocalypse’. . . . The final drama has not yet taken place” (TD4.11). In his development of a dramatic soteriology, Balthasar weaves together five different motifs, “to do justice to all these aspects” (TD4.317), and here there is a greater provisionality, a reweaving of themes and texts that requires polyphony and perspectivism. “For no element may be excluded here . . . All these elements are involved simultaneously: each has its role, each belongs on stage,” and the Trinity and the Church are constitutive elements woven into the mystery of the Cross (TD4.318–19). There is a greater numinosity as soteriology stretches Balthasar’s doctrine of the Godhead; he knows he must be careful in his pronouncements on the immanent Trinity. Thus the relations within the Trinitarian Persons, the kenosis and reception within the Spirit, remain “a profound mystery of faith” (TD4.326). It requires a perspectivism, an awareness of divining a course with an eye on both Scylla and Charybdis: “[r]ather, we approach the mystery [of the Trinity, and Creation] from two sides, that is, from that of negative theology . . . and from the point of view of the world drama” (TD4.327). It

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is provisional as well: “So the circle of relationships between the two Adams is both tragic—the Cross is unavoidable—and anti-tragic (we cannot use the word ‘comic’ here), since he who is infallibly vanquished is also infallibly Victor” (TD4.473). The conclusion is a rich exploration that refuses to dissolve the paradoxical, as Balthasar theologizes without his usual prescission into a transcendent, epical view: “Our aim is not to erect a system, for the Cross explodes all systems” (TD4.319). Volume five is the Theo-Drama’s denouement, since the “ultimate theme” has already been revealed in “the action” of volume four (TD5.55). The larger plot of volumes four and five is the elucidation of Christ and Good Friday in a way that retains the mystery of the final eschaton—there can be no realized eschatology, despite the definitiveness of God’s action and revelation in Christ. Yet a vital leitmotif of these volumes is how to resolve the problem of the ongoing rejection of Christ by humanity, the potential suffering for God who “. . . encounters a [human] freedom that, instead of responding in kind to this magnanimity [of God], changes it into a calculating, cautious selfpreservation” (TD4.328). The crisis was not resolved in the Cross; in reality, it has been heightened and worsened, for to reject this self-giving of God is to reject the greater gift. The problem remains of how to resolve this theme of “the world’s ‘ever-greater’ (i.e., ever-increasing) resistance to the ‘evergreater’ divine, incarnate love” (TD5.55). The theme, it proves, is dynamic and unresolved (TD5.55), and might even be tragic for God, as one section explores (TD5.191–246)—here is a looming, involving, and dramatically conceived plot by which to structure a volume on eschatology. If Balthasar continues, on occasion, his method of surveying and charting histories of thought, it is now riven within this ongoing theological dilemma: “God has to reject the man who rejects his love” (TD5.193); “the central mystery of the theo-drama: God’s heightened love provokes a heightened hatred . . .” (TD5.285); and the nature of heaven and “existence in God” (TD5.410), which somehow must preserve the drama of life, its “constant vitality,” because even God is dynamic (TD5.511). He is forced, in considering eschatology, heaven, and earth, into “an astonished stammering as we circle around this mystery . . .” (TD5.13). He is willing, as Wainwright observes, to resist synthesis when it comes to the Final Judgment; he leaves the two perspectives of eternal damnation, and

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God’s will and power to save everyone, to stand unreconciled.140 In this sense, the questions remain unanswered, at least conceptually, although Balthasar famously hints in “the hope that all men will be saved” (TD5.316). The drama remains unresolved, from both a rational point of view and a chronological point of view, for the end of the drama has not yet occurred, and we live and move now in the shadow of the eschaton. This plot, along with the unfinalized nature of heaven and eschatology and the presence of paradox, forces Balthasar’s hand to remain more provisional and closer to the task. “A summary of this section [“The Descent of the Son,” TD5.247–68] might easily suggest a self-indulgent love of paradox,” comments MacKinnon.141 He is, in a sense, onstage for these acts of the drama, rather than in a reactionary position among the audience. It is precisely this kind of dramatic form, polyphony, and provisionality that Balthasar has neglected in his other theological volumes; its absence is what sounds the notes of discord and antiperspectivism—until the final two volumes of the Theo-Drama.

Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine An interesting point of comparison is Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine. Vanhoozer, in one volume and from an evangelical point of view, has engaged in a similar theo-dramatical vision to Balthasar’s. In contrast, however, he confines his introduction in thirty pages—in comparison to Balthasar’s introductions that can hit one hundred pages—to engage directly with the gospel as drama.142 In many ways it is a book more about methodology than theology, “that theology’s method must be appropriate to its matter,”143 and it is this awareness of methodology that seems to escape Balthasar; he has not fully considered how the shape and expression of his theology should match its goals. Vanhoozer comments that his “analogia dramatis” shouldn’t be “pressed too far,” because the insistence “that everything in drama must have a theological counterpart runs the risk of turning a simple analogy into a 140

Geoffrey Wainwright, “Eschatology,” in Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 122. 141 MacKinnon, “Reflections,” 176. 142 Vanhoozer, Drama, 37, 115, 243, 363. 143 Ibid., 57.

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complex allegory.”144 Keeping the analogy simple and lithe, Vanhoozer allows that the director of a drama invites different possibilities, such as the Father, the theologian, or pastor, though he finds, like Balthasar, that the Holy Spirit is the most apt analog.145 Unlike Balthasar, Vanhoozer is self-aware and even narratorial. He develops his own role as theologian within the theo-drama, devoting a whole chapter to the theologian as a dramaturge, the one who interprets the script for both the players and the audience.146 There is a self-conscious theological narrator at work in Vanhoozer’s theology, as well as a dramatic sense of provisionality and incompletion; he concludes with a call to see the church as an amateur (i.e., nonprofessional) theological theater and to engage in “local dramatic productions” of the gospel.147 This is a theological use of drama that invites, instead of oppressive distances or hermeneutics, endless exploration and incarnations. The provisional and perspectival nature of his work is much more freeing than Balthasar’s distanced, univocal approach. Modern theology will always be more effective where it is polyphonal, provisional, and nonepic. A theological aesthetics should sense the beautiful as endless repetition and expansion, what Hart describes as “the proportion of the infinite, and so is inexhaustible . . . able always to discover new intonations, new styles of rejoicing, new measures of delight.”148 It should be unconcerned that its reality must be meaningful according to an oppressive moral compass. This sense of dramatic beauty is what Balthasar had aimed for in The Glory of the Lord and the Theo-Drama, but he largely fails. Distance is not freeing but entrapping, and the conversation with modernity ultimately fails when provisionality and perspectivism are rejected. This is particularly seen by way of contrasting Hardy’s narrator and polyphonic approach in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. To encounter the varieties of tragedy and the religious imagination, a theological aesthetics must have a breadth, perspectivism, and freeing closeness to the subject matter. The novel is an aesthetic form which theology must continue to explore, for precisely these reasons.

144

Ibid., 243. Ibid., 243–4. 146 Ibid., 243–362. 147 Ibid., 441, 457. 148 Hart, Beauty, 34. 145

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6

Jude the Obscure and Ignoble Suffering

The Incarnation shows man the greatness of his wretchedness through the greatness of the remedy required. —Pascal, Pensées The previous three chapters have questioned Balthasar’s denigration of the novel as a symptom of larger problems within his theology. His literary misjudgment of the novel and prosaic reality, especially within a theological aesthetics, is troubling. These issues, coupled with his tendencies toward aristocratism and distanced objectivism, also influence his approach to suffering, which is the concern of this chapter. One of the places where tragedy and theology intersect is in the area of human suffering. The closest one comes to an absolute for tragedy is that, as a very sad story, it will always deal with suffering and loss. Moreover, the central place of the Crucifixion in Christianity makes the problem of suffering an intransigent issue for Christian theology. The Christian gospels function, in many ways, as extended passion stories with lengthy introductions.1 In addition, theology throughout the ages has commonly sought to render an account of human suffering as part of a theodicy that places human loss within a larger doctrine of Providence, as a result of sin, or as a training and purification for the afterlife. Suffering, therefore, remains a key issue for both theology and tragedy. This chapter explores the problem of suffering in Balthasar’s theology, as his tendency toward conceptualization and the epic leads him to disregard the ambiguity and diversity of human suffering. A close reading of Hardy’s Jude 1

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Balthasar, Mysterium, 14. This interpretation originally dates from Kähler. Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, trans. C. E. Braaten, 3rd printing (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 80n11.

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the Obscure points to a form of suffering that is unconsidered by Balthasar: the ignoble, circumstantial, and repetitive. This insight has implications for Christology, because a robust theology will acknowledge that Christ assumed even the ignoble and circumstantial in order to heal it. If Christ is all in all (Ephesians 1:23), if God has overcome tragedy “right down to its ultimate abysses . . .” (TD2.54), then this type of suffering must be considered theologically. Following an examination of Balthasar’s approach to suffering, a consideration of Jude the Obscure and the problem of irredeemable suffering will provide for a fruitful re-examination of Christology.

Tragic suffering and Balthasar One of the insights of literature, and particularly tragedy, is the mysteriousness of human suffering. A deficiency of systematic theology, as a conceptual and rational discipline, is its tendency to dispel the ineffable nature of suffering by framing it within a larger epic. This is part of Balthasar’s intuitive insight that leads him to speak of tragic drama as more percipient and Christian than Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy tends to overreach and epically resolve life’s contingencies and ambiguities, while tragedy holds the mysterious tension between loss and gain, eternal and finite, human and divine. “That is the valour of the unshielded heart, which philosophy will lack, and which stands in a direct relation to Christ” (GL4.103). Tragedy remains inscrutable about the fates of Philoctetes and Lear, as well as the motivations of Iago and even Don John (Much Ado about Nothing). Poole puts it trenchantly: “Tragedy teaches us that the objects of our contemplation – ourselves, each other, our world – are more diverse than we had imagined, and that what we have in common is a dangerous propensity for overrating our power to comprehend this diversity.”2 The diversity of tragic literature reveals the final ineffability of suffering. It can be ennobling, as in Prometheus’ sacrificial torment to bring fire to the world, or it can be ignoble and gruesome, as Philoctetes’ incurable wound. The catastrophe can be self-caused like Othello’s and Macbeth’s easy credence in Iago

2

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Poole, Shakespeare, 1.

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and the witches; it can also be unintentional, as Deianeira’s gift in The Women of Trachis. And it can be both, as the concept of peripeteia—the “boomeranging” of causation3 that becomes a monstrous effect—includes both intent and accident, blame and innocence. The tragic cause can be located in opposing forces (Hegel), a mistaken act (Aristotle), or in the circumstantial (Eagleton). “Tragedy is commonly supposed to teach wisdom through suffering, as the Chorus chants in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Yet nobody in the Oresteia really learns from their suffering, least of all Agamemnon himself,” writes Eagleton.4 Rather than being ever educative, tragedy points to the mysteriousness of suffering in its many forms: the pointless, redemptive, inglorious, victorious, and circumstantial—and that it can reside in multiple forms simultaneously. Suffering can be both victorious and defeating, as was seen in Chapter 4 with the death of Michael Henchard. The diversity of approaches to suffering in tragic literature is mirrored by the Bible’s pluralism on the subject, where there is a variety of interpretation regarding suffering. Paul’s statement about boasting in sufferings (Romans 5:3), for example, can be understood in at least three ways. It could reflect a Stoic valuing of suffering as productive of good character, or it could be a relating to Christ’s suffering that is mysteriously shameful and glorying.5 Third, it could also reflect the Biblical understanding of suffering as paternal reproof and discipline (1 Cor 11:32; Prov 3:11; Judith 8:27; 2 Macc 6:12).6 Paul displays all the aspects of these different interpretations of suffering in various other places, showing that he allows for a pluralistic approach to the problem of suffering. In addition, there is the Deuteronomistic approach that points to sin, and the sins of the fathers, as the cause of suffering (Exod 20:5; Deut 5:9; 2 Kings 5:27; John 5:14, 9:2), and this is perhaps the most persuasive way to read David’s family crises with Tamar, Amnon, and Absalom (2 Sam 13-15). Suffering can also be purposive, as the place of revealing of God’s glory (Exod 7:3-5; John 9:3, 11:4).7 The ambiguity of suffering, particularly as unmerited 3 4 5

6 7

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Eagleton, Violence, 108. Ibid., 31. Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans: A Literary and Theological Commentary (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997), 81. Charles H. Talbert, Romans (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 2002), 134. Or, as Talbert provocatively suggests, the punctuation can be altered so that the cause of the man’s blindness in John 9 is left unanswered. Charles H. Talbert, Reading John: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles, rev. edn (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 2005), 164.

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anguish, is present in many Biblical figures: Joseph, King Saul, Moses (who does not reach the Promised Land), Samson, Judah, Job, and, of course, Christ. There is a diversity of interpretation within the scriptures regarding suffering, much as there is in tragic literature. Balthasar admits to a pluralism within the Bible ((TD2.79), though, interestingly, not on this important issue of suffering.

Balthasar’s monocularity Balthasar possesses, despite the diversity of approaches to suffering in tragic literature and the Bible, a monocularity regarding suffering. This is somewhat ironic in light of the breadth of his knowledge of literature and the arts, and his portrayal of truth as dramatic, symphonic, encountering, and dialogical. His univocal approach reflects his similar approach to tragic literature that prefers aristocratic, ennobling, and ultimately Christological, tragic drama. His tendency is toward the monological. Similarly, all human suffering in Balthasar’s theology is ultimately Christological; his response to the problem of suffering is to craft a sense of Christ’s extreme suffering in his Passion. This approach is rooted, in part, in the inspiration and visions of his theological partner, Adrienne von Speyr. Speyr is present, as Balthasar openly admits, throughout his work, and their thought is inseparable after their first encounter in 1940.8 In a book dedicated to exploring her work, Balthasar describes how Speyr experienced Christ’s Passion, death, and descent into hell every year, during Holy Week, for the last twenty-six years of her life.9 He references the diverse kinds of humiliation, fear, shame, Godforsakenness, and physical pain she suffered through her spiritual, visionary experiences, which Balthasar labels “unique in the history of theology.”10 Balthasar developed and then published his theology of Holy Saturday (Mysterium Paschale) as a result of his theological response to her visions. Speyr’s meditations on hell led to her publishing two volumes (Kreuz und Hölle, 1966 and 1972) and, as Wainwright analyzes, influenced Balthasar to 8

9

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Johann Roten, “The Two Halves of the Moon: Marian Anthropological Dimensions in the Common Mission of Adrienne Von Speyr and Hans Urs Von Balthasar,” in David L. Schindler (ed.), Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, 77. Hans Urs von Balthasar, First Glance At Adrienne Von Speyr, trans. Antje Lawry and Sergia Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1968), 64–5. Balthasar, Glance, 67.

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a more radical notion of Christ experiencing “the full fate of the damned.”11 At its most extreme, Christ’s death goes “all the way ‘to the end’ and had no limits on it” (ET4.438). It is a tragedy worse than Auschwitz, Balthasar declaims,12 “a suffering that goes to the utter limits” (TD2.252) and is “deeper than any hell” (TD5.277). This influence of Speyr’s thought informs the later Theo-Drama, so that volume four begins with her exegesis of Revelation, and volume five quotes her incessantly.

Christ’s ever-excessive suffering For Balthasar, it is Christ alone who truly suffers, as he exceeds all human suffering. He suffers more, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our own suffering, therefore, is minimized and circumscribed by the Cross, where Christ’s obedience is complete as the “obedience of a corpse.”13 Balthasar intends this as ameliorating good news. We will never face true God-abandonment or utter hopelessness, for Christ alone suffers this fate vicariously for us. We may suffer, but only as a reflection of Christ’s suffering in our place. “Redemption does not release it [the suffering creature] toward a God who is beyond all suffering: rather, it is redeemed by a God who suffers along with it, not to say even more correctly that the Sufferer is simply God himself (on the Cross), while the creature is only a cosufferer.”14 All human beings have been “drawn in suffering into the all-embracing suffering of the one righteous man” (ET3.403). Balthasar’s answer to the problem of suffering, evil, and hell is to have Christ exceed all suffering, so that our sufferings are always minimized. Suffering unites all humanity, even as it points to Christ, who surpasses all and who has always gone further. He mitigates our calamities. Quoting Claudel in relation to eschatology and the Cross, Balthasar writes, “ ‘The poor man,’ says Claudel in one of his poems, ‘has no friend to rely on except one poorer than himself ’ . . .” (TD5.312). Christ is ever poorer, the scapegoat who experiences the Godforsakenness so that we will not. Christ’s singular experience of Godabandonment is the basis for Balthasar’s hope, his hypothesis for universal 11 12 13 14

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Wainwright, “Eschatology,” 117. Balthasar, Credo, 97. Balthasar, Mysterium, 174. Balthasar, Bernanos, 193.

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salvation (TD5.299). Christ’s is a “heart which endures more than could ever be expected of it . . . even in the most extreme instance . . .” (GL4.107). This approach is also how Balthasar reads tragic drama. Christ exceeds all tragic heroes, as someone who fulfills and deepens all authentic tragedy, both Hebrew and Attic Greek. “. . . Christianity cannot be understood without the element of tragedy,” he says approvingly of Reinhold Schneider’s work.15 All subsequent, authentic tragedies will reflect Christ’s tragedy, whose reality has shifted the world’s aesthetics. Thus Christ enters and surpasses all tragedy, beyond even The Trojan Women’s awful conclusion, for Christ is bankrupted of all hope, light, and even temporality—in the Cross, no hope can be found for him either in the past or future (ET3.401). Christ surpasses all authentic tragic literature; however extreme the tragic suffering is, Christ has always gone further. It is extreme suffering that leads to Christ. “Ajax is exposed to an extreme degree,” and Philoctetes is reminded that Heracles also suffered for a lengthy time before his apotheosis (GL4.110). The power of tragic drama is precisely that it reveals truth through suffering, as the philosophers and Pindar cannot. “. . . [T]he situation in which this truth emerges is now that of suffering, and preferably a most horrendous form of suffering which lays man bare in his vulnerability, forcibly exposing and humiliating him” (GL4.103). Yet this suffering calls for a sense of noble, tragic endurance and the greatness of the aristocratic, representative tragic protagonist: Only a great and majestic human being is equal to this [horrendous suffering]; he alone can bear such a burden, and only from him, when he is finally and necessarily broken apart, can there rise, like a fragrance, the pure essence of human kind, indeed, of being as such. What is unprecedented here is that . . . the deep truth of existence passes directly through the most extreme form of suffering. (GL4.103)

Euripides’ extremes For Balthasar, Christ’s suffering is ever greater and more encompassing than human imagination or experience, in the vein of Speyr’s visions of hell and Holy Saturday. Following this logic, the more extreme the portrait of suffering, 15

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Balthasar, Tragedy, 271.

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the more covertly Christian it is, since it adumbrates the depths of Christ’s passion. This is why Euripides is Balthasar’s favorite Attic tragedian, as seen in his extended discussion in the fourth volume of The Glory of the Lord. The Trojan Women is “the most extreme play” as characters face desperation and death, “further into the abysmal deaths of sufferings” (GL4.135). Euripides’ protagonists are “more sensitive in their defencelessness . . .” (GL4.136), and he puts his characters into terrible suffering, “which lays man bare in his ultimate reality, which vivisects him” (GL4.133). If Sophocles portrays Philoctetes and Heracles (The Women of Trachis) as tormented and insulted figures, then “[t]his Euripides later takes still further [with Heracleidae] . . .” (GL4.124). “In Euripides there is great bitterness” (GL4.107). A theme discerned by Balthasar in much of Euripides’ works is the Christ-figure of the “self-sacrificial heart . . . the peaceful centre of reconciliation in the sacrifice of love.” This glory appears in the most extreme sufferings, “in ultimate impotence and abandonment, in subjection to brutal and hostile forces, in inescapable death” (GL4.151). Because Euripides is the most terrible in his portrayals of suffering, he also portrays the greatest images of grace, so that no one can follow him. “For Euripides man becomes credible in suffering . . . from him the path leads directly to Gethsemane and to Golgotha” (GL4.133). It is part of what Quash calls Balthasar’s “strain of epic relativization” that reads Euripidean themes of self-sacrifice as images of Christ.16 The individual is subordinated to the Divine, as Quash argues, but we might add that the individual is also subordinated to Christ’s greater suffering. The palimpsest of the Cross ever obliterates the individual and his or her loss; it is “the watermark of the creation.”17 Euripides and other tragedians help to illuminate the Cross and Christ’s suffering. Here Balthasar walks a razor’s edge, for he does not want to reduce the Cross to some sort of archetypal suffering, or allow Euripides to define Good Friday. Christ alone defines true suffering. Yet Balthasar uses tragedy to illuminate elements of Christ’s Passion not before considered. The method is similar to Adrienne von Speyr’s visions, or the use of the Stations of the Cross by Christians as an imaginative way to prayerfully identify with Christ 16 17

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Quash, Theology, 143. Balthasar, Tragedy, 108.

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on Good Friday. To examine the various ways of human suffering is to also illumine the areas that Christ has encompassed and ultimately healed through his Cross and Resurrection. Balthasar’s concern for Christ’s superior, excessive suffering is also evidenced in his definition of tragedy in volume one of the Theo-Drama. There he describes a threefold typology of tragedy, based on the work of Albin Lesky, of a tragic situation, a closed tragic conflict, and a closed tragic worldview. Because Balthasar wants to establish that Christ suffers at the extremity of possible suffering, he places Christ’s tragedy between the latter two tragic modes, where tragedy is a tragic worldview that is almost closed, almost an absolute tragicism. “So the interpretation of the tragic comes within a hair’s breadth of the third of the categories mentioned, while remaining just as clearly distinct from it” (TD1.431–2). Great tragedy is a hair’s breadth away from absolute tragedy, for it is transparent to the inconceivable gift of Christ’s suffering of God-abandonment that comes so close to complete meaninglessness and annihilation. Euripides walks this fine line, where oppositional forces seem intractable while not collapsing into a destructive nihilism. In a sense, the further Balthasar pushes the needle, the more powerful the connections are between Christianity and tragedy, as well as the potency of Christ’s suffering atonement. Ultimately for Balthasar, tragedy and tragic suffering are grounded in the Trinity and the infinite spaces between the Divine Persons. For Balthasar, separation means risk and potential tragedy, even in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son.18 “This [the Father’s giving of his divinity to the Son] implies such an incomprehensible and unique ‘separation’ of God from himself that it includes and grounds every other separation—be it never so dark and bitter” (TD4.325). This line of reasoning is partly posed by Balthasar’s concern that there is nothing that is outside God (TD4.333; TD2.260). This raises the rather surprising thought that something like tragedy can occur within God (TD4.327).19 18

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Williams suggests this, noting that “the trinitarian Persons eternally elude each other’s possession. . . . [S]ince the Father has given everything to the Son, he now depends on the Son for his own selfrepresentation . . .” Williams, “Balthasar,” 45. “We are not saying that the eternal separation in God [between Father and Son] is, in itself, ‘tragic’ or that the Spirit’s bridging of the distinction is the sublation of tragedy, that is, ‘comedy’. . . . However, if we ask whether there is suffering in God, the answer is this: there is something in God that can develop into suffering” (TD4.327–8).

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Balthasar’s oppressive understanding of suffering The problem for Balthasar is that this understanding of suffering becomes oppressive and epic. His concern for a participative distance between the human and the divine has been lost, enfolded in Christ’s ever greater sacrifice. It results in making all human loss, tragedy, and sacrifice somehow pointers for Christ’s suffering, so that the human loses its proper distance. The suffering of the Son, and these infinite distances within the Trinity, always supersede any suffering of human beings or the tragic protagonist. In Balthasar’s exegesis of Job, Quash discerns, Job is part of “some kind of progression . . . the final stage of which is the cross.”20 Job becomes part of “the building-blocks [that] have been gathered together for the final synthesis which a fortiori only God can achieve: the unity of the glory of God and uttermost abandonment by God, Heaven and Hell” (GL6.290). It also means that any sense of mystery regarding suffering or any place for the creature to process, renounce, or triumph over suffering has been lost. Tragic suffering is never truly our own, but always properly Christ’s and Christ’s alone. Balthasar does not argue or establish precisely how Christ’s suffering encompasses human suffering, but assumes it as a given within his theology. Nor does he address the diversity of tragedy or the reality of ignoble tragic suffering. Balthasar ends up making too much and too little of human loss. He makes too much of suffering by including it within Christ’s greater redemptive suffering. Suffering is glorified, requisite, even vitalizing. “Even if many suffering believers ‘no longer experience joy’ in their following of Christ, ‘they too will rejoice in being permitted to suffer’ ” (TD5.253). Creation is united in suffering; now death, the individual, and everything are connected by it (TD5.324). All suffering is necessary and redemptive, rather than the empty meaninglessness, a privation of the good, that is the tradition that theologians like Hart follow.21 Balthasar has strangely instrumentalized suffering, making it necessary for God’s revelation of Christ’s endurance of the worst suffering. All human suffering is now meaningful, revelatory, even Christological, for it points to Christ’s ever greater pain. If Balthasar instrumentalizes and valorizes suffering, he also denies human suffering any proper meaning. He fails to make enough of human suffering in 20 21

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Quash, Theology, 154. Hart, Beauty, 391.

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his dismissal of tragic loss as proper to the creature. In essence, Edgar’s words from King Lear are terribly insightful, that the worst is not, So long as we can say, “This is the worst.” (4.1.27)

For Christ has always suffered the worst—“raised to the highest degree of suffering” (GL4.104)—so our sufferings are never truly horrific, as the lines seem to say. Yet Edgar’s words, in the context of the play, mean precisely the opposite: there can always be worse to come, a catastrophe unimaginable; as Hardy notes in The Woodlanders, “yet to every bad there is a worse.”22 Attenuating the worst, therefore, is ineffective, either by proclaiming it cannot be worse or by pointing to one who has suffered the most. It erases over the moment and the experience by melioration (it could have been worse) or anticipation (something worse is coming); either way, the experience is reduced to a pointer for something else. Our suffering is no longer our own, but always Christ’s, who ever exceeds us.

Suffering and identity To construct a theological approach to suffering in such a way is to denigrate certain forms of life and experience. To point to Christ’s ever greater suffering, and make human experiences of suffering transparent to Christ’s, is to deny persons their integrity, space, and identity. The human being is left without the dignity of his or her own suffering, without the right of proclaiming “this is the worst,” for it is folded into Christ’s ever greater suffering. Humanity loses its proper distance, for all is elided into God’s greater, epic suffering. It is the attenuation of suffering’s significance and meaning, or even lack of meaning. Instead of conceiving of suffering as something requiring God’s healing and restoration, Balthasar places it within a widening gyre of Christological significance. Balthasar’s eagerness to see Christ in all tragic suffering loses the larger diversity of tragic suffering in reality and literature; his tendency is toward the aristocratic and the agonized. “Lear is the ultimately dispossessed eternal 22

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Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 226 (ch. 34).

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father; the duke in Measure for Measure is the eternal God . . .” (GL4.104), for all human loss, imagined and real, is a parable for God’s great suffering in Christ. His aristocratic tendencies overlooks more modern forms of catastrophe, hence forms of suffering that are lowly and ignoble are denied recognition or sympathy. Is there not something in Willy Loman’s losses and delusions that demands our attention and acceptance, even if it is bourgeois and circumstantial? In reality, Michael Henchard is noble in his very bourgeois and economic struggles, and Tess is tragic as a fallen and impoverished woman. Suffering is more mysterious than Balthasar allows. Suffering and the Cross remain, like tragic literature, mysterious, resistant, and paradoxical. The palimpsest of Christ must not erase the identity or history of particular creatures, real or fictional, because the infinite distance between Creator and creatures must not be erased or elided, as Balthasar has argued yet, in regard to suffering, he abandons. Pain and loss, whether it produces a triumph or not, cannot be taken from the sufferer as a sign of the Passion, made valuable only for its transparency to the Cross. Yet neither should suffering be something to be glorified. Feminist theologians raise strong objections to such a glorying in suffering, especially when aligned with a feminine essentialism and subordination, for it only establishes a matrix of further suffering.23 Tragic loss is not intrinsic to human identity, but it is not wholly extrinsic, either; like our personal history and experiences, it forms us in ways that cannot be easily abstracted. It remains part of our identity, and it is our own. To make it point to Christ, or to unify us to Christ in some grand scheme, is to reduce the mystery of human suffering and loss. Some losses are ultimately justified or victorious; others are ignoble and wasteful, and this is part of the tremendous diversity of suffering and tragedy. Just as the Bible does not give a clear, systematic answer to human suffering or even the Cross itself, so neither should the Christian theologian attempt to systematize it. It remains a mystery. Like the saints and martyrs whom Balthasar so admired, our sufferings form part of our personal histories. The martyrs are pictured in medieval 23

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The problems with Balthasar’s views on gender are evident in the way they crop up throughout the essays of The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Crammer, “Sex,”; Williams, “Balthasar,” 45. Gemma Burnett-Chetwynd, “The Challenging of Suffering for Theology” (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007).

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and Renaissance art not as monotonous reflections of Christ, but in the very imagery of their losses: Michelangeo’s Saint Bartholomew with his flayed skin and the knife, Saint Paul with his sword, Saint Stephen and his X-shaped cross. The instruments of torture have become their symbol of endurance and triumph, and part of their own history. These stories are not prescinded into Christ’s Cross, but their own. Their lives point to Christ and Christ’s triumph, but not in a way that minimizes their sufferings. This is a truer theological understanding of suffering as something our own, rather than something that is always transparent to, and lessened by, the Cross.

Tragedy and Christology Nonetheless, Balthasar has provided a fascinating theological possibility. Might tragic literature illuminate Christology and a deeper understanding of the Passion? If a proper regard for the distance between the Creator and the creature is maintained, as well as a respect for the mystery of suffering, might the diversity of tragic literature further Balthasar’s explorations into understanding the Cross? Here again we return to the tragic novel and the work of Hardy. An examination of Jude the Obscure, moreover, provides an alternative portrait of human suffering as circumstantial, meaningless, and ignoble. It is an apt pairing for examining Balthasar’s thoughts on tragic suffering, for it is Hardy’s final and most extreme novel. There is a “degree of waste and agony involved” in Jude’s experiences and attempts at flourishing,24 a level of gratuitous suffering unreached previously by Hardy. Everything is “pushed to extremes.”25 By examining this novel, a Balthasarian concept of suffering and soteriology is enlarged to reflect appropriately the diversity of tragedy and tragic suffering, repairing his lack of interest in the ignoble and his monocular concern that Christ exceeds every suffering. The proper theological approach is to envision Christ as one who heals all kinds of suffering, without being destructive of creaturely identity, particularity, and freedom. The Incarnation must be

24 25

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Millgate, Career, 328. Gregor, Web, 211. Gregor says this of the novel’s opening section.

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concerned with the depths and abysses of human life, as Balthasar says, if they are to be overcome, even if he fails to conceive that this extends to the ignoble and dross.

Jude the Obscure and meaningless suffering Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s final novel (1895), is the narrative of the constant thwarting of Jude Fawley’s hopes and dreams for love, an academic vocation, and a life of loving-kindness. Gerard Loughlin notes from Balthasar (TD2.353, 358) that the riddle of human existence is its three polarities: spirit and body, man and woman, and individual and community.26 These are precisely the crises of Jude as he seeks to negotiate between the spirit and the flesh, his love for the ungraspable Sue, and their attempt to flourish despite communal scorn and rejection. The novel opens with Jude as a boy, along with his teacher Phillotson, who has inspired Jude for a Christminster education (a fictionalized University of Oxford) and toward a life of mercy. Jude’s hard autodidactic work in Greek and Latin (something Hardy did himself), done in order to attend Christminster, is undone by his romance and marriage to the coarse, sensual Arabella. The marriage ends disastrously, and Arabella leaves for Australia. Jude attempts to start over, moving to Christminster, working as a stonemason, and still hoping to find entry into the university. While there, Jude meets his cousin Sue, whom he has fantasized about despite his Aunt’s ominous warning: the Fawleys are doomed to unhappy marriages. Jude also re-encounters Phillotson, who is teaching at a nearby school, but Phillotson has given up on attending Christminster and forgotten about Jude. Jude introduces Sue to Phillotson, whom she marries, to Jude’s despair. Their marriage is disastrous as well, since Sue finds Phillotson physically repugnant and, in truth, married him out of jealousy of Jude’s marriage to Arabella. Confessing her love for Jude to Phillotson, Phillotson releases her from their marriage. She moves in with Jude, and both of them divorce their first spouses. It appears Jude’s troubles are over.

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Gerard Loughlin, “Erotics: God’s Sex,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 2003), 150.

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Their relationship, however, is far from happy. Sue maintains a Platonic relationship with Jude and hesitates to marry again, even as they are perpetually threatened with poverty and social condemnation at their unwed marital status. Only the return of Arabella leads her to physically consummate her relationship with Jude. They have two children, but the family is forced into nomadism, since Jude is often without work. Jude is surprised to learn that Arabella was pregnant with his child while in Australia, and his son, the odd and oddly named Little Father Time, comes to live with them. The little boy’s natural melancholia leads him to a horrific (if overwrought) tragic act: he kills the other children and himself to solve the family financial woes. This catastrophe unhinges Sue’s mind, and she becomes hyper-religious and recriminatory about her abandonment of Phillotson, whom she is convinced is her true husband. She decides that she must return to him as her punishment, and that Jude must do the same with Arabella. Meanwhile, Phillotson’s act of kindness in releasing Sue from their marriage has cost him his job and livelihood, and he accepts Sue back to restore his future. Arabella, through inebriating Jude, seduces and remarries him. Despondent and fatally ill, Jude will die alone outside of Christminster’s walls. As the bells ring in the city for the university’s Remembrance games, he reminisces “upon the defeat of his early aims” (JO 6.10.398). The novel is constantly moving, fractured, cyclical yet unsummarizable. Its action is divided between Jude’s desire for Christminster and for love, making the novel partly about desire and marriage, and partly about false hopes, social norms, and education. Millgate reasons that Hardy’s final novel was composed “as a comprehensive image of intellectual and social chaos.”27 It reflects in many ways the resistance that all tragedy creates against systemization or conceptualization, echoing Adrian Poole’s comment that: Both these cries find their voice in tragedy: both “what splendour it all coheres,” and also “Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone” [quoting John Donne, “The First Anniversarie”]. Tragedy is a way of doing justice to both voices, a way of redeeming the world’s incoherence by composing a splendid coherence. . . . There is a coherence, but it does not all cohere; things fall apart, but it is not all in pieces.28 27 28

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Millgate, Career, 334. Poole, Shakespeare, 86.

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The novel caused controversy from its first publication (a bishop burned it); the reviews howled at the novel, Hardy writes, and a good section of his autobiography is a spirited defense of the novel and his motives.29 It was seen by many as Hardy’s scandalous attack on the Victorian institutions of marriage and religion, and current critical opinion varies as to whether it was this strong response of public antipathy, or Hardy’s desire to return to poetry, that made it his final novel.

Suffering as irredeemable and meaningless Jude the Obscure has remained a perennially difficult tragic work due to its extremes of suffering and constant sense of loss. Jude is opposed by various forces from early on in the novel, and this opposition is consistent and regnant, such as in this early scene when he is prevented in his attempt at suicide on a frozen pond: Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter him. He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice making sharp noises as he went. When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge, and stepped upon the ground. It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him. (JO 1.11.70)

These oppositions to Jude continue, and are fueled and intensified by the moments of hope that end each of the novel’s sections (except for the final one). Part one may conclude with Jude’s failed marriage to Arabella, but it then moves to a renewal of hope for Christminster. Jude serendipitously finds the milestone near his home with “THITHER J.F.” (Jude Fawley), and a hand pointing toward the university (which he had earlier inscribed), so that the “sight of it [the milestone], unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles, lit in his soul a spark of the old fire” (JO 1.11.73). Part two concludes with the encouragement by a local curate to enter the church as a licentiate, which

29

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Hardy, Life, 287 (8 November 1895).

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invigorates Jude after his failed acceptance to Christminster (JO 2.7.125). In part three there is an invitation to visit Sue in Shaston, despite her marriage to Phillotson, his despairing at a church vocation, and the disappointing encounter with a favorite hymn composer (JO 3.10.196). In part four, Sue may have left her marriage for Jude, but an ominous shadow is cast by her unwillingness to share a room with him at the hotel (JO 4.5.238). As part five ends, we find the pale hope of Jude’s return to his dream-city of Christminster (JO 5.8.320), despite their poverty and forced move (JO 5.6.305) from their home, and the return of Arabella. Each part travels through disappointment and loss, only to end with some kind of hope, which serves only to lead into further losses. The hope and serendipity provide the grounds for a greater despair, so that Sue can sadly observe to Jude, “My poor Jude – how you’ve missed everything!” (JO 6.2.339).

The tragedy of repetition This tragic cadence is an element in Hardy’s fiction, particularly in the later works. His characters seem to find hope, only to see it dissipate. Four arcs of hope and disappointment color Henchard’s narrative, for example.30 Tess finds herself unable to escape either Alec or Angel, and her renewal at the Valley of the Dairies sets her up only for further tragedy. Arguably Shakespeare’s most painful play, King Lear, is agonizing precisely because it creates this cadence of loss, respite, and further loss; when Lear’s respite appears in his reunion and hopeful future with Cordelia (5.3), her subsequent death becomes all the more crushing—precisely because of that parenthetical hope within the tragic sequence. The experience of hope, followed by its loss, forms a particularly painful type of tragedy. Jude the Obscure, with its lack of a revitalizing, pastoral element found in Hardy’s other works, makes the repetitions peculiarly bleak. There is no place of external regeneration, either through the pastoral (Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d’Urbervilles), through work (The Mayor of Casterbridge), or through the temporal seasons (Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d’Urbervilles). The cadence, like a 30

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Robert Schweik, “Character and Fate in the Mayor of Casterbridge,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 21, no. 3 (1966): 250–1.

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drum, seems merciless; as little as Jude rises, he falls, and there is never any sense of profit from his losses. His loss of Christian faith makes his world more painful; it closes the possibility of an ecclesial vocation and makes his division from the newly churchy Sue complete. His failure at Christminster points to the meaninglessness of his lucubrations, and the ironic repetitions, capped with his return to matrimony with Arabella, make it all ring hollow and painfully empty. Time becomes emptily oppressive for Hardy’s Jude, whom he called “his poor puppet.”31 Jude is thrown against the painful contrasts of his life, close to Christminster and Sue even as they remain out of his grasp. These knowing ironies of Hardy’s, which make the novel “all contrasts . . . Christminster academical, Chr [sic] in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude the sinner,”32 and they add to the emptiness of his suffering and death. Gregor notes how “Hardy draws lavishly on the ironies of plot” as well as the “ironies of tone.”33 Jude’s deflations begin early on, as his dreams of becoming a bishop are interrupted by Arabella throwing a pig’s “pizzle” at him (JO 1.6.37–38). This juxtaposition borders, as others do, on the comedic. “Comic irony is everywhere implicit in the vanity of Jude’s ambitions, a soaring superstructure based on frail foundations . . .” writes Millgate.34 Other contrasts are more heavy-handed, as when Jude and a pregnant Sue reletter the Ten Commandments, only to be dismissed because they are unmarried (JO 5.6.303–04). As Jude attempts to comfort Sue after the death of the children, a nearby College organ plays the anthem to “Truly God is loving unto Israel” (Psalm 73; JO 6.2.337). At his death, the hurrahs of the Christminster crowd are contrasted with Jude’s quotations from Job, though unlike Job, Jude is not restored. Deepening the ironies of Jude’s tragedy, Millgate points out, is the fact that Jude’s stonemasonry trade is both a faux and neoGothic fad, and a vocation that keeps Jude tied to the past through ancient walls, buildings, churches, and gravestones.35 Jude is, therefore, perpetually restoring the past, which remains elusive and illusive to him. His death does not have a mystery of simultaneous triumph in it, as Tess’ and Henchard’s do. It is hard to find much ennobling in Jude’s tragedy. 31 32 33 34 35

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Hardy, Life, 514 (10 November 1895). Hardy, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 2:99; Hardy, Life, 514 (20 November 1895). Gregor, Web, 231. Millgate, Career, 327. Ibid., 330.

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There is an ironic, frustrating sense for the reader of Jude’s lowliness as a tragic protagonist. He can be rather dim. It takes Jude ten years and a good hundred pages to realize that his aims for Christminster are impossible, yet still he returns there for the novel’s final section. It is difficult to ignore the sense that if he would only push Sue a little harder into marriage, they could end their painful period as social pariahs. Jude seems forever impractical, childlike, and simple, and Sue is similarly somewhat illogical and unrealistic. “ They never wholly grasp what social pressure they are likely to encounter, the effect they will have upon other people, the amount of attention their way of life must inevitably attract . . .” notes Millgate.36 This type of ironic tragedy falls squarely in Northrop Frye’s literary scheme of the fifth phase of autumnal tragedy. “Irony does not need an exceptional central figure: as a rule, the dingier the hero the sharper the irony, when irony alone is aimed at. . . . The ironic perspective in tragedy is attained by putting the characters in a state of lower freedom than the audience.”37 Frye helpfully discerns a type of tragedy that is highly ironic, whose characters are not demigods as in Attic tragedy, but of a low station and repute. They are, in relation to the reader, ignoble and even common, so that the reader’s perspective jars with their actions. Their doom is obvious to everyone but them. It is a far cry from Balthasar’s vision of aristocratic, ennobling, and Christological tragedy. The tragic cadence is, therefore, heightened through the repetitions, empty and unregenerative cycles, and the circumstantial ironies. The net result of these elements is Jude’s ignobility; even his death is without profit. This is not a vicarious death or atonement as Balthasar prizes in many of Euripides’ works. Jude fails either to rise or fall, except in his hopes and ambitions. It is hard to say that Jude “becomes credible in suffering” (GL4.133); more poignant and pitiful, perhaps, but not of greater worth or credibility. There is no final vindication, as with Prometheus Unbound or Oedipus at Colonus. Jude has no such a priori nobility. Rather, like Samuel Beckett’s characters, he fails ever truly to rise. He cannot suffer the loss of fortune or prestige, for he never truly had it. He remains obscure and, in many ways, simple; one of Hardy’s early 36 37

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Ibid., 319. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 210, 221.

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titles for the novel was “The Simpletons.”38 The same can be said of Sue, whose final mental breakdown is especially painful, as it profits no one and ruins both their lives.

Meaningless suffering Furthermore, Jude is opposed by mean, ignoble, social circumstances: poverty, the inability to attend Christminster, slander, and his lack of meaningful and remunerative work. This is different from the classical hamartia, the cataclysmic confession of Phèdre, and the actions of Oedipus and Macbeth. These are conditions and oppositions that have a common, quotidian origin. Rather than a dooming fate from the gods—Prometheus’ torture by Zeus for his gifts to humanity, for example—Jude is subject to social and financial conditions. He has been overcome, in part, by blind social and historical forces: “the time was not ripe for us!” (JO 6.10.400).39 In this regard, his tragedy is more like Philoctetes, where a circumstance of mean origin (a poisonous snake guarding a temple is aroused by mere accident) is the defeating element, and Philoctetes’ suffering is similarly demeaning, meaningless, and unheroic. Jude realizes his inability to triumph “against man and senseless circumstance” (JO 6.3.342) and rails bitterly, much as Philoctetes does. Both suffer the ignoble, circumstantial, and prosaic in a way that differs from traditional tragic literature and criticism. The thought that suffering can be meaningless is an argument of Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite. His larger argument is that, in the uniqueness of Christianity, there is the idea of an inherence “of beauty and the infinite: peace and delight being the ‘cadence’ of their unity.”40 This vision of God’s beauteous peace permits difference, which makes difference and particularity good in and of themselves. Evil is, therefore, privation, meaninglessness, a Heraclitean violence against the other. Those who died in the concentration camps are not beautiful or victims of tragic fate in their deaths, but like Christ 38 39

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Millgate, Biography Revisited, 321. Lesky ascribes this type of tragedy to Hebbel, despite his “pantragicism.” “Hebbel sees in the person of the tragic hero the fighter who opposes the world and thus prevents it from stagnating. . . . The time in which he lives is not yet ripe for the values for which he fights and dies, but his sacrifice opens the way to a better future.” Albin Lesky, Greek Tragedy, trans. H. A. Frankfort (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1965), 22. Hart, Beauty, 33.

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were “anonymous victims of political violence. . . . Their deaths were without meaning, beauty, or grandeur.”41 He summarizes, therefore, that Christ was raised, and so the cross (every cross) is shown to be meaningless in itself . . . . . . Easter unsettles every hermeneutics of death, every attempt to make death a place of meaning.42

And thus, for Hart, the Cross is condemned, even by God, while Christ and His obedience are vindicated in the Resurrection. Here violence, suffering, and tragic fate are vehemently rejected and denied in Hart’s vision of God’s peaceable difference. Hart’s approach to suffering is closer to the portrait drawn in Jude the Obscure, where any sense of redemptive qualities to Jude’s sufferings—that they benefit someone, somehow, or that they atone for something, or are somehow victorious in the end—are hard to find. Only Easter does that. Problematic for Hart, however, is conceptualizing this on a universal level. Some kinds of suffering can be mysteriously triumphant, resistant, and ennobling, as he adumbrates by ending his book with the example of martyrs. In truth, suffering remains an ever diverse and intractable topic. Hart, in this respect and despite his esteem for Balthasar, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Balthasar regarding tragic suffering. Balthasar finds all tragedy and tragic suffering meaningful, because it points to Christ’s greater suffering; Hart denies suffering any place of meaning beyond the chaotic, Heraclitean violence of this world. Neither Hart nor Balthasar is satisfying in this regard. Both tend toward the epic, Hegelian, and conceptual, especially regarding suffering and tragedy. In reality, our particular sufferings are part of our identity, not to be completely negated nor wholly valorized. Painful loss does not define us, yet it does mark us; it is part of our identity, just as Christ’s resurrected body bears the marks of crucifixion, the same body, transformed. With tragic literature, suffering is more mysterious than these theologians allow; it can be ennobling, victorious, meaningful, and atoning, as well as being ignoble, circumstantial, ironic, meaningless, and defeating. These characteristics may be opaquely mixed within a solitary tragic work, or certain characteristics may be more distinguishable in particular works. 41 42

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Hart, Beauty, 393–4. Ibid., 391.

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Antigone’s death, for example, is painfully unnecessary and even ironic (as Creon’s change of heart comes too late), but also victorious (as Tiresias’ words convey). A respect for the diversity of tragic literature, as well as its resistance to an easy conceptualization, must be maintained, if it is not to be misused or instrumentalized. The benefit from close, respectful readings of tragedies is the awareness of the mysteriousness of human suffering, culpability, and identity. Tragic literature, in its diverse approaches to human suffering, reflects human experience. Some people turn personal tragedies into missions, paths of growth, and a source of accomplishment. Jane Tomlinson, after being told that her metastatic breast cancer was incurable, dedicated her life to raising money for charity through running. Some forms of suffering emerge victorious, as with Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven year imprisonment. Other forms are simply painfully pointless. This ambiguity in suffering is an argument against final metaphysical certainty, either in reference to suffering’s meaningfulness or its wastefulness.

The tragic gap between the real and the ideal Whether suffering is victorious, empty, or a strange mixture of both, tragic seriousness cannot be denied to human suffering, be it ever so ignoble, idealist, or common. This is especially true for Christian theology, which looks to the Cross (an ignoble form of execution for criminals) as the central meaning of history. Chapter 4 of this book argued precisely for the Christian and Biblical serious, tragic interest in the common and ignoble. This serious interest in human agony must include the empty repetitions and self-caused sufferings. Hardy was aware of Jude’s hopeless, enervating war between the ideal and the real in which he had placed him. He wrote, “The ‘grimy’ features of the story go to show the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to lead.”43 It is hard to see why misguided hope or self-destructive desires are not sufficient grounds for tragedy, what Williams calls the “tragic position, of the self against the self.”44 Being trapped and defeated by chronic failure has its place in tragic 43 44

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Hardy, Life, 514 (10 November 1895). Williams, Tragedy, 100.

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literature; it is the place of Jude’s precarious existence. People can be trapped in terrible conditions, as the nineteenth-century realists revealed, and elements of tragic literature—irony, serious regard, peripeteia, anagnorisis, and hamartia, for example—can apply to these kinds of narratives, false hopes, and defeated ambitions, as well. Eagleton is aware of the problem, that “[t]here are those, in other words, for whom, as Walter Benjamin soberly reminds us, history constitutes one long emergency . . . such extremities may be less tolerable precisely because they are routinely predictable . . .”45 George Eliot especially wants to illuminate “that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency.”46 Brecht ends Mother Courage with Mother’s painful survival of multiple wars and the death of her children; it is a summary of life’s painful resiliency: MOTHER COURAGE. The new year’s come. The watchmen shout. The thaw sets in. The dead remain. Wherever life has not died out It staggers to its feet again.47

This is to point to a widening of the definition of what constitutes tragedy, even to recognize these elements in the classical tradition. Philoctetes was left for ten years to hobble on a “rankling wound” (line 7), after all, and mighty Heracles dies not in battle but in agony from a poisoned gift (The Women of Trachis). Euripides explores how “crisis is permanent,”48 and was accused of having “vulgarized tragedy into a drama of everyday life” by one twentiethcentury critic.49 The question that remains is, how can theology respond to this widened understanding of tragic suffering? Balthasar’s response to such kind of circumstantial sufferings is to negate it completely. His criticism, common among traditionalists, is that social tragedy is not truly tragic because society is remediable (TD2.48). Mother Courage, as he notes, is merely a puppet for Brecht’s desire for social change, and not a truly tragic figure. This is dubious at best. Society may indeed be malleable, but not in a way that would restore Mother and her children, and any transformation 45 46 47

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Eagleton, Violence, 11. Eliot, Middlemarch, 189 (ch. 20). Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, vol. 5 of Collected Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 1999), 121 (lines 186–9). Poole, Shakespeare, 65. Eagleton, Violence, 88.

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of society will come too late for her and her family. After all, societies change only slowly and painfully, with many reversions, oppressions, mistakes, and sufferings. Williams, as favorable as he is to modern tragedy, has a more potent critique of social tragedies: they fail to question the larger societal issues, pandering instead to the dreams of prosperity and social influence.50 Regardless, Jude the Obscure is a tragic novel that is larger than society. Jude is opposed, only in part, by social forces; his plight is larger than the need for societal change regarding Oxbridge admissions and the marriage problem. Yet social factors are undeniably part of his tragedy: his plebeian birth, his inability to attain higher education, the censure he and Sue suffer, the problems with income, and the marriage covenant. It is a realistic tragedy where social conditions, such as university attendance, rail travel, the Divorce act, neo-Gothic restoration, social mobility and movement, the “New Woman,” Victorian agnosticism, and the self-employment of stonemasons, are all woven into the action of the novel. These factors, along with personalities, ignominy, and aleatory misfortune, are what create the tragic web for Jude and Sue. Jude’s tragic oppositions are larger than these social forces. The social idealisms that he and Sue wrangle with and are defeated by—that education and marriage are ennobling, freeing, innervating—are rooted in the natural word itself, which reveals that nature’s ways are cruel too. “O why should Nature’s law be mutual butchery!” exclaims Sue. There is a cruelty in society and in nature; “both kinds of law have a relentless universality, an indifference to the fate of the individual.”51 Jude and Sue can find happiness in neither. Society blocks Jude from his dreams of Christminster. Nature, meanwhile, prevents Jude from finding a joyous love with Sue (or anyone else), despite their mutual divorces that free them from society’s cruelty of unhappy marriages. It is hard not to be reminded of Hardy’s own unhappy marriage to Emma Gifford, who was infuriated by the novel and its candor regarding matrimonial cheerlessness.52 It is “the tragedy of unfulfilled aims,” as Hardy described it in his preface (JO 3), and it creates the sense of ironic tragedy pervading the 50

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“Obliquely, confusedly, the recognition is made, that the struggle for money has replaced the struggle for power as a human motive and as a tragic motive. . . . But the imperative is not seriously questioned . . .” Williams, Tragedy, 94. William R. Goetz, “The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 38 (1983): 209. Emma wrote in a later letter that if she had read the pre-publication manuscript, “it would not have been published.” Millgate, Biography Revisited, 351.

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novel. Theology, and especially a theology shaped by tragedy like Balthasar’s, must have a response. Jude has a propensity to see things through rose-colored glass, as haloed and glowing. Jude imagines and dreams of Christminster, so that “he was always beholding a gorgeous city . . . the new Jerusalem” (JO 1.3.22). He is compared to Joseph, Don Quixote, and St Stephen. His eyes of faith see halos around his wistful destinations and hopes of Christminster (JO 1.3.23, 1.11.74, 2.6.115), Sue (JO 2.1.78), and his role-model Phillotson (JO 2.4.101).53 His dreams and desires are blamelessly good, if naïve and impotent. He is Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress who perceives a Heavenly City—Christminster and Sue—yet finds it an impossible destination. Stability remains out of his reach, as he remains trapped between the ideal and the real, which is a peculiarly ignoble basis for tragedy. Sue herself is trapped between the ideal and the real. She deftly deflects any attempts at intimacy; Jude notices that “whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster [Phillotson] she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending University” (3.4.151). Sue escapes into reveries, especially at Jude’s overtures toward intimacy. On their first night together after Sue leaves her husband Phillotson, she wants to recite Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” rather than engage in the physical intimacy that Jude desires. Hardy was struck with Shelley’s concepts of the perfect woman, ideal love, and spiritual union between two people, and “Sue is Hardy’s full-length, mature study of the Shelleyan woman, shown not only in her idealistic youth, but as he imagined she would disintegrate under the stresses of child-bearing, poverty, and social custom.”54 She is the spiritually ideal woman, torn by physical love and the death of the children. D. H. Lawrence realizes the problem in his poem, “And Jude the Obscure and His Beloved”: “What a bitter shame that she should ask it/Of love not to desire.”55 In the end, Sue and her fractious idealism become another oppositional force in Jude’s life; “. . . the forces internal to Sue . . . constitute a 53

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Also note how Sue’s first sight of the statuettes perceive “their contours with luminous distinctness” (JO 2.3.93), and Phillotson’s perception of a “new emanation” around Sue as he becomes attracted to her (JO 2.5.105). Phyllis Bartlett, “ ‘Seraph of Heaven’: A Shelleyan Dream in Hardy’s Fiction,” PMLA 70 (1955): 625, 632. Laon and Cynthna of “The Revolt of Islam” are incestuous lovers, as Jude and Sue vaguely are (their being cousins). D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (London: Heinemann, 1967), 2:880. Lawrence evocatively terms Sue’s “porcelain/Of flesh,” which would crack in Jude’s flame of passion.

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fatal barrier to her and Jude’s happiness,” and she becomes the later, dominant motif of the novel.56 These are part of the circumstances that oppose Jude, the repetitions and “complex irony . . . [that is] wrought into the intimate fabric of Hardy’s representation of life.”57 Hardy’s final novel presents a different type of tragedy than Balthasar’s conception. Balthasar wants all suffering to be meaningful and Christologically significant. But to make all human suffering transparent to Christ’s evergreater suffering raises two thorny problems. For one, it denies the possibility that human suffering can, at times, be meaningful—or at least significant—on its own terms. Second, Balthasar cannot make sense of a tragic suffering that is lowly, common, and empty. Christ cannot redeem the tragedy of prosaic reality. In contrast, Jude the Obscure is prosaic in both form and content, as it traces someone who falls from not a great height, but a low one. His suffering is profitless, largely self-engendered, and empty. The origin of many of his oppositions come not from powerful sources, such as Fate or the gods, but from common details of society, poverty, Victorian higher education, and his attraction to women who make poor lovers. He seems caught between the ideal and the real, his imaginary perceptions and the reality that proves regnant. It is a life of failure, and raises the question: in what sense might Christ have a solidarity and Passion that enter and transcend such a life?

A Christology of ignobility Balthasar found profit, theologically, in considering Christ as a tragic hero, whose entrance into tragic human existence is ultimately healing. His consideration, however, is solely for classical, tragic drama. There is no place for ignoble suffering in his considerations. Following and expanding his thought, if there is profit in thinking of Christ as a classical tragic hero, then there is also profit in thinking of him as a modern, ignoble one—especially since Christ is, if anything, more a peasant than an aristocrat. The classical tragic hero may resist and curse his enemies, as Heracles does in The Women of Trachis, yet Christ fails as a classical hero because he forgives his enemies,

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Dale Kramer, “Hardy and Readers: Jude the Obscure,” in Dale Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, 175. Miller, Distance, 207.

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MacKinnon points out.58 The question remains, what is the theological response to Hardy’s portrait of ignoble, meaningless suffering in Jude the Obscure? Are there resources to craft a response better than Balthasar’s obliviousness to the problem, his monocularity regarding human suffering? The answer lies in a re-examination of Christology, a closer look at Christ’s life and death, which was as ignominious as it was ennobling. If tragedy reveals the quiescent acceptance of fate, as some aristocratic and Romantic theories hold, then it is hard to make sense of Christ’s agony in the garden or the disciples’ fear. The realistic novel, Frei argues (influenced by Auerbach), helps us to read the Bible,59 and so too the tragic novel helps us to grapple with the reality of Christ and his life spent with fishermen and peasants. “For that which he has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved,” wrote Gregory of Nazianzus of the Incarnation (Epistle 101),60 and Paul writes of Christ being made a curse for us (Gal 3:13). Christ can be understood as one who not only defeated death and evil on the Cross, but one who suffered the circumstantial, conditional, and ignoble, “a world so interesting to God that He sent His Son to redeem it,” writes Boyle.61 Balthasar wants Christ to be prefigured by great aristocratic tragedy, but this simply does not hold. Christ is a protagonist of the prosaic, not the aristocratic. The gospels themselves are in prose form, not tragic drama, and they feature lowly characters such as fishermen and tax collectors. Christ’s incarnation and life were marked with poverty, scandal, and ignominy. Jesus is born in near anonymity in a stable and feeding trough, and his suffering is better understood not as vicarious or triumphant, but as a disturbing, wrenching event. True suffering, Simone Weil rightly understood, is something we avoid and make invisible, for it is too painful, shameful, and afflicting to be truly perceived.62 The reality of Christ is that he dies not only nobly in a victory over evil, but also in solidarity with sinners and his betrayers. To Nietzsche’s horror, he dies in an unaristocratic fashion, acknowledging

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MacKinnon, Problem, 123. Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), Nice and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7: Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazienzen, Second Series (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 440. Boyle, “Art,” 108. “Thus compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility. When it is really found it is a more astounding miracle than walking on water, healing the sick, or even raising the dead.” Weil, Reader, 441.

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his persecutors and pronouncing forgiveness. The Cross is irreducible, like tragedy, polyvalent in its significance—a humbling defeat, in the very midst of its prosaism. It is for this reason that Eagleton speculates that Christ must have felt disappointment, ineffectiveness, and doom as he faced the Crucifixion. Christ had a “solidarity with failure,” an unpalatable despair and ignobility that Nietzsche despised.63 Yet it is only through such a real encounter with despair from within that it could be overcome and transcended. Similarly, MacKinnon verbalized that elements of Christ’s Passion were disastrous, tragic, and even unsuccessful.64 The destruction of Jerusalem and the burgeoning anti-Semitism in parts of the New Testament, which becomes full-fledged in later Western history, show Christ as a failure, MacKinnon argues. Christ was rejected by his own people and Zion itself, and his throne was a Cross. His mission, with his Crucifixion and the impending destruction of Jerusalem, ends with disaster. We understand the Crucifixion more deeply if we permit the notion that Christ was crucified not only for breaking the Sabbath law, angering the Jewish leaders, and threatening the state, but also for his plebeian status and his failure to inspire a mission that could protect him and his people. His death involves tragic waste, as it will not avert Jerusalem’s destruction or the pain his mother will feel. Eagleton holds that only through this, Christ’s final despair, could there be renewal. “The destitute condition of humanity, if it was to be fully restored, had to be lived all the way through, pressed to the extreme limit of a descent into the hell of meaningless and desolation . . .”65 Balthasar pictures this heroically and aristocratically; Eagleton and MacKinnon, however, willingly allow this kind of defeat in the Cross. In Gethsemane, Christ experiences the fullness of ignoble despair and circumstantial defeat. A theological allowance must be made in Balthasar’s theology for human suffering that, in its extremes, can be repetitive, empty, and irredeemable. Ignoble and circumstantial tragedy was part of Christ’s Passion. Balthasar is blind to this reality, for his ultimately 63

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Eagleton, Violence, 35. As Nietzsche realized, “Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, failed, it has made an ideal out of whatever contradicts the preservation instincts of a strong life . . . Christianity is called the religion of pity. . . . You lose strength when you pity . . . sometimes it can even cause a total loss of life and of vital energy wildly disproportionate to the magnitude of the cause (– the case of the death of the Nazarene).” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5–6. MacKinnon, Problem, 128. Eagleton, Violence, 37.

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reactionary classicism will not probe this kind of extreme—and thus he skews suffering, tragedy, and the Cross. Such an understanding shows a more full engagement with modernity than Balthasar will admit. Recent centuries have established modern life to be both tragic and egalitarian, and a suitable genre will reflect this modern sense of ignoble, prosaic suffering. The novel is the dominant literary art form in our current era, and this is no historical coincidence. Henry James argued that culture had become too complex to allow for the straightforwardness of ancient drama, where life was act, passion, expression; things were now too complex, diffuse, and reflective, and novels are the proper expression of contemporary life.66 This is a form of life that requires a full theological encounter, yet it is one that Balthasar has avoided. What Hardy shows is the reality of deep and ignoble suffering. If there is a fragility to goodness, there is also a fragility of being human, as Jude and Sue reveal, and it may be more delicate and profitless than we would like to admit. The mystery of Christ’s suffering, and thus human suffering, remains paradoxical, resistant to a complete conceptualization that will always be reductive; as Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo writes, “Did you know that suffering is limitless/that horror cannot be circumscribed.”67 Tragic literature, with its opaque inscrutability regarding human suffering and evil, remains a potent way to explore these elements of human existence, to enlarge our comprehension of these realities, and to repel unsatisfying conceptualizations. Christ’s life and Passion reveal resources for a healing of ignoble tragedy that does not deny or rescind its reality, but offers a realistic encounter that claims the whole tragic action—which includes, in the end, the final restoration of the Resurrection, precisely because it has already been embraced and healed in Christ’s embrace of a lowly life, which has triumphed in its very ignobility.

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King, Tragedy, 36; James, Muse, 54–5 (ch. 4). Jennifer Geddes, “Religion and the Tragic,” Literature and Theology 19, no. 2 (2005): 98.

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Conclusion: The Place of the Tragic Novel within Balthasar’s Theology

Why, my good sir, a novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! Stendhal, Scarlet and Black God is under no sort of necessity to make use of man for his own selfrevelation; but once he has decided on this and done so in an incarnation, all human dimensions . . . are taken up and used to express the absolute personality. Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, volume 1 This book has argued that there are significant problems within Balthasar’s development of the theological importance of tragedy and larger theological aesthetics. A contradictory aristocratism and antimodernism are lurking in his theological vision. Balthasar’s desire to engage with the full reality of creaturely freedom and the divine glory in the world stumbles in significant ways, for his work is marred by antimodernism, antiprosaism, a dislike of the novel, and a resistance to ignoble suffering. Chapter 1 argued for the importance of tragic literature for Balthasar, while observing the limiting of his praise to classic, aristocratic drama, in a manner similar to Hegel; Chapter 2 pointed to Balthasar’s conception of authentic tragedy and how it undergirds his rejection of modern drama and especially the novel. Chapter 3 established Balthasar’s specific critique of the novel, again with parallels to Hegel, and questioned his judgment by exploring an early Thomas Hardy novel, The Return of the Native. Chapter 4 looked at Balthasar’s aristocratism, so unfavorable to the fullness of reality and especially bourgeois ordinariness, and compared it to the prosaic tragedy of Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Chapter 5 traced

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Balthasar’s dislike of perspectivism or a sense of his own place as narrator in light of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the following chapter discussed the inadmissibility of ignoble suffering in Balthasar’s theology by way of Jude the Obscure. Through these chapters, a clear picture of Balthasar’s hermeneutical and theological tendencies emerged, which resist a full acceptance of “all human dimensions” (ET1.89) or an honest encounter with modernity. The result for Balthasar’s theology—its classicism, unwillingness to fully engage the novel, and mistrust of modernity and quotidian reality—is an etherealized aesthetics. It is limited by a suspicion of any hermeneutic or literature that does not have an overt presence of the Divine or a moral compass that points to the Divine, otherwise “[e]xistence must founder in the upheaval of revolution where there is no horizon of meaning (Büchner’s Danton) . . .” (TD1.75). In the end, Balthasar resists prosaic reality, resulting in a Hegelian dislike of the common because it cannot be trusted to be meaningful on its own terms or related to God. Without a larger horizon of meaning, reality is mere formlessness, the “prosaic realism of ordinariness . . . which ‘raises the question whether products of this kind can be called works of art at all’” (TD1.63–4). For all Balthasar’s desire to explore creaturely freedom, it is not extended to the reality of ordinariness or literature that is bourgeois, egalitarian, ignoble, or prosaic. This falls especially hard on the novel, which encapsulates these elements so thoroughly. There are alternatives to such a narrow theological hermeneutic, and an approach that reveals these problems within Balthasar’s hermeneutics can be briefly sketched by way of three contemporary theologians: Rowan Williams, Francesca Aran Murphy, and David Bentley Hart. With Williams, there is a basis for a trusting allowance for all art, modern or ancient, freely and obliquely to reflect God’s glory; it is, he writes, “an acknowledgement of the proper distinction between grace and nature: God makes a world in which created processes have their own integrity, so that they do not need God’s constant direct intervention to be themselves.”1 With such a view of art and aesthetics, art is not defined by a desire for delight, good, or even God, but merely “the good of this bit of work . . . to love what he or she [the artist] is doing.”2 Love’s caring attention, and not a transcending telos, constitutes good 1 2

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Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2005), 9. Williams, Grace, 15.

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art and literature. It is along the lines of Hardy’s statements that realism can be more instructive than the moral novel, whose unconvincing nature teaches nothing: “It may seem something of a paradox to assert that the novels which most conduce to moral profit are likely to be among those written without a moral purpose.”3 Such a vision is one that permits a “realistic imagination,” where language imitates reality’s particularities and multiplicity, finding “meaning in ordinariness,”4 Murphy notes; this vision neither devolves into a simple naturalism that facilely copies life,5 nor dogmatically presses everything with Christ-figures. It connects, in a deep way, the artist and God, who both seek to create objects of love, attention, and independent reality (although God’s creating ability remains on a scale ultimately inconceivable, in comparison to the artist’s). It trusts reality, on its own terms, to find ways to praise God. “Art helps us understand creation; the trinitarian birth of the other helps us grasp the complex relation of same to other in the artist’s product,” writes Williams.6 The connection between theology and literature is not dogma, a horizon of meaning, theme, a clear Christ figure, or genre, but one of delight, the love of reality’s plenitude. This approach, unlike Balthasar’s, is more trusting of aesthetics, human creativity, and reality itself. There is no particular need to privilege the classics to the point that modern art, in a shadowy and derivative sense, must overtly imitate and repeat. Nor is there a need to establish a hierarchy of art with drama at its pinnacle. As Murphy briefly realizes, Balthasar’s desire to make tragedy a definitive form for Christ, as well as Christ the conclusion of tragedy, “can turn playwrights into choreographers.”7 The problem for Balthasar is that he is not willing to engage fully with reality or aesthetics, in what Hart calls an “analogia delectationis” where creative joy, delight, and freedom are the basis for a relationship between Creation and art.8 Hart argues that God delights with particularity, with endless variety and surfaces. “Analogy differs and defers, as a style of rejoicing,”9 so there remains, 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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Hardy, Writings, 118 (“The Profitable Reading of Fiction”). Murphy, Christ, 6–9. Williams, Grace, 26. Ibid., 161. Murphy, Christ, 158. Hart, Beauty, 250–2. Ibid., 311.

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simply, “an infinity of perspectives, an unending ‘vista’ of the beautiful.”10 There is rarely in Balthasar this sense of perspectivism—the multeity of voices, interpretations, and meanings of human existence, that sense of “jostling phantasmagorias crowded like a heap of soap bubbles, infinitely intersecting, but each seeing only his own,” as Hardy writes of a Sunday morning congregation.11 Such an endless perspectivism need not be a threat. Rather, it is a basis for encountering fully the wealth of human experience and literary creation, that does not require a prioritizing of classicism or aristocratism, a hierarchy of art which Hegel and Balthasar espouse. A realistic aesthetics embraces an attention to the world’s surfaces and realities in an un-Hegelian way. Balthasar is unwilling to allow this range of free play, however. In the end, his controlling Gestalt interferes with the full dramatic sense of time, imposing alien patterns on creation, as Quash argues.12 Balthasar’s rejection of the bourgeois novel goes hand in hand with his rejection of modernity. His thoroughgoing, Lawrencian aristocratism13 and classicism lead him to reject the modern and the prosaic—and thus unnecessarily limit his theological and aesthetical vision. The novel has established itself as a flexible, popular, dramatic, tragic, and modern genre, and for these very reasons it simply demands a theological encounter. “But since the time of the industrial revolution, the writer in essence, the man who typifies even at first glance the profession of letters, is the novelist,” comments Steiner.14 By effectively removing himself from a proper engagement with modernity, he has dismissed “the principal literary form of the last three centuries,” as Boyle inveighs against Balthasar.15 He is left in a reactionary position toward modernity, modern culture, and literature. It is no coincidence that the polyphonic novel is, on several counts, superior to drama in relating to modernity’s perspectivism and egalitarianism. The novel values modernity and the beauty of the ordinary, which in turn values a dimension of God’s creation. “Doing justice to the visible world is reflecting 10 11 12 13

14 15

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Hart, Beauty, 343. Hardy, Life, 219 (8 July 1888). Quash, Theology, 185. An interesting similarity exists between Balthasar and D. H. Lawrence, whose strongly patrician tastes parallel Balthasar’s, though for different reasons. Lawrence’s criticisms of Hardy’s novels, for example, exhibit his strong distaste for the average, undistinguished person. Albert J. Guerard, ed., Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1963), 49. Steiner, Death, 307. Boyle, “Art,” 107.

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the love of God for it, the fact that this world is worth dying for in God’s eyes,” summarizes Williams.16 Striking is Williams’ openness, in comparison with Balthasar’s a priori demands. Balthasar asks, rather calculatingly, “Does that mean then that Western history from the Renaissance to the present has been a false trail that can be disposed of and forgotten with impunity or even with profit?” He answers himself with a vague hope: “By no means,” but then proceeds to forlornly analyze Western history as the decision between Christianity as the summit of the classic tradition and modern nihilism (GL5.248–9). The options, according to the scheme of volume five of The Glory of the Lord, are either “Classical Meditation” or a retreat into the idealism of the self (“The Metaphysics of Spirit”). There is a deep faultline within Balthasar, running from, on the one hand, his love and wide knowledge of literature, his desire to be hopeful for the future, and his intention to engage modernity and human freedom fully, and, on the other hand, his dour aristocratism, antimodern prejudice, and tendency to conceptualize and misprize. Thus it is somewhat inevitable that he reacts negatively to Vatican II and descends into virulent attacks on aggiornamento as a godless modernism, holding that “[m]odern is something Christ never was, and, God willing, never will be.”17 It is ironic that Balthasar, who wanted to acknowledge creaturely freedom and identity, has failed to do so. His prioritizing of only the aristocratic and patrician means that there is no place for human existence in its ordinary aspects—the reality that it can be, for some people, banal and ignoble; persons cannot be represented on their own terms or allowed their own forms of freedom, triumph, and significance. These lower echelons remain, for Balthasar, vulgar, but the truth is that it is an impoverished theology where there is no place for the Tesses, Henchards, Judes, Clyms, Eustacias, and the “Christs of unwrit names” that are “unpenned” yet nonetheless worthy.18 If anything, Balthasar fails to go far enough in his theological vision. The end result is a theology hampered and limited, unwilling to engage fully with modernity, the varied range of literature, or the extent of the world and human experience. Literature, and particularly tragic literature, is diverse, wide-ranging, and innovative, and a full theological aesthetics will reflect and

16 17 18

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Williams, Grace, 99. Henrici, “Balthasar,” 36. Thomas Hardy, “Unkept Good Fridays” (CP 826).

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respond to such a diverse canon. Christ is best understood, as Hart understands him, within the world’s plenitude as “an infinite thematism, embracing the lowest and the highest within himself.”19 Such a widened vision is thoroughly possible for Balthasar’s work; his immense literary knowledge and writings themselves admit to a less etherealized angle, at times. His monumental contribution is to have so powerfully engaged theology, literature, and tragedy. No other Christian theologian has so thoroughly engaged with Western tragic literature. An acknowledgment of the full range of tragic literature that includes the modern novel, as well as a willing encounter with modernity, prosaic literature, and common reality, profitably continues the theological project he began.

19

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Hart, Beauty, 343.

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Index absolutism 44, 99–101 Aeschylus 19, 25 Agamemnon 134, 185 and Balthasar 10, 11n. 5, 38 and Hardy 70, 72 Oresteia 25, 33, 40, 53, 185 Orestes 14, 28 The Persians 33 Prometheus 52, 104, 163n. 77, 184, 201 Prometheus plays 25, 33, 53, 113, 200–1 Alcestis 45, 53 Allen, Diogenes 27n. 5, 28n. 56 anagnorisis 65, 72, 89, 204 anti-Semitism 209 apostles, the 117 Aquinas, St. Thomas 44, 99 aristocratism 3, 24, 26, 104–5, 136, 208 Aristotle 72, 103 definition of tragedy 19, 51, 64, 65, 71–2, 92 influence on tragic literature 43, 60n. 13, 103 tragedy as hamartia 55, 71, 89, 91 unities of time, place, and action 65, 71, 89, 120 Attic tragedy or tragedians 14, 28, 42, 46, 75, 106 Auerbach, Erich x, 75, 85 concern for the ordinary 66n. 33, 105n. 20, 108, 127, 130 critique of aristocratism 44, 98, 100, 107 mixing of high and low styles 127–30 Augustine, Saint 1, 129 Auschwitz 11n. 6, 187, 201, 210 Austen, Jane 107, 109, 140 Bakhtin, Mikhail 114, 116 and Dostoyevsky 80, 84, 95

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definition of the novel 67n. 34, 79–80, 89–90, 96, 174 God and the novel 84 Balthasar, Hans Urs von and Euripides 188–90, 200 and Goethe 5, 47, 101–2 and Hegelian reductionism 37 history and institutions as tragic 18 importance of action 28, 48, 62, 76 meandering style 9 moral compass 141–2 novel’s lack of proper distance 84, 137–8 optimism about tragedy’s future 35, 45–6 place of staged dramas 84 and politics 22, 48–9, 99, 146n. 15 primary writings on tragedy 10–11 problem of perspectivism 149–52, 177 and Racine 10n. 4, 11n. 5, 35, 106, 118 and Racine’s Baroque era 40, 43–4, 100 and Reinhold Schneider 11n. 5, 62–3, 99–101, 106, 188 recent critiques of 4 and Shakespeare’s interpretation 37, 98, 143 and Shakespeare’s valorization 10n. 4, 11n. 5, 40, 42, 44, 106, 163n. 74 universalism 180 use of epic, lyric, and dramatic categories 36, 61, 86, 141 Balzac Honoré de 60–1, 101, 141 Baroque tragedy 40, 42–4, 46, 50–1, 100 Barth, Karl 7, 21, 114 Bayley, John 82n. 91 Beckett, Samuel 47, 49, 200 Beer, Gillian 87, 165 Benvenuto, Richard 83 Bernanos, Georges 58, 98 Betz, John R. 22n. 42

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Bible and aristocratism 106, 208 artistic elements 115 and Hardy 114–21 modern Biblical criticism 114 and narrative 1, 2 rude style 129 scripture references Psalms 114, 199 Job 21–2, 53, 115, 186, 191, 199 Matthew 25:31–46 33 Sermon on the Mount 173 Galatians 3:13 218 Ephesians 1:23 184 Revelation 25, 115, 178 and suffering 185, 193 and tragedies of Greece 20, 30–1, 43, 45–6 and tragedy 17, 21, 25, 55, 117, 128, 188 and tragic realism 171 Blake, William 161 Block, Ed, Jr. 12n. 9, 13n. 10 Boethius 29, 120 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 47n. 11 bourgeois progress 121–2 Boyle, Nicholas 46, 93, 116, 135 critique of Balthasar 58–9, 98, 130 place of the novel 114, 214 prosaic tragedy 208 Bradley, A. C. 51, 121 Brecht, Berthold 48–50, 60, 144, 145, 164n. 81, 204–5 Buber, Martin 13 Büchner, George 41, 122, 145, 212 Bunyan, John 63, 206 Calderón 25, 51n. 15, 99 esteemed by Balthasar 37, 40, 43, 161 Camus, Albert 40 catharsis 51n. 17 Cervantes, Miguel de 65, 108n. 37, 206 Chaereas and Callirhoe 64, 108n. 37 chain of being 62, 100, 109–10, 113, 130, 135 Chaucer, Geoffrey 108 Chekov, Anton 64 Chesterton, G. K. 168 chivalry 106

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Christ Christology 184, 208 does not annul tragic existence 16 exceeds all tragedies 30–1 as prosaic 208–9 Christian triumphalism 16 Christus Patiens 55 church 4, 18, 94, 151 and preserving tragedy 26, 35, 99 Cicero 129 Claudel, Paul 44, 98–9, 106n. 28, 187 Clement of Alexandria 1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 20 comedy 129, 135, 143, 167, 179 comic irony 199 relationship to tragedy 5, 12n. 9, 24, 126, 190n. 19 Corn Laws 111 Corneille 10n. 4, 35, 43, 106 Counter-Reformation 43 country life 107, 110 Dante 14, 43, 63, 128 Darwin, Charles 87, 105, 132, 159, 170 David, king of Israel 10n. 4, 20, 25, 31, 106, 115, 117 Davies, Oliver 3 de Vega, Lope 106 Defoe, Daniel 65, 108 Descartes, René 108 despair 209 deus ex machina 41 Dickens, Charles 47, 58, 61, 84, 87, 101, 107 Dickinson, Emily 57 Dionysus 25–6 Doctor Zhivago 133–4 Donne, John 196 Dostoyevsky 38, 50, 58, 63, 108 see also Bakhtin, Mikhail: and Dostoyevsky Eagleton, Terry x, 49n. 13 bourgeois tragedy 55, 103, 105, 107, 122, 204 Christ’s solidarity with failure 209 and Hardy 5, 82n. 91, 88, 111, 165 loss and triumph in tragedy 133–4 and Marxism 146n. 15

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Index and the novel 65, 73, 75, 85, 109, 112–13 and the post-tragic 23 tragedy’s indefinition 51, 53, 83 economics 98, 107–8, 127, 132 Electra 16, 164 Eliot, George 6, 87, 111 prosaic tragedy 55, 66, 105, 107, 204 Eliot, T. S. 64, 77, 116 English novel 6 Enlightenment 22 epic genre 62–3, 73, 92, 141 eschatology 140, 179 Eucharist 44, 93, 151 Euripides 1, 10n. 4, 11n. 5, 37, 204 The Bacchae 51 and Balthasar 188–90, 200 Heracleidae 189 Medea 51 The Trojan Women 188–9 Evangelicalism 170, 173 existentialism 139 Farrer, Austin 20 fate 88, 123, 142, 207–8 Faulkner, William 46, 50, 58, 108 feminist theology 193 feudal society 63 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 24n. 50, 62, 98 Flaubert, Gustave 61, 85, 101 Fontane, Theodor 61, 101 Ford, David 10n. 2, 25 Forster, E. M. 90 Forsyth, P. T. 10n. 2 Frei, Hans 112, 114, 127, 208 French Revolution 102n. 15, 105 Freud, Sigmund 121n. 103 Freytag, Gustav 61, 101 Frye, Northrop 90n. 123, 117n. 86, 200 furze 68, 74 Fusillo, Massimo 35–6, 60n. 13 Galsworthy, John 61, 101 Gardner, Helen 15n. 19, 26, 93, 154 Gardner, Lucy 9n. 1, 151 Gethsemane 28, 134, 189, 208–9 God and beauty 20–1 as co-sufferer 187

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divine and human freedom 21–2, 36, 138–9, 177, 215 as dramatic 13 human distance from God 3, 138–9, 146, 193 and the infinite difference of the Divine Persons 21, 31, 138–9, 190 tragic human resistance 179 God-abandonment 29–31, 136, 186–7, 190–1 Goethe 13, 51, 64, 98 and Balthasar 5, 47, 101–2 Golgotha 30, 189 Good Samaritan 33 Greek chorus 120, 176 Greek tragedians see Attic tragedians Gregor, Ian 73n. 58, 82, 167, 199 and The Mayor of Casterbridge 132–4 and Tess of the d’Urbervilles 154, 158 Gregory of Nazianzus 208 Gregory of Nyssa 43, 149–50 Gregory of Tours 129 Guy Fawkes night 71, 73 Hagar 21 hamartia 55, 121, 201, 204 Hamilton, Edith 77, 154 Hamsun, Knut 61, 101 Hardy, Thomas and Aeschylus 70, 72 and Christianity 168–74 Dynasts, The 72, 163, 173 and fatalism 165–7 grotesque, the 88, 110, 169 Immanent Will 162 loving-kindness 171 novels A Laodicean 124 A Pair of Blue Eyes 155 Far from the Madding Crowd 123, 127, 198 The Trumpet-Major 124 Two on a Tower 124 Under the Greenwood Tree 123, 198 The Woodlanders 78, 192 Our Exploits at West Poley 131 perspectivism 155–6

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Index

poems “A Broken Appointment” 90n. 126 “The Darkling Thrush” 161 “Fellow Townsmen” 165 “God’s Funeral” 168 “The Impercipient” 162 “The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid” 78n. 75 “Tess’ Lament” 131 “Unkept Good Fridays” 215 problem of human maladaptation 87 proto-modern 67 saturninity 161 and Shakespeare 4, 70, 89, 119 King Lear 70–1, 119–20, 120n. 94, 128, 131 Macbeth 70, 110n. 48 and Sophocles 70, 72, 116, 120 Tess’ rape-seduction 156–7 uneven style 81–2 Hart, David Bentley 19, 28n. 56, 49–50, 175 aesthetics 46, 181, 152, 212–13, 216 critique of tragic theology 32 suffering as meaningless 191, 201–2 Hartmann, Robert Eduard von 171n. 124 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 63 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich 41, 201n. 39 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 10 definition of tragedy 21, 24, 142–3 and historicism 102 influence on tragic theory 52 and interpretation of tragedy 11n. 7, 15, 19, 26, 31 narrator’s perspective 81, 177 and Renaissance/Baroque tragedy 35, 51n. 15 rich exploration of tragedy 38 and tragic guilt 16 Heidegger, Martin 17n. 26 Heilman, Robert 117 Heracles 104, 188–9, 204, 207 Heraclitus 28, 201 Higonnet, Margaret 73, 79 Hinduism 10 Hofmannsthal 11n. 5 Holocaust 18 Holy Saturday 135, 186, 188 Homer 1, 19–21, 26, 28, 99 see also myth and mythology

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and the novel 64, 108n. 37 Homer’s double doctrine 20 horizon of meaning 82, 141–6 Howsare, Rodney 27n. 54, 105n. 21 human existence as dramatic 12–18, 30 as existentially tragic 14–16, 30 as prosaic 15 humanism 47, 86 Hus, Jan 18 hypostasis 30 Ibsen, Henrik 47–50, 61, 64, 112, 145 idealism 86, 89 see also philosophy: modern philosophy bourgeois idealism 63, 205 and the novel 68 subjective idealism 47–9, 61, 96, 101, 112, 215 and tragedy 41–2 Idealism, German 62 ideology 145 Incarnation 129–30, 194 Iphigenia 46, 53, 104 irony 110, 200, 204 James, Henry 6, 109, 116n. 79 and the novel 76, 109, 210 and tragedy 51n. 15, 66 Jephtha, daughter of and very unlucky 21, 104 Jerome, St. 129 Joan of Arc 18 Johnson, Samuel 83 Judas Iscariot 25 Kafka, Franz 50, 58, 63, 108 Kant, Immanuel 24n. 50, 62, 98 and perception 1, 140, 151, 159 Kermode, Frank 65, 92, 148 Khovacs, Ivan Patricio 95 Kierkegaard 29, 51 Kilby, Karen 4, 149n. 20, 176 King, Jeanette 66, 71–2, 126 Kott, Jan 70 Kramer, Dale 72, 78 language 93–4 Laplace, Pierre-Simon

26

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Index Lautréamont, Comte de 61, 102 Lawrence, D. H. 73, 127, 206, 214 Leavis, F. R. 116 Lerner, Laurence 111, 132 Lesky, Albin 40, 102n. 14, 190, 201n. 39 Lessing, Gotthold 62 Lévinas, Emmanuel 93, 114 Levine, George 86, 109, 110–11 Lewes, George Henry 76 Lewis, C. S. 51, 63, 85, 103 Lucas, F. L. 15n. 19 Lukács, György 60 Luther, Martin 17

235

Nabokov, Vladimir 51n. 15 narrative 1–2 Newman, John Henry 20 Newton, A. Edward 73 Newtonian universe 140 Nichols, Aidan 12n. 9, 44 Niebuhr, Reinhold 10n. 2, 17, 103 Nietzsche, Friedrich 28–9, 34, 51, 52, 171, 208–9 nihilism 25, 84, 144, 190, 215 see also Schopenhauer novel’s adaptive powers 65 Odysseus 19–20, 31, 160

Machiavelli 102 MacKinnon, Donald 12n. 9, 16, 32, 88 and Balthasar 34, 140, 180 and contingency 1–2, 97 defining tragedy 163n. 74, 164 and tragic elements of Christianity 17–18, 25, 207–9 madness 51–2 Malraux, André 50, 58, 108 Mann, Thomas 61, 101–2 Marxism 49, 60, 146n. 15 Mary, mother of Jesus 94, 151 Maximus the Confessor 43 McDowell, J. C. 23 medieval era 128, 193–4 medieval wheel of Fortune 120–1 Melville, Herman 75, 135 Milbank, John 175 Miller, Arthur 51, 105, 146, 193 Miller, J. Hillis 125, 137, 160 Millgate, Michael 125, 154, 159, 199 critiques of Hardy 68n. 37, 73n. 58, 119, 153, 167, 196 Milton, John 55, 63–4, 108, 157n. 48, 166 mimesis 45 modern art’s oppressiveness 22 Moira 163 Mongrain, Kevin 12n. 9, 35n. 79 Moses 117, 186 Moule, Henry 172 Murphy, Francesa 12n. 9, 20, 28, 128n. 130 aesthetics 22n. 42, 212–13 mystery plays 26, 93, 98, 144 myth and mythology 11n. 7, 14, 20, 26–8

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paganism 69, 169 Parmenides 28–9 Pascal, Blaise 183 Passion 130, 183, 186, 189 past, the 89, 91 Paterson, John 70, 72, 75, 121n. 101, 127, 168n. 99 Paul, Charles Kegan 73 Peasants’ War 102 performance 93, 95 peripeteia 65, 89, 92, 204 philosophy 177, 188 Greek philosophy 9, 11, 26–9, 184 modern philosophy 27–8, 43, 98 Pindar 188 Pitstick, Alyssa 4 pity 33 Plato 1, 12, 19n. 32 and tragedy 26–9 Poole, Adrian 137, 156, 184 and Attic tragedy 83, 120, 134, 160 characteristics of tragedy 52, 70, 89, 196 Princess of Clèves, The 64, 108n. 37 Protestantism 62 Providence 25, 43, 163, 183 psychology 61, 101, 122, 145–6 Pushkin, Alexander 61, 101 Quash, Ben 13, 93, 95, 107 critique of Balthasar 4, 12n. 9, 96, 151, 177, 189, 214 Hegel’s influence on Balthasar 34–7 tragedy and time 14, 66–7, 89–90

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236 tragic elements in Christianity unframeability 92, 159

Index 25

Racine 51n. 15, 53, 201 Balthasar’s esteem of his Baroque era 40, 43–4, 100 interpreted by Balthasar 10n. 4, 11n. 5, 35, 106, 118 use of Bible 21, 31, 45, 55 Rahner, Karl 98 rationalism 27–8, 174n. 134, 177 Reformation 18 Renaissance tragedy 3, 35, 50 Resurrection and tragedy 24 Richards, I. A. 51 Richardson, Samuel 51, 64–5, 108, 132, 134 Ricoeur, Paul 80n. 87, 93, 114, 116, 176n. 138 Rimbaud, Arthur 61, 102 Romanticism 41, 48, 49n. 13, 101, 126–7, 208 rough music 119, 132 Russell, Bertrand 102 Samson 21, 55, 64, 104, 186 Sartre, Jean-Paul 100 Saul, King of Israel 115, 117, 122 as a tragic figure 10n. 4, 21, 25, 186 Schelling 51 Schindler, D. C. 13 Schneider, Reinhold 44 Balthasar’s acclaim of 11n. 5, 62–3, 99–101, 106, 188 Schopenhauer 34, 123, 164, 171n. 124 and meaninglessness 23, 25, 41, 66n. 33 Scott, Nathan, Jr. 5 Scott, Walter 47, 61, 101 Seneca 29, 64 Shakespeare 51n. 15, 75, 94, 100, 108, 128 Balthasar’s misreading 37, 98, 143 Balthasar’s valorization 10n. 4, 11n. 5, 40, 42, 44, 106, 163n. 74 and the Bible 21 and Christ figures 45, 131, 147, 192–3 condemned by Hegel 35, 51n. 15, 126 and God 163, 192–3 and Greek tragedy 45, 83

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and Hardy 4, 70–1, 89, 119–20, 120n. 94, 128, 131 high and low styles 66, 98, 125 plays A Winter’s Tale 24 As You Like It 14 Hamlet 14, 16, 24–5, 53–4, 120n. 94, 164 Hamlet an unusual tragedy 125–6 King Lear 83, 126, 132, 143–4, 184 Macbeth 107, 123, 142, 184, 201 Macbeth and Hardy 70, 110n. 48 Measure for Measure 143–4, 193 The Merchant of Venice 143 Much Ado about Nothing 184 Othello 113n. 60, 143–4, 184 Romeo and Juliet 162 Timon of Athens 51 Troilus and Cressida 145 Two Gentlemen of Verona 154 romances 143 and suffering 16, 198 Shaw, George Bernard 49, 100 Shelley, Percy 91, 206 Silenus, wisdom of 23 Social meliorism 49, 173, 205 Socialism 49, 108 sociology 61, 101, 145 Socrates 28–9 Soloviev, Vladimir 58n. 1 Sophocles 25, 99, 120 Ajax 188 Antigone 14, 18, 78, 100, 203 and Balthasar 10n. 4, 11n. 5, 21 and Hardy 70, 72, 116, 120 importance of the gods 24, 138 Oedipus 28, 119–20, 133, 201 Oedipus and blindness 16, 71–2 Oedipus at Colonus 25, 33, 200 Oedipus Rex 51, 72, 83n. 95 Philoctetes 16, 33, 188–9 Philoctetes and circumstantial tragedy 113n. 60, 184 , 201, 204 The Women of Trachis 185, 207 Spenser, Edmund 108 Speyr, Adrienne von 32, 186, 188–9 Stallman, Robert 78 Steinbeck, John 64

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Index Steiner, George 19n. 32, 44, 51, 103, 214 and absolute tragedy 23 God and tragedy 22n. 42, 24 Stendhal 61, 75–6, 101–2, 211 Stoicism 28 suicide 68, 127 Szondi, Peter 24n. 50, 44 Taylor, Charles 15–16 Thackeray, William 61, 101 theater of the absurd 41 theodicy 183 time and history 89–93, 122 Tolpuddle Martyrs 111 Tolstoy, Leo 61, 101 Toulmin, Stephen 105n. 20 Tractarianism 169 tragedy and causation 88–9, 165–7 different kinds of 10, 52 and existentialism 12–18 and happy endings 53 as a sacrament 26 and sin and guilt 14–18, 89, 139 tragic drama as worship 25–6 typology 190 an unstable genre 25 victory in tragedy 203 tragicism 40–2, 50, 190, 201n. 39 see also Steiner, George: and absolute tragedy

Hans.indb 237

237

Turner, J. M. W.

110

Unamuno, Miguel de 15n. 19 Vanhoozer, Kevin 18n. 27, 21, 180–1 Victorian era 5, 87, 107, 126, 168, 205 Wallace, Jennifer 15n. 19, 26n. 53, 72, 94, 133, 143 Waller, Giles 10, 23n. 44 Ward, Keith 20 Watt, Ian 64, 73, 90, 96, 111 Weil, Simone 19n. 31, 97, 160n. 63, 208 and tragedy 10n. 2, 21n. 38, 33 Wessex 73–4, 124 Wilder, Thornton 3, 46, 58 Williams, Raymond 54–5, 101, 120, 133 and Hardy 74, 107, 113, 116, 127 realistic fiction 112 and social tragedy 205 tragedy and fatalism 24–5, 134, 163 Williams, Rowan 31, 137, 151–2, 190n. 18, 212–13, 215 Wilson, A. N. 168 witchcraft 73–4, 169 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 93 World War I 171, 173 Wuthering Heights 69n. 38 Zola, Émile

61, 101

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