Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature 019259592X, 9780192595928

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OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES General Editors Gillian Clark

Andrew Louth

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THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes scholarly volumes on the thought and history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, the books are of interest to theologians, ancient historians, and specialists in the classical and Jewish worlds. Titles in the series include: The Roman Martyrs Introduction, Translations, and Commentary Michael Lapidge (2017) Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings Jennifer Otto (2018) St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons Theology and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Byzantium Torstein Theodor Tollefsen (2018) Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works A Literary Study Andrew Radde-Gallwitz (2018) The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age Jesse A. Hoover (2018) The Minor Prophets as Christian Scripture in the Commentaries of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Cyril of Alexandria Hauna T. Ondrey (2018) Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East A Study of Jacob of Serugh Philip Michael Forness (2018) God and Christ in Irenaeus Anthony Briggman (2018) Augustine’s Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement Bart van Egmond (2018) The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, AD 431–451 Mark S. Smith (2018) The Many Deaths of Peter and Paul David L. Eastman (2019)

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Visions and Faces of the Tragic The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature

P A U L M. B L O W E R S

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Paul Blowers 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954805 ISBN 978–0–19–885410–4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Richard Major non alienus a tragoedia

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Preface and Acknowledgments In the spring of 2001, I performed the role of Polonius in the Milligan College theatre department’s production of Hamlet. Toward the end of Act II, the pretentious Polonius announces an acting troupe lately arrived at the castle of King Claudius. The lines were not easy to memorize, but they are altogether memorable: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragicalcomical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.

Amid this announcement, Hamlet scorns Polonius as witless, calling him a “Jephthah,” the infamous tragical-comical character from Judges 11 who fatefully sacrificed his own daughter to fulfill a vow to God. Hamlet is referring to the events preceding, in which Polonius has effectively sacrificed the good repute of his own daughter Ophelia in his foolish scheme to identify the root of Hamlet’s purported madness. Ostentation aside, Polonius’s introduction of the actors betrays Shakespeare’s admiration for the amazing diversity and cross-fertilization of dramatic forms that had descended from Greek and Roman theatre and captured audiences for centuries. Hamlet’s scoffing of Polonius as a Jephthah-figure, on the other hand, bespeaks Shakespeare’s ingenious sense of the thin line between mimesis and reality. Tragedy and comedy are in the Bible and in the great classics of old, but they are also all around us. We are all characters on the world stage playing them out regularly and mostly unwittingly. Indeed, at their best, tragedy and comedy seek not merely to move and to amuse, but to intrude themselves into our own lived reality, even vicariously to interpret that reality for us. As I have undertaken research for a book on the visions and faces of the tragic in early Christian literature, I have needed the collective help not merely of historians of theatre, cultural historians of late antiquity, specialists in literary criticism, biblical critics, and fellow patristics scholars and historical theologians. I have needed the artist’s eye, the intuitions of the dramaturge, and the strivings of the director and actor to understand dramatic interpretation and performance from the inside out. Professor Richard Major, my friend of more than forty years who directed Hamlet in 2001, and with whom I have collaborated in numerous stage productions over

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the years, has helped me immensely in all these respects. In rehearsals where he has been as much a teacher as a director, I have learned much about that fine line between mimesis and reality, and of the ways that tragical and comical vision, duly vetted, are a boon to Christian faith. I am pleased to dedicate this book to him in recognition of our long friendship as well as of his deep artistic insight and his hidden contributions to this book. I am also very grateful to have received a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology for the academic year 2017–18, by the generosity of the Luce Foundation in New York City, which enabled me to take a full year sabbatical to complete the present book through research undertaken for extended periods in the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. While in Leuven, Prof. Johan Leemans was a gracious faculty host and allowed me use of his office in the main theological Library. I am thankful as well for fruitful exchanges with other Luce Fellows in conferences hosted in 2017 and 2018 by the Association of Theological Schools at Pittsburgh. There are others to thank as well. This book grew originally out of research on tragical pity and Christian mercy for my presidential address to the North American Patristics Society at our annual conference at Chicago in 2009. Subsequently, I was able to give further presentations from this body of research in lectures at the Sophia Institute conference at Union Theological Seminary (NY) in 2009 by invitation of Prof. John McGuckin; at Duke Divinity School in 2010 and again in 2019 by invitation of Prof. J. Warren Smith; at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011 by invitation of Prof. Andrew Crislip; and at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame in 2019 by invitation of Prof. Thomas Burman. All these occasions provided me good feedback from scholars and non-scholars alike and gave me an opportunity to test my ideas with others besides specialists in early Christianity. I must express a very special thanks as well to Dr. Suzanne Abrams Rebillard, an esteemed scholar of Gregory Nazianzen, who read and critiqued the fourth chapter of this book, and who also, in personal conversations, has shared her classicist’s expertise on the bishop’s autobiographical poetry. Her insights have been extremely valuable to me. Also, I am truly grateful to Tom Perridge, Karen Raith, John Smallman, my copy editor Joanna North, and others at the Oxford University Press (UK) for their encouragement and help in bringing this book to publication. Certainly I need to acknowledge the publishers who have allowed me to incorporate material from some previously published essays. First, the Johns Hopkins University Press, for permission to use content from my essay “Pity, Empathy, and the Spectacle of Human Suffering: Exploring the Emotional Culture of Compassion in Late Ancient Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18 (2010): 1–27. Second, Wiley-Blackwell, for permission to

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integrate content from my essay “Envy’s Narrative Scripts: Cyprian, Basil, and the Monastic Sages on the Anatomy and Cure of the Invidious Emotions,” Modern Theology 25 (2009): 21–43. One final note. In the chapters to follow, all translations from ancient texts are my own unless a preexisting translation is indicated. Paul M. Blowers Milligan College, Tennessee May 2019

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Contents List of Abbreviations

1. Excavating Tragical Perspectives in Early Christianity: Trajectories of Inquiry and Interpretive Challenges Tragical Vision in Early Christian Literature: Preliminary Considerations Tragedy: Form, Reception, Interpretation, and Cultural Utility Tragedy in Roman Culture Tragedy, Philosophy, and Life The Grand Complication: Early and Sustained Christian Aversion to Theatrical Art Incipient Polemics Transitional Responses: Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea Maturing Critical Engagement of the Theatre and Tragedy Paths into Christian Tragical Mimesis

2. Tragical Mimesis and Biblical Interpretation I: Primitive Tragedies in Genesis The Mimetic and Dramatic Dimensions of Interpretation The Dynamics of Mimesis Dramatic Interpretation of Scripture Theorizing (Contemplating) the Tragic in Genesis Adam and Eve’s Fall and “Recognition” Tragic Sibling Rivalries

3. Tragical Mimesis and Biblical Interpretation II: Exposing and Expounding the Tragic in Sacred History The Undoing of Ancient Judges and Kings The Disastrous Saga of Jephthah and His Daughter Samson: A Tragic Downfall? Saul as a Tragic Hero Job’s Reversal of Fortune The Tragic in the New Testament King Herod and the Holy Innocents The Demise of John the Baptist Tragic Villains: Judas Iscariot, Ananias, and Sapphira Conspectus: Tragical Mimesis in Biblical Interpretation

4. The Tragic Christian Self: Three Late-Ancient Profiles Lives and Selves Gregory Nazianzen’s Profile of the Tragic Christian Self Gregory’s Depiction of His Own Life as a Tragedy Gregory’s Objectification of the Tragic Christian Self

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1 1 7 7 12 20 21 23 28 31 34 34 34 38 43 43 51 67 67 67 73 74 78 84 84 89 92 99 102 102 107 107 114

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Contents

“The Nothingness That Is All I Am”: Tragic Selfhood as Shared by John Chrysostom and His Soul-Mate Olympias Augustine of Hippo: The Tragic Self, Fallen and Distended in Time Approaching the Self and Its Fallenness in Augustine The Tragic Self Scattered in Time Conspectus: Comparing Tragic Selves

5. Tragical Conscience: Contemplating the Faces and Bodies of Tragedy in the Foreground of the Church Tragical Vision and Christian Moral Conscience Faces and Bodies of Tragedy I: The Indigent and the Diseased Faces and Bodies of Tragedy II: Parasites, Society’s Tragic Comics Faces and Bodies of Tragedy III: Marrieds and Ascetics Faces and Bodies of Tragedy IV: Unbelieving Jews Conspectus: Christian Tragical Conscience

6. Tragical Pathos: The Expanding Christian Repertoire of Tragical Emotions

118 123 123 129 133 136 136 142 150 159 168 176

Emotions and Moral Vision The Classic Tragical Emotions “Cleansed” and Reeducated Fear Retrained and Recontextualized Re-scripting Tragical Pity as Christian Mercy Re-scripting Mercy with Empathy Emotions of Tragical Sorrow The Gamut of Grief and Melancholy Compunction and the “Gift of Tears” Conspectus: Tragical Conscience and Tragical Emotions

179 179 184 184 191 196 200 200 209 216

7. The Theological Scope of Early Christian Tragical Vision

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Tragical Vision and Mimesis: A Nascent Theological Artform in Early Christianity Tragical Vision through a Theodramatic Lens Theodramatic Perspective: Contemplation (θεωρία) and Performance (πρᾶξις) Plotting the Cosmic Tragedy and Its Resolution A “Play of Freedoms” The Theological Intelligence and Accountability of Early Christian Tragical Vision Identifying and Authenticating the Tragic Wisdom, Providence, and the Artful Flirtation with Necessity and Fate The Limited Function of Theodicy Salvation’s Folly: Where Tragedy and Comedy Meet

Epilogue: Hope and the Christian Tragical Pathos Select Bibliography General Index Index of Scriptural References

220 223 225 227 232 236 236 240 248 249 254 263 281 288

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List of Abbreviations ACW

Ancient Christian Writers series

APA

Apophthegmata patrum, Alphabetical Collection

CCSG

Corpus Christianorum, series graeca

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum, series latina

CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

DOML

Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

FOTC

Fathers of the Church series

GCS

Griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte

GCS NF

GCS Neue Folge

GNO

Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. Werner Jaeger et al.

Görgemanns

Görgemanns, Herwig, and Heinrich Karpp, eds., Origenis De Principiis Libri IV, Karpp Texte zur Forschung 24. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976

LCL

Loeb Classical Library

NETS

New English Translation of the Septuagint, ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin Wright (1996)

OECT

Oxford Early Christian Texts

PG

Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne

PL

Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne

PO

Patrologia Orientalis

PPS

Popular Patristics series

PS

Patrologia Syriaca

PTA

Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen

PTS

Patristische Texte und Studien

SC

Sources Chrétiennes

SVF

Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. Hans von Arnim

TLG

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

TTH

Translated Texts for Historians

WSA

Works of St. Augustine, ed. John Rotelle et al.

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1 Excavating Tragical Perspectives in Early Christianity Trajectories of Inquiry and Interpretive Challenges

TRAGICAL VISION IN EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE: PRELIM INARY C ONSIDERATI ONS In introducing this book, I am quite intentionally projecting the image of excavation. Early Christians did not normally compose tragedies; nor did they engage in dramatic theory; nor in general did they studiously attend to the history of Greek and Roman tragedy, although some erudite patristic writers, like Clement of Alexandria and Gregory Nazianzen, enjoyed extensive knowledge of that poetic tradition. At the popular level, we know that Christian leaders from early on discouraged the faithful from attending theatre of all sorts and for all sorts of reasons. These and other factors lie behind the judgment of some more recent philosophers and literary critics, most notably George Steiner, that Christianity, with its message of redemption from suffering and of transcending the world, is endemically anti-tragic, and that it has decisively contributed to the attrition of the genre in modern Western culture.¹ This judgment cannot be final. In the first place, it is premature on historical grounds, for there were, in fact, some early Christian works of tragedy, however scarce, just as in the Hellenistic-Jewish tradition there was at least one such work, the intriguing Exagôgê, a tragedy on the Israelite Exodus in five acts by an Alexandrian Jew named Ezekiel (second century BCE).² The first ¹ See Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); George Steiner, “ ‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35 (2004): 13 (“Christianity made total tragedy implausible”). Cf. Richard Sewell, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 50, calling Christianity a reversal of tragical vision. ² For the Greek text with translation and commentary, see Agnieszka Kotlińska-Toma, Hellenistic Tragedy: Texts, Translations and Critical Survey (London: Bloomsbury, 2015),

Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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known but long-lost writings to qualify as Christian tragedy belong to Apollinaris the Elder of Syria in the fourth century, father of the better known and controversial bishop Apollinaris of Laodicea. According to the Church historian Socrates, he sought to defy the Emperor Julian’s ban (362 CE) on Christians studying classical literature. He went on the offensive and first composed a treatise of grammar for Christian consumption. He further “transferred into heroic verse all the Books of Moses along with all Old Testament books qualifying as history, putting the texts into dactylic meter while also reworking them in the form of dramatic tragedy”—all in a campaign to insure that no genre of Greek literature would be left unclaimed by Christianity.³ Socrates concluded that this literary project was ultimately in vain, providentially so.⁴ But the Christian historian Sozomen, reporting the same, adds the detail that Apollinaris the Elder . . . used his tremendous learning and ingenuity to compose a heroic epic on the antiquities of the Hebrews up until the reign of Saul, in place of Homer’s poem. He divided the entire work into twenty-four parts, denominating each part by a letter of the Greek alphabet, according to the number and order of the letters. He also produced comedies imitating those of Menander, tragedies like those of Euripides, and lyric like Pindar’s.⁵

Sozomen, far more optimistically than Socrates, further purports here that these compositions could genuinely have competed for status had it not been for the longstanding favoritism accorded the original pagan classics. In addition, the medieval Byzantine scholar-bishop Eustathius of Thessalonica (twelfth century) attributes a verse tragedy to the earlier monastic theologian John Damascene in the eighth century: He did not just leave pages of regular poetry, but also wrote plays. We know this at first-hand, having come across his play, written on the virtues of the blessed and chaste Susanna noted in the margins as being the work of John Mansur [Damascene] . . . The play is entirely Euripidean in style. Susanna genealogises herself and bewails that she fell into such great evil and violence within the garden. Then having compared the place to the garden in which the first mother

202–33; also Pierluigi Lanfranchi, L’Exagoge d’Ezéchiel le Tragique: introduction, texte, traduction et commentaire (Leiden: Brill, 2006). The substantial fragments of this work come from three Christian writers: Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Ps-Eustathius of Antioch. On the hints of primitive Christian interest in tragical art, see Jeff Jay, The Tragic in Mark: A Literary-Historical Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); Courtney Friesen, Reading Dionysus: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 37–9; Courtney Friesen, “Paulus Tragicus: Staging Apostolic Adversity in First Corinthians,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134 (2015): 813–32; Michael Cover, “The Death of Tragedy: The Form of God in Euripides’s Bacchae and Paul’s Carmen Christi,” Harvard Theological Review 111 (2018): 66–89. ³ Socrates, Historia ecclesiastica 3.16.1–4 (SC 493:308–10); quoted at 3.16.3–4 (p. 310). ⁴ Ibid. 3.16.7 (SC 493:310). ⁵ Sozomen, Historia ecclesiastica 5.18 (SC 495:188).

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[Eve] was deceived by the devil, she sweetly says that “the serpent, the architect of all evil, has sent me forth to wander like a second Eve.”⁶

But Apollinaris’s and John’s works being lost, the first extant writing to qualify as an authentically Christian tragedy is the Christus patiens, a cento of Euripidean verse on the passion of Christ from the middle Byzantine period, probably no earlier than the twelfth century albeit erroneously ascribed to Gregory Nazianzen in the fourth.⁷ My premise for this book, meanwhile, is that, absent well-defined mythopoeic patterns and profuse textual specimens of Christian tragedy, the makings of tragical interpretation of human existence are sometimes overt but also frequently latent, implicit, or oblique in patristic literature, just as they are in the New Testament; and they are spread broadly across a variety of genres, writers, and contexts. I want to argue that “the tragic”—which has long eluded hard and fast definitions—loomed larger in early Christian imagination than has heretofore been recognized and was not dependent for this purely on reminiscences of Greco-Roman tragedy. Christian interpretations of the tragic dimension of human life, moreover, transcended any urge to create a whole genre of Christian tragedy such as might displace pagan tragedy. What we have, I hope to show, is a dialectical response from Christian thinkers that developed over a very long period. On the one hand, some of them expressed hermeneutical confidence that sacred revelation already held its own keys to humanity’s tragic condition, and that the Bible at times played up that tragic state of things precisely in order to amplify the power of the gospel to bring salvific clarity, resolution, and hope to the world. Greco-Roman tragedy, by their account, languished in its own attachments to polytheistic delusion and hopelessness, and made a mockery of whatever notions of divine providence and justice were available from pagan philosophy. On the other hand, Christian writers were keenly aware of the longstanding cultural potency of tragedy as an artistic form, and of the debate as to whether the tragedians’ representation of the tragic could have its own philosophical force. It was out of the question completely to ignore this legacy in expounding tragic features in the redemptive drama sustaining Christian faith. Even if Apollinaris the Elder’s production of Christian tragedy and comedy may have been exceptional, and largely aimed at defying the pretensions of the Emperor Julian, it signals an interest in emulating pagan sources as well as Scripture itself in order to generate new Christian literary “classics” that could hold their own against older pagan ones.⁸ ⁶ Eustathius, praef., Interpretatio hymni Pentecostalis Damasceni (PG 136:507–8), trans. Lynette Muir, in William Tydeman, ed., The Medieval European Stage, 550–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 184. ⁷ Critical text in SC 149, with introduction by André Tuilier. ⁸ On the broader early Christian campaign to develop new “classics” and an “alternative literary culture,” see Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

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Understanding this emulative process entails more than simply collating patristic literary citations of (and allusions to) the pagan tragedies, or tracking down specific reactions of Christian writers to tragical drama. Some valuable scholarly work has already been done along those lines, but more to the initial purposes of my investigation is how the intellectual reception and criticism of tragical art in Greco-Roman culture affected—both negatively and positively—the appropriation, vetting, and reworking of tragical poetics in ancient Christian literature. The considerable debate over the cultural value and utility of tragedy within pagan philosophy, beginning with the divergent perspectives of Plato and Aristotle, provided a range of criticism to which Christian writers were all too willing to add their own philosophical analysis while also exploiting whatever valid insight they could glean from classical tragedy. In what follows, it will nevertheless become clear that I am writing as a historical theologian, not as a classicist or a cultural historian of the lateancient Mediterranean world. My principal object is the visions and faces of the tragic in early Christian sources as viewed through a theological rather than a cultural-historical or literary-critical lens, though my historicaltheological interpretation will still entail attention to the aesthetic and the dramatic dimensions of the art of theology. “Tragedy” (τραγῳδία; tragoedia) is notoriously vexing in its historical, artistic, and colloquial usages,⁹ so I must clarify terminology and frames of reference for this study. Scholars and historians of classical tragedy of course have their own definitions and usages. Three in particular are significant in the background of my analysis. First is the perceived universal reality of the tragic, an inexorable ontological condition bound up with human finitude, mutability, instability, passibility, and mortality—the tip of an interpretive iceberg as old as tragedy itself and perduring for centuries. Second is tragedy proper, the artistic dramatization of the tragic which originally derives from the ancient Greek cult of Dionysus, and which has in its sights to move, uproot, or illuminate its spectators, individually or communally, by putting human identity and destiny into fundamental moral or religious question. Third is tragical vision, which first tries to recover the perspective of a tragedy’s author and lead characters before adding new perspectives in the ongoing interpretive reception of classical works of tragedy.¹⁰ Despite the absence of a developed genre of tragedy in early Christianity, elements of the above distinctions are still heuristically helpful in studying

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49–75, 257–64; and Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). ⁹ For the inherited definitional problems that continue to vex the treatment of tragedy and the tragic, see Steiner, “ ‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” 1–15. ¹⁰ On this terminology, see also William Storm, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 28–51.

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relevant Christian writings. We shall see that the early Christian authors under discussion were not dogmatic in fixing a comprehensive definition of the tragic. Many of them nonetheless presupposed an overridingly tragic ontological condition of the human race binding its primordial past to its present and future, although the meanings and implications of that condition were sure to differ greatly not only between pagan and Christian writers but among Christian writers. For many of the latter, “the tragic” evoked conditions and eventualities that radically tested believers’ sense of security, whether the security of their material existence itself or the security bequeathed by inherited theological canons respecting divine providence and goodness. As for tragedy itself as an artistic or poetic form, we must recognize that already in Roman literary culture before the rise of Christianity, a tragedy could be scripted for recitation and interpretation without necessarily ever being staged and performed theatrically. Christian writers were obviously free, in their turn, to push the literary and rhetorical envelope of what a tragical “script” and “audience” might look like. They gained inspiration from within the Bible, where they discerned, not tragedies in the strictest artistic sense, but narratives peculiarly shaped to powerful dramatic effect, provocative narratives that seemed quite intentionally to problematize the “plot” (μῦθος; ὑπόθεσις) of the economy of salvation and to resist premature encapsulations of that plot. Christian writers thoroughly exploited what I shall be calling tragical mimesis, the poetic enterprise of dramatizing humanity’s tragic state of being by recalling its shameful legacies, and by playing up the constrained and degraded human condition while projecting still its possibilities and opportunities—all with a view to prompting an upheaval, a growth in insight, or a transformed pathos on their reader/audience’s part. In this connection, throughout my study, I want to be clear that early Christian tragical mimesis was foremost a re-presenting of the tragic itself, not a slavish imitation of the classical tragedians who depicted the tragic on their own terms. Also, for clarity and consistency, I am and will be using the adjective “tragical,” even if archaic, specifically in reference to mimesis and interpretation of the tragic, thus reserving “tragic” for the objectified phenomena (events, plot, persons) being dramatized or envisioned. The language is slippery, I confess, as some will still want to say that tragedy of its very nature cheats the line between mimesis and reality. Today we habitually call cataclysmic human events “tragedies” or “tragic” to define rather than just represent them. Tragical vision in early Christian sources also needs to be scrutinized and nuanced, as it will constitute an important theme in the coming chapters. Since, for the Christian writers whom we will be discussing, the relevant subject matter was the tragic itself and not just the poetic representation of the tragic (whether the poet be a classical tragedian, the inspired author of a tragic narrative in Scripture, or a Christian writer or preacher), I will be suggesting that early Christian tragical vision was essentially contemplative,

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integrating interpretation, intuition, and imagination alike. It involved both logos—the exposition of divine wisdom and justice, created nature, evil, and human destiny in considering what is genuinely tragic in the world—and a Christian mythos conducing believers to behold, in the world’s “subjection to futility” (Rom. 8:20), the severity and gratuity of divine mercy and the depth of divine identification with the “groaning” creation (Rom. 8:22). The impact of tragical mimesis, along Christian lines, would ultimately be judged by whether an audience could “see” this tragical vision contemplatively (θεωρητικῶς), and so also process that vision intellectually, emotionally, performatively (πρακτικῶς), and most importantly salvifically. Tragical vision perceived the sublime “folly” of salvation elicited in some of the Bible’s more problematic and less straightforwardly edifying narratives, and in Christians’ ongoing experience of a world not yet fully rescued from evil and death by Jesus Christ. In later chapters, then, I will exhibit how Christian authors of late antiquity cultivated this tragic mythos and vision, in various and flexible literary forms: sermons and orations, biblical commentaries, poetry and hymnody, hagiography, autobiography, and theological treatises. Inculcating and training Christian tragical vision, I will propose, was a matter of stretching the moral imagination and giving believers the heightened spiritual senses to see—and therewith to continue to enact—the cosmic drama of salvation in which they, as Christ’s ecclesial embodiment in the world, were now the principal dramatis personae. It was not enough, however, simply to hold up tragic heroes from the Bible, or from martyrological and hagiographical tradition, and encourage believers to imitate their venerable examples. It was imperative, at the level of Christian moral psychology and spiritual anthropology, to shape an objective model of the “tragic self” to which all Christians might aspire, a self whose faculties were heightened both by and for the experience of suffering, a self prudentially aware of the divine providence operative beneath the seeming caprice of evil and the randomness of suffering in the world. It was necessary, I will further argue, to reform the Christian moral conscience by providing it a tragical frame of reference, and to foster emotions morally beneficial to Christians in their encounter with the depths of human sin and with the miseries relentlessly persisting in the world that Jesus Christ came to transfigure. Central to this emotional repertoire would be the “re-scripting” of the old tragic pity as Christian mercy and empathy; but it would also include godly sorrow and melancholia, deep compunction, and an appropriately chastened hope, all as enriching tragical vision. Before turning in earnest to the manifestations of tragical mimesis in patristic literature, however, we must move well back into the pre-Christian era to examine, even if relatively briefly, the roots, development, and functions of tragical poetics within the Greek and more immediate Roman past. For to the extent that they fostered a tragical vision of the world at all, early Christian authors were inevitably caught up in a much larger history of the literary and

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dramatic forms of tragedy, which has for centuries proven its resilience and its capacity for variation and reinvention. Christianity was the latecomer to a cultural conversation that had been going on for six centuries.

TRAGEDY: F ORM, RECEPTION, INTERPRETATION, AND CULTURAL UTILITY In approaching its early history, there is no warrant for speaking of an absolutely pure Urform of tragedy set in stone by the revered Attic triumvirate of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, such as supposedly degenerated into weaker and variegated approximations. Even though Aristotle claimed that very early on tragedy ceased to evolve,¹¹ there appears to have been no clear consensus among the Greeks themselves as to what invariably defined the tragic, other than circumstances “of high-flown solemnity or overwhelmingly lugubrious subject matter.”¹² And yet Aristotle’s influential treatment of tragedy in his Poetics, written about a half-century after the death of Sophocles, impressed on later generations that classical Greek tragedy had set certain standards and determinative criteria. Paul Ricoeur has insisted that the great Athenian playwrights defined the essence of tragedy once for all, such that all authentic tragedy is always an analogue of the original Greek. “To understand the tragic,” says Ricoeur, “is to relive in oneself the Greek experience of the tragic . . . ”¹³ Such a view, however, too easily begs the question of the malleable identity of “the tragic” across times and cultures. Early Christian interpreters, as we shall see, discerned the tragic in biblical narratives and in the Church’s unfolding history, but only rarely made explicit comparisons with, or allusions to, the classical Athenian and subsequent Roman tragedies. But some of these same Christians, especially those writing in the post-Constantinian Empire, also knew the advantages of exploiting these comparisons in their bid to seize control of the noblest aspects of Greco-Roman literary culture.

Tragedy in Roman Culture Before the advent of Christianity, the key test of the resilience of Greek tragedy was its adaptation in the Roman Republic and early Empire. The earliest of Roman tragedies, most notably those of Livius Andronicus ¹¹ Poetica 1449A. ¹² Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 98–102, quoted at 100. ¹³ See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 211; echoed also by Storm, After Dionysus, 30 and n. 3.

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(ca. 284–ca. 204 BCE), Gnaeus Naevius (ca. 280–ca. 201 BCE), and Quintus Ennius (ca. 239–ca. 169 BCE), come down to us only in fragments, requiring historians and classicists to piece together available evidence and to do a significant amount of speculating about the thrust of their works. But already with these early compositions, it is clear that the Roman tragedians, though depending on their Greek predecessors, were looking to emulate this inheritance rather than slavishly duplicate it. Tragedy and comedy alike had to be made compelling for Roman audiences in their own new contexts, in an era of relatively rapid political and cultural change.¹⁴ Crucially important, in the bigger picture of things, was the deepening social and political function of theatrical spectacle of all kinds, and its increasing power as a mode of mass communication, propaganda, and cultural definition over and beyond its artistic and recreational value.¹⁵ We must put out of our minds modern assumptions about theatre-going principally as a pastime for consumers of dramatic art or competitive sport. Before the construction of enclosed theatres as such, plays in Rome were performed on makeshift stages in public spaces such as the Forum, the Circus, or the temple façade of a god whose festival a play was serving to celebrate.¹⁶ Theatricality, we know, insinuated itself into many aspects of Roman life, from the public celebration of military victories to the private staging of funerary dramas.¹⁷ Among the regular forms of theatrical spectacle on display early in Roman history, A. J. Boyle identifies “public celebrations, sacrifice, divination, communal prayer, political and military oration, legal trials and executions, marriage, funerals, religious and triumphal processions, even a magistrate’s movement through the city streets.”¹⁸ Indeed, Christian suspicion of pagan ¹⁴ This adaptation is elucidated by Mario Erasmo, Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 9–30; Gesine Manuwald, Roman Republican Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20–2; Ingo Gildenhard, “Buskins & SPQR: Roman Receptions of Greek Tragedy,” in Ingo Gildenhard and Martin Revermann, eds., Beyond the Fifth Century: Interactions with Greek Tragedy from the Fourth Century BCE to the Middle Ages (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 153–85; also A. J. Boyle, An Introduction to Roman Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 11–12, 27–108. On the early Roman campaign, “rusticizing” other Italians, to develop a new Latin literature truly competitive with the Greek achievement, see Denis Feeney, “The Beginnings of Latin Literature,” Journal of Roman Studies 95 (2005): 226–40, at 236–9. ¹⁵ See esp. Richard Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). ¹⁶ Tertullian (Spect. 10, CCSL 1:236–7) attests some of these venues and the resistance of some critics to construction of permanent theatres Rome itself. On these venues, see also Vayos Liapis, Costas Panayotakis, and George W. M. Harrison, “Introduction: Making Sense of Ancient Performance,” in George W. M. Harrison and Vayos Liapis, eds., Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 22–5. ¹⁷ Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments, 2–3. ¹⁸ Boyle, An Introduction to Roman Tragedy, 3. On the panorama of Roman theatricality, see Jacob Latham, Performance, Memory, and Processions in Ancient Rome: The Pompa Circensis from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); also

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theatrical shows, a subject I will resume in more detail below, was based in part on their permeating influence and seeming inescapability, which carried over from the Republic into the Empire. In this wider context, tragedy was neither fully insulated nor reserved exclusively for elite viewers. It proved over time to be quite pliant as a mode of fashioning political and cultural consciousness, for which reason it increasingly became an object of some imperial control and manipulation. Gnaeus Naevius is credited with first producing a derivative of tragedy, the fabula praetexta, a historical play that dramatized momentous events and the quasimythic exploits of famous Roman political or military figures.¹⁹ The praetexta, as Mario Erasmo emphasizes, was a major positive step toward “metatheatre,” the deliberate attempt to interconnect the unfamiliar mimesis of reality onstage with the familiar reality of events outside the theatre.²⁰ Horace, in the first century BCE, boasted that the praetexta proved how Roman poets could innovate, transcending their dependence on Greek predecessors by celebrating Rome’s own “domestic achievements” (domestica facta).²¹ Much later, speaking retrospectively of the classifications of Roman drama, the fourth-century CE grammarian Diomedes defended a genetic connection between tragedy and the praetextae because both set in relief their lead characters’ dignitas and sublimitas, even if in tragedies those characters were Greek heroes while in the praetextae they were celebrated Romans such as the statesman Brutus or the Emperor Decius.²² Modern classicists do not all agree on the genetic link between the fabulae praetextae and tragedy;²³ but the anonymous Octavia, a praetexta written during the Flavian dynasty (late first century CE), was unmistakably a tragedy, one that set in devastatingly bold relief the tyrannical whims of Nero, including his murder of his mother Agrippina, his marriage to his stepsister Poppaea after an adulterous affair, and his scandalous banishment of his first wife.²⁴

Katherine Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 1–229. ¹⁹ On this genre, see esp. Gesine Manuwald, Fabulae Praetextae: Spuren einer literarischen Gattung der Römer (Munich: Beck, 2001); also her “Editing Roman (Republican) Tragedy: Challenges and Possible Solutions,” in George W. M. Harrison, ed., Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 3–23. Classicists do not all agree, however, on the relation of the praetexta to tragedy, and some consider it a separate genre altogether. ²⁰ See Erasmo, Roman Tragedy, 4–5. ²¹ Ars poetica, ll. 285–8 (LCL 194:474). ²² Ars grammatica 3, in Heinrich Keil, ed., Grammatici Latini 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1857), 489. ²³ See Harriet Flower, “Fabulae Praetextae in Context: When Were Plays on Contemporary Subjects Performed in Republican Rome?” Classical Quarterly 45 (1995): 170–90; Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, “Tragic Rome: Roman Historical Drama and the Genre of Tragedy,” in Harrison, Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy, 216–37. ²⁴ Text in Rolando Ferri, ed., Octavia: A Play Attributed to Seneca, Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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A related case of tragedy’s adaptability, further extending the scope of its cultural influence, was its cross-fertilization with historiography. This had already begun in Greece. As Richard Rutherford summarizes, “Tragedy and history are related—both high mimetic genres, indebted to epic, much concerned with leaders and nobles, politics and wars, nations or individuals in lengthy conflicts, often describing the sequences of events that span more than one generation of human experience . . . ”²⁵ Aristotle notably had insisted on a rather strict distinction. Poetry, he says, tends to deal with universal reality (τὰ καθ’ ὅλου) while history tends to treat the particular (τὰ καθ’ ἕκαστον); and tragedy, moreover, is a mimesis of events in which characters are bound to the “probability or necessity” of artful plots, while history has to do with real-life contingencies.²⁶ And yet intriguing comparisons appear between ancient tragedy and history at the level of plot-patterns. In Greece, the history-writing of Thucydides (fifth century BCE) revealed tragical elements such as juxtaposition (a way of forcing readers to interpret certain events in the light of others); prefiguration and repetition of events; irony; reversal of fortune (περιπέτεια), and more.²⁷ Later on, the tragical features in the works of certain Hellenistic historians were so robust that Polybius criticized them outright for being sensational and emotive rather than factual.²⁸ This did not hinder the Roman historian Tacitus, however, from introducing significant tragical elements into his work, including a “riveting account of the hubristic rise of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and its spectacular fall.”²⁹ In addition to its cross-fertilization with other genres, tragedy’s endurance in the highly theatricalized culture of the early Roman Empire depended on its raw ability to compete for attention. Its deep connection with revered epics and its intrinsic rhetorical power were crucial advantages, no doubt.³⁰ In fact, tragedy was increasingly recited or sung more often than it was staged.³¹ Amazingly, we have no positive evidence that Seneca’s tragedies of the first century CE were actually performed on stage, though they were certainly scripted for it. They have even been called “rhetorical tragedy” because of

²⁵ “Tragedy and History,” in John Marincola, ed., A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 504. ²⁶ Poetica 1450B, 1451B. ²⁷ See John Marincola, Greek Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69–73; cf. Rutherford, “Tragedy and History,” 507ff. ²⁸ Historia 2.56 (LCL 128:414–16). ²⁹ Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, Tragedy, Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 75. ³⁰ On the strongly rhetorical dimension and “declamatory style” of Senecan tragedy, see A. J. Boyle, ed. and trans., Seneca: Medea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xliv–xlviii; Boyle, An Introduction to Roman Tragedy, 193–7. ³¹ See Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–23; Boyle, An Introduction to Roman Tragedy, 186–8, 192–3, 236.

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their characters’ frequent and potent declamations, by which, as Sander Goldberg suggests, Seneca “brought the genre out of the intellectual doldrums that had so exasperated Cicero and Horace.”³² Complicating the maintenance of tragedy as “high” drama, however, was its commandeering by other forms of dramatic entertainment, especially those alleged to be most pleasing to the eyes. Comedy had long parodied tragic themes in the hearty competition between the two genres,³³ but now tragedy could also be danced by masked pantomimes (tragoedia saltata), communicating more directly through sensual, bodily articulations—“an affective vocabulary of steps and gestures”³⁴— with the accompaniment of instrumental music and a chorus or narrator. Knowing the popularity of pantomime, Seneca seems even to have designed his tragedies precisely for its incorporation,³⁵ while a century later, Lucian of Samosata praised pantomime for embracing tragic themes but also for showing greater thematic and artistic dexterity.³⁶ Tragedy also had to compete not just with but in the arena. Seneca’s tragedies scripted bloody spectacle precisely when popular Roman audiences were ever more devoted to, and demanding of, the blood spilled in gladiatorial contests, chariot races, and other games—entertainment that the imperial authorities sought to regulate but also expand in order to placate the populace’s demand for “bread and circuses.”³⁷ Gladiatorial combats, Carlin Barton has argued, served an important social as well as dramatic function to give the disempowered in Roman society an emotionally real if existentially illusory hope for empowerment. The gladiator combined the imperviousness of a Stoic sage with the resolve of a tragic hero, paving a path to honor amid the most graphic disgrace, in defiance of “arbitrary and unpredictable fortune and the Powers That Be.”³⁸ This was tragedy that could sell and sell widely. Despite the survival of Greek tragedies performed in festivals in the Empire beyond

³² “Melpomene’s Declamation (Rhetoric and Tragedy),” in William Dominik, ed., Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature (London: Routledge, 2003), 140. See also David Konstan, “Rhetorical Tragedy: The Logic of Declamation,” in Harrison, Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy, 105–17. Tertullian knew of this pattern of declamations within tragedy (De spectaculis 25.3, CCSL 1:248). ³³ See Niall Slater, “Roman Tragedy through a Comic Lens,” in Harrison, Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy, 283–308. ³⁴ Ismene Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence: Lucian and Pantomime Dancing (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 13. ³⁵ See Alessandra Zanobi, Seneca’s Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), viii–ix and passim. ³⁶ De saltatione 26–31 (LCL 302:238–42). On the increasing dominance of pantomime in Roman drama, see Marie-Hélène Garelli, Danser le mythe: la pantomime et sa réception dans la culture antique (Louvain: Peeters, 2007); Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 58–94. ³⁷ Juvenal, Satires 10 (LCL 91:372). ³⁸ Carlin Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 34–5.

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the city of Rome during the second and third centuries CE, the drastically changing landscape of drama in the Augustan and post-Augustan age was largely leaving high tragedy in the dust. Boyle concludes: Roman tragedy as creative writing or fully staged/recited performance died. The latter’s prime successor in the empire’s capital and that empire’s many centres of cultural production was not Greek tragedy nor even “tragic” pantomime, but the arena, whose “fatal charades” cruelly mimicked the subjects of tragedy and of the praetexta, and whose political pragmatics of spectacle and blood enacted—in a potent but less subtle form—the analysis of power and death central to Roman tragedy throughout its evolution.³⁹

Tragedy, Philosophy, and Life Needless to say, the reception, interpretation, and cultural utility of tragedy in Greece and Rome did not hinge solely on its entertainment appeal or even its aesthetical and dramatic worth. I have only briefly mentioned its political usefulness in the Empire, which is another story of its own. But in order to prepare the way more directly for analysis of early Christian appropriations and reworkings of tragedy and the tragic, I turn now to tragedy’s relation to philosophy and its importance for Greco-Roman moral culture, for this is the domain of enduring debate over the value of mythopoeia and poetic discourse, the validity of literary and dramatic mimesis (artistically “imitating” reality), and the prospects of tragedy—along with comedy—being able to deepen moral, religious, and political insight for individuals or whole communities. Tragedy’s philosophical benefit had famously been called into question in classical Athens by Plato himself, who as a young man wrote his own tragedy for a competition, only to burn it after hearing Socrates speak and then becoming his disciple.⁴⁰ Plato’s declaration, mouthed by Socrates, that “there is from of old a quarrel (διαφορά) between philosophy and poetry”⁴¹ was not just a retrospect but also an invitation to continued quarreling. Plato joined the “struggle” (ἀγών)⁴² full force in the Republic, where, begrudgingly admitting Homer’s influence as the first and greatest tragical poet, he rebukes the “honeyed muse”⁴³ of poetry for aspiring to dull our intellectual wits by offering a cheap imitation of truth and catering to base emotion. Plato’s criticisms in the Republic of poetic—especially tragical—mimesis appear implacable:

³⁹ Introduction to Roman Tragedy, 236, 238. ⁴⁰ Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum 3.5–6 (LCL 184:280). ⁴² Ibid. 608B. ⁴³ Ibid. 607A.

⁴¹ Respublica 607B.

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• The poet, a meager imitator (μιμητής), “knows nothing of the reality (τοῦ ὄντος) but only the appearance (τοῦ φαινομένου),”⁴⁴ and is powerless even to judge the validity or morality of his imitations.⁴⁵ • The poet’s mimesis, worse yet, is an imitation of an imitation, “at third remove from the truth” since it represents only “the thing that appears beautiful to the ignorant multitude.”⁴⁶ • The poet’s mimicry is mere “child’s play” (παιδία) and “not in earnest” (οὐ σπουδήν). In fact it is bald exploitation and “witchcraft” (γοητεία).⁴⁷ • Mimetic art pitches itself to the baser part of the soul, and plays off raw emotions, since it “imitates human beings acting under compulsion or voluntarily, and as a result of their actions supposing themselves to have fared well or ill and in all this feeling either grief or joy.” Such in no way projects a virtuous, philosophical singleness of mind, but subverts the sober judgment of the intellect amid misfortune. Indeed, mimicking emotions is much easier than representing the often-hidden judgment of the intellect, and thus the tragical poet merely caters to the rabble.⁴⁸ • Tragical mimesis (including Homer) can seduce even astute observers into the superficial pleasure of “sympathizing with” (συμπάσχοντες) and “taking seriously” (σπουδάζοντες) the emotions expressed by characters, even when those same observers would pride themselves, in their own real-life experiences, on being calm and collected in the face of misfortune. The cheap satisfaction of identifying with the tragically stricken characters, “contemplating the woes of others,” and “feeding fat the emotion of pity” easily leads to resonating such emotions in real life, again to the detriment of reason.⁴⁹ • The poets are therefore charlatans, merely out for praise and rewards, while true justice (as anchored in reality and apprehended by philosophy) earns praise in and of itself.⁵⁰ In his Laws Plato ratchets up this criticism. Having noted that comedy’s sole value is as a foil for “the things that matter” (τὰ σπουδαῖα), having no place among the occupations of the wise,⁵¹ he next assails the tragedians as alleged purveyors of serious truth, and airs a mock response of the philosophizing lawgivers to their tragedian rivals: Most excellent of strangers, we ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as

⁴⁴ Ibid. 601B. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 602A–B. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 602B–C. ⁴⁷ Ibid. 602B, D. ⁴⁸ Ibid. 603A–605B. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 605C–606D. Plato here approximates Aristotle’s later description of tragic pity as emotional catharsis. ⁵⁰ Ibid. 612B–E. ⁵¹ Leges 816D–E.

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a representation (μίμησις) of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy. Thus we are composers of the same things as yourselves, rivals of yours as artists and actors of the fairest drama, which, as our hope is, true law, and it alone, is by nature competent to complete. Do not imagine, then, that we will ever thus lightly allow you to set up your stage beside us in the marketplace, and give permission to those imported actors of yours, with their dulcet tones and their voices louder than ours, to harangue women and children and the whole populace, and to say not the same things as we say about the same institutions, but, on the contrary, things that are, for the most part, just the opposite.⁵²

Striking as it is, Plato’s claim here that the philosophers are authors of the only true tragedy, and that dramatic art must be banned from public consumption, should not be taken overly literally. After all, why would he describe the philosophers’ work as superior tragedy, rather than as simply the superior means to pursue truth and virtue, unless he held out some serious respect for the genre? In the background, Plato certainly knew that the tragedians had long been competing with the philosophers on their own turf by engaging cosmic and metaphysical questions such as evil, suffering, death, and the injustices of life.⁵³ Furthermore, Plato endorsed the constructive role of poetry in, for example, his evocative creation myth in the relatively late Timaeus, as well as in other dialogues.⁵⁴ Even amid his polemic in the Republic, Plato has Socrates allowing, in principle, for the poets to mount their own defense,⁵⁵ and Plato ends this dialogue with the memorable “myth of Er” precisely to promote the superior quest of philosophia.⁵⁶ Various recent theories have been proposed to explain Plato’s monumental critique. Martin Puchner, for example, believes that Plato wanted to upstage the old forms of drama with a new kind of philosophical theatrics, the drama of ideas, exemplified precisely in his own dialogues.⁵⁷ Thomas Gould instead asserts that Plato’s goal was exposing the tragical poets’ anti-philosophical urge to induce the kinds of pathos that would enable humans to endure a world which, by those same poets’ account, was ⁵² Ibid. 817A–B, trans. R. G. Bury (LCL 192:99). ⁵³ See Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 98–117, 207. Not all of Plato’s references to tragedy, moreover, are negative, as shown by Dana Munteanu, Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 56–8. ⁵⁴ For recent extended discussion, see the essays in Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée, and Francisco Gonzalez, eds., Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths (Leiden: Brill, 2012). ⁵⁵ Respublica 607C–D, although Socrates only concedes “hymns to the gods and the praises of good men” as appropriate poetry for public consumption (ibid. 607A). ⁵⁶ Ibid. 614B–621B. Cf. also the end of the Gorgias (523A–527A), where Plato similarly portrays Socrates using a myth (of King Rhadamanthus, judge of souls after death) to advance the superiority of the philosophical life to that of the poet or rhetorician. ⁵⁷ The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–72; cf. Nikos Charalabopoulos, Platonic Drama and Its Ancient Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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intrinsically and metaphysically unjust.⁵⁸ Andrea Nightingale contends that Plato’s “ancient quarrel” between the poets and philosophers was his own rhetorical ploy intended to enhance the public stature of philosophy while it was still an upstart in Athenian culture.⁵⁹ But most compelling is Stephen Halliwell’s well-developed thesis that Plato’s censure of the poets ultimately constituted a broadside against “the tragic” as a worldview with tragedy as its formal mimesis.⁶⁰ Scrutinizing his engagement of tragic themes, allusions, and sources in his earlier dialogues before coming to his final rebuke in the Republic, Halliwell argues that Plato targeted four “primary propositions, or quasi-propositional attitudes” of the tragic worldview: first, that the gods are responsible for evil; second, that death is an evil to be feared because it negates everything worth living for; third, that the tragic heroes themselves regard death as inexorable loss and as grounds for utter despair; and fourth, that justice and happiness do not intrinsically correlate in the world since many unjust persons thrive and many just persons bitterly suffer.⁶¹ Taken together, says Halliwell, these propositions “configure a mentality that finds the organization of the world—governed by divine powers capable of ruthless destructiveness, and limited by the inevitability of a death that negates everything worth having—to be fundamentally hostile to human needs and values and irreconcilable with a positive moral significance.” Hence Plato must reject this morally disabling worldview in order to champion a viable religious and ethical interpretation of reality.⁶² Tragedy’s poetic mimesis compounds the problem by brokering emotions that both solicit and facilitate this tragic worldview, in particular a psychologically crippling grief unleashed through close identification with the tragic characters.⁶³ For Plato, then, a tragic worldview is perpetually premature; it is “philosophy in embryo”; but its perspectives are sufficiently persuasive that it remains a useful adversary to the quest of true philosophia.⁶⁴ I am convinced by Halliwell’s reading of Plato’s critique, and hope later to demonstrate that this critique, thus interpreted, provided, if not an authoritative mandate as such, at least a useful precedent for early Christian philosophoi in responding to a tragic worldview. But we must also consider the other most influential approach to tragedy in the background of Christianity, that of Aristotle in his Poetics, which takes on a very different analytical cast insofar as it focuses on tragedy’s mimesis of the tragic more as a human artistic phenomenon than as a worldview—though still with moral and philosophical consequence. The Stagirite sage famously defines tragedy as “mimesis of an ⁵⁸ The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 216–17, 278. ⁵⁹ Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60–92. ⁶⁰ Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 98–108. ⁶¹ Ibid. 108–9. ⁶² Ibid. 111. ⁶³ Ibid. 112–13. ⁶⁴ Ibid. 116–17.

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action which is elevated (μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας), complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions.”⁶⁵ Aristotle’s focus is on the “live action” of actors mimicking plausible scenarios of human experience, framed most strategically through plot (μῦθος) but also through character (ἦθος), diction (λέξις), thought (διάνοια), spectacle (ὄψις), and music (μέλος).⁶⁶ Thus the mimesis is no longer a philosophical charade or an imitation of an imitation, as Plato avers; rather, tragical mimesis represents “what is possible according to probability (τὸ εἰκός) or necessity (τὸ ἀναγκαῖον).”⁶⁷ Spectators, moreover, do not merely observe the mimesis but are participatively drawn into the mimetic process itself, an altogether natural and salutary exercise of practicing aspects of human selfhood through emotional (and cognitive) identification with the actors,⁶⁸ even though good acting as such pales in importance to plot structure. Indeed, Aristotle’s science of tragical mimesis shifts—crucially so—to its subjective dimension, the horizon of the audience. An effective tragical plot is normatively “complex” (πεπλέγμενος), combining elements of severe “reversal” (περιπέτεια) of fortune; characters’ “recognition” (ἀναγνώρισις) of their grave circumstance, and concomitant affection (φιλία) or enmity (ἔχθρα) for fellow characters discovered to be respectively virtuous or vile; and finally characters’ “suffering” (πάθος) of disaster or death. The best tragedy, moreover, deals with lead characters who are neither preeminently virtuous nor intrinsically vile, but who make a tragic miscalculation (ἁμαρτία) that precipitates their fall into misfortune.⁶⁹ This hamartia has often been rendered “tragic flaw,” but it is best described as an ominous miscalculation. Kierkegaard interpreted it as a highly qualified “guilt”: Aristotle, as we know, requires the tragic hero to have hamartia (guilt). But just as the action in Greek tragedy is something intermediate between activity and passivity, so too is the guilt, and in this lies the tragic collision. On the other hand, the more the subjectivity becomes reflected, or the more one sees the individual, in the Pelagian manner, left to himself, the more the guilt becomes ethical. Between these two extremes lies the tragic. If the individual is entirely ⁶⁵ Poetica 1449B, trans. Halliwell (LCL 199:46, 47). ⁶⁶ Ibid. 1449B–1450A. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 1451A and B. See Neil O’Sullivan, “Aristotle on Dramatic Probability,” The Classical Journal 91 (1995): 47–63, who argues that this “probability” is the plot’s plausibility, effective for moving an audience emotionally; but Halliwell relates it to the objective force of a plot, its consistency and “logic,” in Aristotle’s Poetics, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1998), 99–106. In her Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 113–19, Elizabeth Belfiore argues that Aristotle’s “probability or necessity” in a plot resembles a biological system that is intelligible in its parts according to a common telos; it also bespeaks the “necessity” imposed by the parameters of human nature itself. ⁶⁸ See the extended analysis of Aristotelian mimesis in Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures, 44–82. ⁶⁹ Poetica 1452A, 1452B, 1453A.

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without guilt, the tragic interest is removed, for the collision loses its power. If, on the other hand, he is guilty absolutely, he can no longer interest us tragically.⁷⁰

Together these elements induce the audience’s powerful emotions of fear and pity.⁷¹ Not only does such tragedy prompt these emotions, it relieves or “cleanses” them.⁷² But in what does this cleansing (κάθαρσις) actually consist? Aristotle unfortunately does not elaborate on tragedy’s emotional catharsis, thereby inviting a historically broad array of explanations. Halliwell has identified five especially relevant interpretive streams:⁷³ moralistic or didactic training

Catharsis as a function of tragedy’s use of positive and negative exempla to educate an audience’s fear and pity so as to avoid unhealthy expressions of these emotions

training for emotional courage

(Closely related to the interpretation above), catharsis as serving specifically to cultivate courage in the face of prospective misfortune by lessening the audience’s proneness to disabling fear and pity

moderation

Catharsis as attuning the passible self and strengthening psychological balance in order to habituate healthy expressions of fear and pity for future experience

outlet

Catharsis as primarily the pleasurable ventilation of pent-up fear and pity, enjoyed by observing the suffering of a tragedy’s characters

intellectual clarification

Catharsis less as emotional than as intellectual, as a matter of learning, and having to do with the audience of tragedy being conducted to greater clarity regarding the characters and plot

I am not interested here in judging the accuracy of these interpretive alternatives so far as Aristotle’s original meaning is concerned; but further on, especially in my treatment of early Christian reworkings of tragical fear and pity in Chapter 6, I hope to demonstrate that patristic adaptations of Aristotelian catharsis are congenial mainly with the first three streams in Halliwell’s outline. It is enough at this point to note that Christian writers themselves were less occupied with establishing the original Aristotelian version of catharsis than with exploiting (or transcending) its insights into the moral psychology of human response to the tragic. Later in this study, moreover, we will examine some intersections in early Christian literature of the Platonically-inspired suspicion of poetic mimesis and the Aristotelian valorization of the moral-psychological benefits of tragical mimesis and catharsis. Some patristic interpreters were quite familiar with ⁷⁰ Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1992; Danish edition, 1843), 143. ⁷¹ Poetica 1452A–1453A. ⁷² Ibid. 1449B. ⁷³ Aristotle’s Poetics, Appendix 5, 350–5. Halliwell’s list here of possible interpretations of catharsis is not exhaustive; see Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures, 257–360; Munteanu, Tragic Pathos, 238–50.

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these classical sources—perceived to be philosophical through and through and not restricted to purely literary or artistic interests. Discussion of the relation between tragedy and philosophy had not ended with the classical thinkers. In the Roman Republic and early Empire, writers like Cicero and Seneca integrated passages from the classical tragedies into their philosophical works; conversely, some Roman playwrights occasionally included philosophical elements in their tragedies. Though refraining from enthusiastic embrace of philosophy for its own sake, and occasionally showing scorn for philosophical elitism, early Roman tragedians like Ennius recognized the profound influence of Greek philosophy on the intellectual culture of their time, and were not averse to conveying a good word for some aspects of philosophical wisdom in their dramas.⁷⁴ As for Seneca, whose tragedies are the only ones in Latin to survive fully intact, there has been longstanding debate as to why these plays, teeming as they are with exhibitions of high emotion and unbridled passion, appear prima facie to contradict the Stoic values of self-rule and apatheia that he extols in his prose philosophical works. Recently, Gregory Staley has offered a convincing reading of Seneca’s theory of tragedy, claiming that for him it could and did serve philosophical purposes. With their exhibitions of graphic and violent passions, Seneca used his tragedies as a form of moralpsychological profiling, hoping precisely to instruct audiences in how to avoid destructive emotions.⁷⁵ According to Staley, Seneca took full account of Aristotelian catharsis, construing it as an enlightening of the moral self, maturing the self ’s judgments “homeopathically” through the cognitive dimension of emotion. The lofty rhetoric of the tragical characters, with accompanying high emotion, evoked emotional responses from members of the audience who, reflecting on how the presentation made them feel, developed judgments about what should constitute right (or wrong) courses of action.⁷⁶ In his theory of tragedy’s effects, Seneca was drawing precisely from his thinking about the emotional impact and moral illumination gleaned from the potent rhetoric of philosophers.⁷⁷ Seneca is one of the last Greco-Roman philosophers to theorize the relation between tragedy and philosophy, culminating a long history of pagan reception of Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to tragedy. While there is little evidence that his ideas specifically on this issue directly influenced later Christian thinkers, they do furnish an important resource for comparative purposes. Certain Christian writers, who were far more aware of Seneca as a ⁷⁴ For examples of this measured inclusion of philosophical motifs in early Roman tragedies, see Christopher Star, “Roman Tragedy and Philosophy,” in Harrison, Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy, 238–59. ⁷⁵ Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 66–95. ⁷⁶ Ibid. 90–2. ⁷⁷ Ep. 108.5–8 (LCL 77:232–4).

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philosophical moralist than as a tragedian, likewise remained deeply interested in the interconnection between mimesis, rhetoric, and the moral psychology of an audience or readership. Further in this study, I will explore how the tragic mythos in patristic writings functioned to cultivate virtuous emotions and moral vision. Already, however, I hasten to mention Clement of Alexandria’s relatively early estimation of the value of poetry alongside philosophy for conveying divine truth, part of his larger argument that certain pagan sources anticipated or approximated—even if by providential “accident” (συντυχία)⁷⁸—the scriptural revelation of the Logos. Clement is quick to caution that “the barbarian and Hellenic philosophy has torn off a piece of eternal truth not from the mythology of Dionysus but from the theology of the eternally-existent Word.”⁷⁹ Given Clement’s deep affection for Plato, his enthusiasm for philosophy’s contributions is obvious enough, but his vindication of the insights of certain of the poets, including the Greek tragedians (whose art originated precisely in the cult of Dionysus), is more curious. Philosophy alone will not suffice, he says, and yet poetry perennially engages in deception (τὸ ψεῦδος); nevertheless, even the poets will occasionally glance on the truth, and Clement quotes examples from verses in Euripides, Sophocles, and other writers who elicit worthy theological principles or else expose the debauchery of the pagan gods.⁸⁰ With Clement, then, we see the beginnings of a dialectical approach to tragical poetics that will be extended and deepened by later patristic authors. It is briefly echoed by Eusebius of Caesarea.⁸¹ Gregory Nazianzen revives the stock argument that pagan poets, when they got things right, plagiarized scriptural revelation.⁸² Gregory of Nyssa, who valued the pagan classics, nonetheless notes that his mother, in instructing his sister Macrina as a youth, avoided poetic writings that induced “tragical passions” (τὰ τραγικὰ πάθη) and works of illicit comedy.⁸³ Augustine writes in his City of God: There are also more acceptable theatrical shows, namely, comedies and tragedies—that is, poets’ fables designed to be performed in public performances with much immorality of action but at least written, unlike many others, with no obscenity of language. These are even included in the studies of what is called an admirable and liberal education, and the older generation compels youngsters to read and to learn from them.⁸⁴

⁷⁸ Stromateis 1.94.1–2 (GCS 15:60). ⁷⁹ Ibid. 1.57.6 (GCS 15:36). ⁸⁰ Protrepticus 7 (GCS 12:55–9). ⁸¹ See the texts cited below in n. 116. ⁸² Poema (ad Nemesium) 2.2.7, l. 249 (PG 37:1570A). Kristoffel Demoen has extensively explored Nazianzen’s assessment of the pagan poets in Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen: A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 211–31. ⁸³ Vita Sanctae Marcinae 3 (SC 178:148). ⁸⁴ De civitatis Dei 2.8 (CCSL 47:41), trans. William Babcock, WSA 1/6:44.

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While this is hardly an enthusiastic endorsement, it presupposes the broad attitude among late ancient writers that classical sources had a place as well in a Christian humanistic education for those capable of appropriately vetting these sources.

THE GRAND COMPLICATION: EARLY AND SUSTAINED CHRISTIA N AVERSION TO THEATRICAL ART Before proceeding further into my investigation of early Christian appropriations of tragedy and the tragic, there is a huge historical and cultural elephant in the room, one that demands consideration sooner rather than later, namely, the early and entrenched Christian antipathy toward virtually all GrecoRoman theatrical artforms. Indeed, digging after early Christian interpretation of the tragic, let alone critical and artistic reworkings of tragedy itself, admittedly seems counterintuitive from the outset. Theatre-going of any kind was certainly never held up in antiquity as a strategy for the Christian faithful to engage in constructive cultural criticism, let alone as a healthy pastime for edifying souls. Bishops assumed that average Christians did not have the intellectual and moral wherewithal adequately to filter what they saw in the shows. Not surprisingly, we have no evidence of those bishops soliciting literarily and rhetorically astute Christians to produce new and “safe” dramas for viewing by ecclesiastical audiences. In these early centuries we are a far cry indeed from the medieval mystery plays, or the liturgical “Furnace Play” of the Byzantine tradition, which celebrated the three young Jews’ survival of the fiery furnace (Dan. 3:1–30). The Christian response to tragedy, within the much larger context of aversion to pagan theatre and theatricality generally, is a whole story unto itself that need not be rehearsed in minute detail here since it has been the subject of extensive studies;⁸⁵ but certain aspects of it are crucial for understanding the peculiar nature of the biases that accrued over time within the Church and that complicated Christian engagement with Greek and Roman tragedy. ⁸⁵ On Christian response to pagan tragedy in particular, see J. H. Waszink, “Die griechische Tragödie im Urteil der Römer und der Christen,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 7 (1964): 139–48; Claudio Moreschini, “Dalla scena alla lettura: l’auctoritas dei tragici nella apologetica cristiana,” in Joachim Fugmann et al., eds., Theater, Theaterpraxis, Theaterkritik im kaiserzeitlichen Rom (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2004), 133–53. On the Christian aversion to pagan theatrics in general, see Heiko Jürgens, Pompa Diaboli: Die lateinischen Kirchenväter und das antike Theater (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1972); Werner Weissman, Kirche und Schauspiele: Die Schauspiele im Urteil der lateinischen Kirchenväter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustin (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1972), esp. 25–122; Latham, Performance, Memory, and Processions in Ancient Rome, 186–92; Timothy Barnes, “Christians and the Theater,” in William Slater, ed., Roman Theater and Society: E. Togo Salmon Papers I (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 161–80; Webb, Demons and Dancers, 197–216.

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Incipient Polemics Ardent condemnations of pagan entertainment abounded in Christian writers throughout antiquity. In Roman Africa, Tertullian’s well-developed opprobrium in his treatise On the Shows (De spectaculis, ca. 198),⁸⁶ echoed later by the Roman priest Novatian’s treatise of the same title,⁸⁷ was indicative of broad and deepening suspicion of Roman theatre of every type. Theatrical amusements, among other cultural icons, epitomized the idolatry (idololatria) and moral-spiritual bankruptcy of paganism. Spectacle had long functioned in the service of religion, as evidenced in the so-called ludi, religious festivals originating in the Roman Republic in the fourth and third centuries BCE, which gave rise to a wide array of popular amusements, from the ludi circenses, or circus shows, to the ludi scaenici, staged entertainment featuring tragedies, comedies, farces, mime, music, and dancing.⁸⁸ Jacob Latham notes, moreover, that in the culture of Roman civil religion, which had little in the way of institutionalized religious instruction, lavish public performances of ritual devotion to the gods (the pompa deorum) were crucial.⁸⁹ Tertullian, who as a polemicist delighted in exploiting internal pagan criticism of Roman cultural institutions, went to some length, using Suetonius’s Ludicra historia and probably other pagan sources, to track the history of the ludi and their religious aspects, clearly hoping to expose a long pedigree of theatrical decadence feeding the idolatry and indignity of the shows in his own day.⁹⁰ Tertullian already perceived, as have cultural historians of Rome, that by the second century CE in Roman theatrics, vaudevillian revelry had pretty fully eclipsed sober drama so far as public shows were concerned.⁹¹ As the apologist Minucius Felix remarks of the pagan ludi scaenici: In your stage plays there is the same wild passion [as in the chariot races and gladiatorial contests], with indecencies still more prolonged; at one a farcer describes or acts adulteries; at another an actor expends his forces on the amours which he depicts; by masquerading their intrigues, their sighs, and their hates, he brings disgrace upon your gods. For feigned sorrows he moves you to tears by unreal nods and gestures, till in the arena you clamour for the bloodshed for which upon the stage you weep.⁹² ⁸⁶ CCSL 1:225–54. ⁸⁷ CSEL 3.1:3–13. This work was originally ascribed to Cyprian of Carthage, but has been proven to be Novatian’s, and bears obvious influence from Tertullian’s treatise. ⁸⁸ For substantial background on the ludi and ludi scaenici, see Boyle, An Introduction to Roman Tragedy, 13–16. On the “circus parades,” or pompa circenses, see Latham, Performance, Memory, and Processions in Ancient Rome, 67–240. ⁸⁹ Performance, Memory, and Processions in Ancient Rome, 44–66, esp. 46–9. ⁹⁰ Spect. 5–12 (CCSL 1:231–9). On this historical review, see also J. H. Waszink, “Varro, Livy and Tertullian on the History of Roman Dramatic Art,” Vigiliae Christianae 2 (1948): 224–42. ⁹¹ Tertullian, Spect. 17 (CCSL 1:242–3). See also Barnes, “Christians and the Theater,” 167. ⁹² Octavius 37.11, trans. T. R. Glover and Gerald Rendell (LCL 250:430, 431).

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Attending such shows, then, constituted an egregious betrayal of the Christian’s baptismal vow to renounce the Devil and his pomp.⁹³ These were not simply reactionary tirades devoid of any understanding of the internal dynamics of drama and the arena games. Tertullian and Novatian specifically comment on the visual, auditory, and emotional appeal of the shows and their deeply seductive character, recognizing that they exercised an illicit but real psychological power beyond the viewer’s rational ability to process or resist.⁹⁴ Spectaculum betrayed the power of theatre to seduce the eyes in particular. Even Aristotle, in his cool analysis of the elements of tragedy, doubtless knew that spectacle (ὄψις) could take on a distractive life of its own with audiences, since he treats it just as a mimetic expedient, not a key agent of the effectiveness of a dramatic plot.⁹⁵ And as Horace had recognized, “Less vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty eyes (oculis fidelibus), and what the spectator can see for himself.”⁹⁶ Much later John Chrysostom will warn a Christian audience, “Are you not in utter dread, mortal human, over gazing with the same eyes both on the bed on stage, where the abominable dramas of adultery are performed, and on this sacred [Eucharist] table, where the awe-inspiring sacramental mysteries are enacted?”⁹⁷ Tertullian insists that one heaped condemnation on oneself all the more by going to the shows while disclaiming any intention of becoming like the actors or sympathizing with them, for one’s very presence in the theatre was intrinsically contaminating and demoralizing, since one’s guard was fully let down in spite of oneself.⁹⁸ Three centuries later, Augustine confirms this scenario, recounting how his soul-mate Alypius, a young man thoroughly contemptuous toward the theatre, was dragged there in Rome against his will by some friends and fellow law students. Trying to shut himself off from the spectacle, a roar of the crowd piqued his curiosity, and, once his hearing and his gaze were compromised, Alypius fell utterly prey to bloodthirsty pleasure.⁹⁹ In the emotional contagion that it generated, says Tertullian, theatre elicited the basest of passions—fury, illicit pleasure (voluptas),¹⁰⁰ lust, rivalry ⁹³ Tertullian, Spect. 4.1–3 (CCSL 1:231). ⁹⁴ Cf. Tertullian, Spect. 15–17 (CCSL 1:240–3); Novatian, De spectaculis 6–8 (CCSL 4:174–7). ⁹⁵ Poetica 1449B; 1450A; 1453B. ⁹⁶ Ars Poetica, ll. 180–2, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (LCL 194:464, 465). ⁹⁷ Hom. de Davide et Saule 3.2 (PG 54:696–7). ⁹⁸ Spect. 15 (CCSL 1:240–1). ⁹⁹ Confessiones 6.8.13 (CCSL 27:82–3). On Augustine’s reaction to Roman theatre, see Richard Lim, “Augustine and Roman Public Spectacles,” in Mark Vessey, ed., A Companion to Augustine (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 138–50. ¹⁰⁰ On this vice in particular, which Tertullian mentions early (De spectaculis 1.1–6, CCSL 1:227) and some 61 times throughout the treatise, see Andreas Kessler, “Tertullian und das Vergnügen in De Spectaculis,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 41 (1994): 313–53. Kessler notes Tertullian’s distinction (De spectaculis 14.2) between the “lust of the world” (concupiscentia saeculi) and “lust of pleasure” (voluptatis concupiscentia). In Ad uxorem

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(aemulatio), and the like—which stood in the very starkest contrast with the modesty and gentle-spiritedness proper to Christian decorum.¹⁰¹ Especially striking is his assumption that tragedy cast the same depraved spell as all other spectacle. That it had a revered pedigree made no difference. Again, if we reject the learning of secular literature as convicted of foolishness before God, we have a sufficiently clear rule also concerning those types of spectacles which, in profane literature, are classified as belonging to the comic or tragic stage. Now, if tragedies and comedies are bloody and wanton, impious and prodigal inventors of outrage and lust, the recounting of what is atrocious and base is not better; neither is what is objectionable in deed acceptable in word.¹⁰²

Tertullian’s last line here indicates his keen awareness that, in the tradition of Seneca discussed above, the rhetorical impact of tragedy was highly prized, but in his opinion it was drowned out by the destructive force of the spectacle itself. Tragedy, furthermore, was sheer dramatic mockery with its masked and “high-shoed” characters, pseudo-humans mimicking those who have been not only created in the image of God but also barred from the hypocrisis of pretending to be what they are not.¹⁰³ And even when these tragical characters were delivering their polished speeches, how could a Christian already compromised by the spectacle ever resist by calling to mind a “prophetic” (i.e. biblical) message?¹⁰⁴ Later in North Africa, the bishop Cyprian resumed the polemic against theatrical mimesis itself, especially the male mimes taking on feminine roles in tragedies and comedies alike. When his fellow bishop Eucratius sought his advice on what to do with an actor in his church who had withdrawn from performing just this kind of transvestite mime but continued teaching it to others because he needed the money, Cyprian recommended his excommunication until he could fully break free from such work and rely on the support of the congregation.¹⁰⁵

Transitional Responses: Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea Tertullian, Novatian, Cyprian and others were responding to the degenerate state of tragedy in their own time, a development that I will discuss in more 1.4.2 he instead calls voluptatis concupiscentia the “lust of the flesh” (concupiscentia carnis); and in the same work, under concupiscentia saeculi, he subsumes gloria, cupiditas, ambitio, and insufficientia (i.e. the passion of “enough is never enough”) (Ad uxorem 1.4.6, CCSL 1:377–8). Theatrical spectacle could unleash all these. ¹⁰¹ Spect. 14.2–15.6 (CCSL 1:240–1). ¹⁰² Ibid. 17.6–7 (CCSL 1:243), trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, FOTC 40:88–9 (slightly altered; emphasis added). ¹⁰³ Ibid. 23.4–6 (CCSL 1:247). ¹⁰⁴ Ibid. 25.3 (CCSL 1:248). ¹⁰⁵ Cyprian, Ep. 2 (CCSL 3B:6–8).

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detail further on. Within and well after their time, patristic authors echoed and expanded this invective against tragedy and all theatrical spectacle. The African Arnobius of Sicca (255–330) claims that pagans shamed their own gods by dedicating to them spectacles full of outrageous sport, dancing, and tragical and comical acting; and yet, he jibes, those very deities enjoyed the mimes and the silly plots in which the gods themselves were implicated and made a mockery.¹⁰⁶ Arnobius’s student and fellow African, Lactantius (ca. 250–ca. 325), being a strategically important Christian apologist in the transition to the Constantinian regime, considers the theatre’s sensational impact in a section of his Divine Institutes devoted to general Christian asceticism and the retraining of the passions. Having castigated bloodsport and the debauchery it induced, Lactantius turns to comedy and tragedy, whose prurient influences, laced with rhetorical pomp, warrant lumping them together with all the base spectacles: Comedies talk of the rape of girls or the love affairs of prostitutes, and the more eloquent the authors of these outrages are, the more persuasive they are with the elegance of their language: harmonious and well-wrought verse sticks in an audience’s memory all too easily. So too the plots of tragedy put bad kings before our eyes, busy at parricide and incest; evil deeds are paraded on high heels. As for indecent posturing of the actors, that simply teaches and stirs up lust. Their bodies go soft and willowy, with gait and gestures that are effeminate, and they do bogus imitations of immoral women with movements of immodesty. And what about mimes, which offer classes in corruption, teaching adultery even as they present it, preparing the way to the real thing in images of it? What are boys and girls to do when they see these shows being put on without shame and being watched with pleasure by all? Frankly, they are being told what they can do; they are being inflamed with lust, and lust is most excited visually; according to their sex they can see themselves in the acts, in laughing at them they are accepting them, and they go back home to bed all the more corrupted with the vices clinging close, and I don’t mean just boys, who ought to be kept out of vice early on, but even old men, who ought to be beyond such misbehaviour by now. What is the purpose of the games in the circus if not a trifling and empty-headed silliness? People’s spirits are stirred to a frenzy with the same energy as goes into the races; once they start shouting and raving and jumping up and down, there is more of a spectacle to be had from the people who go to watch. All such spectacles are to be avoided therefore, to prevent not just any element of vice getting settled in hearts that ought to be calm and peaceable, but any habit of pleasure softening us and diverting us from God and good works.¹⁰⁷

¹⁰⁶ Adversus nationes 7.33 (CSEL 4:266–7). Earlier, Tertullian too claimed that the pagan lyricists, the comic and tragic playwrights, and authors of other literature merely made fools of their own gods (Apologeticum 14–15, CCSL 1:112–14). ¹⁰⁷ Institutiones divinae 6.20.27–33 (SC 509:322–6), trans. Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey, TTH 40 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 376–7.

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Much like Tertullian, then, Lactantius targets tragedy and theatrical spectacle as self-evident examples of the idolatry and moral bankruptcy of pagan culture. What is striking, however, is that in the Divine Institutes, Lactantius otherwise shows greater respect for pagan poets than philosophers, since they enjoy divine inspiration, and, as he says, “no poetical work is a total fiction” because of its capacity to veil truth.¹⁰⁸ But he fairly thoroughly passes over the possible revelatory value of tragedy, concentrating on its sheer superficiality and illicit power as entertainment. Only once in this work do I find Lactantius citing a tragedian positively, when he quotes a solitary line attributed (albeit dubiously) to Euripides that “What here are thought ills are in heaven goods.”¹⁰⁹ Meanwhile he abundantly quotes the early Roman tragedian Ennius, but only from his historical works, and Seneca as well, but only from his moral writings and not his tragedies. One comes away from Lactantius with the sense that tragedy has been wholly surrendered to the mimes and has no lasting legacy to speak of, reflecting the perception that, at this juncture, tragedy was more purely a performance medium than a text to be interpreted by critics, philosophers, and audiences.¹¹⁰ Lactantius’s slightly younger contemporary Eusebius of Caesarea (260–340), forging a reinterpretation of cultural history that dramatized the Peace of the Church and the reign of Constantine as the denouement of a long providential process, looked not just to parrot earlier criticism of pagan theatre but to situate it within his historical reconstruction. Tragedy, he avers, is the stuff of hoary antiquity in which nations and cities, and the entire human race, were corrupted and destabilized, generating “the myriad plots of history, adulteries and rapes of women, so too the evils recorded in the Iliad, and the ancient tragedies remembered among all peoples.”¹¹¹ Referencing the Roman writer Varro’s classification (used also by Tertullian and Augustine¹¹²) of the three evolving types of pagan theology—“storied/mythical,” “natural” (philosophical), and “political”—Eusebius observes how the first, the perspective of historia or myth, has been “treated by the poets in tragedy,” albeit with theology wholly unbecoming of the Divine.¹¹³ At length he quotes the first-century Cynic Oenomaus of Gadara, whose Charlatans Exposed heaped scorn on the Greeks for having deified the tragedians, claiming that the tragic characters themselves—“a Thyestes, or an Oedipus, or the famous

¹⁰⁸ Ibid. 1.11.30 (SC 326:120). ¹⁰⁹ Ibid. 5.15.11 (SC 204:208). ¹¹⁰ See Pat Easterling and Richard Miles, “Dramatic Identities: Tragedy in Late Antiquity,” in Richard Miles, ed., Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999), 96, 97. ¹¹¹ Oratio de laudibus Constantini 16 (GCS 7:248–9); cf. Eusebius’s Theophania 2.18, Eng. trans. of the lone surviving Syriac version by Samuel Lee, On the Theophany or Divine Manifestation . . . of Jesus Christ (Cambridge: Duncan & Malcolm, 1843), 77. ¹¹² Cf. Tertullian, Ad nationes 2.1.8–15 (CCSL 1:41); Augustine, Civ. Dei 4.27; 4.31; 6.5 (CCSL 47:121–2, 125–6, 170–2). ¹¹³ Praep. evang. 4.1.2 (SC 262:70).

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Phineus”—would scarcely have minded being subjects of tragedy given the honors accorded it; indeed, they would have “ceased caring for their old misfortunes, and rather than devoting themselves to better things would have turned to composing poetry.”¹¹⁴ Sarcasm aside, and notwithstanding Eusebius’s conclusion that the tragedians were ultimate impostors so far as any serious piety was concerned, we must not make light of his initial concession, following Varro, that they were theologians of a sort. They might be fitted into his taxonomy of cultural failure, but Eusebius surely knows that they also staked a formidable claim in the development of Greco-Roman religious consciousness. Pat Easterling and Richard Miles summarize well the attitude of Eusebius and other apologists: “The theatre is constructed as a direct rival to the Christian church not just as a physical space but also as an alternative and well-established interpretation of the past, present and future.”¹¹⁵ Eusebius confirms that it is a cultural force to be reckoned with by abundantly quoting passages from Plato criticizing the pretensions of the poets and tragedians, along with passages from Clement of Alexandria identifying their redeemable insights.¹¹⁶ Indeed Eusebius, unlike Lactantius, clearly sees the usefulness of engaging the ancient debate between poets and philosophers that Plato had brought to the forefront in the Republic and the Laws. Eusebius quotes select passages where Plato has Socrates confessing his boyhood fondness for Homer but railing against the tragedians’ power to dupe the unwitting. Tragedians are the league of charmers and mimetic artists who do not actually know reality but write like they do.¹¹⁷ Additional citations from Plato are aimed to show his quasi-Christian deference to divine providence, something of which the tragedians also know nothing.¹¹⁸ And yet in Clement, Eusebius finds justification from an erudite Christian writer for affirming that even the tragedians providentially landed on truth from time to time,¹¹⁹ something sparingly conceded by Lactantius. In Book XIII of the Preparation for the Gospel, quoting from Clement’s Stromateis on the Greeks’ plagiarizing of the Hebrew Scriptures, the tragedian Sophocles is cited honorably for outing Zeus’s adultery, and Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus alike are held up for their testimony to the true God.¹²⁰ Clement provides one of the few fragments from Euripides’s tragic drama Pirithous, a hymning of the Creator:

¹¹⁴ Ibid. 5.33.13 (SC 266:92), quoting Oenomaus in his Γοήτων φωρά, the sole fragments of which are here. ¹¹⁵ Easterling and Miles, “Dramatic Identities,” 99. ¹¹⁶ See Praep. evang. 13.3.9, 25 (SC 307:252, 260); 13.13.38, 40–1, 48, 55, 60 (pp. 362, 364–6, 376, 386, 390). ¹¹⁷ Praep. evang. 12.49.1–14 (SC 307:170–6). ¹¹⁸ Ibid. 12.49.15–12.50.11 (SC 307:176–84). ¹¹⁹ See Stromateis 1.94.1–2 (GCS 15.60). ¹²⁰ Praep. evang. 13.3.14 (SC 307:254); 13.13.38, 40–1, 48, 55, 60 (pp. 362, 364–6, 376, 386, 390).

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Thee we sing, the Self-begotten, Who all nature dost embrace, And mid yon bright ether guidest In her everlasting race. Day and dusky night returning Deck for Thee heaven’s wide expanse: Myriad stars for ever burning Weave round Thee their mystic dance.¹²¹

Not surprisingly, only in one place in the Preparation does Eusebius quote at length a tragedian whose witness to the biblical revelation appears fairly untainted; it is Ezekiel the Tragedian in his tragedy on the Exodus, with Moses as the tragic hero quoted in long monologues along with other characters.¹²² If, as Timothy Barnes remarks, the Greek comedies and tragedies were not part of the library that Eusebius inherited from Origen in Caesarea Maritima,¹²³ it is nonetheless not only possible but likely that Ezekiel’s tragedy did make it into the collection. Eusebius quotes far more of the fragments of Ezekiel’s Exagôgê than what we find in his go-to source, Clement. While certain late-ancient Christian authors were critically but constructively engaging elements of Greek tragedy, however, the dangers of theatrical spectacles of all kinds, many of which remained alive and well after Constantine (despite his attempt in 325 to shut down gladiatorial contests),¹²⁴ were consistently brought to the attention of Christian audiences as evidence of the recalcitrance of pagan religious culture and identity, and of the urgent need to shore up boundaries. At least as early as the fourth century, and as late as the sixth century, the Church was also seeking to fend off professional and nonprofessional mimes who were publicly satirizing Christian clergy, practices (such as baptism), and asceticism. As Gregory Nazianzen writes, Christians became an entertainment spectacle . . . in marketplaces, at carousals, in times of festivity and of sorrow. Speaking of it brings me to tears, but we already have appeared on stage, and are derided along with the most licentious of characters. The most delightful of all dialogues and scenes is the comedy of a Christian!¹²⁵

¹²¹ Ibid. 13.13.41 (SC 307:366), trans. E. H. Gifford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), 735–6. ¹²² Ibid. 9.28.1–9.29.16 (SC 369:282–308). ¹²³ Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 93–4. Cf. Andrew Carriker, The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 136–7, who notes that Eusebius’s citations of Euripides have the look of being well-known dicta, though he may have had in his collection some anthologies of poetic writers. ¹²⁴ On the persistence of pagan spectacles after Constantine, see the primary texts in Michael Maas, ed., Readings in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2000), 41–6; also Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle, 230–69. Augustine preached his Sermo 19 (on faithfulness, CCSL 41:252–8) on a day when the “games” (munera) were being celebrated in Carthage, a carryover of the Roman Saturnalia. ¹²⁵ Or. 2.84 (SC 247:200).

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Such abuse later prompted a strong prohibition from the Emperor Justinian in one of the New Laws (Novellae) in his Corpus Iuris Civilis.¹²⁶

Maturing Critical Engagement of the Theatre and Tragedy While the Platonic aversion to the philosophical or theological value of poetry remained the norm in Christian culture well after Constantine,¹²⁷ a new negotiability begins to show up in earnest in the fourth century. Three writers of exactly the same generation are especially instructive regarding the ongoing battle of Christianity with pagan theatrics and poetics: Prudentius (b. 348) in Spain, John Chrysostom (b. 347) in Antioch and Constantinople, and Augustine (b. 354) in Roman Africa. Living in the fragile Western Empire on the eve of the barbarian invasions, Prudentius, the one-time civil administrator turned poet, was fiercely protective of Roman Christian identity, whether “the other” against which to define it be pagans, Arians, or barbarians (those “four-footed beasts”¹²⁸). He himself had called for an end to the gladiatorial games,¹²⁹ but in his Psychomachia Prudentius coopts precisely the violent imagery of the Roman amphitheatre and transposes it into the internal arena of the soul.¹³⁰ This most famous of his poems, which also heavily reworks epic elements from Virgil’s Aeneid, pits personified virtues and vices against each other in a moral-spiritual bloodbath. Prudentius trains his Christian readers, who are already accustomed to martyr stories in which the victims are thoroughly innocent, to be spectators of the violent and now utterly just punishment of the Vices, especially Luxuria (“Indulgence”), who is brutally trampled beneath the chariot of Sobrietas.¹³¹ Conscientious Christian readers are thereupon, of course, to play out this same godly violence in their own souls. But this is not just an effective strategy for resisting the allure of the pagan theatre. Prudentius’s literary project, Marc Mastrangelo has argued, is much more grandiose, since he wants to integrate elements of biblical typology, of Roman poetry and ¹²⁶ Novella 123.44, in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, ed. Rudolf Schoell and Wilhelm Kroll (Berlin: Weidmann, 1954), 3:624–5. On this public theatrical nuisance for Christians, see also Stanley Longosz, “L’antico mimo anticristiano,” in Elizabeth Livingstone, ed., Studia Patristica 24 (1993): 164–8; and Andrew Walker White, Performing Orthodox Ritual in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 74–85. ¹²⁷ On the endurance of this anti-poetic bias among patristic authors, see Marc Mastrangelo, “The Early Christian Response to Platonic Poetics: Boethius, Prudentius, and the Poeta Theologus,” in Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato, eds., The Poetics of Late Latin Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 393–400. ¹²⁸ Contra Symmachum 2, ll. 807–19 (LCL 398:70). ¹²⁹ Ibid. 2, ll. 1114–29 (LCL 398:94–6). ¹³⁰ Text in LCL 387:274–342. ¹³¹ See Psychomachia ll. 403–33 (LCL 398:306–8); and for further analysis see Paula James, “Prudentius’ Psychomachia: The Christian Arena and the Politics of Display,” in Richard Miles, ed., Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999), 84–109, esp. 92–104.

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history, and of pagan philosophy and Christian theology in a comprehensive narrative “delineating the Roman-Christian self and state” over against the pagan past.¹³² John Chrysostom, as an episcopal preacher, seized on all manner of theatrical imagery for homiletical use, in part to amplify his moral instruction for audiences that included numerous Christians who were still finding their way into the pagan shows.¹³³ For Chrysostom, the Church is the “spiritual theatre” (πνευματικὸν θέατρον) hosting a cosmic drama in which God is the principal spectator and critic, and Jesus Christ the unrivaled protagonist.¹³⁴ Accordingly, Christians here and now, finding themselves in the “satanic theatre” (θέατρον σατανικόν) of pagan culture,¹³⁵ are not merely spectators to the cosmic drama but, by virtue of their own ascetical battles, engaged participants “on stage” fighting inherited battles against idolatry, perversion, and moral tepidity. Much earlier Tertullian and Novatian had claimed that the Church already has its own salubrious theatrical spectacles, truthfully and magnificently displayed in biblical revelation, with its spectacular events and pageant of moral exemplars.¹³⁶ Not only Chrysostom¹³⁷ but Augustine too reiterate this in their preaching.¹³⁸ Chrysostom, however, also greatly intensifies the all-out ascetical battle between Christians and the theatre, pulling out the stops on reproaching the sordid culture of the stage and the sleazy reputation of its professionals, as were already widely acknowledged in pagan society.¹³⁹ Invective against poetic mimesis itself appears again in full force, for in John’s purview the theatre has become the quintessential icon of the faux reality long propagated by paganism, a deception duping Christian viewers at their own eschatological peril. Were we to remove the masks of the actors and actresses, we would find that they are but ordinary folk; and in the real world, where “our present situation is a theatre and our business one of acting (ὑπόκρισις),” if we remove the “masks” of Christians who put on the airs of wealth and sophistication, we ¹³² The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1–175; quoted at p. 7. ¹³³ See his Hom. contra ludos et theatra 1–4 (PG 56:263–70). ¹³⁴ Cf. Hom. in Johannem 3.1 (PG 59:37); Hom. in Isa 6:1 1.3–4 (PG 56:102); and on God as the all-seeing Spectator, Hom. in Johannem 3.6 (PG 59:46); Hom. de Lazaro 1.8 (PG 48:973); also the analysis by David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 249–50. See also Basil of Caesarea, who views the entire cosmos as the amphitheatre in which all Christians, as ascetics, struggle to discern the inner-workings of God (Hom. in Hexaemeron 6.1, GCS NS 2:87–8). ¹³⁵ Hom. in Matt. 48.2, 3 (PG 58:489, 490); Hom. in Isa. 45:7 (PG 56:143). ¹³⁶ Tertullian, Spect. 29–30 (CCSL 1:251–3); Novatian, Spect. 10 (CCSL 4:178–9). ¹³⁷ Hom. contra ludos et theatra 1 (PG 56:264). ¹³⁸ Tractatus in evangelium Johannis 7.6 (CCSL 36:70). ¹³⁹ For an insightful examination of Chrysostom’s perspective on pagan theatre, see Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 42–74.

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may well uncover their true selves and their actual, meager record of good works.¹⁴⁰ On stage or in reality, we will all be unmasked before the judgment of God. Christians who still frequent the theatre, with its smut and license, invariably carry its effects with them through the doors of the church, and thus have no business contaminating fellow Christians and the liturgy itself unless they are serious about a penitential overhaul.¹⁴¹ Jerome shares this sentiment: “For created as we are in the image of God and after his likeness (Gen. 1:26-27), it is our own wickedness which makes us assume masks. Just as on the stage the same actor now figures as a brawny Hercules, now softens into a tender Venus, now shivers in the role of Cybele; so we—who, if we were not of the world, would be hated by the world—for every sin that we commit have a corresponding mask.”¹⁴² I would interject here that this rhetorical campaign was echoed a century later on Byzantium’s eastern frontier by the Syriac preacher Jacob of Sarug, in his Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre. For Jacob too the shows are all mimetic farce, lewd revelry, and staged debauchery when compared with the true biblical spectacle displayed, for example, in Moses’s miracles. The “miming of lying tales” about gods shrivels before the prophetic poetry of David the Psalmist.¹⁴³ As in Chrysostom (and Tertullian), the church is the most august theatre. “At which place,” asks Jacob, “was the manifestation of true things celebrated? Upon the Bema [church chancel], the source of Mysteries, or in the playhouse?”¹⁴⁴ Jacob clearly indicates that some Christians continued to frequent the theatre since he attacks their rationalizations, like the claim that they attended only for the cheap laughs and thrills, not because they took the mimed stories seriously. Such people were fooling themselves, since the shows were ineluctably contaminating (as Tertullian had argued three centuries earlier).¹⁴⁵ Augustine for his part uniquely speaks of the bogusness of the theatre from his own experience. Early in Book 3 of his Confessions, he reminisces on his addiction to the theatrical productions in Carthage that he frequented as a youth. This is an extremely important text, one which I will take up again in Chapter 6. Here I would simply highlight Augustine’s admitted disgust at ever having fallen under the spell of the tragedies, expending emotional energy on

¹⁴⁰ Hom. de Lazaro 2.3–4 (PG 48:986–7); and ibid. 6.5 (1035). ¹⁴¹ Hom. de Davide et Saule 3.1–2 (PG 54:695–7). ¹⁴² Ep. 43.2 (CSEL 54:320; trans. NPNF² 6:58). ¹⁴³ Hom. 2–3, 5 (de spectaculis), Syriac text ed. and trans. Cyril Moss, Le Muséon 48 (1935): 95–8, 100, 103–6, 109. Given the consonance of Jacob’s diatribes with those of very early secondand third-century Christian polemicists, Moss (ibid. 93–4) believes it likely that by Jacob’s time there were formal manuals in circulation that contained longstanding arguments against pagan amusements. ¹⁴⁴ Hom. 4 (Moss, 98–9, 107). ¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 5 (Moss, 100–3, 108–12).

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fake stories and characters. Why feel pity toward actors on stage when there are so many in reality who need authentic mercy, like the person who is reveling in her or his own sinfulness? Pity is a decent emotion, after all, but in the context of the theatre, Augustine avers, it degenerates merely into selfindulgence, taking its place among other illicit pleasures.¹⁴⁶ After Constantine, Christian protests against theatrical spectacle, whether of the stage or of the arena, registered with imperial authorities but did not usually effect immediate results. The degeneration of Roman theatre was slow in developing and continued well beyond Constantine’s own time. Persistent Christian outrage against bloodsport helped to bring the gladiatorial games to a relative end by the early fifth century, though in some locales they endured longer.¹⁴⁷ Tragedy and comedy, in the meantime, had already undergone significant metamorphoses long before Christian polemicists ever began to rail against Greco-Roman theatrical culture. Their demise was nonetheless auspicious for certain Christian writers of late antiquity who, considering this cultural lion to have been tamed, seized the opportunity to plumb the archive of Greco-Roman tragedy. They are the ones who did the real excavation of its philosophical and rhetorical as well as poetic/artistic resources for Christian usage, whatever the risks involved—and there were indeed risks. As Ruth Webb remarks: Beneath the sensational surface of the polemics, the theater emerges as a rich source of ideas and images for Christian writers to use. In its transience, its play on illusion, its arousal of the passions, and its display of worldly wealth, it was in many ways the perfect opponent to the Church. But there were dangers involved, because the theater provoked, inevitably, some awkward questions: When is the preacher a performer? When is a ritual a performance? Where is the boundary between social mimesis, the learning of a new way of life and a new habitus that is vital for the creation of a new society, and the imperfect mimesis of the theater? Is there a single unified self, or is the individual as endlessly plastic as the mimes and pantomimes of the stage?¹⁴⁸

PATHS I NTO CHRISTIAN TRAGICAL MIMESIS In the chapters ahead, I look to demonstrate how ancient Christian authors constructively but critically coopted the power of drama and especially of tragical mimesis for the edification of their Christian audiences. For them, Christian preaching, worship, and literary culture warranted new dramatic “scripts” that would induce the faithful to imagine the world through a ¹⁴⁶ Confessiones 3.2.2–3.2.4 (CCSL 27:27–9). ¹⁴⁷ See Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle, 235–6.

¹⁴⁸ Demons and Dancers, 212.

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uniquely Christian tragical lens, with appropriate deference to acquired Christian teaching on providence, justice, evil, human free will, and the theological virtue of hope. These new scripts would stage the salutary formation of the Christian moral self, abundantly employing positive and negative exempla. Because, for these writers and preachers, the Bible remained the privileged script, bearing in its own complexity the primary historical and trans-historical “reality” for all Christian mimesis (rhetorical, ritual, ascetical, etc.), my next two chapters focus on illustrative cases wherein patristic exegetes discerned tragic characters and themes within Scripture, in narratives that seemed to beg for tragical interpretation. What I will call the dramatic (or better “theodramatic”) reading of biblical narratives in certain interpreters supported these explorations of tragical perspectives within Scripture itself. Chapter 4 takes an introspective turn, moving more directly into tragical mimesis as developed by select Christian writers who envisioned themselves and their life circumstances in a tragic light. I will examine three classic cases of Christian authors who consciously articulated profiles of the tragic Christian self: Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. I will show how these highly literate and rhetorically sophisticated writers used their own life experience and highly theologically nuanced self-awareness to negotiate between tragical and providential perspectives on human existence. I will argue that their autobiographical approaches simultaneously constituted a quasi-poetical and often paradoxical form of theodicy, since each was keen on vindicating the providence, justice, and mercy of God but also on duly representing the severe vagaries and vicissitudes of life in the flesh. Each one, moreover, sought to instruct other Christians in what it means, existentially, to live in hope amid the subjugation of creation to “vanity” (Rom. 8:20–1). In contrast with Chapter 4, Chapter 5 will take an extrospective turn, examining how early Christian authors engaged in tragical mimesis in identifying and depicting tragic “faces and bodies” in the social and cultural foreground of the Church, especially for purposes of prompting compassionate and eleemosynary responses from their audiences, but also, more basically, for cultivating what I shall call a Christian “tragical conscience.” The forming of such a conscience was a discipline of seeing the social “other” differently, contemplatively, in sustained mindfulness that all human creatures— Christian and non-Christian alike—are implicated in the same cosmic tragedy, the same vanity of creation, while being potential beneficiaries of the same grace and the same hope. We will investigate how this new seeing was tested on specific social groups within the spheres and horizons of Christian experience. In Chapter 6 I will endeavor to show that this tragical conscience, as projected by early Christian theologians and moralists, was both “cleansed” and enriched through the instilling of a distinct Christian tragical pathos, a repertoire of well-refined emotions that included but went beyond the classical

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tragical emotions of pity and fear. I draw here upon Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of the “moral intelligence” of emotions in Hellenistic philosophy, and on Robert Kaster’s identification of the “narrative scripts” of various powerful emotions in Greco-Roman moral culture. Both are extremely helpful for explaining how early Christian authors targeted specific emotions, in their cognitive and not just affective dimensions, as instrumental in edifying and extending a Christian’s moral vision. We shall explore how these authors not only “re-scripted” the classic tragical emotions of fear and pity but also enlisted other emotions (especially grief in its various forms) to this same end. Chapter 7 will present some summary reflections on the distinctly theological scope of early Christian tragical vision and mimesis. I will return here to certain themes already touched on in earlier chapters, but my purpose will not be to force some final verdict on the compatibility of Christianity and tragedy but rather to set out, in greater detail, the theological significance of tragical vision and mimesis and their accountability to normative Christian teachings on divine wisdom, providence, and justice, the character of evil, human freedom, and related doctrinal principles. Along the way, I will bring my findings into a preliminary sort of conversation with contemporary theologians who have significantly advanced or debated the role of tragical vision as an avenue of interpreting sacred revelation and fortifying Christian faith.

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2 Tragical Mimesis and Biblical Interpretation I Primitive Tragedies in Genesis

THE MIMETIC AND DRAMATIC D IMENSIONS OF INTERPRETATION

The Dynamics of Mimesis My objective in this chapter and the next is to establish how early Christian interpreters found precedent within the Bible itself for tragical mimesis, rather than simply deferring to the classics of Greek and Roman tragedy, whatever comparative value they might have had. First, though, we must briefly address the complex dynamics of mimesis, the work and art of representation, lest this concept drift into abstraction when I explore early Christian tragical interpretation at work. As the better recent studies of mimesis have shown, there is no single definition to cover all of its applications and cultural functions. In the visual arts, in literature, in staged drama, in ethics, in educational psychology, and in scores of other contexts as well, mimesis has, historically, taken on innumerable lives.¹ Seeing as early Christian authors did not indulge in mimetic theory as such, we must therefore constantly keep in mind what they inherited and recognized as philosophically normative in this regard. Here I want to propose that they found ways to adapt and reconcile the seemingly disparate but regnant theories of poetic mimesis in Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s criticism of poetic

¹ For a good overview of the historic theories and applications of mimesis, see Michael Potolsky, Mimesis (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–161; Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis. For its philosophical and literary implications, see also Karl Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Erich Auerbach’s still classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953).

Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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(and especially tragical) mimesis cast an exceedingly long shadow in antiquity. By his account, as we saw in the previous chapter, the poets sought to simulate “reality” and in so doing created a dangerous cultural sideshow that detracted from the legitimate philosophical quest for truth. But that only raised the question of the “reality” being pursued for imitation. Is it physical or metaphysical, material or spiritual, historical or transcendent? Plato was specifically interested in the concrete reality of the polis, the just state, and yet this was an ideal already fixed within intelligible reality, the province still of philosophers and not of poets. Early Christian writers, as we also saw, made convenient use of Plato’s criticism of poetic mimesis in their broadsides against the sham reality represented in the sundry kinds of pagan theatrical spectacle. It was a prime argument from within the pagan intellectual tradition that they could easily turn against the degraded state of pagan culture as they saw it. Ironically, though, by their deep trust in the ability of the Bible’s own “poets” to represent ultimate reality, Christian interpreters opened even themselves to Plato’s rebuke. Aspiring in their writings to imitate the mythopoeia of the biblical authors, they too were vulnerable to Plato’s specific criticism that the poets’ mimesis was at third remove from the truth, imitating an imitation, mimicking a mere appearance. No acknowledgment of these possible censures appears among Christian writers, and some, like Arnobius of Sicca and Augustine, even held forth the relative rhetorical and poetic vulgarity of the biblical authors—long an object of scorn among pagan critics of Christian literature—as a paradoxical sign of their grasp of universal truth.² On the other hand, Christian interpreters further turned Plato’s criticism to their own advantage by setting the Bible’s poets alongside Plato’s philosophical sages. They proceeded under the hermeneutical assumption that the biblical authors had unique access to “ultimate reality,” the divine Word,³ a reality intrinsically greater than all its imitations or approximations, however noble. Christian writers could easily enough, by their own standards, uphold this revelatory superiority with respect to approximations of the biblical Word in Greco-Roman philosophy, even at its most incisive.⁴ But from the fourth century on, various Christian thinkers redirected this same criticism to pretentious theological interpretations of the biblical Word within the Church. The Cappadocian Fathers, for example, vehemently castigated Eunomius and other Arian rationalists for presuming that they could press beyond the biblical authors themselves, not merely approximating but even capturing

² Cf. Arnobius, Adversus nationes 1.58–9 (CSEL 4:39–41); Augustine, Confessiones 6.5.8 (CCSL 27:78–9). ³ As Origen states, Scripture as a whole contains one superabundant Word (λόγος εἷς) comprehending many ideas (θεωρήματα) (Comm. in Johannem 5.5, GCS 10:102). ⁴ See my comments on Clement of Alexandria in the last chapter, p. 19.

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God’s nature, the ultimate reality, within subtle pieces of philosophical logic. The best theological language and rhetoric employed in expounding scriptural discourse about the triune God and his activity in the world, as Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa tirelessly insisted, upheld the impenetrability of God’s nature and its resistance to being comprehended by even the most cautiously nuanced terms and concepts.⁵ Eventual distinctions between God’s “essence” and extroverted “energies” (ἐνέργειαι) worked to similar effect, at least in Eastern Christian tradition. Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. 500), in his treatise On the Divine Names, propounded a whole sophisticated hermeneutical strategy to negotiate very precisely between theologia proper (contemplating the ineffable triune God) and oikonomia (the revelatory economy of God) in approaching biblical discourse.⁶ Not surprisingly, the content of patristic interpretation of Scripture—in formal commentaries, homilies, treatises, catecheses, etc.—was overwhelmingly devoted to oikonomia. All the while Clement and Origen, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, John Scottus Eriugena, and other late ancient and early medieval biblical interpreters—partially in response to Platonism and Stoicism but also protective of basic cosmological claims of the Christian faith—affirmed that metaphysical reality transcendently originated in the divine Mind/Logos/Wisdom as perfect archetypal “principles” (λόγοι; rationes), “capacities” (virtutes), “ideas” (ἐννοίαι), “concepts” (νοήματα), or “starting-points” (ἀφορμαί) of all things that clued humanity to God’s immanent plan in creation and history.⁷ While this metaphysical reality embodied itself in the very fabric of intelligible and sensible creation, it inscribed itself in Scripture not as an isolatable body of philosophical insights but as the divine Wisdom embedded and emplotted within the drama of revelation, within the thickness of the plot of tri-personal divine intervention in the world. One of the relatively late representatives of patristic hermeneutics, Maximus the Confessor, summarizes this concept by asserting that the logoi as the “principles” or ontological coordinates of created nature and the logoi as the “words/meanings” of sacred Scripture are mutually interconnected and complementary within the divine economy. The “book” of creation and the ⁵ See Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 27.1–10 (SC 250:70–98); 28.2 (p. 102). For the relevant passages in Gregory of Nyssa’s Contra Eunomium, see Ari Ojell, “Apophatic Theology,” in Lucas Francisco Mateo-Seco and Giulio Maspero, eds., The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Seth Cherney (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 68–73; Stuart Hall, “Contra Eunomium libri I et II,” ibid. 298–306. ⁶ De divinis nominibus 1.4; 2.1–5 (PTS 33:112–15, 122–9). ⁷ Cf. Clement, Strom. 4.25.155 (GCS 15:317); 5.11.73 (GCS 15:375); Origen, De principiis 1.2.2 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 126); Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia in Hexaemeron 9 (GNO 4/1:18); Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 4.33.51 (CSEL 28/1:132); 6.10.17–6.11.19; 6.14.25–6.18.29 (CSEL 28/1:182–5, 189–92); Dionysius, Div. nom. 5.8 (PTS 33:188); Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua ad Johannem 7 (PG 91:1077C–1088A); John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon 2.36 (PL 122:615D–617A).

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“cosmos” of Scripture together unfold one and the same drama: the perennially creative, redemptive, and transformative self-revelation of the divine Logos/Wisdom.⁸ In eliciting the dramatic character of this revelation, various patristic exegetes, including those keen on tragic elements within the Bible’s narratives, were thoroughly aware that the Bible could not be interpreted purely by philosophical exposition (logos), and thus erred, even if unconsciously, on the side of Aristotle’s alternative (non-Platonic) perspective on mimesis and on his insights into the power of dramatic plot, or mythos. As I remarked in the last chapter, Aristotle did much to redeem poetic mimesis from Plato’s reductionist assault by emphasizing how the artform of drama can profoundly and positively affect audiences. He moved the discussion away from how mythopoeia presumes to simulate “reality,” turning attention instead to the effective realism of good plots or their capacity, through the powerful plausibility (“probability and necessity”) of the staged events, to command emotions that could cleanse, educate, or transform the spectators caught up in the dramatic re-presentation of existence. Though the impact of mimetic theory in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric on Christian authors may have been more implicit than explicit, more indirect than direct, it factored into what I shall be calling the dramatic dimension of early Christian biblical interpretation. Aristotle’s assertion that the plot of a drama, of tragedy in particular, was a “mimesis of action and life” (μίμησις πράξεως καὶ βιοῦ)⁹ proved well-suited to a mimetic-dramatic interpretation of Scripture, such as treated biblical historia as a dynamic continuum, an ongoing dialogical—but also conflictive—exchange between God and creatures as personal agents in ever new, contingent circumstances. Early Christian theologians, preachers, catechists, and moralists (including monastic pedagogues) conveyed in their various forms of discourse that sacred history in Scripture was the representation, the playing out, of the supremely compelling, divinely authored plot unfolding from the biblical past into the ecclesial present, and having its denouement in the eschatological future already opened up by Jesus Christ.¹⁰ This grand mythos was compelling not only because it displayed extraordinary divine interventions in the world but also because (further along Aristotelian lines) it had historical plausibility and concreteness. It illuminated the vagaries of life in the flesh and provided transformative perspective on Christian moral selves struggling to be faithful to Christ amid a flood of evils. Here was the cosmic drama into which Christ was summoning his body the Church—through liturgy, public recitation of Scripture, sacramental actions, preaching, teaching, and ministry—to take ⁸ Ambigua ad Johannem 10 (PG 91:1125D–1133A). ⁹ Poetica 1450A. ¹⁰ Early on Irenaeus of Lyons is pivotal in educing Scripture’s progressive economies and the “plot” (ὑπόθεσις) of revelation: Adversus haereses 3.16.6; 3.24.1 (SC 211:310–14, 470–4); 4.1.1 (SC 100:392–4); 5.2.2 (SC 153:30–2).

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center stage. All Christians were to assume their new roles and to participate in this salvific drama at the level of moral and ascetical mimesis of Christ and of the biblical and Christian saints.

Dramatic Interpretation of Scripture To claim that early Christian theologians engaged in a “dramatic” interpretation of Scripture seems strange on the face of it. Most biblical literature, after all, hardly reads like a stage play. But just as modern biblical critics have explored Scripture’s tragical and comical features,¹¹ patristic exegetes found numerous aspects of tragedy and the tragic within its narratives: for example, Aristotelian components of tragic plots such as radical reversal of fortune (“peripety” = περιπέτεια), “discovery” (ἀναγνώρισις), graphic suffering (πάθος), and developed character (ἦθος); also heroic and villainous players; intrigue and betrayal; and dramatic monologues and dialogues. Insofar as they were dealing with dramatic or tragic narrative in the Bible, they could not, of course, address features exclusive to dramatic art, like vocal inflection, facial expression, bodily gestures, movement, or timing. But some interpreters— among the best examples below will be the Latin writer Avitus of Vienne and the Byzantine hymnographer Romanos the Melodist—found ways to compensate by embellishing and enhancing the dramatic elements of biblical narratives in order to render them even more vivid and to induce audiences to use their imaginations in reliving the events. Dramatic interpretation was not some method all its own, but largely a function of what Erich Auerbach, Hans Frei, John David Dawson, and other critics have identified as “figural” exposition. Much of the prophetic and typological interpretation undertaken within the Bible itself and in Greek, Latin, and Syriac patristic sources fit this pattern. Figural (as distinct from purely “figurative”) interpretation assumes that the “literal meaning” (γράμμα/ littera; ἱστορία/historia) of biblical texts is not constrained absolutely by the relation between a given text and the events and persons to which it once referred and of which it once made sense.¹² It depends rather on the ¹¹ For modern scholarship on tragedy in the Bible, see David J. A. Clines, “Contemporary Methods in Hebrew Bible Criticism,” in Magne Saebø, ed., Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 3/2: The Twentieth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015), 150; also Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ¹² For “figural” interpretation in patristic exegesis, especially Origen, see John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), esp. 10–13, 83–218; also Ben Fulford, Divine Eloquence and Human Transformation: Rethinking Scripture and History through Gregory of Nazianzus and Hans Frei (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013); Rowan Williams, “The Literal Sense of Scripture,” Modern Theology 7 (1991): 121–34.

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overarching “intelligibility” of divine performances over the long haul, the freedom of God to make new sense of events or characters in the sacred past through their figural relation to other events or characters elsewhere in the sacral-historical continuum. Origen and other Christian exegetes justified this figuration based on Paul’s claim that certain things happened to the ancient Israelites “figurally” (τυπικῶς) for the admonition of believers in the present (1 Cor. 10:11).¹³ This includes, but is not limited to, the pattern of prophetic events or oracles being “fulfilled” in future eventualities, or of past typoi finding closure in later antitypes, even though figural interpretation might sometimes simply entail evocative analogies between earlier and later events or persons. I mention just two familiar but classic examples of the fulfillment pattern of figuration. First, and enormously influential, is Paul’s Adam-Christ typology (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:21–7, 45), which implied that Christ not only fulfilled what Adam failed to accomplish as a model for humanity but also transcended the old Adam by inaugurating the eschatological perfection of human nature.¹⁴ Second is Isaiah’s figure of the “suffering servant” (Isa. 53), whom Origen and many other early Christian exegetes took to be definitively fulfilled by Jesus the Messiah.¹⁵ But patristic biblical interpreters, recognizing that the ultimate fulfillment of the typologically and symbolically fertile sacred past lies in the eschatological future still being opened up by Christ, actually allowed that past prophetic events or types might have multiple fulfillments or outcomes (ἐκβάσεις). If, for instance, Matthew’s Gospel had Christ as the new Moses (lawgiver) fulfilling the typos established by the original Moses on Sinai, Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century discerned still another “new Moses” in Constantine, who, like the ancient Moses, was raised under a regime of despots and polytheists whom he eventually put down; and who, like Moses, destroyed his nemesis Maxentius (≈ Pharaoh) in a watery deluge (the Tiber River); and who, like Moses, led his people from persecution to new security.¹⁶ Various monastic writers furthermore imagined Christian ascetics as striving existentially to

¹³ Int. al., Origen, De princ. 4.2.6 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 718–20); Origen, Hom. in Lev. 10.1; 15.3 (SC 287:130, 258); Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 34.21 (CCSL 40:1953); De catechizandis rudibus 3.5 (CCSL 46:126); Contra Faustum 6.5 (CSEL 25/1:290–1); John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 2 (PG 57:30). ¹⁴ Paul’s Adam-Christ typology exercised enormous influence in early patristic Christology, beginning especially with Irenaeus in his Adversus haereses. ¹⁵ Int. al., Justin, 1 Apol. 50.1–12 (ed. Dennis Minns and Paul Parvis, OECT [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 204–8); Origen, Contra Celsum 6.75 (SC 147:368); Eusebius, Comm. in Isaiah 5.1–8 (PG 24:456C–459A); Jerome, Comm. in Isa. 14.22. ¹⁶ See Eusebius, Vita Constantinii 1.12 (GCS 7:13–14); Hist. Eccl. 9.9.5–8 (GCS 9/2:828–30). On the Moses-Constantine typology see also Michael Stuart Williams, Authorised Lives in Early Christian Biography: Between Eusebius and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 28–9, 36–42.

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fulfill an array of biblical moral types, so as to become, through virtue and knowledge, another “Moses,” “Elijah,” “David,” “John the Baptist,” or other exemplary persona. The fifth-century Eastern monastic writer Nilus of Ancyra gave a rationale for such “live” typology: If something has been recorded in the Old or New Testament to have happened historically, and this or that deed was manifestly accomplished, and we interpret it for our own purposes, using ideas and thoughts for our own spiritual edification, do not suppose that we have disregarded the letter, or rejected the history. By no means! We neither condemn nor reject the empirical event that has been committed to history. Since, however, we are the world (1 Cor. 3:22), we benefit today by interpreting everything that happened yesterday for ourselves. For since today there is no Joseph, no Egypt, no King Hezekiah, no Judas the betrayer, no Lazarus dead and raised, no Simon Magus, etc., for this reason if [today] we see someone prudent, we call him “Joseph,” an adulterous woman, we call her “Egyptian”; if a ruler is faithful to God and pious, he is named “Hezekiah.” Everyone who betrays the Word of truth and casts others to death is acknowledged a “Judas.” If the noblest man, having become negligent, sins, and afterwards repents and is made alive, clearly his mind died through error and was raised through repentance [= “Lazarus”]. But him who approaches the Church of God hypocritically and is baptized merely with water but not with the Holy Spirit we are wont to call a “Simon Magus” . . . So interpret for your own purposes all the things that happened figurally (τυπικῶς) to the ancients and were performed by them (cf. 1 Cor. 10:11). For the Apostle says, We are the temple of the living God (2 Cor. 6:16), not the one built by Solomon of stone (cf. 1 Kings 6:1ff.). For everything is yours, whether the world, or the present, or the future (1 Cor. 3:22).¹⁷

Nilus is noticeably insistent that such typology does not compromise the integrity of the original biblical history. Skeptical modern critics have often surveyed the panoply of typologies put forward by early Christian interpreters and judged them to undermine history, overriding the past for the sake of new artificial meanings that are more “figurative” or “allegorical” (i.e. purely symbolic) than strictly typological or figural. Even within Scripture, for example, John’s typological correspondence between Moses in the desert holding up a bronze snake on a pole (Num. 21:8–9) and Jesus of Nazareth being “lifted up” (John 3:14) on a cross hardly appears transparent. But the modern criticism, which often lacks the patience to see how such connections were actually justified by their ancient sources, more seriously ignores the deep theological interest operative in patristic figural exegesis, with its supposition that God is the true author of Scripture and that biblical texts, to the extent that they communicate the divine Word, are inexhaustibly significant and perpetually interpret each other. Figural interpretation, as the standpoint of the Church working to make sense of God’s reiterative performances in his revelatory economy, respects the ¹⁷ Epistula 2.223 (to Maximus the Presbyter) (PG 79:316B–317A).

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integrity of each and every event or person in a pattern of figuration, even though each figure in a pattern cannot be claimed as equally definitive. Living after the image of Christ, every Christian is a “new Adam,” but not as Christ himself is—particularly and universally—the New Adam. And in his Moses typology mentioned above, Eusebius might see Constantine as a “new Moses,” but he pales in comparison with the Matthaean Christ who gives a whole new law for the people of God. Obviously, then, the chronologically most recent antitype is not necessarily the superior fulfillment of the original type or even of another, intermediate antitype. Frances Young, in her magisterial study of early Christian hermeneutics, largely concurs with Auerbach and Dawson that figuration is possible without annihilating littera or historia. She employs a distinction between, first, a more “ikonic” typology, frequent especially in Antiochene biblical interpretation, which thrived on analogies and resemblances between types and antitypes; and second, a more “symbolic” (properly “allegorical” and “speculative”) exegesis, frequent in Origen and others in the Alexandrian tradition, which took certain events or persons as clues to a reality transcending their historical province.¹⁸ This distinction is not entirely true to Origen, who actually does not sharply differentiate typological and allegorical exegesis, since for him a typos in biblical historia can be a simple anticipation of something in the future, or else a richer “symbol” of a larger truth, such as the cross of Christ prefiguring or symbolizing the “crucifixion” of every Christian disciple (Gal. 2:20).¹⁹ Young rightly emphasizes, however, the power of figuration to bring the biblical text to life in the contemporary situation of the Church. In particular, she suggests, it promoted a kind of “mimetic exegesis” that “assumes the replay of a drama—an act or plot—and so had a place in forming ethics, lifestyle, and liturgy.”²⁰ Origen, for example, calls the Song of Songs a wedding song (ἐπιθαλάμιον) masterfully scripted as a play dramatizing the bride’s (the soul’s or the Church’s) passionate nuptial pursuit of the elusive Bridegroom, Christ the Logos, such as believers could reenact again and again in their moral and spiritual life: For a play (drama) is defined as a story, usually enacted on the stage (ut in scaenis agi fabula solet), where different characters are introduced, and where with some characters entering and others making their exits the structure of the narrative is completed by different speeches addressed to different characters. Each of these elements the book of Scripture includes by its own order, and its whole body is fashioned together through fine and mysterious words.²¹ ¹⁸ Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 161–9. ¹⁹ Contra Celsum 2.69 (SC 132:446–8). Peter Martens has proven the assimilation of typological and allegorical (symbolical) exegesis in Origen: “Revisiting the Allegory/Typology Distinction: The Case of Origen,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16 (2008): 296–306. ²⁰ Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 209. ²¹ Comm. in Canticum Canticorum, Prol. (GCS 33:61–2), trans. Rowan Greer, Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer (et al.), Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist

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Recognizing that biblical commandments may not succeed by their own blunt rhetorical force, Asterius of Apamea (d. ca. 420) asserts that Scripture sets forth its admonitions “dramatically” (δραματικῶς), using vivid “characters” (πρόσωπα).²² The tragical vision of biblical events and characters in early Christian interpretation often took similar form, uncovering and enhancing dramatic plots within scriptural narratives, as I will show in this and the next chapter. Keeping in mind that figural, and more specifically dramatic, interpretation depends on the intelligibility of divine performances over the long sweep of sacred history, the question naturally arises as to who perceives this intelligibility and how. Broadly, the early Church understood interpretation to be an ecclesial venture, even if the work of individual, specialized biblical scholars was highly prized. Interpretation had to do not just with exacting grammatical commentary but also with the ritual rehearsal of sacred history within public liturgy and the “re-performance” of its message in the disciplines of Christian living, since all of these were indispensable to authenticating that message. The image that comes to mind is not a mechanical extraction of meaning but a gradual, patient discernment involving all resources of the Church’s life and receptivity. Numerous patristic exegetes described this process as θεωρία/ contemplatio, a deep and circumspect intuiting of how the biblical Word was continuing to speak to, in, with, and for the Church.²³ As John Breck notes, patristic interpreters took their cues from the inspired biblical authors themselves, presuming that they were connecting various sacred events figurally and thus already exercising theôria.²⁴ Theôria was not intended to be an end in itself. Figuring out the figural in Scripture meant piecing together the dramatic (and therein tragical) plots of sacred history so as to project how the Christian faithful were still actively (πρακτικῶς) playing out the same salvific drama in their own context. As Kristoffel Demoen puts it, “in the eyes of the [early] Christians, salvation history continues, and the present adds new episodes to the succession of divine interventions.”²⁵ Tragical mimesis, in its diverse early Christian literary forms, set in bold relief the tragic aura of biblical narratives so that believers, having grappled with the seemingly hopeless situations and unresolved Press, 1979), 217. See also Karl Shuve “Entering the Story: Origen’s ‘Dramatic’ Approach to Scripture in the Homilies on Jeremiah,” Studia Patristica 46 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 235–40. ²² Hom. de Divite et Lazaro (PG 40:177C). ²³ For good background on θεωρία in patristic interpretation, see Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 179–81; John O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). ²⁴ Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 36–7. ²⁵ Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen, 307.

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miseries experienced by their revered predecessors, might begin negotiating their faith through the refiner’s fire of current temptations and sufferings.

THEORIZING (CONTEMPLATING) THE TRAGIC IN GENESIS As mentioned before, early Christian interpreters did not delve into mimetic theory over and beyond the influential insights of Plato and Aristotle; and neither did they normally theorize “the tragic” as a poetic fixture in scriptural narrative. For them, “theorizing” the tragic, far from a literary-critical venture in any postmodern sense, was rather a discipline of θεωρία, contemplation, intuitively “seeing” biblical texts within the larger horizon of divine and human performances in sacred history, whether before Christ, in the crucial events of Christ’s own ministry, or in the ripple-effects of the work of Christ and the Spirit in the Church’s ongoing experience. Theôria was the primary vehicle of tragical interpretation of Scripture in early Christian authors, and is best illustrated, I believe, by a series of case studies drawing upon a wide spectrum of patristic commentaries, homilies, and other writings. The primitive tragedies from Genesis will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter, before examining other cases from sacred history in my next chapter.

Adam and Eve’s Fall and “Recognition” In the extensive tradition of patristic commentary on Genesis 1–3,²⁶ the story of Adam and Eve and their fall was the archetypal tragedy. It generated a constellation of debated themes: the physical and moral status of the protoplasts before their lapse; the nature of their freedom; the role and identity of the serpent/deceiver; the respective degrees of culpability of Adam and Eve; the latent significance of the two trees in paradise; the specific vice that instigated the transgression (pride, envy, sloth, self-love?); the way in which Adam and Eve’s disobedience implicated their human descendants; and the providence of God operative in the whole episode. As James Kugel and Gary Anderson have illustrated, much of the commentary tradition, Jewish and Christian, ancient and modern, has taken the form of carefully scrutinizing the narrative coherence of Genesis 2–3 and imaginatively attempting to fill in perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the plot.²⁷ ²⁶ See the survey in Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008). ²⁷ Cf. James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 94–144; Gary Anderson, The

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The story’s two most salient tragic features are the catastrophic reversal of fortune (περιπέτεια) attending the transgression, and Adam and Eve’s recognition (ἀναγνώρισις) of the disastrous result of their action in partaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked . . . (Gen. 3:7, RSV). Adam and Eve’s realization of their sin after the fact was as climactic as the sinful act itself, since by tragic irony it fulfilled the deceiver’s prophecy. He had predicted that by eating of the tree, they would enjoy the knowledge of good and evil. They might have gained it, but what they actually experienced was being naked, utterly exposed in the presence of God and each other. Neither the “exceedingly shrewd” (φρονιμώτατος, LXX; callidior, VG) deceiver nor the promised knowledge were in reality what at first they seemed to be, but already a dangerous new existential condition had befallen Adam and Eve and their posterity. To call it a “loss of innocence” hardly captured the moment. Early Christian interpreters explored and played up several tragic aspects of the story of Adam, Eve, and the fall. An enormous tragic theme, connected with the protoplasts’ reversal of fortune, was the nature of humankind’s finite ontological condition and/or mortality, and whether these were the presupposition or else the consequence of the fall. Strangely, God warned Adam that if he partook of the tree of knowledge then on that day he would die (Gen. 2:17), and yet neither Adam nor Eve died immediately after they disobeyed (cf. Gen. 5:5). Justin Martyr and various Jewish authors early on recalled that a single “day” was a “thousand years” in God’s sight (Ps. 89:4, LXX; 2 Peter 3:8).²⁸ Thus for some commentators, the consequence of the Adamic lapse for humanity was a “slow death” that was existentially irreversible but eschatologically redeemable. Athanasius highlights the peculiarity of the Septuagint text of Genesis 2:17, where God warns Adam that if he partakes of the tree of knowing good and evil “you [plural] will die by death” (θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε). What can this mean but human beings “languishing in the corruption of death,”²⁹ wasting away and receding into non-being since their failure in the knowledge of God turned the protoplasts only toward knowing evil, which has no being?³⁰ Impending, therefore, was the ultimate reversal of fortune: nonexistence, oblivion. Both Athanasius, and Irenaeus before him, nonetheless moved to obviate any semblance of fatalism in mortality and its constriction of human thriving. Recognizing that the Creator’s providence was fully operative before the creation and lapse of humanity, Irenaeus makes clear that the imposition of Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). ²⁸ Justin, Dialogus cum Tryphone 81.3 (PTS 47:211); and for other commentators see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 94–5. ²⁹ De incarnatione 3 (SC 199:274). ³⁰ Ibid. 4 (SC 199:276–8).

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death as a consequence of disobedience could not be purely punitive, removing all hope of renewal. The warning of death (Gen. 2:16–17; 3:2–3) was an original sign of the Creator’s will to discipline humanity in retaining the consummate good of communion with God.³¹ Adam and Eve, moreover, partook of the tree of knowledge and, proleptically, died on the same day they were created, Friday of creation week (Gen. 1:24–31), as can be inferred, Irenaeus suggests, from the fact that Christ (the New Adam) died on a Friday, and “recapitulated” in his own redemptive death the events of the protoplasts’ death, so as to grant all humanity a “second” (new) creation.³² To the extent that the death of Christ is key to the eschatological purpose of death, death has henceforth been revealed, paradoxically, as an agent of life, not of oblivion. Though he does not emphasize as strongly as Irenaeus that it was in God’s “original” plan, Athanasius makes the compatible claim that the incarnation and death of Christ redefined human mortality by infusing “incorruptibility” back into human nature and thereby reversing the presumably fatal Adamic relapse into non-being.³³ But let us turn to the bitter tragic irony of Adam and Eve’s anagnôrisis, their discovery that the knowledge of good and evil, far from a means to flourish, was a curse, indeed a total miscarriage of the knowledge of God. Patristic interpretation took various directions here. A prize question was how God could allow this debacle to happen in the first place, accented by the strange “distance” of God after the recognition of the sin, when he asked Adam his whereabouts (Gen. 3:9). Classical Athenian tragedy, being thoroughly saturated with elements of religious myth, had conjured all manner of ideas about the wisdom, patronage, caprice, justice, involvement, and imperviousness of the gods. George Steiner avers that Greek tragedy, in its very essence, was “a questioning and an enacted testing of theodicy.”³⁴ Christian authors in their turn scrambled to prove the divine providence operative in the tragedy of the fall. Ephrem the Syrian, for example, reimagined Adam and Eve in Eden as beholden to a divine pedagogy, needing in due course to experience the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to embrace the Tree of Life and realize their full potential as created in God’s image. They cheated the educational process by prematurely partaking of the Tree of Knowledge, an occasion for bitter lament rather than a step toward maturity.³⁵ Augustine nonetheless confessed his loss to explain why God let the fall happen when he knew that Adam would transgress, other than to say that God needed for future ³¹ Epideixis 15 (PO 12:670); cf. Adv. haer. 5.23.1 (SC 153:286–90). ³² Adv. haer. 5.23.2 (SC 153:290–4). ³³ De incarnatione 8–9 (SC 199:288–98). ³⁴ “A Note on Absolute Tragedy,” Literature and Theology 4 (1990): 153. ³⁵ Ephrem, Hymni de paradiso 3, strophes 1–17; 4, strophe 1 (CSCO 174:8–13). For analysis see Lucas van Rompay, Humanity’s Sin in Paradise: Ephrem, Jacob of Sarug, and Narsai in Conversation (Piscataway, NJ: Georgias Press, 2011); Tryggve Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian (Lund, Sweden: Gleerup, 1978), 85–134.

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generations the example of a presumptuous human who abused free will and justly incurred guilt and punishment.³⁶ Other interpreters looked to divert attention to the human responsibility for the fall and its due punishment, only to be thrown back on the problem of how two human beings, enjoying intimate communion with God in a paradisiac state, could possibly sin unless they already had some innate weakness or tragic flaw that merely surfaced when they ate the forbidden fruit. But could not that too reflect badly on the Creator? Origen famously tried to resolve the conundrum by focusing on the fall as an epistemological crisis that began before human beings were even enfleshed. Adam and Eve graphically symbolized the pre-mundane failure of all intellectual beings (νόες) to keep their spiritual eyes fixed on contemplating the Divine, thus lapsing through negligence.³⁷ In recognizing their sin, their sensual eyes were fatefully opened (Gen. 3:7) just as their intellectual eyes, on the use of which they had flourished in paradise, were fatefully shut.³⁸ Many of Origen’s legatees in the East, including those who rejected his theory of the preexistence of noetic beings, continued depicting the fall as a crisis of knowledge, an ignorance-turned-alienation, a failure of spiritual vision. Some of these were ascetical theologians who imagined Adam and Eve in the garden as proto-ascetics enacting “Scene One” of humanity’s long ascetical struggle with demonic deception, the drama now being mimetically played out by all Christians as ascetics in the present. Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom transfer Origen’s depiction of pre-mundane spiritual negligence to the temporal and empirical sphere. Basil suggests that the protoplasts in paradise fell by satiety, distraction toward sensible pleasures, and “indecisiveness” (ἀβουλία).³⁹ Chrysostom claims that they succumbed to sheer sloth (ῥαθυμία), and constantly warns his morally lethargic audiences not to mimic this primal vice of Adam and Eve.⁴⁰ For Gregory of Nyssa, the protoplasts’ newly acquired “knowledge” was neither “scientific” knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) nor a mature discernment (διάκρισις) of good from evil (cf. 1 Thess. 5:21; 1 Cor. 2:15), but a ruined version of that knowledge which is a “disposition (διάθεσις) toward what is gratifying”; it was a “mixed knowledge” (σύμμικτος γνῶσις), insofar as whatever the good of the tree itself (as created by God), the protoplasts inclined toward its latent evil masquerading as a merely apparent

³⁶ Gen. litt. 11.4.6; 11.6.8–11.7.9 (CSEL 28/1:337–8, 339–40); cf. Civ. Dei 14.11 (CCSL 48:433). ³⁷ Cf. De princ. 1.4.1 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 184–6). ³⁸ Contra Celsum 7.39 (SC 150:104). ³⁹ Homilia: Quod Deus non est auctor malorum 7 (PG 31:344D–345A). ⁴⁰ E.g. Hom. in Genesim 14.2, 4 (PG 53:114, 116); ibid. 16.4 (PG 53:130); Hom. adversus eos qui dicunt daemones gubernare res humanas 1.3; 3.5 (PG 49:249, 262). According to the TLG, the term ῥαθυμία appears 790 times in Chrysostom’s works (albeit including works spuriously attributed to him).

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good.⁴¹ For Maximus the Confessor, Adam’s tragic miscalculation, which occurred virtually the instant he was created,⁴² was his embrace of this “mixed knowledge (μικτὴ γνῶσις),”⁴³ which bound him and the human race in perpetual ignorance. Joined with this was Adam’s failure after his lapse to maintain “natural contemplation” (θεωρία φυσική), the very discipline by which ascetics (and all believers) discern the proper interrelation of Creator and creation.⁴⁴ Though certainly there are interpretive commonalities and parallels, a variant reading of the “epistemological” tragedy of the fall took shape in the West with Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, and Avitus of Vienne. For them the story unfolded as a progressive deception, a portentous comedy of errors, with disastrous consequences for its cast of characters and the human posterity. Albeit not lost on Eastern exegetes, the stealth of the “envious” Devil (cf. Wis. 2:24), himself already fallen and speaking untruth through the serpent with rhetorical skill, was strongly enhanced.⁴⁵ Ambrose commenced a pattern of depicting the fall as a tragic reversal in which the proper hierarchy of divine– human authority and communication became unraveled. Adam, despite his glorious state in paradise, needed the divine commandment because of the intrinsic weakness of his judgment (judicium) and his inability to manage the knowledge of good and evil.⁴⁶ The even weaker woman, not duly informed of God’s commandment by her husband and instead ill-informed by the Devil, initiated the actual breach (cf. 1 Tim. 2:14), leading to the recognition of that “nakedness” which was the despoiling of humanity’s paradisiac glory.⁴⁷ Only the salutary subordination of woman to man and of both to the authority of

⁴¹ De hominis opificio 20 (PG 44:197C–201A); cf. Hom. in Canticum Canticorum 12 (GNO 6:348–52). This too raised problems of theodicy. Why would God plant the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” a tree of death, at the center of Eden alongside the tree of life? On Gregory’s treatment of this problem, see Richard Norris, “Two Trees in the Midst of the Garden (Gen. 2:9b): Gregory of Nyssa and the Puzzle of Human Evil,” in Paul Blowers, Angela Russell Christman, David G. Hunter, and Robin Darling Young, eds., In Dominico Eloquio/In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 218–41. ⁴² Quaestiones ad Thalassium 61 (CCSG 22:85). Maximus denied any extended period in paradise in which Adam allegedly enjoyed his perfect state of being. He was created with a summons to perfection but squandered his giftedness (natural freedom, spiritual pleasure, apatheia) for the sake of an ulterior and merely sensible pleasure. ⁴³ Qu. Thal. Intro. (CCSG 7:39, l. 357). Closely related here is Maximus’s idea of “gnomic” will, the negative meaning of which is a vacillation between good and evil; Adam’s sin was not only intellectual misjudgment but also a failure of γνώμη (ibid. 1 [CCSG 7:47]; 61 [CCSG 22:89]). ⁴⁴ In Amb. ad Johannem 45 (PG 91:1353C–1356A), Maximus notes that before the fall, Adam was in such sublime communion with God that he did not even need the contemplation of nature. ⁴⁵ Cf. Ambrose, De paradiso 12.54–5 (CSEL 32/1:311–13). On the Devil’s archetypal envy, see also Cyprian, De invidia et livore 4 (CCSL 3A:76–7); Basil of Caesarea, Hom. de invidia 3 (PG 31:376A). ⁴⁶ De paradiso 11.52 (CSEL 32/1:309). ⁴⁷ Ibid. 12.56 (CSEL 32/1:314–16).

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Christ could thus redeem the situation and restore the communion (and communication) lost in and with paradise. Augustine for his part hardly exonerates Adam in his role as primogenitor. Having surmised that the protoplasts before the fall had animal bodies that were felicitous (so long as they were nourished by the primordial sacramentum of the tree of life) but liable to defecting from natural goods to ulterior and illicit pleasures,⁴⁸ Augustine determines that the first man fell both through the vice of sheer pride (superbia) and the raw expression of a rebellious will (i.e. not principally out of an intellectual negligence of the good).⁴⁹ Simply said, Adam perceived evil qua evil and chose it anyhow. But much like Ambrose, Augustine throws in relief the devolution of divine–human communication and the strategic role of Eve. “Augustine shapes the Fall,” writes Eric Jager, “into a tragic plot that hinges on the reversal of the entire moral, intellectual, and verbal order of the Garden.”⁵⁰ For the man, created first, received God’s direct commandment, then the woman received it indirectly through the man, whom God still indicted first even though the sin had actually arisen from the woman’s deception by the Devil when he capitalized on Eve’s own latent hubris (Gen. 3:5).⁵¹ The eye-opening anagnôrisis (cf. Gen. 3:7), in turn, was both the newfound interior shame of conscience and the exterior shame of an exposed prurient desire.⁵² The lesser known Gallican bishop Avitus of Vienne (d. ca. 518) provides an intriguing complement to the perspectives of Ambrose and Augustine, which he certainly knew. George Shea emphasizes that in his poem On Original Sin, Avitus artfully restaged the drama of the temptation and fall like a Greek tragedy, with his own interjected commentary functioning like a tragical chorus.⁵³ Indeed, Avitus goes to great lengths to explore the psychology of the characters, especially Satan and Eve, and to play up Satan’s extraordinary rhetorical skill in the seduction, though he too must be rendered fully naked as a fallen, tragic figure. Along the way Avitus intermingles rhetorical declamations from the characters further to augment the drama of the narrative. Satan: I shall acquire a name divine and shall establish my eternal abode higher than Heaven’s vault, I, who will be like God on high and not unequal to His mightiest power . . . O that this upstart concoction [humankind] should arise in our place and that a hated race take its rise from our destruction! My valor kept me in high station, but now, behold, I am ⁴⁸ Gen. litt. 11.32.42 (CSEL 28/1:365–6); Civ. Dei 14.11 (48:431–3). ⁴⁹ Gen. litt. 11.5.7 (CSEL 28/1:338–9); Civ. Dei 14.11 (CCSL 48:432). ⁵⁰ The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 30. ⁵¹ Gen. litt. 11.30.39; 11.34.45 (CSEL 28/1:362‒4). ⁵² Ibid. 11.31.41 (CSEL 28/1:364–5). ⁵³ George Shea, ed. and trans., The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 20–1.

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rejected and driven forth, and this clay succeeds to my angelic honors. Earth now possesses Heaven. The very soil, exalted in this base construction, now rules, and power passes from us and is lost . . . No use delaying. Even now I shall meet them in a context of seduction, now while the security of these first days and a simplicity ignorant of guile lays them open to my weapons. They will be better caught by treachery while they are alone, before they send their fecund offspring forth to fill unending ages yet to come . . . ⁵⁴ Through a carefully crafted rhetorical seduction, Satan flatters Eve about her deserved glory and dominion, which the Lord would begrudge her with his prohibition. In her turn she piously praises the Creator’s generosity but then solicits the Deceiver’s explanation of the “death” that prospective transgression would allegedly incur.⁵⁵ He is all too willing to oblige. Satan: Woman, you fear a word that holds no terror. No sentence of swift death will fall upon you. No, the Father in his jealousy has not allotted to you a portion equal to his. He has not given to you the understanding of these high matters which he keeps to himself. What joy can there be in seeing and apprehending this lovely world while your blind minds are shut up in a miserable prison? This is the way Nature creates the gross senses and wide eyes of animals. If your powers are the same, a single sun serves all, and human vision is no different from a beast’s. But take my advice instead. Fix your mind on things celestial and turn your mental powers, once lifted up, heavenward. This fruit you fear to touch because it is forbidden will give you knowledge of whatever your Father lays away as secret . . . ⁵⁶ Especially provocative here is Satan’s subtle ploy of orthodoxy. Has not nature been created for creatures’ full enjoyment? Is it not a godly thing for human beings to aspire to transcendent knowledge? In particular, Avitus is drawing on a tradition, rooted in Tertullian, Augustine, and other Christian writers, of exposing the two-edged sword of human curiositas, its penchant either for vain inquisitiveness or else pious exploration of higher truth.⁵⁷ ⁵⁴ Poemata, lib. II: De originali peccato, Latin text ed. Rudolph Peiper, Alcimi Ecdicii Aviti opera quae supersunt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctorum Antiquissimorum 6.2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883), 213, ll. 42–4; 214, ll. 89–94; 215, ll. 97–101, trans. Shea, The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 81, 82 (insertion added). ⁵⁵ Ibid. (Peiper, 216–17, ll. 166–82). ⁵⁶ Ibid. (Peiper, 217, ll. 185–97), trans. Shea, The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 84 (slightly altered). ⁵⁷ On curiositas as unhealthy inquisitiveness, see Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 14, 30, 36 (SC 46:107, 126–7, 137); Ad nationes 1.1; 2.4 (CCSL 1:11, 47–8); Augustine, De moribus (CSEL 90:42–4); Basil, Hom. in Hex. 1.9 (GCS NF 2:16); Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:38, 40). On potentially pious or virtuous curiosity (πολυπραγμοσύνη), see Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 28.21 (SC 250:144); Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 1.641 (GNO 1:210); 2.12–13 (GNO 1:230); Hex. 1 (GNO 4/1:7); Hom. in Cant. 6 (GNO 6:182).

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Imbued with “ambition’s noxious poison,” Eve is strained beyond the breaking point and, having eaten from the apple, solicits her husband’s participation. Eve: Sweet spouse, take this food from the branch of life; perhaps it will make you like the almighty Thunderer, equal to the gods. I do not bring you this gift in ignorance but having just now acquired new wisdom . . . Why do you put off desires that will bring you good? Why do you rob yourself so long of the honor that is to come?⁵⁸ Adam in his turn grasps and partakes of the “poison dowry,” and with that, Avitus’s chorus-like commentary intervenes to intimate its universal consequence to the audience: It was from that act that that their posterity, because of their tainted seed, conceived a desire to learn the future through unlawful arts, to direct their dull senses toward holy secrets, to search out what Heaven holds on high or what is sunk in the foul depths of the earth, and to break the careful laws of nature, now to inquire from the stars under what constellation each man is born and how prosperous he may be for the remainder of his life, and to predict different outcomes even though the signs are the same . . . ⁵⁹

That the fall has triggered a domino effect for later generations is proven, says Avitus, by the example of Lot’s wife (Gen. 19:15–26), who replayed Eve’s sin when she succumbed to Satanic deception, though in this case “her brave Adam [Lot] did not follow his spouse and was not overcome.”⁶⁰ Avitus’s figural and intensely dramatic interpretation of the story concludes ominously with a parting declamation from the “victorious” Deceiver: Satan: Behold, the godlike glory of the praise I promised abides in you. Whatever knowledge was within my grasp, trust now that it is yours. I have shown you everything, have guided your senses through what was hidden, and whatever evil ingenious nature had denied to you, this I have taught, allowing man to join left and right, foul and fitting. And so your fate is sealed forever and I have consecrated you to myself. Nor does God, although he formed you earlier, have greater rights in you. Let him hold what he himself made. What I taught is mine, and the greater portion remains with me. You owe much to your Creator but more to your teacher.⁶¹ Over and beyond his strong tragical mimesis, Avitus further develops a crucial aspect of the interpretation of the fall in Ambrose and Augustine. As Eric Jager ⁵⁸ Poemata, lib. II (Peiper, 218, ll. 242–5; 219, 250–1), trans. Shea, The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 85. ⁵⁹ Ibid. (Peiper, 219, ll. 277–84), trans. Shea, The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, 86. ⁶⁰ Ibid. (Peiper, 223, l. 401). ⁶¹ Ibid. (Peiper, 223, ll. 412–21), trans. Shea, The Poems of Alcimus, 89 (slightly altered).

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has demonstrated, the upshot of the fall for these writers was not just the reversal of humanity’s paradisiac bliss and the fall’s ontological legacy, or the moral shame associated with the newfound “knowledge of good and evil.” It was a total breakdown of communication, a calamity of missed and mixed signals, commencing a perennial hermeneutical and rhetorical crisis for the human race. In the school of the garden, Adam and Eve had desperately flunked. God’s sublimely eloquent word was lost in the fray of the Devil’s deceptive rhetorical ploy, and a disastrous wedge was driven into human language itself. Signs, and referentiality itself, were thrust into chaos. And in a sense the heuristic exegesis of these patristic interpreters, struggling to overcome the ostensible obscurity of Genesis 2–3, was itself a testimony to this fact, this legacy.⁶²

Tragic Sibling Rivalries Cain and Abel Genesis 4 drew early Christian interpreters into yet another primordial landscape, another archetypal crime, another set of textual conundrums, and another auspicious opportunity for tragical mimesis.⁶³ Though still a part of primeval history, the story conveyed more the ambiance of concrete mundane existence, with Adam and Eve having children, Abel herding sheep, and Cain farming. In this “civilized” state, there was no Devil/serpent lurking. Instead, as God admonished Cain, evil was a mysterious presence lying in wait, couching at the door (Gen. 4:7, RSV).⁶⁴ This narrative, like that of Adam and Eve in the garden, posed a primary question of divine justice. In the story’s depiction of the beginnings of a cultic system, why did God honor Abel’s animal sacrifice but reject Cain’s agricultural one? The ancient versions of God’s instruction to Cain in Genesis 4:7 give mixed clues.⁶⁵

⁶² I am very briefly summarizing here Jager’s detailed exposition in The Tempter’s Voice, 1–142. ⁶³ See Sabine Schrenk, “Kain und Abel,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersmann, 2001), 19:943–72; Johannes Glenthøj, Cain and Abel in Syriac and Greek Writers (4th–6th Centuries) (Leuven: Peeters, 1997); Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 146–69. ⁶⁴ John Byron observes in his Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry (Leiden: Brill, 2011) that Adam and Eve’s disobedience is never actually labeled “sin.” Sin first appears in Gen. 4:7 in the warning to Cain. But as Ambrose insisted, Cain was the true “heir” (heres) of Adam and Eve’s lapse (De Cain et Abel 1.1, CSEL 32/1:339). ⁶⁵ See Mark Scarlata, Outside of Eden: Cain in the Ancient Versions of Genesis 4:1–16 (London: T & T Clark, 2012), see 74–110.

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HEBREW: If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it (RSV). SEPTUAGINT: If you offer correctly but do not divide correctly, have you not sinned? Be still; his recourse is to you, and you will rule over him (NETS). PESHITTA: Behold, if you do well, have I not received it? But if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. You will turn toward it, and it will seize you. Alternative: Behold, if you were doing well, I would have received it. But if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. You should turn toward him (your brother) and he will rule over you.⁶⁶ VULGATE: If you do well, will you not receive in return? But if you do ill, will not sin be immediately at the door? But the desire for it will be under you, and you will prevail over it.⁶⁷

In the Hebrew, Peshitta, and Vulgate versions, the Lord both warns and encourages Cain, but only after his sacrifice is rebuffed. God addresses the morality and efficacy of Cain’s sacrifices for the future without explaining the deficiency of his first sacrifice. The Septuagint translators tried to rectify this by introducing into God’s admonition the fact that Cain had not rightly “divided” his original sacrifice. Some Christian exegetes picked up on this, such as Irenaeus, who infers that Cain sinned by not giving Abel his fair portion of the sacrificed crop.⁶⁸ Later Ambrose, whose Old Latin text of Genesis 4:7 relied on the Septuagint, contrasts Cain’s failure rightly to divide his sacrifice with Abraham’s proper and pious division of his (Gen. 15:10). The Lord thus told Cain to “be still” lest he rashly undertake another sacrifice before he was religiously ready.⁶⁹ John Chrysostom also discerns a deficit in Cain’s intention (γνώμη),⁷⁰ and judges here that the Lord was seeking to pacify Cain before further disaster struck.⁷¹ Other attempts too were put forward by ancient exegetes to vindicate God’s justice in rejecting Cain’s sacrifice and giving him fair warning for the future. Some early Jewish interpreters, including Philo, who was greatly revered by patristic exegetes, capitalized on the reference to Cain having offered his sacrifice only “after some days” (Gen. 4:3), an indication that he had failed to offer the first fruits of the land and given only the leftovers.⁷² Chrysostom, Didymus the Blind, Ephrem the Syrian, Cyril of Alexandria, and other Christian writers recognized these and other reasons for the inferiority of Cain’s sacrifice and God’s good judgment in rejecting it.⁷³ For the Spanish

⁶⁶ I thank Prof. Jeff Childers for these alternative literal translations of the Syriac text of Gen. 4:7. ⁶⁷ Translation mine. ⁶⁸ Adv. haer. 3.23.4 (SC 211:454–6); 4.18.3 (SC 100:598–606). ⁶⁹ De incarnationis dominicae sacramento 1.2–3 (CSEL 79:225–6). Cf. Augustine, Civ. Dei 15.7 (CCSL 48:459–60). ⁷⁰ Hom. in Gen. 18.5 (PG 53:154–6). ⁷¹ Ibid. 18.5–6 (PG 53:156–8). ⁷² See Philo, De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 52; cf. also the works cited by Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 150. ⁷³ John Chrysostom, Hom. in Gen. 18.4–5 (PG 53:154–5); Ephrem, Comm. in Gen. 3.2 (CCSO 152:47–8). For a fuller survey of patristic views on Cain’s failed sacrifice and God’s response, see Glenthøj, Cain and Abel in Syriac and Greek Writers, 87–107.

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Christian poet Prudentius, Cain, with his failed sacrifice, “staining the new-made world with unnatural bloodshed,” had become the very antithesis of Christ’s perfect sacrifice, and a virtual Marcionite in proving how human devotion could disastrously divide its loyalties between a “bad” god of this world and a “good” God of the spiritual realm.⁷⁴ Most early Christian interpreters naturally had difficulty getting past the fact that Cain ended up murdering his godlier brother Abel. The fratricide itself, as an ignoble fait accompli, and as the first recorded human death in history,⁷⁵ was inevitably the lens through which Cain had to be understood. Surely momentary disgruntlement over a rejected sacrifice does not lead someone to kill. Already one New Testament source had labeled Cain a horribly tragic figure, a marked man, a “child of the Devil” (1 John 3:10–12) bent from the outset on destroying the innocent.⁷⁶ Much later, Ephrem the Syrian would further claim that Cain from the start was a child of “the darkness” that once veiled the goodness of creation, though not in any quasi-Manichaean sense of being ontologically predestined to do evil.⁷⁷ Even Origen, so likely to see Cain as a prospective penitent, emphasizes that his wickedness was in place well before he killed his brother.⁷⁸ And yet, could Christian interpreters abide the possibility that a human being, indeed the firstborn (Gen. 4:1), had been cursed from birth or predisposed to murder, especially one born to Adam and Eve by divine assistance (διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ; per deum) (Gen. 4:1)? Surely there must have been a process whereby Cain, endowed with free will, mutated into a villain of such epic proportions. The properly tragic dimension of the story came to the forefront, in turn, especially in speculation about the tragic hamartia or deadly vice that drove Cain to kill his brother, which the biblical text does not explicitly specify. Rather than simple jealousy (ζῆλος; zelus), the painful desire for a good that is another’s and not one’s own,⁷⁹ many interpreters opted for its emotional cousin, envy (φθόνος; invidia), technically understood after Aristotle as the seething resentment of another’s good fortune just because it is the other’s and not one’s own.⁸⁰ The oft-cited text of Wisdom of Solomon 2:24 identified envy as the Devil’s own original vice,⁸¹ and in primitive Christian tradition the ⁷⁴ Psychomachia, Praefatio, ll. 1–63 (LCL 387:200–4). Prudentius expressly calls Cain a “divider of God” (divisor Dei) (ibid. ll. 1–2, p. 204). ⁷⁵ As emphasized early by Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum 2.29, ed. Robert Grant, OECT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 72. ⁷⁶ Cain’s diabolical origins were an object of speculation in other ancient sources as well: see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 147–8, 157–8; Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition, 16–20. ⁷⁷ Carmina contra haereses 18.6–8 (CSCO 169:64–5). Ephrem suggests conversely here that Abel was a child of the primordial light. For analysis see Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 135–42. ⁷⁸ De oratione 29.18 (GCS 3:392). ⁷⁹ Rhetorica 1387A–B. ⁸⁰ Ibid. 1387B–1388B; Ethica Nicomachea 1107A. ⁸¹ Either the Devil envied humanity’s creation in God’s image (cf. Wis. 2:23–4; Vita Adae et Evae 12–16; Tertullian, De patientia 5.5–6, CCSL 1:303), or humanity’s enjoyment of God’s favor

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author of 1 Clement tagged Cain as the human agent of this diabolical envy and jealousy alike.⁸² Envy, as the most insidious in the repertoire of rivalrous passions in GrecoRoman and Christian antiquity, seemed the natural pick as Cain’s tragic vice since it was already widely recognized as an evil that could consume the soul.⁸³ Envy was by definition a species of profound emotional pain (λύπη; dolor),⁸⁴ and relieving it could lead to wanton acts, including murder (cf. Rom. 1:29). Not surprisingly, then, numerous Christian exegetes presumed that Cain killed Abel out of envy (φθόνος)⁸⁵ or its close cousin, malignant jealousy (βασκανία).⁸⁶ Basil of Caesarea plays up the cosmic scope of the crime in his homily On Envy. Cain not only envied his brother, he also mimicked the Devil’s vicious envy of the Creator, unleashing on the human race a path of destruction and a domino effect of invidious passion. Vexed by God’s show of munificence toward humanity, [the Devil] avenged himself on humanity since he could not do so on God. Cain showed himself doing the very same thing, for he was the Devil’s first disciple and had learned from him envy and murder (φθόνον καὶ φόνον), crimes of brother against brother. Paul pairs these vices when he speaks of being full of envy, murder (Rom. 1:29). So what did Cain do? He saw the honor bestowed by God and he too was inflamed with jealousy (πρὸς ζῆλον), and so killed him who had received the honor in order and special workmanship (cf. Irenaeus, Epideixis 16, PO 12:670–1; Adv. haer. 4.40.3, SC 100:978–80), or the Creator himself (2 Enoch 29:4). ⁸² 1 Clement 4.1–7, Greek text ed. and trans. Michael Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd edn. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 48–50. ⁸³ For background on envy and jealousy in Greco-Roman tragedy, see David Konstan, “Envy and Jealousy,” in Hanna Rosin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2013), 1:328–30; on the family of invidious emotions in classical thought, see David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, eds., Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Robert Kaster, “Invidia, νέμεσις, φθόνος, and the Roman Emotional Economy,” ibid. 253–76; Christopher Gill, “Is Rivalry a Virtue or a Vice?” ibid. 29–52; also David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Greek Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 111–28. On early Christian reworking of pagan notions of the invidious emotions, see Paul Blowers, “Envy’s Narrative Scripts: Cyprian, Basil, and the Monastic Sages on the Anatomy and Cure of the Invidious Emotions,” Modern Theology 25 (2009): 21–43. ⁸⁴ Gen. 4:8 in the LXX may intimate envy as Cain’s sin by suggesting, not that the rejection of his sacrifice angered him but instead “exceedingly pained Cain” (ἐλύπησεν τὸν Καιν λίαν). For discussion, see Angela Kim Harkins, “Cain and Abel in the Light of Envy: A Study in the History of the Interpretation of Envy in Genesis 4:1–16,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 12 (2001), 71–7; also Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 151–2; James Kugel, “Cain and Abel in Fact and Fable: Genesis 4:1-16,” in Roger Brooks and John Collins, eds., Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 167–90. ⁸⁵ E.g. Basil of Caesarea, Hom. de invidia (PG 31:376A–B); Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 260 (LCL 270:54); John Chrysostom, Hom. in Gen. 19.2 (PG 53:162). For additional references and analysis, see Glenthøj, Cain and Abel in Syriac and Greek Writers, 284–6. ⁸⁶ Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 4.18.3 (SC 100:598–600: cum zelo et malitia); Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 2.7 (PG 33:392A); John Chrysostom, Hom. in Gen. 18.6 (PG 53:156).

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to lash out at the one who granted it. Powerless to contend with God, he did the next best thing and murdered his brother. Brothers and sisters, let us flee this disease that teaches us to contend with God, for it is a mother of homicide, an aberration of nature, an ignorance of the closest ties of kinship, and the height of irrational character.⁸⁷

Elsewhere Basil identifies no less than seven tragic sins of Cain, paralleling the sevenfold vengeance that God later vows to execute on anyone who would attempt to murder Cain himself. After envy, . . . the second is guile (δόλος), with which he said to his brother, Let us go into the field (Gen 4:8); the third is murder (φόνος), an additional evil; the fourth is fratricide (ἀδελφοῦ φόνος), a still greater iniquity; the fifth that he was the first murderer (πρῶτος φονεύς), and left the world a bad example; the sixth wrongdoing (ἀδίκημα) in that he grieved his parents; seventh, the fact that he lied to God (Θεῷ ἐψεύσατο), for when he was asked, Where is your brother Abel? he replied, I do not know (Gen 4:9).⁸⁸

For purposes of tragical mimesis however, playing up the cosmic proportions of Cain’s murder of Abel was one, albeit spectacular, interpretive angle. It treated the narrative more or less as “Scene Two” in the primeval tragedy of the fall, the injection of deadly vice into the web of human relations that threatened to dissolve moral order in the world. But another, more subtle yet effective mode of tragical mimesis was to tease out of the story the internal dynamics of Cain’s relationship with Abel—to heighten its pathos and personalize it, as it were—even though these relational dynamics are scarcely detailed in Genesis 4:1–8. Perhaps Cain and Abel had started off right, but their relationship had horribly collapsed as they competed for God’s good graces. At any rate, the murder must have had a history behind it. At this personal level, both Basil, and a century before him Cyprian of Carthage, perceived that envy was not the only rivalrous passion in play in the story; jealousy, a more complicated passion, was also instrumental. One can be jealous for right or wrong reasons. The Greek ζῆλος variously translates as “jealousy,” “zeal,” and “emulation,” while Latin has both zelus (“jealousy”; “zeal”; “emulation”) and aemulatio. The common thread is that jealousy (unlike envy) aims first at the perceived good enjoyed by another, though this can also entail the recognition that the “other” is zealous for the same good, thus engendering a competition or “emulation” in relation to that object. This approximates what, in more recent philosophy and literary criticism, René Girard has called “mimetic desire,” whereby one’s rival “mediates” the

⁸⁷ Hom. de invidia 3 (PG 31:376A–B). ⁸⁸ Ep. 260 (LCL 270:54–6), emphasis added; cf. Chrysostom, Hom. in Gen. 19.5 (PG 53:164). Other interpreters posited lists of Cain’s vices, though not wholly agreeing on the specific sins. See also the exegetes noted by Glenthøj, Cain and Abel in Syriac and Greek Writers, 195–7.

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desired good by competitively enhancing its desirability all the more. This mimetic desire is at bottom salutary, since it can lead to healthy rivalry for authentic goods (cf. Rom. 12:10), and emulation of virtuous exemplars or “competitors” in their zeal for those worthy things; but it can just as easily degenerate into a vicious form of rivalry.⁸⁹ Interpreting Cain’s vice, Cyprian largely conflates envy and jealousy. They are so deeply mutually insinuated as to be indistinguishable in his inner compulsion to murder Abel.⁹⁰ But Basil, reflecting the highly nuanced moral psychology characteristic of the Cappadocian Fathers, knows that jealousy is a curiously ambiguous emotion that can cut two ways. He happily concedes that Christians can be appropriately jealous of the virtues of another person, but they can just as easily and perilously succumb to envy. Such was Cain’s downfall. The overriding target of his passion was not the approval from God for which both he and Abel longed; rather, it was Abel himself.⁹¹ In effect, pious jealousy or emulation, which might well have bonded Cain and Abel in the love of God and so each other, was buried beneath the sinister cancer of envy.⁹² Fratricide tragically usurped fraternity, reconciliation having had no possible chance. One Syriac poet, deploying a not uncommon literary artifice in Syriac biblical interpretation, stages an imaginary dialogue between Cain and Abel in hopes of conveying the deeper pathos of their tragic alienation.⁹³ Much like Avitus of Vienne in his poem on the Adamic fall discussed earlier, this anonymous Syriac author poses himself as the chorus/narrator offering commentary on the dialogue as it unfolds. He first establishes the scene, and intimates that Adam had conversed with his sons, telling them that their sacrifices would atone for his sin and bring reconciliation with God.⁹⁴ Adam in fact witnesses the sacrifices. After Cain’s is rejected, and his envy of Abel exposed, the brothers engage in a conversation in which Cain asserts his superiority as firstborn and his entitlement to an honored sacrifice, while Abel responds by schooling him in the need for the love of God and a proper

⁸⁹ On mimetic desire, see René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 2–3; René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 15–16. ⁹⁰ De invidia et livore 6 (CCSL 3A:78). ⁹¹ Hom. de invidia 3–4 (PG 31:376A–377C). ⁹² Glenthøj (Cain and Abel in Syriac and Greek Writers, 243–5) identifies several Greek and Syriac interpreters who explored the loss of love at the core of the narrative, some echoing Philo’s view that Abel loved God while Cain loved himself (De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 1; 52). ⁹³ Sōghīthā (Poetic Dialogue) on Cain and Abel, Syriac text ed. and trans. Sebastian Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogue Poems on Abel and Cain,” Le Muséon 113 (2000): 333–75; Eng. trans. reprinted in Sebastian Brock, Treasure-House of Mysteries: Explorations of the Sacred Text through Poetry in the Syriac Tradition, PPS 45 (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 51–60. ⁹⁴ Sōghīthā on Cain and Abel 4–9 (ed. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogue Poems,” 341).

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disposition in sacrificing. Cain insists that “the earth will not hold us both” and reveals his plan to destroy Abel.⁹⁵ The dialogue continues: Abel:

Adam will question you about me, what answer will you give him? His first injury has not yet healed, And you will be hitting his wound with thorns. Cain: If God has sent to accept your offering, honouring you greatly with the flames, then I will kill you because He has favoured you, accepting your sacrifice and rejecting mine. Abel: Alas for my youth, what is become of it, seeing that I shall die without having done wrong. Show some sorrow, brother, and pity me: do not shed my blood, filled with hate.⁹⁶ In what follows Abel further seeks to assuage his brother’s grief, and even suggests that his accepted sacrifice might cover for Cain’s failure (“Let my offering count for yours, and so be quiet”).⁹⁷ Abel’s “negotiation” continues, accentuating what his death would mean to their family: Abel:

He would have chosen you, had you acted well, And He would have been pleased with your offering: you would have been accepted if only you had mixed sincere love along with your sacrifice. Cain: What shall I say when Adam asks me “Why did He not accept you?” He will be pleased with you—if you remain alive— but with me He will be angry and treat me as hateful. Abel: It is an evil death that you will bring upon me, and Adam will be angry if you kill me. Spare your mother: let not the young shoot which sprang from her be cut off. Cain: That shoot which left me behind, as it went on to grow tall, I will tear out by its roots, lest it hold me back; with my iciness I will cause it harm, while it is still tender, lest it grow strong and rebel against me. ⁹⁵ Ibid. 10–21 (ed. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogues,” 341–3; trans., 350–2 = Treasure-House of Mysteries, 53–4). ⁹⁶ Ibid. 22–4 (ed. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogues,” 343; trans., 352 = Treasure-House of Mysteries, 55). ⁹⁷ Ibid. 34 (ed. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogues,” 345; trans., 354 = Treasure-House of Mysteries, 56).

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Visions and Faces of the Tragic Abel: Let your heart be quieted from wrath, hold yourself back from grief: look, sin is crouching at the door (Gen. 4:7); do not approach it lest it tear you to pieces. Cain: He has cast me down and rejected me in anger, He has refused my offering and abhorred my worship. What else can He bring against me more than this if I kill you? Abel: It is a most cruel thing to shed my blood, to destroy the image which His hands have fashioned. Allow the earth to be at peace; ask for mercy, and then you will find rest.⁹⁸

Along the way in the dialogue, surely hoping to intensify the pathos, the poet clearly but subtly exploits Abel as a Christ-figure, and interweaves allusions to the “Suffering Servant” (Isa. 53) and the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). For this author and for other Christian exegetes as well, this story was not, after all, just a primeval tale of how deadly vice was inseminated into human relations; it was a preview of redemption, even of the passion of Jesus Christ, the new Abel. Still another theme radiating from the story of Cain and Abel, and taken up into the tragical vision of some early Christian interpreters of this story, was the curse that God imposed after the murder (Gen. 4:9–15). This punishment both supplemented and went beyond the curse placed on Adam and on the ground he would labor to cultivate (3:17–19). Henceforth humanity’s native turf, the ground from which Adam had been created (2:7; 3:19), the good earth essential for agriculture and human survival (cf. 3:23), was stained with the blood of Abel, and would be rendered desolate: . . . And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth (4:11–12, RSV). Some commentators, notably in the Syriac tradition, saw this as a sign of creation, like an additional character in the tragedy, rising up in righteous indignation to witness against Cain and so against human vice. Posthumously Abel’s blood, as if having a voice, cried out from the ground to God against Cain (Gen. 4:10; cf. Heb. 12:24), with the earth having opened its own mouth, in stunned silence as it were, to receive Cain’s blood (4:11). The anonymous Syriac author, in his dialogue poem quoted above, assumes that when God asked Cain What have you done? (4:10), he was actually quoting the earth’s own outcry at being stained with Abel’s “first blood.” The creation became its own tragical chorus: ⁹⁸ Ibid. 36–42 (ed. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogues,” 345–6; trans. 354–5 = Treasure-House of Mysteries, 57–8).

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The hills bent down to lament at this novel corpse in their midst; the heavenly ranks were left in stupor at what the audacious Cain had done. He cried out in grief as he was bound, and the mountains wailed at the sound of his moans; the deaf rocks heard his weeping (cf. Matt. 27:51) and gave out a sound in their suffering The earth cried out when she received that first blood that trickled down upon her; she gave a thunderous sound at the murderer, cursed him as she said, “What have you done?” (Gen. 4:10) The elements quaked in terror at seeing that first corpse; the earth shook as she received that first blood that descended upon her.⁹⁹

Similar perspectives on creation’s own outrage at the fratricide are registered in Jacob of Sarug and others sources.¹⁰⁰ The biblical text explicitly states, moreover, that Cain was cursed from the ground (Gen. 4:11). What else can this mean, says Ephrem the Syrian, but that Cain prematurely opened Sheol, the place of the dead, for the entire world to behold?¹⁰¹ The Book of Adam, the Georgian recension of the Greek Life of Adam and Eve, instead deduced that the ground refused to cover Abel’s corpse. His body kept sticking out, thus preventing Cain from burying his innocent victim and from laying anyone to rest before Adam himself, the firstborn of the earth, had been buried.¹⁰² The curse not only involved the material creation, it also spelled a new level of alienation and shame tragically implicating the whole inhabited earth. Basil of Caesarea, having cataloged Cain’s seven sins, outlines also the sevenfold vengeance (Gen. 4:15) which he incurred both for the murder and for his evasion of repentance (4:9), even though God granted him immunity from being killed (4:15). First was the cursing of the earth on Cain’s account (4:10–11). Second was his being forced to till the earth (4:12), which, according to Basil, entailed a “secret necessity” that he would not be able to take rests from tilling it and that he would have to struggle with the earth as his “enemy”

⁹⁹ Ibid. 48–51 (ed. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogues,” 347; trans. 356 = Treasure-House of Mysteries, 59). ¹⁰⁰ Jacob of Sarug, Hom. 148 (on Cain and Abel), Syriac text ed. Paul Bedjan, Homiliae selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1910), 5:29, 30. ¹⁰¹ Comm. in Gen. 3.7 (CSCO 152:50). ¹⁰² Book of Adam 40.3–5a, trans. Jan-Pierre Mahé online: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/ anderson/vita/english/vita.geo.html.

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(ἡ ἐχθρὰ γῆ) since he polluted it with Cain’s blood.¹⁰³ Third, despite his trying to cultivate it, the earth would yield no fruit (4:12). Fourth and fifth, as indicated only in the Septuagint (Gen. 4:12, 14, LXX), Cain would henceforth “groan and tremble” on the earth, an omen of the murderer’s physical strength atrophying under hard labor. Sixth, Cain would suffer estrangement not only from the land but from God himself (4:14). The seventh and final penalty was that Cain would bear an outward mark (4:15) to stigmatize him as a “doer of unholy deeds”; and this would be the severest of punishments, the mark of shame (αἰσχύνη).¹⁰⁴ Ancient Christian commentators admittedly struggled to negotiate between treating Cain as a genuinely tragic character, a villain and murderer who sealed his own fate, and as a potential penitent in whom God might still work mercy. The Septuagint version of Genesis 4:12, suggesting that Cain would be forced to “groan and tremble” on the earth, was already quite probably an attempt to explain the fact that, in the Hebrew, Cain was commanded to be a fugitive and nomad and yet later successfully had a family and built a city (Gen. 4:17). This reading was also intended to give assurance that God had imposed on the murderer Cain his due corporal punishment, even if not capital punishment.¹⁰⁵ Furthermore, the Septuagint gives a very different reading to Genesis 4:13. Whereas the Hebrew has Cain crying out to God, My punishment is greater than I can bear (RSV), the Greek has him saying My guilt is too great for me to be forgiven! (NETS), as if to hold out hope for his reconciliation to God.¹⁰⁶ Christian moralists strained for just such a hopeful ending, lest Cain’s evil remain hidden away like a cancer in the recesses of creation and history. Origen affirmed that if Eve was herself a typos of the Church (in its marriage to Christ the New Adam, Eph. 5:31–2), then all the children of Eve, including Cain and his descendants, could qualify as derivative types of the Church.¹⁰⁷ In John Chrysostom’s view, Cain could yet be held up both as a tragic hero and a model for Christian repentance and compunction. If God had immediately destroyed him, Cain would have disappeared, his sin would have stayed concealed, and he would have remained unknown to men and women of later times. But as it is, God let him live a long time with that bodily tremor of his. The sight of Cain’s palsied limbs was a lesson for all he met. It served to teach all men and women and exhort them never to dare do what he had

¹⁰³ This clearly echoes the punishment of Adam, namely, profound toil in cultivating the land (Gen. 3:17–19). ¹⁰⁴ Ep. 260 (LCL 270:58–62). On this final stigma of shame in Basil and other ancient Jewish and Christian authors, see also Ruth Mellinkoff, The Mark of Cain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), 14–21. ¹⁰⁵ Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition, 97–102; Scarlata, Outside of Eden, 141–2. ¹⁰⁶ For the significance of this LXX reading of Gen. 4:13, see Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition, 102–6. ¹⁰⁷ De princ. 4.3.7 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 750).

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done, so that they might not suffer the same punishment. And Cain himself became a better man again.¹⁰⁸

Tragical mimesis in early Christian biblical interpretation thrived on precisely this ambiguity, the tension between seemingly arbitrary and unrestrained evil, allowed to infect the creation, and the (often delayed) action of God to set things right and to work toward a whole new moral state of things, even if the evil was not always visibly and coherently resolved. Indeed, as the subsequent narratives of Genesis proved to these ancient exegetes, things had to get profoundly worse before they could get better under the eye of divine providence.

Jacob and Esau: Tragical Comedy? Another intense sibling rivalry of Genesis, stemming literally from a prepartum strife (Gen. 25:22–6), was that of Jacob and Esau, which also presented its own unique set of contradictions and ambiguities.¹⁰⁹ This time it was the younger brother, Jacob, who seemed at first sight to be paving a path toward villainy by cheating his slightly older twin out of his birthright, like an ancient identity theft (25:29–34; 27:1–40). Dramatically speaking, the story plays a fine line between tragedy and comedy. As J. William Whedbee observes, the story displays some of the stock characters of comedy: “Jacob and Rebekah appear as consummate tricksters in a family of tricksters, whereas Isaac and Esau appear as befuddled simpletons.”¹¹⁰ Esau, as James Kugel puts it, is the “fall guy” of Genesis, utterly no match for his far cleverer brother.¹¹¹ What is more, Jacob fits much better Aristotle’s profile of the comic hero, a figure of relatively low character—in Jacob’s case a homebody and mother’s pet—whose antics generate a healthy ridicule enjoyable to an audience. Such a figure brings no ultimate harm, no wretched ending. In comedy, says Aristotle, “those who are deadliest enemies in the plot, such as Orestes and Aegisthus, exit at the end as new friends, and no one dies at anyone’s hands.”¹¹² Indeed, unlike Orestes and Aegisthus, who remained enemies until the one killed the other, the rivalry of Jacob and Esau ended precisely in reconciliation and friendship (Gen. 32:3–21; 33:1–15). ¹⁰⁸ Hom. adversus Judaeos [against Judaizing Christians] 8.2 (PG 48:930), trans. Paul Harkins, FOTC 68:212 (slightly altered). ¹⁰⁹ For excellent background on the interpretive complexities of the story, see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 352–76; and Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 61–8. ¹¹⁰ The Bible and the Comic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7–8, 91–100. ¹¹¹ Traditions of the Bible, 352. ¹¹² Poetica 1453A (LCL 199:72, 73); see also 1448A, 1449A, 1451B.

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Chrysostom, however, specified that the havoc wreaked in the house of Isaac and Rebekah by the rivalry of Jacob and Esau “exhibited a tragedy on stage, and typified the drama of the Theban striplings”—a clear reference to Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of Oedipus who vied for their father’s throne in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus.¹¹³ And yet if the story presents a tragedy, who is its real (and flawed) hero, Jacob or Esau? Exegetical tradition might prefer Jacob, but pure tragedy would prefer Esau, whose misjudgment cost him his inheritance and was accompanied by a grievous anagnôrisis (Gen. 27:30–41). Early Christian interpreters sorted out this ambiguity less by closely analyzing tragic features in the narrative than by trying to assess its multiple figurations and discerning the hand of God amid the alienation between the brothers and even between their parents, Rebekah being endeared to Jacob and Isaac to the firstborn Esau. Adding massive weight to the dilemma was the fact that God seemed to have predetermined Jacob, the younger, to serve Esau, the older, and thus to bear Abraham’s ethnic line (25:23; Rom. 9:12). The arresting text of Malachi 1:2–3—“Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated”—was taken up by Paul (Rom. 9:13) and exercised many other Christian interpreters too, especially Augustine, who strained to show how God could love all his creatures alike and hate none of them (Wis. 11:24) except Esau. To obviate any injustice on God’s part, Augustine concludes that the Creator loved Esau the human but hated Esau as sinner, even though the eternal reprobation of Esau was not based on any foreknowledge of that sin.¹¹⁴ In a show of exegetical humility and resistance to a theologically callous notion of divine predestination, Origen, for one, admits his inability to fathom the favor accorded Jacob from before birth,¹¹⁵ preferring—in a manner congenial to his overall approach to scriptural texts relating to divine predestination—to draw out moral and allegorical meanings and to look at the story teleologically, that is, from the standpoint of ultimate results or ends rather than causes. Similarly in his Commentary on Romans, examining how Paul paralleled the “hated” Esau with the “hardened” Pharaoh (Ex. 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8; Rom. 9:10–18), Origen straightforwardly refuses to answer why God elected Jacob over Esau and seeks rather to follow Paul’s painstakingly dialectical approach.¹¹⁶ But seeking to fathom the deeper meaning of this passage, he draws an analogy with the situation in Exodus where God had been patient with Pharaoh, allowing him gradually to harden himself of his own free will (cf. Ex. 8:15, 32; 9:34) before justly devastating

¹¹³ Ad Stagirium a daemone vexatum 2.10 (PG 47:464). ¹¹⁴ Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus 1.2.8–11; 1.2.18 (CCSL 44:32–6, 44–7). ¹¹⁵ Hom. in Gen. 12.1, 4 (SC 7, 2nd edn., 294, 300). Origen explicitly castigates those “Philistines” who would stir up controversy over this problem while the spiritual interpretation of the text remains latent. ¹¹⁶ Comm. in Rom. 7.14.1 (SC 543:380–2).

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him.¹¹⁷ Always, however, God’s “electing” will operates within the framework of the contingent situations wrought by free creatures.¹¹⁸ By the same logic certain other authors set out to prove that Esau, like Cain, incurred his rejection due to antecedent vices. In their view, Esau had to decrease morally in order for Jacob to increase. Ambrose partially blames the parents for playing favorites, causing Esau as an impressionable youth to build up an envy (invidia) of his brother that turned vengeful. Had Esau only exercised some forbearance he could have vindicated his worthiness of the paternal blessing.¹¹⁹ Meanwhile, only foolishness would have led him to cede his birthright to Jacob, and in agreeing to the transfer of privilege, Esau provided a lesson for the future that the intemperantes lack judgment.¹²⁰ When the famished Esau came to Jacob and casually sold him his birthright for a plate of lentils (Gen. 25:29–34; Heb. 12:16), says Basil, this was no innocent hunger but the ascetical vice of gluttony (γαστριμαργία) seizing him, just as it had coopted Adam before him.¹²¹ Ephrem is equally disparaging: Esau sold the birthright not out of hunger but because he stupidly devalued it (25:34).¹²² And when Esau had his tragic discovery of Jacob’s theft of their father’s blessing, Chrysostom avers, the fact that he cried out in wild rage (27:34) signaled an already distilled anger.¹²³ Vicious envy, the root of murder, seized him as well (27:41).¹²⁴ Even though he later reconciled with Jacob (32:3–20; 33:1–16), Esau gets little credit for a forgiving spirit, being overshadowed by the humble and kindhearted initiative of Jacob.¹²⁵ His own “blessing,” gotten only through making demands of Isaac, was material prosperity, but more appropriately it was the benefit of remaining servile to his wiser brother (27:38–40).¹²⁶ Conversely, Jacob was to be made out as a paragon of virtue, his deceitful tactics purely a function of unbridled zeal to fulfill God’s will. Ambrose epitomizes the patristic justification of Jacob’s questionable exploits by pronouncing that “deceit is good when the robbery is blameless” (bonus enim ¹¹⁷ Ibid. 7.14.1–7.14.5 (SC 543:382–90); cf. Hom. in Ex. 4.2 (SC 321:120–2). ¹¹⁸ For one of Origen’s most candid defenses against raw divine determinism, see Comm. in Rom. 7.5.4–7.7.7 (SC 543:304–20), where he sorts out the interconnected meanings of divine foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification in Rom. 8:29–30. Later, Augustine will famously take a very different tack, both rejecting the idea that divine predestination is based on a foreknowledge of future merits, and asserting that God’s show of gratuitous mercy overrides any doubts about divine justice (Enchiridion de fide et spe et caritate 25.98, CCSL 46:100–1). ¹¹⁹ De Jacob et vita beata 2.2.5 (CSEL 32/2:34–5). ¹²⁰ Ibid. 1.2.6 (CSEL 32/2:7). ¹²¹ Sermo de renuntiatione saeculi 7 (PG 31:640C). Cf. Augustine, Civ. Dei 16.37 (CCSL 48:541), where greed (aviditas) rather than gluttony is Esau’s vice here; cf. Serm. 207.2 (for Lent) (PL 38:1044), suggesting Esau was censured for craving mere lentils as opposed to a more sumptuous fare. ¹²² Comm. in Gen. 23.2 (CSCO 152:86). ¹²³ Hom. in Gen. 53.4, 5 (PG 54:469, 470). ¹²⁴ Ibid. 54.2 (PG 54:473). ¹²⁵ See ibid. 58.3–5 (PG 54:511–12). ¹²⁶ Ambrose, De Jacob et vita beata 3.11 (CSEL 32/2:38).

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dolus, ubi inreprehensibilis est rapina).¹²⁷ His mysterious wrestling match with God (Gen. 32:22–32), taking place precisely in the midst of fleeing the feared retribution of Esau, was more a confirmation of Jacob’s virtue than a testing of it.¹²⁸ A Christ-figure himself, Jacob showed consummate tranquility in the face of impending death, and bowed to the ground seven times (33:3) before meeting his estranged brother in a gesture prophesying Jesus’s teaching about forgiving one’s offender “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:22).¹²⁹ Chrysostom for his part explicitly analyzes Jacob’s deception of the feeble Isaac (Gen. 27:1–41) as a carefully developed miniature theodrama with impeccable timing; and he even laces the dialogue between Isaac and Esau with amplifying and explanatory paraphrase.¹³⁰ The putative divine determinism in the story is allayed at least in part by viewing the plot as a relentless forward movement of deepening cooperation (συνεργία) between the earnest Jacob and his God. Seeing as God cooperated (συνεργῶν) in what he did, Jacob pulled it all off. What is going on, then, somewhat might ask, if God collaborated (συνήργησε) in deceit like this? Beloved, simply do not pry into exactly what transpired; instead, attend closely to the overall purpose (σκοπόν), and see that it happened not on account of any worldly greed but because Jacob was eager to gain his father’s blessing.¹³¹

The properly tragic aspect of the story, of course, could all too easily get lost in moral interpretations like these, which primarily encouraged the audiences of Christian preaching to identify with the appropriate biblical characters and imitate their virtues. But as Karl Morrison has shown, Augustine is perhaps the only patristic interpreter who explored more deeply the tragic dimension of the saga of Jacob and Esau, albeit from the standpoint of figural or typological reading. The real tragedy transcends the quotidian story of an estrangement of brothers, which on its own terms, had no sufficiently tragic effect of fear or pity in Augustine’s view.¹³² Instead, the tragedy unfolds on different planes of figural meaning (a “montage of narratives”), through a dynamic of assumed, mistaken, changed, and reversed identities.¹³³ On the historical level, of course, Jacob deludes Isaac to seize from Esau the identity of the firstborn, and an angel impersonates God to wrestle and maim Jacob. But around these swirl multiple figural re-identifications. Isaac takes on the guise of the Law and Prophets blessing the one to whom the Law and Prophets

¹²⁷ Ibid. 2.3.10 (CSEL 32/2:37). ¹²⁸ Ibid. 2.7.30–1 (CSEL 32/2:49–50). ¹²⁹ Ibid. 2.6.26–8 (CSEL 32/2:47–8). ¹³⁰ Hom. in Gen. 53.4–5 (PG 54:468–71). ¹³¹ Ibid. 53.1–5 (PG 54:464–70). Chrysostom refers to “the plot of the drama” (ἡ τοῦ δράματος ὑπόθεσις), which he parallels with the providential divine economy (οἰκονομία), in §3 (col. 468). ¹³² “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 84. ¹³³ Ibid. 82–95.

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testify.¹³⁴ The angel becomes a typos of Christ at his passion, insofar as he was temporarily defeated by Jacob who was then acting as a typos of the unbelieving Jews; but in obtaining the new name “Israel” Jacob becomes a figure of those future Jews who will believe in Christ.¹³⁵ But Jacob himself also figurally becomes Christ.¹³⁶ Esau figurally becomes the defrocked Jewish nation (the older subverted by the younger),¹³⁷ and Jacob also figurally becomes the Church as a mixed society of elect and reprobates.¹³⁸ And in eschatological perspective, Jacob becomes the figure of God’s true elect within the Church, whereas Esau becomes the figure of the reprobates within its ranks.¹³⁹ Augustine’s intention, in turn, is to remind Christians in the present that they are the beneficiaries of these transfers of identity, and that their own identity in Christ is graciously bequeathed. Discerning a pattern of tragical elements in these different strata of Augustine’s interpretation of the story, Morrison comments: In the account of Jacob’s conflict with Esau, the sequences of pathos to discovery to peripety to epiphany are laminated and visible, each through the others. The struggle of Esau and Jacob in the womb crowned by Jacob’s deception of Isaac (pathos), the disclosures of Jacob’s plot and his flight (discovery–peripety), and the reconciliation between the brothers (epiphany) is seen through the etiological sequence of Adam’s disobedience (pathos), the Fall and Expulsion from Eden (discovery–peripety), and the advent and second coming of Christ, the New Adam (epiphany). Further, the historical and etiological narratives are visible through the anagogical one of persecution of the Church by the Jews and the Roman Empire (pathos), the pacification of the Church (discovery–peripety), and the long-deferred supplanting of the Jews by the Christians, notably in the Diaspora (epiphany). All other narratives are read through the allegorical, which follows the sequence of daily conflict between flesh and spirit both in each Christian and in the Church (pathos), illumination by faith and progress through conversion until death (discovery–peripety), and direct vision in Paradise (epiphany). Each movement from pathos to epiphany ends in happiness for the elect and misery for the reprobate . . . ¹⁴⁰

Morrison is correct that for Augustine at least, the truly tragical interpretation of Jacob and Esau depended on shifting from the historical plane to the figural one, where the contingencies of history could be seen as already reconfigured in the larger economy of divine grace and election. Still, there remains the

¹³⁴ Civ. Dei 16.37 (CCSL 48:542). Cf. Serm. 4.21 (CCSL 41:35–6), where Augustine insists that Isaac was consciously aware of the prophetic moment of Jacob’s usurping of Esau’s blessing. ¹³⁵ Civ. Dei 16.39 (CCSL 48:545). ¹³⁶ Serm. 4.16 (CCSL 41:32). ¹³⁷ Civ. Dei 16.35, 42 (CCSL 48:539–40, 548); Serm. 5.4 (CCSL 41:53–5). ¹³⁸ Serm. 5.6, 8 (CCSL 41:56–7, 59–60). ¹³⁹ Serm. 4.12 (CCSL 41:28–9). ¹⁴⁰ “I Am You,” 85. (Prof. Morrison has kindly confirmed for me that the term “peripety,” the anglicized form of περιπέτεια, appeared by typographical error in his book as “periptery.” I have inserted the correction in quoting this passage.)

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“comical” outcome. At the level of the historical sense, the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau (Gen. 33:1–15) problematized the tragical interpretation of the story by supplying a happy ending to their fraternal alienation, and by appearing to tie up any loose ends in their relationship. As I noted, some exegetes took this reconciliation simply as confirmation of Jacob’s virtue and generosity of spirit. Cyril of Alexandria, writing in the same period as Augustine, instead took it as prophetic of the eschatological reconciliation of unbelieving Jews to Jesus Christ.¹⁴¹ For Augustine, however, the brothers’ reconciliation did not remove the mysteriously tragic fact of reprobation in sacred history, the rationally inexplicable dark side of the revelation of divine mercy in God’s elect. As Paul Rigby proposes, Augustine works within a framework of three concurrent “economies” in tracing the legacy of Adamic sin. First, the “penal economy” reveals a certain discernible justice in original sin as a punitive result of the fall. Second, the “tragic economy” conjures up the “the phantasm of the tragic God” who of his own desire chooses some sinners to receive his electing grace (“vessels of mercy”) and others to be rejected as “vessels of wrath” (Rom. 9:22–3), thereby encouraging believers to exercise a “tragic wisdom” acknowledging that they cannot fathom God’s inscrutable ways. Finally the “gracious economy” subjects both moral freedom and tragic necessity to the overriding principle of the superabundance of grace.¹⁴² Augustine himself does not explicitly differentiate these three economies in expositing biblical narratives, but they are cogent and helpful lenses on his interpretation of salvation history. Accordingly, for Augustine’s ancient and modern audiences alike, tragical mimesis as a mode of interpretation need not result in cathartic pity for the reprobates like Esau and unbelieving Jews; but it does need to evoke healthy fear of God’s electing will and judgment, and an intensely worshipful awe of the divine grace that alone makes ultimate sense of creaturely existence and destiny. Clearly not all early Christian interpreters would have wholeheartedly agreed with Augustine’s conclusions about a salutary determinism operative in these primordial tragedies of Genesis. Most did, however, share his intuition that God’s own freedom was properly basic to the outworking of these tragedies, and that, while this divine freedom was unflaggingly benevolent, it was anything but predictable by the standards of human reasoning.

¹⁴¹ Glaphyra in Genesim 5.3 (PG 69:261A–D). ¹⁴² Paul Rigby, The Theology of Augustine’s Confessions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 153, 158.

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3 Tragical Mimesis and Biblical Interpretation II Exposing and Expounding the Tragic in Sacred History

Oh my, how ready mortals are to pin the blame on the gods. For they say that evils derive from us, but mortals in their own right, through their own presumptuousness, have sufferings beyond what is ordained by destiny. —Zeus in The Odyssey¹

In this chapter I will set forth additional salient examples of biblical narratives that early Christian interpreters expounded, partially or fully, through a tragical lens. I must reiterate, nevertheless, that the tragical-mimetic and “dramatic” interpretation of these narratives, as developed by patristic exegetes, did not represent an attempt technically or categorically to isolate a tragic sense of the texts under discussion, but was rather a function of explaining the texts’ theologically “literal” or else figural meaning. A tragical lens on certain narratives was warranted because they appeared to have an inherent and unmistakably tragic quality, a plot whose structure and characters begged for tragical exposition, or because their characters and themes compellingly epitomized the tragic condition in which the whole fallen human race found itself either before or aside from divine redemption.

THE UN DOIN G OF ANCIENT JUDGES AND KINGS

The Disastrous Saga of Jephthah and His Daughter Terry Eagleton notes that for many people, tragedy invariably “smacks of virile warriors and immolated virgins, cosmic fatality and stoical acquiescence.”² ¹ Odyssey, Book 1, ll. 32–4 (LCL 104:14), my translation. ² Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), ix. Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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Stereotypes aside, all of those apply to the bitter saga in Judges 11 of the Israelite mercenary Jephthah, the son of Gilead by a prostitute, and Jephthah’s unnamed and ill-fated virgin daughter. The story, perhaps the one from the Hebrew Scriptures that most begs for tragical interpretation, is disturbing at multiple levels. Superficially it seems inevitable that Jephthah be treated as a hero, for the “spirit of the Lord” came upon him (Judges 11:29), and God gave him a decisive victory against the Ammonites; in addition, he was touted as a judge in Israel, praised by Samuel (1 Sam. 12:11), and, most strikingly of all, included in the litany of faithful biblical witnesses in Hebrews 11:4–40 (at v. 32). And yet the narrative in Judges 11 exposes a tragic hamartia of potentially epic proportions. Originally spurned by his family and by his father’s people (the “elders of Gilead”) because of his illegitimate birth (Judges 11:2–7), Jephthah suddenly finds himself elevated to lead an army in a crucial battle, vowing to God that if he is granted success, he will sacrifice the first thing that comes through the door of his house. This putative act of piety (hubris? foolishness?) grievously backfires when it is his daughter, his only child, who comes out to meet him, and whose subsequent death drastically flies in the face of Israelite bans on human sacrifice. Jephthah is stunned by the tragic peripety and agonized by his anagnôrisis (Judges 11:35). But the killing of the daughter, though worthy of extended mourning (11:39–40), appears an unrectified injustice at best, a moral outrage at worst, all the more so because of the girl’s willing compliance with it, her forsaking of her own future (11:36–7). Is her death really to go down in sacred history as sad but ultimately pointless, and must we conclude that God approved her sacrifice? Examining early Christian readings of this story, I have greatly benefited from John Thompson’s trenchant investigation of the formative history of its interpretation, which already identifies several of the major patristic treatments of the narrative, even though some of them are quite cursory. As Thompson shows, they ran a wide gamut, from attempts at understanding Jephthah’s perplexing fidelity and vow, to figural interpretations of the sacrifice, to moralizing expositions of the virgin daughter’s “ascetical” devotion and “martyrdom.”³ Here I shall focus principally on those interpretations which, to some degree at least, envisioned Jephthah and his daughter as tragic characters locked in a grievous plot that demanded redemptive explanation. First, however, I would mention a small minority of early Christian interpreters who, responding a fortiori to the scandal of the story, imagined Jephthah as transparently pious from the outset. The fourth-century Syriac writer

³ Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100–78; cf. Thompson’s additional discussion in his Reading the Bible with the Dead: What You Can Learn from the History of Exegesis That You Can’t Learn from Exegesis Alone (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 33–47.

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Aphrahat went so far as to compare Jephthah with Jesus: each rejected by his kinsmen; each offering up a sacrifice to God, Jephthah his daughter and Jesus his own body on a cross.⁴ The later Syriac preacher Jacob of Sarug furthermore exonerated Jephthah by suggesting that he was an ascetic and deliberately acted to prefigure Christ’s sacrifice: Wondrous was the sacrifice offered to You by the hands of Jephthah: the beloved virgin who by her parent was slain. The father offered his daughter for slaughter out of love for You, so that he might depict You, whom the Father gave for our salvation . . . I must speak . . . concerning him who was a sea full of fatherhood’s love, and how he prevailed to see his loved one beneath the knife; concerning that fervor of faith which consumed like fire, so that he performed slaughter and his zeal was not quenched; concerning the athlete who wrestled with himself, and conquered his pity and snatched the crown of his faith.⁵

Jacob finds no tragic flaw and abides no scandal whatsoever in Jephthah’s actions, although he does acknowledge that Jephthah was not aware at the time of his vow that his own daughter would be the sacrifice. And yet Jacob embellishes the piety even of Jephthah’s ignorance, placing new words in his mouth that vindicate his vow to God: I do not know whom You desire to be offered to You; choose for Yourself a sacrifice, and I will not spare him even if beloved. Set apart for Yourself whatever is fitting and beautiful and choice and beloved; whomever You set apart I will sacrifice without restraint. Whatever you choose from all that is mine I will give to You; set apart for Yourself a vow, and bring it to my hands to offer to You. I made a vow and I will give; I do not know what I will give.⁶

Most patristic interpreters, however, were far less generous toward Jephthah, and more open to scrutinizing his ambiguous faith and exposing his tragic hamartia, albeit with appropriate deference to the divine providence operative in the events. For example, Gregory Nazianzen, having granted Jephthah the benefit of the doubt that his vow to God could originally have arisen from genuine religious devotion, in the image of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his only son Isaac,⁷ elsewhere clarifies that Jephthah’s sacrifice was neither fully trustworthy (ἀσφαλής) nor noble (μεγαλοπρεπής), but prompted by raw ⁴ Demonstrationes 21.12 (PS 1:964). ⁵ Hom. on Jephthah’s Daughter, ll. 15–18, 58, 61–6; Syriac text with translation by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Ophir Münz-Manor, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 22 (Piscataway, NJ: Georgias Press, 2010), 10, 11, 16, 17. ⁶ Ibid. ll. 99–105, trans. Harvey and Münz-Manor, 20, 21. ⁷ Epitaphium 94 (PG 38:58A). The comparison with Abraham also appears in Ephrem the Syrian, Carmina Nisibena 63.1–5 (CSCO 240:99), who speaks of “Jephthah’s sword” being raised against anyone who would lament Abraham’s vow to sacrifice his son, because of its scandalousness.

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lust for military conquest (νικῆς ἔρως).⁸ A little later on, John Chrysostom, who nervously accepts the theological and moral difficulties of the story, uses it to discourage Christians from making premature vows to God. God allowed the horrific sacrifice to go forward as a bitter moral object lesson for future generations.⁹ But John also openly claims that a “malicious demon was vying to bring about such a tragedy (τραγῳδίαν),” not only with Jephthah but in the later story of Saul’s vow to let Jonathan die for breaking another rash vow on Saul’s part (1 Sam. 14:1–45). Had the demon had its way, these would have both been cases of child murder abhorrent to God.¹⁰ Some later Greek exegetes, likely under Chrysostom’s influence, were similarly friendly to the idea that a demon had infected Jephthah’s judgment and helped create the disaster.¹¹ Theodoret of Cyrus, in his Questions on the Octateuch, echoes Chrysostom’s view that Jephthah’s “senseless vow” (ἀνόητος ὑπόσχεσις) and subsequent child sacrifice were allowed by God as a warning to later Israel about human sacrifice. What is more, Theodoret selects Jephthah’s daughter as the true hero of the story, morally superior to her father in teaching him the seriousness of keeping an oath made to God (Judges 11:36).¹² Especially striking is Chrysostom’s recognition that Jephthah’s daughter’s fate could have been “consigned to oblivion” (λήθῃ παραδοθῆναι) had it not been enjoined on later Jewish virgins to mourn and lament her death so that it could be perpetually remembered (Judges 11:39–40).¹³ This seems tantamount to admitting that the daughter’s killing was deeply tragic, albeit gathered into the divine purposes for morally and spiritually instructing the human race. Chrysostom refused, in other words, a facile dismissal of the scandalousness of the story, lest its true tragic force be lost on his Christian audience in pursuing an otherwise moralistic warning against perfunctory vows. Doubtless this is a function of Chrysostom’s conviction that sacred history always holds greater dramatic force (and prompts more virtuous emotions) than anything humanly produced. As for Latin Christian writers of the same period, Ambrose unambiguously blasts Jephthah’s presumptuous vow alongside the sins of other alleged Old Testament heroes like Saul and David.¹⁴ But in his treatise On the Duties of the Clergy Ambrose states that Jephthah acted less under the sway of blatant sin ⁸ Or. 15.11 (PG 35:929D–932A). ⁹ Hom. de statuis 14.3 (PG 49:147). ¹⁰ Ibid. 14.3–5 (PG 49:147–50). ¹¹ Thompson (Writing the Wrongs, 131–2) notes the views of the anonymous Quaestiones et responsiones ad orthodoxos 99 (PG 6:1344) and the catenist Procopius of Gaza, Comm. in Judices 11.30 (PG 87:1069). ¹² Quaestiones in Octateuchem: In Iudices 20, Greek text ed. John Pettrucione, Library of Early Christianity 2 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 2:342–6. ¹³ Hom. de statuis 14.3 (PG 49:147). See also Thompson’s comments in Writing the Wrongs, 116–17. ¹⁴ Apologia prophetae David 4.16 (PL 14:899); De officiis ministrorum 1.50.255, ed. Ivor Davidson, OECT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1:266.

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than under the force of a “pitiable necessity” (miserabilis necessitas) to which he had bound himself by making an irreversible vow to God.¹⁵ This is strong language coming from Ambrose, who highly valued human free will and the power of repentance. He unquestionably saw the constraint of necessitas as entirely self-imposed by Jephthah. But it sets in bold relief the categorically tragic dimension of the narrative. As Thompson wryly remarks, “It would appear that the camera has captured Ambrose’s moral casuistry in this treatise at the moment of its metamorphosis into something else, into (say) a tale of redemption through tragedy.”¹⁶ Even so, Ambrose cannot resist attempting to adjudicate Jephthah at some level and to extract a positive moral of the story, once more comparing Jephthah to Abraham, since he had real reverence for God in determining to fulfill his sacrificial vow, the kind of resolve appropriate for Christian parents vowing to consecrate their children to God and to the ascetic life.¹⁷ Thompson rightly emphasizes Ambrose’s waffling.¹⁸ He was trying to hold in tenuous balance the goodness of God, the decent intentions of Jephthah, and the outrageousness of his vow and child sacrifice. But one could also see this waffling as Ambrose’s reticence further to exploit a distinctly tragic dimension of the narrative, or to allow too many interpretive loose-ends in relating it to a contemporary Christian audience, even though his overall approach to the story sent its own mixed exegetical signals. Other Latin patristic writers besides Ambrose condemned Jephthah’s sin without necessarily speculating into his tragic hamartia. Ambrosiaster comes close to doing so in surmising that Jephthah was plagued by an “improvident” (improvidus) mind and a “foolish devotion” (stulta devotio) to God that crippled his moral judgment from the outset.¹⁹ But when we get to Augustine, we find Jephthah looking at first less like a defective tragic hero than a villain through and through, especially since Augustine’s Old Latin text of Judges 11:31 has Jephthah vowing that his sacrifice will be not “whatever” (quodcumque) comes through his door after the victory but “whoever” (quicumque), a patently human victim.²⁰ As he further elaborates on the story in his Questions on the Heptateuch, nevertheless, even Augustine needs to find something redeemable in this same Jephthah later honored in Hebrews 11; so he too explores Jephthah’s intentions. Already in the City of God, he had queried whether, in the image of Abraham, Jephthah might have been granted some special divine exceptio or “command” (jussio) for his sacrificial vow, despite its

¹⁵ De officiis 3.12.78 (Davidson, 1:402). ¹⁶ Writing the Wrongs, 119. ¹⁷ De virginitate 2.6–3.10 (PL 16:267C–268D); cf. Ambrose, Exhortatio virginitatis 8.51 (PL 16:351A–B). ¹⁸ Writing the Wrongs, 118–21. ¹⁹ Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti 43 (PL 35:2239). ²⁰ Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 7.49.6 (CCSL 33:361).

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appearance of scandal.²¹ After all, he went on to win a great victory. On the other hand, there is an unmistakable signal of divine punishment in the sacrifice of his only child. We are back again to Jephthah as a tragic character, perhaps honorably motivated, and duly anguished with remorse after his daughter’s death, but grossly ignorant of contradicting the antecedent divine ban on human sacrifice. The bishop of Hippo has a sure alternative, even if it is not utterly new. To recall the hermeneutical rubrics in Augustine outlined by Paul Rigby,²² the bishop adjusts his exegetical angle from “the penal” and “the tragic” to “the gracious” using figural interpretation. “Justice” may have been served to Jephthah for his foolishness, but hardly to his innocent daughter. “The tragic” might be good here for engaging the moral ambiguity of the narrative, and for effecting an appropriate fear and pity, but it cannot clarify God’s eschatological purposes. Augustine thus expounds at length on Jephthah, much like the fellow sinner and Israelite judge Gideon, as one whose action hides a deeper prophetic meaning—a treasure hidden in earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4:7).²³ Ultimately it makes no difference whether these ancient figures were cognizant (scientes) or ignorant (nescientes) that they were prefiguring a future reality.²⁴ Thus Augustine ventures at considerable length to propose that Jephthah— even if unwitting and imprudent and offensive—acted as a Christ-figure. His name in Hebrew means “he who opens” (Aperiens), hinting of the Lord himself who “opened” his disciples’ minds to the secrets of Scripture (Luke 24:27, 45).²⁵ Jephthah was rejected by his kinsmen as illegitimate, and so too the chief among the Scribes and Pharisees, perceived as vaunting their adherence to the Law, considered Christ an “illegitimate son” even though he liberated that Law.²⁶ This is just the beginning of Augustine’s extended etymological and figural justification of the correspondence between Jephthah and Christ,²⁷ the one sacrificing his virgin daughter, the other sacrificing his “virgin” Church.²⁸ That Augustine expends so much exegetical energy on this figural argument doubtless betrays his knowledge that any correspondence between Jephthah and Christ would be sheer nonsense at the literal level of the text. To his credit, however, Augustine had allowed in his long exposition for a tragic reading, even if it is toned down and qualified, and even if the many interpretive loose ends at the literal level persist, including the grave injustice done to Jephthah’s daughter and how it is only resolved within the divine providence as an intermittent object lesson for Israel.²⁹ ²¹ Civ. Dei 1.21 (CCSL 47:23). ²² See above, p. 66. ²³ Qu. in Hept. 7.49.12 (CCSL 33:364–5). ²⁴ Ibid. 7.49.13 (CCSL 33:365). ²⁵ Ibid. 7.49.16 (CCSL 33:366–7). ²⁶ Ibid. ²⁷ Ibid. 7.49.17–28 (CCSL 33:367–73). ²⁸ Ibid. 7.49.26 (CCSL 33:372). ²⁹ This is the primary burden of Thompson’s analysis in his Writing the Wrongs, in treating Augustine and other representative early Christian interpreters of the Jephthah narrative.

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Samson: A Tragic Downfall? Before leaving the book of Judges, let us turn briefly to patristic renderings of another candidate for tragical interpretation: Samson (Judges 13–16). Like Jephthah, “the spirit of the Lord” had come upon Samson (Judges 13:25; 14:6, 19; 15:14) before disaster befell him. But unlike Jephthah, a bastard spurned by his own kin, Samson had enjoyed a miraculous birth, with his parents being visited by an angel and commanded to offer God a thanksgiving holocaust (13:2–23). He was from a pious family and held great promise as a hero in Israel. “Who,” asks Ambrose, “was mightier and from his cradle more abundantly endowed with God’s Spirit than the Nazirite Samson?”³⁰ Although centuries later the Puritan poet John Milton retold the undoing of Samson precisely as a tragedy in his closet drama Samson Agonistes (1671), and Samson has popped up again in modern tragical readings of the Bible,³¹ early Christian interpreters were more reticent to consider Samson straightforwardly as a tragic hero. Perhaps his peripety, his nosedive into calamity, was perceived as too gradual and insufficiently precipitous. Perhaps some interpreters shared Chrysostom’s judgment that Samson wreaked havoc on himself by his own free choice (προαίρεσις),³² that is, without necessarily being constrained by a tragic hamartia. On the other hand, if there was any prior righteousness in Samson, Augustine furthermore observes, it was indeed deeply hidden (valde in profundo).³³ Extant patristic interpretations appear to have settled on two alternative strategies. One was to read Samson, a Nazarite, as a failed ascetic, overtaken by violence and lustfully consorting with a prostitute to his own ruin. Ambrose, forcing the issue of the divine providence operative in the story, surmises that Samson’s rise was predestined by God’s very word (ortus divino oraculo predestinatus), and was vindicated only at the end of his life, when he finally conquered himself and earned his greatest triumph.³⁴ In that dramatic finale, where Samson toppled the walls of the Philistine temple on himself and its hostile throng (Judges 16:29–30), Augustine even gladly absolves him of an unseemly suicide (and of murder) because he was acting under the “secret command” of the Holy Spirit.³⁵ This intuition of a special divine intervention in Samson’s demise and exculpation worked to save the literal sense of the story, burdened as it was by moral turpitude and ambiguities. But there was

³⁰ Ep. (lib. 9) 42.8 (ad Vigilium) (CSEL 82/2:124–5). ³¹ See Ben Quash, “Four Biblical Characters: In Search of Tragedy,” in Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller, eds., Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 27–9. ³² Hom. in Ep. ad Philippenses 12.3 (PG 62:274). ³³ Sermo 364.1 (PL 39:1639). ³⁴ Ep. (lib. 9) 42.10–33 (ad Vigilium) (CSEL 82/2:125–42). ³⁵ Civ. Dei 1.21 (CCSL 47:23).

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another interpretive strategy, which was once more to remove to the text’s non-literal horizon. For one thing, Samson’s enigmatic “riddle” about the lion and honey (Judges 14:12ff.), and his bizarre acts such as using the tails of live foxes as torches to destroy Philistine crops (15:4ff.), proved adequate justification for diverting to a higher moral and spiritual meaning, and some authors looked for insight there.³⁶ But the sixth-century episcopal homilist Caesarius of Arles, among others, even insisted on dubbing Samson a Christ-figure to the extent that he wielded superhuman powers and overwhelmed the enemies of (the spiritual) Israel. Caesarius goes so far as to suggest that Samson’s fornication with the harlot Delilah is excused by the fact that he was acting as a prophet, magnificently displaying the mystery of Christ’s descent into Hell.³⁷

Saul as a Tragic Hero The story of King Saul occupies a whole chapter of its own in J. Cheryl Exum’s pioneering modern study of Tragedy and Biblical Narrative (1992). She even deems it “the clearest example of biblical tragedy.”³⁸ Saul, being the first of Israel’s kings when monarchy was an untested institution, and yet another figure on whom “the spirit of the Lord” rested (1 Sam. 10:6), shouldered high hopes for the success of this fledgling political system before drastically falling from grace and squandering his kingship. But in addition, as Exum reminds us, the long narrative poses the theological dilemma of a God who grants Israel’s request for a monarch and then, amid the contingent circumstances of Saul’s reign, regrets his decision (1 Sam. 15:11) and withdraws his spirit from the languishing and alienated king (16:14), driving him into even deeper despair by sending an “evil spirit” on him (19:9). This bizarre sort of providence is doubtless one significant reason why, as Francesca Murphy observes, patristic and medieval commentators, with few exceptions, shied away from detailed exposition of 1 Samuel.³⁹ Early on Origen mounted a preemptive defense of God’s providence and justice in the story of Saul’s demise. Actually it appears in a homily on ³⁶ Cf. Ambrose, De spiritu sancto 2, Prol. 8–10 (CSEL 79:89–90); Caesarius of Arles, Serm. 118 (CCSL 103:491–6), which has come down to us as Serm. 364 wrongly attributed to Augustine; also Maximus of Turin, Serm. 41.5 (CCSL 23:166–7). ³⁷ Serm. 118.5 (CCSL 103:494–5). ³⁸ Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, 16–44. See also Klaus-Peter Adam, “Saul as a Tragic Hero: Greek Drama and Its Influence on Hebrew Scripture in 1 Samuel 14, 24–46 (10,8; 13,7–13A; 10,17–27),” in Erik Eynikel and A. Graeme Auld, eds., For and Against David: Story and History in the Books of Samuel (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 123–83. ³⁹ “Providence in 1 Samuel,” in Francesca Murphy and Philip Ziegler, eds., The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 57–60.

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Jeremiah’s outcry to God, You deceived me, Lord, and I have been deceived (Jer. 20:7ff.). These are words that Saul too presumably could have uttered in the twilight of his kingship. The common thread is God’s faithfulness to his promises to his appointed servants. Origen cites God’s “regret” (μεταμέλεια) of his support for King Saul (1 Sam. 15:11) as a case in point of the higher providence and judgment whereby God has to work to fulfill his purposes in ways that seem superficially deceitful or unjust to human beings, but which, in teleological perspective, thoroughly benefit humanity. In Saul’s case, writes Origen: One who is able might ask, “What does the regret of God achieve? What has it accomplished?” Well, it deposed Saul who [of his own free will⁴⁰] was ruling illegitimately, and it raised up a king for the people who was after God’s own heart. For in that beneficial regret, God said, I have found a man according to my own heart, David, son of Jesse (Ps. 88:21, LXX; Acts 13:22).⁴¹

Tertullian similarly balked at any hint of divine injustice in Saul’s case. Confuting Marcionite allegations that the Old Testament deity was unfair to Saul by endorsing him and later rejecting him, he insists that God does not antecedently condemn persons who have not yet merited condemnation, nor does God remit sins in consideration of one’s former virtues that one later fails to exercise.⁴² But even if this line of reasoning succeeds in placing the burden of responsibility on Saul for his own undoing, it still does not erase the semblance of a genuinely tragic character caught in a progressively downward spiral after originally being so promising (1 Sam. 9–12) and even humble (9:21).⁴³ Hence some Christian interpreters searched for the definitive tragic hamartia of this king who was originally sanctioned by God but ultimately passed over for God’s true messianic favorite, David. It was too simple just to reiterate Saul’s bungling of his kingship, such as his ill-fated sacrifice outside of Samuel’s presence (13:9–14),⁴⁴ and most egregiously his open disobedience of God in not completing the ban on the Amalekites (15:1–9).⁴⁵ Chrysostom, enhancing ⁴⁰ I insert this clarification because the point of Origen’s larger argument here is that God never acts by compulsion, but always in relation to human free will, in this case Saul’s. ⁴¹ Hom. in Jeremiam 20 (GCS 6:176–7; quoted at 177, ll. 21–5); cf. De princ. 4.2.1 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 698). ⁴² Contra Marcionem 2.23–4 (SC 368:136–42). Cf. Cyprian, Ep. 13.2 (CSEL 3/2:505, ll. 19–22): “Solomon . . . and Saul and many others were unable to maintain the grace given them by God so long as they did not walk in the ways of the Lord. When the Lord’s discipline withdrew from them, so did his grace.” ⁴³ As John Chrysostom notices, Samuel had even put his own reputation on the line in recommending the young King Saul (Hom. in 2 Cor. 24.3 (PG 61:567–8)). ⁴⁴ See Constitutiones apostolorum 8.46.7 (SC 336:268), where Saul’s sacrifice out of the presence of a priest (Samuel) registers as an early warning against the ecclesiastical offense of performing Eucharistic sacrifices apart from a bishop. ⁴⁵ See the cool and objective review of Saul’s earlier career in the late antique Gallican author Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 1.33–5 (SC 441:173–80).

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the ascetical dimension of Saul’s downfall, summarized all this as a case of incremental deception by the Devil, commensurate with the withdrawal of God’s Spirit.⁴⁶ But it was not until later in the narrative, in the drawn-out rivalry with his successor David (1 Sam. 16–31), that Saul’s tragic hamartia was fully revealed, and not as a mere lack of leadership qualities, but as the truly archetypal and deadly sin of envy (φθόνος; βασκανία; invidia) and detrimentally competitive jealousy (ζῆλος; zelus; aemulatio). This took the consideration of Saul’s story as tragic to a whole new level since now he could be linked with a primeval vice that had devastating effects for the whole human race. Already the firstcentury writer of 1 Clement recognized this as Saul perpetuating the invidious legacy of Cain, eliciting envy (φθόνος) and malevolent jealousy (ζῆλος) alike.⁴⁷ Just like Cain, Saul found a place in the focused treatises on envy and jealousy by Cyprian in the third century and Basil of Caesarea in the fourth, and his envy became legendary in the larger patristic tradition.⁴⁸ Cyprian positions Saul in a whole lineage of biblical enviers. It began with the Devil himself in his envy of humanity as created in God’s image. It continued with Cain in his murder of Abel. It resurfaced with Esau in his contention with Jacob, and yet again with the brothers of Joseph, who sold him into slavery out of envy. But Saul’s envy of David, all the starker in contrast with the latter’s reciprocal mercy, had catastrophic results for Israel itself, setting the stage for the Jews’ envy and jealousy of Jesus (Mark 15:10; Acts 5:17; 13:45).⁴⁹ Basil largely concurs with this invidious legacy, but finds Saul representative of a unique breed of irrational envy that targets one’s own benefactors, in this case David. Granted Saul’s jealousy of David’s victories in battle (1 Sam. 18:6–9), the truly sobering fact is that the more graciously and mercifully David acted toward him, the more Saul envied David.⁵⁰ David’s upward spiral in virtue and Saul’s downward spiral in vice were mirror opposites. In his three Homilies on David and Saul, John Chrysostom plays up exactly the same tragic irony, and searches for some kind of convoluted logic in Saul’s illogical envy of his benefactor David. Though underlying this envy was a fundamentally impulsive anger (ὀργή),⁵¹ a passion that tends to take on a whole psychological life of its own, it began to manifest in Saul specifically as

⁴⁶ Hom. in Matt. 86.3 (PG 59:766–7); Hom. in Rom. 28.2 (PG 60:651). ⁴⁷ 1 Clement 4.1–13, Greek text ed. and trans. Michael Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 48–50. ⁴⁸ On Saul’s primal hamartia as envy or else jealousy, cf. also Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 3.4 (CCSL 1:188); Ephrem, Carmina Nisibena 57.15 (CSCO 240:86); Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 1.33–5 (SC 441:173–80); Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 33, Serm. 1.2 (CCSL 38:274–5); John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 42.2 (PG 57:453–4); ibid. 62.4–5 (PG 58:601–2); Hom. in Rom. 7.6 (PG 60:448–9); Hom. in 2 Cor. 24.4 (PG 61:568). ⁴⁹ De invidia et livore 5 (CCSL 3A:77). ⁵⁰ Hom. de invidia 3 (PG 31:376C–D). ⁵¹ Hom. de Davide et Saule 1.1 (PG 54:677).

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a leer of jealous suspicion (ὑπόψια), as John extrapolates from the text’s mention of Saul “eyeing” (ὑποβλεπόμενος) David after he was praised for superior military feats (1 Sam. 18:9, LXX).⁵² As David’s virtue—specifically his continuing deference to Saul as king, his utter fairmindedness (ἐπιείκεια), prudence (συνίων, 18:14), humility (ταπεινοφροσύνη), and gentleness (πραότης)—increased, Saul’s jealous sneer morphed into outright enmity (ἔχθρα) and malicious envy (βασκανία), resulting in an attempted murder (19:9–10).⁵³ For Chrysostom, David’s own tragic heroics take center stage. Not only did David show extraordinary self-control in refusing to kill Saul when he had the chance. Not only did he consciously demonstrate sublime clemency and mercy as a lesson to his troops (24:5–8), even to the point of trying to help Saul save face.⁵⁴ And not only did David eventually weep bitterly when the severely wounded Saul at last committed suicide (2 Sam. 1:11–16), and thereupon eulogize Saul and Jonathan after their deaths (1:17–27).⁵⁵ But David also did all these things ultimately and tragically in vain, as set in such spectacular relief by the oblivious Saul’s ever more poisonous envy.⁵⁶ Chrysostom is able to rescue something redemptive in the tragedy, to the extent that Saul, after being spared twice by David, was at least temporarily softened, calling David his “child” and exhibiting some remorse (1 Sam. 24:17; 26:17, 21, LXX).⁵⁷ And yet the fact remains: Saul was fatefully bent on a self-destructive course, seemingly powerless to turn back from it. Chrysostom thus tried to remove the drama to the foreground of his own audience, which could still be effectually warned against the schemes of envy and positively encouraged by David’s virtuousness. As for the Spirit of God at first visiting Saul and then leaving him, and being replaced by an “evil spirit” also from God, the Persian Christian sage Aphrahat had a ready answer, one that would have been acceptable to Chrysostom and other interpreters who did not want to allow the story of Saul to drift too far from traditional teaching on providence, grace, and free will. Saul “quenched” the divine Spirit (cf. 1 Thess. 5:19) thoroughly of his own choosing, such that God justifiably sent an evil spirit on him, which David intermittently relieved to some degree by playing his lyre for Saul (1 Sam. 16:23).⁵⁸ Such spirits, even Satan himself, says Aphrahat, are sent by God to test and to engage human beings in spiritual warfare.⁵⁹ But there was no question that Saul, whatever the demonic influences, self-destructed of his own choosing. The decisive evidence, for patristic interpreters, was Saul’s fateful decision, after having banished all wizardry and sorcery from Israel (1 Sam. 28:3), to consult a pagan

⁵² ⁵⁴ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸

Ibid. 1.2 (PG 54:679). ⁵³ Ibid. 1.3–4 (PG 54:680–1). Ibid. 1.4–6 (PG 54:682–6). ⁵⁵ Ibid. 2.5 (PG 54:693–4). Ibid. 3.3–4 (PG 54:699–700). Ibid. 3.5–6 (PG 54:702–3); ibid. 3.7 (704–5); ibid. 3.8–9 (706–7). Demonstratio 6.16 (PS 1:297–300). ⁵⁹ Ibid. 6.17 (PS 1:300–5).

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oracle, the “witch of Endor” (28:7–25), in order to learn his political and military fate. In this extreme behavior, Saul’s tragic heroism-turned-ruination was confirmed. Though many exegetes were vexed by the fact that the witch successfully conjured Samuel from Hades, hoping to explain this away,⁶⁰ Origen for his part claimed there was no scandal (πρόσκομμα) at all. Just as Christ had descended into the netherworld, he argued, Samuel the Spirit-filled prophet emerged therefrom precisely to deliver Saul a fateful message of divine judgment—and by extension to admonish the Church in the present time.⁶¹ This pathetic scene thus dramatically closed the curtain on the tragic Israelite hero once favored by God.

J O B’ S REV ERS AL OF F ORTUN E While some modern scholars consider the story of Saul the consummate model of biblical tragedy, others find powerful echoes of tragedy in the book of Job.⁶² One critic has instead proposed seeing Job as a classic of biblical comedy, albeit a thoroughly dark comedy laced with tragic features, aimed not at levity but at strong irony, parody, and satire.⁶³ Early Christian interpreters of Job nevertheless saw little need to fix the book absolutely within any poetic genre. Some did acknowledge its tragic elements, as we shall see, but many more favored a moralizing approach, treating the book mainly as a testament of Job’s ascetical virtue and “patience” amid profound testing allowed by God,⁶⁴ and of his dignity as “an evangelist before the gospel appeared, an apostle before there were apostolic injunctions.”⁶⁵ ⁶⁰ For the key texts, see Rowan Greer and Margaret Mitchell, eds. and trans., The “BellyMyther” of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007); and on the various interpretive approaches, see Greer and Mitchell, ibid., xxxi–clvii; K. A.D. Smelik, “The Witch of Endor: 1 Samuel 28 in Rabbinic and Christian Exegesis till 800 A.D.,” Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1979): 160–79 (esp. 164–79); Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 163–5. ⁶¹ Hom. in 1 Sam. (= 1 Kingdoms, LXX) 28 4.1–10.1, Greek text with trans. in Greer and Mitchell, The “Belly-Myther” of Endor, 38–58. ⁶² Cf. Horace Kallen, The Book of Job as Greek Tragedy, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959); Richard Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). Criticizing this approach is Stephen Vicchio, The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, vol. 1: Job in the Ancient World (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 22–3. ⁶³ Whedbee, The Bible and the Comic Vision, 221–62. ⁶⁴ Especially good examples of the moralizing approach to Job are Tertullian, De patientia 14 (SC 310:106–8); Ambrose, De interpellatione Job et David (CSEL 32/2:211–96); Ambrose, De officiis 1.40.195 (Davidson, 230); Prudentius, Psychomachia, ll. 163–71 (LCL 387:290); Gregory the Great, Moralia, passim. On the growing phenomenon of the “patient” Job in rabbinic and Christian interpretation, see Samuel Balentine, Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), esp. 15–49. ⁶⁵ Pelagius, Epistola ad Demetriadem 6.3 (PL 30:22A).

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All the while the book’s complex and daring theodicy, with its provocative questioning of the Deuteronomic principle of God’s equitable retribution for the just and the wicked (cf. Deut. 11:26–32; 27:9–28:68), along with the troubling defiance and impatience of Job himself, proved quite the challenge for patristic interpreters bent on vindicating the pure justice, mercy, and providence of the Creator. Since Job’s peripety is the most spectacular in the entire Bible, the tale was a natural candidate for tragical exposition. Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–ca. 428), however, allegedly overstated the book’s similarity to Greek tragedy, thereby incurring posthumous censure from the Council of Constantinople of 553 for this opinion in addition to his supposed christological errors. In the fragments (translated into Latin) of his Commentary on Job adduced by the Council, Theodore questions the very credibility of the book as sacred Scripture given all the “badmouthing” (maledicta) proceeding from the lips of pious Job and the unseemly tirades of Job’s “friends” and Elihu. The bishop also notes how Job, after his restoration, had named his third daughter “Horn of Amaltheia” (Ἀμαλθείας κέρας, Job 42:14, LXX), a glaring proof that unlike Job himself, who was an Edomite, the book’s author was thoroughly familiar with pagan mythology (Amaltheia having been a shegoat who nurtured the infant Zeus!) and, out of ambition, he had used this knowledge to pervert the true story of the historical Job.⁶⁶ The author of Job, Theodore deduces, was thus a pretentious and disgraceful tragedian: For those among the pagans who compose tragedies use as their pretext stories that many have narrated, even when lots of people still consider these stories in some manner to be true. Using the mere pretext, however, these authors hasten to show off their artistry and wisdom in the fabrication of fables, introducing characters that are pleasing to them and dressing up those characters with speeches by which [the authors] believe they can become more famous and honored. As a result, their readers will attribute the reproach or praise incurred by their compositions—whether the author has erred in the meaning of the speeches or in the words themselves—not to the characters whose words he invents but to the author himself of the fables.⁶⁷

By contrast, Theodore’s Western contemporary Jerome had no doubts whatsoever about the status of Job as canonical Scripture. Instead, in his Preface to Job, Jerome introduces his revised Latin translation of the book by lamenting the conflicted state of this “slippery” (lubricus) text in the Hebrew itself as well

⁶⁶ Theodore of Mopsuestia, Comm. in Jobum, fragments in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, 4/1: Concilium universale Constantinopolitanum sub Iustiniano habitum (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), 66–8. On the curious “Horn of Amaltheia” and its possible derivation in the LXX, see Gerard Mussies, “Amaltheia,” in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. Van der Hoorst, eds., Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 26–7. ⁶⁷ Comm. in Jobum (frag. 5) (Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, 4/1:67–8).

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as in its Greek and Latin recensions. He also notes that the Greek text of Job 3:3–42:6 took the poetic form of either dactylic or spondaic hexameter, the meter of Greek epic. But Jerome was less interested in casting judgment on the Septuagint version of Job and its apparent penchant for pagan poetic style than in defending his own translation against criticism, asserting simply that he tried to render coherent a very perplexing work.⁶⁸ But by recognizing that the whole middle section of the book was a poetic hero saga, with the ending (42:7–17) being a prose appendix recounting Job’s material restoration, Jerome inadvertently boosted the prospects of reading the heart of the story as a tragedy of sorts. Though in his own early exposition he too highlighted the ascetical endurance of Job in the face of Satanic temptation and horrific suffering, his later homilies, in the wake of the Pelagian controversy, have Job “a flawed and sinful Everyman, a sufferer from original sin.”⁶⁹ Especially intriguing for our purposes is John Chrysostom’s treatment of Job, for while he went far to champion the moralizing approach, he still found the story’s distinctly tragic features edifying for Christian audiences and exploited them accordingly. Chrysostom unabashedly calls Job’s saga of suffering a τραγῳδία.⁷⁰ He does so at one point in commenting on the messenger reports informing Job of his peripety (Job 1:14–19), the death and destruction that have come upon his house.⁷¹ Messengers and their reports of events offstage had played a significant role in Sophocles’s classic Oedipus Tyrannus and in other Greek tragedies. Indeed, when a shepherd brings bad tidings to Oedipus, the Chorus interjects in a manner not unlike Job’s comforters’ universalizing commentary on his misery: Ah, generations of men, how close to nothingness I estimate your life to be! What man, what man wins more of happiness than enough to seem, and after seeming to decline? With your fate as my example, your fate, unhappy Oedipus, I say that nothing pertaining to mankind is enviable.⁷²

Chrysostom doubtless noticed the parallels. But what John found in Job was, in effect, a tragedy within a tragedy. In the larger picture of things, Job in his misfortune was a truly cosmic spectacle (θέατρον; θέαμα), being turned over to the Devil for an epic testing, and set out as a humiliated object for all to see, a situation he voluntarily embraced to prove his righteousness, not as a ⁶⁸ Praefatio in librum Job (PL 28:1079A–1084A). ⁶⁹ Vicchio, The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, vol. 2: Job in the Medieval World, 10–17, quoted at 17. ⁷⁰ Expositio in Job 1.17 (SC 346:128); 1.19 (p. 132); 1.26 (p. 152); 2.10 (p. 180); 2.12 (p. 186); Hom. adversus eos qui non adfuerunt; ac demonstratio de agonibus et certaminibus beati et justi Jobi 2 (PG 63:479); Expositio in Psalmos 122.1 (PG 55:353). Chrysostom calls Job’s loss of children a τραγῳδία in Ep. ad Olympiadem 17.2b–c (SC 13, 2nd ed., 372–4); Hom. in 1 Cor. 28.3 (PG 61:236). ⁷¹ Expos. in Job 1.17–20 (SC 346:128–36). ⁷² Oedipus Tyrannus, ll. 1189–96 (LCL 20:452, 453).

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superhuman feat but that by displaying himself so publicly he might encourage others with his fierce ascetical discipline.⁷³ Up close, however, Job shared the stage with his wife, three friends, and Elihu. Though they were spectators to his wretchedness—like an onstage audience to his dramatic peripeteia and anagnôrisis—they were also fellow actors enacting a gross miscarriage of tragical pity, and worse yet a total failure of authentic (Christian) mercy, compassion, and friendship.⁷⁴ Indeed, through expanded paraphrase of the dialogue between Job and his wife and between Job and his three comforters, Chrysostom plays up the psychological torture inflicted on Job that was worse than his physical misery. John allows that Job’s wife was, in some sense, a tragic heroine, to the extent that she bitterly shared in Job’s disaster, describing with great pathos the loss of her children (birth pangs of my womb, Job 2:9, LXX), and calling on her husband to put aside his own stoic endurance in order to show her mercy.⁷⁵ Her advice to him was ultimately “malicious and wily,” like Eve’s to Adam, but she could not be faulted for lacking compassion on Job, or, like the three friends, offering counsel at a distance rather than intimately.⁷⁶ The three comforters’ response, on the other hand, was a toxic cocktail: latent envy of Job and ambitious jealousy of his virtue;⁷⁷ jaded theological platitudes to rationalize Job’s suffering;⁷⁸ insinuations of Job’s secret sins or failures that had merited punishment;⁷⁹ disingenuous flattery of Job to remind him that the truly righteous only need wait for divine justice;⁸⁰ and refusal to countenance Job’s pious lamentations.⁸¹ Chrysostom looks to explain away Job’s more desperate, fatalistic, and defiant outbursts, suggesting that his complaints were really the function of his profound grief or better still the sign of a deeper trust in God;⁸² moreover, he balances Job’s admission of his sin with the fact ⁷³ Expos. in Job 2.6–8 (SC 346:166–72); 6.7 (pp. 266–8). ⁷⁴ See ibid. esp. 1.17–26 (SC 346:128–54); 2.8–18 (pp. 170–96); 4.1 (p. 218); 13.1–5 (pp. 344–6); 15.1 (SC 348:10); 17.1–3 (pp. 28–30); 18:1–7 (pp. 32–6); 19.1–11 (pp. 38–42); also Hom. de statuis 1.10 (PG 49.29–30); Hom. in 1 Cor. 28.3–5 (PG 61:236–8); Hom. de Laz. 1.10 (PG 48:977). On the three friends’ failure of (tragic) pity, see also Ambrose, De officiis 3.22.131 (Davidson, 1:432); Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 5.11.23 (CCSL 143A:233–4). ⁷⁵ Expos. in Job 2.10 (SC 346:178–82). ⁷⁶ Ibid. 2.9–14 (SC 346:174–90). ⁷⁷ Ibid. 4.1 (SC 346:218); 18.1 (SC 348:32). ⁷⁸ Ibid. 5.1–21 (SC 346:242–56), where Eliphaz pontificates on the principle of just retribution and the general wretchedness of humankind; 8.1–8 (pp. 290–8), where Bildad upholds the flawlessness of divine judgment; 11.7 (p. 330), where Zophar addresses the chasm between the transcendent, omniscient God and lowly humanity; 20.3–7 (SC 348:52–8), where Zophar deliberates on humanity’s “extraordinary fall” (πτῶμα ἐξαίσιον) and the inevitability of punishment for the wicked; similarly Bildad in 25.1–3 (pp. 86–8). At 32.2–37.4 (pp. 150–90), Chrysostom grants that Elihu has better pastoral intentions than Job’s three friends, and that there is much truth in his theodicy despite some of his arguments echoing the friends’. ⁷⁹ Ibid. 4.2–10 (SC 346:220–8). ⁸⁰ Ibid. 5.17–18 (SC 346:252–4); 11.8–9 (pp. 330–2). ⁸¹ Ibid. 11.1–4 (SC 346:326–8); 15.1–6 (SC 348:10–20); 18.1–7 (pp. 32–6); 22.1–6 (pp. 68–72). ⁸² Ibid. 3.1–7 (SC 346:198–216); 7.1–18 (pp. 276–88); 10.1–12 (pp. 318–24); 13.1–14 (pp. 344–54); 19.1–14 (SC 348:38–50); 21.1–9 (pp. 60–6); 23.1–24.3 (pp. 74–84); 29.1–30.8

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that his punishment far exceeded that sin, giving room for righteous indignation.⁸³ Chrysostom sees in the repartee a serious debate as to whether humanity’s tragic condition is, at bottom, an innate sinfulness or rather the intrinsic weakness of a creaturely nature;⁸⁴ and so too whether human salvation is based on righteousness or rather on being God’s very handiwork.⁸⁵ All the while, for Chrysostom, Job’s pre-Christian heroics—performed “before the age of grace and of the law, when moral discipline was less exacting, when the grace of the Spirit was not as strong, when sin was really hard to struggle against, when the curse held dominion and death was dreaded”—provided a monumental example of courage and faithfulness amid excruciating hardship.⁸⁶ Other patristic interpreters, whether independently or inspired by Chrysostom, reached similar conclusions, though not without some exegetical strain in trying to render Job an undaunted moral paragon. As Richard Layton observes in the Commentary on Job of the fourth-century Alexandrian sage Didymus the Blind, Job was an “anomalous hero,” a descendant of Esau not easily positioned in salvation history and difficult to hold up as an ascetical model given his affluent background.⁸⁷ But much like Chrysostom after him, Didymus heightened the tragic intensity of the story precisely to aggrandize Job’s heroism and virtue for disciples of the ascetical life. Given that the Devil himself (i.e. demonic temptation) disappears from the story after the prologue, Job’s wife stood in to do the Devil’s bidding, taking center stage as tempter and working to push Job to the very brink of despairing contempt (ὀλιγωρία) over his situation—a test he was able to withstand.⁸⁸ More striking, however, is Didymus’s use of allegorical interpretation to explain Job’s audacious cursing of his own birth and of the miseries of carnal life (Job 3:1–26).⁸⁹ Recurring to his own Origenist cosmology, and presuming that Job was perfectly virtuous from the beginning of his existence, Didymus claims that Job in effect mouthed this curse in the persona of his preexistent rational soul lamenting the wretched material-corporeal state of fallen humanity into which he was destined to enter at birth.⁹⁰ Here, in effect, Didymus makes Job into a “transcendent” commentator on the tragic ontological condition of the (pp. 104–26). At times, as at 28.1–3 (SC 348:100–2), Job articulates a profound understanding of divine wisdom, defying that of the friends. ⁸³ Ibid. 9.17–18 (SC 346:312–14); 10.6–12 (pp. 320–4); 11.3–4 (pp. 326–8); 13.11–12 (pp. 350–2); 19.3 (SC 347:38–40); 21.2 (p. 60); 27.1–8 (pp. 94–8); 31.1–17 (pp. 128–48). ⁸⁴ Cf. ibid. 10.6–8 (SC 346:320–2); 14.1–3 (pp. 356–8); 37.1 (SC 348:186–8). ⁸⁵ Ibid. 14.5–6 (SC 346:360). ⁸⁶ John Chrysostom, Hom. adversus eos qui dicunt daemones gubernare res humanas 3.5–7 (PG 49:270–6; quoted at 275–6); also his Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso 3 (SC 103:70–2). ⁸⁷ Didymus the Blind and His Circle in Late-Antique Alexandria (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 56–7. ⁸⁸ Comm. in Job (Tura Papyrus) 45, l. 21–51, l. 23 (PTA 1:144–60). ⁸⁹ Ibid. 54, l. 18–56, l. 20 (PTA 1:168–72). ⁹⁰ Ibid., 56, l. 20–91, l. 7 (PTA 1:172–258).

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human race. Layton fittingly calls it an “Olympian viewpoint” since this Job is speaking on behalf of all humanity in history.⁹¹ Job’s primordial virtuousness is revealed in time and space commensurate with his heroic transcending of the sufferings and temptations of life in the flesh. Because he is a “gnostic,” a consummately mature and proto-Christian wise man, Job is furthermore able to bear with his three comforters’ premature logic concerning the ways of God. He even benevolently turns the table and schools them in a more salutary vision of divine providence, using his most offensive outbursts precisely to bait them and thereby prompt from them a greater sense of God’s mercy.⁹² Less adventurous interpreters nonetheless remained, with Chrysostom, leery of allowing the heroic Job to languish in the quagmire of pure tragedy, and therefore looked through (or beyond) his brink-of-despair laments and his indignant protests to his victorious endurance and his paradoxically expressed piety. In the Greek tradition, the presbyter Hesychius of Jerusalem in his Homilies on Job (fifth century), and the deacon Olympiodorus of Alexandria in his long Commentary on Job (sixth century),⁹³ carried forward this line of thought, though not without insights of their own. Hesychius, for example, sees Job’s bitter outburst about humanity being mortal, born of a woman, destined to live but a few days, and full of wrath (πλήρης ὀργῆς) (Job 14:1, LXX) as directly recalling the tragedy in Eden, where fallen humanity was commanded to return to the earth (Gen. 3:19).⁹⁴ In the Latin tradition, Julian of Eclanum’s Commentary on Job⁹⁵ and Pope Gregory the Great’s Moralia on Job perpetuated the “patient Job” as an object of Western devotion. With these treatments of Job, I would argue, we see the real limits of tragical mimesis as a mode of patristic biblical interpretation. In general, the Fathers were willing to descend compassionately and even empathetically into the arena where Job struggled to endure and fathom his lot. They did not tag him with a tragic hamartia, and consistently they distanced themselves from Job’s friends’ pompous theological harangues. But unlike their modern biblicalcritical counterparts, patristic interpreters were more reticent openly to acknowledge that beneath the outcries of this tragic hero was a hardnosed questioning of divine justice and mercy, an articulated fear of divine capriciousness, a critique of overly simplistic theodicies, or a bid to put God, not Job, to the test.⁹⁶ If God was being “tested” at all, it could only be proleptically, in the way that Job’s suffering and experience of abandonment prophetically simulated the redemptive testing and anguish of God incarnate, Jesus Christ, as Ephrem the Syrian adduced.⁹⁷ ⁹¹ Didymus the Blind, 73. ⁹² Ibid. 74–9. ⁹³ Comm. in Job (PTS 24). ⁹⁴ Hom. in Job 16.14.1–2 (PO 42/2:420–2). ⁹⁵ Expositio libri Job (CCSL 88). ⁹⁶ No Latin patristic author considered Job a work of theodicy, according to Kenneth Steinhauser, “Job in Patristic Commentaries and Theological Works,” in Franklin Harkins and Aaron Canty, eds., A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 34. ⁹⁷ Ephrem, Carmina de nativitate 18.35 (CSCO 186:98).

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THE TRAGIC IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

King Herod and the Holy Innocents Early Christians were pained and haunted by what seemed to them the senseless murder of infant boys at the hands of Herod the Great in the events surrounding Jesus’s nativity (Matt. 2:16–18). Eusebius calls it the story that “casts every other tragic drama into the shade.”⁹⁸ In a sermon honoring the so-called Holy Innocents, who had already become venerated martyrs in the churches East and West, the fifth-century bishop Basil of Seleucia (Asia Minor) graphically describes the horrific spectacle for his congregation: For me, the infants’ cries still echo all around, and I have imagined watching them, these babes wailing indiscriminately with terror as they saw the gleaming of the swords and turned in panic to their mothers’ arms for safety, then sank into their bosoms. I consider too the mothers themselves looking on, one here and another there passing through the city with their piteous and precious cargo, seeking a place of refuge, and not even receiving a decent veil over their eyes when the danger reached its peak. I think of one mother trying to escape and casting herself into totally unfamiliar courses of action. Still another mother I see vainly flinging her hair over her child, hoping by such modest shelter to steal him away from the danger. Yet another mother I imagine being violently cornered by her pursuers, then withdrawing, and being stricken with fear and crying her eyes out, and gazing at the flashing sword, dividing her attention between the sword’s forward motion and her baby boy about to be hacked, and instinctively insinuating herself between the weapon and the child she holds. In addition, I see another mother able neither to move nor to exhale even a little, frozen in her tracks by terror, having already consumed herself with a parent’s proper fear, and awaiting, with faint wailing, the smiting sword . . . ⁹⁹

In the West, Prudentius portrays the tragic spectacle even more gruesomely: Scarce can the slayer find room on the little frames for the gaping wound to fall upon; the dagger is bigger than the throat. O barbarous sight! A head dashed against the stones scatters the milk-white brains and spews out the eyes through the wound; or a babe is flung all throbbing into the depths of the flood, and beneath in his narrow throat water and breath make choking spasms. Hail, martyr-flowers, whom on the very threshold of life the persecutor of Christ destroyed, as the stormy wind kills roses at their birth. You are Christ’s first

⁹⁸ Historia ecclesiastica 1.8.4 (GCS NF 6/1:64). Robert Grant suggests that Eusebius, following Josephus, may have viewed Herod the Great and his family virtually as enacting tragic drama; see his Eusebius as Church Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 147. ⁹⁹ Or. 37.2 (de infantibus in Bethleem ab Herode sublatis) (PG 85:389C–392A). Cf. Gregory of Nyssa’s dramatized depiction of the scene in Hom. in diem natalem (GNO 10/2:262–3).

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offerings, a tender flock slain in sacrifice, and before the very altar you play in innocence with palm and crowns.¹⁰⁰

Other late antique episcopal sermons on the Holy Innocents elicit a similar pathos, ventilating a collective Christian sorrow for the nameless baby boys who, unlike the infant Jesus, did not survive Herod’s wrath.¹⁰¹ Indeed, Jesus’s own survival and escape to Egypt posed a potential problem of divine justice that demanded addressing.¹⁰² The origins of the martyr cult of the Holy Innocents are sketchy, but one theory is that it was generated in part by the need to counter Jewish criticism of Jesus’s survival at the expense of all these male infants. The apocryphal Acts of Pilate (Gospel of Nicodemus), based on material perhaps from as early as the second century, refers in its account of Jesus’s trial to Jewish elders coming forward to accuse him of being responsible for these infants’ deaths.¹⁰³ Much later on John Chrysostom cites certain unidentified critics, perhaps from within the Church, who also openly expressed perplexity at the unjust deaths of the Holy Innocents. Even if direct blame could be placed on the sinister Herod, the question lingered as to why God allowed these shocking murders to happen in the first place. Granted, moreover, that God uses suffering to expel sin and to prepare the faithful for greater rewards, what possible sin could these baby boys have committed at this tender age to merit such a radical purgation?¹⁰⁴ While looking to resolve the problem theologically, it is nonetheless striking that Chrysostom refuses to downplay the heavy tragical pathos of this event. He openly calls the episode a tragedy, the cruelty of which God himself abided according to his inscrutable purposes.¹⁰⁵ John recognizes that in Matthew’s Gospel, the murder had “fulfilled” Jeremiah’s figural prophecy of the ancient matriarch Rachel weeping over dead children in Babylonian-occupied Ramah (Jer. 31:15; Matt. 2:18; cf. Gen. 30:1). The scriptural text expressly states that Rachel was inconsolable, weeping for the infant boys because they are no more.¹⁰⁶ Chrysostom suggests that, even though believers here and now are ¹⁰⁰ Liber cathemerinon 12, ll. 97–132, trans. H. J. Thomson (LCL 387:108–10). ¹⁰¹ Cf. Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 152–3 (CCSL 24B:949–57); Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 222.1–2 (CCSL 104:877–8). ¹⁰² See Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 151 (CCSL 24B:941–6). ¹⁰³ Acta Pilati 2.3, ed. Bart Ehrman and Zlatco Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 430. ¹⁰⁴ Hom. in Matt. 9.2 (PG 57:178). ¹⁰⁵ Ep. ad Olympiadem 7.3c (SC 13, 2nd ed., 144); Hom. in Matt. 9.3 (PG 57:178). ¹⁰⁶ Hom. in Matt. 9.3 (PG 57:179). With Jeremiah’s prophecy (Jer. 31:15) we see an excellent example of Christian “figural” interpretation discussed earlier (see above, pp. 38–43). Chrysostom understood that Jeremiah already took Rachel’s anguish over her unborn children (Gen. 30:1) as capable of being figurally applied to lamentation of the deceased children during the Babylonian conquest of Judah. Rachel’s grief over her children who were never even born in the first place could extend to the children in Ramah whose lives were prematurely snuffed out by

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licensed to share Rachel’s tears, to feel her desperation over a seemingly unfathomable loss, they cannot remain in an inconsolable state given Christian confidence in God’s providence and goodness.¹⁰⁷ Chrysostom’s theological response to the tragedy of the Holy Innocents, which is paralleled and supplemented by other Christian homilists of late antiquity,¹⁰⁸ and which goes far to explain why this martyr cult evolved, is to insist that, whatever horrible suffering the Holy Innocents endured, their reward in heaven was far greater by comparison. God, in the mysteriousness of his will, always has a greater and more just plan than we are able to see.¹⁰⁹ Even without willing it, the fifth-century Italian bishop Peter Chrysologus argues, these infants advanced the cause of Jesus Christ, so that their “martyrdom” was a pure gift of divine grace. In their utter passivity to Herod’s killers, moreover, these babies paradoxically were “active” witnesses for Christ: The whole cohort that arose alongside its King was eager to die before its King rather than to die with him. The soldiers dedicated to Christ began to fight before they began to live, to do battle before playing, to shed their blood before drinking up all the milk from their mothers’ breasts. The ardent souls did not put up with any delays imposed on them by their bodies: rushing off from the lap into the raging troops of the enemy they receive courage before caresses, wounds before kisses, and sword before ointment, so that they can inhabit heaven before earth . . . They confess while being silent, they fight although they do not know how, they conquer although unaware of the fact . . . ¹¹⁰

In the eschatological perspective, Christ is thus absolved of any blame for the infants’ massacre, and quite the contrary, his birth is the very basis of their redemption and now their veneration. As Caesarius of Arles puts it, “the one who was the cause of their being hated was also the reason for their crown.”¹¹¹ The tragedy as such of the Holy Innocents was especially evident to patristic interpreters in the way their extermination powerfully dramatized the rocky transition from one divine economy to a new one. Ironically the Innocents were Christian martyrs before Christ himself was a “martyr” (Rev. 1:5; 3:14). They were “sacrificed before the New Victim,” says Gregory Nazianzen.¹¹² the Babylonians. Chrysostom saw that Matthew 2:18 extended Rachel’s archetypal grief to the infant boys in Bethlehem who are no more (almost as if they never existed in the first place). Figural interpretation, we must remember, allowed for multiple “prophetic” fulfillments of the same event in the minds of early Christian exegetes. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid. 9.3 (PG 57:179). ¹⁰⁸ See Francesco Scorza Barcellona, “La celebrazione dei Santi Innocenti nell’omiletica greca,” Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata NS 29 (1975): 105–35. ¹⁰⁹ Hom. in Matt. 9.3 (PG 57:179). ¹¹⁰ Peter Chrysologus, Hom. 153.2 (CCSL 24B:956–7), trans. William Palardy, FOTC 110:261–2; cf. Ambrose, De officiis 1.41.204 (Davidson, 236). For further background see Paul Hayward, “Suffering and Innocence in Latin Feasts for the Holy Innocents, c. 400–800,” in Diana Wood, ed., The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 67–80. ¹¹¹ Hom. 222.2 (CCSL 104:878). ¹¹² Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 38.18 (SC 358:144–6).

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Their suffering was still grounded in the older dispensation, and for Christians to identify with their tragedy was to show compassion for the masses of righteous persons unjustly slaughtered in the Hebrew and Jewish past before Christ’s redemptive advent. Those persons’ horrific experience nevertheless also represented the birth pangs of a new dispensation. Gregory of Nyssa stresses this fact: It was necessary that bloodthirstiness against the holy ones spring up like a kind of wicked and thorny shoot from the devil’s evil root. It was necessary that the Jews’ fury against God’s saints become manifest when they killed the prophets and stoned those sent by God and finally brought pollution in the case of Zachariah between the sanctuary and the altar (Matt 23:35–7; Luke 11:51). Added to the list of wicked shoots is Herod’s infanticide. And so, when the whole power of wickedness had shot up from its evil root and expanded in various forms, it grew to a thick forest with the choices of those in each generation who were famous for wickedness. Then, as Paul says to the Athenians, Although God looks past the times of ignorance (Acts 17:30), the last days came, when there was no one who understood and sought God, when all had turned aside and were made worthless (Ps 13 [14]:2–3; Rom 3:11–12) when all things were imprisoned in sin (Gal. 3:22), when lawlessness had expanded, when the gloom of wickedness had grown to his greatest extent—then grace appeared (Titus 2:11), then the true light’s ray rose again, then the sun of justice (Mal. 4:2) appeared to those seated in the darkness and shadow of death (Luke 1:79; cf. Ps. 106 [107]:10; Isa. 9:1), then he crushed the dragon’s many heads (Ps. 73[74]:13,14; Rev. 12:3), placing his foot upon them through his human flesh, pressing them to the ground, and trampling them.¹¹³

Nyssen is reasserting here his conviction that evil, an ontological aberration but a moral and existential reality, ultimately reaches a peak (ἀκρότατον) and exhausts itself, since it is bounded by—and can only give way to—the divine Good that is unconstrained and infinite.¹¹⁴ In the theatre of salvation history, the massacre of the Holy Innocents by Herod manifested evil’s zenith but so too evil’s eschatological surrender to the benevolent “necessity” of a superior divine graciousness inaugurated by Christ. It was clear to patristic commentators, meanwhile, that the faithful must worshipfully grapple with the despairing depths of the pre-Christian tragedy in order to fathom the richness of the new salvific economy that was still breaking forth in the wake of Christ’s birth. Romanos the Melodist (sixth

¹¹³ Hom. in diem natalem Christi (GNO 10/2:241–2), trans. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, in Mark DelCogliano, ed., The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, vol. 3: Christ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). ¹¹⁴ See Nyssen’s Hom. de tridui inter mortem et resurrectionem domini nostri Iesu Christi spatio (GNO 9:283–4); De hominis opificio 21 (PG 44:201B–C); also Jean Daniélou, L’être et le temps chez Grégoire de Nysse (Leiden: Brill, 1970), ch. 9 (“Comble”), 186–204.

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century), prolific Syro-Byzantine hymn-writer and a master of intensifying and embellishing the dramatic features of biblical stories, portrays the Bethlehem murders as a tragedy of cosmic proportions in his Kontakion on the Massacre of the Innocents. In eighteen strophes, far more than the few verses in Matthew 2, Romanos amplifies every element of the narrative and adds new details.¹¹⁵ Here Herod is the archetypal criminal, consumed with fear, envy, jealousy, cruelty, and wrath.¹¹⁶ His soldiers beg him to spare them the humiliation of warring on infants, but to no avail.¹¹⁷ All creation thus rises up in indignation, “for the hills and ravines and hollows of the mountains cried back, as if imitating the wailing and beating each other in sympathetic lament.”¹¹⁸ The killing of the baby boys is an all-out bloodbath, an unspeakable holocaust. As in Basil of Seleucia quoted above, the mothers too experience monumental panic and desperation.¹¹⁹ As in Gregory of Nyssa also cited above, the atrocity adds itself to a whole heritage of horrors from the HebrewJewish past.¹²⁰ And in the midst of it all, Jesus Christ, even as an infant, is still, by virtue of his dignity as cosmic ruler and Creator, in full command of the situation, strategically fleeing to Egypt according to a plan that will ultimately undo the earthly power of the vile King Herod.¹²¹ Romanos’s kontakion, along with the extant homilies for the feast of the Holy Innocents, indicate how this celebration was anything but joyous. Christians were to enter this feast identifying in a tragedy still very much in its denouement. Penitent Christians, as Romanos would have it, effectively assume the role of defenseless infants seeking deliverance from the one (the Devil) who, long after Herod, still holds the power to destroy humankind. Although there is admittedly much anti-Jewish polemic in early Christian interpretation of this event, since Herod is routinely identified with Hebrew or Jewish murderers of an earlier era, the principal message is that beneficiaries of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ must still recognize and imaginatively appropriate the anguish of their forebears in sacred history. They must read the Old Testament as a tragedy that has only lately come to a head and only gradually begun to find its final resolution in Jesus Christ.

¹¹⁵ Romanos’s kontakion deploys rhetorical ekphrasis, a highly inventive and elaborative re-telling of a story that seeks to capture its audience in the action. See J. H. Barkhuizen, “Romanos Melodos, ‘On the Massacre of the Innocents’: A Perspective on Ekphrasis as a Method of Patristic Exegesis,” Acta Classica 50 (2007): 29–50; also Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 29–65. ¹¹⁶ Kontakion 15, Prooimion and strophes 1–10, 13, 15 222 (SC 110:204–16, 218–19). ¹¹⁷ Ibid. strophe 5 (SC 110:210). ¹¹⁸ Ibid. strophe 10 (SC 110:216). ¹¹⁹ Ibid. strophes 11, 14 (SC 110:216–18, 220). ¹²⁰ Ibid. strophe 12 (SC 110:218). ¹²¹ Ibid. strophes 15–17 (SC 110:222–4).

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The Demise of John the Baptist In early Christian tradition, John the Baptist was, like the Holy Innocents, a virtual Christian martyr, the difference of course being that he consciously willed his service to Christ, in obedience to a divine calling signaled in John’s own miraculous birth (Luke 1:5–25). His austere profile as a prophet and preacher of repentance, as a marginalized figure in his own religious setting, and as a proto-Christian ascetic all the more enhanced his mystique as the “forerunner” of Jesus the supreme Forerunner (πρόδρομος, Heb. 6:20).¹²² John’s ministry, however, bore its own subtly tragic quality. He was destined, by vocation as well as by circumstance, to fade from the scene, to decrease (John 3:30), and as patristic commentators certainly knew, there is no mention of him in the New Testament beyond the Gospels, the “baptism of John” (Matt. 21:25; Luke 20:4) having been superseded and voided after Jesus’s advent. To be sure, John the Baptist showed no tragic hamartia, no shrinking from his role, remaining fully obedient to his office of heralding the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29, 36), the one whose sandals he was not worthy to untie or carry (Matt. 3:11; Mark 1:7; Luke 3:16; John 1:27) and who seemed to transcend a baptism of repentance (Matt. 3:14). But despite Jesus himself exalting John as greater than all (Matt. 11:11; Luke 7:28) and as an eschatological prophet (Elijah who is to come, Matt. 11:14), and despite some people thinking that the Baptist himself was Messiah (John 1:19–20), it was possible to perceive in John a latent innocence and vulnerability that caught up with him in the course of his relationship with Jesus. Twice, for example, the Baptist confesses that he did not know the one to whom he had been enjoined to bear witness. The first time was after announcing that a man comes before me, who was begotten before me, because he is the first (πρῶτος), at which point John said I myself did not know him (John 1:30–1, RSV). The second was when John indicated that I myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit” (1:33, RSV). Patristic exegetes scrambled to apologize for or contextualize the Baptist’s “ignorance.” Origen posits that John’s first confession of ignorance stemmed from his preexistent soul not fully knowing the deified humanity of the first and perfect human being, Jesus Christ, and that in Elizabeth’s womb he had begun to learn of the Messiah who would administer a superior baptism.¹²³ Augustine, being particularly vexed by John’s initial ignorance of

¹²² For a superb analysis of the early and growing veneration of John the Baptist, though primarily from an Eastern Christian perspective, see Sergius Bulgakov, The Friend of the Bridegroom: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Forerunner, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003; original Russian edition, 1927). ¹²³ Comm. in Johannem 1.236–9 (GCS 10:42).

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Jesus, asks how he could not have known Jesus’s identity when he had insisted that Jesus should be the one baptizing him (Matt. 3:14). In his long response, Augustine asserts that John must have known that the Father and the Son had “sent” him to testify and baptize, but only after the descent of the Dove in Jesus’s baptism did he come to know that Christ himself holds the sacramental power of baptism.¹²⁴ By sharp contrast, Theodore of Mopsuestia advances a relatively simple, commonsensical explanation. John did not “know” Jesus because, by divine providence, he had lived away from him in the wilderness, lest critics think his favorable testimony to Jesus was skewed by the fact that the two men were blood-relatives (cf. Luke 1:36).¹²⁵ However it be explained, John’s initial ignorance of Jesus was innocent, since he remained faithful in his witness to the Christ. More problematic, and prima facie more pathetic, is the scene at the end of his life, in prison and destined for execution, where John dispatched two of his disciples to ask Jesus, Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another? (Matt. 11:2–3; Luke 7:19, RSV). Luke includes the potentially disturbing detail that John’s disciples had even told him about the miracles Jesus was performing before John sent them back to Jesus. Had his original ignorance of Jesus’s true identity been confirmed? Had the specter of suffering led him to doubt the one to whom he bore witness? John Chrysostom and Augustine put strong rhetorical questions directly to John. “Before [Jesus] performed his signs and wonders, did you not proclaim all these things . . . Were all your declarations a fraud, a mere stage play and fable?”¹²⁶ “How do you prepare the way, and yet stray from it?”¹²⁷ Chrysostom explains, however, that John was in firm command of the situation, and was deliberately sending his overly loyal— indeed jealous—disciples back to Jesus so that Jesus might convince them not to look for “another,” namely the Baptist himself.¹²⁸ In the West, the Gallican bishop Hilary of Poitiers, suggesting that John was speaking in a “prophetic” ignorance in Matthew 11:2–3, embodying the Law in its “imprisoned” state looking for liberation through the Word, Jesus Christ, also refers to the more practical solution that the Baptist was really wanting to send his disciples to Jesus so that they could be convinced by his works that he was the Christ.¹²⁹ Augustine’s solution parallels Jerome’s¹³⁰ and agrees more basically with Hilary: the Baptist’s strange query was for his disciples’ benefit, with hopes

¹²⁴ Tractatus in Johannis evangelium 4.15–16; 5.1–11 (CCSL 36:39–46). ¹²⁵ See the translation of the relevant passage of the Syriac recension of the Commentary by Marco Conti, Theodore of Mopsuestia: Commentary on John, Ancient Christian Texts series (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), 21 (on John 1:31). ¹²⁶ John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 36.1 (PG 57:413). ¹²⁷ Augustine, Serm. 66.3 (CCSL 41Aa:410). ¹²⁸ John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 36.1–2 (PG 57:413–14). Similarly, cf. Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 179.2 (CCSL 24B:1086). ¹²⁹ Comm. in Matt. 11.1–2 (SC 254:252–4). ¹³⁰ Comm. in Matt. 2.11.3 (CCSL 77:77).

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that Jesus would in due course confirm for them the truth of John’s testimony to him.¹³¹ In all these interpretations, John was simply acting to instruct his disciples in the need for full devotion to Jesus. And yet the exoneration of John the Baptist of any wavering about Jesus and the vindication of his absolute integrity only served to make his execution and his abrupt exit from sacred history all the more gut-wrenching. Chrysostom and other preachers play up the bitter irony of this ascetical saint ending his ministry having fallen victim not only to the pagan immorality of the Herodian court but also specifically to the theatricality of a Herodian banquet, which so epitomized that immorality, and which led directly to the Baptist’s severed head becoming a vixen’s dancing trophy (Matt. 14:3–12; Mark 6:17–29). Chrysostom expressly calls the scene a “diabolic drinking party” (συμπόσιον διαβολικόν),¹³² a “satanic spectacle” (θέατρον σατανικόν)¹³³ featuring “illicit dancing” (παράνομος ὄρχησις),¹³⁴ and a “weaving drama” (ὑφάνασα δρᾶμα)¹³⁵ of interconnected tragic characters. John was beheaded because of a sacrilegious pagan oath, Herod Antipas’s promise to reward Herodias’s daughter with whatever she requested after her lusty dance.¹³⁶ Hesychius of Jerusalem similarly plays up the spectacle of the dancer whose seductiveness, along with her mother’s adultery, stand in a tradition of deceitful women in the Bible (though he later emphasizes that other biblical women were agents of salvation).¹³⁷ “For everyone,” proclaims Hesychius, “the queen (Herodias) becomes the butt of gossip because of John’s bold speech [against the court, Matt 14:4; Mark 6:18]. Everyone enacts the tragic drama here, but it is the Baptist, the cause of the tragedy, who jumps ahead of everyone else’s lines. That same man blew his trumpet against us!”¹³⁸ Peter Chrysologus similarly describes the Baptist’s demise as a theatrical fiasco in the Herodian household: A house is transformed into an arena, the table turns into a theater, dinner guests become spectators, a banquet is turned into frenzy, a meal becomes carnage, wine changes to blood, a funeral is held on a birthday [of Herod], to mark one person’s beginning is another person’s ending, a banquet morphs into a murder scene, musical instruments ring out a tragedy for the ages (tragoediam saeculorum).¹³⁹

Elsewhere Peter speaks of the outrageous “comedy” (comoedia) wherein the dancer requested the head of the Baptist, and in doing so also orchestrated a ¹³¹ Hom. 66.4 (CCSL 41Aa:411). ¹³² Hom. in Matt. 48.2 (PG 58:489). ¹³³ Ibid. 48.2, 3 (PG 58:489, 490). ¹³⁴ Ibid. 48.2 (PG 58:489). ¹³⁵ Ibid. 48.3 (PG 58:491); Hom. in 2 Cor. 28.2 (PG 61:593). ¹³⁶ Hom. in Matt. 48.2–3 (PG 58:489–90). ¹³⁷ Hom. 16 (in conceptionem venerabilis praecursoris) 21–4, 29, Greek text ed. Michel Aubineau, Les homélies festales d’Hésychius de Jérusalem (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1980), 2:694–8, 704. ¹³⁸ Ibid. 24 (Aubineau, Les homélies festales, 2:698). ¹³⁹ Serm. 127.9 (CCSL 24B:786), trans. William Palardy, FOTC 110:190 (slightly altered).

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“heinous tragedy” (tragoediam nefandam).¹⁴⁰ As Peter’s contemporary Basil of Seleucia likewise avers, “the Devil conceived this tragedy, Herod cooperated in it, and Herodias danced it out.”¹⁴¹ John himself watched this diabolical drama unfold, the vile kingdom of Herod becoming a “theatre of lawlessness” in the midst of which his voice was again crying in the wilderness (Matt. 3:3 et par.).¹⁴² The tragedy of John the Baptist was not, however, centered wholly on the pathos generated by the grievously ironic circumstances of his death. John was also the victim (like the Holy Innocents) of being caught in the middle, that is, in the crossfire of the stormy transition from old to new dispensations in sacred history. Jesus declared that the violence attending the arrival of his eschatological Kingdom had erupted beginning with John the Baptist (Matt. 11:11–12; Luke 16:16). Hilary of Poitiers educes that John embodied the “glory” of the Law in its giving way to the newer glory of the gospel, violently resisted by the human sensuality and profligacy on display in the Herodian court. When the young dancer handed the platter holding John’s severed head over to her mother, she symbolized the Jews’ surrender of the glory of the Law to infidelity; and with John’s burial, his disciples announced that the day of “the Gospels” had dawned.¹⁴³ Augustine refers to John as the true “boundary” (limes) between Old and New Testaments,¹⁴⁴ and Basil of Seleucia praises him as the “height of the prophets” (ἡ τῶν προφητῶν κορυφή), the “perfection of the Law” (τοῦ νόμου τὸ πέρας), and the “agent of the Old and the New Covenant alike” (ὁ τῆς ἀρχαίας ὁμοῦ καὶ τῆς νέας Διαθήκης μεσίτης).¹⁴⁵ Precisely this liminality—and the need to rescue him from the semblance of expendability—fueled the early Christian cult of John the Baptist, which venerated at once the tragedy of his demise and the triumph of his witness as a Christian protomartyr whose death served Law and Gospel alike.

Tragic Villains: Judas Iscariot, Ananias, and Sapphira The canonical Gospels’ accounts of Judas Iscariot left a bitter taste in the mouths of early Christians, and yet the Evangelists had not delivered a crystalclear portrait. Was Judas, like Jephthah in the Old Testament, a tragic hero of sorts, in this case a disciple who originally meant well, committing in faith to follow Jesus (Mark 3:19 et par.), only to cave in to a hamartia (greed) causing ¹⁴⁰ Serm. 173.7 (CCSL 24B:1057). ¹⁴¹ Hom. 18.1 (in Herodiadem). In some early MSS, Herodias’s daughter who danced is also named Herodias, though in Josephus she is famously identified as Salome (Ant. 18.5.4). ¹⁴² Hom. 18.2 (PG 85:229C–232A). ¹⁴³ Comm. in Matt. 14.7–8 (SC 258:16–20); cf. Ambrose, De virginibus 3.6.26–30 (PL 16:227C–229A). ¹⁴⁴ Serm. 293.2 (PL 38:1328). ¹⁴⁵ Hom. 18.2 (PG 85:229C).

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him to reverse his allegiance? Was he just the extreme representative of a failure of faith in which all the Twelve shared to greater or lesser degrees? Did he rather fall prey to the great Betrayer himself, Satan, who allegedly possessed him (John 13:27; cf. 6:70–1)? If Judas was a villain through and through, from beginning to end, why would Jesus have chosen him at all? Yet, in Jesus’s own words, it would have been better had the one who betrayed him not even been born (Mark 14:21 et par.), in which case Judas might appear damnable from birth. No further clarity is offered by Paul or other New Testament witnesses who never mention Judas Iscariot (save Luke in Acts 1:16–20, 25). The only relative agreement is that Judas had a terrible demise, and even with this there are significant differences of detail concerning his actual death, the destiny of the blood money he received, and the fate of his body in the so-called “Field of Blood” (cf. Matt. 27:3–10; Acts 1:18–20).¹⁴⁶ This ambiguity fueled a number of catholic as well as apocryphal traditions about Judas, from attempts to malign him as a virtual antichrist to a now famous rehabilitation in the Gnostic Gospel of Judas. Fragments of the sub-apostolic Christian writer Papias seem to take their cue from Luke’s depiction of Judas’s body having burst open and spilled his entrails when he died (Acts 1:18). Accordingly, Judas’s faith was a charade from the outset, and so his body, even before his death, had deservedly swollen out of proportion, teeming with “pus and worms,” saddling him with horrible misery.¹⁴⁷ The apocryphal Acts of Peter, on the other hand, appears to seize on John’s depiction of Judas as ruined by the indwelling of Satan (the Devil).¹⁴⁸ By sharp contrast, however, the Gospel of Judas entirely removes from Judas any hint of a tragic demise and instead makes him a virtually transcendent figure, a unique confidant of Jesus who knew Jesus’s true heavenly origin when the other disciples, all of whom were of a fallen and ignorant generation, did not. Most strikingly, Jesus asked Judas to “sacrifice the man who carries me about” (i.e. the phantom body of the spiritual Christ), such that the “betrayal” to the authorities for execution was actually Judas’s faithful assistance in the revelation of Jesus’s true pneumatic identity.¹⁴⁹ Even if Judas is depicted in the Gospel of Judas as one still learning Gnostic perfection, his heroic ¹⁴⁶ For an excellent overview of the interpretive reception of Judas in early Christianity, see Peri Terbuyken and Christian Josef Kremer, “Judas Iskariot,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2001), 19:142–60. ¹⁴⁷ Frag. 14 (from Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 5.33.3–4); frag. 18 (from Apollinaris of Laodicea), in Michael Holmes, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 752, 754–6. ¹⁴⁸ Acta Petri 8, Latin text ed. Marietheres Döhler, Texte und Untersuchungen 171 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), 78. ¹⁴⁹ For translation from the Coptic and good analysis of the especially relevant passages, see Simon Gathercole, The Gospel of Judas: Rewriting Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69–73, 81–3, 85–6, 105–13.

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destiny as one of the immortal generation of “the holy” seems assured.¹⁵⁰ Conversely, in this work’s portrayal of the larger cosmic drama of salvation, it is the other disciples and their excluded, hopeless stock who warrant tragical pity. They are the ones doomed by the Divine from the outset. Patristic interpreters, however, were not at all inclined to appraise Judas so generously. Origen is a slight exception. A fierce opponent of the Gnostic determinism evidenced in works like the Gospel of Judas, he is quick to protect the disciple’s self-determination. Enjoying free will and starting out well, Origen believes, Judas fell prey over time to avarice (cf. John 12:6) and therewith became an instrument of the Devil’s scheming (cf. John 13:27; Luke 22:3);¹⁵¹ but even in the end, he revealed a capacity for repentance, giving his blood money back to the Temple authorities (Matt. 27:3–5).¹⁵² Origen assumes that, even in his foreknowledge of Judas’s sin, Jesus had not only given him the same blessing as the other disciples, he had also held out hope for him, even if to no avail since Judas fully succumbed to the Devil.¹⁵³ Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, in Origen’s view, ultimately served the divine oikonomia—not at all, of course, in the way that we saw in the Gospel of Judas, but as directly willed by Jesus himself.¹⁵⁴ The betrayal worked in concert with the Father’s own “handing over” of his Son for the sake of human salvation (Matt. 26:2; Rom. 8:32).¹⁵⁵ Judas, then, was not driven by any ontological necessity to turn against the Savior, but his actions, however disastrous in the short run, contributed teleologically to the benevolent necessity whereby God, the chief ¹⁵⁰ Ibid., 113. ¹⁵¹ Cf. De princ. 3.2.1; 3.3.4 (GCS 22:246, 260); Comm. in Canticum Canticorum 4 (GCS 33:236); Comm. in Johannem 10.322 (GCS 10:225); 32.23–5 (pp. 428–9); 32.109–10 (p. 441); 32.154–5 (p. 447); 32.165–8 (pp. 448–9); 32.280–312 (pp. 464–8); Comm. in Matthaeum 11.9 (GCS 40:49–50). On Origen’s vigorous defense of Judas’s free will, see Samuel Laeuchli, “Origen’s Interpretation of Judas Iscariot,” Church History 22 (1953): 253–68. Among fellow Greek Christian writers, John Chrysostom shares Origen’s insistence on Judas’s self-determination (Hom. in Matthaeum 81.2, PG 58:732). Among Latin writers, Ambrose is quick to defend Judas’s freedom from compulsion in his betrayal of Jesus (De paradiso 8.39, CSEL 32/1:295). ¹⁵² Cf. Comm. in Matthaeum (Latin series) 117 (GCS 38:243–50); Contra Celsum 2.11 (SC 132:312). ¹⁵³ Comm. in Johannem 32.158–62 (GCS 10:448); 32.241–50 (pp. 458–9); 32.313–17 (pp. 468–9); 32.382 (p. 478). Origen’s emphasis on Jesus’s patient endurance and good counsel (συμβουλή) of Judas is echoed in a fragment on Luke 22:42–8 attributed to Dionysius of Alexandria, Greek text ed. Charles Feltoe, The Letters and Other Remains of Dionysius of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 248–50. Ephrem the Syrian, unlike Origen, asserts that Jesus did not share the full apostolic blessing with Judas, having “washed it away” with the water in which he dipped Judas’s bread at the time of the betrayal (John 13:26) (Sermo in hebdomadam sanctum 4, CCSO 412:27–33). ¹⁵⁴ With the words “What you must do, do quickly” (John 13:27), Origen understands Jesus to be deliberately prompting Judas to expedite the oikonomia through his betrayal: Comm. in Johannem 32.295–9, 318–20 (GCS 10:466–7, 469–70). ¹⁵⁵ Hom. in Lucam frag. 151 [XXVI] on Luke 9:45 (GCS 35:287); Comm. in Matthaeum (Latin series) 72 (GCS 38:175–6). On this convergence of “betrayals,” see also Laeuchli, “Origen’s Interpretation of Judas Iscariot,” 264–6.

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protagonist in the drama of redemption, brought the sacrifice of his Son to a head. With this rendering, Origen seizes complete triumph out of Judas’s tragedy. But as Samuel Laeuchli points out, the great pioneer of Christian universalism never speculates about, let alone explicitly affirms, Judas’s eschatological salvation.¹⁵⁶ The tragedy of a lost and suicidal disciple, prophesied to be replaced by another apostle who would leave Judas’s memory in the dust (cf. Acts 1:16–20; cf. Ps. 108:8, LXX), remained for Origen the dark side of the felicitous outcome of the betrayal. Indeed, the betrayal was a mystery that even Peter and John strained to fathom.¹⁵⁷ John Chrysostom, likely aware of Origen’s perspective, offers some clarification: Judas was in no way absolved by the fact that, within the economy of salvation, Christ was already destined to be betrayed, since he acted out of patently wicked motives. “Judas’s betrayal did not bring about salvation for us; rather, it was Christ’s own wisdom, the ease of his skill (εὐμηχανία) in using the wickedness of others for our profit.”¹⁵⁸ Indeed, Judas’s vain repentance led to a suicide that itself fulfilled prophecy: “See how the prophet spoke of this disaster in tragic terms, when he said: Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be tossed about and leave the land, and let them be cast out of the house where they lived (Ps. 108:9–10, LXX).”¹⁵⁹ Hilary, representing a more typical severity among Latin patristic interpreters about Judas’s fate, concludes that he was so desperately lost that he was neither “visited among the dead” (i.e. by Christ preaching to the “spirits in prison,” 1 Peter 3:19–20) nor given the chance to repent after the resurrection.¹⁶⁰ Indeed, when Jesus breathed his last from the cross, Hilary surmises, he let out an anguished gasp because he did not redemptively bear all human sin—that is, including Judas’s.¹⁶¹ Augustine too does not hold back from painting things in the bleakest of terms. Judas was bitterly flawed from the outset. He was under the power of an avaricious desire (affectus) that came fully to a head when Jesus offered him some bread and sop (John 13:26).¹⁶² Like Origen, Augustine admits that Judas’s betrayal of Jesus ultimately served the Father’s own “betrayal” of the Son, but Judas’s “handing over” (traditio) of Jesus was intrinsically vicious. The Father handed over the Son, and the Son (Christ) handed over himself, out of sheer love for humanity; but Judas did so out of blatant treachery.¹⁶³ Unlike Origen, however, Augustine deduces that Judas was already the “son of perdition” (John 17:12), predestined to his ¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵⁷ ¹⁵⁸ ¹⁵⁹ ¹⁶⁰ ¹⁶² ¹⁶³

Laeuchli, “Origen’s Interpretation of Judas Iscariot,” 260. Comm. in Johannem 32.276 (GCS 10:463). John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matthaeum 81.2 (PG 58:732). Demonstratio adversus Judaeos et gentiles 4 (PG 48:818). Comm. in Matthaeum 32.5 (SC 258:244). ¹⁶¹ Ibid. 33.6 (SC 258:254–6). Tract. in Johannem 50.10 (CCSL 36:437); 62.4 (CCSL 36:484). Tract. in Epistulam Johannis 7.7 (SC 75:324–6); cf. Ep. 93.7 (CSEL 34:451).

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betrayal of Christ according to the prophecy of Psalm 108 (109).¹⁶⁴ Judas’s suicide merely confirmed his impenitence and added all the more to his summative culpability.¹⁶⁵ After Augustine, no significant new perspectives on Judas’s betrayal of Jesus appeared in patristic exegesis.¹⁶⁶ The consensus remained that his was a totally lost cause, whether predetermined or freely willed. His betrayal nonetheless continued to send shockwaves through the media of Christian preaching and liturgy. As the pilgrim Egeria reveals from the rituals of Holy Week in Jerusalem, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus was commemorated on Wednesday in the Anastasis (Church of the Holy Sepulchre), with the bishop reading the narrative and inducing the people to moaning, groaning, and tears.¹⁶⁷ John Chrysostom devotes two whole homilies to Judas’s betrayal of Jesus at supper in order to strike fear in his audiences as they approach the Eucharistic bread and wine.¹⁶⁸ More graphic is Romanos the Melodist’s liturgical Kontakion on Judas, which in his characteristic style magnifies the story’s dramatic effect so as to magnetize the contemporary audience. Unlike Origen, who had determined that Jesus never washed the feet of Judas (John 13:2–11),¹⁶⁹ Romanos assumes, like Chrysostom, that Jesus did exactly that, demonstrating the depth of his incarnational condescension, and in turn rendering Judas’s treachery all the more insidious.¹⁷⁰ Its tragic repercussions are both cosmic and ecclesial. Romanos improvises a “dialogue” with the characters in the story: [Narrator to Christ] When he plotted his trickery, when he planned your murder— the one who had been loved and rejected you, called and abandoned you, crowned and insulted you, then you, compassionate, long suffering, wanting to show the murderer your ineffable love for mankind, filled the basin, bowed your neck, became slave of slaves. And Judas presented you his feet for you to wash them, Redeemer . . . [Narrator] Lifting his feet, the deceiver went brazenly to the devil, and when he reached the murderous gang, betraying Christ like a stranger, he fawned, “What are you willing to give?” he says to those willing to buy the blood of the One who lives and abides.

¹⁶⁴ Tract. in Johannem 107.7 (CCSL 36:615); cf. Enarrationes in Psalmos 108 (CCSL 40:1585–601). ¹⁶⁵ Civ. Dei 1.17 (CCSL 47:18). ¹⁶⁶ Terbuyken, “Judas Iskariot,” 154. ¹⁶⁷ Egeria, Itinerarium 34 (SC 296:276–8). ¹⁶⁸ Hom. in proditionem Judae 1–2 (PG 49:373–92). ¹⁶⁹ Comm. in Johannem 32.19–25 (GCS 10:428–9). ¹⁷⁰ Kontakion 33, strophes 2–3 (SC 128:72); cf. Chrysostom, Hom. in Johannem 70 (PG 59:381, 382).

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[Narrator to Creation] Listen, earth, and shudder. Sea, flea in haste, for a murder is being agreed. The price of the One without price is being discussed, and the slaughter of the Giver of life. [Narrator to Judas] Now your insatiable greed has appeared; now your voracious appetite has been revealed, you ravenous, profligate, implacable, shameless, and gluttonous, conscienceless lover of money! “What are you willing to give?” you say to those willing to buy the blood of the One who lives and abides. What fair thing did you not possess? What did you not share? What were you ever refused? With the things below you possessed those on high, and do you now sell your God?¹⁷¹ Amid the desperateness of the situation, Romanos intermittently inserts the choral refrain of the participants in the liturgy: “Be merciful, merciful, merciful to us, you who are patient with all, and wait for all.” Derek Krueger notes that this kontakion was apparently assigned to Holy Thursday in the Byzantine liturgical cycle, such that “Judas functioned not only as a powerful counterexample but also as a horrifying opportunity for Christian self-recognition on the eve of the crucifixion.”¹⁷² Two other treasonous villains in the New Testament, Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11), did not garner nearly the attention that Judas did. Their story does not recount so much a gradual fall into evil like Judas’s—though they too started out well, in allegiance to the Church. The focus is on a single fateful decision to withhold from the Jerusalem congregation a portion of the earnings on property they sold, which early Christian interpreters easily read as another case of avarice.¹⁷³ And yet their terrible end, dropping instantly dead after being exposed by Peter, was not a retribution for greed so much as for the deeper sin of “lying to” (ψεύσασθαι, 5:3) or “tempting” (πειράσι, 5:9) the Holy Spirit by not honoring the sacred vow to share all things with the community (cf. Acts 2:44–5; 4:32–7).¹⁷⁴

¹⁷¹ Kontakion 33, strophes 2, 14–15 (SC 128:72, 84–6), trans. Ephrem Lash, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), 115–16, 120–1. ¹⁷² Liturgical Subjects, 41. ¹⁷³ John Cassian directly compares the fateful covetousness of Ananias and Sapphira with that of Judas in De institutis coenobiorum 7.14, 25 (CSEL 17:138, 146). ¹⁷⁴ Cf. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 16.17; 17.21 (PG 33:941B–C, 993B–C); Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto 16.37 (PG 32:134B); Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium (GNO 3/1:45); Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto 3.9.54–3.10.58 (CSEL 79:172–4).

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This story too, however, raised for at least one critic the possibility of an ominous injustice. Macarius Magnes, a late fourth-century apologist whose Apocriticus (alternatively titled The Only-Begotten) stages a dialogue with an unnamed pagan philosopher, most likely Porphyry of Tyre, quotes the opponent as accusing Peter of grossly overreacting to Ananias and Sapphira, issuing a death penalty for their innocent retention of some of their earnings.¹⁷⁵ Peter, the philosopher insists, should have heeded Jesus’s own teachings about forgiving another “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:22); and besides, it was altogether hypocritical given that Peter had himself grievously lied, denying he knew Jesus and thereby ignoring God’s coming judgment.¹⁷⁶ Macarius responds that the interests of the new spiritual community of the Jerusalem church, having become like a “heavenly festival, a spectacle of piety,” overrode all others.¹⁷⁷ Leaving the sin of Ananias and Sapphira unchecked would have disastrously undermined the community.¹⁷⁸ “Hence, so that this tragedy would not straightaway befall the faithful, Peter, knowing this, quickly cut out the sickness, cutting out future disease along with it.”¹⁷⁹ Though superficially the sin of Ananias and Sapphira might not appear all that grave, they were looking to possess what was rightfully Christ’s. Having tempted the Spirit, they were slain not by a sword but by the internal power of conscience. Peter was exonerated of their death since he was acting only to warn the larger community.¹⁸⁰ The tragic aura of the three villains we have observed in patristic interpretation—Judas, Ananias, and Sapphira—consists not only in the surfacing of hidden vices which had deadly consequences. The dramatic intensity of their stories was augmented by the fact that their villainy came fully to light within the live space, as it were, of “the Holy.” Judas’s slow exposure arose through extended and conscious intimacy with Jesus, climaxing across a table with a sharing of bread. By contrast, Ananias and Sapphira had entered into, then abruptly violated, an ecclesial trust directly sanctioned by the Holy Spirit. For my purposes, however, it is important to look beyond the moralizing interpretations that held these three up primarily as examples of the horrible consequences of betraying God. Patristic interpreters also carefully held in a dialectical balance the tragic “fatalism” of Judas: that he was predestined to ¹⁷⁵ In his Ep. 130.14 (ad Demetriam) (CSEL 56/1:194), Jerome attributes this same criticism to Porphyry. ¹⁷⁶ Apocriticus 3.21.1–2, Greek text ed. Richard Goulet, Macarios de Magnésie: Le Monogenes, Textes et Traditions 7 (Paris: Vrin, 2003), 2:148. ¹⁷⁷ Ibid. 3.28.4 (Goulet, 2:180), trans. Jeremy Schott and Mark Edwards, TTH 62 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 169. ¹⁷⁸ Ibid. 3.28.5–10 (Goulet, 2:180–2). ¹⁷⁹ Ibid. 3.28.11 (Goulet, 2:182); trans. Schott and Edwards, 170. ¹⁸⁰ Ibid. 3.28.11–14 (Goulet, 2:182). For Peter’s action primarily as a warning to the larger church, see also Ambrose, De officiis 1.30.146 (Davidson, 1:202); Jerome too absolves Peter of “cruelty” here because he was acting in true pietas (Ep. 109.3 [ad Riparium] CSEL 55:354).

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betray Jesus, but also had a free will aided by Christ; that his betrayal was a self-annihilation, but also a part of a larger drama, or oikonomia, of the “handing over” of the Son of God for human salvation. Even the much shorter narrative of Ananias and Sapphira, a seemingly open-and-shut case of disobedience, had elicited from at least one ancient author a question (albeit dismissed) related to theodicy, namely, whether their punishment far outweighed their crime in the context of a divine community intended to model forgiveness and reconciliation.

C ONSPECTUS: TRAGICAL MIMESIS I N BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION At this point I wish to pause and recapitulate briefly my findings in this and the preceding chapter before we move on to other dimensions of tragical vision in early Christian literary culture. Tragical mimesis as a subsidiary mode of figural and “dramatic” biblical interpretation thrived, not on any scrupulously developed technique aimed at matching classical tragedy, but on navigating—for purposes of convicting and edifying Christian audiences—the massive theatre of sacred history within the Bible, with all its constituent plots and sub-plots, scenes, and characters, its suspense and intrigue, and its power to prompt particular kinds of responses and deep emotions. Even if the precise meaning of “the tragic” remained flexible for early Christian interpreters, with no urge to force a comprehensive definition, their attention to some of its classical features is unmistakable as they engaged various narratives. “Reversal of fortune” (περιπέτεια) and painful “discovery” (ἀναγνώρισις) were just too obtrusive to miss in stories like those of Adam and Eve in the garden, Jephthah and the sacrifice of his daughter, Esau with the loss of his birthright, or the material and spiritual devastation of Job. Patristic commentators, we have seen, cultivated unmistakable profiles of the tragic hero with a fateful hamartia (e.g. Samson and King Saul), the tragic villain/ antagonist (e.g. Cain and Judas Iscariot), but also more ambiguous profiles, characters not easily or precisely fitted into heroic or villainous molds (e.g. Adam, Eve, Esau, Jephthah). There are also the silent victims of injustice denied the chance to speak up in defiance: Jephthah’s daughter, Job’s children, the Holy Innocents. There are casualties of the “greater good,” destined to fade from the scene, such as Esau superseded by Jacob, or, in quite different circumstances, John the Baptist eclipsed by Jesus. What is more, we have observed that patristic interpreters, despite their concerns for a doctrinal logic (logos) vindicating the providence and goodness of God and the promise of his ultimate defeat of evil, still allowed an array of

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biblical narratives to put tragic themes in play. The mythos in these stories demanded nothing less, for the stories simply would not abide exegetical naïvety. Certainly one such crucial theme was the (pre-)conditions of creaturely existence. The Adamic fall (Gen. 2–3), of course, captured tremendous attention since it left generous room for speculation on the pre- and postlapsarian status of the human race as already tied up in the experience of the protoplasts. Patristic interpreters explored whether there was a tragic hamartia—either in the form of an ontological imperfection or even of a specific, latent vice (e.g. multiform envy)—endemic in human nature before the fall. They asked whether the Creator had instituted death purely as punitive, to rectify the ensuing transgression, or else intended it also as instrumental to a wider economy of salvation and transformation, as a vehicle of “new” creation. In analyzing spectacular cases like those of Cain, King Saul, and Judas Iscariot, early Christian expositors also inquired whether human selfdetermination was possible, let alone viable. Had not Cain been marked out as a “child of the Devil” (1 John 3:10–12)? Did God not visit Saul early on with an evil spirit, such as could have stunted his choices henceforth (1 Sam. 16:14)? Was not Judas a “son of perdition” (John 17:12) from the outset? Did such figures purely subvert themselves or were they actually undone by factors ultimately outside their control, such as the maneuverings of Satan, or the Creator’s desire to make examples of them (as Augustine surmised of Adam himself)? Christian exegetes answered these questions, often obliquely, not in order to match the wits of their tragedian predecessors but to mature the faith of Christians by granting them the hermeneutical space to entertain what haunted their own moral imaginations and their experience of creaturely freedom, sin, and suffering. In effect, some patristic interpreters could have endorsed George Steiner’s claim, mentioned earlier, that ancient tragedy was at bottom an “enacted testing of theodicy,”¹⁸¹ even though their own subject matter was biblical. No sober exegetical conscience could pass lightly over sagas of abject— unredeemed and disproportionate—human suffering. We have observed these interpreters’ angst about making good theological sense, for example, of the seemingly no-win fate of Jephthah’s daughter. Relatively rare were attempts to tie up every loose end or polish away all the rough edges of these kinds of stories, such as when Jacob of Sarug fully exonerates Jephthah’s “sacrifice” by alleging that he consciously intended to prefigure the sacrifice of Christ. More often Christian interpreters assumed that there were deep reasons why they had to work so hard to disclose the divine justice and redemption operative in scandalous narratives. Even where they shifted their analyses to the level of figural interpretation, the result in some instances was

¹⁸¹ See above, p. 45.

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to intensify rather than allay the tragic aura, such as when Augustine pegs Esau as the prototype of fallen and unbelieving Israel, or Prudentius makes Cain into a mythic divisor Dei. Rendering the Holy Innocents prototypical Christian martyrs, moreover, hardly lessened the sheer horror of their murders. Indeed, we have consistently seen how, especially in poetic and homiletic forms, early Christian interpreters could push the envelope of tragic pathos in bringing the Bible’s most disturbing stories before their audiences. More, not less, emotion was warranted, and authoritative interpretation needed to start the process of appropriately and subtly reframing tragic fear, pity, and other emotional responses on the part of Christian audiences still being trained intelligently to contemplate the drama of a God who effected his righteous will even (or precisely) in the midst of human catastrophe. I will take this up in more detail in Chapter 6, but suffice it to say for now that Christian response to others’ sins and miseries on the grand stage of sacred history had to be something far more than emotional “voyeurism,” identifying with biblical characters at the safe distance provided by time and space. We have seen good examples of patristic interpreters like the anonymous Syriac author (of the poetic dialogue between Cain and Abel), the Gallican bishop Avitus of Vienne, and the Byzantine hymnographer Romanos the Melodist greatly escalating the emotions at play in the Bible’s tragic stories exactly so that they could grip their audiences, insinuate them into the action of the narratives, and induce them to transformative repentance and new insight into their salvation. Tragical mimesis, as a mode of biblical interpretation, constantly put to believers the question of whether they could faithfully endure and perform as dramatis personae in the continuing denouement of sacred history. It now remains to be seen whether, in early Christian literature, other media besides biblical interpretation could similarly authorize a uniquely Christian tragical vision of creaturely life and destiny.

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4 The Tragic Christian Self Three Late-Ancient Profiles

L I V E S AN D S E L V E S Moving away from biblical interpretation in its own right, I turn now to another mode of Christian tragical mimesis, namely, the work of certain authors to imagine the Christian moral self as a “tragic self.” By that I mean a human subject capable of exhibiting varying degrees of self-consciousness of being locked in an antecedent condition of creaturely finitude, vanity, or sinfulness; a self that is, as it were, both actor in and chorus for its own tragedies, able not only to articulate its tragic circumstance and its endurance thereof but also to begin to exemplify the catharsis/transformation of a full spectrum of tragical emotions, from fear to grief to despair to hope. I will argue that the profiles of such a tragic Christian self—crafted literarily, rhetorically, dramatically, and not least theologically by their exponents—were a distinctive means for these authors to achieve a more tempered and rigorously realistic theodicy by negotiating their readers between experience of the bitter vicissitudes of life in this world and the assurance of God’s redemption through (not necessarily immediately from) their struggles therein. Going forward, two areas of recent scholarship on late-ancient Christianity are especially relevant to my discussion. One is the pivotal role of biographical narrative and the composition of new Christian Lives in the emergence of a distinctive Christian literary and rhetorical culture.¹ Hagiography was ¹ Dated but still useful is Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols., trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950). More recently, see esp. Patricia Cox Miller, Biography in Late Antiquity: The Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 89–119; Williams, Authorised Lives in Early Christian Biography; Marie-Françoise Baslez, Philippe Hoffmann, and Laurent Pernot, eds., L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hésiode à Saint Augustin: actes du deuxième colloque de l’Équipe de recherche sur l’hellénisme post-classique (Paris, École Normale Supérieure, 14–16 de juin 1990) (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1993); Stefan Maul and Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers, eds., La biographie antique: huit exposés suivis de discussions

Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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destined to become the predominant form of this literature. But biography was flexible, and there were associated literary genres as well,² such as acta, passiones, letters, panegyrics, funeral orations, and, as we shall see in more detail further on, autobiographical writings like many of Gregory Nazianzen’s poems and, most famously no doubt, the Confessions of Augustine. Broadly speaking, these sorts of literature looked not just to narrate or illuminate the lives of specific figures but also to hold up distinctive models of Christian asceticism and heroism, often drawing on the dramatis personae of sacred history as prototypical exemplars of the disciplined religious life. Such literature still drew heavily on the figural interpretation of the Bible so as to bridge the sacred past with the present and to extract from biblical history strong character-types and genealogies of the virtuous self.³ This is the kind of literature in which I have presumed to find some lucid profiles of the tragic Christian self. An even more significant object of intensifying study, for my purposes, has been the “self” and human personality in Greco-Roman and early Christian thought. One whole segment of this work has been the debate over the “culturally-constructed” self, including responses to Michel Foucault’s campaign to liberate the self from its historic objectifications so as to interpret it more as a self-constituting subject exercising its own “technologies.”⁴ More germane to my own investigations, however, is the accruing scholarship on the self as a reflective moral agent in ancient philosophy and poetry, including tragedy. What counted in the philosophical context more than anything, as Pierre Hadot emphasizes, referencing Plotinus in particular, was not that there is a rationally ensouled self, but how that self lives, and how, through asceticism (and contemplation), it becomes aware of, and pursues, the richness of

(Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1998); Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau, eds., Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Brian McGing and Judith Mossman, eds., The Limits of Ancient Biography (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2006); Martin Hinterberger, “Byzantine Hagiography and Its Literary Genres: Some Critical Observations,” in Stephanos Efthymiadis, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 2: Genres and Contexts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 25–60; Antonio Rigo, Eleftherios Despotakis, and Michele Trizio, eds., Byzantine Hagiography: Texts, Themes & Projects (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). ² See Sarah Insley and Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, “Biography, Autobiography, and Hagiography,” in Scott McGill and Edward Watts, eds., A Companion to Late Antique Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 373–88. ³ See Williams, Authorised Lives in Early Christian Biography, esp. 9–22, 26, 28–9, 36–48, 55–7, 71–100, 107–47. ⁴ See Foucault’s “Technologies of the Self,” in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49. For Foucault’s impact on research on the self in ancient cultures, see David Brakke, Michael L. Satlow, and Steven Weitzman, eds., Religion and the Self in Antiquity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). Especially helpful is Patricia Cox Miller, “Shifting Selves in Late Antiquity,” 15–39.

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what it already is.⁵ The clear assumption was that the self found its true identity within a larger ontological frame of reference, such as the transcendent divine Intellect (Νοῦς) in Neoplatonism, or what Stoics called “Nature” (φύσις), the immanently divine order that sponsors the moral harmony of multiple selves. But especially from about the second century CE, some scholars argue, there arose new notions of the self more as an independent seat of consciousness, an individual subject and agent with an ego at its core—a perspective which Christianity helped to nurture along with its gospel of personal salvation.⁶ Meanwhile the various philosophical schools, in their zeal to commend a particular way of life (βίος; vita), were strongly intent on fashioning profiles of the healthy, disciplined self-in-becoming, and providing the wisdom and exercises to guide the process.⁷ The didactic strength of classical tragedy was that it staged characters who both reflected a larger moral and religious framework (shared by playwright and audience) and yet who also tested that framework within profoundly variable and sometimes excruciating concrete situations. As Stuart Lawrence remarks, these characters are not “abstract, bloodless figures” providing “schematized cases” for moralphilosophical debate; rather, they concretely embody and dramatize moral dilemmas that are far more compelling for audiences and likely to engender greater moral profundity.⁸ Christopher Gill and Richard Sorabji, though differing in some of their interpretations, have done much to map how Greco-Roman philosophers and poets posited objective models of the self while also, in their respective ways, addressing the subjective individual self and something approximating “personality.” Gill, who rightly distances ancient thinking about the self from modern Western (Cartesian) notions of the autonomous self aspiring to transcendental freedom, discerns already in epic and tragedy as well as philosophy what he terms the “objective-participant” self. Such is the self which, in its psychological and ethical life, finds its identity precisely in striving to be ruled by higher reason (logos) and in “whole-hearted ⁵ What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 164. ⁶ Cf. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 114, 163–8, 190–206, 210–11; Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 206–13; Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 43–6; John Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 20–2; Henry Chadwick, “Philosophical Tradition and the Self,” in Glen Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, eds., Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 60–81. See also the fine volume of essays in Alexis Torrance and Johannes Zachhuber, eds., Individuality in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). ⁷ On this broad theme, see Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, esp. 79–144, 264–76; Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, passim. ⁸ Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4–5.

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engagement with an interpersonal and communal role and in debate about the proper form that such a role should take.”⁹ This engagement is not just external or public, evident in interplay with other human moral agents in a body politic, but includes the self ’s capacity for internal dialogue when the parts of the psyche commiserate about the proper moral ends of human life—a dialogue Gill finds in various characters in epic and tragedy,¹⁰ and which I will explore in Christian writers. All told, selfhood is about participating, effectively and teleologically, in a humanness larger than any one person, which may entail concurrent participation in other kinds of being, such as “animal” and “divine.”¹¹ While Gill finds analogues for the modern “subjectiveindividualist” self in classical thought, Richard Sorabji is much more insistent that certain of the Greeks and Romans—from Aristotle to Christianity—knew the embodied self as an individual owning its own faculties and subjectivity, even though they differed over, for example, whether the self is a datum that endures from birth or else has its identity formed over time; whether the self is identical with a human’s psychic constitution or instead transcends it; whether selfhood requires self-awareness; and whether or not the self survives and retains its particular identity after the death of the body.¹² Christian thinkers in late antiquity, many of whom liberally appropriated elements of Greek moral and philosophical psychology in developing their theological anthropology,¹³ benefited from the rich array of pagan approaches to selfhood and “normative” personhood,¹⁴ whether simply to use them as a foil against which to argue, or more often to draw out compatible or presumably superior Christian ideas. Generally, however, patristic authors sought to mediate between a metaphysically and interpersonally defined self, on the one hand, and a persona or characterized self on the other. It was imperative to give priority to the human self as a creature defined by and gifted with the “image of God” (Gen. 1:26–7) and properly nurtured within the interpersonal context of the Christian ecclesia (and/or monastic community), but also to

⁹ Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11–12. Gill explores the psychological anatomy and structure of the self, and revisits the “objective” and “subjective” dimensions of selfhood in Greco-Roman philosophical traditions, in his The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). ¹⁰ Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy, 12, 94–239. ¹¹ Ibid. 12. ¹² See Sorabji’s discussion of no less than sixteen exemplary Greco-Roman conceptions of the self in his Self: Ancient and Modern Insights, 32–46. ¹³ E.g. the assumption of the tripartite soul (reason and the lower faculties of desire [ἐπιθυμία] and aversion [θυμός]) from Platonism, or the notion of a higher “governing principle” (ἡγεμονικόν) of the soul from Stoicism. Both ideas appear consistently in patristic and monastic writers of late antiquity. ¹⁴ On this variety of approaches, see esp. Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy, 240–469.

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provide a posteriori an account of the self as formed and reformed over time through the exercise of its own moral faculties of reason, desire, and will.¹⁵ Early patristic writers like Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen promote such a dual account of the self in their interpretation of Genesis 1:26–7, where they distinguish between the ontological givenness of the “image” (εἰκών) of God in a human being and the teleological or eschatological realization of “likeness” to God, since the text of Genesis 1:26 (LXX) specifies this as an “assimilation” (ὁμοίωσις), a process rather than a static likeness (i.e. ὁμοίωμα).¹⁶ The extensive patristic discussions of the precise substance and location of the image of God in human nature—e.g. the mind (νοῦς), reason (λόγος), the soul (ψυχή), the capacity for free will, etc.—could well be seen as attempts to determine the ontological threshold of selfhood; and yet Christian writers gave even more attention to its moral and teleological dimensions, the life lived, which required giving account of the role of the body and its share in the divine image and in the final identity of the self. Christian understanding of selfhood demanded a perspective on the self sub specie aeternitatis, in terms of ultimate human conformation to Jesus Christ, the perfect Image of God (cf. Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49; 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15; cf. Heb. 1:3). Gregory of Nyssa is especially illuminating in this regard. He considered selfhood in terms both of solidarity with the larger “plenitude” (πλήρωμα)¹⁷ of humankind and of the horizon of individuals’ variegated conversions to divine goodness and beauty. Accordingly, not only did Gregory write a treatise On the Creation of Humanity that considered the image of God and universal human constitution in the context of God’s original crafting of human nature, he also composed a Life of his sister Macrina’s progress as a disciplined ascetic attaining to supreme likeness to God,¹⁸ and an equally ascetically charged Life of the third-century bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, Gregory Thaumaturgus.¹⁹ Nyssen’s interest in the ontology and physiology of the divinely imaged self was largely a function of his preponderant focus on the eschatological assimilation of the human self to God, a process in which the whole of one’s human nature was to be ingathered toward its final—yet mysteriously original— perfection. Gregory conflated “image” and “likeness” since together they conveyed the human self as a protological and eschatological work-in-progress,

¹⁵ See Paul Blowers, “Emotional Scripts and Personal Moral Identity: Insights from the Greek Fathers,” in Alexis Torrance and Symeon Paschalidis, eds., Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2018), 19–28. ¹⁶ Though sometimes seeming to conflate “image” and “likeness,” Irenaeus’s overall tendency was to distinguish them, see Epideixis 11 (PO 12:666); Adv. haer. 5.16.2 (SC 153:216); cf. Clement, Strom. 2.131.2–2.136.6 (GCS 15:185–8); Origen, De princ. 3.6.1 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 642–6). ¹⁷ See Hom. opif. 16 (PG 44:185C); 22 (204D). ¹⁸ Vita Sanctae Macrinae (GNO 8/1:370–414). ¹⁹ De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi (GNO 10/1:3–57).

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eternally striving after its true identity in God.²⁰ While not all Christian writers of late antiquity wholly shared Gregory’s assessment of the divine image, selfhood, and assimilation to God, most still affirmed that likeness to God was both endowed and acquired. Augustine, for example, presumes that the creature is naturally inferior to the Creator and finds herself both at a distance from God, a distance augmented by sin, and yet also on an ethical trajectory either of dissimilation from or assimilation to God.²¹ In the remainder of this chapter, what I am describing as the “tragic Christian self” in the authors that I have selected belongs essentially to an account of the human self in-progress, the self being made and remade within the refiner’s fire of material, historical existence. Distinctive to the three profiles that I have chosen—Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine—is a tragic self that is more or less acutely self-aware, a self at times perplexed by its own creation in the image of God; a self whose formation actually entails some measure of questioning its own origins and destiny, exploring and exposing its own condition amid the experience of sin and suffering; a self openly longing—on behalf of itself and other selves—for deliverance from the tragic “vanity” of the world (cf. Rom. 8:19–22; Eccl. 1:2) without ever dismissing the essential goodness of creation within the divine economy. And as I noted at the outset of the chapter, the tragic self is both experiencing tragedy and serving as its own chorus, as it were, so as to interpret its circumstances and to prompt the appropriate kind of catharsis from its assumed audience or prospective imitators.

GREGORY NAZIANZEN’ S PROFILE OF THE TRAGIC CHRISTIAN S ELF

Gregory’s Depiction of His Own Life as a Tragedy The prolific Cappadocian bishop, rhetor, and theologian Gregory of Nazianzus wrote not only autobiographical poetry, most famously the De vita sua (382), but also other poems, orations, and letters that consistently broached tragic themes and allusions as he reflected on his own trials and experience.²² ²⁰ Cf. Hom. opif. 16 (PG 44:185B–D); Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:18). ²¹ See esp. De Trinitate 7.6.12 (CCSL 50:265–7). ²² For Gregory’s life and work in context, see John McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001); also the shorter account of Brian Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–61. On Gregory as an autobiographer, see Jean Bernardi, “Trois autobiographies de saint Grégoire de Nazianze,” in Baslez, L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hésiode à saint Augustin, 155–65; Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2:600–24.

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Gregory was well-served by his exquisite command of classical literature and rhetoric, and demonstrated a strong capacity to deploy language from epic, lyric, and tragedy alike in order to ratchet up the dramatic intensity of his recounted career and circumstances. On two occasions, referencing his resignation from the patriarchate of Constantinople and the presidency of its Council (381), Gregory candidly confesses his desire to speak in the voice of a tragedian to those who have allegedly betrayed him.²³ Much earlier, in a letter to Gregory of Nyssa, he twice uses phrases from Euripides to lambast Nyssen for initially deciding to become a secular teacher of rhetoric: Nyssen has succumbed to “the worst of demons, the love of honor (φιλοτιμία).”²⁴ “For myself,” adds Nazianzen, “I will not go so far as to say about you, as the tragedy puts it, ‘A friend has become an enemy, dear though he still is.’”²⁵ This starkly contrasts with Nazianzen’s eulogy for his deceased brother Caesarius, who had embraced a secular career as a physician in the imperial court of Julian the Apostate (r. 360–3), the emperor whom Gregory accused of singlehandedly unleashing a whole other “tragedy” or tragical “comedy” for the Christians whom he insulted and repressed.²⁶ For Gregory, Julian, in his pseudo-neo-pagan heroics, was a sham actor on a fleeting stage,²⁷ whereas Caesarius, with impeccable authenticity, “would project [his secular career] as a stage or use it as a multifaceted and ephemeral mask for playing his role (ὑποκρινόμενος) in the drama of this world, all the while living for God with that image (Gen. 1:26) that he knew he had received from God and was obliged to dedicate to him.”²⁸ Many of Nazianzen’s references to tragedy—and there are hundreds of them in his poetry alone²⁹—are less sensational, more subtle, but no less significant in elevating the already high emotion that colors his rhetoric and ²³ Cf. De se ipso et de episcopis (Poema 2.1.12), ll. 134–5 (PG 37:1176A); De vita sua (Poema 2.1.11), ll. 1804–7 (PG 37:1155A–1156A), quoting from Euripides’s Phoenissae, l. 380. Recently, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard has furnished additional and detailed evidence from Gregory’s autobiographical poetry of direct and indirect allusions to Greek (especially Sophoclean and Euripidean) tragedy. See her “ ‘Let Me Cry Out in Tragic Voice!’: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Use of Tragic Pathos,” paper for the International Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, August 13, 2015; also her “Gregory of Nazianzus’ De vita sua (Poema 2.1.11): Tragedy’s Emotion and Historiography,” unpublished paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, New Orleans, January 2015. I am grateful to Dr. Abrams Rebillard for providing me drafts of both these papers pre-publication. ²⁴ Ep. 11 (GCS 53:13, ll. 19–20), citing Euripides, Phoenissae, ll. 531–2. ²⁵ Ibid. (GCS 53:14, ll. 15–17), trans. Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, 174; quoting Euripides, Phoenissae, l. 1446. ²⁶ Or. 4.20, 79, 82 (SC 309:112–14, 200–2, 208). ²⁷ Ibid. 4.3, 78, 112–13, 114 (SC 309:88–90, 200, 268–70); Or. 5.18 (SC 309:328). On Gregory’s accusation of Julian’s superficial theatrics, see Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 340, 346, 347–53. ²⁸ Or. 7.9 (SC 405:202). ²⁹ As discussed in more depth by Abrams Rebillard, “ ‘Let Me Cry Out in a Tragic Voice.’ ”

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poetry. And yet cumulative citations of and allusions to Greek tragedy, or even a tragical style, do not tell the complete story on the makings of a tragical vision in patristic authors. This is especially true of Nazianzen. Gregory and other late-ancient Christian writers drew upon the two prevailing philosophical traditions regarding tragedy: Plato’s devastating attack on tragical poetry as propagating a mimetic lie and as subverting true philosophy; and Aristotle’s vindication of tragedy as a human artform with definable features, values, and uses. Gregory shows negligible interest in Plato’s critique, which had been so crucial to early Christian apologists like Tertullian. For Tertullian, as we have seen, tragedy merely stages pseudo-humans in pseudo-plots. Tragical acting intrinsically is hypocrisis, the assuming of a false identity, something from which Christians were categorically banned.³⁰ Gregory, however, seems thoroughly at ease in comparing Christian deportment in the world with a kind of pious acting, the freest kind of “play” since the grander plot is christomorphic growth in virtue. When, as mentioned, he praises his brother Caesarius for having used his secular career to “play his role” in the drama of the cosmos, the term he proffers is none other than hypokrinomenos, the enacting of an artificial persona (πρόσωπον). But Christian mimesis of the higher life in Christ, the true philosophia, is inherently self-authenticating and altogether free of affectation. Caesarius, says Gregory, deftly used secular affairs as a subplot for his unmistakably Christian performance: For [those affairs] are like a role played in others’ presence on a stage that is very swiftly set up and taken down again—or perhaps rather more quickly destroyed than constructed, as is obvious from the many changes of this life, and the ups and constant downs of prosperity. Meanwhile the only proper and securely enduring good thing is godliness.³¹

Perhaps it comes as little surprise, then, that Nazianzen composed his poetic masterpiece, the autobiographical De vita sua (382), as well as his In suos versus (a poem on his own poetry), in iambic trimeter, the meter of tragedy.³² In both poems he whimsically states that he is “playing” with words; and yet it is all to a deadly serious purpose, to report (ἐξιστορῆσαι) his personal and episcopal crises truthfully, especially those of his short and stormy tenure as Patriarch of Constantinople and champion of Nicene orthodoxy.³³ He is even ³⁰ Spect. 23.4–6 (CCSL 1:247). See also above, p. 23. ³¹ Or. 7.10 (SC 405:204–6). ³² As noted by Carolinne White in her Introduction to Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, Greek text and Eng. trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xxvi, 3 (n. 1), 11 (n. 1). For Gregory’s long De vita sua, I am using White, who has reproduced the critical edition of the Greek text by Christoph Jungck, De vita sua: Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar (Heidelberg: Winter, 1974). She has reproduced the Greek of Gregory’s other poems from PG 37. For convenience I will hereafter simply cite the Greek text as reproduced in White’s book. ³³ De vita sua, l. 6 (White, 10, 11); also In suos versus, l. 60 (PG 37:1333A; White, 6) on poetry as a form of “play” with words.

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compelled to apologize for cheating the line between reality and his poetic mimesis of reality, knowing that this is precarious and could lead him to yet another downfall. But as for me, my aim is to speak the truth and I worry whether things are as I say they are, or not. For my path leads along a precipice, and to fall from it is undoubtedly to fall down to the gates of hell.³⁴

All the while for Gregory, tragedy is simply the only poetic or rhetorical medium that can adequately communicate the immensity of his “twists (στροφαί) of fortune”;³⁵ his near-death experience of a horrific storm at sea (a familiar motif in Greek epic and tragedy);³⁶ the “vicissitudes of life” (στροφαί βιοῦ) that landed him in ordained ministry against his will;³⁷ the egregious “villainies” (κακά) of betrayal by Maximus the Cynic and others;³⁸ the grievous and lamentable miseries created by the Meletian schism in Antioch, which Gregory had to endure in his short tenure in Constantinople, and which he saw as tearing apart the Church and the world alike;³⁹ and lastly the bodily illness that effectively left him a “living corpse.”⁴⁰ Only tragedy can convey how “everything ends in disaster” and “even good things are by time outworn.”⁴¹ Only tragedy can help him articulate the “complexities of evil” (πλεκτὰ κακά) which intellectually he cannot fathom.⁴² Ultimately, as Suzanne Abrams Rebillard aptly describes it, Gregory’s De vita sua is like a “giant messenger speech” in the genre of tragedy, a sobering report of harsh truths bound to evoke strong emotions from characters and audience alike.⁴³ In this respect it also bears interesting parallels with the contemporary Autobiography of the pagan rhetorician Libanius of Antioch, in which Libanius speaks with

³⁴ De vita sua, ll. 1246–9 (White, 102, 103). See also Čecilia Milovanović-Barham, “Gregory of Nazianzus, Ars poetica (In suos versus: Carmen 2.1.39),” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997): 508, who observes how Nazianzen is oblivious to Plato’s critique that poets are merely spinners of myth, not dealers in truth. ³⁵ De vita sua, l. 18 (White, 10, 11). ³⁶ Ibid. ll. 124–210, 1040–1 (White, 18–25, 86, 87). McGuckin (Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, 50, n. 57) notes the frequency of the storms-at-sea imagery in Gregory’s autobiographical writing, as do Bernd Lorenz, “Zur Seefahrt des Lebens in Gedichten des Gregor von Nazianz,” Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1979): 234–41; and Rickmer Freise, “Zur Metaphorik der Seefahrt in den Gedichten des Gregor von Nazianz,” in Justin Mossay, ed., II. Symposium Nazianzenum: Louvain-la-Neuve, 25-28 août 1981: actes du colloque international (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1983), 159–63. ³⁷ De vita sua, ll. 330–4, 361, 1945 (White, 34, 35, 36, 37, 152, 153). ³⁸ Ibid. ll. 736, 738–9, 995, 999 (White, 66, 67, 84, 85). I prefer to translate κακά “villainies” here. ³⁹ Ibid. ll. 1535–90 (White, 122–7). ⁴⁰ Ibid. ll. 1337–8, 1919 (White, 108, 109, 152, 153). ⁴¹ Ibid. ll. 20–1; cf. ll. 384–5 (White, 12, 13, 38, 39). ⁴² Ibid. l. 1865 (White, 148, 149). ⁴³ Abrams Rebillard, “Gregory of Nazianzus’ De vita sua.”

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tragical force and emotion about the storms and stresses of his life under the guidance of divine Fortune (Τύχη).⁴⁴ As his own dramaturge, Nazianzen capitalizes on the classic features of tragedy identified by Aristotle. Certainly Gregory plays up more than one reversal of fortune (περιπέτεια), which, as we have already seen, must happen in a plot according to “probability (τὸ εἰκός) or necessity (τὸ ἀναγκαῖον),” so that, however astounding or unexpected, it still comes across as plausible lest the audience can in no way identify.⁴⁵ A salient example in De vita sua is Gregory’s precipitous fall into what he calls the “abyss” of priestly and episcopal ministry in the midst of his progress as an ascetic—a shocking disruption in his own experience but altogether plausible given the stories from this period of ascetics and monks being dragged against their will into ordination.⁴⁶ Gregory further intensifies it by depicting it as an all-out conspiracy on the part of those so beloved to him, namely Basil of Caesarea and his own father Gregory the Elder.⁴⁷ With these and certain other events Gregory says he will “pass over in silence” their details⁴⁸—deploying rhetorical silence as he does elsewhere, in a different context, to honor the mystery of the Trinity or other matters of major consequence.⁴⁹ Reflecting on his speech to the assembled bishops at Constantinople amid the fiasco of his resignation, he writes: Reefs, lying in wait deep below, also cause destruction to ships. Others may speak of these things, but I shall remain silent. I do not have the time to understand the complexities of evil, I who practice simplicity of heart…⁵⁰

Nazianzen also features in his autobiographical drama various instances of anagnôrisis, the raw discovery, as Aristotle describes it, when a tragic character finds that things or persons are not at all as they appear, leading to friendship

⁴⁴ For the text of Libanius’s Autobiography see LCL 478. On its character as tragic autobiography, see Bernard Schouler, “Libanios et l’autobiographie tragique,” in Baslez et al., L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hésiode à Saint Augustin, 305–23, esp. 319–23, explaining Libanius’s “oscillation entre l’ascension vers la gloire et l’effondrement pathétique” (p. 322). Jean Bernardi also sees a parallel between Nazianzen and Libanius in his “Trois autobiographies de saint Grégoire de Nazianze,” in Baslez et al., L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hèsiode à Saint Augustin, 159. ⁴⁵ See above, pp. 10, 16, 37. ⁴⁶ See De vita sua, ll. 277–551. See l. 361 for the image of sinking into an “abyss.” On forced ordinations and attempts to evade them, see e.g. Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi (GNO 10/1:15–16); John Chrysostom, De sacerdotio 1.6 (SC 272:88–92). For more on this pattern, see Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 143–9. ⁴⁷ De vita sua, ll. 337–429 (White, 34–42). ⁴⁸ E.g. ibid. ll. 108, 386ff., 1864 (White, 18, 19, 38, 39, 146, 147). ⁴⁹ Cf. Or. 29.8 (SC 250:192); 45.22 (PG 36:653B). ⁵⁰ De vita sua, ll. 1863–6, trans. White, 147–9.

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(φιλία) or enmity (ἔχθρα) for fellow characters discovered to be respectively virtuous or vile. A most impressive case is Gregory’s realization that the Alexandrian Maximus the Cynic, his rival to the patriarchate in Constantinople, was an episcopal fraud. Grasping this fact in De vita sua is all the more bitter in the light of his panegyric on Maximus (whom he nicknamed “Hero”) in the earlier Oration 25, where, having been initially so impressed, he praises him as a Christian philosopher and comments on his Cynic’s hair and garb as perhaps strange to Christian spectators but not at all alien to an angel’s. As for the Cynic (Κυνικός) being known as a kind of ascetical “dog” (κύων), Gregory assures us in the oration that Maximus was a dog “not in [your] shamelessness but in your openness, not in ravenous ways but in your hand-to-mouth existence, not in barking but in your defense of the good and your vigilant watch.”⁵¹ But such rhetorical syrup was a thing of the past after the attempted episcopal coup by Egyptian intermediaries to force Gregory out of his patriarchal throne in order to install Maximus. Now, in poetic retrospect, Maximus the Cynic becomes quite another dog: “a pestilential fanatic…a puppy, a street-walker, a disaster with no sense of smell, no bark, a great hulking monster,” whose dress and demeanor are that of a cross-dressing sophist.⁵² Gregory confesses his naïvety but surmises that this whole affair was one of the sorriest and most melodramatic scenes ever played on life’s stage.⁵³ Not so subliminally, he subverts the old “Hero,” Maximus, with himself as the genuine tragic hero amid profound alienation not only from Maximus and his supporters but from all other bishops and authorities who have called into question Gregory’s episcopal legitimacy. For Gregory, this entire fiasco with Maximus the Cynic, and his betrayal by fellow bishops or his own church members in other circumstances, grows to biblical and cosmic proportions. He has become the butt of life’s joke. His personal tragedy is made a comedy by his enemies.⁵⁴ His multiple discoveries (ἀναγνωρίσεις) are not just grueling experiences, they are apocalypses about the world, human nature, and the fragility of relationships and friendships even—no, especially—in the Church: What great confusion exists in creation! How very unequally we are yoked together by God. Which of the moderates will recognize a wicked person plotting, intriguing, contriving, always managing to conceal himself by a thousand tricks?⁵⁵

⁵¹ ⁵² ⁵³ ⁵⁵

Or. 25.2 (SC 284:158–60), trans. Martha Vinson, FOTC 107:158. De vita sua, ll. 728–1054 (White, 66–89), quoted at ll. 751–3 (White, 68, 69). Ibid. ll. 865–7 (White, 74, 75). ⁵⁴ Or. 22.8 (SC 270:236). Quarela de suis calamitatibus (Poema 2.1.9), ll. 92–3 (White, 160, 161).

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In effect, with Gregory’s enemies the evil couching at the door (Gen. 4:7) has relentlessly pounced, and he deploys tragical mimesis to identify himself with biblical characters who were similarly reviled or tested. Like Adam he has been ruthlessly deceived.⁵⁶ Like Jonah he has sacrificed himself to save the ship (the Church) amid a storm he did not provoke.⁵⁷ He is a second Job, though in a different contest.⁵⁸ In retrospect he can find company with the Gospels’ most desperate souls, crying out for redemption. Imploring Christ directly, he writes: There are three famous tax collectors in your scriptures: great Matthew and the one who shed tears in the temple, and in addition Zacchaeus: may I be the fourth. There are three with palsy: one on the bed, one by the pool, and then the woman bound by a spirit: may I be the fourth. Three saw the light after being corpses, as you commanded: the daughter of the ruler, the widow’s son, and Lazarus, half-rotting in the tomb: may I be the fourth.⁵⁹

The last of Aristotle’s major elements of tragedy in Gregory is, of course, the deep and abiding pathos itself, both the suffering of the characters and the subsequent emotion aroused in an audience, with all the different nuances and connotations of πάθος in Greek: liability, passivity, calamity, suffering, experience, but especially the surging force of emotion, the deep-seated passion aroused by contingent circumstances over which one has no control. Nazianzen’s autobiographical poetry and related works collectively display a veritable whirlpool of emotions, some of them seemingly contradictory and difficult to sort out: sanctimoniousness, compunction, indignation, dejection, confidence, pride, desire, guilt, fear, bereavement, vindication, pity, and a panoply of others. But at the center of this vortex is an equally passionate theological reasoning. All of this is under Gregory’s rhetorical command and a function of his dramaturgic strategy. He is acutely aware of the audiences of his works⁶⁰ and of the need to induce and calibrate salutary expressions of pathos in their response. Tragical verse, with its constitutive high emotion, is a “pleasing medicine” (τερπνὸν φάρμακον) or “paregoric” (παρηγόρημα) that can urge especially the impressionable souls of the young toward “more useful things” (χρησιμώτερα).⁶¹ It can soothe life’s pain. But simultaneously it can be

⁵⁶ De vita sua, l. 960 (White, 82, 83). ⁵⁷ Ibid. ll. 1838–42 (White, 144–7); cf. Querela de suis calamitatibus, l. 84 (White, 160, 161). ⁵⁸ Querela de suis calamitatibus, l. 31 (White, 156, 157); cf. Or. 26.3, 13, 15 (SC 284:230–2, 256). ⁵⁹ Querela de suis calamitatibus, ll. 91–8 (PG 37:1278A–1279A; White, 160–3). ⁶⁰ See Jean Bernardi, La prédication des pères Cappadociens: le prédicateur et son auditoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 93–260. ⁶¹ In suos versus (Poema 2.1.39), ll. 39–40, 55 (White, 4, 5).

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genuinely instructive for religious maturity;⁶² and Gregory is surely speaking of all of his verse when he pleads that his readers be pure or at least in the process of being purged (καθαιρομένοι).⁶³ Foremost he has in mind an ascetical and contemplative cleansing, no doubt, but he is also supposing a deep emotional catharsis as well, insofar as his readers are to be lifted to a uniquely Christian tragical vision of human existence, in which fear and pity are not the only powerful emotions in play. I will take up this cathartic process of reeducating tragical emotions more substantially in Chapter 6.

Gregory’s Objectification of the Tragic Christian Self Nazianzen sends clear signals that he is doing more than just confessing his own tragic circumstances before God, or turning himself inside out to induce affect, but that he is also shaping an objective profile of the Christian self as a tragic self. For instance, as Abrams Rebillard has highlighted, he occasionally poses as his own tragical chorus. When, in the De vita sua, he recounts his reverence for priestly ministry but also his strong inclination to avoid it in the face of pressures to be ordained, he mimics verses of the chorus in Sophocles’s Ajax reminding the tragic hero that he has nothing of which to boast since he is merely human, and that he needs to beware of impending danger to his wellbeing.⁶⁴ Gregory thereby maneuvers as best he can to convey to his audience an “outsider’s” objective perspective on his internal experience, so as to validate his own emotions and to engross the audience all the more in the gravity of his situation. “At a moment of moral quandary and high emotion,” Abrams Rebillard remarks, “the tragic allusion [to Ajax] melds life and text, myth and history, and poet, characters, and audience.”⁶⁵ In addition, there is rich evidence in Gregory of the “objective-participant” self that Christopher Gill has discerned and described in Greek epic and tragedy. Gregory too is intent on creating exchanges with his fellow players in the drama of the moral and religious formation of the self. His is a tragic self bound up with a complex web of allegiances and accountabilities: family, close friendships, intellectual elites, ascetical circles, priesthood and episcopate, laity, theological partisans, and the empire. In the (impossible) best-case scenario these should all balance and even complement each other in the direction of a singular goal, but in the helter-skelter of life lived, they have instead pulled Gregory apart at the seams and frustrated his hope for an integrated and truly “philosophical” self. Sometimes in the autobiographical ⁶² In suos versus, ll. 37–67 (PG 37:1332A–1334A; White, 4–7); De vita sua, ll. 6–8 (White, 10, 11). ⁶³ De Patre (Poema 1.1.1), ll. 9–10 (PG 37:399A); cf. In laudem virginitatis (Poema 1.2.1), ll. 7–10 (PG 37:522C–523A). ⁶⁴ De vita sua, ll. 334, 336 (White, 34, 35), echoing Ajax, ll. 384–6 (LCL 20:66–8). ⁶⁵ Abrams Rebillard, “Gregory of Nazianzus’ De vita sua (Poema 2.1.11).”

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poetry he stages mock dialogue with fellow characters in the tragedy as well as with the audience. In the De vita sua, for example, he fashions a conversation with his father in which Gregory the Elder movingly entreats him to join the company of the biblical saints Aaron and Samuel by taking up the priestly mantle.⁶⁶ The picture radically contrasts with what elsewhere, even in the same work, he depicts as a swift and ruthless ordination process, but it bespeaks Nazianzen’s reconstruction, late in life, of the layers of his struggle for a secure identity.⁶⁷ In his poem On Himself and the Bishops, which addresses his strained relations with fellow-bishops in the debacle at Constantinople, he banters with an imaginary interlocutor about episcopal duty, character, and effectiveness.⁶⁸ Eventually it becomes a diatribe targeting the personas of various corrupt bishops who have wronged both Gregory and the Church as a whole. Gregory’s tragic episcopal self, buffeted by all manner of pressures and abuses, becomes the model by which his envious and egregiously irresponsible peers can regain their own integrity. Should you, my friends, find another Gregory, be kinder to him. Should you not, it only remains for you to be upright to your colleagues and yourselves; because your agreement has been proportionate only to the sway of the same sufferings among yourselves. Cling always to the peace for which I strove, and lay aside those private failings by which the whole world is miserably confused.⁶⁹

The model of the tragic Christian self is not, then, Gregory’s to possess, but projects itself on others too. His sufferings are not his alone since they invariably implicate his family, his intimate friends like Basil, his congregations at Nazianzus, at Sasima, and at the Anastasia church in the imperial capital. They implicate the whole city of Constantinople, and the whole ecumenical episcopate. Indeed, Gregory’s personal “passion play” is but an epitome of the historic struggle of the Christian communion and its trinitarian faith in the face of manifold antagonists. To read it any other way, it seems, would be to read Gregory as a self-absorbed narcissist wholly bent on his own vindication and fulfillment. John McGuckin deduces that the poetry “does not so much reveal the persona of Gregory more directly, as serve to cover it with yet more texture.”⁷⁰ I would add that he does this precisely to enrich and nuance his icon of the tragic Christian self.

⁶⁶ De vita sua, ll. 502–17 (White, 46–9). ⁶⁷ On this contrast, see McGuckin, Gregory of Nazianzus, 14–15. ⁶⁸ De ipso et de episcopis (Poema 2.1.12), ll. 176–796 (PG 37:1179A–1224A). ⁶⁹ Ibid. ll. 818–25 (PG 37:1226A), trans. Denis Meehan, FOTC 75:74 (slightly altered). ⁷⁰ See John McGuckin, “Gregory: The Rhetorician as Poet,” in Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg, eds., Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 194.

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Also like Gill’s “objective-participant” self in epic and tragedy, Gregory frequently scripts internal dialogue with himself, and here we see him moving beyond the particularities of his own life more straightforwardly to universalize the icon of tragic Christian selfhood. In one poem, for instance, he stages a dialogue between the “worldly life” and the “spiritual life,” which, though presented with himself as moderator, and having broad relevance, bespeaks also his own internal struggle between the claims of carnal existence and the soul’s higher calling to philosophia.⁷¹ In a whole series of short poems he questions, admonishes, and exhorts his own soul in the ongoing quest for moral self-definition. I quote one of them in Peter Gilbert’s lucid translation. You have a job to do, soul, and a great one, if you like: examine yourself, what it is you are and how you act, where you come from, and where you’re going to end, and whether to live is this very life you’re living, or something else besides. You have a job to do, soul; by these things cleanse your life. Make me to know God and God’s mysteries. What was there before this universe, and why is this universe here for you? Where has it come from, and where is it going? You have a job to do, soul, by these things cleanse your life. How does God guide and turn the universe: or why are some things permanent, while other things flow away, and us especially, in this changing life? You have a job to do, soul: look to God alone. What was my former glory, what is this present arrogance? What will be my crown, and what the end of my life? Of these things inform me, and check the mind from wandering. A job you have to do, soul: lest you suffer in deep trouble.⁷²

Here Gregory could just as well be addressing all Christian souls perplexed by their finitude, and inextricably bound up with the origins and destiny of the whole created universe. Elsewhere he even scripts a dialogue directly between himself and the cosmos: ( GREGORY ): I’ve an issue, world, to bring up with you. First teach: Who are you, and whence do you come, and whither do you roll? And how do you revolve me, like a wheel that carries an ant?

⁷¹ Comparatio vitarum (Poema 1.2.8) (PG 37:649A–667A). ⁷² Ad suam animam (Poema 2.1.78) (PG 37:1425A–1426A), trans. Peter Gilbert, On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, PPS 21 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 170.

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( COSMOS ): Where I’m from I don’t know, but I know it’s from God. And I roll towards something greater. But I don’t turn you round. But it’s you, unworldly one, who act violently towards me. ( GREGORY ): How then do you stand solid, whilst I’m unsteady? ( COSMOS ): I am something external, and what’s the advantage of that? But the things you want to do, you can do them, if you want. ( GREGORY ): Well and good; but external things, who can bear them? ( COSMOS ): Why, is something wrong? Matter here is for the sake of the salvation of the good. ( GREGORY ): Then, the cause of you is something greater? ( COSMOS ): You’ve got it.⁷³

These verses from Gregory fit into a much larger tragical vision of the self and the universe that he unfolds, across his writings, in a carefully crafted dialectic of despair and hope. At once he leads his audience down the path of embracing the vanity of existence (cf. Rom. 8:19–22; Eccl. 1:2) and draws them to the anchorage of Christ and the Church. Much like his confrère Gregory of Nyssa, Nazianzen revels in the paradox that stability is constantly reborn of instability. Accordingly, he presses the image of the tragic Christian self nearly to the breaking point, such as when he portrays it not only as buffeted by relentless sufferings but even, in a frequently deployed metaphor, as passively swept away by the “flowing stream” of materiality and carnal existence.⁷⁴ It is a motif already conspicuous in the Roman tragedian Seneca, who describes how, since material things do not exist in the strict sense, embodied beings are “in a constant state of flux…[and] our bodies hurried along like flowing waters; every visible object accompanies time in its flight; of the things which we see, nothing is fixed.”⁷⁵ As Gregory muses in a poem On Human Nature: I am. Think: what does this mean? Something of me’s gone by, something I’m now completing, another thing I’ll be, if I will be. Nothing’s for sure. I am, indeed, a troubled river’s current, always in transit, having nothing fixed. Which of these, pray tell me, will you say that I am more?⁷⁶

Gregory’s last line here is especially striking. He is vexed by the fact that his true self is elusive, stretched by time between past, present, and future as he strives after a stable identity in God. In this train of thought he approximates Augustine’s notion of the distentio animi, the distension or scattering of the ⁷³ Dialogus cum mundo (Poema 1.2.11) (PG 37:752–3), trans. Gilbert, On God and Man, 129 (slightly altered). ⁷⁴ Cf. Or. 14.30 (PG 35:897B); De vitae itineribus (Poema 1.2.16), l. 24 (PG 37:780A). ⁷⁵ Ep. 58.22–3, trans. Richard Gummere (LCL 75:400–3). Seneca references both Plato and Heraclitus here. ⁷⁶ De humana natura (Poema 1.2.14), ll. 25–8 (PG 37:757), trans. Gilbert, On God and Man, 133 (altered).

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self in time and multiplicity that is contrasted with the reintegrating intentio of the self toward God by grace.⁷⁷ Gregory also uses the even starker image of creaturely existence as a divine game in which human beings seem to be the helpless pawns.⁷⁸ His melancholy rhetoric presses to the brink of fatalism, but all as a strategy to divulge a more sublime providence. For his own struggle (ἀγών), but a sub-plot of the larger tragedy implicating all creation, is finally enfolded into a deeper and mysterious drama of severe divine mercy. Such is, in yet another potent image, the story of a blessed “chaos” (τὸ ἄτακτον)⁷⁹ out of which the Creator is constantly forming a new creature. As Stratis Papaioannou shows in a compelling study of Gregory’s rhetoric of selfhood, he uses discourse, and the art of radical transparency (ἐνάργεια), to foster within himself and his audience a deep pathos that might remove them beyond selfhood idealized purely as perfected ontological “sameness” (stability) to selfhood that is “infinitely becoming” in God through sustained, concrete engagement with other selves.⁸⁰ In other words, the seemingly tragic loss of one’s self over the course of a lifetime is, in truth, the process of gaining a new and unprecedented self honed by alienations, provocations, conflicts, and reconciliations. As Gregory describes it in the De vita sua, his tragic Christian self was from the beginning of its existence becoming the self of another (ἀλλότριος) through “beneficial estrangement” (ἀλλοτρίωσις ἡ καλή) and by having other persons, outside his control, offer his self up to God as a “noble sacrifice” (θῦμα εὐγενές).⁸¹ But again, Gregory determines to project this pattern not as unique to himself but as applicable to countless other tragic Christian selves-in-the-making.

“ THE NOTHINGNESS THAT IS ALL I AM” : TRAGIC SELFHOOD AS SHARED BY JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND H IS SOUL-MATE OLYMPIAS John Chrysostom did not provide nearly the volume and nuance of autobiographical reflection that we find in Gregory Nazianzen, and so his profile of a tragic Christian self requires more excavation and reconstruction. In addition, ⁷⁷ Confessiones 11.26.33–11.29.39 (CCSL 27:211–15); and below, pp. 129–33. ⁷⁸ Cf. Praecepta ad virgines (Poema 1.2.2), ll. 589–90 (PG 37:624A–625A), on the Logos playing with the world from on high; also De exterioris hominis vilitate (Poema 1.2.15), ll. 141–2 (PG 37:776A), on humanity as God’s “toy” (παίγνιον). Cf. Or. 7.19 (PG 35:777C–D), on the vanity of human “play” on earth; similarly Or. 14.20 (PG 35:884A–B). ⁷⁹ Or. 14.30 (PG 35:897B). ⁸⁰ “Gregory and the Constraint of Sameness,” in Børtnes and Hägg, Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, 59–81. ⁸¹ De vita sua, ll. 87–90 (White, 16, 17).

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John was more reticent than Gregory to frame his own experience on an epic or cosmic scale. He projects the tragic Christian self primarily through sober musings on particular events in his life, playing up the high drama only at certain turning points. In still another contrast with Gregory, Chrysostom manifests a strong spiritual triumphalism that significantly qualifies his tragical vision of the Christian life. Whereas Nazianzen does not hold back in his dark and melancholy grievances against the vanity and tragic conditions that pervade human existence, John proceeds with an ebullient confidence in divine justice and providence. Indeed, by John’s moralistic account the only ultimately tragic figures are those languishing in their estrangement from Christ and entrapped in the world’s allurements. For such a tragic character, Chrysostom had to look no further than the eunuch and imperial chamberlain Eutropius, who opportunistically ascended to the title of patrician in the court of the Eastern Emperor Arcadius and was instrumental in John’s appointment as Patriarch of Constantinople. Through miscalculations and overplaying his hand with the throne, Eutropius found himself in exile in 399, and sought refuge in the patriarchal Great Church at the mercies of Chrysostom himself.⁸² In John’s view, Eutropius’s rise to power was of a piece with his tragic peripety, making him a monumental example of the blatant vanity of this world, epitomized in the lavish lifestyle that Eutropius had come to know at court. Borrowing from “the Preacher,” Qoheleth himself, John spares no rhetorical expense in depicting Eutropius’s disgraceful fall: It is always opportune—but particularly at this moment—to say Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2). Where now are the splendid trappings of the consulship? Where are the gleaming torches? Where are the outbursts of applause and the choruses and the festivities and the public holidays? Where are the crowns and banners? Where are the uproar of the city and the acclamations during the chariot-races and the flattering comments of the spectators? They’ve all gone. A blast of wind has blown away the leaves and revealed the tree to us— naked and shaken to its very root at this moment…Where now are those who posed as friends? Where are the drinking parties and dinners? Where’s the swarm of hangers-on (παρασίτων), and the undiluted wine that filled glasses all day long, and the varied arts of the chefs, and the cultivators of power who would do and say anything to please him? They were all spring flowers and, when spring passed, they all withered. They were a shadow and melted away. They were smoke and dispersed. They were bubbles and burst. They were a spider’s web and have been torn to shreds. That’s why we’re chanting this spiritual maxim, saying over and over: Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity. For this maxim should be inscribed ⁸² On the misfortunes of Eutropius, cf. Socrates, Hist. eccl. 6.5 (SC 505:272–4); Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.7 (SC 516:266–70); Palladius, Dialogus de vita Joannis Chrysostomi 5, 20 (SC 341:112–14, 402). See also J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom: Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 110–11, 145–55.

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permanently on walls and on clothing and in the market-place, and in the home and in streets and on doors and in foyers and, above all, in each person’s conscience; and it should be studied constantly. Since fraudulent matters and masks and acting are thought to be true by the majority, each of you should address this to your neighbour and in turn hear it from your neighbour at dinner, at lunch and in assemblies every day: Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.⁸³

Despondent as this sounds, John is using Eutropius’s situation less as a point of departure for pondering the ontological conditions of human finitude or fallenness than as an illustration of how an individual’s vices mirror and perpetuate the ages-old crisis of moral license. Eutropius has no latent tragic hamartia to speak of. Nor has he suffered far more than he deserves. He has made poor choices and his woes merely confirm God’s retributive and rehabilitative justice. When elsewhere Chrysostom comments on Paul’s portrait of the creation being subject to vanity (ματαιότης, Rom. 8:20ff.), he takes the Apostle to mean precisely that human moral dereliction has thrown even the non-human creation into a state of futility and corruption (φθορά, 8:21) from which, at least by humanity’s recovery of moral and spiritual glory, it has the “hope” (8:20) of renewal.⁸⁴ John’s forward-looking optimism will not give tragic fate the last word. Late in his career, however, tragic events hit home for Chrysostom himself. In 403 he experienced the greatest peripety of his career, when he was initially deposed from the patriarchate of Constantinople amid an ecclesiastical and political firestorm that had erupted when the besieged Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria and some sympathetic suffragan bishops from Egypt ruled John’s patriarchate illegitimate and succeeded in subverting him. John was temporarily recalled to his see due to a groundswell of support. But subsequently the Empress Eudoxia, once loyal to John, took offense at a sermon in which he ostensibly criticized the erection of a public statue of her as Augusta.⁸⁵ His episcopal nemeses attacked him with renewed force. Quickly John found himself again alienated from numerous fellow-bishops and from former friends within the imperial court. During the second exile that lasted from 404 until his death in 407, Chrysostom corresponded with his soul-mate, the erudite deaconess Olympias, a wealthy widow and benefactress who had supported John in his ministry and sought his consolation and spiritual guidance in the face of the deep depression she suffered amid the events of his betrayal and deposition.⁸⁶ ⁸³ Hom. in Eutropium 1.1 (PG 52:391–2), trans. Pauline Allen and Wendy Mayer, John Chrysostom (London: Routledge, 2000), 131–2. ⁸⁴ Hom. in Rom. 14.4–5 (PG 60:529–30). ⁸⁵ For the events leading to and climaxing in John’s deposition and exiles, see Palladius, Dialogus 1–11 (SC 341:46–230); Socrates, Hist. eccl. 6.5–21 (SC 505:272–346); Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.9–28 (SC 516:274–362). See also Kelly, Golden Mouth, 163–285. ⁸⁶ On the career of Olympias, see Elizabeth Clark, John Chrysostom and Friends: Essays and Translations (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979), 107–26. On Chrysostom’s

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In a letter to Pope Innocent I, John describes these events as a “grievous tragedy” (χαλεπὴ τραγῳδία)⁸⁷ and indeed “more harrowing than any tragedy”;⁸⁸ and he does so even more graphically for Olympias, deploying the classical imagery of storms and shipwreck at sea reminiscent of Gregory Nazianzen: If you wish, I will depict an image of what happened, to make the tragedy more vivid to you. I behold a sea in fury everywhere, forced open to the depths of the abyss, revealing corpses floating on the waves, others submerged beneath them; the bridges of the ships destroyed, the sails in shreds, the masts shattered, the oars fallen out of the hands of the oarsmen; the pilots seated upon the decks in front of the tillers, with their hands crossed over their knees, and in the face of their impotence before these events, they are groaning, crying out in anguish, lamenting, wailing; with nothing clearly visible, neither the sky nor the sea, but with everything plunged into deep darkness, with such obscurity and gloom that upon turning around it’s impossible to recognize one’s neighbor; and with the sailors everywhere beset by crashing waves, and by monsters of the sea. But how long will we pursue that which is impossible to grasp? For whatever imagery I search for to portray the current evils, words are powerless to suffice.⁸⁹

This shipwreck imagery appears elsewhere in the letters to Olympias,⁹⁰ but John finds other images as well to convey his tragic circumstances. Again like Nazianzen, he portrays himself the victim of an all-out conspiracy on the part of the bishops who have slandered and undermined him, and by so doing cast the Church—and with it the world!—into a dangerous chaos.⁹¹ John’s pastoral purpose in his correspondence with Olympias is to prove how all this upheaval is like a massive and sustained testing of their ascetical endurance, and he accordingly introduces a number of biblical exempla to strengthen their identification with saints from sacred history. Deploying strategies of ascetical self-care familiar from other of his works, John constantly challenges Olympias to overcome her disabling despair (ἀθυμία) by exercising philosophia and discretion (σωφροσύνη).⁹² He even sent her, he says, a copy of his treatise No One Can Be Harmed Save by Oneself, a work of “medicine” for her soul that he addressed to others too who had suffered amid

close relationship with Olympias, see ibid. 67–9; and Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85–97. ⁸⁷ Ep. ad Innocentium papam (SC 342:68). ⁸⁸ Ibid. (SC 342:82). ⁸⁹ Ep. ad Olympiadem 7.1 (SC 13, 2nd ed., 132–4), trans. David Ford, Saint John Chrysostom: Letters to Olympia, PPS 56 (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016), 45–6. ⁹⁰ Cf. Ep. ad Olympiadem 1.1; 12.1 (SC 13, 2nd ed., 106; 320). ⁹¹ Ibid. 7.1; 8.10; 11.1 (SC 13, 2nd ed., 134–6, 200, 308). ⁹² Chrysostom refers constantly to Olympias’s ἀθυμία: e.g. Epp. 2.1; 3.1; 4.1; 5.1; 6.1; 7.5; 8.1; 9.1; 10.1 (SC 13, 2nd ed., 94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 115, 116, 117, 142, 153); and on her pursuit of philosophia, see e.g. Epp. 3.1; 5.1; 8.1, 4 (SC 13, 2nd ed., 97, 101, 116–17, 121).

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the turmoil of his deposition.⁹³ But in the letters he also seeks rhetorically to weave his and Olympias’s experiences as tightly as possible, for her hardships in this tragedy mirrored John’s own. She too had been abused by imperial authorities, at first when, as a young widow, she resisted the Emperor Theodosius’s pressure to marry one of his relatives, and thereupon saw her properties confiscated—though she deemed this ascetically beneficial and moved to distribute her goods.⁹⁴ Later, and more seriously, she was brought twice before an imperial tribunal for humiliating charges of arson after the Great Church in Constantinople was gutted by fire in 404 during the riots that broke out over Chrysostom’s final deposition.⁹⁵ Sozomen reports that Olympias successfully acquitted herself of the charges, but after the second harassment by the tribunal, having been further censured for refusing to acknowledge John’s episcopal successor Arsacius, she was dealt a heavy fine, and subsequently went into voluntary exile at Cyzicus, across the Sea of Marmara from the capital.⁹⁶ John thus works to fuse horizons with Olympias, to cultivate a common subjectivity, a shared tragic selfhood. He reiterates to her that she too knows what it is to be victimized by others’ plots, to endure insults, to lose possessions, to go into exile in a foreign place.⁹⁷ Their selves are so tightly knitted together that, in a memorable phrase, John laments that Olympias has suffered not only by her share in his circumstances but also because she has been physically separated from “the nothingness that is all I am” (τῆς οὐδενίας τῆς ἡμετέρας).⁹⁸ Literally he says “our nothingness” but I have opted for J. N. D. Kelly’s more robust translation of the Greek,⁹⁹ as it captures John’s sense in the present moment that his own selfhood is, on this side of eschatological transformation, a fleeting vanity—and of course not his alone but Olympias’s too. But if that selfhood is a vanity, it is only so, again, in the Apostle Paul’s sense. While Chrysostom does not specifically reference Romans 8 in his letters to Olympias, he has in mind, I believe, that vanity or futility (ματαιότης) to which all creation has been subjected until the glory of the children of God is disclosed in the mystery of adoption (Rom. 8:19–23). The vanity is the matrix for the revelation of that glory, that true splendor of soul and sanctity of body toward which John and Olympias are together striving through their ascetical resilience. For Chrysostom, the dark cloud hovering over the tragic self is real

⁹³ In Ep. 17.4 (SC 13, 2nd ed., 384). For the text of Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso see SC 103. ⁹⁴ Palladius, Dialogus 17 (SC 341:344–8). ⁹⁵ The unsympathetic historian Socrates (Hist. eccl. 6.18, SC 505:340) insists that “Johnites” had started the fire. ⁹⁶ Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.24 (SC 516:338–40). ⁹⁷ Ep. ad Olympiadem 7.1c; 14.1b; 15.1b; 16.1b (SC 13, 2nd ed., 352, 356, 364). ⁹⁸ Ibid. 8.11a (SC 13, 2nd ed., 202); cf. ibid. 17.4a (p. 382). ⁹⁹ Golden Mouth, 266.

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enough to cause anguish, to induce crippling despair and self-doubt, but that cloud also gradually dissipates from those who hold firm with patience and fortitude, and will in due course give way to a transcending bliss. The whole collective peripety John shares with Olympias—the “enmities, or deceptions, or slanders, or abuses, or accusations, or confiscations, or banishments, or sharpened swords, or high seas, or war engulfing the entire world”—is mere “fable,” utterly transitory (2 Cor. 4:18).¹⁰⁰ In No One Can Be Harmed Save by Oneself, a formal piece of rhetorical declamation, John, without ignoring the existential bitterness of human suffering, controverts those cynics who dispute divine providence because of the world’s tragic condition and built-in injustices.¹⁰¹ Final surrender to tragedy is simply not an option. All theodicy aside, John’s tone with Olympias is consoling and hopeful, and, in the end, manifests an altogether traditional pastoral wisdom: Whatever is like a spider’s web, or shadow, or smoke, or anything else even more paltry—this is what the fierce torments coming upon you are like in comparison with the prizes that will be given to you in the coming age. For what is it to be driven out from one’s city, to be transferred from place to place, to be harassed everywhere, to have one’s goods confiscated, to be dragged before the tribunal, to be savagely mistreated by soldiers, to endure the opposition of those who have received from you a myriad of benefactions, to be abusively treated by both servants and free men, when the prize for all these things is heaven, along with those pure, good things which are impossible to describe and which have no bounds, and the enjoyment of which will be eternal for those who have procured them? Therefore, leave off considering the plots, the insults, the loss of your possessions, being continually uprooted, and living in a foreign country; and trampling upon all these things as if they were more paltry than mud, think rather upon the treasures that are laid up for you in the heavens—things that cannot be taken away, riches that cannot be plundered.¹⁰²

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO: THE TRAGIC SELF, FALLEN AN D DISTENDED IN TIME

Approaching the Self and Its Fallenness in Augustine Needless to say, the life of Augustine, especially as he recounts it in the Confessions he wrote early in his episcopate in Africa (ca. 397), has been ¹⁰⁰ Ep. ad Olympiadem 7.1c (SC 13, 2nd ed., 136). ¹⁰¹ Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso 1–2 (PG 52:459–62). ¹⁰² Ep. 14.1b (SC 13, 2nd ed., 350–2), trans. Ford, Saint John Chrysostom: Letters to Olympia, 147–8.

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more heavily scrutinized by scholars than the lives of Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom put together. Much more like Gregory than John, Augustine surfeits his readers, especially though not exclusively in the Confessions, with material on which to speculate about the internal and external dynamics of his formation as a Christian. In addition, despite his attention to the peculiarities of his own experience, he too, like Gregory, couches his vita within the much larger cosmic narrative of the pre- and postlapsarian human situation and of creation’s absolute dependence on the graciousness of its Creator. The thickness, the multiple layers, of Augustine’s articulation of a “self,” and the acuteness of his self-consciousness in composing it, continue to inspire fresh interpretations. Certainly I cannot survey all those interpretations here, but the contrasts among them are profound.¹⁰³ A series of scholars, for example, approaching him from the standpoint of philosophical epistemology, has read the introspective Augustine in the Confessions as precursor of the modern Cartesian ego, an independent subject confident that because it thinks or doubts, it exists (the famous cogito ergo sum) and is sufficiently positioned to judge what is real despite the impairments of sin.¹⁰⁴ Janet Soskice, among others, discounts the comparison, noting that “Descartes, achieving certainty in himself, will never be able to escape from himself,” whereas “Augustine, by losing him ‘self ’ finds, in a sense, that he does not need to fathom himself since it is enough that he is known by God.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Jean-Luc Marion has claimed of late that the reflective author of the Confessions is the very antithesis of Descartes’s ego. In place of a self as such, argues Marion, the Confessions begins purely from a dual “disposition” of confessio, in which the ego “becomes itself precisely in the measure to which it responds to a call always already issued, but never entirely received, with praise (of the holiness of God) and, inseparable from it, an admission (of faults which conspire against the holiness of God).”¹⁰⁶ So too the life of the self, as opposed to its “being” in any metaphysical sense, cannot for Augustine consist in comprehending the self ’s existence as a knowing subject, ¹⁰³ In his Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–47, Matthew Drever provides substantial background to the modern debate on the self in Augustine. ¹⁰⁴ Ironically, though, the primary text cited as Augustine’s “cogito” argument is not in the Confessiones but in Civ. Dei 11.26 (CCSL 48:345–6). On Augustine as forerunner of the modern self, see esp. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 127–42. ¹⁰⁵ “Augustine on Knowing God and Knowing the Self,” in Simon Oliver, Karen Kilby, and Thomas O’Loughlin, eds., Faithful Reading: New Essays in Theology in Honour of Fergus Kerr, OP (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2012), 74. Brian Stock too, while allowing some common ground, forcefully dismisses the comparison with Descartes in his Augustine’s Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6, 91–4. ¹⁰⁶ In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 56.

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nor in “self-possession.” Such is how Marion reads Augustine’s admission twice in the Confessions that “I had become to myself a vast problem” (factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio).¹⁰⁷ The self ’s life consists rather in discovering that it is a sheer gift of God, and in finding its place vis-à-vis God precisely by being displaced, or as Marion puts it, “exiled” between existence and essence.¹⁰⁸ John Cavadini, moreover, astutely warns that if one seeks to tag the imago Dei, “inner human being,” “the heart,” or the ascending sojourner as a stable reality tantamount to a self, one is chasing after something that for Augustine is clearly and necessarily elusive: The images that Augustine uses for the content of self-awareness all defy the attempt to reify this content in the form of a “self” which persists essentially unchanged throughout interior observation. They are essentially images trying to describe the self-awareness as precisely not the awareness of a stable, statue-like entity which may need cleaning or some touch-up polishing, but rather the awareness of a subject in transformation, undergoing transformation, being transformed, re-created; of subjectivity that—to the extent that it is truly self-aware—is resisting a premature foreclosure of identity and yielding to a process that will be complete only eschatologically, and only as a gift partly received and mostly hoped for, and not in the first place an accomplishment.¹⁰⁹

Cavadini’s admonition is imperative, and Marion’s analysis is also compelling in its attention to the priority of confessio to cognitio and its resistance to identifying Augustine’s self purely and simply as an entity within a hierarchy of being. And yet if we read the Confessions in the context of Augustine’s larger corpus, it is hard to deny that he has a stake in the ontological or metaphysical bearings of the human self at least as a heuristic category, by its intrinsic connection with mind (mens) and soul (anima) and its involvement in the relation of both of these to the body.¹¹⁰ Brian Stock, taking account of Augustine’s evolving psychology also in works prior to the Confessions, insists that the soul and self be carefully distinguished, despite the connection, and even the occasional identification (“ego, ego animus”¹¹¹).

¹⁰⁷ Confessiones 4.4.9 (CCSL 27:44); also 10.33.50 (p. 182). See also Marion, In the Self ’s Place, 44, 64, 240, 282–3, 307. ¹⁰⁸ In the Self ’s Place, 66–7. ¹⁰⁹ “The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine’s Thought,” reprinted in Cavadini’s Envisioning Augustine (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 138–55, quoted at 141. ¹¹⁰ On Augustine’s use and modification of the metaphysical notion of substantia in propounding his views of the soul and its formation, see Drever, Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul, 48–84. ¹¹¹ In Confessiones 10.6.9 (CCSL 27:160).

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Although there is considerable overlap in Augustine’s thinking about the soul and the self, a number of important distinctions are made between the two entities. The soul is eternal; it is nonmaterial and not subject to extension or division. By contrast, the self is impermanent. It has a clearly material component, consisting in embodiment, and a less clear, presumably nonmaterial component, in which it acts as a framework or container for the mind and its products. As such, it is subject to extension and division between birth, when its corporeal encasement is initiated, and death, when the body dies. Moreover, unlike the soul, which is essentially good, as created by God, the moral condition of the self depends on the exercise of the will in combatting evil and embracing high ideals.¹¹²

By his own admission, Neoplatonism provided Augustine with a philosophical idiom in which to articulate the fall and recovery of the soul and the religious self ’s quest for transcendence, although he certainly modified this Neoplatonic framework as he deepened his engagement with scriptural revelation and developed his views on embodiment.¹¹³ Philosophical psychology continued to play a role in his larger theological anthropology as he intimated the inner quest for divine illumination and for knowledge of the soul’s origins and true destiny. Like Gregory Nazianzen, moreover, he extensively engaged in internal dialogue with himself to this very end, as seen incipiently in his Soliloquies and other early works,¹¹⁴ although in the Confessions the dialogue is more in the form of redirecting his questionings of himself to God.¹¹⁵ As Augustine eventually affirms in his treatise On the Trinity, the soul, being “present to itself” (praesens sibi) already “knows itself” so long as it is, in its godlike simplicity, true to itself as imago Dei, true to its true love (God), and not distracted by ulterior loves, ulterior knowings, which invariably pervert its pure and innocent self-knowledge.¹¹⁶ The theologically conscientious bishop of Hippo recognized all too well, however, that sacred history in the Bible told the tale of just such a disastrous distraction and confusion. With Augustine, therefore, understanding the self as a self, let alone a tragic self, requires accounting not only for the soul’s metaphysical status, its participation in and deviation from the intelligible creation, but also, in obviously ¹¹² The Integrated Self: Augustine, the Bible, and Ancient Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 129. ¹¹³ For Augustine’s early debt to Platonism, see Contra Academicos 2.2.5 (CCSL 29:20–1), where he speaks of his reading of the Platonists as a “return to himself”: Prorsus totus in me cursim redibam. Similarly, see Confessiones 7.10.16 (CCSL 27:103). For his later reflection on Christianity’s transcending fulfillment of Platonism, see Ep. 118.16–21 (ca. 411) (CSEL 34/ 2:681–5). There is an enormous scholarship on the role of Neoplatonism in Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, but for an excellent short tour through it, see Ronnie Rombs, Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond O’Connell and His Critics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 3–22. ¹¹⁴ See Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue, esp. 18–120. ¹¹⁵ See esp. Confessiones, Book 7; also Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63–139. ¹¹⁶ De Trinitate 10.3.5 (CCSL 50:317–18); 10.8.11 (pp. 324–5).

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stark contrast with Neoplatonism, for the soul’s hereditary link to Adam and its embroilment in the tragic historical contingencies affecting fallen humanity.¹¹⁷ Augustine clearly realizes that the latter is not his individual dilemma alone but that of the universally perverse human condition, and in the Confessions he aspires to speak for and with the masses of fellow sinners, fellow beneficiaries of divine grace, locked in a collective helplessness: When I am confessing not what I was but what I am now, the benefit lies in this: I am making this confession not only before you [God] with a secret exaltation and fear and with a secret grief touched by hope, but also in the ears of believing human beings, sharers in my joy, conjoined with me in mortality, my fellow citizens and pilgrims, some who have gone before, some who follow after, and some who are my companions in this life.¹¹⁸

The tragic fact for Augustine and his fellow human selves is that they have been thwarted from returning expeditiously to the divine bosom or recovering the prelapsarian paradise from which Adam and Eve were cast. As a consequence of the primeval peripety, the Adamic fall narrated in Genesis 3,¹¹⁹ they have all inherited the catastrophic and tragic hamartia, as it were, of original sin, the engrained powerlessness of the soul to will the good, much less to do it, along with the deep disorientation of the soul’s root desire. Sin has become like a viral infection of the human race, with unbridled lust (concupiscentia) as its principal carrier,¹²⁰ such that, as Augustine makes clear in his anti-Pelagian treatises, even the most disciplined asceticism cannot reverse the contagion or provide the vaccine.¹²¹ Francesca Murphy suggests that the peculiarly tragic dimension of original sin for Augustine is that there really is no ready rational explanation of it, no patented theodicy to make sense of why God allowed the fall (and its subsequent curse) to eventuate. The primordial lapse of Satan, the angels, and Adam simply happened, and it has caught up Adam’s posterity in the net of its historical repercussions: “Albeit [the fall] is a merely contingent fact, it is still reasonable to take a certain aboriginal failure into account. To say that human beings are living in a potentially tragic situation, bearing that potential within themselves, is thus no logical theodicy, but an inductive, ‘history-based’ account of the existent particulars.”¹²² Paul Rigby, by contrast, judges that Augustine does rationalize original sin and the condemnation

¹¹⁷ On this contrast and the importance of Augustine’s notion of personal sin in conjunction with “the fall” of souls, see the still classic study by Jean Guitton, Le temps et l’éternité chez Plotin et Saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1959), esp. 271–88. ¹¹⁸ Confessiones 10.4.6 (CCSL 27:157), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 181–2 (slightly altered). ¹¹⁹ See above, pp. 43–51. ¹²⁰ See esp. De nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.1.1–1.39.40 (CSEL 42:211–52); 2.5.14 (pp. 265–6). ¹²¹ E.g. De perfectione justitiae hominis 11.28 (CSEL 42:26–8). ¹²² God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 174.

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thereof as an irrefutably just divine punishment for human disobedience,¹²³ but that alongside this theodicy remains the profoundly tragic reality that Adam’s descendants—Augustine calls them the “mass of perdition” (perditionis massa)¹²⁴—are caught up in a fateful inevitability of sin from which they can be extracted solely by an extrinsic and gratuitous divine election.¹²⁵ He is one of them: In my own case, as I deliberated about serving you my Lord God (Jer. 30:9) which I had long been disposed to do, the self which willed to serve was identical with the self which was unwilling. It was I (ego eram, qui volebam, ego nolebam; ego eram). So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself (dissipabar). The dissociation came about against my will. Yet this was not a manifestation of the nature of an alien mind but the punishment suffered in my own mind. And so it was not I that brought this about but sin which dwelt in me (Rom. 7:17, 20), sin resulting from the punishment of a more freely chosen sin, because I was a son of Adam.¹²⁶

In my view Augustine heightens the tragic intensity of the fall precisely by proposing that the human self ’s freedom is not lost but horribly stunted, its “ability not to sin” (posse non peccare) forfeited,¹²⁷ such that the self languishes not just under the inevitability but also the inner necessitas of sin, which can be countermanded solely by God’s own freedom to intervene. When the Pelagian Caelestius disputes the possibility of sin being an unavoidable necessitas, Augustine turns to the authority of the Psalmist’s own plea, Lead me out of my necessities (De necessitatibus meis educ me) (Ps. 24[25]:17).¹²⁸ Other scholars are more skeptical. The feminist theologian Kathleen Sands discounts real tragedy in Augustine’s thought because, in her view, he imposes a rationalized theodicy that fundamentally usurps all contextually-based human struggle for good in this world for the sake of a final, de-historicized, all-harmonizing Good.¹²⁹ Rowan Williams nonetheless asserts against Sands, I think correctly, that Augustine still maintains a tragical perspective insofar as he sees human moral struggle for the good in this life as already shot through ¹²³ See e.g. De natura et gratia 5.5 (CSEL 60:236); Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 2.7.13 (CSEL 60:473–4). ¹²⁴ See e.g. De correptione et gratia 7.12, 16 (CSEL 92:232, 236–7); 9.25 (p. 249); 10.26 (pp. 249–50); De gratia Christi et de peccato originali 2.31.36 (CSEL 42:195). ¹²⁵ See above, p. 66. See also Paul Blowers, “Augustine’s Tragic Vision,” Journal of Religion and Society, Supplement Series 15: Augustine on Heart and Life: Essays in Memory of William J. Harmless, S.J. (2018): 157–69; online: https://dspace2.creighton.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/ 10504/119176/2018–29.pdf. ¹²⁶ Confessiones 8.10.22 (CCSL 27:127), trans. Chadwick, 148–9 (emphasis added). ¹²⁷ De correptione et gratia 12.33 (CSEL 92:259). ¹²⁸ De perfectione justitiae hominis 2.2 (CSEL 42:4–5); cf. De natura et gratia 66.79 (CSEL 60:293). ¹²⁹ See her Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994), 17–19, 38–9.

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with “mistaken and conflictual accounts of our true interests,” a grim horizon which “requires a measure of [divine] coercion if total incoherence and fragmentation are to be avoided.”¹³⁰ Sands is certainly not alone among modern theologians who allege that Augustine’s God effectively does violence to human freedom and the quest for the good, but as Paul Rigby further contends, the bishop of Hippo is willing to allow the “phantasm of the tragic God” (or “wicked” God) to linger in order to set in bold relief the miracle of the gracious God.¹³¹ Jesse Couenhoven’s recent work on original sin in Augustine also revisits its tragic aspect. By his account Augustine is straightforwardly setting in opposition the sinful Adam, in whom moral evil has arisen and abides in the body of death (Rom. 7:24) bequeathed on Adam’s offspring, and the New Adam in whom alone that sin is healed (Rom. 5:12ff.; 1 Cor. 15:22). But Augustine is inferring original sin not only from Scripture but empirically from the decaying state of creation and humanity. He avoids and even refutes Manichaean dualism because evil is not an ontological force possessing humanity from without but the “internal malignancy of our own sinfully diseased selves.” Still, Couenhoven finds a viable grain of hope amid tragedy in the fact that the Augustinian self, corrupted by original sin, is precluded from becoming moralistic or pretentious, and, in its deformed and helpless state, is rendered peculiarly open to the healing grace of Christ.¹³²

The Tragic Self Scattered in Time As a tragical commentary on human fallenness, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is indisputably the most widely influential such assessment emerging from antiquity in the Western Christian tradition. Rather, however, than dwelling on original sin, which assumes a whole life of its own in Augustine’s thought and legacy, let us turn back to his more philosophically-inclined reflection on the tragedy of human existence and on the self ’s subjective experience of its perilous condition. One of his most trenchant analyses in this regard appears in the heavily discussed Book 11 of the Confessions, in which he ponders the mystery of time and of the “distention” of his soul (distentio animi) in time.¹³³ Augustine’s ultimate interest here is not to deliver a definitive philosophical theory of time, despite his musings on the status or “reality” of past, present, and future; rather, he longs to confess and articulate ¹³⁰ Rowan Williams, “Insubstantial Evil,” in On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 95–101. ¹³¹ The Theology of Augustine’s Confessions, 158–9. ¹³² Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Healed by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 52–4. ¹³³ See esp. Confessiones 11.14.17–11.28.38 (CCSL 27:202–14).

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his self ’s experience of being scattered or fragmented in and by time. Initially his dilemma seems to be purely subjective, as he struggles to grasp time as such through his own recollections and to capture it, as it were, in a mentally immediate and supposedly “duration-less” present through remembrance of the past and expectation of the future.¹³⁴ It nevertheless becomes clear to Augustine that it is not just a matter of his mind “distending” or stretching itself in order to measure and comprehend time. Time, which ultimately defies human attempts to measure it according to perceptions of physical motion, is an overridingly obtrusive reality that does its own distending of the soul.¹³⁵ This distension pulls apart his thoughts and recollections,¹³⁶ and disrupts any secure sense of self-presence; and because the self in a certain sense is its memoria,¹³⁷ the experience is altogether harrowing. In a salient summation Augustine dramatizes it as his very life or selfhood being stretched beyond the breaking point on time’s rack: Because your mercy is more than lives (Ps. 62:4 [63:3]), see how my life is a distension (distentio) in several directions. Your right hand upheld me (Ps. 17:36 [18:35]; 62.9 [63:8]) in my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things; so I might apprehend him in whom also I am apprehended (Phil. 3:12–14), and leaving behind the old days I might be gathered (conligar) to follow the One, forgetting the past and moving not toward those future things which are transitory but to the things which are before me, not stretched out in distraction but extended in reach (non distentus, sed extensus), not by being pulled apart but by concentration (non secundum distentionem, sed secundem intentionem). So I pursue the prize of the high calling where I may hear the voice of praise and contemplate your delight (Ps. 25[26]:7; 26[27]:4) which neither comes nor goes. But now my years pass in groans (Ps. 30:11 [31:10]) and you, Lord, are my consolation. You are my eternal Father, but I am scattered in times (in tempora dissilui) whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when,

¹³⁴ Confessiones 11.15.20; 11.20.26–11.21.27; 11.26.33 (CCSL 27:204; 206–7; 211). See also Guitton, Le temps et l’éternité chez Plotin et Saint Augustin, 223–70. ¹³⁵ Paul Ricoeur, in his Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–8), 1:5–30, and 3:12–96, suggested that Augustine’s dilemma here was a failure to impose psychic (Ricoeur calls it “phenomenological”) time, i.e. the mind’s internal ordering of past and present and future, in place of cosmological time, i.e. linear succession or duration. James Wetzel, however, in his Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17–44, argues convincingly that in his discussion of the distentio animi, Augustine is seeking to correlate two distinct meanings: the distension of the soul/mind to grasp time (psychic time), and cosmological time’s command over the soul/mind. ¹³⁶ On memory’s struggle to hold on to its recollections amid their scattering, see Confessiones 10.11.18 (CCSL 27:164). ¹³⁷ Ibid. 10.17.26 (CCSL 27:168–9).

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purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together (confluam) to merge into you.¹³⁸

What Ricoeur calls Augustine’s “aporetic” approach to time, his ponderous treatment of time’s multiple quandaries, truly comes to a head in this passage. Just when he thought that his mind might grasp the being of time by using memory and expectation, what is grasped merely slips back into the “no longer” and the “not yet,” into non-being.¹³⁹ As James Wetzel puts it, Augustine is left with psychic time, “the distension of presence into past, present, and future.” But the question for him then is: “whose presence”? “His own experience of psychic time has been that of a rending and a scattering: mortal wear and tear, exacerbated by fantasies of being above it all.”¹⁴⁰ Andrea Nightingale aptly describes it as Augustine chasing after his own selfhood as a “moving target, full of opacities and lacunae.”¹⁴¹ His identity is relentlessly fractured, leaving him thoroughly dependent on the reintegrating power of divine grace, to which I will return momentarily. So far as Augustine’s “tragic self” is concerned, the distentio animi is emblematically crucial because, in this dense notion, both the ontological and historical crises of the human condition overlap. On the one hand, it engages the philosophical dilemma of the pilgrim soul’s embodiment, its exposure to and life within time-bound material flesh, which is at once a foreign land and a providential home. Nightingale envisions Augustine’s self as a soul “fallen into psychic time” and caught between “heterochronic time zones” of psychic time and “earthly” time—the latter indicating “the aging and changing of bodies in the natural world as the seasons pass”—such that the self longs to be raptured to a transcendent, “transhuman” paradise.¹⁴² And yet what she calls “earthly time” is not time at all for Augustine; it is only the physical movements in time that the mind employs to measure time.¹⁴³ More accurately, again, his temporal dilemma is to stabilize self-presence within psychic time while being constantly subverted and eroded by cosmological time. In this sense the human condition is not ontologically fallen, as would be the case in a strictly Platonic framework of eternally preexistent souls degraded into corporeal time and space; instead, it is intrinsically inferior to, and

¹³⁸ Ibid. 11.29.39 (CCSL 27:214–15), trans. Chadwick, 243–4; cf. also ibid. 10.29.40 (CCSL 27:176). ¹³⁹ Ibid. 11.14.17 (CCSL 27:202–3). See Ricoeur’s detailed discussion of this aporia in Time and Narrative, 1:7–12. ¹⁴⁰ James Wetzel, Review of Andrea Nightingale, Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body (2011), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, January 4, 2012 (online: http://ndpr.nd.edu/ news/once-out-of-nature-augustine-on-time-and-the-body). ¹⁴¹ Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 18, 105, 110, 120–31 (quoted at 121). ¹⁴² Ibid. 19–22, 25, 33, 36–40, 56, 61, 67, 79, 83–92, 104. ¹⁴³ As Wetzel points out in his review of Nightingale (see n. 140 above).

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different from, the realm of the Uncreated, and still good in its own right. In virtue of their rationes causales, and respecting the ontological priority of the soul to the body, soul and body have been created for each other, and submitted to created (cosmological) time,¹⁴⁴ and in turn, given the integral union of soul and body, the human self experiences a condition of mutability and vulnerability that is also, by salutary paradox, its horizon of growth and flourishing. On the other hand, for Augustine, the bitterly tragic fact of the distentio animi is that it unfolds inextricably within the historical saga of universal sin. If Augustine’s memory struggles to pull together the fragments of his self dispersed in time,¹⁴⁵ how can he possibly succeed in doing so without recollecting the partial, deviant, disordered pieces of his past sinful life, which is, of course, exactly one of the things he is aspiring to do in Books 1–9 of the Confessions? Time’s erosion of the self is of a piece with the sinful self ’s incapacity to stay its worship on the gracious Giver of creaturely identity. Even over-fixation on the philosophical aporia of time is an evidence of sinful distraction away from the Creator who is the sole source of stability.¹⁴⁶ By the end of Book 11 of the Confessions, it is quite clear that Augustine has shifted his perspective from the distentio animi as an ontological fact of psychic life to the distentio animi as an attrition of the self under sin’s degenerative impact.¹⁴⁷ At this point, confession finally trumps cognition, since, having not finally resolved the mystery of time, and acknowledging his desperation within its grip, Augustine’s tragic self is left to the mercies of the Creator, in the realization that only the Creator’s grace can reintegrate his scattered and disjointed self. The tone now is both confessional and soteriological, as we see in the summation I quoted above, with its allusion to the Pauline language of being embraced by the one whom the self strains to embrace according to its upward calling (Phil. 3:12–14).¹⁴⁸ Ricoeur comments that the tone is not just one of confession but of lamentation, as Augustine reflects on the staggering contrast between his own dissolution in time and the perfect stability of the eternal God outside time.¹⁴⁹ Other commentators besides Ricoeur have emphasized that Augustine’s treatment of time and the ¹⁴⁴ On the origin of the soul and its union with the body, see esp. Gen. litt. 6.10.17–6.11.19; 6.14.25–6.29.40; 7.24.35–7.28.43 (CSEL 28/1:182–5, 189–200, 222–8). ¹⁴⁵ Interestingly, as Jason BeDuhn has revealed, Augustine’s image of the scattered and gathered self reworks very similar motifs from the Manichaean tradition with which he would have been familiar from his time as a Manichaean “Hearer” (lay disciple). See BeDuhn’s Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, vol. 2: Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 CE (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 330–1. ¹⁴⁶ Confessiones 11.10.12–11.12.14; 11.30.40 (CCSL 27:200–1, 215). ¹⁴⁷ See Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 37–44. ¹⁴⁸ Confessiones 11.29.39 (CCSL 27:214–15). On this shift to soteriology, see also Drever, Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul, 33–45, 75–6, 110–11, 116–17, 119. ¹⁴⁹ Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3:26–8.

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distentio animi is couched within a larger meditation on divine eternity,¹⁵⁰ which, despite accentuating the radical disparity between time-bound human selves and the timeless God, extracts hope out of the grim purview of temporality. Marion argues a fortiori: “book 11 of Confessiones is not about a definition of time or its supposed psychological reduction…It aims rather to conceive how time is not closed to eternity any more than it is abolished in it— in short, how it could be articulated together with it, without confusion or separation.”¹⁵¹ Indeed, how could the tragic self be regathered, “flowing together” into God as Augustine imagines it,¹⁵² unless time is an agent of the healing that is to be consummated in eternity? But ending on this hopeful note in Book 11, I would hasten to add, does not suddenly erase Augustine’s agonizing appraisal of the aporia of time. The relentless entropy of time remains, paradoxically, the matrix from which the creature is created anew. Augustine knows full well that he cannot abide in a frozen mystical “present,” even one as apocalyptic as his moment of truth in the Garden of Milan or his vision at Ostia.¹⁵³ As Burcht Pranger remarks, “whatever mystical moments and reflections may occur in the Confessions, they are incessantly sent back and recycled into the ongoing story of confession, which, for all its paradoxical incapacity to express the indivisible punctum of the present, lingers between remembering, forgetting, and expectation.”¹⁵⁴ The Augustinian self is tragically but also wondrously elusive.

CONSPECTUS: COMPARING TRAGIC SELVES Looking back across the three profiles of the tragic Christian self in this chapter, and keeping in mind the absence of any antecedent template and the writers’ literary and rhetorical prerogative to invent such a self, certain common patterns of tragical mimesis are evident together with some obvious differences in the presentations of Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. ¹⁵⁰ Cf. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:5, 22–30; Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 33–7. ¹⁵¹ In the Self ’s Place, 193. ¹⁵² Confessiones 11.29.39 (CCSL 27:215):…donec in te confluam purgatus et liquidus igne amoris tui. ¹⁵³ Ibid. 8.12.28–30; 9.10.23–6 (CCSL 27:130–2, 147–8). See also John Cavadini, “Time and Ascent in Confessions XI,” in Joseph Lienhard, Earl C. Müller, and Roland J. Teske, eds., Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), 171–85. Cavadini convincingly argues that Augustine’s discussion of the aporia of time in Book 11 is in fact one among other Plotinian-style forays of ascent into eternity in the Confessions, though one like the others that he cannot hold on to. Only the Creator can sustain human souls there. ¹⁵⁴ Eternity’s Ennui: Temporality, Perseverance and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 40.

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Especially in Gregory and Augustine, less explicitly so in John, the tragic Christian self is portrayed against the dramatic backdrop of an ineluctable condition of the human race that manifests both in the ontological parameters of creaturely existence and in the quagmire of historical contingencies and vicissitudes. The self has no “square one” from which an unsullied freedom might proceed, no safe haven of innocence to which it may recur, since it is already thoroughly implicated in what the cosmos—createdness and history together—has to offer it. Though these writers all revere the goodness and beauty of creation, and the integrity of the imago Dei, and though they fervently assert the providence of the Creator, there is neither naïvety nor quixotism about the arena of creation in which life is lived, endured, enjoyed. Gregory Nazianzen left it to his Cappadocian associates, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, to write the Hexaemeral commentaries extolling and expounding the mysteries of creation. Nazianzen (with sympathy from Nyssen) understands that we can see no order unless we confront the fragility and vanity of things, the way in which “chaos” (τὸ ἄτακτον) is still an undercurrent constantly tamed by the Creator. Augustine, who had already begun his own commentaries on the creation account in Genesis before composing his Confessions, and who grappled with all manner of philosophical and exegetical difficulties concerning the origins and nature of the world, also recognizes the miracle that God was able to bring order from formless matter which was, ontologically speaking, next to nothing (prope nihil), a kind of “nothing something” (nihil aliquid).¹⁵⁵ Despite, then, the intrinsic participation of human souls in the higher, intelligible creation, material embodiment is precarious, as Augustine never ceases to remind us. Even cosmic time itself appears to stretch the soul into the “nothing” of past and future. And all the while, original sin continues to impose its necessitas on human selves, a flaw wreaking its own tragedy, though neither Nazianzen nor Chrysostom shared Augustine’s perspective on this aspect of the human condition in their reflections on the pervasiveness of sin. Gregory and John, perhaps even more than Augustine, portray the vanity of human existence in the register of the twists and turns of contingent events in one’s own lifetime. Whatever ontological constraints saddle human moral agents, the real tragedy lies in the accumulated history of betrayal and broken trust, egocentric interests and choices, habituated vices, and in general the unrelenting replication of the fall. Gregory, we have observed, went much further than John or Augustine in the detail of his tragical mimesis, sketching his own life as an unfolding tragedy on a virtually epic scale, while also projecting an image of the tragic Christian self applicable to his fellow believers within the Church. As his own dramaturge, he sets his multiple

¹⁵⁵ Confessiones 12.6.6 (CCSL 27:219).

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peripeteiai and anagnôriseis in spectacular relief, and in his display of a whole gamut of emotions he models the way forward for the cathartic transformation of the tragic Christian self. Chrysostom, the most passionate defender of divine providence among our three writers, is more restrained in his tragical mimesis but still prizes representing the downfall of Eutropius, and his own catastrophic peripety that he shared with Olympias, through the lens of tragedy, with identifiable villains, victims, and heroes. Like Gregory, John calls up the examples of tragic heroes in the Bible (Job is a favorite) who prevailed against seemingly impossible odds. Chrysostom, however, deploys tragical mimesis more for the positive task of clarifying Christian morality than for the negative task of assisting believers in negotiating the instabilities and ambiguities of historical existence. When he pastorally comforts Olympias, it is only on the strong supposition that God in due course will vindicate her righteousness and longsuffering. One of the most intriguing parallels between Gregory and Augustine that we have found is their exploration of the subjectivity and acute self-awareness proper to the tragic Christian self. Unlike Chrysostom, they both engage in the kind of sustained inner dialogue that Christopher Gill has found in characters from classical epic and tragedy. In Gregory’s autobiographical poetry, these inner dialogues are interspersed with staged dialogues with fellow tragical “actors,” even with the cosmos itself, heightening the intense drama of his quest for secure identity in God. In Augustine’s Confessions, the dialogue with his inner self is redirected to God in a way that augments the essentially confessional mode of his discourse and his plea for God to regather his tragically distended and sinful soul. In both writers the soul’s tragical pathos runs deep, however much it is reconditioned by an aspiring expectation of salvation. Indeed, despair and hope must somehow run together and qualify each other if this mimesis is to remain both tragical and Christian.

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5 Tragical Conscience Contemplating the Faces and Bodies of Tragedy in the Foreground of the Church

TRAGICAL VISION AND CHRISTIAN MORAL CONSCIENCE As a hermeneutical, rhetorical, philosophical, and theological feature of early Christian literary (and moral) culture, tragical mimesis was scarcely restricted to biblical commentary or to framing new narratives of the tragic Christian self. In this chapter and the next I will examine how tragical mimesis also found a place in other literary genres and modes of discourse as a means to educate believers, cognitively and emotionally, in fathoming the vanity of created existence and engaging the real tragedies playing out in the Christian foreground, while also trusting in the Creator’s providential and salvific purposes. As we have already found in preceding chapters, tragical mimesis curbed any temptation to glamorize Christian existence as an expeditious path to transcendence wholly detached from the failings and calamities affecting all mortals. It compelled Christians to imagine themselves as implicated in the same drama with those—believers and non-believers alike—who, either by their own doing or by disastrous circumstances outside their control, had sustained unspeakable miseries or been pushed to the moral brink. Concurrent with this trend, I propose, was the rapidly increasing domestication of the discourse of tragedy in both colloquial and rhetorical Christian usage in the fourth and fifth centuries. It is not at all uncommon in this period to find writers describing horrific or inexplicable misfortunes afflicting Christians and non-Christians as “tragic” without fear of the overtones of pagan theatrical depravity that scandalized apologists of an earlier generation. Lactantius gives us a brief look at this discursive transition while documenting the demise of pagan Rome and its cruelties. In a passage from his On the Deaths of the Persecutors, he describes the sobering tragoedia enacted at

Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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Nicaea when a pagan noblewoman was implicated in discouraging Valeria, daughter of the Emperor Diocletian, from marrying the infamous Eastern Caesar Maximin Daia, her would-be suitor. Maximin had her, and two of her equally noble friends esteemed for their beauty and chastity, put to death, employing a Jewish convict to bring false charges against them.¹ This story comes from the same Lactantius who earlier had repudiated the moral foolishness of pagan tragedy pretty much in toto.² Beyond Lactantius’s time, the language of tragedy appeared much more routinely in Christian discourse. In rare cases it was applied retrospectively to the Christian martyrs of an earlier era.³ Various Christian writers spoke of the tragedy of specific crises threatening the Church’s well-being precisely at a time when it should have been thriving in unity. Athanasius dramatizes the tragedy that erupted in Alexandria when, having gone into exile, his episcopal seat was handed over to an alleged Arian, Gregory of Cappadocia: The aftermath of all this is hard to describe in simple terms. I can neither provide a worthy rendering of the events nor mention even a few of them without tears and lamentations. Have the likes of these things ever been the subject of tragedy (τετραγῴδηται) among the ancients? Or has anything like this ever happened before in time of persecution or war? The church and the holy baptistery were set aflame, and immediately wailing, crying, and lamentation erupted throughout the city, while the citizens, in their indignation at what had happened, railed against the governor and protested the violence.⁴

The controversial Nestorius, who was deposed from the patriarchate of Constantinople amid the intensifying christological crisis of the fifth century, composed an autobiographical work, now lost, that he entitled Tragedy. The church historian Evagrius Scholasticus is almost certainly referring to this work when, in his criticism of the bishop, he reports that Nestorius claimed he had been driven by “utter [tragic?] necessity” (πάσης ἀνάγκης) to take the ¹ De mortibus persecutorum 40, Latin text ed. and trans. J. L. Creed, OECT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 58–60. ² See above, pp. 24–5. Henry Ansgar Kelly, in his Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (p. 32), also notices this strong change in Lactantius’s attitude to tragedy. ³ E.g. Prudentius, Peristephanon 10 (LCL 398:302, ll. 1111–15), describing the martyrdom of Romanus of Antioch in the Diocletianic persecution as “great tragedy” (tanta tragoedia). Ambrose, in his De officiis 1.41.205–7 (Davidson, 1:236–8), draws a negative parallel between the tragic figures of Pylades and Orestes (in Sophocles and Euripides), whose friendship was morally compromised, and the martyrs Pope Sixtus II and his deacon Lawrence, who clearly triumphed through tragedy. ⁴ Epistola encyclica 3 (PG 25:228C). Cf. Gregory Nazianzen’s description of the “tragedy” of Arian horrors committed against himself and the pro-Nicenes in Constantinople during his brief tenure there, in Or. 33.3, 5 (SC 318:160–2, 166–8); Gregory of Nyssa’s depiction of the “tragedy” of his falling out with his metropolitan bishop, Helladius of Caesarea, in Ep. 1.3, 12, 14 (ad Flavianum) (GNO 8/2:3, l. 19; 6, l. 23; 7, l. 10); John Chrysostom’s portrayal of the “grievous tragedy” (χαλεπὴ τραγῳδία) of Theophilus of Alexandria’s maneuvers to depose him from the patriarchate of Constantinople, in Ep. ad Innocentium Papam 1.1 (PG 52:529).

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position he did in order to heal the profound rift in the Church over Christology.⁵ Nestorius’s friend and supporter, the bishop Irenaeus of Tyre, subsequently composed a defensive synopsis of Nestorius’s plight that he too called A Tragedy, which is also lost save for some fragments translated into Latin.⁶ Still, it was the sheer pathos of tragedy that commended it to Christian usage, as we saw so abundantly in the autobiographical poetry of Gregory Nazianzen. There are numerous examples, but a most striking one appears in a series of letters of the bishop Theodoret of Cyrus (northern Syria) to civil magistrates, fellow bishops, and even an elite Christian rhetorician Aërius, requesting asylum for a certain Carthaginian senator, Celestiacus, a Christian refugee who had fled east with his family during the Vandal invasions of North Africa in the early fifth century.⁷ In one letter Theodoret, who was quite judicious in his allusions to classical pagan sources, suggests that the current suffering of the Carthaginians deserves the extravagant tragical language of Aeschylus and Euripides, perhaps even outstripping the horrible evils these two great tragedians recounted. “Those who were the pride of [Carthage’s] renowned senate now wander all over the earth, receiving their subsistence at the hands of kindly strangers. They move these folks to tears when they see them, as if instructing them in the perilousness (τὸ σφαλερόν) and volatility (τὸ εὐρίπιστον) of human affairs.”⁸ To the pagan rhetorician Aërius the Sophist, whose own tragical eloquence Theodoret clearly sought to recruit, the bishop commends Celestiacus as a man who once showed hospitality to priests, but who now, through a tragic peripety, needs hospitality and relief from poverty such as Odysseus famously received from Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians.⁹ To the bishop Domnus of Antioch, Theodoret praises Celestiacus’s faith as annealed by the experience of gross misfortune (δυσκληρία) and bad luck (δυσπραξία).¹⁰ Challenging the bishop Theoctistus of Beroea to rally his city to

⁵ Historia ecclesiastica 1.7 (SC 542:126). Frederich Loofs includes this allusion first among the fragments of Nestorius’s lost Tragedy in his Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius (Halle: Niemeyer, 1905), 203–8. ⁶ Irenaeus of Tyre’s A Tragedy is known principally from its use by the Roman deacon Rusticus in the sixth century, whose Synodicon contained translated correspondence of Eastern bishops attempting to exonerate Nestorius, while also incorporating material from Irenaeus’s Tragedy. ⁷ On the context and pastoral thrust of this correspondence, see Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410–590 CE): A Survey of the Evidence from Episcopal Letters (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 62–5. ⁸ Ep. 29 (ad Apellionem) (SC 98:86). Cf. Ep. 30 (ad Aerium Sophisten) (SC 98:88), where Theodoret speaks of Celestiacus’s peripety as evincing the “quick-sweeping changes in human prosperity” (τῆς ἀνθρωπείας εὐημερίας τὰς ἀγχιστρόφους μεταβολάς). ⁹ Ep. 30 (SC 98:88–90), referencing Homer’s Odyssey, Bks. 7 and 8. In his Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 142, Adam Schor suggests that an elite sophist like Aërius could provide strong rhetorical persuasion for potential hosts of refugees such as Celestiacus. ¹⁰ Ep. 31 (SC 98:90–2).

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aid the senator, just as the poor in his own smaller city of Cyrus stepped up to meet the needs of total strangers,¹¹ Theodoret expounds the senator’s precipitous peripety all the more: To recount the sufferings of the most honorable and illustrious Celestiacus would require tragical eloquence. For those poets fully elicit the tragedies of humanity, but I can only briefly inform your Excellency that his homeland is Libya, long celebrated far and wide, his city the far-famed Carthage, his hereditary rank a seat in her illustrious senate, his circumstances affluent. But all this is now a tale, mere words stripped naked of reality. For the barbarian war has now deprived him of all this. But such is human good fortune (εὐκληρία), which refuses to remain always with the same persons and hastens to move on to dwell with others.¹²

The last line here is a paraphrase of Euripides’s Trojan Women: “For in its very nature fortune (αἱ τύχαι), like a crazed man, leaps now in one direction, now in another, and the same man is never fortunate forever.”¹³ To the civil official Patricius as well, Theodoret similarly enhances Celestiacus’s abrupt fall from wealth to poverty, adding again that “the plot of the drama of his misfortune (τοῦ τῆς συμφορᾶς δράματος ἡ ὑπόθεσις) is the barbarian devastation of Libya and Carthage,” which will hopefully move Patricius and others to (tragical) pity and timely kindness (φιλανθρωπία).¹⁴ At last, Theodoret appeals also to the bishops Irenaeus of Tyre and Pompianus of Emesa, mentioning again Celestiacus’s exemplary “piety and philosophy,” and encouraging the bishops to make his situation known to the wealthier men in the city who might be moved to aid him out of (tragic) fear that such a calamity could befall them as well (i.e. their philanthropy becoming a catharsis of that very fear).¹⁵ Remarkably, Theodoret exhibits no apprehension whatsoever in these letters that he will be accused of implying that fortune reigns in human life over against the providence of God. Rather, he is conceding that what human beings actually can experience is evil’s caprice, the randomness of suffering, perhaps for Christians with the expectation that the justice of God will prevail for the righteous but not necessarily in this earthly life. The tragedy here is amplified all the more because, as in the classical forms, Celestiacus is a “weighty” (σπουδαῖος) character, not just an everyman, who has suffered catastrophe. Even though confuting pagan criticism of Christian faith and defending God’s justice and providence remained a priority well after the Peace of the Church in 313, certain Christian writers in this postConstantinian era exercised ever greater freedom to dramatize the earthly travails of Christians as well as non-Christians in starkly realistic terms. Such

¹¹ Ep. 32 (SC 98:92–4). ¹² Ep. 33 (SC 98:94). ¹³ Euripides, Troades, ll. 1204–6, trans. David Kovacs (LCL 10:126, 127). ¹⁴ Ep. 34 (SC 98:96). ¹⁵ Epp. 35–6 (SC 98:96–100).

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realism stifled possible expectations that the brave new order after the Roman persecutions was suddenly going to inaugurate an earthly panacea. As the present chapter unfolds, it should become clear that it was not enough, for some Christian authors at least, simply to propound a predigested theodicy that obviated any questioning of God’s sovereign purposes or the character of his mercies. The fullness of God’s goodness, justice, and wisdom came to light, not simply by rigorously philosophical and theological arguments, nor by resorting to biblical proof-texts of “redeemable” suffering, but rather, paradoxically, by making real space for the despair, desperation, and disorientation accompanying profound human misery, and by demonstrating how these were taken up into the gospel of the incarnate Logos—all in a period when patristic theology was modifying older philosophical notions of an “impassible” (ἀπαθής; impassibilis) God.¹⁶ John Chrysostom observes this accommodation in a simple example, when, discussing the healing of the paralytic (John 5:1–9), he highlights how Christ did not just immediately remove the man’s infirmity, but first asked him if he desired to be healed (5:6), specifically so as to allow him “tragically to recount” (ἐκτραγῳδῆσαι) his personal disaster. Thereby, says Chrysostom, Christ gestured to future generations the depth of divine philanthrôpia as well as the imperative to persevere through suffering.¹⁷ For purposes of clarity and concreteness, I will be profiling some distinctive “faces and bodies” of tragedy in the purview of the late-ancient Church that various authors targeted for their audiences’ consideration and compassion— mostly but not exclusively in the context of preaching. The case studies that follow are certainly not exhaustive, but they are, I believe, representative, and illustrate the attempts of Christian preachers to foster what I shall be calling a tragical conscience. Such a conscience, as I find them projecting it, takes to heart the residual moral and doctrinal questions evoked by abject human suffering: e.g. whether it appears self-induced or “innocent”; whether and how it works to God’s retributive or rehabilitative ends; whether it carries special significance for training Christian practice and ascetical discipline; whether and how it solicits compassionate Christian response; and so on. But the peculiarly tragical bent of this conscience is the wisdom to put theodicy in its proper place while entering empathetically into the horizon of those whose wretchedness has left them powerless to make sense of their lot, or those whose very humanity appears devastated by circumstances, or even those languishing in a catastrophe of their own doing. Discerning the intelligibility of specific cases of suffering, as early Christian preachers came to realize, was not, in the end, merely about keeping a ledger of the putative justice or ¹⁶ For the story of this modification, see Paul Gavrilyuk’s masterful The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ¹⁷ Hom. contra Anomoeos (= de incomprehensibili Dei natura) 12.2 (PG 48:804–5).

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injustice of each case. It was about seeing the human condition with renewed moral and spiritual eyes. In the next chapter, moreover, I will be exploring the affective dimension of the response to human tragedy, the unique moral intelligence of emotions pivotal to tragical vision in early Christianity. In this chapter, I am using “faces” of tragedy quite intentionally, and hopefully not anachronistically, in deference to the phenomenological analysis of the face in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion. In his deep investigation of the dynamics of identity and alterity in human intersubjectivity, Levinas famously posits that the “face” is the primal point of encounter between “the other” and oneself, confronting the self by its sheer “manifestation” or “epiphany” apart from spoken language, and so too apart from attachments to “being” or “essence” as the means to secure identity and overcome alterity. For Levinas and Marion alike, the face of the other imposes on a subject’s gaze; it foregrounds a living presence who commands a subject’s attention (or “intentionality”) while also wresting that subject from purely egoistic desire or self-interest.¹⁸ The alien face opens up the self to a nameless “transcendence” in the presence of the transcendent Other, which in turn engenders compassion, ethical responsibility for the human other, and an even more radical self-giving for the sake of the divine Other and human other.¹⁹ There are, of course, no simple patristic analogues for these modern phenomenological reflections on the power of the human face for ethics. And the ancient authors we are considering attended more to whole bodies as revealers and agents of the spiritual beings occupying them. Nonetheless there are intriguing parallels with the interests of a Levinas or a Marion. With the case studies below, a common element in the cultivation of tragical conscience by Christian preachers was the urgency to insinuate the nameless presences of alienated or beleaguered strangers into their audiences’ immediate visual field and ethical space, with a view to something far more radical than a mere disruption of one’s personal security. There was urgency as well to break down overly tidy rationalizations and objectifications of others’ miseries which lingered in complacent Christian consciences, and which undermined compassion and empathy. Patristic moralists, moreover, brought to bear their own ideas of how compassion for others who were locked in grievous states of suffering had, as its true context, an encounter with the transcendent-butincarnate Word who condescended precisely to the likes of these and who ¹⁸ See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 42–8, 74–5, 187–219, 293–4; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 3–20, 89–93, 131–6; cf. Marion’s analysis of the phenomenology of the face, see In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), esp. 75–81, 113–27. ¹⁹ Cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33–42, 48–151, 254–85, 304–5; Otherwise than Being, 61–129.

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made himself present through their faces and bodies (cf. Matt. 25:40). Lateancient Roman society was full of the faces and bodies of tragedy, and the challenge was not just to notice them but to gaze more intently toward them, and so to respond to them with appropriate judgment and mercy, such as could “cleanse” the Christian’s tragical conscience.

FACES AND BODIES OF TRAGEDY I: THE INDIGENT AND THE DISEASED Early Christian perceptions of and responses to the poor have become the focus of a substantial body of scholarship in recent decades, some of it debating the extent to which patristic writings, sermons in particular, accurately convey the nature and visibility of indigence in late Roman and Byzantine society as well as the precise character of Christian responses to poverty.²⁰ Peter Brown and others have claimed that bishops, looking to extend their institutional powers in the post-Constantinian Church, significantly changed public attitudes to the poor, making them into a readily visible social class who could now regularly benefit from episcopal patronage.²¹ The Cappadocian Fathers and John Chrysostom are often referenced in this connection because of their consistent regard for the poor and the imperatives of Christian philanthropy in their preaching.²² But Richard Finn has challenged this perspective with evidence that Christian euergetism remained quite broadbased,²³ and that if Christian authors and preachers intended to make the destitute more visible, it turned out to be only a relative visibility at that. Typically in pagan society, Finn explains, the poor had been viewed as a social group deserving of contempt. If Christian philanthropists were going to break through this pattern, the poor needed to remain something of an ambiguous presence, lest exhibiting them too personally in their suffering actually render them even more contemptible and put off potential benefactors.²⁴

²⁰ For orientation to this scholarship and the interpretive issues at stake, see Pauline Allen, Bronwen Neil, and Wendy Mayer, Preaching Poverty in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Realities (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2009), 15–33; also Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–33. ²¹ See Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 45–73. ²² See esp. Susan Holman, The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). ²³ Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, 34–115. ²⁴ Richard Finn, “Portraying the Poor: Descriptions of Poverty in Christian Texts from the Late Roman Empire,” in Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne, eds., Poverty in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 136–7.

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This all seems counterintuitive, but in terms of ancient thinking on pity and compassion, it makes perfect sense. For Aristotle and many others in his wake, whether in real life or in staged tragedy, the closer the viewer was in social or personal status to another who was suffering unmerited pain (λύπη), the more the powerful emotions of fear and pity were likely to register themselves—fear because the other’s suffering was too close for comfort, and pity because that same suffering was unjust.²⁵ Fear would thus be commanded by distance or alterity, pity by intimacy or identification. The key for Christian preachers seeking to promote care for the poor was rhetorically to negotiate this dialectic of distance and closeness, alterity and identity. Drawing the indigent and diseased too close to their audiences’ attention and emotional space could trigger fear and repulsion, counterproductive for almsgiving. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that some of those not only in the broader social foreground but in the very audiences of Christian preachers and writers were already relatively poor themselves.²⁶ These included what sociologists call the “conjunctural” poor, that is, people without the competencies to sustain themselves long-term, or else the “occasional” (or “episodic”) poor, people with petty trades and skills who lived precariously on the brink of falling into indigence.²⁷ People in either of these categories could look in the faces of the hardcore (“endemic”) poor and see their own future prospects—hardly a motivation for charitable response. On the other hand, if the poor and diseased were kept at too remote a distance, to the point that the injustice of their miseries was virtually imperceptible, how could any level of intimacy adequate to expressing authentic mercy (the best possible prompt for almsgiving) be achieved? Rhetorically dramatizing the plight of the poor and diseased became an important means of negotiating this difficulty. Gregory Nazianzen begins his Oration 14 (On the Love of the Poor) by invoking biblical commandments to virtue and charity, but quickly segues into a much more graphic and

²⁵ Aristotle, Poetica 1453A; cf. Rhetorica 1385B. ²⁶ Basil of Caesarea appears to address the same type of “relative poor” in his Hom. 7.5 (In divites) (PG 31:292B); Hom. 8.5–6 (Dicta tempore famis et siccitatis) (PG 31:317C–321A), as does Gregory of Nyssa in De beneficentia (de pauperibus amandis) 1 (GNO 9.1:98, ll. 13–14). Chrysostom does as well: see Wendy Mayer, “John Chrysostom: Extraordinary Preacher, Ordinary Audience,” in Mary Cunningham and Pauline Allen, eds., Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 123, with citations. ²⁷ On these categories, see Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, 22–6; Allen et al., Preaching Poverty, 26–8, 42, 82, 149, 211. Both these studies lean on the fine work of Anneliese Parkin, “Poverty in the Early Roman Empire: Ancient and Modern Conceptions and Constructs” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2001), 7–8, 11–12. Parkin appropriates a threefold sociological distinction: not only (1) the occasional or episodic poor, and the (2) conjunctural poor, but also, and most fundamentally, (3) the endemic poor, those locked into lifelong poverty with little or no hope of escape.

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pathos-laden appeal.²⁸ Diseased indigents become an immediate focus, not only because there is already a distance between healthy “spectators” and those “others” deformed by disabling illness,²⁹ but also because the precariousness of embodiment, the liability of all bodies to disease, levels the landscape and forces the healthy into identifying with those robbed of physical vivacity.³⁰ Those like lepers, who are the victims of disfiguring disease, are eminently tragic figures, especially worthy of tragical pity, because they have known good health and then fallen from it precipitously, being “betrayed” by the body itself.³¹ They are truly endemic poor who have no hope whatsoever for rising beyond their circumstance.³² They are “a dreadful and pathetic sight,” “the pitiful wreckage of what had once been human beings…[and] the only people in the world who hate and feel pity for themselves at the same time.”³³ They are already a thoroughly tragic spectacle that cannot go unnoticed, a spectacle that includes a mother desperate to comfort her ravaged son, posing again Job’s question (Job 3:11–12) by asking why the son ever had to grow in her womb and see the light of day in the first place. “As she says these words,” writes Gregory, “she unleashes a flood of tears; the poor woman wants to embrace her child’s flesh but shrinks from it in hostile fear.”³⁴ Even in the intimacy of motherhood, she recoils, for the boy is untouchable. No wonder, then, that Nazianzen confesses that even tragical language falls short of conveying the misery of the abject poor.³⁵ Gregory is especially vexed by the fact that these diseased bodies show up at Christian festivals, perhaps merely to see a human face, hear a human voice, or find a food scrap, only to be met with horrified gawking by Christians who should surely know better.³⁶ Some bystanders gather round them like spectators at a drama, deeply affected, but only for a moment…Why lay out the full measure of their tragedy to those in the midst of celebration? Perhaps I might raise a dirge even among yourselves, if I were to evoke in tragic detail all their sorrows; then their suffering will overwhelm your festal spirit. I speak this way because I am not yet able to

²⁸ On Gregory’s rhetoric of pathos in Or. 14, see Susan Wessel, Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 40–6. ²⁹ In Or. 14.9 (PG 35:868B–C), Gregory laments the fact that the diseased are often so abhorrent that people avoid them at all costs, such that “they sense that they are hated for their misfortune.” ³⁰ Ibid. 14.10 (PG 35:869A–B). Gregory muses on the self-delusion whereby people are foolish enough to think that if they just avoid the diseased they will be guaranteed good health. ³¹ Ibid. 14.6 (PG 35:865A). ³² Ibid. 14.9 (PG 35:868B–C). ³³ Ibid. 14.10 (PG 35:869A), trans. Martha Vinson, FOTC 107:45. At ibid. 14.16 (877B), Gregory observes that the diseased are grateful to their own eyes that they do not have to look upon their own ravaged state. ³⁴ Or. 14.11 (PG 35:869C–871A), trans. Vinson, FOTC 107:46. ³⁵ Or. 43.63 (SC 384:264). ³⁶ Or. 14.12–13 (PG 35:871B–873D).

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persuade you that sometimes anguish is of more value than pleasure, sadness than celebration, meritorious tears than unseemly laughter (Eccl. 7:3).³⁷

Gregory heaps irony and scorn on his Christian audience and tries to turn the table. Who are the genuinely tragic characters here? Are they the destitute dressed in rags and scrambling for whatever paltry food they can find to keep them alive? Or are they those Christians primping about in fine linen gowns meant to enhance their fleeting appearance even when those same costumes will eventually be eaten up by moths and fade into oblivion?³⁸ Superficially it seems that Gregory, in this oration setting out the horrors of poverty and disease in the most morbid and gruesome terms, risks opening even greater distance between spectators and victims, inducing potential almsgivers to flee in fear. Gregory, however, does not want to put away all fear; he simply wants to elicit the right kind of fear. Indigents remain an imposing, haunting, and inescapable presence intruding itself into Christians’ sense of well-being. They force Gregory’s audience to ponder the “human condition” (τὰ ἀνθρώπινα), the inevitable fickleness of human fortune, the way in which prosperity is here one moment and gone the next.³⁹ Like the pieces in a child’s game of checkers, the goods enjoyed in this life move this way and that between owners until time snatches them away or someone seizes them out of envy.⁴⁰ Meanwhile, opposite fear, on the pity side of the equation, there are no “named” victims and, besides a few examples describing suffering individuals, no “personal profiles” of the poor in Gregory’s speech such as appear consistently in appeals made by modern Christian relief organizations that see this as an essential strategy for charitable activism. Like other episcopal preachers of the same period, Nazianzen seeks to engender mercy toward the destitute rather by highlighting the common humanity shared by the poor and the flourishing alike, and more especially the fact that the poor are created in the image of God⁴¹ and are “members of Christ,”⁴² and that Christ himself indwells their afflicted bodies, meeting the merciful Christian there.⁴³ Christ is the one who gives face to the seemingly faceless. Gregory’s tragical mimesis in Oration 14 is a function of his larger Christian philosophia concerning the world, evil, the randomness and injustice of much human suffering, and the providence and mercy of God. Tragical mimesis draws the Christian audience on stage, as it were, with the poor and the diseased as their fellow tragic selves, players in the same drama. It problematizes the motivation for almsgiving by resisting the urge simply to reissue biblical commandments on care for the poor (though these remain binding), ³⁷ Ibid. 14.13 (PG 35:873C–D), trans. Vinson, FOTC 107:48. For a similar scene, see Or. 43.63 (Funeral Oration for Basil) (SC 384:262–4). ³⁸ Or. 14.16–17 (PG 35:876D–880B). ³⁹ Ibid. 14.19 (PG 35:881A–C). ⁴⁰ Ibid. 14.20 (PG 35:882D–884A). ⁴¹ Ibid. 14.14 (PG 35:876A). ⁴² Ibid. 14.37 (PG 35:908A). ⁴³ Ibid. 14.40 (PG 35:909B–C).

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and by exploring more precisely the emotions that inform philanthropy. It becomes clear that for Gregory, almsgiving is altogether worthy of the Christian, but if it is couched purely in terms of feeling momentary pity for the indigent because they have already lived out a horror story, it cannot subsist. Christians with means must meet the poor and diseased at the ground zero of human vulnerability. They must cultivate a tragical conscience, something that is, from the standpoint of moral psychology, much deeper and more viable than a fleetingly guilty conscience. Basil of Caesarea, the greatest promoter of institutionalized Christian philanthropy in late antiquity, also develops a tragical mimesis in his preaching on poverty and almsgiving. Like Nazianzen, he employs vignettes of the particularly horrific scenes played out every day in the lives of the desperately poor, such as the parent who, utterly disempowered by circumstance, contemplates selling a child into slavery in order to survive. Which one should I sell first? Which one will earn the greatest favor with the grain merchant? Should I choose the eldest? But I cannot bear to do so, since he is firstborn. The youngest? But I take pity on his youth, as yet untouched by tragedy (συμφορῶν). This one looks just like his mother, that one shows aptitude in his lessons. Curse this helplessness! What am I to do? How can I forget the bond of nature? If I hold onto all of them, I must watch them all perish with hunger. If I send one of them away, how will I be able to look the others in the eye ever again?⁴⁴

The last of the Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa, likewise engages in tragical mimesis to dramatize the incredibly disastrous peripety of those fallen into both poverty and severe disease, some of them even reduced to a sub-human physical state, no longer standing upright but lumbering about as monster-like quadrupeds.⁴⁵ They are actors in a theatre of the grotesque: Can you see these melancholy dancers, this mournful and wretched chorus? How are they able to parade around with their misfortunes? How are they able to theatricalize (θεατρίζουσι) their disfigured bodies? How, like jugglers, can they sport their various infirmities before the crowd? They are singers of forlorn melodies, composers of grievous tales, and provide lyrics for their sad compositions. Poets of a new and ill-fated tragedy (τραγῳγοὶ τῆς καινῆς ταύτης καὶ δυστυχοῦς τραγῳδίας), they use no alternative tragic themes (τραγῳδήμασι) to evoke emotion, but fill up the stage with their own woes.⁴⁶

Like Nazianzen, Nyssen explores tragical fear and how it operates on the audience of this spectacle of the poor and diseased. While Nazianzen tries to ⁴⁴ Hom. in illud: “Destruam horrea mea, et majora aedificabo” (Luke 12:18) 4 (PG 31:268D– 269A), trans. C. Paul Schroeder, Saint Basil the Great: On Social Justice, PPS 38 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 64–5. ⁴⁵ De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 2 (GNO 9/1:114–15). ⁴⁶ Ibid. (GNO 9/1:116–17).

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nuance an appropriate kind of fear in the presence of the poor, namely, a healthy fear of how suffering can capriciously visit all human beings of whatever material estate, Nyssen advises an equally salutary fear of God (the God who is not a respecter of persons), which evens out the differences between those of means and the victims of indigence.⁴⁷ Nyssen also assails the sadly prevalent fear that lacks the courage provided by Christian mercy, a fear of contamination or of the contagiousness of disease that continues to express itself in revulsion and evasion.⁴⁸ How can this possibly compare with the horrid fear of their bodily lot that the diseased live with every day? These are persons, after all, who are ashamed to carry the title of human beings and anguish over insulting the name of humanity’s common nature.⁴⁹ Besides the Cappadocians, John Chrysostom, who employed theatrical imagery prolifically in his writings, proves as well to be a master of tragical mimesis in certain of his sermons, so many of which are preoccupied with issues of poverty, wealth, and Christian benevolence.⁵⁰ He opens a homily On Almsgiving by graphically setting forth the bitter “spectacles” (θεάματα) of the poor, “some with severed hands, others with gouged-out eyes, others filled with festering ulcers and incurable wounds, especially exposing those body parts that, because of their stored-up rottenness, they should be concealing.” John presses his audience to see them, pitifully, as self-employed entrepreneurs of a sort in their struggle to survive.⁵¹ “What fields and houses and other sources of revenue are to the wealthy, this body is to the poor.” During the summer months their situation is physically better, and they might even be able to find some modest work. But in the winter all that changes, and their urgency for food and shelter surges exponentially.⁵² Particularly in his homilies on the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), as Francine Cardman has highlighted,⁵³ Chrysostom goes to ⁴⁷ De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 1 (GNO 9/1:97). I will take up this theme again in the next chapter. ⁴⁸ De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 2 (GNO 9/1:124). See also Wessel, Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity, 52–6. ⁴⁹ De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 2 (GNO 9/1:118). ⁵⁰ In discussing the “faces and bodies” of the poor and diseased, I am not including Augustine, since he is interested less in the visibility of the impoverished than in the religious motivation and character of almsgiving, set against an eschatological backdrop and with the conviction that through almsgiving Christians are storing up a treasure in heaven. See Pauline Allen and Edward Morgan, “Augustine on Poverty,” in Allen et al., Preaching Poverty, 119–70. ⁵¹ Elsewhere Chrysostom gives evidence of some indigent persons actually making “spectacles” of themselves as street entertainers: cf. Hom. in 1 Cor. 21 (PG 61:177); Hom. in Rom. 4 (PG 60:420); Hom. in 1 Thess. 11 (PG 62:465); also Wendy Mayer, “John Chrysostom on Poverty,” in Allen et al., Preaching Poverty, 86–7; Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 56–7. ⁵² De eleemosyna (PG 51:261), trans. Gus George Christo, FOTC 96:131, 132. ⁵³ “Poverty and Wealth as Theater: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Lazarus and the Rich Man,” in Susan Holman, ed., Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 159–75.

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considerable lengths to visualize and theatricalize the plight of the indigent. His mission is to force them into his audience’s purview, using various Greek verbs for “seeing” (βλέπειν, ἰδεῖν, ὁρᾶν, θεωρεῖν) the poor more than ninety times in the homilies.⁵⁴ Truly seeing the poor is the first and pivotal step in the breakthrough to caring for them in their suffering. The outrageous sin of the rich man is that he unmistakably saw Lazarus, “a spectacle of grievous tragedy” (θέατρον χαλεπῆς τραγῳδίας),⁵⁵ and yet remained utterly impervious,⁵⁶ and now Chrysostom’s congregation is in imminent danger of doing the same. They are implicated in an unfolding tragedy in which the rich man and Lazarus are respectively antagonist and protagonist. By a sudden and dramatic peripety—and role reversal—death casts the rich man down into the torments of Hades while poor Lazarus, at his death, enters into the sublime bosom of Abraham (Luke 16:22–3). For John it is an “unmasking,” a shift from mimesis to reality as the internal spiritual poverty of the rich man is at last exposed. Just as in a play, where actors appear on stage wearing the masks of kings, generals, physicians, orators, sophists, and soldiers when actually they are none of these, so also in our current life poverty and wealth are sheer guises. So while you are sitting in the theatre, if you see one of the actors wearing the mask of a king, you do not simply consider him happy or as actually being a king. Nor would you vow to be one such as him. Rather, seeing that he is a commoner, perhaps a rope-maker or coppersmith or some such, you neither suppose him happy because of his mask and costume nor determine his actual way of life from these things, but you look down on him because of his low estate. So it is in real life here and now. We sit in the world as though in a theatre, watching the actors on stage. Whenever you see many wealthy persons, do not consider them actually wealthy, but rather arrayed in the mere guise of wealth. For just as one actor playing a king or a general on stage may in reality be a household servant or a seller of figs or grapes in the marketplace, so too the rich man may frequently be the poorest of all. For if you strip away his mask and examine his conscience, and enter his mind, you will discover severe poverty of virtue, and that he is the most disgraceful man of all. And just as, when evening descends on the theatrical performances, and the spectators leave and go their separate ways, the actors also depart without their costumes, and those who appeared to everyone as kings and generals are suddenly seen as what they actually are. It’s the same with our life here and now. When death comes, and the theatre [of this world] is deserted, and all people, stripped of their masks of wealth and poverty, leave there judged solely by their works, they will be exposed, some as truly rich, some truly poor, some honorable, some disgraceful.⁵⁷

Chrysostom’s potent theatrical imagery here leaves his audiences in Antioch little if any room for extracting themselves from the drama of wealth and

⁵⁴ Ibid., 166, n. 29. ⁵⁵ Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso 10 (SC 103:108). ⁵⁶ Ibid.; and Hom. de Lazaro 1.6 (PG 48:971). ⁵⁷ Hom. de Lazaro 2.3 (PG 48:986).

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poverty. By figural interpretation that collapses any gap between these Christians and the characters in Jesus’s story, they are inextricable actors alongside the rich man and Lazarus. With this rhetorical strategy, John looks to instill a tragical conscience in his congregants, a habit both of social vigilance and moral self-awareness wherewith they imagine themselves in a cosmic drama in which appearances are deceiving and the terms of true wealth and true poverty are being shattered and redefined. John challenges them not just to “see” the poor (and the rich) phenomenally, but to contemplate, on a higher level, the eschatological testing of compassion and generosity that they are undergoing. Implication in the drama is undoubtedly destabilizing for the Christian faithful but its denouement is potentially redemptive. As part of their tragical mimesis, the two Cappadocian Gregories and John Chrysostom to some degree heroize the indigent and diseased, not necessarily in order to turn them into formal paragons of Christian virtues of endurance, but to exhibit how, even passively, even unwittingly, in their public display of egregious affliction or in their sheer muteness and disability, they play a signal role in the Christian community as agents of divine judgment and transformation. The poor, writes Gregory of Nyssa, are the stewards (ταμίαι) of anticipated goods, gatekeepers of the Kingdom, who open the gates to those who are kind and shut them to those who are acrimonious and misanthropic. They are severe accusers and yet good advocates, accusing and advocating not with spoken words but by being seen (ὁρώμενοι) by the Judge. For the deed done to the poor resounds more clearly than the herald’s trumpet in the presence of the One who knows the heart.⁵⁸

Those who, like a “myriad of Lazaruses,” lie at the gate in an utterly degraded physical state, their cries for help drowned out by the raucous singing and howling from dinner parties inside, then cruelly turned away with sticks and whips, are the “beloved of Christ,” and fulfill the chief commandment (Matt. 22:37–9) simply by enduring hostility and abuse.⁵⁹ In other ways too these bishops sought to dignify the poor, with or without heroizing them.⁶⁰ Gregory Nazianzen, as I noted earlier, insisted on the poor as creatures in God’s image and “members of Christ.” They participate in that original “equality of status” (ἰσονομία) that marked human creaturehood in prelapsarian paradise.⁶¹ He speaks as well for their common humanity, being “equals and kindred” (ὁμοφύλοι καὶ ὁμοτίμοι) with whom people of means are ⁵⁸ De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 1 (GNO 9/1:99). ⁵⁹ Ibid. (GNO 9/1:106). ⁶⁰ The Hungry Are Dying, 148–67. ⁶¹ Or. 14.26 (PG 35:892B). Holman (The Hungry Are Dying, 150) translates ἰσονομία “equality of rights,” which risks overloading the term with modern connotations of civil rights. Nazianzen is using the term theologically. Numerous Greek patristic authors uphold the equality of human nature on theological grounds without immediate concern for the political domain. Holman herself shows some recognition of this fact (pp. 152–3).

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intrinsically connected.⁶² More on the heroic side is the role of the poor and diseased as brokers of holiness and facilitators of the salvation of almsgivers. As Susan Holman has emphasized, Nazianzen and Nyssen alike note that the fear of the contagiousness of disease was a serious obstacle to potential almsgiving; but they both turn the table on this fear.⁶³ Nyssen plays off of the paradox that the sufferer’s afflicted body, because of its identification with the condescending and indwelling Christ, communicates holiness to those who reach out in kindness with aid. Both Gregories call leprosy the “sacred disease” (ἱερὰ νόσος), principally in reference to the biblical Lazarus, who, in Luke 16:20, is said to have sores but not necessarily leprosy.⁶⁴ Chrysostom agrees, noting how Lazarus, in his utter misery and passivity, was already pure of soul, enduring, patient, “his will (γνώμη) sprouting wings.”⁶⁵ He similarly extols the paralytic in John 5, who, despite the “magnitude of his tragedy” (τῆς τραγῳδίας τὸ μέγεθος), with “a heart crushed by protracted ailments,” manages to answer Jesus’s bid to heal him (John 5:6–7) without seeing it as a joke, without blaspheming, without “cursing his day,” instead humbly narrating his situation and looking to Jesus for help.⁶⁶ As Holman concludes of these strange inversions, the diseased, once set apart for their pollution, become a symbol of all that is now “set apart” for God.⁶⁷ As utterly desperate and hopeful candidates for physical healing, they are agents of spiritual healing from sin for those willing to show them compassion. In the tragedy of abject human suffering, they are heroic precisely in their total inability to transcend that suffering, thereby imitating the depth of Christ’s own passion.

FACES AND BODIES OF TRAGEDY II: P ARASITES, S O C I E T Y’ S TRA GIC CO MICS Along the spectrum of economically imperiled persons in Romano-Byzantine society was the “parasite,” the sponge or sycophant who sought to sustain himself by attaching to a more securely situated patron. Because this required proficiency at sundry antics or theatrics to entertain and placate the patron, the parasite had become a stock character early on in Greek and Roman literature, especially in comedy, and was often closely paired with the figure

⁶² Or. 14.28 (PG 35:896C). ⁶³ Cf. ibid. 14.27 (PG 35:893B–896A); Gregory of Nyssa, De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 2 (GNO 9/1:124); also Holman’s analysis in The Hungry Are Dying, 158–63. ⁶⁴ Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 14.6 (PG 35:865A); Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione (GNO 3/3:106, l. 5). ⁶⁵ John Chrysostom, Hom. de Lazaro 6 (PG 48:1034). ⁶⁶ Hom. in Johannem 37.1 (PG 59:207). ⁶⁷ The Hungry Are Dying, 161.

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of the “flatterer” (κόλαξ).⁶⁸ Foreshadowed in some of the beggars in Homeric poetry, the parasite first shows up in earnest as a comical character in the Sicilian dramatist Epicharmus (late sixth and early fifth century BCE), often considered the pioneer of ancient comedy relating to good manners and table etiquette. In his comedy Hope or Wealth, the parasite appears onstage as the quintessential freeloader, boasting of his ingenuity in survival: I sup with anyone who likes, if he has only the good sense to invite me; and with each man who makes a marriage feast, whether I’m invited or not, and there I am witty; there I make others laugh, and there I praise the host, who gives the feast. And if by chance anyone dares to say a word against the host, I arm myself for contest, and overwhelm him. Then, eating much and drinking plentifully, I leave the house. No slave-boy doth attend me; but I do pick my way with stumbling steps, both dark and desolate; and if sometimes I do the watchmen meet, I swear to them by all the gods that I have done no wrong; but they still set on me. At last, well beaten, I reach my home, and go to sleep on the ground, and for a while forget my blows and bruises, while the strong wine retains its sway and lulls me.⁶⁹

Unwelcome, and yet deftly getting a foot in the door, eating and drinking his life away, a classic sycophant, the parasite also inevitably betrays his underlying poverty and inequality.⁷⁰ Indeed, one of his especially useful satirical functions, in his marginal position, is to epitomize the thin line between social inclusion and exclusion,⁷¹ a position likely in effective drama to stir a range of audience emotions, from contempt, to blithe or humored approval, to tragical pity. In today’s theatrical jargon, the parasite would be an ideal candidate for “black comedy.”

⁶⁸ See the grammarian Athenaeus of Naucratis, Deipnosophistae, VI.261F–262A (LCL 224:176–8). ⁶⁹ Epicharmus, Hope or Wealth, ap. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae VI.235F–236B (LCL 224:62). The translation here is that of Charles Duke Yonge in The Deipnosphists, or Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus, Bohn’s Classical Library (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 1:372 (slightly altered). ⁷⁰ John Wilkins, The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 321. ⁷¹ For a full study of this dramatic function of the parasite, see Elizabeth Tylawsky, Saturio’s Inheritance: The Greek Ancestry of the Roman Comic Parasite (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

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Given this versatility, it is little wonder that the entertaining persona of the parasite has endured for centuries,⁷² assuming faces not only in the Greek comedies of Eupolis, Alexis, Antiphanes, Menander, and the later Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence,⁷³ but again in the early modern and modern periods with the likes of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Molière’s Tartuffe (1664), Victor Hugo’s Thénardier in Les Misérables (1862), and much more recently surfacing in the role of Jerry Baskin (Nick Nolte) in the 1986 motion picture Down and Out in Beverly Hills. There are no overt references to parasites in the New Testament and earliest Christian literature, though a case has recently been made that Paul has in mind to caricature his Corinthian opponents as parasites in 2 Corinthians 11:20, where he chides the faithful for putting up with those who prey on them.⁷⁴ It has also been argued that the Apostle is taking on the role of a benevolent flatterer in 1 Corinthians in claiming to become all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:19–23).⁷⁵ But the parasite reappears much later in patristic homiletic literature, most notably in the late fourth century in John Chrysostom in the East, and a halfcentury after him, the Gallican bishop Valerian of Cimiez in the West. These writers, especially Chrysostom,⁷⁶ stage the parasite quasi-theatrically in some of their homilies, not simply as a familiar stereotype in the real and fictional dinner parties of the wealthy but also as exactly the kind of marginal figure in society who can test a Christian audience’s response to poverty and suffering, exploiting once more, like the ancient dramatists, the fine line between revulsion and compassion. In John’s case, I believe we can identify likely sources for his caricature of the parasite, and acquire a good sense of how the profile of the parasite was received specifically within the society and culture that John inhabited. Generally speaking, we can safely assume that any student enjoying the level of classical education obtained by Chrysostom would have been thoroughly familiar with the parasite as a literary and dramatic type. John rarely cites the Greek poets and when he does it is usually ⁷² See Myriam Roman and Anne Tomiche, eds., Figures du parasite (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2001). ⁷³ On the evolution of the parasite as dramatic type in Greek and Roman comedy, see HeinzGünther Nesselrath, “Parasite,” in Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, eds., Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopedia of the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 10:522–3; J. C. B. Lowe, “Plautus’ Parasites and the Atellana,” in Gregor Vogt-Spira, ed., Studien zur vorliterarischen Periode im frühen Rom (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1989), 161–9; J. O. Lofberg, “The SycophantParasite,” Classical Philology 15 (1920): 61–72; P. G. McC. Brown, “Menander, Fragments 745 and 746 K-T, Menander’s Kolax, and Parasites and Flatterers in Greek Comedy,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 92 (1992): 98–107. ⁷⁴ See Larry Welborn, “Paul’s Caricature of His Chief Rival as a Pompous Parasite in 2 Corinthians 11.20,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32 (2009): 39–56. ⁷⁵ See Clarence Glad, Paul and Philodemus: Adaptability in Epicurean and Early Christian Psychogogy (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 15–52. ⁷⁶ According to the TLG, the term παράσιτος and its cognates appear 79 times in Chrysostom’s writings.

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with contempt, not appreciation. There is only one fleeting (and anonymous) quotation from the comedy writer Menander, with no reference to parasites.⁷⁷ It is likely, however, that John would have been familiar with Lucian of Samosata’s bold satire The Parasite, a work whose sardonic protagonist, the parasite Simon, skillfully mounts an argument that sponging is an art (τέχνη παρασιτική) superior to rhetoric and philosophy.⁷⁸ Chrysostom would probably also have known Plutarch’s renowned treatise on How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,⁷⁹ a text that had significant influence on pagan and early Christian views of friendship⁸⁰—although Plutarch’s target was more the subtle and sophisticated sycophant than the bawdy trickster who is the usual butt of John’s criticism.⁸¹ Chrysostom’s most likely direct source for the figure of the parasite, however, was his own former teacher, the renowned rhetorician Libanius of Antioch. Among his Declamations, stylized monologues composed for practice-runs by students of rhetoric, two are placed in the mouth of a professional parasite.⁸² They are raucously funny and memorable. In the first of them, for example, the parasite delivers up a bombastic lamentation on having lost the opportunity to glut himself at a feast because of an accident involving the horse he had stolen from a hippodrome to ride to his host’s home. “I have held out against starvation,” he boasts, “just long enough to be able to tell you what I have suffered, and then end my life.”⁸³ He proceeds, then, in melodramatic detail to lay the blame on himself for the chain of oversights that led him to miss a good meal. And so I shall depart from the human scene, for my sufferings are beyond human limits. Some are troubled by the loss of money, some have been led to death by the loss of children: these things do not trouble me so much because I have not been

⁷⁷ A quotation from Menander’s Epitrepontes appears in Hom. in Matt. 80.4 (PG 58:729), identified by P. R. Coleman-Norton, “St. Chrysostom’s Use of the Greek Poets,” Classical Philology 27 (1932): 216. ⁷⁸ Full text of De Parasito in LCL 130:236–316. See also the important critical analysis by Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, Lukians Parasitendialog: Untersuchungen und Kommentar (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1985). ⁷⁹ Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur, in Plutarchi Moralia, 2nd ed., vol. 1, ed. W. R. Paton, Johannes Wegehaupt, Max Pohlenz, and Hans Gärtner, Bibliotheca scriptorum graecorum et romanorum teubneriana (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1993), 97–149. ⁸⁰ See Troels Engberg-Pedersen, “Plutarch to Prince Philopappus on How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,” in John T. Fitzgerald, ed., Friendship, Flattery, and Frankness of Speech: Studies on Friendship in the New Testament World (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 61–79; also David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98–103. ⁸¹ For Plutarch’s warnings against the subtle flatterers, see Quomodo adulator 4–6, 50D–52A (ed. Paton et al., Plutarchi Moralia, 1:100–3). ⁸² Declamationes 28 and 29, ed. Richard Foerster, Libanii Opera (Leipzig: Teubner, 1911), 6:573–610. ⁸³ Declam. 28 (ed. Foerster, Libani Opera 6:574), trans. Russell, 131.

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so keen on them in the first place; to me the greatest disaster is to be done out of a feast and a meal which is being set up in someone else’s house.⁸⁴

The amusement of such a declamation, just like the farcical presentations of parasites in comedic plays, should nevertheless not distract us from the very serious role they were capable of representing in late-ancient society. Let us return to the marginal status of the parasite. Already in Greek and Roman comedy, he provides comic relief precisely because he parodies Mediterranean cultures in which food is in great supply for some and in very short supply for others. He could appear as a poor wretch unable to conceal his desperation, or as an astute professional who could hold his own socially as long as the payoff was fine cuisine. As Cynthia Damon has further demonstrated, the parasite in Roman culture symbolized a particular “pathology” in the relation between a patron and one of lesser means looking to that patron for sustenance or other benefits. “The parasite,” Damon remarks, “is in fact a conveniently compact personified form of something quite abstract, of a complicated nexus of social irritants including flattery, favoritism, and dependency.”⁸⁵ The parasite, in a word, epitomizes and satirizes a whole range of possible abuses of the Roman patronage system. He also can appear from across the gamut of poverty, from the “relative poor,” discussed earlier, to the desperately hungry. The parasites in the preaching of Chrysostom and Valerian of Cimiez appear against the backdrop of a culture of rivalry and envy which saw the constant comparing of lots and the acute consciousness of having and having not.⁸⁶ It was a society in which many faced the live prospect of downward mobility.⁸⁷ The fear of at least temporary destitution was real, and the pervasive presence of the abjectly poor, some of whom congregated at the doors of churches, was a constant reminder of the threat of falling into indigence.⁸⁸ In this context, the parasite effectively served to parody the lavish life—and especially the dinner habits—of the wealthy who could afford to have parasites at their tables as the evening entertainment. Chrysostom explicitly repudiates the mutual exploitation of “the more affluent [who] pick out those persons whose laziness has made them victims of hunger, and maintain them as parasites and dogs feeding at the table; they stuff their shameless bellies with the leftovers of these iniquitous banquets and exploit their hosts at will.”⁸⁹ ⁸⁴ Ibid. 17 (ed. Foerster, Libani Opera 6:582–3), trans. Russell, 133. ⁸⁵ The Mask of the Parasite: A Pathology of Roman Patronage (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 7. See also her “Greek Parasites and Roman Patronage,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 (1995): 181–95. ⁸⁶ See my essay “Pity, Empathy, and the Tragic Spectacle of Human Suffering: Exploring the Emotional Culture of Compassion in Late Ancient Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18 (2010): 1–27. ⁸⁷ See Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, 18–26. ⁸⁸ Mayer, “John Chrysostom: Extraordinary Preacher, Ordinary Audience,” 124–5. ⁸⁹ Panegyricum in Babylam martyrem et contra Julianum et gentes (PG 50:544–5).

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A generation later, Valerian of Cimiez similarly censures affluent Christians in Gaul who, in the name of friendship, invited parasites to their banquets in order to abuse them for entertainment, making a mockery of them by teasing them with sumptuous food and drink.⁹⁰ Like John, Valerian primarily indicts the rich hosts, but he is also concerned with the welfare of the parasites themselves, acknowledging that they are unfortunate victims of poverty acting out of desperation to get what they can from society’s more privileged: While this man is eating, his beard gets pulled; while that one is drinking, his chair is pulled out from under him. This fellow eats from wood easily split, that one drinks from a glass which is easily broken. So great is the urge to laugh!… How great, do you think, are the miseries to which these deeds add up?⁹¹

In Chrysostom’s preaching, the two most basic responses to the character of the parasite inherited from Greco-Roman literary and theatrical culture— revulsion and compassion—come more clearly into focus. From one angle the parasite was an egregious exploiter and self-serving toady. But adjust the profile slightly and he was a truly tragic figure, the victim of an unwieldy system, a pawn in the depraved designs of the rich to enhance their public repute and widen their circle of friends. Two of John’s homilies are especially illustrative here, Homily 1 on Colossians, in which he clearly castigates parasites and Christians’ association with them, and Homily 48 on Matthew, in which he instead broaches the possibility of reaching out to parasites in benevolence and mercy. In the first sermon, Homily 1 on Colossians, where he is encouraging bonds of spiritual friendship within the community of the Church, John confronts his audience with images of two optional tables, or feasts, which the Christian might prospectively attend. The one is an extravagant spread in the presence of the wealthy and powerful, with all fineries and costly meats and wines. It is a table of mere appearance and of earthly honor.⁹² It can be imagined also as a thoroughgoing Herodian banquet (cf. Matt 14:6–11), a “theater of Satan” (θέατρον σατανικόν).⁹³ It is a table of demons (cf. 1 Cor. 10:21), a disgraceful feast of unbridled envy with the “evil eye” all around, the whole affair being shot through with personal and social rivalries.⁹⁴ But among its most prominent features is the presence of parasites presumably of all varieties—we can imagine social climbers, hangers-on, flatterers and sycophants, fools and lewd comics—all trying to ingratiate themselves to the host and thus to be fed

⁹⁰ ⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹³ ⁹⁴

Valerian of Cimiez, Hom. 10 (PL 52:722D–725A). Ibid. 10.2 (PG 52:723C–D); trans. George Gantz, FOTC 17:366. Hom. in Col. 1.4–5 (PG 62:304–7). Hom. in Matt. 48.3, 5 (PG 58:490, 493); cf. Hom. de Lazaro 6.4 (PG 48:1033). Hom. in Col. 1.5–6 (PG 62:306–8).

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well.⁹⁵ The second table, however, is a table set in the company of the poor, the infirm, the alienated, with Christ seated prominently among those with whom he most closely identifies. It is a modest feast, absent of fineries or exquisite foods; but it is also a table of true honor, true freedom, immune from the evil eye of envy and parasitism, and marked by philanthrôpia and by a profoundly spiritual and enduring friendship.⁹⁶ John describes both tables, the one of shame and the other of honor, while considering the nature of true Christian friendship, and against the larger backdrop of imminent eschatological judgment. As in certain pagan philosophical discussions, where parasites and flatterers are targeted as sham companions,⁹⁷ and where, in the words of one historian, authentic friendship is “a breathing space in a society permeated by a concern about status distinctions,”⁹⁸ Chrysostom assails the utter vanity and superficiality of parasitic friendships, and like Valerian later on, sees an abusive aspect in them as well. In Homily 48 on Matthew, he writes: Cast out the parasites, and make Christ recline for a meal with you. If he partakes of your salt, and of your table, he will be gentle in judging you…And consider, when you are conversing with him, the parasites: What kind of actions do they have to show for? What do they do to profit your household? What do they possibly do to make your meal pleasant? How can their being beaten with sticks and their lewd talk be pleasant? What could be more disgusting than when you strike one who has been created in God’s image, and from your insolence to him take enjoyment for yourself, turning your house into a theater, and filling your banquet with stage-players—you who are well-born and free mimicking actors who have shaved their heads for the stage?⁹⁹

In these banquet scenarios, in much the same manner as in his Homilies on the Rich Man and Lazarus, Chrysostom intentionally and artfully plays up the theatricality of the situation.¹⁰⁰ The profile of the parasite includes not just sponging, sycophancy, and sham friendship, but committing all these sins with the virtuosity of an actor, rendering his actions all the more opprobrious. To be in the company of parasites and their patrons is to be caught up in a large-scale stage production that stands in outrageous contrast with the ⁹⁵ Hom. in Col. 1.4, 6 (PG 62:305, 308); Hom. in Matt. 48.6 (PG 58:494–5). Cf. also Hom. in 1 Cor. 29.5 (PG 61:247); ibid. 34.6 (PG 61:296); Hom. in Eutropium eunuchum et patricium 1.1 (PG 52:391). ⁹⁶ Hom. in Col. 1.4–6 (PG 62:304–8). ⁹⁷ As mentioned above (see n. 79), one of the standard pagan texts in Chrysostom’s time would still have been Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend (Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur). ⁹⁸ Engberg-Pedersen, “Plutarch to Prince Philopappus on How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,” 77. ⁹⁹ Hom in Matt. 48.6 (PG 58:494). On the abuses of the pagan theatre infecting Christian behavior and etiquette, see also Hom. in Matt. 37.6–7 (PG 57:426–7). ¹⁰⁰ See Cardman, “Poverty and Wealth as Theater.”

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modesty and sobriety of a banquet with Christ in the company of the poor and the diseased. Further into his Homily 48 on Matthew, however, after employing the image of a Herodian banquet to heap scorn on the theatrics of parasitism, John surprises us with a whole different angle on parasites and on Christians’ response to them. In effect he blurs his images of the two dining tables, with parasites now qualifying as pitiful characters, for the focus turns abruptly from the buffoonery of parasites to their desperate state as victims of poverty who need to be provided food like any other of the poor. Here, indeed, John seeks to instill greater tragical conscience in his audience, urging it to reimagine the parasite in a new and compassionate light. Let feeding him be for purposes of loving-kindness (φιλανθρωπία), not cruelty; let it be for mercy (ἔλεος), not insolence. Because he is poor, feed him; because Christ [in him] is fed, feed him. Do not feed him for introducing satanic sayings and disgracing his life. Do not see him outwardly laughing, but examine his conscience, and you will see him speaking ten thousand curses on himself, and groaning, and mourning.¹⁰¹

What is more, Chrysostom recommends going the extra mile with them. So then let your meal companions be men that are poor and free, not perjurers nor mimes. And if you wish to barter with them for their food, bid them, if they see anything done wrongly, to reproach, to give counsel, to assist in taking care of your household and in governing your servants. Do you have children? Let these [former parasites] also be fathers to them; let them share your discipline with you, thus profiting you in ways that are cherished by God. Engage them in a spiritual profiteering. If you see one of them needing your patronage, help him, and command him to minister. Through these [former parasites] pursue strangers; through these clothe the naked; through these send to prison and relieve others’ suffering.¹⁰²

John does not stop here. Through this redemptive bartering with parasites he proposes the possibility of actually liberating them from their shame into authentic friendship (φιλία), so that “they again will dwell with you in confidence and appropriate freedom, and your house, instead of a theatre, will become for you a church, and the devil will be forced to flee, and Christ will enter in, as will a chorus of angels.”¹⁰³ Parasites are to be commended to the study of Scripture, to becoming ministers in the household and thereby becoming the equals of angels.¹⁰⁴ Set them free as well as your own self, and remove the name of parasite, and call them companions at your meals; and take away the label of flatterers, and apply to

¹⁰¹ Hom. in Matt. 48.7 (PG 58:495). ¹⁰³ Ibid. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid. (PG 58:495–6).

¹⁰² Ibid. (emphasis added in my translation).

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them the title of friends. This is why God created friendships: not for the detriment of the befriended and the friend, but for their welfare and benefit.¹⁰⁵

Chrysostom’s proposal of friendship with parasites is, in its societal context, and within the larger scope of his own moral preaching, quite daring. As several late-ancient Christian writers indicate (including Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Paulinus of Nola), the faithful could legitimately embrace friendship with the desperately poor and diseased, since, in the spiritual protocol of almsgiving, the destitute could return such friendship by bestowing earthly or heavenly blessings on their benefactors.¹⁰⁶ But the friendship of parasites came with all the baggage of the culture of entertainment and debauchery with which they remained linked. Chrysostom barely tenders his scenario of redemptive friendship with parasites before counseling extreme caution, since such would carry every potential of their reneging or lapsing.¹⁰⁷ Why this dialectical approach to benevolence toward parasites on Chrysostom’s part? A case can certainly be made that, as a sage Christian moralist, John is carefully weighing the high cost of discipleship and negotiating his audience between the opportunities and the perils of relationships with exactly those persons thought to be incapable of escaping the throes of pagan culture. But I wish to emphasize also the Greco-Roman literary and theatrical culture that underlies John’s image of the parasite, and to substantiate my claim that he is skillfully playing on the classic audience reactions to parasites: from revulsion, to humored approval, to compassion. As I noted earlier, the figure of the parasite exploited the fine line between social inclusion and exclusion. He is the supremely marginal figure, since he has no secure status with people of means, and yet, with his deft survival skills, he alienates himself from the destitute poor as well. But the parasite, as a dramatis persona, also exploited the fine line between comedy and tragedy, a line that Aristotle himself had originally recognized,¹⁰⁸ and of which ancient comic and tragic poets were also aware. Audiences gravitated to the spectacle of transgression, the reversal of norms, and social outrages, which could be found in comedy and tragedy alike.¹⁰⁹ In the same manner, I believe, Chrysostom is seeking, at least in his Homily 48 on Matthew, to steal the parasite from his native comic stage and recast him with a tragic script, as a hero of sorts striving to overcome his miserable circumstances in poverty and to find a new role, redeemed to a new dignity

¹⁰⁵ Ibid. (PG 58:496). ¹⁰⁶ On this point, see Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, 184–7. ¹⁰⁷ Hom. in Matt. 48.7 (PG 58:496). ¹⁰⁸ Poetica 1453A. ¹⁰⁹ On this fine line between tragedy and comedy, see Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 143–4; also Dirk Westerkamp, “Laughter, Catharsis, and the Patristic Conception of the Embodied Logos,” in John Michael Krois, Mats Rosengren, Angela Steidele, and Dirk Westerkamp, eds., Embodiment in Cognition and Culture (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 229–40.

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and honesty, in the theatre of Christian virtue. It is a tragedy, or else a very dark comedy, that comes with all the suspense of the parasite’s possible or even likely relapse into his old ways, or of his spiritual redemption turning out, ironically, to be his social and economic undoing. But it is also a tragedy where the audiences of John Chrysostom or Valerian of Cimiez could very well feel themselves being moved from revulsion to compassion.

FACES AND BODIES OF TRAGEDY III: MARRIEDS AND ASCETICS To modern Western eyes, it seems strange to be considering married and celibate Christians under the rubric of tragic faces and bodies in the purview of the late-ancient Church, at least until we take into account the critical role of sexual ethics, virginal asceticism, and the institution of marriage for Christian identity in this transitional age.¹¹⁰ The fourth and fifth centuries saw an enormous burst of Christian writing on these themes, in the form of treatises eulogizing the celibate life, works defending the legitimacy of marriage, hagiographies extolling the pioneers of a moral virginity greater than mere sexual chastity, and a growing corpus of monastic wisdom literature addressing bodily self-mortification and the retraining of the soul. Variegated forms of Christian asceticism and monasticism burgeoned in this period—from the austere bios philosophikos of desert anchorites like Antony of Egypt to the novel ascetical commitments of affluent Roman Christians (e.g. Paula and Eustochium) whose imaginations were captured by the ideal of a more radical discipleship. This rapid expansion, however, carried with it a whole deepening drama of ascetical (and matrimonial) “heroics” destined to betray comical and tragical elements alike, but also with significant repercussions for the Church’s public face in a culture still straining to envision itself as Christian. The monastic historian Palladius (ca. 363–431) gives a sense of the potential comedy when

¹¹⁰ Abundant studies have now appeared on these themes, but see esp. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, revised ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); David Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a valuable anthology of primary texts on early Christian marriage, see David Hunter, ed., Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity, Ad Fontes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018).

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he notes those immature and rambunctious souls who do not really fathom the cost of the ascetical life but fancy themselves spiritual heroes all the same: For many of the brothers, pluming themselves both on their labors and charities and boasting of their celibacy or virginity and putting their trust in meditation on the divine oracles and acts of zeal, have yet failed to attain impassibility (ἀπάθεια). Through lack of discernment, under the pretext of piety, they have fallen victim to a disease (which manifests itself) in acts of idle curiosity, from which spring officious or even evil activities, such as drive away good activities, the mother of spiritual self-culture.¹¹¹

But the fiasco of ascetical affectation was one thing. Deeper still was the drama of determining the Christian norms and boundaries concerning celibacy and marriage, a drama which many patristic writers believed had already begun to be scripted in the opening chapters of Genesis, especially the Adamic tragedy narrated in Genesis 3.¹¹² Several early Christian moralists believed that the Apostle Paul had offered a decisive clarification on marriage and the spiritually freer celibate life in 1 Corinthians 7.¹¹³ In the fourth century, the two Cappadocian Gregories, picking up on Paul’s concern that marriage necessarily binds couples to “carnal affliction” (θλῖψις τῇ σαρκί) (1 Cor. 7:28), began to apply the language of tragedy to marriage within the larger context of the economy of salvation. Gregory Nazianzen, in an oration discussing Jesus’s response to the Pharisees’ query about divorce (Matt. 19:1–12), upholds the good of marriage, but also recalls its “comedy and tragedy” (κωμῳδία καὶ τραγῳδία), “its widowhoods, orphanhoods, untimely deaths, the cries of lamentation following upon the applause, the funerals following upon weddings, the cases of childlessness and of vile children and of imperfect and motherless children.”¹¹⁴ Gregory of Nyssa, in his treatise On Virginity, likewise defends the dignity of marriage but portrays its woes even more graphically, and as one who was himself married. “Where,” Gregory asks, “is one even to begin worthily describing this oppressive way of life in tragic terms?”¹¹⁵ Marriage seems so promising with its prospect of mutual affection; but quickly it bogs down. Marriage’s virtues, including the “sweet rivalry” (φιλονεικία) of two spouses taming their self-will through reciprocal love (ἀγάπη), falls victim to the grief of being the object of others’ envy.¹¹⁶ The fear of death and of the wilting flower of marital bliss

¹¹¹ Historia Lausiaca, prologus, Greek text ed. Cuthbert Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, Texts and Studies 6/2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 11–12; trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke (London: SPCK, 1918), 42 (slightly altered). ¹¹² See above, Chapter 2, pp. 43–51. ¹¹³ Clark, Reading Renunciation, 259–329. ¹¹⁴ Or. 37.9 (SC 318:290); cf. De vitae itineribus (Poema 1.2.16), ll. 15–16 (PG 37:779A): “marriage is a bond; good children are a cause of worry; bad ones a malaise…,” trans. Gilbert, On God and Man, 145. ¹¹⁵ De virginitate 3 (GNO 8/1:257, ll. 12–13). ¹¹⁶ Ibid. (GNO 8/1:257–8).

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intensifies, as does the pain of awaiting a reversal (μεταβολή) of fortune.¹¹⁷ The joy of childbirth is compromised by gripping fear of the mother’s death, and when this actually happens, the husband is left with an even “more bitter tragedy” (πικρότερον τραγῳδία) as he cannot endure the extreme suffering and grief at his loss.¹¹⁸ As in Nazianzen, the prospects of orphanhood, widowhood, and troubled children also appear on the horizon. “All else aside,” writes Nyssen, “contemplate the tragedies on life’s current stage and you will find that marriage is for human beings their chorus-master (χορηγός).”¹¹⁹ Though Nyssen’s grim portrait of marital tragedy seems well-suited to an encomium on virginal asceticism, interpreters still puzzle over its severity compared with his meager assessment of marriage’s virtues.¹²⁰ This kind of dialectical approach, juxtaposing the vicissitudes of carnal existence with the intrinsic value of created graces like marriage, is nonetheless typical of Nazianzen and Nyssen alike, and shows up in Ambrose as well.¹²¹ Simply speaking, the virgin life is the most expeditious path to godliness and the restoration of primordial beauty. Marital heartaches make for a more precarious journey, and the harsh realism of the two Gregories functions to instruct married persons in their own kind of asceticism, the moral self-management of the attendant pains of wedlock. The tragical language is thoroughly appropriate precisely because the hopes and dreams of marriage are so quickly given to reversal and recognition, Aristotle’s peripeteia and anagnôrisis.¹²² In a different but related setting, Blake Leyerle has uncovered how in John Chrysostom’s treatment of “spiritual marriages,” the cohabitations of female virgins (συνείσακτοι; subintroductae) and male monks intending to observe strict celibacy, the bishop contrasts the prospective comedy of such marriages with the utter tragedy of their grievous consequences both for the spouses and for the whole Church.¹²³ While heaping scorn on female virgins for becoming ¹¹⁷ Ibid. (GNO 8/1:258–60). ¹¹⁸ Ibid. (GNO 8/1:261). See also below, pp. 204–5, discussing this same tragic grief. ¹¹⁹ Ibid. (GNO 8/1:266, ll. 9–11). Morwenna Ludlow is surely right that χορηγός for Gregory retains here its more ancient tragical meaning. See her “Useful and Beautiful: A Reading of Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity and a Proposal for Understanding Early Christian Literature,” Irish Theological Quarterly 79 (2014): 219–40, at 225–7. ¹²⁰ See Virg. 7 (GNO 8/1:282–4) for Nyssen’s defense of marriage. ¹²¹ See Ambrose’s De virginibus 1.6.24–6 (PL 16:195C–196B). ¹²² See Michel Barnes, “ ‘The Burden of Marriage’ and Other Notes on Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity,” in M. F. Wiles and E. F. Yarnold, eds., Studia Patristica 37/2 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 12–19; Michel Barnes, “What Have I Become, My Sweetest Friend? Death and Its Passions in the Early Church,” in George Kalantzis and Matthew Levering, eds., Christian Dying: Witnesses from the Tradition (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 41–69. Barnes observes that while Gregory’s laments on marriage have antecedents in Stoic teaching, the tragical language is thoroughly appropriate to deepen his point. ¹²³ Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 145–260, with citations from John’s treatises Adversus eos qui apud se habent subintroductas virgines and Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non bebeant. See also Elizabeth Clark, “John Chrysostom and the Subintroductae,” Church History 46 (1977): 171–85.

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virtual seductresses, John also bitterly satirizes male monks making utter fools of themselves in these relationships. The line between tragedy and dark comedy is quite thin: For what shall we think when we enter a monk’s house and see women’s shoes hanging up, and girdles, headbands, baskets, a distaff, various items of weaving equipment, and all the other things women have, too numerous to be counted? And if you review the situation of a virgin who is well-provided for, the laughter increases. First of all, the monk twists and turns in the midst of so many serving girls, a veritable herd of them, as if he were the dancer in the orchestra of a theatre accompanied by the singing of the women’s chorus.¹²⁴

Spiritual marriages, John believes, were a recipe for disaster and desecration. But on a more reflective and pathetic note, they represented for the female virgins, many of whom came from affluent upbringings, a horrible peripety, and Chrysostom does not hesitate applying explicitly tragical language to their fall into disgrace.¹²⁵ The only redemptive outcome was for these virgins to become like tragic heroes and to withdraw from such marriages, which were tantamount to prostitution, and thereby to undo the havoc they were wreaking on the Christian community.¹²⁶ All the while, the new forms of Christian asceticism and monasticism flourishing across the Mediterranean world in late antiquity played out other dramas as well. Various ascetics and monks not only idealized but also aspired to re-dramatize concretely the “apostolic life” (βίος ἀποστολικός) of the first Christian generation, or else to identify and emulate the virtues of a whole pageant of biblical ascetics from Old and New Testaments.¹²⁷ Ironically, a certain theatrics was inevitable precisely to subvert any play-acting of the strict exercises of ascetical life, to drive home the boldness of its eschatological witness, and to recontextualize for a new cultural day the kinds of disciplines the Bible’s proto-Christian ascetics had enacted in their own time and place.

¹²⁴ E.g. Adversus eos qui apud se habent subintroductas virgines 9, Greek text ed. Jean Dumortier, Les cohabitations suspectes; Comment observer la virginité (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1955), 78, ll. 70–8, trans. Elizabeth Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends (Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979), 192. ¹²⁵ E.g. Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non bebeant 1 (Dumortier, 95, ll. 8–9), describing virginity as the “holy of holies [that] has been trodden under foot,” and as “that which is august and full of awe [that] has been profaned and exposed to all.” Leyerle shows how these images, and even Chrysostom’s appeal to his audience to lament the downfall of the subintroductae, have precedent in Greek tragedy (Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 143–6). ¹²⁶ Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 147–8. ¹²⁷ On this emulation, see Andrew Cain, The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto: Monastic Hagiography in the Late Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 146–81.

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The ultimate goal was to dramatize an alternative mode of Christian society, a new πολιτεία in but not of the world.¹²⁸ Renouncing “secular affairs” (τὰ βιωτικά) and realizing this new order required specific ascetical performances, the body itself being the primary instrument for enacting the new politeia.¹²⁹ Patricia Cox Miller has analyzed the practices of bodily renunciation in the desert (as depicted in the Historia monachorum in Aegypto, Apophthegmata patrum, and other sources) in terms of highly articulated “ritual acts” that commanded an audience.¹³⁰ What might superficially be construed as abusive works of bodily self-mortification or mutilation were actually perceived by original fellow-ascetic observers as calculated, heroic demonstrations of the strength and resilience of the ascetic’s body. Even a rudimentary ascetical discipline like fasting was no simple gesture of self-denial since, as Miller clarifies, it served negatively to dramatize the diminution of the perfect human body that had existed in Eden, but positively to defy that atrophying body by seizing full spiritual control of it, in anticipation of the eschatologically restored and transformed body.¹³¹ While Miller wants to emphasize how such performances changed and widened perception of the ascetic’s body, unveiling its latent glory, I wish to focus instead on their properly dramatic and tragical character. These performances were shot through with all manner of irony, parody, and a deep devotional urgency to amplify the scandalousness and foolishness of the Christian gospel (1 Cor. 1:17–25) over against earthly cultures.¹³² The specific acts that the sagely abbas and ammas of the desert enjoined on their disciples not only taught them ascetical lessons but also staged “scenes” or vignettes anticipating the denouement of salvation history. The strongly eschatological purview of these monastics heightened the drama all the more, as they believed they were working to restore primordial paradise while also living in the shadow of final divine judgment.¹³³ Elements of tragedy and tragical comedy appear in these scenes, since ultimate redemption entails loss of stable ¹²⁸ Cain (ibid., 200–4) rightly warns, however, that monastic marginality and otherworldliness should not be overly exaggerated, since the literature even on desert monks describes them as deeply involved in the lives of non-monastics, especially as aid-workers and as evangelists. ¹²⁹ On early Christian asceticism as highly deliberate “performance,” see esp. Richard Valantasis, The Making of the Self: Ancient and Modern Asceticism (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008), 38–42, 49, 52, 54–6, 107; and Patricia Cox Miller, “Desert Asceticism and the ‘Body from Nowhere,’ ” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 137–53. ¹³⁰ Cox Miller, “Desert Asceticism and the ‘Body from Nowhere,’ ” 147–9, 150–1. ¹³¹ Ibid., 148–51. ¹³² That desert monks were aware of scandalizing their onlookers, see APA: Agathon 6 (PG 65:109D–112A). ¹³³ See here Dimitrios Moschos’s fine monograph, Eschatologie im ägyptischen Mönchtum: Die Rolle christlicher eschatologischer Denkenvarienten in der Geschichte des frühen ägyptischen Mönchtums und seiner sozialen Funktion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). Moschos (pp. 138–51, etc.) notes that monastic eschatology was not restricted to a longing for Paradise restored, but drew together different thematic strands. But on the theme of restoring

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anchoring in the world, and transformation comes ineluctably through the progressive death of self-will. A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, “Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.” So the old man said, “Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.” The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, “Didn’t they say anything to you?” He replied, “No.” The old man said, “Go back tomorrow and praise them.” So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, “Apostles, saints and righteous men.” He returned to the old man and said to him, “I have complimented them.” And the old man said to him, “Did they not answer you?” The brother said no. The old man said to him, “You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.” ¹³⁴ Abba Anthony predicted that this Abba Ammonas would make progress in the fear of God. He led him outside his cell, and showing him a stone, said to him, “Hurt this stone, and beat it.” He did so. Then Anthony asked him, “Has the stone said anything?” He replied, “No.” Then Anthony said, “You too will be able to do that.”¹³⁵ Now there was in the temple a statue of stone. When he woke up in the morning, Abba Anoub threw stones at the face of the statue and in the evening he said to it, “Forgive me.” During the whole week he did this. On Saturday they came together and Abba Poemen said to Abba Anoub, “Abba, I have seen you during the whole week throwing stones at the face of the statue and kneeling to ask it to forgive you. Does a believer act thus?” The old man answered him, “I did this for your sake. When you saw me throwing stones at the face of the statue, did it speak, or did it become angry?” Abba Poemen said, “No.” “Or again, when I bent down in penitence, was it moved, and did it say, ‘I will not forgive you?’ ” Again Abba Poemen answered “No.” Then the old man resumed, “Now we are seven brethren; if you wish us to live together, let us be like this statue, which is not moved whether one beats it or whether one flatters it.”¹³⁶

Christian audiences might well have recognized in these anecdotes the biblical motifs of death to self (Mark 8:35; Luke 9:23; Rom. 6:4–8; 2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 2:20; 5:24; Eph. 4:20–4; Col. 3:3; 1 Peter 2:24) and strength-through-weakness (cf. 1 Cor. 1:18–2:5; 2 Cor. 4:8–18; 11:29–30; 12:5, 9–10; 13:4), but the

prelapsarian paradise through asceticism, see Cain, The Greek Historia monachorum in Aegypto, 196–200. ¹³⁴ APA: Macarius the Great 23 (PG 65:272B–C), trans. Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1975), 132; cf. Arsenius 29 (PG 65:97B–C); Moses 11, 12 (285C–D); Poemen 3 (317B–C). ¹³⁵ Ibid., Ammonas 8 (PG 65:121B), trans. Ward, 27. ¹³⁶ Ibid. Anoub 1 (PG 65:129A–B), trans. Ward, 31–2.

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enthusiastic embrace of these ascetical values rendered Christianity vulnerable to pagan opprobrium and lampooning very early on.¹³⁷ On the face of it, the actions described in the anecdotes above had the monks looking like senseless dupes. And how could any of this be genuinely “tragic” if the monks were not victims of blind necessity or of fatal failures (ἁμαρτίαι) but suffered mostly from their own self-inflicted severities? Centuries later, in an essay appended to his The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche caricatured such Christian asceticism quite anti-tragically as an egregiously misguided moral “burlesque” premised on the illusion of a blessed future life.¹³⁸ The stakes of maintaining ascetical integrity, therefore, were enormously high, especially as “holy men and women” were elevated as late-ancient Christianity’s heroes of godly living, perceived both to possess and to radiate sanctifying power,¹³⁹ even to be mediators of the Divine.¹⁴⁰ All too easily they could lapse, on the one hand, into a destructive extremism or bogus heroism. The Apopthegmata and other monastic texts give ample evidence of this danger.¹⁴¹ Even Gregory Nazianzen sarcastically jabs his friend Basil of Caesarea for taking his temporary embrace of the hermit’s life too far, as if to turn himself quixotically into a tragic hero with Gregory’s help when he joined Basil at their retreat in Pontus: You yourself will heighten the tragedy of these things (τραγῳδήσεις ὑψηλότερον), having learned to talk big through your own sufferings…for had we not been quickly delivered by that great caregiver to the poor—your mother, I mean—who showed up at just the right moment like a refuge for us victims of the storm, we should long ago have been dead men, rather pitied than praised for our trust in Pontus.¹⁴²

On the other extreme, to lapse from the high standard of ascetical discipline set by the revered sages, and by those who recorded their deeds, made for a tragedy in its own right. In a letter to an adulterous monk, Basil, speaking as an

¹³⁷ See Chapter 1 above, p. 127–8, nn. 125 and 126. ¹³⁸ “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” appended to The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. William Haussmann (London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1909), 9, 10. Cf. Nietzsche’s criticism of the devaluation of existence, contradiction of human selfhood, and foolish will-to-power-through-weakness in Christian (and other forms of) asceticism, in The Genealogy of Morality (1887): Third Essay: “What Do Ascetical Ideals Mean?” trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 68–120. ¹³⁹ See here Peter Brown’s groundbreaking essay, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101, esp. 81, 87–91, 93–8. ¹⁴⁰ See Evagrius Scholasticus’s description of Symeon Stylites in his Hist. eccl. 1.13 (SC 542:156–68); also Moschos, Eschatologie im ägyptischen Mönchtum, 360–76; R. M. Price, Introduction to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, A History of the Monks of Syria (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985), ix–xxxvii, esp. xxvii–xxix. ¹⁴¹ Cf. APA: Poemen 129 (PG 65:353D); Lucius 1 (254B–C); Silvanus 5 (409B–D); Barsanuphius and John, Ep. 433 (SC 451:512). ¹⁴² Ep. 5 (PG 37:29A). On this episode, see also McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, 94–5.

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eminent patron and reformer of monasticism, laments how his once committed and respected addressee has desecrated his vocation and brought shame not only on himself but on his whole community: At once you have become security for fatal perjury and, by your contempt for the character of asceticism, you have disgraced the Apostles and even the Lord himself. You have put to shame the boast of purity, and scourged the promise of chastity. We have become a tragedy of captives (αἰχμαλώτων τραγῳδία), and are made into a stage-play (δραματουργεῖται) for Jews and Greeks.¹⁴³

Writing to another lapsed monk accused of covetousness, Basil depicts the man’s sin as cosmic in scope: “even the sun has grown dark at your fall, and the heavenly powers have been shaken at your perdition. Even senseless stones have shed tears at your madness; even your enemies have wept at the magnitude of your iniquity.”¹⁴⁴ Of him whose memory of Holy Scripture was on everyone’s lips, the memory today has vanished with the sound. The man of quick intelligence has quickly perished. The man of profound intelligence has committed an intricate sin. Those who benefited from your instruction have been injured by your depravity. Those who gave their attention to hearing you speak have shut their ears at your depravity…¹⁴⁵

Doubtless Basil’s stark rhetoric here is partly intended to enhance the seriousness of the monk’s sin in order to begin the process of moral healing, a healing that necessitated the instilling of a tragical (not just a “guilty”) conscience in the perpetrator. But Basil’s gravitas bespeaks also the real fear that any and every compromise of ascetical integrity spelled disaster not only for individual monks and their communities but also for Christianity as a whole in its wider witness to pagan culture in the decades after Constantine. Ultimately, however, episcopal scrutiny of the propriety of ascetics and monastics did not impede certain monks, at least, from breaching the boundary between decorum and scandal in order to amplify all the more the “foolishness”—the tragical comedy—of the Christian gospel. The fourthcentury Syrian recluse Abraham of Qidun, who raised his orphaned niece in ascetical purity only to see her fall into prostitution, entered her tavern dressed like a soldier to seek out her services, a ploy to gain the privacy with her that he needed to cajole her back to a pious and chaste life. Abraham’s biographer rhetorically interjects: “Should I speak of you as a Nazirite, or someone who ¹⁴³ Ep. 45.2 (PG 32:368B–C). Basil’s “tragedy of captives” here, eliciting how the monks have been collectively submitted to scorn and rebuke because of the lapsed monk’s sin, undoubtedly references the fact that captives and ransoms constituted a favorite theme in Greek epic and tragedy: see Rachel Sternberg, Tragedy Offstage: Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), 42–75. ¹⁴⁴ Ep. 44.1 (PG 32:361B). ¹⁴⁵ Ibid. (PG 32:361C).

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has compromised himself? Full of wisdom, or of folly? A man of discernment, or someone who has lost all sense of proportion?”¹⁴⁶ Probably the most spectacular example of this pattern, however, is Symeon the Holy Fool in sixth-century Emesa (Syria), who stands in a long monastic tradition of “holy fools” extending all the way up into modern Russia.¹⁴⁷ Fortunately, we have a quite literarily sophisticated Life of Symeon by Leontius of Neapolis (Cyprus, seventh century), who, even as a bishop, saw fit to sponsor Symeon’s remarkable story.¹⁴⁸ In constructing the Life, Leontius drew parallels between Symeon and the Cynic street-philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 404–323 BCE), renowned—even admired by some—in Christian antiquity for performing outrageous acts in public precisely to satirize mindless social conventions of the polis, and to expose their opposition to true reason and nature.¹⁴⁹ Symeon’s own “cynicism” (literally “dog-likeness”) appears in his dragging of a dead dog through the streets of Emesa, like a prophet invading the supposed safe space of the city.¹⁵⁰ Similar to Diogenes, Symeon performs lewd acts to scandalize Emesa’s citizens. He farts and defecates in public, shamelessly gluts himself with beans, and plays the sexual deviant all as a fierce parody of the citizens’ misplaced values and worldly attachments.¹⁵¹ But Leontius, following a consistent pattern of Byzantine hagiography, develops strong parallels as well between Symeon and the ministry of Jesus,¹⁵² who, also in the city, alienated himself and took on the fool’s humiliation precisely to redeem its inhabitants from their sins. Intermingled with his more comical antics, Symeon, like Jesus, performs miracles of healing and feeding,¹⁵³ ejects demons,¹⁵⁴ incites people to repentance (including some theatre mimes),¹⁵⁵

¹⁴⁶ Life of Abraham of Qibun 23, trans. Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 34. ¹⁴⁷ For background, see Sergey Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Albrecht Berger and Sergey Ivanov, eds., Holy Fools and Divine Madmen: Sacred Insanity through Ages and Cultures (Leiden: Brill 2017); Vincent Déroche, Études sur Léontios de Néapolis (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1995), 154–225; Irina Gorainoff, Les fols en Christ dans la tradition orthodoxe (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer 1983). ¹⁴⁸ For an incisive analysis of the Life of Symeon, together with an English translation, see Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); and for the critical edition of the Greek text, see A. J. Festugière and Lennart Rydén, Le Vie de Syméon le Fou et Vie de Jean de Chypre (Paris: Geuthner, 1974), 55–104. ¹⁴⁹ On Leontius’s use of the chreiai of Diogenes, see Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool, 72–107. ¹⁵⁰ Vita Symeonis Sali (Festugière and Rydén, 79, ll. 19–25). ¹⁵¹ Ibid. (Festugière and Rydén, 81, l. 25–83, l. 18; 88, l. 28–89, l. 18; 90, ll. 11–22). ¹⁵² For detailed analysis, see Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool, 108–25. ¹⁵³ Vita Symeonis Sali (Festugière and Rydén, 91, l. 17–92, l. 8). ¹⁵⁴ Ibid. (Festugière and Rydén, 83, l. 19–84, l. 6; 87, l. 18–88, l. 11; 91, ll. 5–11; 96, ll. 12–21). ¹⁵⁵ Ibid. (Festugière and Rydén, 84, ll. 7–19; 95, l. 13–96, l. 11).

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and more, even though some of his actions seem to parody certain of Jesus’s own deeds.¹⁵⁶ The comedy of Symeon’s life is obvious enough, and doubtless prompted laughter, both raucous and uncomfortable, from Leontius’s audience. The dark side of the story, its comical-tragedy as Shakespeare would have it, demands a closer look. After all, Symeon’s eminent control of his situation, his singularly redemptive purpose (σκοπός), his hidden virtue and apatheia preventing him from feeling humiliation—all of which Leontius highlights editorially¹⁵⁷—militate against the Fool being any kind of tragic hero. For those believers “in on the joke,” the comic inversion stands on its own. On the other hand, the very premise of Symeon’s ascetical performance is the scandal of Christ’s incarnation and passion. As a complex mimesis of the work of Jesus presented in the gospels and interpreted in the Chalcedonian Christology that Symeon and Leontius uphold, the underlying plot is still that of the tragic necessity of divine kenosis, God’s own deep identification with human fallenness in the city/cosmos. In this deeper sense the “foolishness” of Symeon is not feigned at all; it is the obtrusive reality of the gospel in its worldly embodiment. Thus, already in his introduction to the Life, Leontius instructs his readers that if they truly want to fathom Symeon’s performances, his alternative politeia, they must first appropriate Paul’s statements about God’s own folly and the Christian becoming a fool for Christ’s sake (1 Cor. 1:25; 3:18; 4:10).¹⁵⁸ Leontius’s admonition could well have been directed to the non-monastic audiences of many of the monastic texts and hagiographies of late antiquity. His aim was to stretch believers’ imaginations so that they could discern the deeper meaning of the ostensibly strange, even exotic performances of the diverse monks and ascetics in the Church’s foreground, and so also be drawn into the same eschatological drama if not exactly the same paths of spiritual discipline.

FACES AND BODIES OF TRAGEDY IV: U N B E L I E V I N G JE W S No portrait of the tragic faces and bodies in the foreground of the late-ancient Church would be complete without addressing the group whose perceived tragedy factored so profoundly into the very shaping of Christian identity in ¹⁵⁶ See ibid. (Festugière and Rydén, 94, l. 25–95, l. 12), where Symeon, seeking to heal a man’s eye disease, applies a salve of mustard rather than clay and spittle, and commands him to wash it off with vinegar and garlic instead of at a local pool (cf. John 9:6–7). ¹⁵⁷ Ibid. (Festugière and Rydén, 82, ll. 13–20; 83, ll. 16–18; 88, l. 28; 91, ll. 12–18). ¹⁵⁸ Ibid. (Festugière and Rydén, 56, l. 25–57, l. 3).

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the early centuries: “unbelieving” Jews. Voluminous historical analysis has been devoted to the sharp and sustained tensions between early Christianity and Judaism in their respective processes of normative self-definition, though opinions differ on the concrete interplay of Jewish and Christian communities in these processes.¹⁵⁹ Since World War II and the Holocaust, moreover, much scholarship has understandably focused on the virulent rhetoric of Christian adversus Judaeos literature that began in the second century and continued unabated into the medieval era. The upshot of this cumulative polemic, we know, was a relatively coherent and highly influential tragical narrative that ran as follows. In the Hebrew era, Israel was God’s chosen and favored people, but later, because “hard-hearted” Jews ignored their own prophets and rejected Christ, and worse yet were instrumental to his death, “Israel” experienced its most precipitous fall (peripeteia) from grace. The punitive result was both the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) and another dramatic displacement of Jews from the Holy Land. Judaism accordingly became an obsolete religion, stymied by its literal observance of the Law, and was effectively superseded by Christianity, with its spiritual and christocentric reinterpretation of Israel’s sacred Scripture. By this reconstruction it certainly appears that among Christians, Jews were fated to be objects of condescending pity at best, scorn and rejection at worst. In fact some historians have treated the pervasive anti-Jewish rhetoric in patristic sources as virtual if not actual racism.¹⁶⁰ Others insist, I think rightly, on a more circumspect distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism,¹⁶¹ even if the line between them eventually became more permeable, and even if arguments drawn from patristic polemical literature later fueled outright hatred of the Jewish people.¹⁶² Careful nuancing is also required, I hope to show, in considering early Christian perceptions of the Jews as a tragic people or religious group, especially given the stark contrast

¹⁵⁹ For guidance into the interpretive issues and the differences of perspective among historians, see esp. James Carleton Paget, Jews, Christians and Jewish Christians in Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 1–76. ¹⁶⁰ E.g. William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1993); Nicholas de Lange, “Antisemitismus,” pt. IV (Alte Kirche), Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), 3:128–37; and perhaps most famously Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Antisemitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). ¹⁶¹ See esp. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (135–425), trans. H. McKeating (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 202–33; Adolf Ritter, “An Anti-Semite?—A Reconsideration,” in his Studia Chrysostomica: Aufsätze zu Weg, Werk und Wirkung des Johannes Chrysostomus (ca. 349–407) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 105–16. ¹⁶² John Gager reviews the emerging debate over anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in his The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 7–23.

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with the other three groups that we have considered as objects of tragical vision. Christian authors were in part inspired to read the Jews’ history as a tragedy by none other than the Jewish historian Josephus, in his The Jewish War, which graphically depicts the disasters that befell the Jews under the Seleucids and Romans (up to 74 CE).¹⁶³ Eusebius and John Chrysostom both reference Josephus directly for the τραγῳδία of events surrounding the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, including a mass starvation and the tragedywithin-a-tragedy of a Jewish mother named Maria who, in desperation and fear of enslavement, roasted and ate half of her infant son’s body and offered the rest to Roman invaders repulsed by her invitation.¹⁶⁴ Other Christian writers admitted the tragic horror of this story but still, like Eusebius and Chrysostom, contextualized it among the extreme hardships that the Jews had to endure after Christ’s death, such as had been predicted by the prophets.¹⁶⁵ Among patristic authors, and not surprisingly given his pervasive deployment of theatrical imagery, John Chrysostom most frequently identified the situation of unbelieving Jews in the Church’s purview as a tragedy,¹⁶⁶ especially in his eight Homilies on the Judaizers delivered in Antioch, the notorious invective of which targeted Jewish religious rituals and practices in large part because of their attraction for Judaizing Christians.¹⁶⁷ If only the Jews had heeded their prophets’ own “tragic phrases” (τραγῳδοῦντα) predicting disasters to befall Israel for its sin; but such was an opportunity lost.¹⁶⁸ Meanwhile Jewish unbelievers cannot but acknowledge the empirical evidence of their punishment: If these prophecies had not been fulfilled, if you Jews are not now held in dishonor, if you are not now bereft of everything your fathers had, if your city did not fall, if your temple is not in ruins, if your disaster has not surpassed every

¹⁶³ On Josephus’s own tragical perspective in The Jewish War, see Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War AD 66–74 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 114–16; Honora Chapman, “Spectacle and Theater in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1998). ¹⁶⁴ Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.6.1–28 (GCS NF 6/1:198–210), citing extracts from Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum 5–6; also Eusebius, Theophania 4.20–2, trans. of Syriac version by Samuel Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843), 250–6; John Chrysostom, Hom. adversus Judaeos 5.8 (PG 48:896); Hom. in Matt. 76.1 (PG 58:695); Expositio in Psalmos 8.5 (PG 55:114). On Josephus’s strong tragical perspective here, see Honora Chapman, “Josephus and the Cannibalism of Mary,” in John Marincola, ed., A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 419–26. ¹⁶⁵ E.g. Basil of Caesarea, Hom. dicta tempore famis et siccitatis 7 (PG 31:324A); Theodoret, Comm. in Esaiam 5.13 (PG 81:256D–257A). ¹⁶⁶ See his Contra Judaeos et Gentiles, quod Christus sit Deus (PG 48:824), referring to “the tragedy of the Jews surpassing every disaster” under Vespasian and Titus. ¹⁶⁷ E.g. Hom. adv. Judaeos 1.2 (PG 48:847), describing the synagogue as a spectacle all its own; also Expos. in Psalmos 115.2 (PG 55:323). ¹⁶⁸ Hom. adv. Judaeos 6.2 (PG 48:906).

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tragedy, then you Jews should refuse to believe me. But if the facts (τὰ πράγματα) shout out and prophecy has been fulfilled, why do you keep up the foolish and unavailing impudence?¹⁶⁹

In Egypt, where the numbers of Jews in Alexandria once again greatly increased in the fourth and fifth centuries after being decimated by Roman persecution, and where violence broke out between Jews and Christians during the patriarchate of Cyril,¹⁷⁰ the tragedy of the Jews was heavily played up by the monastic elder Isidore of Pelusium, a close associate of Cyril. Isidore uses the fact that Josephus’s “tragic history” is a Jew’s own powerful witness to argue that the “unbelievable and incalculable tragedies” of the Jews have been held up as an object lesson for all who would reject faith in Christ.¹⁷¹ He also cites Jesus’s own authority to this effect: As for those who are punished in this life and will be punished in the life to come, the Judge himself has declared in the Gospels, It will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town (Matt. 10:15). The Sodomites and the Jews alike have already in this life been punished, the former by being consumed with fire, the latter by war and famine and by entering such sore straits that they ate their own children. For necessity (ἀνάγκη) forced everything to fall under their teeth!¹⁷²

At this point, Josephus’s story of Maria, who ate half her son’s body during the famine in Judaea, took on a life of its own in the Christian imagination, turning from a pathos-laden epitome of tragic desperation into a generalized image of Jewish unbelievers who, pushed to the brink by the harsh necessity of relentless punishment, ate their young, whether literally or metaphorically. Isidore’s invective comports with Chrysostom’s own recall of the Deuteronomic curses whereby Israel’s punishment for disobedience would prospectively be a state in which even a “tender” (ἀπαλή) mother would eat her own child (Deut. 28:56), a scenario confirmed by the prophet Jeremiah (Lam. 4:10).¹⁷³ Such could easily be lumped together with the accusation of Jews as those who savagely “sacrificed their own sons and daughters to demons” (Ps. 105:37, LXX; cf. 2 Kings 16:3).¹⁷⁴ “What tragedy, what manner of lawlessness have they not eclipsed by their blood-guiltiness?”¹⁷⁵

¹⁶⁹ Ibid. 6.5 (PG 48:911), trans. Paul Harkins, FOTC 68:164. ¹⁷⁰ On these developments, see Guy Stroumsa, “Jewish Survival in Late Antique Alexandria,” in Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Strousma, and Rina Talgam, eds., Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 257–69. ¹⁷¹ Ep. 1692 (SC 454:454); cf. Ep. 1227 (SC 422:200): Ἰουδαῖοι πεπόνθασι τραγῳδίας ἀπάσης μείζονα. ¹⁷² Ep. 1507 (SC 454:180–2). ¹⁷³ Hom. adv. Judaeos 5.6 (PG 48:892). The larger passage in Deut. 28:53–7 projects this same curse. ¹⁷⁴ Ibid. 1.6 (PG 48:852). ¹⁷⁵ Ibid. (PG 48:852), trans. Harkins, FOTC 68:24–5.

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By all indications, portraying the lot of non-Christian Jews as a tragedy still thoroughly served the larger narrative arising from earlier adversus Judaeos literature. Their fate was sealed by their rejection of the proto-evangelium of the prophets and of Jesus as the Messiah. This implacable approach to religious difference, and characterization of the Jews as a people recycling their own degradation, is certainly disturbing to modern Western readers and to modern canons of religious toleration. And yet it is far too easy to assume a simple causal connection between this bitter anti-Jewish rhetoric and the alienation of Christians and Jews at the popular level which did, in fact, see instances of open violence, including the destruction of synagogues and churches,¹⁷⁶ with some cases of anti-Jewish activism having episcopal endorsement or at least non-interference.¹⁷⁷ As Robert Wilken has stressed, the takeno-prisoners style of invective such as Chrysostom unleashed against Judaism was not uncommon in the rhetoric of the Second Sophistic; and in the foreground, in this case, were situations where Judaizing among Christians was ostensibly rampant and undermining the fixing of boundaries,¹⁷⁸ or situations where imperial administration was lax in enforcing restrictions on non-Christian religious practices.¹⁷⁹ As well, anti-Jewish rhetoric did not necessarily always perfectly mirror animosities on the ground in the personal interactions of Jews and Christians; and in many places Jews and Christians

¹⁷⁶ On the known instances of mutual Christian and Jewish violence, see John Gager, “Who Did What to Whom? Physical Violence between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity,” in Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Nathaniel DesRosiers, Shira L. Lander, Jacqueline Z. Pastis, and Daniel Ullucci, eds., A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer (Providence, RI: SBL and Brown University, 2015), 35–48; also Wolfram Kinzig, “Juden und Christen in der Antike: Trennungen, Transformationen, Kontinuitäten und Annäherungen,” in Reidar Hvalvik and John Kaufman, eds., Among Jews, Gentiles and Christians in Antiquity: Studies in Honour of Professor Oskar Skarsaune on His 65th Birthday (Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2011), 129–56. ¹⁷⁷ The most famous episode is Ambrose of Milan’s forceful appeal to the Emperor Theodosius not to unleash imperial punishment on local Christians who in 388 burned a synagogue in Callinicum (Syria), nor to command the local bishop or magistrate to use Christian funds to rebuild it (Ep. 74, CSEL 82/3:54–73). While referencing the old argument that every synagogue is already under prophetic condemnation (Jer. 7:14), Ambrose’s principal concern is not to energize local Jews by handing them a moral or physical victory with the rebuilding of their synagogue. ¹⁷⁸ John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 66–127. Lingering fears of Judaizing seem to lie in the foreground of the correspondence of Augustine and Jerome over Peter’s lapse in Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14), Jerome’s controversial Latin translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and Paul’s accommodations to Jewish Christians (Acts 16:1–5; 1 Cor. 9:20); see Augustine’s Epp. 40, 75, 82. On the reappearance of Judaizing groups in the Byzantine East, see Philippe Gardette, “The Judaizing Christians of Byzantium: An Objectionable Form of Spirituality,” in Bonfil et al., Jews in Byzantium, 587–611. ¹⁷⁹ Even protections on synagogues in the Theodosian Code (438) did not guarantee their immunity to violence.

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actually carried on with little friction or even cordially.¹⁸⁰ Still, as John Gager emphasizes, the rhetoric took on new life in popular appeals through sermons, tracts, public debates, and more. Chrysostom’s eight sermons alone were transmitted in some two hundred minuscule manuscripts and eventually translated into multiple languages, even finding a place in Byzantine liturgy. It seems unimaginable that they had no role whatsoever in the eventual destruction of Antiochene synagogues in 423, 489, and 507.¹⁸¹ That said, we still must recognize that many of the same preachers who, like Chrysostom, promulgated inflammatory anti-Jewish rhetoric nonetheless asserted as a matter of theological principle that unbelieving Jews, whatever their punitive burden in this world, were fully free still to give allegiance to Christ and join the ranks of the Church. Isidore of Pelusium, as we saw, used tragical language to describe the Jews languishing under bitter necessity (ἀνάγκη). But such could not be a final curtain closed on the Jewish people. Chrysostom and others found themselves under the constraint of the Apostle Paul to insist on the Jews’ free will and prospects for ultimate reconciliation. John’s tone in his Homilies on Romans is noticeably different from the Homilies against the Judaizers. This is especially true for his treatment of Romans 9–11, where Paul had spelled out the mysterious interplay of Jews and Gentiles in the economy of salvation. Much earlier Origen set a precedent in his Commentary on Romans which, in fiercely repudiating Marcionism, guarded the continuity of sacred revelation and of the disclosure of divine justice to Jews as well as Gentiles. Origen insists with Paul that non-Christian Jews still have a zeal for God that simply needs to be enlightened by Christ as the true telos of the Torah (Rom. 10:2–4),¹⁸² and that God, in his elective freedom, is holding out for the unbelieving Jews, pulling out all the stops such as by drawing them into jealousy of the Gentiles for their salvation’s sake.¹⁸³ No fatal necessity has been enjoined on Jews. Even the strongly deterministic language of God imposing a “stupor” on unbelieving Israel (Rom. 11:8; cf. Deut. 29:4; Isa. 29:10), or a “snare” entrapping them and a “darkness” blinding them (Rom. 11:9–10; Ps. 68:23–4, LXX), indicates only the consequences of voluntary ignorance.¹⁸⁴ Israel, while stumbling, has not fallen once for all (cf. Rom. 11:11–12). Instead, Jewish unbelief has providentially served the salvation of the Gentiles and precluded any conceit on their part (11:17–22, 25a).¹⁸⁵ In the mystery of his will (the actual outworking of which Origen claims not to ¹⁸⁰ 94–6. ¹⁸¹ ¹⁸² ¹⁸³ ¹⁸⁴ ¹⁸⁵

On this fact, see Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews (New York: Doubleday, 2008), Gager, “Who Did What to Whom?” 48. Origen, Comm. in Rom. 8.1.1–8.2.6 (SC 543:440–60). Ibid. 8.5.1–10; 8.9.1–6 (SC 543:484–96, 538–46). Ibid. 8.7.1–12 (SC 543:512–24). Ibid. 8.8.1–6; 8.10.1–13 (SC 543:526–36, 548–62).

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know), God has still paved the path for “all Israel” to be saved (11:25–6) in a glorious restoration that vindicates God’s graciousness equally to Gentiles and Jews.¹⁸⁶ Later Greek Christian interpreters followed suit to differing degrees, though with not nearly the depth of Origen’s exegetical analysis. For Chrysostom, who does not see Paul entirely lifting his condemnations of unbelieving Jews, God would not finally drive them into an impasse of despair nor invite a new disaster of Gentile Christian arrogance—though John conspicuously refrains from commenting on the phrase “all Israel will be saved.”¹⁸⁷ Despite qualifications, hope is rescued from the tragedy of unbelieving Israel. Diodore of Tarsus,¹⁸⁸ Theodoret of Cyrus,¹⁸⁹ even the strongly polemical Cyril of Alexandria,¹⁹⁰ as well as the Latin writers Ambrosiaster¹⁹¹ and Pelagius,¹⁹² all affirm in their various ways the prospect of the reconciliation of those Jews who, like the Gentiles, freely come to faith in Christ. Among Eastern authors, only Theodore of Mopsuestia outdoes Origen in praising both the past and future role of the Jews in the economy of salvation, and the assurance of their share in the very same grace as the Gentiles.¹⁹³ Augustine, however, quite differently approaches the more hopeful outcome of the tragedy of the Jews. To be sure, he still echoes much of the older adversus Judaeos polemic, such as the traditional identification of the Jews with the accursed Cain (Gen. 4:9–16) who murdered the Christ-figure Abel.¹⁹⁴ ¹⁸⁶ Ibid. 8.11.1–8 (SC 543:564–74). For comparison of Origen’s views here with two other luminary interpreters, see Peter Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis: Romans 9–11 in Origen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983). ¹⁸⁷ Hom. in Rom. 19.6 (PG 60:591–2). On Chrysostom’s far less ebullient (compared with Origen’s) attitude toward the prospect of unbelieving Jews turning to Christ, see Jeremy Cohen, “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation: Romans 11:25–26 in Patristic and Medieval Exegesis,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 247–81, at 263–5. ¹⁸⁸ Frag. In Rom., in Karl Staab, ed., Pauluskommentare aus der griechischen Kirche (Münster: Aschendorff, 1933), 104. ¹⁸⁹ Comm. in Rom. (PG 80:180B–C). ¹⁹⁰ Ibid. (PG 78:849B–D); cf. Glaphyra in Genesim 5.3 (PG 69:261A–D) on the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau as prefiguring the reconciliation of unbelieving Jews to Christ. ¹⁹¹ Comm. in Ep. ad Romanos 9.1–11:36 (CSEL 81/1:302–92). See also Cohen, “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation,” 266–70. ¹⁹² Expositio in Romanos on Rom. 9–11, ed. Alexander Souter, Pelagius’s Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, Text and Studies 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 2:72–94. Pelagius (who knew Rufinus’s Latin translation of Origen’s Romans commentary) reads Paul to mean that Jews and Gentiles are pure equals in God’s sight, and that God elects people according to his foreknowledge of future merits. Pelagius averred that in fact all Jews had already been saved—their salvation not eschatologically deferred—insofar as the incarnate Christ already arrived with the same grace for Jews and Gentiles who would freely embrace the Savior. See also Cohen’s commentary, “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation,” 271–3. ¹⁹³ Fragments of Theodore’s Comm. in Rom. in Staab, Pauluskommentare 143–59 (on Rom. 9–11). See also Cohen, “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation,” 265–6. ¹⁹⁴ Contra Faustum 12.9–13 (25/1:337–43). For Augustine’s advancement of the adversus Judaeos argumentation, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins: Ein Beitrag zur Geschicthe der jüdisch-christlichen Beziehungen in den ersten Jahrhunderten (Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1946).

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Among his different figural readings of Jacob and Esau,¹⁹⁵ Augustine views Esau as the beleaguered unbelieving (carnal) Jews and Jacob as the (spiritual) Church;¹⁹⁶ but his maturing theology of election and predestination significantly qualifies the typology, lest someone simply equate Jews with reprobation and Gentiles with election. In his early, strongly anti-Manichaean Propositions on the Epistle to the Romans, he had actually taken a position compatible with his Eastern counterparts, suggesting that the election of Jacob over Esau (Rom. 9:13; Mal. 1:3) was based simply on God’s unprejudiced foreknowledge of their future merits;¹⁹⁷ but in his later To Simplician: On Diverse Questions, he famously reverses himself, dismissing any such foreknowledge of merit and basing election purely on God’s prerogative to dispense his grace on whomever he decrees (Rom. 9:15).¹⁹⁸ By this account, Jews as well as Gentiles can be elected among the “vessels of mercy” (Rom. 9:22–4).¹⁹⁹ Indeed, in a letter to the bishop Hesychius of Salona, Augustine affirms that even some of the Jews who had died in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (the very event for which unbelieving Jews had long been held responsible) were “men of the circumcision who had become believers or were about to become believers, elected before the foundation of the world.”²⁰⁰ By the same principle of election, though, Augustine in his turn qualifies Paul’s projection that “all Israel” will be saved (Rom. 11:25). “All Israel” must consist of the body of elected souls known only to God.²⁰¹ In the meantime, Christians are to love the Jews in hopes that they will respond positively and penitently to the prophetic indictments against them and to the gift of salvation in Christ.²⁰² Sadly, Augustine’s more nuanced speculations about the destiny of the Jews in the economy of salvation were largely lost on later generations of Western Christians who internalized foremost his anti-Jewish polemic and his contention that unbelieving Jews, in their punitive state as hold-outs against the gospel, were an abiding negative witness to the superior truth of Christianity.²⁰³ Accordingly they bore the “mark of Cain” (Gen. 4:15)²⁰⁴ and were to be spared from assault and death—fulfilling Psalm 58(59):12: Slay them not—in ¹⁹⁵ See my discussion above, Chapter 2, pp. 64–6. ¹⁹⁶ Serm. 4.12 (CCSL 41:28–9). ¹⁹⁷ Expositio quaraundum propositionum ex Epistola ad Romanos 60, Latin text. ed. and trans. Paula Fredriksen Landes (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 30–2. ¹⁹⁸ De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 1.2.1–22 (CCSL 44:24–56). ¹⁹⁹ Ibid. 1.2.19 (CCSL 44:47–50). ²⁰⁰ Ep. 199.29 (CSEL 57:269–70). ²⁰¹ Ep. 149.19 (CSEL 44:365); cf. Tractatus adversus Judaeos 5.6 (PL 42:55). Cohen nonetheless notes some other passages in Augustine seem more ambiguous, speaking of “all Israel” as the whole Jewish people though without explicitly designating all individual Jews (“The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation,” 275 and n. 73). ²⁰² Tract. adv. Judaeos 10.15 (PL 42:63–4). ²⁰³ On the medieval legacies of Augustine’s perspective on the Jews, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 19–146. ²⁰⁴ Contra Faustum 12.11–13 (CSEL 25/1:339–43). See also Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 260–89.

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order to preserve their function as witnesses.²⁰⁵ New and dire tragedies lay ahead for Jews in the medieval West, whose “witness” led to ever more profound social ostracism and attempts, in some cases, to force their conversion and make exhibitions thereof.

CONSPEC TUS: CHRISTIAN TRAGICAL C ONSCIENCE In the contexts and literature that we have examined in this and preceding chapters, it has become increasingly apparent that tragical mimesis, in its various literary and rhetorical forms, pressed Christian believers (spectators) to enter through their mind’s eye into the zone of disorientation and despair that typically surrounded the human experience of profound evil and suffering in classical and biblical tragedy alike. For all the writers and preachers we have considered, this required less a suspension of the Christian hope, or a total bracketing of rational attempts to understand divine justice and providence, than a robust use of the moral imagination to envision how the chaos of evil and suffering is paradoxically the occasion of new epiphanies of God’s goodness. One way of stretching the Christian moral imagination, as we have found, was to implicate readers/hearers in the fray of the Bible’s own tragic narratives, and to see the world in or through the eyes of its tragic heroes and villains. Another way was to prompt believers to contemplate introspectively the Christian self as a “tragic self” thoroughly bound by the world’s vanity (and original sin, in Augustine’s view). In this chapter, however, I have suggested that Christian preachers and moralists also endeavored to turn their audiences outward, to instill in them a tragical conscience, which, to reiterate, was something quite distinct from a guilt-ridden conscience stricken with remorse over the fact that others, undeservedly or deservedly, suffered horrors worse than oneself. In modern Western societies, journalistic and social media, and thus much public discourse, are heavily invested in “raising awareness” of fellow humans victimized by natural catastrophes, disease, and geopolitical or social evils, with some studies showing little return in the way of activism.²⁰⁶ Such “awareness,” in some instances no doubt, is an antidote for individual guilt or feelings of powerlessness, or even for fears of our human susceptibility. As Rowan Williams puts it well, our consciousness of tragic suffering “can be ²⁰⁵ De civitatis Dei 18.46 (CCSL 48:644–5); Tract. adv. Judaeos 7.9 (PL 42:57); Enarrationes in Psalmos 58[59], Serm. 2.2 (CCSL 39:745–6). See also, Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 23–65; Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 290–352. ²⁰⁶ See e.g. Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand, “Stop Raising Awareness Already,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 15.4 (Fall 2017): 34–41.

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transformed into a sentimental self-awareness, a fascination with our own vulnerability; it can turn into a troublingly lucid awareness of how we might secure ourselves against others or consolidate our advantage over others, even destroy the threat of others.”²⁰⁷ But all this is largely foreign to the tragical conscience described in this chapter, primarily because secular Western cultures do not share a sacred moral narrative and struggle even to articulate a common mythos of global community or human solidarity, let alone a singular interpretation of earthly “justice.” Tragical conscience, for its early Christian exponents, demanded its subject to contemplate human evil and suffering—not merely abstractly but concretely—as symptomatic of the deeper vanity or futility to which God has exposed the creation (Eccl. 1:2; Rom. 8:19–23), and as the great behemoth (along with death itself) to be vanquished by the residual grace of God’s intervention in Jesus Christ.²⁰⁸ As conscience, it entailed deep moral self-awareness; but as tragical conscience it demanded the expanded vision of oneself as bound up with the human “other”—Christian or not—in the same vanity, and so too in the same susceptibility to disorientation or even despair. The “faces and bodies” that we have identified in the early Christians’ visual field represented characters in the various sub-plots of the cosmic drama of evil and redemption, sub-plots having their own complexities and respective dynamics of concealment and disclosure. The bodies of the poor and diseased, tragic heroes amid the worst-case scenario of mortal human existence, paradoxically redefined the terms of wealth and poverty in the world, and divulged the kenotic Christ concealed within them. Social parasites, scandalizing the Christian faithful with their comical theatrics, played out a tragedy of life on the social and economic margins. Could the Christian conscience stretch to reimagine the parasite rather as a tragic comic whose suffering put Christian generosity of spirit to the test? Married Christians revealed the tragic fact that the sacred bond of matrimony was no safe haven from suffering, and that even the most intimate human relationships were matrices of deep pain and loss. Ascetic and monastic Christians played the fine line of dramatizing to the world the “scandal” and “foolishness” of the eschatological gospel without running amok in incoherent extremism, turning their practices into a cultural sideshow, or, worst of all, falling short of the high bar of radical devotion to Christ and the “apostolic life.” In the end, however, unbelieving Jews, presenting a unique kind of “otherness,” strained the Christian tragical conscience to ²⁰⁷ The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 52. ²⁰⁸ I have explored patristic interpretation of these “vanity” texts in some detail in Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 207–22; Paul Blowers, “The Groaning and Longing of Creation: Variant Patterns of Patristic Interpretation of Romans 8:19–23,” in Markus Vinzent, ed., Studia Patristica 63 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 45–54.

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its capacity. For even if enduring divine punishment was allegedly theirs to bear as an object lesson, a sadly poetic justice, Israel’s “tragic history” (extending back to the time of the prophets) was also now part of the Church’s own scriptural heritage, a tragedy for the Church to bear for better or worse, in which case the prospects of the Jews in the full revelation of God’s righteousness still absolutely factored into Christian vision of the future economy of salvation.

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6 Tragical Pathos The Expanding Christian Repertoire of Tragical Emotions

My proposal going forward in this chapter is that the tragical conscience, as we have seen it projected and convicted by various Christian preachers in late antiquity, was a conscience always demanding therapeutic cleansing and clarifying. Certainly these same preachers knew the scriptural teaching on “cleansing of conscience” specifically as the purging of the guilt of sin and “dead works” through the sacrificial blood of Christ, liberating believers to new life (Heb. 9:13–14).¹ But the catharsis of the tragical conscience was distinct. On the one hand, I suggest, its catharsis consisted in rehabilitating misused or misdirected emotions (including the classic tragical emotions of fear and pity), and turning them toward doing virtuous work in the moral and spiritual life. But it also involved cultivating and expressing an array of other distinctively Christian tragical emotions instrumental for fathoming creation’s overall tragic condition and responding to specific tragedies in the purview of the Church or in the experience of individual Christians. Along the way, I will also be considering the cleansing and retraining of these tragical emotions in the light both of ancient thinking on the nature of emotions and Aristotle’s influential reflections on catharsis.

EMO TIONS AN D MORAL VISION The emotional culture of early Christianity, by which I mean the nurturing and inculcation of emotions considered vital to the moral and spiritual health of the Christian—and conversely, the targeting, prevention, or eradication of ¹ See e.g. John Chrysostom, Hom. in Heb. 15.2–3 (PG 63:119–20). Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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passions deemed harmful—owed much to debates in Greco-Roman moral philosophy over the nature and function of human emotions and their relation to virtue and vice. Broadly speaking, early Christian moralists were challenged, like various Hellenistic moral philosophers before them, to weigh Stoic concepts of the emotions, either as “diseases” (πάθη) of the soul or as misfiring “judgments” (κρίσεις) of the intellect,² against Platonically-inspired ideas of the emotions as rooted in psychic faculties (δυνάμεις) or drives, appetitive (ἐπιθυμητική) and aversive (θυμητική), positioned under the rule of reason.³ Aristotle’s insights into the emotions had unique attraction as well, since they were less strictly theoretical than framed in terms of desired responses to effective rhetoric⁴ and drama,⁵ and better yet in terms of moral performance and virtue ethics.⁶ Christian thinkers were drawn to the fact that many of the virtues commended by Aristotle, just like those attested in the New Testament, indicated healthy emotional states and not just dispositions (διαθέσεις) of the soul. In truth, early Christian moral psychology ultimately drew upon Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian perspectives alike. More importantly, in critically synthesizing these perspectives with their reading of virtues and vices in biblical narratives, Christian authors increasingly learned to treat the emotions as integral in a believer’s moral formation rather than as purely distractive or corrosive impulses undercutting the mind’s moral resolve.⁷ Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the gradual Christian redefinition of Stoic apatheia, the “impassibility” or radical detachment characterizing the philosophical sage. Though early Christian writers, especially monastics, routinely speak of sedating detrimental passions, their convictions that emotions are rooted in constitutive human faculties still beneficial to the health of the soul, that some emotions can even be put to good moral “use” (χρῆσις),⁸ and that

² Stoics were not unanimous in defining emotions. See the collection of Stoic texts in A. A. Long and David Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 2: Greek and Latin Texts with Notes and Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 404–18. ³ Most famously, Plato’s image of reason as a charioteer reining in the race horses, the subsidiary drives of desire and temper: Phaedrus 246A–254E. ⁴ Rhetorica 1378A–1388B. John Cooper sees the (incomplete) makings of a “theory” of emotions on the basis of this work in “An Aristotelian Theory of the Emotions,” Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 406–23. ⁵ Most famously, the tragical emotions of fear and pity, in Poetica 1452Bff. ⁶ See Ethica Nicomachea 1152Bff.; Ethica Eudemia 1220Bff. ⁷ For further analysis, with citations of primary sources, see Paul Blowers, “Hope for the Passible Self: The Use and Transformation of the Human Passions in the Fathers of the Philokalia,” in Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: Exploring the Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 216–29. ⁸ On this Stoic principle and its appropriation in Christian writers, see Christian Gnilka, ΧΡΗΣΙΣ: Die Methode der Kirchenväter im Umgang mit der antiken Kultur (Basel: Schwabe, 1984), 65–79.

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human passibility (τὸ πάθος) is to be eschatologically transformed instead of annihilated, imply that apatheia can never be a purely passionless state.⁹ It is rather the perfected attunement of the lower (passible) soul, fused with the mind in the love and knowledge of God; and it is the fruit of sustained internal discipline and ascetical struggle. And yet precisely how, for episcopal and monastic pedagogues guiding their disciples toward spiritual maturity, could emotions actually enhance moral (and tragical) vision? Here we may find help from the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has explored this question within Hellenistic moral philosophy. As Nussbaum deduces, modern theories of the emotions as innate and uneducable bodily reactions completely independent of the reasoning mind would have been foreign to the Hellenistic moralists who influenced Christian thinkers. In general, these philosophers conceived the emotions as forms of “intentional awareness,” directed to specific objects or ends, intimately connected with beliefs about real states of affairs, and thus capable of being appraised as rational or irrational, or as valid or invalid (though rationality and validity were not equatable).¹⁰ The assumption was that emotions have their own intelligence, or cognitive content, rather than being mere ⁹ Early on Clement of Alexandria, in his instructions on moral self-care, assumed a fairly rigorous position on apatheia, suggesting that even healthy emotions would need to be sublimated by the perfected Christian gnostic (Strom. 6.71.1-6.79.2 (GCS 15:467–71)); and yet en route to that perfection, the Christian can still use various emotions to morally salutary ends: e.g. fear, as will be discussed in Clement at length below. The Cappadocians take this further. Basil of Caesarea declares that desire, anger, and the like, “each becomes a good or an evil for its possessor consistent with its mode of use (χρήσεως)” (Hom. adversus eos qui irascunter 5 [PG 31:365C–D]); similarly on good use of “hatred,” see Hom. in Psalmos 44.8 (PG 29:405B). Gregory of Nyssa writes of the transmutation even of irrational passions: “anger into courage, cowardice into caution, fear into obedience, hatred into aversion from evil, the faculty of love into the desire (ἐπιθυμία) for what is truly beautiful” (De hominis opificio 18, PG 44:193B–C). Ambrose too prescribes the healthy channeling of emotional impulses, under reason’s rule, toward godly ends (De Jacob et beata vita 1.1.4-1.2.7, CSEL 32/2:6–8). Among monastic theologians, Evagrius Ponticus combined the negative thrust of apatheia, namely, the stifling of vain or illicit “thoughts” (λογισμοί) that lead to destructive passions, with its positive meaning as the tranquility of the mind (νοῦς) in its peaceful relation to the soul’s passible part (τὸ παθητικόν), which comes only as the fruit of great contemplative and ascetical struggle (see Practicus 57–90, SC 171:634–90); also Jeremy Driscoll, “Apatheia and Purity of Heart,” in Steps to Spiritual Perfection: Studies on Spiritual Progress in Evagrius Ponticus (New York: Newman Press, 2005), 76–93. John Cassian’s rendering of apatheia as “purity of heart” (puritas cordis) has sometimes been viewed as a corrective to Evagrius, but was instead probably inspired precisely by Evagrius: see Cassian, e.g. Collationes 1.5.2; 1.6.3; 1.7.2 (CSEL 13:11, 12, 13); De institutis coenobiorum 4.43 (CSEL 17:78). For helpful discussion of patristic approaches to the options of moderation of passions (μετριοπάθεια) and dispassion (ἀπάθεια), see Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 385–99. Specifically on Augustine’s critique of Stoic apatheia, see James Wetzel, “Prodigal Heart: Augustine’s Theology of the Emotions,” in Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 81–96. ¹⁰ Nussbaum argues this extensively in her work, but see her summary in The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 79–81.

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subsidiary “feelings” or “blind surges of affect.”¹¹ Nussbaum furnishes illustrations from Greco-Roman sources, but a good example from early Christian ethics (and I shall return to it later) is the difference between “fear” (φόβος; timor; Syriac ) functioning as the recognition of imminent suffering or death, and “fear” functioning as the acknowledgment of the transcendent God who demands allegiance and worship. By an Aristotelian account, both kinds of fear are species of emotional pain (λύπη), but what makes them distinctive is precisely their cognitive content. Educating or reconditioning fear would be a matter, then, of altering one’s ideas of what is truly or negligibly “fearful.” Nussbaum also observes that for many Greco-Roman moralists, emotions have their own status as registers of desires and values, implying that emotions have histories, and that they are shaped over time by prevailing social and cultural values as well as by the variables of an individual’s psychological life and past. An especially lucid example for Nussbaum is the Epicurean Lucretius, who treats an emotion like love as arising not simply from grasping abstract or even concrete propositions about one’s life. “Instead, we internalize culturally narrated scenarios that give us the dimensions, pace, and structure of the emotion. And these scenarios are then enacted in our own lives, as we cast ourselves and others in the roles created by them.”¹² Nussbaum’s “culturally narrated scenarios” of emotional formation appear to me compatible with what classicist Robert Kaster calls the “narrative scripts” of emotions evidenced in Greco-Roman sources. These scripts inscribe in their subject the dominant culture’s moral values, each one bearing a unique constellation of acquired beliefs, desires, and aversions, staged in a concrete social setting or interaction.¹³ This goes far to explain how a given emotion, while physiologically having a very short duration, nonetheless carries the weight of one’s moral past, and can have residual aftereffects in future experience. Emotional scripts betray our formation as moral agents over an extended period.¹⁴ Teleologically speaking, they expose our commitments, strivings, and purposes, in their nobility and ignominy alike. In addition, Kaster observes, emotional scripts can be concurrent and overlap, bespeaking the dynamism of human emotional life. Emotions can

¹¹ Ibid. 38, 369; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19–237. ¹² Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 508 (emphasis added). ¹³ On the idea of “narrative scripts” of emotion as opposed to mere lexical definitions that inadequately account for the dynamism of emotions, see Kaster’s Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8–9, 85, 132–3. ¹⁴ See my discussion in Paul Blowers, “Emotional Scripts and Personal Moral Identity: Insights from the Greek Fathers,” in Alexis Torrance and Symeon Paschalidis, eds., Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2018), 19–28.

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be morally complex; and their scripts can qualify each other and bleed together. Like Nussbaum, Kaster draws his examples from Greco-Roman literature and philosophy, and of particular interest to him are the various scripts of invidious emotions, the often subtle differences and interchanges that play out in pagan sources between envy, jealousy, emulation, spite, covetousness, and so on.¹⁵ Each one has its own sort of moral “logic,” but each can also mutate. A superb illustration from early Christian sources of the outworking of the “narrative scripts” of human emotion, and one especially relevant to my discussion further on, appears in Basil of Caesarea’s Homily on Envy. In this sermon eliciting the manifestations of envy in the Bible and in his congregation’s experiential foreground, he sketches a scenario of how even a decent emotion like pity could take a morally deviant track. Basil portrays a man eaten up with envy for his more prosperous and publicly esteemed neighbor. When the neighbor’s beloved son dies in youth, the envious man shows up at the funeral in a grandiose display of pity. In principle, the pity could be simply the means for the man to cleanse himself of the deep emotional pain of envy. But in this case, as Basil makes clear, a more sinister “script” of pity has unfolded. This is a condescending pity meant to punctuate the envious man’s superior lot in comparison with his now bereaved neighbor, colored as well by glee (Schadenfreude) at his suffering. In effect, the more powerful script of envy has coopted the script of a genuinely merciful pity.¹⁶ These emotional scripts certainly bore the imprint of the larger cultural values of honor and shame that reigned supreme in late Roman and Byzantine society. The man’s envy betrayed pathological resentment of another man enjoying honor (the envy of the neighbor being even more powerful than the “jealousy” of the honor itself). Even though showing genuine pity could have brought honor to the envious man, his breed of condescending pity merely accentuated his more deeply seated envy, and so too his inescapable shame. Basil’s audience undoubtedly could recognize the plausibility of these scenarios or emotional scripts. But like other Christian preachers of his time anxious to challenge the prevailing culture of honor and shame, Basil’s interest was to shape and inculcate virtuous emotional scripts from within the moral culture of the Church. We turn, then, to the cathartic healing and “re-scripting” of the classical tragical emotions of fear and pity that were so basic to the Christian tragical conscience.

¹⁵ Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome, 84–103; Kaster, “Invidia, νέμεσις, φθόνος, and the Roman Emotional Economy.” See also Blowers, “Envy’s Narrative Scripts,” 25–7. ¹⁶ Hom. de invidia 1–2 (PG 31:373A–373D).

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THE CLASSIC TRAGICAL EMOTIONS “ CLEANSED ” AND REEDUCATED

Fear Retrained and Recontextualized In Aristotle’s influential treatment, the powerful tragical emotions of fear and pity belong absolutely together.¹⁷ We pity precisely those with whom we most closely identify (people like us) when they appear to suffer undeservedly, and concurrent with the pity are the pangs of fear that the same fate could befall us.¹⁸ These others’ suffering is too close for comfort, and reminds us of our own vulnerability and mortality. To be sure, as Elizabeth Belfiore points out, there is for Aristotle a difference between fear and pity as induced mimetically (from the stage) and as induced in real life.¹⁹ In his Poetics, for example, Aristotle wants to play up the deep and painful instinct of fear that demands catharsis, whereas in his Rhetoric and Ethics, he is more occupied with the cognitive content of fear, the calculation of a genuinely imminent danger.²⁰ And yet this difference only brings us around again to the function of catharsis and its relation to real-life experience, long an issue of debate because Aristotle himself provided no detailed explanation of it in his Poetics.²¹ A fair number of his interpreters have understood him to mean that the catharsis is not just the psychological pleasure of assuaging the painful emotions of tragical fear and pity within the theatre; it might well provide the opportunity to rehearse—in a practice run, as it were—our actual response to human misfortune. For instance, it might provide, says Nussbaum, “a richer self-understanding concerning the attachments and values that support the responses” of fear and pity.²² Some of Aristotle’s Renaissance and early modern interpreters even advanced an “allopathic” theory that the catharsis of tragical fear and pity was meant to benefit other emotions too and generally to restore moral health to the whole soul.²³ Early Christian moralists held no interest in definitively resolving the ambiguity of Aristotelian catharsis or in assessing the emotional benefits of good theatre; but some did embrace an educative catharsis. Their focus was on healing and retraining fear and pity in response to real-life tragedy, which required the hard, sustained psychological work of revising these emotions’ cognitive content and orienting them to salubrious ends. Catharsis of these ¹⁷ See Munteanu, Tragic Pathos, 70–138 (on Aristotle). ¹⁸ Poetica 1453A; cf. Rhetorica 1385B. ¹⁹ Tragic Pleasures, 179, 226–38. ²⁰ As Belfiore quips (ibid. 179), “We do not, for example, usually run screaming from a stage monster in the belief that it is about to attack.” ²¹ See above, Chapter 1, pp. 17–18. ²² The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 388–91 (quoted at 388). ²³ For examples, see Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures, 261–3.

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emotions had nothing to do with a pleasurable “venting”; it was about clarifying moral conscience and vision, which was a constant contemplative and ascetical discipline. In articulating their own perspective, Christian authors had at their disposal considerable Greco-Roman philosophical reflection on the disabling power of fear (φόβος), especially among Stoics. The fifth-century CE doxographer John Stobaeus recounts a Stoic catalogue of painful passions that includes multiple species of fear: Hesitation (ὄκνος) is a fear of future action; agony (ἀγωνία) is a fear of failure or, otherwise, a fear of defeat; shock (ἔκπληξις) is a fear arising from a presentation of something unfamiliar; shame (αἰσχύνη) is a fear of bad reputation; panic (θόρυβος) is fear which hastens with the voice; superstition (δεισιδαιμονία) is a fear of gods and daimons; fright (δέος) is a fear of something dreadful; dread (δεῖμα) is a fear which produces fright.²⁴

In short, fear has become feared because it is an emotion that feeds on itself, proliferating new objects and running wild with the imagination, for which Stoics and others prescribed their own cognitive therapies.²⁵ Christian moralists concentrated on “using” fear well, and developing fresh emotional scripts of fear framed within a larger, biblically-inspired, quasi-heroic narrative of redemption and transformation in the midst of the world’s vanity and tragedy. In the era still of Roman persecutions, Clement of Alexandria approached fear fully aware of how Stoics had scrutinized it, but also convinced that it played a constructive role in the formation of the perfect Christian gnostikos. Controverting detractors of the Hebrew Law (Gnostics, Marcionites, and pagan philosophers alike) who saw the Law as triggering irrational fear rather than instilling authentic piety, Clement responds that fear, grounded in faith (itself founded on love) and instrumental for realizing the tutorial function of the Law (Gal. 3:24),²⁶ belongs within a biblically-sanctioned protocol or governance (διοίκησις)²⁷ of progressive religious conversion. So great a change (μεταβολή) as this, when someone passes from faithlessness to faith and comes to believe through hope and fear, is truly a divine thing. Faith is revealed in us as the first inclination (νεῦσις) toward salvation. In faith’s wake

²⁴ Anthologion 2.10c (SVF 3 §408), trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 218–19; cf. the similar Stoic list of fears in Diogenes Laertius 7.112 (SVF 3 §407); also the expansive list from Andronicus of Rhodes, De passionibus 3 (SVF 3 §409). ²⁵ On the Epicurean therapy for fear, see Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 195–238. For extensive discussion of cognitive therapies for an array of emotions in Greco-Roman moral philosophy, see Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 159–300. ²⁶ Strom. 2.30.3–4; 2.125.3 (GCS 15:129, 181). ²⁷ Ibid. 2.32.1 (GCS 15:130).

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appear fear, hope, and repentance, which, in conjunction with self-control and patience, lead us to progress toward love and knowledge.²⁸

Noting the Stoics’ criticism of fear as “irrational avoidance” (ἄλογος ἔκκλισις), a cardinal disease (πάθος) of the soul,²⁹ Clement responds that perhaps they could at least agree that the fear inculcated by the Law is more like “caution” (εὐλάβεια), a rational avoidance of evil or danger that Stoics included among the so-called εὐπαθείαι, or useful emotional states,³⁰ and which even the tragical and comical poets seemed to value.³¹ Other of the Stoic species of irrational fear, such as “shock” (ἔκπληξις) at what is unfamiliar, or fear at something astounding, are altogether useful in the disciplinary work of the Logos,³² even if other forms, such as superstition (δεισιδαιμονία), remain irrational and counterproductive.³³ Still, these are simply Clement’s conciliatory overtures toward thoughtful pagan moralists. In Christian terms, both the cognitive content and the telos of fear have been radically revised. Penultimately, Christian fear is a fear of divine judgment, but ultimately it is worshipful reverence for God himself—a view directly contradicting the Epicurean belief that fear (especially of death) is invariably linked with irrational fear of the gods.³⁴ The fear is “rational” (λογικός) insofar as it is incited by the Logos immanent in the Law’s commandments, protecting us from real rather than apparent evils and vices, and serving the tutorial function of the Law.³⁵ Indeed, the Christian who has matured from fear under the Law to freedom in Christ (cf. Gal. 3:23–5) remains only a “prudent” (ἔμφρων) phobic.³⁶ For Clement, all this is summed up in the biblical proverb, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7; Ps. 110:10, LXX),³⁷ contrasted but complemented by Sirach’s proverb, “Wisdom’s crown is the fear of the Lord” (Sir. 1:18).³⁸ In an important clarification, Clement also indicates that the healing and re-scripting of the emotion of fear is, at bottom, inextricable from the ²⁸ Ibid. 2.31.1 (GCS 15:129). ²⁹ Ibid. 2.32.3 (GCS 15:130), referencing unnamed Stoic sources (see above, n. 24). ³⁰ Ibid. 2.32.4; 2.33.2 (GCS 15:130), again referencing unnamed Stoic sources. ³¹ Ibid. 2.119.4-2.124.1 (GCS 15:178–80). ³² Ibid. 2.37.1-2.38.1 (GCS 15:132–3). ³³ Ibid. 2.40.1 (GCS 15:134). ³⁴ See Nussbaum’s comments on Lucretius in The Therapy of Desire, 197, 261. ³⁵ Strom. 2.32.3-2.35.5; 2.37.3 (GCS 15:130–1, 132). Even Plato, while criticizing the disabling effects of fear as elicited by the tragical poets, projected an acceptable mode of philosophical “fear-reverence” for avoiding injustice (Munteanu, Tragic Pathos, 66–9). ³⁶ Paed. 1.33.3–4 (GCS 12:109–10). ³⁷ Strom. 2.35.5; 2.37.2 (GCS 15:131, 132); ibid. 7.70.1–2 (GCS 17:50). ³⁸ Paed. 1.69.2 (GCS 12:130). See also Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski, Clement of Alexandria: A Project of Christian Perfection (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 68–78 (“The Hebrew Attitude of φόβος and Its Role in Clement’s Project”). Origen, too, posited the importance of a worshipful “fear” as the “beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7), a beginning for those who are at the most basic level of conformity to the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29), which is the form of a “slave” (Phil. 2:6) (Comm. in Rom. 7.5.3, SC 543:302–4).

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reorientation of deep-seated desire and love. Since there is no mechanical causality operative in the soul’s spiritual progress, and the various virtues mutually interconnect and constantly condition each other, fear cannot really be analyzed in pure isolation anyhow. And because fear is twofold (dread of evil or punishment; and pious reverence), it holds true simultaneously that, for the Christian gnostic, “fear is the beginning (ἀρχή) of love” and yet, as it expands, it actually turns into faith, then into love.³⁹ Progressively, fear is recontextualized by love, and perfected love “casts out” the lesser fear of pain or punishment (1 John 4:18; cf. Heb. 2:15).⁴⁰ Threats of chastisement, a necessary divine rhetoric for disciplining the immature, especially in the Old Testament, are superseded for the mature by the divine rhetoric of persuasion to the good for its own sake,⁴¹ just as the old covenant of fear informs but gives way to the new covenant of love.⁴² The gnostikos is pressed to move beyond confessing God merely with the lips, out of fear or expectation of reward, to confessing “from a disposition (διαθέσεως) formed by gnostic love.”⁴³ Only the purely worshipful fear of God endures, as a complement to the superior love of God.⁴⁴ Origen concurs with Clement but with his own nuances. Slavery to fear (cf. Rom. 8:15) is to be transcended through a liberating love (1 John 4:18), and yet that initial, enslaving fear, is not useless if it is already worshipful, a “beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7), since this conforms the beginner to the Christ who himself condescended to take the form of a slave (Phil. 2:6).⁴⁵ The instruction of Clement and Origen here had strong echoes especially in early monastic ethics. Monks in the Christian East were perplexed by the fact that Scripture routinely commanded fear while 1 John 4:18 bluntly stated its incompatibility with love and perfection.⁴⁶ Acknowledging this interpretive problem, John Cassian set a lasting precedent for expounding different degrees of ascetical perfection, and so too different scripts of fear such as were either incompatible or compatible with final perfection in love as projected by 1 John 4:18. The ideal is an upward spiral of ever purer fear and ever more intense

³⁹ Strom. 2.53.3 (GCS 15:142). ⁴⁰ Ibid. 4.100.5 (GCS 15:292). Augustine later takes a similar position on 1 John 4:18, noting that it only apparently contradicts Psalm 19:9 (The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever) since the latter upholds only the pure fear of God, not the inferior fear of punishment: In epistulam Johannis tractatus 9.4–6 (SC 75:382–90). ⁴¹ Clement, Paed.1.75.1-1.95.2 (GCS 12:133–46); cf. Origen, Hom. in Jesu Nave 9.7 (SC 71:258), noting the superiority of loving the good for its own sake rather than out of a fear of evil. ⁴² Paed. 1.59.1–2 (GCS 12:124–5). ⁴³ Strom. 4.111.5-4.112.3 (GCS 15:297). ⁴⁴ Ibid. 4.108.4-4.109.1 (GCS 15:296); 7.78.7-7.79.1 (GCS 17:56). ⁴⁵ Comm. in Rom. 7.5.3 (SC 543:302–4). ⁴⁶ Cf. John Cassian, Collationes 11.12 (CSEL 13:326–8); Dorotheus of Gaza, Didaskaliai 4.47 (SC 92:220); Diadochus of Photiki, Capita de perfectione spirituale 16 (SC 5:92–3); Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium 10 (CCSG 7:83–7).

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love, fear remaining essential to curbing complacency or self-satisfaction.⁴⁷ Maximus the Confessor shows the distillation of this principle in monastic practice: Fear of the Lord is twofold. The first fear is provoked in us by threats of punishment, and produces, in their proper order, self-control, patience, hope in God, and the apatheia from which comes love. The second type of fear is yoked with love itself and perpetually evinces reverence in the soul, lest through overfamiliarity with love it turn into presumptuousness toward God. Perfect love casts out the first fear (1 John 4:18) from the soul, which, having acquired that love, no longer fears punishment. The second fear, as I said, always has love yoked with it. The following scriptures apply to the first type of fear: By the fear of the Lord everyone turns away from evil (Prov. 15:27); and The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord (Prov. 1:7). The following apply to the second: The fear of the Lord is pure and endures forever and ever (Ps. 18:10, LXX); and There is no want in those who fear him (Ps. 33:10, LXX).⁴⁸

Meanwhile, however, many monastic writers could not imagine fear of any kind subsisting in the zenith of deification, the soul’s final union with God in love.⁴⁹ Christianity’s burgeoning corpus of martyrological and hagiographical literature made sure that fear as a cowering or shrinking in the face of pain and suffering was to have no place among fear’s healthy scripts. The question nevertheless persisted as to whether some measure of fear and trembling (φόβος καὶ τρόμος, Phil. 2:12; Ps. 2:11), enjoined by the Apostle and the Psalmist alike, was inevitable for the Christian, even instrumental for scripting the crucial virtues of courage and hope. For a practical preacher like John Chrysostom, the answer was obvious enough: no one can accomplish anything of virtuous consequence without a measure of motivating anxiety; besides, the fear and trepidation Paul recommends simply remind us that our free will is always operative even while God is working his own will in us (Phil. 2:12–13).⁵⁰ Evagrius Ponticus, on the other hand, illustrated the monastic urgency always to guard a measure of godly cautiousness (εὐλάβεια), even if it was ultimately to be transcended. Deferring to Psalm 2:11 (LXX)—Serve the Lord in fear and rejoice in him with trembling—Evagrius insists that this

⁴⁷ John Cassian, Collationes 11.7, 13 (CSEL 13:320, 329–31); 3.18 (pp. 90–1); De institutis coenobiorum 4.35, 39 (CSEL 17:72–3, 75–6). ⁴⁸ Capita de caritate 1.81–2, Greek text ed. Aldo Ceresa-Gastaldo, Massimo confessore: Capitoli sulla carita (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1963), 80; see also Maximus the Confessor, Qu. Thal. 10 (CCSG 7:83–7). ⁴⁹ Cf. already Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.71.4; 6.74.2; 6.76.1–3 (GCS 15:467, 468–9, 469); Evagrius Ponticus, Scholia in Proverbia 17 (SC 340:110); John Cassian, Collationes 11.7 (CSEL 13:320); Inst. 4.39 (CSEL 17:75–6); Diadochus of Photiki, Capita 16 (SC 5:92–3). ⁵⁰ Hom. in Phil. 8.1–2 (PG 62:237–40).

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applies to the monk in times of trouble, yes, but even more so in those times when trials subside and the monk relaxes.⁵¹ The question of “fear and trembling,” however, became far more acute in considering whether Jesus himself had experienced trepidation at the specter of his passion. Clarity here was critical to acclaiming Jesus as a new kind of tragic hero not just whose death but whole facing of death had redemptive power while also scripting perfect courage. Raising the interpretive stakes was the fact that in much ancient philosophy, fear of death betrayed irrational selfinterest and weakness of soul unbecoming the moral sage.⁵² So it is little surprise that interpreting Jesus’s agony in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:36–46 et par.) began already within the New Testament itself, with the variations in the Gethsemane account in the Synoptic Gospels and in the important text of Hebrews 5:7–10.⁵³ Origen, Didymus the Blind, and Jerome all sought to obviate the problem of Jesus’s trepidation by adapting the Stoic notion of “pre-passions” (προπάθειαι), suggesting that in his carnal state, Jesus experienced only the first impulses of fear, not a fully developed and morally culpable emotion of fear.⁵⁴ Arian interpreters for their part welcomed Jesus’s fear in Gethsemane, using this pericope among others that disclosed his weakness to support their case against his divinity, while pro-Nicenes like Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, and Ambrose countered by assigning Jesus’s fear exclusively to his human nature assumed on sinners’ behalf.⁵⁵ Augustine toyed with the possibility that in Gethsemane Jesus experienced not fear and sorrow for himself but vicariously that of his future bride, the Church.⁵⁶ The writer of Hebrews, however, had strongly advocated for seeing Jesus’s fear in the garden, part of his being “perfected” through suffering (Heb. 2:10; 5:8–9), as a redemptive anguish intended by its “prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears” (5:7), and by its “godly fear” (εὐλάβεια, 5:7), to be

⁵¹ De oratione 143 (PG 79:1197B). ⁵² E.g. Socrates’s famous argument that to fear death is to fear what is unknown, which is unwise since death might just be the greatest of goods (Plato, Apology of Socrates 29A–B). For the long-developing philosophical criticism of the fear of death, see Karl Olav Sandnes, Early Christian Discourses on Jesus’ Prayer at Gethsemane: Courageous? Committed? Cowardly? (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 17–39. ⁵³ For a detailed examination, see Sandnes, Early Christian Discourses on Jesus’ Prayer at Gethsemane, 98–221. ⁵⁴ Cf. Origen, Comm. in Matt. (Latin series) 90 (GCS 38:205–6); Didymus the Blind, Comm. in Ps. (Tura Papyrus) 293, ll. 6–12 (PTA 12:16–18) (favoring the Markan version, where Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled”); Jerome, Comm. in Matt. 4.26.37–9 (CCSL 77:253–4). On these writers’ views of Jesus’s προπάθειαι, see also Layton, Didymus the Blind and His Circle, 121–7; Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 346–55. ⁵⁵ Athanasius, Or. contra Arianos 3.56–7, ed. Karin Metzler and Kyriakos Savvidis, Athanasius Werke 1/1/3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 367–70; Hilary of Poitiers, De trinitate 10.9 (SC 462:18); Ambrose, Expositio evangelii Lucae 10.56–7 (CSEL 32/4:476–8). ⁵⁶ De consensu evangelistarum 3.4.14 (CSEL 43:285); Enarrationes in Psalmos 21.4, serm. 2 (CCSL 38:123).

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effective along with his death itself for saving others from the fear of death (2:15) and instilling in them the very same godly fear (12:28). Here the Stoic εὐλάβεια as caution, one of the εὐπάθειαι, was re-scripted by Jesus himself as a complex emotion of worshipful reverence for the will of the Father together with deep, even courageous identification (4:15) with the trepidation of believers in their own confrontation of potential suffering and death. Jesus’s fear was intrinsic to his own “service” (λειτουργῶν, 2:11) as incarnate High Priest making the once-for-all sacrifice (7:27; 9:12, 26–8; 10:10) in his own flesh. Though many later patristic interpreters of the Gethsemane prayer and of Hebrews 5:7–9 consistently focused on Jesus’s fear as fully altruistic, and as proof of his thorough humanity and its instrumentality for salvation,⁵⁷ the precise redemptive function of his fear also prompted speculation about its divine appropriation within the communicatio idiomatum of the incarnation. Gregory Nazianzen, for example, calling this a “drama marvelously staged and plotted on our behalf,” asserts that Jesus’s fear, with its “loud cries and tears,” was a lucid demonstration of the kenosis of the Son to consume the human fear of death like fire consuming wax.⁵⁸ Cyril of Alexandria takes this kenotic emphasis still further.⁵⁹ In commenting on the related text of John 12:27 (Jesus’s words Now is my soul troubled), he claims that the Son appropriated the inculpable (i.e. natural or instinctive) passions of fear and alarm, but thereupon transmuted (μεταμορφοῖ; μεταπλάττει) fearfulness into boldness (εὐτολμίαν) as if fear were the raw material of courage.⁶⁰ Later, Maximus the Confessor, who offered an extensive theological exegesis of the Gethsemane prayer, initially posited that Christ had a “gnomic” will (γνώμη),⁶¹ the human capacity to calculate or deliberate in choosing the good, in which case his trepidation in the garden would make complete sense. Further on, in the protracted ecclesiastical debates on the volition of Christ during the monothelete controversy (seventh century), Maximus reversed himself, denying gnomic will in Jesus lest it appear that he vacillated in his obedience unto death, and proposing instead that he only exercised a “natural”

⁵⁷ E.g. Theodore of Mopsuestia, Contra Apollinarium, in H. B. Swete, ed., Theodori episcopi Mopsuestieni in Epistolas B. Pauli Commentarii: The Latin Version with Greek Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1880–2), 2:315; John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 83.1 (PG 58:746); Theodoret of Cyrus, Comm. in Heb. (PG 82:712). For a detailed examination, see Rowan Greer, The Captain of Our Salvation: A Study in the Patristic Exegesis of Hebrews (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1973), 250–1, 286–8, 300–1; also Sandnes, Early Christian Discourses on Jesus’s Prayer at Gethsemane, 282–8. ⁵⁸ Or. 30.6 (Or. theol. 4.6) (SC 250:236). ⁵⁹ See Cyril’s comments on Heb. 5:7–9 in Quod unus sit Christus (SC 97:434–8); also Greer’s critical remarks in The Captain of Our Salvation, 337–43; cf. Cyril’s comments on the depth of the Son’s kenosis revealed in Gethsemane, Hom. in Lucam 146 (Syriac version trans. Robert Payne-Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859, 684–6). ⁶⁰ Comm. in Johannem 8 (PG 74:88D–89D). ⁶¹ Expositio orationis dominicae (CCSG 23:34–5).

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human will, which, in his composite hypostasis, was thoroughly deified and operated in perfect conformity with the divine will.⁶² Thereupon Maximus concluded that, by an active passivity, as it were, Jesus underwent human fear of death but also used this fear in a superior, eschatological—but not painless—mode (τρόπος) that would henceforth empower and encourage his disciples.⁶³ By this account, fear can never be a Christ-inspired victory dance in the midst of tragedy but manifests itself rather in a believer’s mystical solidarity with the Son’s kenosis, an emotionally resolute participation in Christ’s deified and deifying mode of fear.

Re-scripting Tragical Pity as Christian Mercy Next we turn to the other classic tragical emotion, pity (ἔλεος; οἶκτος; misericordia), and its Christian reinvention.⁶⁴ From the Bible, Christianity clearly inherited abundant mandates for exercising mercy, and encomiums on mercy became profuse in early Christian literature.⁶⁵ Scripture, however, largely dealt with mercy as a divine grace communicated to and through human agents, and provided no sustained analysis of the moral-psychological anatomy of human mercy (i.e. how mercy arises and expresses itself from within the moral self), such that Christian thinkers looked for insights from Greco-Roman philosophy and poetry. Two strong inhibiting factors nonetheless imposed themselves. First was the severe philosophical criticism of tragical pity descended from Plato,⁶⁶ complemented by the Stoic reproaches of pity as an emotion that merely weakened one’s moral resolve.⁶⁷ Generally, Stoics were only willing to endorse a measured fellow-feeling reserved principally for a

⁶² Cf. Opuscula theologica et polemica 3 (PG 91:56A–D); ibid. 7 (80C–84A); ibid. 16 (192B–C); Disputatio cum Pyrrho (PG 91:308C–309A, 311A–313C). ⁶³ Disp, Pyrrho (PG 91:297B–300A). ⁶⁴ In this section, I am drawing from my earlier study, “Pity, Empathy, and the Tragic Spectacle of Human Suffering.” ⁶⁵ Among the early encomiums, see e.g. Testamentum Zabulon, ed. Marinus de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 89–101; Cyprian, De opere et eleemosynis (CCSL 3A/2:53–72); more specifically on philanthropia, see Homilia Clementina 12.25–33 (GCS 42:186–91). For the fourth and fifth centuries, see e.g. Ambrose, De Officiis 1.11.38–9 (Davidson, 1:138); Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio de beatitudinibus 5 (GNO 7.2:123–36); John Chrysostom, Homilia de eleemosyna (PG 51:261–72); Hom. in 2 Tim. 6.3–4 (PG 62:633–5); Hom. in Titum 6 (PG 62:696–700); Hom. in Heb. 32.3 (PG 63:223); Augustine, Sermones 206–7 (PL 38:1041–4); Valerian of Cimiez, Homiliae 7–9 (de misericordia) (PG 52:713A–722C); Caesarius of Arles, Sermones 25, 26, 28 (CCSL 103:111–18, 122–5). ⁶⁶ See Respublica 605C–606D; also above, Chapter 1, pp. 13–14. ⁶⁷ E.g. Seneca, De clementia 2.6: “Pity (misericordia) is a weakness of the mind that is overmuch perturbed by suffering, and if any one requires it from a wise man, that is very much like requiring him to wail and moan at the funerals of strangers” (trans. John Basore, LCL 214:442).

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peer experiencing hardships in the pursuit of worthy moral ends.⁶⁸ The secret was to “take” pity rather than “feel” it, fully commanding the psychological conditions of its expression.⁶⁹ Second was the fact that, broadly in pagan moral culture, pity had never been considered intrinsically or self-evidently virtuous, even if in some instances it could be meritorious,⁷⁰ and even if other sympathetic emotions were explicitly virtuous,⁷¹ especially in the intimate contexts of family and friendships.⁷² Virtuous or not, dramatic tragedy had long proven tragical pity’s raw emotional power, which Augustine confirmed from his own experience in the theatre in Carthage, where he wept bitterly as he identified with the tragic characters onstage. Meanwhile he recognized that tragical pity, expressed as cathartic pleasure, all too easily degenerated into mere emotional selfindulgence, a cheap thrill bereft of real compassion: This feeling flows from the stream of friendship, but where does it flow to? Why does it run down into the torrent of boiling pitch, the monstrous heats of black desires into which it is transformed? From a heavenly serenity it is altered by its own consent into something twisted and distorted.⁷³

That said, Augustine also asked the timely question of whether such intense emotion could yet be coopted not by pleasure but by genuine love, for the sake of the Christian’s show of authentic mercy to real-life tragic characters.⁷⁴ Successfully to be healed and re-scripted, tragical pity, like tragical fear, still had to be approached in terms of its cognitive structure and content, which differed from fear insofar as pity inherently required an incipient moral reasoning about the justice of another’s suffering. Basil of Caesarea speaks for many early Christian authors when he defines pity as ⁶⁸ E.g. Cicero, De officiis 2.52–5; 2.61–3; 2.69; Seneca, De beneficiis 4.10.4–4.11.6. See also Sorabji, Emotions and Peace of Mind, 174–5. ⁶⁹ On this controlled pity among Stoics, see Anneliese Parkin, “ ‘You Do Him No Service’: An Exploration of Pagan Almsgiving,” in Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne, eds., Poverty in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61–5. ⁷⁰ See Rachel Sternberg, ed., Pity and Power in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–5; Rachel Sternberg “The Nature of Pity,” ibid. 15–47. Elsewhere Sternberg notes the modest place of some form of empathy in Athenian moral culture: see her Tragedy Offstage: Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens, 15–16, 138–41, 171–3. ⁷¹ E.g. philanthrôpia as a civic virtue (int. al., Demosthenes, Kata Aristogeiton 87); or clementia, as in the Roman tradition with Seneca’s De clementia (addressed to the Emperor Nero). We imagine both of these primarily in a controlled public environment, and especially as aristocratic virtues, although David Konstan (The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 215–17) observes that the first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus treats philanthrôpia as a basic kindness approaching pity. Konstan finds a precedent already in Aristotle, Rhetorica 1390A. ⁷² See Konstan, Pity Transformed, 58–60. ⁷³ Conf. 3.2.3 (CCSL 27:28), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 36. ⁷⁴ Ibid. 3.2.3–4 (CCSL 27:28–9).

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. . . an emotion experienced toward those who have been degraded beyond what they deserve, expressed in those who are sympathetically disposed. We pity one who has fallen from great wealth into the ultimate poverty, one who has been reduced from the peak of bodily vigor to extreme weakness, one who gloried in bodily beauty and the prime of life and then was ruined by most disgraceful passions. And therefore since we too were glorying once upon a time in the life of paradise, yet have become inglorious and lowly because of our banishment, our God shows mercy (Ps. 114:5, LXX) as he looks upon what we have become from what we once were.⁷⁵

To an Aristotelian definition of pity, which appears in this homily in a discussion of how God’s mercy and justice are thoroughly integrated, Basil has added a theological nuance accentuating the utter moral leveling of humanity in view of the Adamic fall, which qualifies all calculations about who “deserves” what. Still, Basil clearly acknowledges here that making moral judgments about who really warrants our mercy is inevitable. Even Christians are wont to calculate whether someone has deservedly brought suffering upon herself or instead been made the victim of circumstance—a fact that greatly vexed Basil’s younger contemporary, John Chrysostom. In his sermons John consistently admonishes his audiences for trying to avoid almsgiving by conducting miniature “inquisitions” (ἐξετάσεις) into whether the wretched in their midst were not, after all, suffering exactly what they deserved.⁷⁶ Some might be cheats, liars and schemers, runaway slaves, Jews, foreigners, pagans.⁷⁷ They might also be secular rather than religious, and it is always easier to pity monks.⁷⁸ But had Abraham been so “probing” (περίεργος; περιεργαζόμενος) he would never have entertained the three angels who appeared to him as complete strangers in need of hospitality (Gen. 18).⁷⁹ Valerian of Cimiez similarly warns his audience in a sermon on mercy: Why have you need to ask whether he who makes the request is Christian or Jew, heretic or pagan, Roman or foreigner, free man or slave? When necessity is pressing, you need not discuss the person. Otherwise, in separating out those unworthy of your mercy, you may likewise lose the Son of God. And when can we know in what region of the earth Christ dwells? He who is known to possess everything should be believed to be everywhere.⁸⁰

⁷⁵ Hom. in Ps. 114.3 (PG 29:489B). ⁷⁶ Hom. de eleemosyna 6 (PG 51:269); Hom. in Matt. 35 (PG 57:405–12); Hom. in Heb. 10.4 (PG 63:87–8); Hom. in Heb. 11.3–4 (PG 63:93–5). In the West, Valerian of Cimiez similarly discourages such inquiries: Nulla est discretio postulantis; nec est necessitas exploranda pauperis (Hom. 8.2, PL 52:717B). ⁷⁷ Hom. in Jo. 77.4 (PG 59:418); Hom. in Matt. 35.3–4 (PG 57:409–10); Hom. in Heb. 10.4 (PG 63:88–9); Hom. in Heb. 11.3–4 (PG 63:94–5); Hom. de eleemosyna. 6 (PG 51:269). ⁷⁸ Hom. in Heb. 10.4 (PG 63:87). ⁷⁹ Ibid. 11.4 (PG 63:95); Hom. de Lazaro 2.5 (PG 48:989–90). ⁸⁰ Hom. 7.4 (PL 52:715B–C), trans. George Ganss, FOTC 17:348.

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Even Chrysostom advises, however, some measure of judgment: better, after all, to pity the demon-possessed than the drunkard;⁸¹ and John Cassian similarly concedes how much easier it is to show mercy to demon-possessed sinners than to the utterly impenitent who evidence no such possession—even though the latter, who seem to thrive in their vice, remain the more pathetic.⁸² Imperative for Chrysostom and other preachers was to avert the disastrous scenario wherein pity’s moral intelligence could degenerate into a fallacious logic of justice subverting the evangelical injunctions of undiscriminating love of neighbor. John avows that always for the Christian “it is the season of loving-kindness, not exacting investigation; of mercy, not reckoning.”⁸³ Augustine, deferring to the Beatitude on mercy (Matt 5:7), which he situates in a scheme of ascending steps toward true wisdom, speaks rather of the “counsel of mercy” (consilium misericordiae) that attends the love of neighbor, the “justice” of which lies in the fact that we show mercy to those weaker than ourselves precisely as we have been shown mercy by our spiritual superiors, all within the shadow of the universal divine pity that relativizes all human mercy.⁸⁴ By this account, the moral intelligence of compassion is bound up with the cultivation of the spiritual life in an ecclesial context. It is a habituated resolve (consilium) to convey divine love and mercy rather than a pure calculation of the merits of those to whom that love and mercy are offered. To his credit, I believe, Augustine showed critical appreciation of the Stoic account, as did Clement of Alexandria before him.⁸⁵ True mercy is no sentimental indulgence; it demands scrutiny about the pitied person’s overall situation—his moral as well as material circumstance. Mercy should be grounded in tranquility of mind and driven by imitation of divine beneficence rather than by modulation of emotional pain; such is akin to angelic mercy and more likely to foster merciful acts.⁸⁶ It is also more like God’s mercy: “with regard to mercy, if you take away compassion which involves a sharing of misery with the one whom you pity, so that there remains the peaceful goodness of helping and freeing from misery, some kind of knowledge of

⁸¹ Hom. in Gen. 29 (PG 53:267). ⁸² Collationes 7.30–1 (CSEL 13:207–10); cf. John Chrysostom, Hom. in Heb. 23.3 (PG 63:163). ⁸³ Hom. in Heb. 11.4 (PG 63:95): φιλανθρωπίας ἐστιν ὁ καιρὸς, οὐκ ἀκριβοῦς ἐξετάσεως. ἐλέους, οὐ λογισμοῦ. Cf. Hom. de eleemosyna. 6 (PG 51:270); Hom. de Laz. 2.5 (PG 48:989–90): “To be a judge is one thing, to be merciful is another. Mercy is called mercy because it gives even to the unworthy.” Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 14.29–31 (PG 35:897A–900C), on not second-guessing the divine justice governing human circumstances. ⁸⁴ De doctrina christiana 2.7.11, ed. R. P. H. Green, OECT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 64; De sermone domini in monte 1.3.10 (CCSL 35:8); 1.4.11–12 (pp. 10, 11); 1.18.55 (p. 63); 1.23.80 (p. 90); cf. Serm. 53.5 (PL 38:366). ⁸⁵ Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.17 (SC 38:91–3); 4.22.138 (SC 463:286); 7.11.62 (SC 428:198). ⁸⁶ Cf. De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum 1.27.52–4 (CSEL 90:55–7); De doctrina christiana 1.30.33 (Green, 42); Civ. Dei. 9.5 (CCSL 47:254–5).

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the divine pity is suggested.”⁸⁷ But Augustine also refused to christianize Stoic pity too readily. Redefining mercy according to the rules of detachment, stripped of its inherent pathos, could easily sour unlearned believers against it, hardening rather than softening their hearts for charitable action.⁸⁸ Mercy entailed genuine compassion, framed in terms of the imitation of divine incarnational grace, which precluded any serenity of soul impervious to emotional pain and “contamination” by another’s suffering. For example, as Ambrose and the Gallican bishop Caesarius of Arles both make clear in addressing a live tragic drama within the Church, there will be little serenity for those Christians who, with empathy and emotional solidarity, become spectators to believers undergoing the humiliating process of public confession of egregious sins.⁸⁹ I have already noted two constraining factors in the re-scripting of tragical pity as Christian mercy, namely, the pagan criticism of pity as morally degrading, and the fact that pity had generally not been considered intrinsically virtuous by pagan moralists. But there were other inhibiting factors as well. We dare not forget the role of fear in relation to pity, especially the capacity of irrational fear to overpower pity at the sight of tragic victims of poverty and disease. Susan Wessel has detailed the crisis of disgust in its many forms in late antiquity, inducing potential almsgivers to recoil in the presence of gruesome suffering, and prompting Christian leaders, especially the Cappadocians and John Chrysostom, to fortify their audiences lest they retreat into a false zone of immunity.⁹⁰ One last constraining factor was the proneness, in an ancient culture of honor and shame, of Christians, just like pagans, constantly to be comparing their moral and material conditions in life. Here, in effect, was the social fallout of the kind of moral judgment-rendering that we have seen as endemic to the expression of pity. Pity ironically found itself in the company of the rivalrous emotions like envy and jealousy, as we saw earlier with Basil’s scenario of the envious man whose condescending pity of his better-off neighbor was actually a function of his deeper envy of him. Numerous classical thinkers recognized, as have some contemporary philosophical ethicists, that pity and envy are emotional opposites that strangely attract. By the technical philosophical definitions, if pity is pain (λύπη) at the undeserved misfortune of relative equals, envy is pain at their good fortune, or more specifically spite (νέμεσις) if

⁸⁷ De div. quaest. ad Simplicianum 2.2.3 (CCSL 44:79). ⁸⁸ Mor. eccl. 1.27.54 (CSEL 90:57); cf. Ep. 104.16 (CSEL 34/2:593). ⁸⁹ Ambrose, De penitentia 1.15.81–3 (SC 179:118–22), indicating that compassion shares the burden of the penitent’s suffering without contamination from their guilt itself; cf. Caesarius of Arles, Serm. 67.2 (CCSL 103:286–7). ⁹⁰ See Wessel’s extended discussion, Pity and Compassion in Early Christianity, 65–97. See also above, Chapter 5, pp. 144–5.

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that good fortune appears undeserved.⁹¹ The emotional scripts of pity and envy tend, therefore, to collide in social circumstances where persons are competing for material or social benefits. As I mentioned in the last chapter, preachers of mercy like John Chrysostom wrestled with audiences teeming with the “relative” or “conjunctural” poor, people whose socio-economic position was unstable, who often believed they were already virtually poverty-stricken, and who were all the more liable habitually to compare lots with others.⁹² Chrysostom thus sought to script a healthier scenario for Christians where envy and rivalry would become the refiner’s fire through which mercy was forged and trained. In contrast with Basil’s grim scenario, John insists that the peculiar mercy of “rejoicing with those who rejoice” in their prosperity (Rom. 12:15) is exactly the means of purging envy and grudging.⁹³ He tries to preempt his congregation’s incipient envy by insisting that wealthier Christians deserve pity, not envy, in view of the unique miseries associated with wealth;⁹⁴ and that envious, covetous, or greedy persons themselves, whether rich or poor, should be supreme objects of compassion because of their selfinflicted emotional pain.⁹⁵ Homiletically, this was an altogether hard sell. John and other bishops recurred frequently to the Bible’s own classic narrative scripts of a mercy seized from the jaws of envy, such as Joseph’s pity of his brothers,⁹⁶ and David’s compassion toward the pathologically rivalrous Saul, which converted Saul’s envious rage into συμπάθεια (cf. 1 Sam 24:17, LXX).⁹⁷

Re-scripting Mercy with Empathy The “cathartic” healing and retraining of tragic pity as Christian mercy depended not just on overcoming social and cultural obstacles. It demanded a conversion of pity’s cognitive scope, pressing it in a more altruistic, ⁹¹ Aristotle, Rhetorica 1385B–1388A. See also Aaron Ben Ze’ev, “Envy and Pity,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1993): 3–19; Edward Stevens, “Envy and Pity in Greek Philosophy,” American Journal of Philology 69 (1948): 171–89. On pity among the rivalrous emotions in certain patristic writers, see Blowers, “Envy’s Narrative Scripts,” 22–3, 26–7, 30–1, 32. ⁹² See above, Chapter 5, p. 143 and n. 26. ⁹³ Hom. in Rom. 22.1 (PG 60:609–10). ⁹⁴ In Hom. in 1 Cor. 30.5 (PG 61:255–6), Chrysostom urges special pity for those of material means who dwell in utter fear of a sudden and dramatic shift (μεταβολή) into poverty, in the manner of Cain, who feared for what he had in excess and—being a model of envy—grieved over what he did not possess. ⁹⁵ Hom. in Phil. 2.3–4 (PG 62:194), noting that the rich are to be pitied rather than envied; cf. Hom. in 1 Cor. 11.5–6 (PG 61:94–6); Hom. in 1 Cor. 29.5–6 (PG 61:247–9); Hom. in 1 Cor. 39.7–8 (PG 61:342–4); Hom. in 2 Cor. 24.4 (PG 61:568); Hom. in Laz. 1.12 (PG 48:980); cf. Asterius of Amasea, Hom. 3.7.1, ed. Cornelius Datema (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 31. ⁹⁶ See Hom. in Gen. 61.1–5 (PG 54:526–32) on the brothers’ bitter envy; Hom. in Gen. 64.3 (PG 54:550–1) on Joseph’s compassion (συμπάθεια) for them. ⁹⁷ John Chrysostom, Hom. de Davide et Saule 3.5 (PG 49:702).

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agapeistic direction through the psychological labor of empathy, the attempt to contemplate another’s experience from within that person’s own horizon or purview, normally for purposes of deepening compassion and fostering solidarity. There is no pure Greek or Latin equivalent to “empathy” in this modern usage (the Greek ἐμπάθεια is not related). But empathy ancient and modern is an emotion aimed at closing the gap between self and suffering other, even though that distance or alterity is intrinsic to the expression of mercy.⁹⁸ It too carries its own moral-psychological challenges, for empathy is no expeditious penetration of another’s experience, no simple merging of subjectivities, and there is always, as Augustine knew, the lingering possibility of mere emotional voyeurism. And yet early Christian authors approximated the modern sense of empathy in their own ways. Monastic pedagogues, for example, came close to it with their instruction to “carry” (βαστάζειν) another, as in shouldering another’s sin but not his guilt.⁹⁹ In this connection, John Cassian tells the moving story of a certain elder of the desert who tried to maintain his prestige on the basis of age alone and not proven virtue. A sure sign was his lack of empathy, when he failed to engage with the internal dilemma of a younger monk who confessed to having deviant lusts and was pondering an exit from monastic life to get married. Instead of identifying in the penitent monk’s plight, the elder simply upbraided him as unworthy of his vocation. By sharp contrast, another elder, Abba Apollos, intervened with empathetic mercy, inquiring deeply into the monk’s crisis, telling him of his own struggles with human desires and encouraging him that only divine misericordia and gratia, not asceticism alone, could relieve his misery. Apollos then proceeded to castigate the delinquent elder for his egregious lack of sympathy, exposing a demon within him and reminding him that “the Lord has allowed you to be wounded [by the demon] so that you might at least learn in your old age to suffer with infirmities that are foreign to you and to condescend to the frailties of the young.”¹⁰⁰ Some Christian writers looked to Paul as a model of this Christ-like empathy. Ambrosiaster praises the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 for seeking to become a Jew for the Jews’ sake, a Gentile outside the Law for Gentiles’ sake—all things to all human beings (vs. 20)—for in doing so he showed himself not as a flatterer but as a physician, attending with pastoral empathy to each individual.¹⁰¹ Augustine too recognizes an equivalent of empathy when he redescribes Paul’s becoming a Jew for the Jews’ sake as ⁹⁸ See above, Chapter 5, pp. 143–4. ⁹⁹ See the exemplary texts from the Apophthegmata patrum identified by Douglas BurtonChristie, The Word and the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 282–3. ¹⁰⁰ Collationes 2.13 (CSEL 13:52–6; quoted at 56, ll. 8–11). ¹⁰¹ Comm. in 1 Cor. 9.20 (CSEL 81/2:103–4).

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manifesting “compassion out of mercy, not simulation out of intentional deceit” (compassione misericordiae, non simulatione fallaciae).¹⁰² Chrysostom finds a precedent for empathy in the Psalmist’s instruction on “considering” (συνίων) the poor (Ps. 40:2, LXX), a deep imagining of their plight.¹⁰³ More satisfactory still is Gregory of Nyssa’s description of virtuous pity as “voluntary misery” (ἐκούσιος λύπη) and “loving self-identification” (ἀγαπητικὴ συνδιάθησις) with the other.¹⁰⁴ Maximus the Confessor combines these by specifying empathetic mercy as “voluntary self-identification” (ἐκούσιος συνδιάθησις),¹⁰⁵ adding that through mercy we proactively acknowledge kinship (τὸ συγγενές) and a filial bond (τὸ ὁμόφυλον) with others in crisis.¹⁰⁶ Still, as the contemporary legal ethicist Steven Tudor observes, empathy ever runs the risk of reading another’s suffering solely through one’s own lens, or of merely resonating or duplicating that suffering emotionally instead of appropriating it on its own terms and reinterpreting it through compassionate action on the other’s behalf.¹⁰⁷ The latter requires close attention to the individual. Expressing pity at the situation of the poor, generally speaking, is not the same as envisioning the unique circumstances of an indigent individual and responding accordingly. Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most astute modern philosophical analysts of empathetic mercy whom we referenced in the preceding chapter, has furthermore argued that this mercy cannot simply resort to ontological or totalizing categories of common human “being” as a kind of anesthetic for the painful existential work of taking ethical responsibility for the truly alien human “other.”¹⁰⁸ Levinas also rejected the idea of a spiritualized “friendship” with the suffering other, or anything short of the radical self-dispossession and being “hostage” to the other requisite for authentic empathy.¹⁰⁹ For Levinas and his recent Christian sympathizers, empathy happens only in the presence of the transcendent and infinite Other ¹⁰² Ep. 40.4.4 (CSEL 34.2:73–4); 40.4.6 (CSEL 34.2:77). Again citing 1 Cor. 9:20–2, see Contra mendacium 12.26 (CSEL 41:506). ¹⁰³ Hom. in Heb. 11.3 (PG 63:93). Cf. Leo the Great, Serm. 9.4 (CCSL 138:36), where this same “understanding” means penetrating the real needs of those who suffer, which are hidden beneath shame. ¹⁰⁴ Hom. in beatitudinibus. 5 (GNO 7.2:126); similarly Basil, Hom. in Ps. 114.3 (PG 29:489B), defines pity in terms of being “sympathetically disposed” (συμπαθῶς διατιθεμενῶν). ¹⁰⁵ Mystagogia 24 (PG 91:713A). ¹⁰⁶ Ep. 2 (PG 91:396A). ¹⁰⁷ Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 79, 87–94. ¹⁰⁸ Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 42–8, 293–4 (and passim); Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 3–20, 131–6. Cf. Levinas’s Christian devotees on this point: Oliver Davies, A Theology of Compassion: Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), esp. 129–37; and David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–44, 58–67, 70–1. ¹⁰⁹ Levinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in Seán Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 72–3. On true compassion as enabled by being radically responsible, or “hostage,” to the other, see Otherwise than Being, 117, 124, 127, 184–5; also Ford, Self and Salvation, 66–7.

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(God), who grounds the otherness of those who suffer, shatters the egoism of the compassionate subject, and introduces into the intersubjectivity of self and suffering other the infinite desire that enables the utterly generous giving of self to O/other.¹¹⁰ In retrospect, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and other patristic preachers of late antiquity appear to have been susceptible to precisely Levinas’s criticism when they charged their congregants to close the gap between themselves and suffering others by engaging them simply as fellow human beings, sharers of a common and vulnerable nature, or by referring to the overarching cosmic drama of postlapsarian human suffering and redemption in which all creaturely bodies are implicated.¹¹¹ Augustine, in identifying the poor as “Christ” for potential almsgivers (cf. Matt. 24:40; 2 Cor. 8:9), ran the rhetorical risk, as did other preachers, of depersonalizing them by losing sight of their distinct individual identity.¹¹² The indigent could too easily lack “face”—the very thing that in Levinas’s pregnant usage gives voice to the suffering other¹¹³—although a more generous construal would allow that Augustine simply meant to prioritize Christ’s own active presence in the poor and in the almsgiver,¹¹⁴ or that this presence would intrinsically dignify the individual poor. The Cappadocians for their part could not imagine a universal human “nature” (φύσις) apart from its concrete instantiation in individual persons (ὑποστάσεις), persons-with-faces (πρόσωπα),¹¹⁵ whose embodied life (including the complex life of the emotions) is, teleologically, the theatre in which that nature is transformed and deified. As I noted in the last chapter, Gregory Nazianzen envisions his own self as being remade, becoming wholly new, through interaction, both conflictive and constructive, with other individual selves.¹¹⁶ Even if deification is the eschatological restoration of human nature as a whole, it entails the “fullness” (πλήρωμα) of ¹¹⁰ Cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33–42, 48–151, 254–85, 304–5; Otherwise than Being, 61–129; Ford, Self and Salvation, 34–43, 57–70; Davies, A Theology of Compassion, 131–6. ¹¹¹ E.g. Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 14.6 (PG 35:864C–865B); 14.14 (876A); 14.28 (896B–C); Gregory of Nyssa, De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 1 (GNO 9.1:103); De beneficentia (de paup. amand.) 2 (GNO 9.1:114, 126). See also above, Chapter 5, pp. 145, 149–50. ¹¹² On this point, see Allen and Morgan, Preaching Poverty, 134, 155–6, with citations; also Boniface Ramsey, “Almsgiving in the Latin Church: The Fourth and Fifth Centuries,” Theological Studies 43 (1982): 253–4. Ramsey expresses concern for a kind of “social monophysitism” in Christian preaching, associating the poor so closely with Christ that their individual identity evaporated. ¹¹³ As in his Totality and Infinity, 74–5, 187–219; Otherwise Than Being, 89–93. ¹¹⁴ Countering Ramsey’s view (see n. 112 above), Andreas Klauser argues that “Rather for Augustine it is necessary to recognize Christ in every man—even in oneself as almsgiver—and to continue to emulate his mercy” (“Eleemosyna,” in C. P. Mayer and Erich Feldmann, eds., Augustinus-Lexikon [Basel: Schwabe, 1986], 2:766). Similarly, cf. Allan Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving in the Works of St. Augustine,” in Adolar Zumkeller, ed., Signum Pietatis: Festgabe für Cornelius Petrus Mayer zum 60. Geburtstag (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1989), 450, 457–8. ¹¹⁵ E.g. Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Graecos (GNO 3/1:23, 31–2). ¹¹⁶ See above, Chapter 5, pp. 111–13, 115, 118.

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individuals as Gregory of Nyssa calls it,¹¹⁷ and not a mere return to primordial ontological “sameness.” Indeed, for these authors deification is inconceivable apart from the existential labor of mercy and empathy conditioned by love and self-denial within the context of a passionate (and infinite) desire for the O/other.¹¹⁸ At bottom, too, lay the consideration of human equality as the basis of compassion between and among individuals. Gregory of Nyssa, later Maximus the Confessor, concur that while there is definitely a protological and eschatological equality of human beings, it is meaningless apart from the historical quest toward an “equalizing” ethics instigated through the evangelical virtues. Nyssen famously shows this in his vigorous opposition to slavery,¹¹⁹ while Maximus, even more so than Gregory, expands Paul’s admonition about supplementing another’s deficiencies with one’s own abundances (2 Cor. 8:14) into a whole eleemosynary and ascetical project to overcome inequality (ἀνισότης ἀνωμαλία) between embodied individuals.¹²⁰ These writers aspire to render empathetic mercy a veritable “theological” virtue, not only by extension, since it is the preeminent mode of love (ἀγάπη),¹²¹ but because it perfectly images Christ’s own intentional kenosis, or self-emptying, into the tragic faces and bodies that surround the Christian at every turn.

EMOTIONS OF TRAGICAL SORROW

The Gamut of Grief and Melancholy Among the late ancient Christian writers and preachers with whom we have been occupied, it was not uncommon to describe the demise and death of friends and loved ones in tragical language and thoroughly to dramatize the experience of being grief-stricken. If there was an inexorable ontological ¹¹⁷ De hominis opificio 16 (PG 44:185B–C); 22 (204D–205A); 29 (233D). ¹¹⁸ On mercy as deifying because it is a divine attribute, see Basil of Caesarea, Hom. in Hexaemeron 10.17 (SC 160:208–10); Gregory of Nyssa, Hom. in beatitudinibus 5 (GNO 7.2:124); De beneficentia (= De paup. amand.) 1 (GNO 9.1:103). Cf. De instituto christiano (GNO 8.1:65–8, 71), where the deifying desire for God, the infinity of which Gregory expounds in De vita Moysis and Homiliae in Canticum Canticorum, is explicitly linked with an “insatiable desire (ἐπιθυμία) for justice” in practicing virtue and with becoming a “slave to all” (Mark 9:35; 10:44). ¹¹⁹ Hom. in Ecclesiasten 4 (GNO 5:334–8). ¹²⁰ Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, De beneficentia (= de paup. amand.) 1 (GNO 9.1:123); Maximus, Ambiguum 8 (PG 91:1105B); Capita de caritate 1.25 (Ceresa-Gastaldo, 58); 1.71 (CeresaGastaldo, 76); Ep. 2 (PG 91:400A). On this theme see also Paul Blowers, “Bodily Inequality, Material Chaos, and the Ethics of Equalization in Maximus the Confessor,” in Francis Young, Mark Edwards, and Paul Parvis, eds., Studia Patristica 42 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 51–6. ¹²¹ Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 14.5 (PG 35:864B).

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condition of the human race that perfectly set the stage for tragic events, it was the reality of finitude and mortality, and with it the bitterness of loss and the relentless pain of bereavement. And when death came as unexpected or premature, its implacability was all the more pronounced. Gregory of Nyssa described the sudden death of his brother Naucratius, a hermit who loved to hunt and acquire food for the needy, as a tragedy descending on his family, complete with a messenger bearing the devastating news. He lived this way for five years, philosophizing and making his mother’s life a blessed one because of the way that he regulated his own life through moderation and put all his energy into fulfilling her every wish. Then there occurred for the mother a grave and tragic experience, planned, I think, by the Adversary, which brought the entire family to misfortune and lamentation. He was unexpectedly snatched from life. It was not illness, which prepares one to anticipate the disaster, or any of the usually anticipated things that brought the young man to death. He went out to hunt, which was his means of furnishing provision for the old people. He was brought home dead, he and Chrysaphius, his companion.¹²² His mother was a three-day journey away from the scene and someone else came to her to report what had taken place. She was perfectly schooled in virtue, but nature won out even over her. She became breathless and speechless on the spot and fainted, reason giving way to passion, and she lay there under the impact of the terrible news like a noble athlete felled by an unforeseen blow.¹²³

Making this a tragedy rather than just a sad story was the unspoken senselessness that one thriving in the ascetical life had been cut short by a hunting accident of all things, testing his equally virtuous mother to the limits of her composure (“nature won out even over her”). Basil, who wrote numerous letters consoling the bereaved, similarly depicts in tragical language the death of the young son of Nectarius, eventual Patriarch of Constantinople: The heir of an illustrious house, the bulwark of his race, the hope of his fatherland, the offspring of pious parents, a lad nurtured amid countless prayers, in the very flower of youth—he is gone, torn from the very arms of his parents . . . And yet hitherto at least it has always seemed that your griefs were few in number, and that for the most part your affairs ran smoothly with the stream; but suddenly, through the malice of the devil, all that happiness of home and that gladness of heart have been swept away, and our whole life has become a dismal tale. If, therefore, we would indulge in protestations and in tears because of what has happened, the span of our lives will not suffice; and though all humankind should mourn with us, they will not be able to match our sorrow with their lamentation;

¹²² Chrysaphius was also Naucratius’s friend and former slave, who had joined him in the life of ascetical retreat. ¹²³ Vita Sanctae Macrinae (GNO 8/1:379, l. 18-380, l. 16), trans. Virginia Callahan, FOTC 58:169.

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nay, even if the waters of the rivers should become tears (cf. Lam. 2:18), they would not suffice to satisfy our lament over what has happened.¹²⁴

In his Letter to a Young Widow, John Chrysostom consoles a woman whose prosperous and prestigious husband Therasius died in the prime of his career, when he was about to be elevated to the office of prefect. Among other strategies, John seeks to comfort her by contrasting her situation with events “more violent and more bitter than those in the tragedies,” in which the untimely deaths of husbands unraveled high-ranking families and even the imperial household.¹²⁵ John writes that he will refrain from mentioning still other such tragedies because he knows that his young addressee is already too pious and too prudent to be consoled by others’ miseries. He has mentioned them, he says, only “in order that you might learn that human affairs are nothingness (οὐδέν), but in truth, as the prophet states, all human glory is like the flower of grass (Isa. 40:6)” destined to wither.¹²⁶ Though John’s purpose is to encourage the widow to seize on her bereavement as an opportunity to exercise new ascetical discipline in widowhood, he still casts her dilemma against the backdrop of the vanity of human existence, and he refuses to dismiss entirely the lingering aura of tragedy even amid his reassurances of the hope of the resurrection of the dead. Death remains for all—young or old, rich or poor, Christian or not—the great leveler, and grief or bereavement is the emotional counterpart of bluntforce trauma,¹²⁷ one of the reasons why grief was consistently explored in Greek tragedy. As David Konstan observes, the basic Greek term for grief, λύπη, was also the generic word for the pain accompanying all distressful emotions (envy, fear, anger, pity, etc.). Konstan reasons that the equivalence stemmed from the fact that grief represented a mode of psychological pain with less cognitive or analytical content than the other unpleasant emotions: the death of a beloved family member or friend is what it is, and such transparency makes grief ’s torment the most immediately like physical pain. Grief for the Greeks also did not have the “action-readiness” of other painful emotions, that is, the “enhanced disposition to respond to whatever aroused the passion.” Konstan references Sophocles’s Elektra, who wailed in lamentation over the tragic murder of her father Agamemnon, but whose overwhelming passion for revenge was a function of anger, not the grief itself, anger having the evaluative dimension of measuring injustice against oneself or someone close.¹²⁸ Grief, then, appears to be the originally and ultimately painful passion by virtue of one’s sense of absolute helplessness under its ¹²⁴ Ep. 5 (LCL 190:33–5) (trans. Roy Deferrari, slightly altered). ¹²⁵ Ep. ad viduam juniorem 4 (PG 48:604–5). ¹²⁶ Ibid. (PG 48:604). ¹²⁷ Gregory of Nyssa even speaks of τῆς λύπης τραῦμα in Or. funebris in Flacillam imperatricem (GNO 9:475–6). ¹²⁸ The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 245–51 (quoted at 247).

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force. To Nectarius’s wife, Basil frames the grief itself and not just the son’s death as altogether tragic: With him a great and illustrious family has fallen, dashed to the ground, as it were by the removal of the prop. Oh, plague of an evil demon, how great a calamity it has had the power to wreak! O earth, that has been compelled to submit to a passion (πάθος) like this! Doubtless even the sun, if it had any power to feel, must have shuddered at that horrible spectacle. And what can anyone say commensurate with that which the soul in its complete helplessness (ἀμηχανία) prompts one to utter?¹²⁹

Still, I would argue that for early Christian moralists grief ’s cognitive content played a role in its uniqueness among distressful emotions. The grieving person, no matter how mentally stunned, evaluates (even if only incipiently) the irreversibility of loss, the thwarting of the soul’s deep desire (ἔρως), and that he is enduring a species of pain that relentlessly revives itself and precludes psychological escape. It is easy to see how grief, left to itself—“smoldering grief” (ὑποσμύχουσα λύπη), according to Gregory of Nyssa¹³⁰—can quickly give way to anger. As classicist and poet Anne Carson puts it, “Why does tragedy [as an artform] exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”¹³¹ Much early Christian catharsis of grief was naturally devoted, then, to strategies of consolation (παραμυθία; consolatio), many of which were adapted from Hellenistic moral philosophy. These included counsel that time heals and that grief needs gradual moderation (μετριοπάθεια), that other human beings have endured similarly grievous experiences or worse, and that prolonged sorrow is unhealthy for the soul and morally counterproductive. To these, Christian authors predictably added the strategy of focusing on the hope of resurrection and reunion with lost loved ones. Good examples of all these therapies appear not only in Chrysostom’s Letter to a Young Widow but also in Ambrose’s On the Death of Satyrus (his brother),¹³² in the consolation letters of Ambrose¹³³ and of the Cappadocians, especially Basil,¹³⁴ and in the Cappadocians’ funeral orations.¹³⁵ But what of grief ’s cognitive content on its own terms, including the more despairing form of grief such as Kierkegaard explored in depth centuries later in his Sickness unto Death (1849)? Grief ¹²⁹ Ep. 6 (LCL 190:40, 41) (trans. Roy Deferrari, slightly altered). ¹³⁰ De virginitate 3 (GNO 8/1:258, l. 2). ¹³¹ Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 7. ¹³² De excessu fratris sui Satyri 1.1–2.135 (PL 16:1289D–1354C). ¹³³ Ep. lib. 2, 8 (ad Faustinum) (CSEL 82/1:66–70). ¹³⁴ See esp. Basil of Caesarea, Epp. 5, 6, 28 (LCL 190:32–44, 158–70); Ep. 101 (LCL 215:186–8); Epp. 269, 301, 302 (LCL 270:134–40, 224–30, 230–4). ¹³⁵ On the forms of Cappadocian παραμυθία in particular, see the groundbreaking study of Robert Gregg, Consolation Philosophy: Greek and Christian Paideia in Basil and the Two Gregories (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975), 51–217.

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cannot, after all, simply morph into hope; it can only be succeeded or displaced by it. Augustine learned this at the death of his intimate but unnamed friend in North Africa, struggling to fathom his pre-conversion lamentation as anything more than emotional self-indulgence.¹³⁶ But does grief for the Christian have a moral use in its own right? Gregory of Nyssa is of significant help here since he considers grief the most crucial test case of the utility of the passions. Grief holds special place for him precisely because it runs such a wide experiential gamut and has such a strong biblical pedigree. In his homily on Jesus’s Beatitude concerning those who mourn (πενθοῦντες, Matt. 5:4), Nyssen concedes that it would be possible (as other patristic interpreters in fact argue¹³⁷) to identify this mourning with the godly compunction over sin described elsewhere by Paul (2 Cor. 7:10); but this would not plumb Jesus’s deeper meaning in the Beatitude.¹³⁸ Jesus is initially getting at earthly grief, the pain over personal loss in this earthly life.¹³⁹ This homily was probably delivered around 378, and perhaps three or four years later, in his dialogue On the Soul and Resurrection (staged between his dying sister Macrina and himself) and his hagiographical Life of Macrina, Gregory explored the anatomy of grief much more intimately, including his own grief over the loss of Basil and his and his mother’s grief over Macrina’s demise. The upshot is a judicious dialectic. On the one hand, grief left unchecked by reason can take on a disabling and destructive life of its own and demands to be controlled in a way that Macrina herself exemplified.¹⁴⁰ In his earlier treatise On Virginity (ca. 371) Gregory had sketched a narrative script of grief where a family descends into anguish anticipating the mother’s death in childbirth before the infant is even born. When such a death actually happens, the situation spins out of control because of unrelenting grief: The house is invaded by relatives as if by the enemy. Instead of a bridal chamber, death provides a tomb. There are senseless invocations and the wringing of hands, recollections of one’s former life, curses against those who advised the marriage, complaints against friends who did not prevent it. Parents are severely blamed whether they happen to be present or not. There is vexation with human life, accusations against all of nature, indictments and charges against the divine economy itself, a battle against oneself, a fierce reaction against those offering advice. There is no hesitation about the most unseemly conduct in word and deed. Many times the end is more bitter tragedy for those overtaken by this

¹³⁶ See Conf. 4.4.7-4.8.13 (CCSL 27:43–7). For this struggle with grief and Augustine’s theological retrospect on it, see also James Wetzel’s insightful “Trappings of Woe: Augustine’s Confession of Grief,” in Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine, 58–80. ¹³⁷ E.g. Hilary of Poitiers, Comm. in Matt. 4.4 (SC 254:124); John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 15.2–3 (PG 57:225–6); John Chrysostom, Hom. de penitentia 7.6 (PG 49:332). ¹³⁸ Hom. in beat. 3 (GNO 7/2:100–2). ¹³⁹ Ibid. (GNO 7/2:102–3). ¹⁴⁰ Vita Macrinae (GNO 8/1:380).

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sorrow and excessively cast down by grief, and the one left behind is not able to live with his misfortune.¹⁴¹

Later too, in his Homilies on Ecclesiastes (ca. 379/80), Gregory envisions Christ, the true Ecclesiast or Preacher, speaking about this and other objects of debilitating grief: “shortness of life, its painfulness, its beginning with tears and its end in tears, pitiable childhood, dementia in [old] age, unsettled youth, the constant toil of adult life, burdensome marriage,¹⁴² lonely celibacy, the troublesome multitude of children, sterile childlessness, miserliness over wealth, the anguish of poverty.”¹⁴³ From her deathbed Macrina reins Gregory in and upbraids him for allowing anticipated bereavement to overwhelm his mind from without and undermine his soul from within. She reminds him that mourning the dead relies on the mistaken judgment that death is permanent and forever separates us from those we lose, a belief typical only of those who grieve without hope (1 Thess. 4:13).¹⁴⁴ On the other hand, properly calibrated (“just and reasonable”¹⁴⁵) grief can serve cathartically to refine and clarify the better aspirations of the human desire with which it is so closely conjoined, for as Gregory cites Macrina, desire (ἐπιθυμία) can be defined not only as longing to satisfy some need or pleasure, but also as “grief at not possessing one’s heart’s desire” (λύπη ἐπὶ τῷ μὴ κατ’ ἐξουσίαν ὄντι καταθυμίῳ).¹⁴⁶ At this point Gregory’s dialectic of grief becomes more complex, as the extensive scholarly debate on it reveals.¹⁴⁷ Rowan Williams considers grief broadly as the “paradigm of desire” for

¹⁴¹ Virg. 3 (GNO 8/1:261), trans. Callahan, FOTC 58:16. ¹⁴² For his views on the “tragedy” of marriage, see above, Chapter 5, pp. 160–1. ¹⁴³ Hom. in Eccl. 6 (GNO 5:387), trans. Stuart Hall and Rachel Moriarty, Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 108–9. ¹⁴⁴ De anima et res. (GNO 3/3:1–6). ¹⁴⁵ Vita Macrinae (GNO 8/1:400, l. 13), being Nyssen’s phrase for the appropriate grounds on which Macrina’s fellow virgins bitterly lamented her death. ¹⁴⁶ De anima et res. (GNO 3/3:37); cf. Hom. in beat. 3 (GNO 7/2:102, ll. 17–18): “Grief is a dour disposition of the soul at the privation of something on which the heart was set” (πένθος ἐστὶ σκυθρωπὴ διάθεσις τῆς ψυχῆς ἐπὶ στερήσει τινὸς τῶν καταθυμίων συνισταμένη). ¹⁴⁷ Cf. Rowan Williams, “Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited: Gregory of Nyssa on Mind and Passion,” in Lionel Wickham and Caroline Bammel, eds., Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy: Essays in Tribute to George Christopher Stead (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 227–46; J. Warren Smith, “Macrina, Tamer of Horses and Healer of Souls: Grief and the Therapy of Hope in Gregory of Nyssa’s De anime et resurrectione,” Journal of Theological Studies NS 52 (2001): 37–60; J. Warren Smith, “A Just and Reasonable Grief: The Death and Function of a Holy Woman in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004): 57–84; Hans Boersma, “ ‘Numbed with Grief ’: Gregory of Nyssa on Bereavement and Hope,” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 7 (2014): 46–59; Hans Boersma, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 137–44; Michael Champion, “Grief, Body and Soul in Gregory of Nyssa,” in Danijela Kambaskovic, ed., Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 99–118; Barnes, “What Have I Become, My Sweetest Friend?”

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Gregory since, though it can betray unhealthy fixation on what is desired but lost, it can also, when properly attuned to the mind (νοῦς), enable the bereaved “to see the other [lost loved one or friend] as more than merely the object of my attachment.”¹⁴⁸ J. Warren Smith, who would not have us forget Macrina’s use of the famous Platonic metaphor of the charioteer (reason) taming the “horses” that are the soul’s faculties of appetite (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν) and temper (τὸ θυμοειδές),¹⁴⁹ nonetheless cautions against Williams that grief can serve the soul’s desire for Gregory only in the best-case-scenario of the cooperation of reason and these non-rational impulses. Otherwise, “grief is frustrated desire which results in the languishing of θυμός . . . and in order for ἐπιθυμία to energize the soul and set it in motion toward its object, there must be the hope of attaining the goal.”¹⁵⁰ My own view falls somewhere between Williams and Smith. Grief indeed registers frustrated desire for Gregory, but such is not altogether negative in the light of his well-known paradox whereby precisely the frustration of desire (for genuine goods and the divine Good) is itself satisfying and energizing since it impels the soul Godward in deification.¹⁵¹ While Smith rightly emphasizes how Macrina’s concessions on the utility of grief and other passions in On the Soul and Resurrection are accommodated to Gregory in his own sorrowful state and should not distract us from the strong message of hope preempting grief, Nyssen is still, in his highly stylized way in these works, pressing exactly for the optimal scenario of the interplay of mind and emotions in anticipation of the eschatological perfection of human nature. There are still additional and beneficial scripts of grief over loss that need to be explored in and beyond On the Soul and Resurrection and the Life of Macrina. For example, as Michael Champion has demonstrated from the Life, which culminates in the rituals of Macrina’s funeral, there is an ecclesial dimension of grief that is fully salutary too. “Grief expressed in the context of the liturgy ¹⁴⁸ “Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited,” 243. For a favorable assessment of Williams’s view of grief in relation to desire for Gregory, see Champion, “Grief, Body and Soul in Gregory of Nyssa,” 99, 100–1, 102, 110, 115. ¹⁴⁹ For this metaphor and its implications for Gregory, see De anima et res., Macrina initially dismisses the metaphor as unscriptural (GNO 3/3:33–4) but ultimately finds it instructive anyhow, conceding that the drives of desire and temper are of human “nature” (φύσις) though not of human “essence” (οὐσια) (ibid. p. 37). ¹⁵⁰ “Macrina, Tamer of Horses,” 41–52 (quoted at 52, citing De anima et res., GNO 3/3:38, 67–9). Hans Boersma (“ ‘Numbed with Grief,’ ” 54–5), agrees with Smith against Williams, and while conceding a certain dialectic of grief in Gregory, suggests that hope is the overriding consideration for Nyssen because only it can truly comfort the bereaved, with grief itself needing mainly just to be vented for the sake of long-term healing. ¹⁵¹ Smith himself (“Macrina, Tamer of Horses,” 52) notes that “λύπη, as an expression of ἐπιθυμία has that chief characteristic of ἔρως, a deep desire for that which is absent or lacking.” Smith too recognizes that the passions in Gregory are not to be fully eradicated but eschatologically transformed. See his Passions and Paradise: Human and Divine Emotion in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa (New York: Crossroad, 2004).

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of lamentation and grief performed in hagiography itself are expressions of desire that propel the believer into deeper relationship with others and with God.” Such grief is appropriate in its own right and not just “a stage on the way to a virtuous affective state such as repentance.” Through the liturgy of lamentation, the individual believer is joined in a cosmic grief over the brokenness of creation, and comes to greater intimacy with God than could be accomplished by enlightened reason alone.¹⁵² In the Byzantine liturgy in particular, the penitential dimension of the Eucharist was heavily played up, and so too the faithful were expected to enter formally into their own compunction (κατάνυξις) especially during the priest’s recitation of the anaphora (Eucharistic prayer); and in the liturgical hymns of Romanos the Melodist alone, “compunction” appears a dozen times.¹⁵³ This brings me back to Gregory’s homily on the second Beatitude, a text that has unfortunately been ignored in the debates over his perspective on grief. As I mentioned earlier, Nyssen insists that this Beatitude addresses mourning over loss more than sorrow for personal sin. The homily in fact furnishes a digest of what emerges from the tortuous debate in On the Soul and Resurrection. Gregory advises that if the mourner is actively to seek blessedness, then in pondering her loss she should attend first to the true Good that warrants grief, and then contemplate the poverty of human nature itself in the absence of that Good. The true Good calls the soul beyond all worldly griefs, and the absence of that Good prompts a craving for its transcending light, the light of the immaterial and invisible God whose own being cannot be approached.¹⁵⁴ At the same time, believers are called to a sustained grieving over the fallen state of human nature, its loss of paradisiac beauty, its inundation in the consequences of mortality and the tyranny of unhealthy passions and the general “deceitfulness of life” (ἀπάτη τοῦ βίου),¹⁵⁵ approximating what Paul calls the vanity (ματαιότης) of creation (Rom. 8:20). For Gregory, then, the second Beatitude solicits not self-pity over personal loss but a kind of deep and contemplative melancholy in solidarity with all humanity and creation in their tragic subjection to vanity, intensified all the more by the concomitant recognition that creation is intrinsically good and destined to transformation to an even greater glory. This melancholy is paralleled in Nyssen’s Homilies on Ecclesiastes, being the same “weeping” and “mourning” that the Ecclesiast (Christ) juxtaposes respectively with “dancing” and “laughing” in expectation of the arrival of the Good (Eccl. 3:4).¹⁵⁶ Gregory also commends this virtuous ¹⁵² Champion, “Grief, Body and Soul in Gregory of Nyssa,” 115. ¹⁵³ On the role of collective compunction in the Byzantine liturgy, see Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 106–29. As Krueger notes, the Emperor Justinian himself issued a decree in 565 enjoining priests and bishops to vocalize formerly silent prayers, most notably the Eucharistic anaphora, in order to amplify the people’s response in worshipful compunction. ¹⁵⁴ Hom. in beat. 3 (GNO 7/2:103–6). ¹⁵⁵ Ibid. (GNO 7/2:106). ¹⁵⁶ Hom. in Eccl. 6 (GNO 5:385–9).

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grief at the close of his treatise On the Dead, once again contrasting it with an “irrational and abject dejection” (ἄλογος καὶ ἀνδραποδώδη κατήφεια) over individual loss.¹⁵⁷ As expected, patristic interpreters paid close attention to Jesus’s own grief, which, of course, had nothing to do with contrition for sin, but was seen to be principally a function of his incarnational mercy. According to Origen, when he wept over Jerusalem in its sinfulness (Luke 19:41–4), Jesus fulfilled all the Beatitudes, the second one by mourning not only for the political Jerusalem which would eventually be razed by the Romans, but for all believers who, mystically constituting “Jerusalem” by receiving the doctrine and mysteries of the Church, still lapse into sin.¹⁵⁸ Chrysostom similarly accentuates the tender mercy of Jesus in his lament over Jerusalem (Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34), sorrowful for the city like a woman spurned by her former lover, or a mother longing to ingather her scattered children.¹⁵⁹ Always he sheds tears salvifically for others, not for himself, though certainly this makes the grief no less intense. His “troubled spirit” and weeping over the deceased Lazarus (John 11:33–5) was the supreme example here, all the more so in the context of demonstrating his divine power to raise the dead. Given that Jesus, knowing already that he would raise Lazarus from the dead, could not be weeping over a permanent loss of his friend, his grief yielded variant interpretations. The monastic theologian Diadochus of Photiki (fifth century) assumed that Jesus’s “troubled spirit” indicated anger-turned-indignation, which he then directed against death itself with the raising of Lazarus.¹⁶⁰ Peter Chrysologus presumed he wept out of joy at the prospect of raising the dead, but he also grieved over not yet being able to raise others besides Lazarus, as well as at the lack of faith of those convinced that Lazarus was permanently lost.¹⁶¹ Potamius of Lisbon (mid-fourth century) judged that Jesus’s tears embodied divine tears over human fallenness,¹⁶² while Cyril of Alexandria went so far as to suggest that, in the Spirit, the Logos “rebuked” (ἐπιπλήττει; ἐπιτιμᾷ) his own flesh, allowing it to grieve for mercy’s sake but not to the extent that grief would tyrannize all human flesh.¹⁶³ The common thread, however, was that Jesus’s grief over Lazarus was a sign of deep and commendable compassion. Still, Augustine for his part could not resist asserting that even here, over Lazarus, Jesus was ¹⁵⁷ De mortuis (GNO 9/1:67, l. 7; cf. 66, l. 25: δυσγενῆς καὶ ἀνδραποδώδη λύπη, “a base and abject sorrow”). ¹⁵⁸ Hom. in Lucam 38 (GCS 35:222–3); similarly, John Cassian, Collationes 9.29 (CSEL 13:275). By contrast, Cyril of Alexandria saw Jesus’s mourning here as directed principally to unbelieving Jews; see his Hom. in Lucam 131, trans. from the Syriac by R. Payne Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), 607–11. ¹⁵⁹ Hom. in Matt. 74.3 (PG 58:682); cf. Hilary of Poitiers, Comm. in Matt. 24.10 (SC 258:176). ¹⁶⁰ Capita de perfectione spirituale 62 (SC 5bis:122). ¹⁶¹ Sermo 64.3 (CCSL 24A:381–2). ¹⁶² De lazaro, Latin text ed. André Wilmart, Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1918): 302, ll. 83–95. ¹⁶³ Comm. in Johannem 7 (on John 11:33–8) (PG 74:52D–57B).

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teaching human sinners to weep, not over loss, but over their sin in the context of repentance.¹⁶⁴

Compunction and the “Gift of Tears” The grief over loss that I have been describing was normally distinguished in early Christian ethics from compunction (πένθος; κατάνυξις; compunctio; Syriac ), the penitent sorrow over one’s sin. As we saw in Gregory of Nyssa, however, the two intersected when contemplating humanity’s postlapsarian loss of the likeness to God enjoyed in paradise. Contrition as an intrinsic discipline of repentance was prescribed throughout the Bible (famously Psalm 51:17 in the Hebrew Scriptures) and enshrined in Paul’s injunction of a “godly grief” (κατὰ θεὸν λύπη) distinct from the griefs of this world (2 Cor. 7:10). It was an original staple of the moral and spiritual life of the Christian, and one which Paul himself, according to various patristic authors, modeled with his own sorrow and tears for others’ sake (cf. Rom. 9:1; 2 Cor. 2:4).¹⁶⁵ Clement identified this same godly grief as one of the preparatory exercises (προγυμνάσματα) of the Christian gnostikos.¹⁶⁶ That said, one did not “outgrow” the need for it. For our purposes, I will focus on compunction and the “gift of tears” in the early monastic tradition, where tears were so meticulously scrutinized in doctrine and practice alike,¹⁶⁷ and where, in the Christian East, they became a crucial theme in the historic monastic texts compiled in the eighteenth century to form the Philokalia.¹⁶⁸ Even in this monastic setting, however, the theme is too expansive to examine in full, hence I will further limit my remarks to what I see as the discernibly tragical dimension of compunction and tears and the nature of their cathartic function in the spiritual life. In the first place, compunction for the monks ran deeper than mere remorse or consciousness of guilt, such as might devolve into a kind of moralistic bidding with God to modify his punishment of sin. Repentance itself was not a negotiation but a gift (cf. Acts 11:18). Compunction certainly included the ¹⁶⁴ Tract. in Johannem 49.19 (CCSL 36:429–30). ¹⁶⁵ Cf. Ambrosiaster, Comm. in 2. Cor. 2.4 (CSEL 81/2:205–6); John Chrysostom, Hom. in 2 Cor. 4.2 (PG 61:420–1); Hom.in Phil. 15.6 (PG 62:296); Maximus the Confessor, Capita de caritate 1.41 (Ceresa-Gastaldo, 62); 1.74 (Ceresa-Gastaldo, 78). ¹⁶⁶ Strom. 4.131.6-4.132.1 (GCS 15:306). ¹⁶⁷ Even the monk-bishop John Chrysostom composed two short treatises De compunctione (Περὶ κατανύξεως, PG 47:393–422). ¹⁶⁸ Int. al., see Irénée Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, trans. Anselm Hufstader (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982); Hannah Hunt, JoyBearing Grief: Tears of Contrition in the Writings of the Early Syrian and Byzantine Fathers (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Alexis Torrance, Repentance in Late Antiquity: Eastern Asceticism and the Framing of the Christian Life c. 400–650 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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individual’s sorrow over personal sins in the present existential and penitential moment. But its scope—and its narrative emotional script—were far more complex, for this sorrow was framed in terms of the larger protological and eschatological drama of salvation playing out in the lives of individual monks and in their communities. Compunction entailed intensive recognition of one’s own implication in the universal tragedy of the Adamic fall, as well as sober anticipation of God’s impending judgment in these last days.¹⁶⁹ Citing the severe text of Hebrews 6:4,¹⁷⁰ the Syro-Mesopotamian monastic preacher Pseudo-Macarius (fourth century) claimed that those who have already tasted heavenly benefits . . . have both the following things in conjunction: joy and consolation, fear and trembling, exultation and compunction. They mourn for themselves and all of Adam’s progeny since human nature is one. Their tears are virtual bread, and their compunction is virtual sweetness and recreation.¹⁷¹

For Mark the Hermit, a fifth-century disciple of Pseudo-Macarius’s legacy, the monk cannot simply cast blame for his sin on Adam, since whenever he sins he is effectively committing the Adamic transgression in his own right, all the more tragically so after having received the grace of baptism and new birth.¹⁷² Synthesizing earlier monastic wisdom on compunction, Peter of Damascus (twelfth century) thus portrays it as the shedding of truly primal, Adamic tears, and designates it the very first phase of a monk’s contemplative journey: [The monk] should seat himself facing the east, as once did Adam, and meditate in this way: “Adam then sat and wept because of his loss of the delights of paradise, beating his eyes with his fists and saying: ‘O Merciful One, have mercy on me, for I have fallen.’ Seeing the angel driving him out and closing the door to the divine garden, Adam groaned aloud and said: ‘O Merciful One, have mercy on me, for I have fallen.’ ” After that, reflecting on what then took place, [the monk] should begin to lament in this way, grieving with all his soul and shaking his head and saying with great sorrow of heart: Woe is me, a sinner! What has happened to me? Alas, what was I and what have I become! What have I lost, what found? Instead of paradise, this perishable world.¹⁷³ ¹⁶⁹ E.g. Apophthegmata patrum (Systematic collection) 3.4 (SC 387:151); APA: Matoes 12 (PG 65:293B–C); Silvanus 2 (408C–D). On compunction in its eschatological context, see also the texts from the Apophthegmata patrum identified and evaluated by Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 181–212. ¹⁷⁰ For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come (RSV). ¹⁷¹ Hom. spiritualis (Collection 3) 15.36 (PTS 4:148–9, ll. 513–17) (emphasis added in my translation). ¹⁷² Consultatio intellectus cum sua ipsius anima 3 (PG 65:1105B–D). ¹⁷³ Book 1: A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, in G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, eds. and trans., The Philokalia: The Complete Text (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 3:109–10.

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Compunction thus has a primordial pedigree, and in consequence of the fall it is an emotion constitutive for realizing one’s creaturely potential and recovering likeness to God. Hardly a provisional virtue, compunction has become fully “natural” for us humans. In an intriguing text from his Praktikos, Evagrius suggests that one of the “peaceful states” of the soul arises “from natural seeds” (τῶν φυσικῶν σπερμάτων) and is characterized by “humility and compunction (ταπεινοφροσύνη μετὰ κατανύξεως), the gift of tears (τὸ δάκρυον), an infinite longing for the divine, and an immeasurable zeal for work.”¹⁷⁴ Humility lays the foundation, compunction “pierces” the soul with the urgency of its vocation, tears water the memory of fallenness, and growth flourishes through infinite desire for God and immeasurable creativity.¹⁷⁵ Being the emotional threshold of a monk’s spiritual progress, however, compunction and the tears of repentance were in constant danger of being preempted by other emotions of grief, two of which Evagrius and other sages target as capital vices. One of these is “dejection” (λύπη), in the sense of selfpity or of a disabling depression totally distinct from the pious melancholy described earlier. It might take the form of a seething grief with accompanying anger,¹⁷⁶ a sense of defeat,¹⁷⁷ or a sadness induced by all manner of worldly concerns or demonically-inspired thoughts (λογισμοί; cogitationes).¹⁷⁸ A second form, closely related and perhaps even more debilitating, is acedia (ἀκηδία; accidie), variously translated “indifference” or “sloth” or “despondency,” a spiritual burnout or ennui that can strike every aspect of the monk’s asceticism, from manual labor and prayer to the singing of Psalms.¹⁷⁹ Together, dejection and acedia threaten to throw the soul into a downward spiral of despair and self-questioning that can utterly immobilize the monk, rendering vain and hopeless the already “tragical-comical” life of asceticism such as we discussed in the preceding chapter.¹⁸⁰

¹⁷⁴ Practicus 57 (SC 171:634), trans. Robert Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 107–8 (slightly altered). ¹⁷⁵ Kevin Corrigan and Gregory Yuri Glazov, “Compunction and Compassion: Two Overlooked Virtues in Evagrius of Pontus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22 (2014): 61–77, at 65. On tears as “natural” (as distinct from supernatural or heavenly) in the penitential context, see also John Climacus, Scali paradisi, gradus 7 (PG 88:808B–C). ¹⁷⁶ Evagrius, Ad Eulogium 7.7 (Greek text in Sinkewicz, 314 [Appendix 2]; trans. 34); De octo spiritibus malitiae 5.1 (Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 81). ¹⁷⁷ Ibid. 5.10 (Sinkewicz, 82). ¹⁷⁸ Evagrius, Antirrheticus, lib. 4, Syriac edition (Wilhelm Frankenberg, Berlin, 1912), trans. David Brakke, Evagrius of Pontus: Talking Back (Antirrhêtikos): A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 99–117; cf. Evagrius, De malignis cogitationibus 12 (SC 438:192–6) (Sinkewicz, 161–2). ¹⁷⁹ Evagrius, Ad Eulogium 8–9 (Sinkewick, 314–15 [Greek]; trans., 35–6); De octo spiritibus malitiae 6.1–18 (Sinkewicz, 83–5). For extended discussion, see Gabriel Bunge, Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Acedia, trans. Anthony Gythiel (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), esp. 65–85. ¹⁸⁰ See above, Chapter 5, pp. 161–8.

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The challenge to vanquish these aberrant passions of grief, and to stabilize and energize the monk in the life of continual repentance and striving for perfection, ultimately served to disclose the emotional latitude and virtuosity of compunction. The Syriac ascetic John the Solitary, in the late fourth century, sets out an itinerary of the monk’s progress in tears: the monk begins with “bodily” tears prompted by fear of poverty and suffering, concerns about his habitat, remembrance of deceased relatives, etc.; he advances to tears of the soul induced by fear of divine judgment, consciousness of sins, remembrance of God’s goodness, etc., but begins now also to be threatened by vainglory over his progress; at last with the tears of the “spiritual” man he beholds God’s majesty and the depth of God’s wisdom, and is overcome with intense joy. In this more perfected state, however, sadness is not initially transcended because the tears still flow over humanity’s tragically fallen state, so the monk still weeps as did Jesus over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) and Paul for three whole years over the Ephesians (Acts 20:31).¹⁸¹ The paradoxical coexistence through compunction of grief and joy (χαρά; gaudium; Syriac ), epitomizing the monk’s being experientially stretched between fallenness and hope, between vanity and glory, was reiterated by later monastic pedagogues too. John Cassian, for instance, posits that besides the more normal compunctio and distress (dolor) that grow so intense in prayer that only tears can relieve them, there are two other ecstatic or mystical expressions, one of an exuberance producing loud and joyous shouting, another of a spiritual illumination rendering the soul speechless and able only to articulate its desire for God through inward groans.¹⁸² Cassian further quotes Abba Germanus confirming that true compunction is a divine gift, that when he recalls with tears his past sins he is moved by the ineffable joy of a divine visitation, although at other times, longing to retrieve this sublime state, his eyes dry up as he falls short.¹⁸³ Cassian also has Abba Isaac interjecting that while the outpouring of tears may come simply from sustained sorrow over sin (Ps. 6:6; Lam. 2:18), it can also proceed from contemplation of eternal goods and the desire thereof, erupting into ebullient joy.¹⁸⁴ Cassian’s teaching here bore fruit later on in the Latin monastic tradition with Gregory the Great, who, echoing Abba Isaac, distinguishes between compunction arising from fear of one’s wickedness and that “compunction of love” that derives from beholding heavenly joys and being encouraged by hope.¹⁸⁵

¹⁸¹ Dialogus de anima 1.16–18, Syriac text with Eng. translation by Mary Hansbury, John the Solitary on the Soul (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 36–42. ¹⁸² Collationes 9.27 (CSEL 13:273–4). On the mystical dimension of compunction in Cassian, see Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 125–9. ¹⁸³ Collationes 9.28 (CSEL 13:274). ¹⁸⁴ Ibid. (CSEL 13:274–5). ¹⁸⁵ E.g. Hom. in Ezechielem 2.10.4 (CCSL 142:382); 2.10.20–1 (p. 395); Moralia 6.25.42 (CCSL 143:314–15); 24.6.10 (CCSL 143B:1194–5); Ep. 7.23 (CCSL 140:475–6); and esp. Expositio in

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This converging of compunction and joy nonetheless required constant caution lest a monk pursue sorrow over sin solely for the emotional benefits of a liberated conscience. Diadochus of Photiki, for example, distinguishes between an immature joy, prone to fantasy, and a mature joy conditioned by humility. Between the two, he says, lies “godly grief” (2 Cor. 7:10) and active tears, in support of which he quotes Ecclesiastes 1:18: In much wisdom is much knowledge, and whoever increases knowledge increases distress (ἄλγημα).¹⁸⁶ Compunction was a true measure not only of the monk’s repentance but also his fundamental humility, earnestness, sober-mindedness, and yet hopefulness. Its subtlety and complexity, and its interconnection with other ascetical virtues, are incisively spelled out by the seventh-century Sinaite abbot John Climacus. Penthos is “Step 7” in his highly influential Ladder of Divine Ascent. His opening definitions give a foretaste: Godly mourning (πένθος κατὰ θεόν) is a melancholy (σκυθρωπότης) of the soul, a disposition of the pained heart that frantically seeks what it thirsts for, and when it fails to get it still pursues it diligently, and follows after it wailing aloud. Or else this mourning is a soul’s golden spur, free of every [worldly] attachment and relation, fixed by holy sorrow to watch over the heart. Compunction (κατάνυξις) is a perpetual tormenting of the conscience, which serves to cool the fire of the heart through spiritual confession . . . ¹⁸⁷

In what follows John is at pains to provide a thick description, a kind of experiential mosaic, of the causes and effects, the cognitive content, the emotional dynamics, the active and passive dimensions, even the ethical exigencies of compunction and tears. Climacus’s seasoned discourse goes far, I would contend, in projecting compunction as the Christian tragical emotion par excellence. First, he consistently emphasizes the “remembrance” (μνήμη) of mortality, the contemplation of death’s unremitting claim on humanity, as properly basic to compunction.¹⁸⁸ Already in this life we are weeping from the grave, as it were, and that deep sobriety must perpetually condition the monk’s self-recognition.¹⁸⁹ Compunction dashes any heroics or Canticum Canticorum 18 (CCSL 144:19–21), on the “ceaseless” compunction of love exemplified by the woman who continued to kiss Jesus’s feet (Luke 7:45). ¹⁸⁶ Capita de perfectione spirituale 60 (SC 5, 2nd ed., 120). ¹⁸⁷ Scala paradisi, gradus 7 (PG 88:801C–D). On the intricacies of John’s teaching on compunction, see also Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief, 65–93. ¹⁸⁸ In the Scala paradisi, grad. 7 on compunction is preceded precisely by grad. 6 on the remembrance of death. ¹⁸⁹ On remembrance of death and the grave, see ibid. grad. 7 (PG 88:805A–B, 805C, 808A, 808C, 809A); cf. also grad. 3 (665D; 668B); grad. 4 (725B); grad. 6 (793B–C, 793D, 796A–C, 797B); grad. 11 (852B); grad. 12 (856B); grad. 20 (940C); grad. 28 (1137A). Cf. APA: Poeman 50 (PG 65:333B), advising a monk to imitate Abraham, who, in entering the promised land, bought a tomb, and by this action inherited the land, the lesson being that one’s true “tomb” is the place of “compunction and tears.” On early Egyptian monks considering their cells tombs, or even actually living in tombs, see Karel Innemée, “Funerary Aspects in the Paintings from the Apollo

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visions of grandeur. Again and again, genuine (as opposed to feigned or vainglorious) compunction draws the soul back to the ground zero of mortality but also of spiritual poverty.¹⁹⁰ By felicitous irony, this poverty is the only possible platform for progress. Climacus states: “Let us appropriate pure and unadulterated tears such as remind us that we must die, for in them there is no fraud or conceit, but instead cleansing, progress in the love of God, washing away of sins, and imperturbability (ἀπάθεια) of the passions.”¹⁹¹ Thus is revealed a second tragical dimension. Compunction and tears unleash an ongoing catharsis across the territory of the self. This is no mere venting of remorse, no self-satisfaction in the pain of repenting; rather, it is an austere housecleaning of soul and body when, in effect, one’s own self becomes the object of one’s tragical conscience. Indeed, compunction reflexively checks itself for false or feigned motivations since it must lead the psychological way—a strenuous interior work indeed—toward rendering the entire self transparent before God. “I have seen little teardrops laboriously shed like drops of blood,” writes John, “and I have seen profusions of tears poured out effortlessly, and so I judge toilers by their labors rather than by their tears, and I suppose God does the same.”¹⁹² The catharsis is unending in this life. Climacus ventures the bold assertion that one’s post-baptismal tears are, in a certain sense, superior to baptism itself insofar as they continue to wash away newly committed sins.¹⁹³ That said, compunction and tears are a gift from above, ravishing the soul with a purgative epiphany of divine grace;¹⁹⁴ and yet they are simultaneously ineffectual without laborious asceticism and the concrete endeavors of existential transformation. Those being perfected in compunction are characterized, for example, by release from anger (ἀοργησία), freedom from holding grudges (ἀμνησικακία), refusal to condemn fellow sinners (ἀκατακρισία¹⁹⁵), and “extravagant compassion” (συμπάθεια ὑπὲρ δύναμιν).¹⁹⁶ Other early monastic writers likewise confirmed that compunction could never be entirely introverted, and that its extroverted turn, in loving

Monastery at Bawit,” in Gawdat Gabra and Hany Takla, eds., Christianity and Monasticism in Middle Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2015), 249–50. ¹⁹⁰ John praises the monk who mourns over the inability to mourn, even when the power is actually there, since it is a sign of the deepest humility (see Scala paradisi, grad. 7, PG 88:809C). Monks’ fears concerning the “method” of compunction and their intermittent dearth of tears appear fairly frequently: e.g. APA: Peter the Pionite 2 (PG 65:376D); Barsanuphius and John, Epp. 237, 285, 343, 394, 395 (SC 450:172–6, 272, 354–6, 454–6); Ep. 462 (SC 451:556–8); Maximus the Confessor, Liber asceticus (CCSG 40:53–7). ¹⁹¹ Scala paradisi, grad. 7 (PG 88:808C). On the threat of conceit or vainglory following upon progress in compunction and tears, see already Evagrius, De oratione 7 (PG 79:1169A). ¹⁹² Scala paradisi, grad. 7 (PG 88:805C). ¹⁹³ Ibid. grad. 7 (PG 88:804A–B; cf. 816A). ¹⁹⁴ Ibid. grad. 7 (PG 88:805D–808A, 812A, 812D). ¹⁹⁵ According to TLG, a virtual hapax, used only twice, once by Dorotheus of Gaza and once by John Climacus. ¹⁹⁶ Scala paradisi, grad. 7 (PG 88:804A).

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mercy toward other children of Adam in the shared tragedy of creation, was its natural outcome and the extension of its cathartic power. References to mourning, compunction, and tears on behalf of others are fairly common in early monastic literature,¹⁹⁷ and we have already noted the importance attached to emulating Jesus’s and Paul’s sorrow in these sources; but an especially lucid portrait of compunction effecting heightened mercy and compassion appears in Climacus’s slightly younger contemporary, Maximus the Confessor, whose ascetical doctrine had the imitation of the kenotic humility of Jesus Christ and the equal love of neighbor at its very core. Maximus knows well the inherited distinction between worldly griefs, including those like grudge-holding (μνησικακία) and envy (φθόνος) that decimate human relationships,¹⁹⁸ and the godly grief or compunction that heals the soul within and social relationships without.¹⁹⁹ “The fruit of this grief,” writes Maximus to one imperial official, “is the love whereby we are united to God and to one another, and we willingly show, so far as we can, the same level of care for others as God the Merciful extends to all beings.”²⁰⁰ Maximus in fact frames godly sorrow—in its connection with love and the other deifying virtues—as instrumental for the reconciliation of all creation. In his Questions and Uncertainties, he recalls the paradoxical coextension of grief and joy discussed earlier, but reflects on them in terms of a larger divine providence operative in the cosmos. Asking how one who is advanced in spiritual knowledge, who has attained to a deifying “identity of motion” (κινήσεως ταυτότης) with God and thus tasted ineffable joy, can nonetheless experience a sadness that is this joy’s ostensible antithesis, Maximus answers that: When the holy ones [ἅγιοι = angels and beatified saints] are alleged to grieve, it is because they are imitating their Lord. For both grief and joy are ascribed to God in view of his providence: grief over those who are perishing, and joy over those who are being saved. The word “grief” is one, then, but admits of many ways of being used. Hence the grief attributed to the holy ones is actually mercy and compassion and superabundant joy, a deiform perfection stored up inside and providentially distributed to those on the outside.²⁰¹

¹⁹⁷ As Hausherr indicates (Penthos, 41–2), both Basil and John Chrysostom encouraged mourning and lamentation on behalf of others (cf. Basil, Hom. in martyrem Julittam 9, PG 31:257D–260D; John Chrysostom, Hom. in Phil. 3.4, PG 62:203). In the APA see Antony 14 (PG 65:80A–C); Paul the Simple (381C–384B). For further examples, see Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief, 47–8. ¹⁹⁸ Capita de caritate 3.89–91 (Ceresa-Gastaldo, 186–8). ¹⁹⁹ Cf. Ep. 4 (PG 91:413A–420A); Liber asceticus (CCSG 40:53–7); Qu. Thal. 55 (CCSG 7:507–9); Expositio in Ps. 59 (CCSG 23:10). On Maximus’s view of godly grief, see also John Gavin, “ ‘The Grief Willed by God’: Three Patristic Interpretations of 2 Cor 7:10,” Gregorianum 91 (2010): 427–42, at 438–41. ²⁰⁰ Ep. 4 (to John the Chamberlain) (PG 91:417B–C). ²⁰¹ Quaestiones et dubia 129 (CCSG 10:94–5).

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Maximus thus envisions a cosmic solidarity of grieving for the tragic state in which the creation finds itself. The reference point of that solidarity is none other than the Lord himself, whose “providential” grief is no abstraction, having been concretely demonstrated in the incarnate Christ’s own sorrow (cf. Luke 19:41; Matt. 23:37). Clearly the “holy ones,” the saints on high and in the world, must radiate this same compassionate sorrow as expressing the Creator’s abiding identification with the creation so long as it remains subjected to vanity.

CONSPECTUS: TRAGICAL CONSCIENC E AND TRAGICAL EMOTIONS In a brief but penetrating remark, John Climacus advises that “mindless weeping” (τὸ δάκρυον ἀνέννοιον) is for irrational beings while true tears arise from thought (ἔννοια), which itself originates in a reasoning mind (λογισμὸς καὶ νοῦς).²⁰² Indeed, early Christian tragical vision was framed in wellreasoned conceptions of the Adamic fall, the work of Christ the New Adam, and humanity’s eschatological vocation in their aftermath. On the other hand, Climacus also states that compunction and theologia do not mix, since the penitent monk occupied with godly sorrow does not have the luxury of theological speculation.²⁰³ John’s caveats here in the case of compunction and tears are tantamount to affirming that emotions have a “moral intelligence” of their own (to recall Martha Nussbaum’s phrase), an intelligence not divorced from reason but also not contingent on advanced theological insight. Precisely such an intelligence of certain emotions was crucial to the refinement of a Christian tragical conscience, the morally strengthened awareness of self and other as locked—to varying degrees, in differing circumstances, but under the same constraints of vanity and mortality—into a tragic existence. Not only did the emotions that we have considered in this chapter have a strong cognitive component that aided the mind in interpreting the reality of “the tragic” in the Christian background and foreground, they also assumed a vital cathartic role in healing the passible self by reeducating it to healthy and virtuous purposes. The image that emerges is not one of emotions simply being “rationalized,” that is, gradually or peacefully succumbing to the superior rule of reason in judging and engaging reality. Rather, the emotions, as we have observed, take on identifiable “scripts,” and when those scripts properly bear the values and aspirations of the larger Christian moral and religious culture in which these emotions are cultivated, they can lead the conscientious ²⁰² Scala paradisi, grad. 7 (PG 88:805A).

²⁰³ Ibid. (PG 88:805C–D).

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disciple into appropriate and compassionate responses to the tragic—although not without liability to wayward scripts, given the highly dynamic nature of human emotions. Tracking the narrative scripts of the various emotions, rather than resorting strictly to lexical definitions, reveals the intelligence of emotions in concrete moral contexts where their variations and nuances also appear. Early Christian moralists clearly seized on certain emotional scripts as both normative and virtuous: reverent fear rather than cowardly fear; empathetic mercy rather than condescending pity; compunction for sin rather than self-pity and acedia, and so on. Even within specifically virtuous scripts, there could be variance, as with grief at the death of loved ones, where a precarious line was sometimes negotiated between obsession over personal loss and what Gregory of Nyssa calls the “just and reasonable” grief which helps both to heal natural sadness and, superiorly, to clarify the heart’s highest and best desire. In the end, early Christian moralists—whether lay theologians like Clement and Origen, episcopal preachers, or monastic pedagogues—greatly expanded the repertoire of tragical emotions beyond Aristotle’s choice two: fear and pity. David Konstan believes that in the interpretation of ancient Greek tragedies, Aristotle’s choice of this classic emotional pair was deficient and restrictive, when in fact the tragedies evoked other strong emotions in their audiences.²⁰⁴ Christian moralists, however, worked within a much broader landscape of “the tragic.” Their subject matter was the salvation history recounted in the Bible and still unfolding in the Church’s foreground, with questions of the justice, mercy, and providence of God, and of the status of evil and the meaning of human suffering often surfacing within the scriptural narratives themselves and not just in the thinking of their interpreters. Christian moralists, furthermore, also treated the faithful not simply as an audience in whom certain desired emotions should be aroused but as actors onstage rehearsing the eschatological denouement of salvation history and expressing emotions stretched across a wide gamut between sober fear or grief on the one end and joyous, even ecstatic hope on the other. The rigorous discipline of instilling and habituating these virtuous emotional scripts depended on preaching (rich in profiles of imitable exemplars), catechesis, liturgical rehearsal, and pastoral care, but also on sheer experience of the tragic in life, for it was here that the tragical conscience was truly matured, and the tragical emotions tested and refined. A comment of Rosalind Hursthouse on Aristotle can certainly apply as well to the interests of early Christian moralists: “The virtues (and vices) are all dispositions not only to act, but to feel emotions, as reactions as well as impulses to action . . . In the ²⁰⁴ “The Tragic Emotions,” Comparative Drama 33 (1999): 1–21; also, more comprehensively, see W. B. Stanford, Greek Tragedy and the Emotions: An Introductory Study, 2nd ed. (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014 [1983]).

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person with the virtues, these emotions will be felt on the right occasion, toward the right people or objects, for the right reasons . . . ²⁰⁵ For these Christian moralists, the projected goal was not only emotional intelligence (insofar as they conceived certain emotions as useful to moral vision) but also emotional virtuosity in the face of the inherited conditions of creaturely vanity and the power of newly rising tragic events to degrade and destroy a Christian’s moral resolve. Such virtuosity of the affective self, in my judgment, was a positive frontier of early Christian ethics because it required a stretching of the moral conscience and moral imagination alike. Developing a tragical vision of the world, in the interest of participating in its salvation, demanded precisely such an enlarged imagination.

²⁰⁵ On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 108 (original emphasis).

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7 The Theological Scope of Early Christian Tragical Vision Having provided a conspectus at the end of preceding chapters, I will not recapitulate all their findings in detail here. In this, the last full chapter of my study, I wish instead to offer some distilled reflections and proposals on the maturing of tragical vision in early Christianity and its legacy for Christian theological hermeneutics, all the while recognizing that we are not identifying a thoroughly uniform vision among ancient authors. Indeed, such vision thrived on these authors’ literary, rhetorical, and interpretive liberties, not to mention their variant dispositions toward classical Greco-Roman paradigms. Looking back across the vast literature that we have explored, I turn now to the cumulative effect of its plural visions of “the tragic.” Along the way I also want to insinuate my findings, even if quite preliminarily, into the conversation among contemporary theologians who are working to enhance Christian tragical vision, most of whom (with few exceptions, like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Rowan Williams) unfortunately pay scant attention to premodern Christian perspectives even while often being quite literate in the classical tragedies themselves. I concede that any “conversation” I might stage between ancient and modern Christian thinkers is complicated from the outset by the fact that contemporary theologians are much more acutely self-conscious of their methodologies, and the warrants of those methodologies, than their ancient Christian counterparts. Most recent advocates of tragical vision in the service of Christian faith hold highly-developed convictions about the parameters of “the tragic” and the putative compatibility of tragedy and Christianity, whereas the many early Christian writers with whom we have dealt in this book do not supply us with even the most basic apologias for imitating tragedy. Their only apologia was their very persistence in imaginatively employing tragical mimesis in a wide array of literary genres, despite the enduring Christian contempt of pagan theatrical art. I am nonetheless convinced that there is room, especially in the current openness toward ressourcement and critical retrieval in historical and systematic theology, Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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and even in some quarters of critical biblical scholarship, to bring together ancient and modern perspectives.

T R A G I C A L V I S I O N A N D MI M E S I S : A N A S C E N T THEOLOGICAL ARTFORM IN E ARLY CHRISTIANITY First a brief retrospect. The supposition of my entire study is that tragical mimesis in early Christian writing and preaching was never exclusively a literary or rhetorical artifice, since it included serious theological and hermeneutical engagement both with sacred revelation, rich in its own dramatic plots and tragic characters, and with the existential tragedies still perceived in Christian experience and demanding interpretation in the light of scriptural precedents. And yet aesthetic and artistic or poetic interests can hardly be denied, and I do not intend to downplay them at all. Indeed, as Morwenna Ludlow has persuasively argued, many modern expositions of early Christian literature divorce literary or rhetorical artistry from theological substance to their own detriment. Ludlow’s very effective case in point is a text that I previously discussed,¹ Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise On Virginity, where, she asserts, the use of tragical language as well as rhetorical ekphrasis (vivid description) to portray the vagaries of married life is vital to Nyssen’s role as both spectator and as (married) narrator.² As I see it, tragical mimesis, in its various forms, served the discipline, both artistic and thoroughly theological, of “spectating”—better still, reimagining and contemplating—human corporeal existence in the light of an often elusive divine wisdom and providence, and simultaneously narrating that existence from the vantage point of an insider experientially familiar with creation’s instabilities and vanities. The tragical vision that both fed tragical mimesis, and was fed by it, helped to stimulate deepening moral engagement with the world, both by nourishing tragical conscience (Chapter 5) and inculcating a distinctively Christian tragical pathos (Chapter 6). In Chapters 2 and 3, I sought to locate tragical mimesis within the emerging patterns of Christian theological hermeneutics and exegesis of Scripture, not as a method all its own or a specific textual “sense” to be set alongside others, but as a function of the prolific figural imagination of early Christian interpreters. Unlike some of their modern higher-critical counterparts, ancient interpreters did not see fit to treat biblical texts as locked into an original and restrictive historical or cultural horizon; instead, they discerned that ¹ See above, pp. 160–1, 204–5. ² “Useful and Beautiful: A Reading of Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity,” 225.

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individual texts found their ultimate meaning within a much larger revelatory trajectory which, when patiently and scrupulously expounded, disclosed God’s purposes within even the most troubling and obdurate scriptural witnesses. Artistically, tragical mimesis amplified the already dramatic elements in the Bible’s hardest narratives, as we saw with spectacular vividness in Avitus of Vienne’s work on Adam and Eve, the dialogue between Cain and Abel by an unknown Syriac poet, and the Byzantine hymnist Romanist the Melodist’s Kontakion on the Holy Innocents. Tragical mimesis in these and numerous other cases provided a way forward for Christian audiences or readers to grasp the harsh realism of scriptural revelation and surmount their initial interpretive naïvety about the Bible—and about themselves. The utter outrage of a grueling narrative like that of Jephthah and his daughter was less an obstacle to be interpretively “removed” than the raw material of more mature insight. Origen’s teaching on the skandala of Scripture, inserted by the Holy Spirit into the biblical text for purposes of goading lazy readers, enjoyed wide acceptance among patristic exegetes.³ Tragical mimesis opened a way for “seeing” (contemplatively, θεωρητικῶς) beneath, beyond, and through the “letter” (γράμμα; littera) of Scripture a supervening divine intention (σκοπός) to educate believers in the fullness of the revelation. In the case of Old Testament tragedies, an especially significant interpretive strategy, understandably, was to appeal to the eventual dispensation of Jesus Christ as the only and ultimate means to rectify their disturbing ramifications and moral ambiguities: e.g. Christ as the New Adam who redeems and renews the fallen Adam and his posterity; Christ as the New Abel whose perfect sacrifice overcomes Cain’s (the Devil’s) murderous deceit and destruction; Christ as the true Ecclesiast who sheds redemptive light on the vanities of life so vividly depicted in Ecclesiastes. Another common strategy, predictably, was to draw from the exempla of the Old Testament’s tragic stories certain moral or spiritual object lessons, positive (e.g. Abel, Jacob, Job) or negative (e.g. Cain, Esau, Saul, Samson), that could instruct Christians in how to endure tribulation for purposes of honing virtues. Still another strategy, more hermeneutically adventurous, was to anticipate or introduce, in varying degrees of subtlety and depth, the hard “ontological” quandaries that biblical tragedies, in their disturbing and sometimes horrifying details, posed about humanity’s fallen condition and encumbered freedom, about lingering fears of divine determinism or caprice, and about human incapacity to make final sense of the randomness or seeming irredeemability of much human suffering. In some instances it is clear that patristic interpreters sought to answer such questions before they were asked, as we saw, for instance, in the

³ For Origen’s teaching on the σκάνδαλα, see De princ. 4.2.7–4.3.15 (Görgemanns-Karpp, 720–80).

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urgency of many exegetes to represent Job’s saga as the vindication of a righteous man rather than as a frontal assault on divine justice. The survival of tragical mimesis as a Christian theological and interpretive artform was due in no small measure to the perception that with the advent of Jesus Christ real human tragedy had hardly abated. Quite the contrary, new tragedies accompanied the incarnation from the outset, as heralded by Herod’s massacre of the Holy Innocents, the quasi-tragic heroics of John the Baptist, the rise and precipitous fall of Judas Iscariot, and the fateful blunderings of Ananias and Sapphira. Paul and other apostolic sources attested that the Church was destined to abide still newer tragedies and crises. Like him his fellow Christians would inevitably be perplexed but not driven to despair (2 Cor. 4:8) by setbacks, reversals, and bitter sufferings. The Apostle even declared that the Creator had subjected the whole creation (of course implicating the Church as well) to vanity or futility, thereby graphically conveying the tragic condition of the postlapsarian world in advance of the final bodily redemption of humanity (Rom. 8:19–23). Here, in effect, was an inducement for new modes of tragical mimesis, like those we observed in the different Christian reinventions of the “tragic self” (Chapter 4) and in the envisioning of specific social groups as endemically beleaguered by a tragic existence (Chapter 5). In the latter case, it is especially striking that such groups were perceived simultaneously both outside and inside the Church, an admission that Christianity did not grant immunity from profound suffering or from an existential collision with futility, and that Christians could scarcely ignore the tragic plight of outsiders and strangers. The various modes of tragical mimesis served, in the long run, to suppress fervid eschatological triumphalism as well as any residual urge to treat the gospel purely as a world-transcending gnosis. All the while, the artistry as such of this mimesis remained instrumental for expanding Christians’ imagination of the moral and spiritual battle to which they were invariably joined. Did all the literary and rhetorical variations of tragical mimesis amount to something we might collectively call a nascent genre of “Christian tragedy”? I have not and will not tender such a claim, though I do believe that a uniquely Christian tragical conscience and tragical pathos were in the making. I have proposed more modestly that ancient Christian writers and preachers actively and artfully reimagined “the tragic,” and capitalized on various elements of classical tragedy as dramatically and rhetorically useful for leading their audiences through Scripture’s most disturbing narratives and through the darkest precincts of Christians’ present experience. While the Bible seemed to elevate the titans of that drama, paralleling the “weighty” (σπουδαίοι) characters in classical tragedy, all believers were now to be the new actors on its stage or athletes in its arena, becoming with Paul a spectacle to the world (θέατρον τῷ κόσμῳ, 1 Cor. 4:9) and with their fellow Christians theatricalized (θεατριζόμενοι) by abuse and affliction (Heb. 10:33). Even as virulent a critic of

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theatrical culture as Tertullian recognized, at the end of the day, that Scripture unfolded the most spectacular apocalyptic drama, into which Christians could presently be recruited “to trample underfoot the heathen gods, to drive out demons, to perform healings, to strive after revelations, to live for God.”⁴ Christianity, it was believed, culminated the plot of the sacred drama and thus needed all manner of literary and rhetorical artistry to confront the culture with its scandalous and sobering gospel—whether the persecuting culture before Constantine or the perilously amenable culture in the decades and centuries after the Peace of the Church.

TRAGICAL VISION THROUGH A THEODRAMATIC L ENS Among modern Christian thinkers worthy of incorporating in this study, the most promising is the late Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), mainly because he commanded a sophisticated knowledge both of early Christian sources and of Greco-Roman literary and philosophical traditions, and used this knowledge in his quest to make tragical—and more broadly theodramatic—vision a staple of Christian theology. Von Balthasar believed that such a vision of things was rooted in the very character of divine revelation itself and that it found preliminary exercise in premodern theological hermeneutics. Already in the fourth volume of his theological aesthetics series, The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik),⁵ von Balthasar begins building his case for a theodramatic and tragical reading of history. First he establishes that ancient Attic culture embraced the unadulterated hegemony of myth, formatively represented in Homeric and Hesiodic epic. At this point religion and art were of a piece in expressing humanity’s utter dependence on the Divine (Zeus and his minions) as well as “man’s transcendence into the sphere of God, in which he finds his salvation, his greatness and his glory.”⁶ The lyric poets added their own mythic accents, especially Pindar with his projection of the sublime intersections of divine “grace” and human aspiration;⁷ but it was the tragedians, von Balthasar wagers, who climaxed this ⁴ Spect. 29 (CCSL 1:251). ⁵ This series being the first in von Balthasar’s trilogy which comprises the aesthetics (Herrlichkeit), the theodramatics (Theodramatik), and the theological logic (Theologik), respectively devoted to divine Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. ⁶ The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, trans. Brian McNeil et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989; original German edition, 1967), 43–100, quoted at 45. ⁷ Ibid. 84–100.

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fusion of religion and art, since tragedy tore away aesthetics and fully laid bare human beings in their vulnerability to profound suffering, to “bloody truth and justice,” even turning the most extreme suffering into the optimal threshold of self-transcending action and encounter with divine glory.⁸ Von Balthasar in turn treats classical tragedy as a veritable praeparatio evangelica, since Jesus Christ alone finally fulfills the role of the mythic tragic hero in history, whose perfect valor “has determined to reveal the light in the darkness, god in his opposite.”⁹ In tragedy and gospel alike, divine glory (δόξα) is paradoxically divulged in the one who has been most abandoned by God, and who has inhabited the most harrowing frontiers of creaturely experience. Von Balthasar provided the fuller dramatic framework for this tragical vision (including dramatis personae, staging, action, and finale) in his TheoDrama (Theodramatik) series, a theological dramatic theory responding, in part, to philosophically reductionistic accounts of human history and destiny.¹⁰ But while his own immediate conversation partners in this series are modern dramatic theorists, philosophical critics (especially Hegel), and theologians, von Balthasar’s larger theodramatics gleans substantially from ancient Christian authors, as observable in his profuse appeal to patristic sources. Initially, in his Prolegomena (vol. 1) to the Theo-Drama series, he designates two phases in the premodern Christian engagement with drama. The first phase saw “the degeneration of the theatre into the circus,” when certain early Christian leaders (beginning with Paul and the writer of Hebrews) opted to theatricalize the role of Christian witnesses (martyrs) on the world stage or moral arena, but with little significant exploitation of theatrical imagery as such.¹¹ The second phase, which extended from late antiquity into and beyond the Middle Ages, saw Christian writers like Augustine occasionally employing dramatic images when they elaborated the Church’s superior perspective on world history.¹² From time to time we hear the sound of motifs from antiquity: the image of the puppet-theatre, illustrating the world’s futility, the imagery of the world as a stage on which nothing is lasting, the image of the world as “God’s plaything,” which, ⁸ Ibid. 101–3, and the extended discussion (with analysis of the major Greek tragedians) in 104–54. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 3: Creator Spirit, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 391–411. ⁹ Glory of the Lord 4:103, 104. Cf. “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” 401–2: “The tragedy of Jesus Christ . . . becomes the universal sacrament in the center of the history of the world, recapitulating all the quasi-sacramental events of the Greek stage and the prophetic-symbolic dramas of the Old Covenant.” ¹⁰ Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols., trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988–98). ¹¹ Ibid. 1:151–5. For von Balthasar’s brief analysis of early Christian rebuke of the theatre, see ibid. 1:89–98, 151–7. ¹² Ibid. 1:155–63.

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however—significantly—Maximus the Confessor employs in the service of a theology of history . . . And Clement of Alexandria, in an echo of stoicism, says that the truly wise man “faultlessly plays the role God has given him in the drama of life; for he knows what he has to do and to suffer.”¹³

This reconstruction is cursory and grossly inadequate, as I hope the present study will have indicated, though in fairness it was not von Balthasar’s concern to offer a detailed examination of early Christian tragical mimesis and dramatic imagery in his Theo-Drama series. Still, the deeper one reads into the series, the more the impact of his ancient sources becomes conspicuous. We will examine some of that impact here, though various aspects of it appear more as points of convergence or comparison than simple retrievals from the ancients. Von Balthasar had no interest in slavishly duplicating his patristic predecessors but adapted insights from them in his own extensive presentation of the theodrama of salvation history. Turning things around, moreover, his fully developed theodramatics actually provides an instructive retrospective lens through which to view some of the most important aims of early Christian tragical vision.

Theodramatic Perspective: Contemplation (θεωρία) and Performance (πρᾶξις) One of the primary features of von Balthasar’s theodramatic theory is the role of contemplation (θεωρία) and not just logical analysis. “Theory” of course has strong resonances in a purely philosophical or scientific key, or in recent forms of “critical theory;” but theory as a comprehensive explanatory template is hardly equatable with theôria as spiritual vision—that is, the capacity, through sanctified intuition and the ecclesially-grounded eyes of faith, to see through the surfaces of things to a deeper economy of divine activity. In the preceding chapters, I have reiterated this mode of theôria as a habit of early Christian theological and biblical hermeneutics, and as instrumental to tragical mimesis. It envisioned God as a Dramaturge emplotting and enacting his will even in the harsh underbelly of history that surfaces in the Bible’s most implacable narratives and in ongoing human catastrophes. Though there is a genetic connection here with Platonic theôria, the contemplation (from below) of eternal heavenly realities, the tragical-contemplative vision that von Balthasar shares with his early Christian counterparts entails a plumbing of life’s abysses, exploring how the frightful calamities and moral ambiguities of human experience may yet fit into the Creator’s providential economy— even if rational clarity and resolution seem to be indefinitely or eschatologically deferred. ¹³ Ibid. 1:155–6; cf. also 249ff. Clement is quoted here from Strom. 7.65.6 (GCS 17:47).

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Von Balthasar in fact posits two subjectivities, contemplative and apologetic, of the theodramatic perspective, both of which have strong precedence in the archive of patristic theology and ethics. The contemplative subjectivity, he writes: . . . [is] turned inward to ponder what it has seen, which needs to be beheld anew each time since it exceeds the capacity of the human eye: yet such beholding is not enough, with the result that contemplation always draws the contemplative into action. This law is always at work throughout tradition, from the early Bible commentaries, via the Alexandrian, Cappadocian, Augustinian and Dionysian “mirroring” (speculatio), the monastic theology of the Syrian and Egyptian Fathers and through to medieval and modern times in religious orders of East and West.¹⁴

By this account Christians are never just passive spectators of the drama of salvation. As they mature in intuiting its plot, they find themselves ever more engaged participants, actors performing on the cosmic stage in the play to fulfill the divine will. As Ben Quash remarks of von Balthasar’s thinking on this point, Christian spectators of the world find themselves already caught “in the middle” of life’s game, challenged to discern truth amid uncertainty.¹⁵ Christians have roles, scripted in a complex way by the biblical revelation itself,¹⁶ and given greater definition through ecclesial relationships, but also demanding the imagination and virtuosity of those who fill the roles in new historical contexts that are different from those in Scripture, even if the moral circumstances or spiritual testings might be quite comparable. Enacting a role is a profound analogy of Christian performance, for while an actor onstage is doing something simply playful or “frivolous” in and of itself, a mere mimetic show, she still communicates the deadly seriousness (“reality”) of the role already plotted by the divine Dramaturge, a role that she herself might not completely fathom but is entrusted to perform nonetheless.¹⁷ For Christians, theodramatic perspective (contemplative vision) and self-understanding grow with the performance of their roles as disciples.

¹⁴ Theo-Drama, 1:126. See also von Balthasar’s essay “Contemplation and Action,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 1: The Word Made Flesh, trans. A. V. Littledale and Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989; German ed., 1960), 227–40. ¹⁵ Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27–8. ¹⁶ See Theo-Drama 2:102–15, where, discussing the place of Scripture in the theodrama, von Balthasar emphasizes that its interpretation (in the Spirit) unfolds the full generative power of the Word which “journeys with us” in Christians’ performance of their roles, constantly opening up new horizons to them. Certainly this perspective is consonant with ancient “figural” interpretation of Scripture, with its attention to new horizons of the texts, and so too the possibility of the “roles” of biblical characters finding new mimetic enactments. ¹⁷ I am extrapolating here from von Balthasar’s extensive commentary on theodramatic “roles” in Theo-Drama, 1:46–8, 144–51, 249–57, 261–8, 281–97.

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Among the Christian authors discussed in earlier chapters, Gregory Nazianzen stands out as adumbrating von Balthasar’s robust notions of theodramatic tragedy, the contemplation thereof, and the performative roles therein. Gregory himself describes human existence in terms of role-playing, as we saw when he portrayed his brother Caesarius using his secular office as a stage on which to play his higher role as a Christian—a virtuous hypocrisy as it were.¹⁸ But Gregory also contemplates his own self as a tragic player implicated in a much larger dramatic plot not of his own making. He writes as his own tragedian, but he is fully aware that he is in a play of cosmic proportions, where the Creator alone knows the outcome. Despite his urge for vindication, Gregory must ultimately surrender his tragic self, the subject of all the details that fill up his autobiographical poetry and letters, to the relentless forward flow of existence, which is paradoxically God’s manner of breaking in his new creation (i.e. guiding his theodrama to completion). What makes Gregory’s profile of the tragic Christian self so compelling is that, even though he inhabits such a self, and is utterly familiar with its torments, the role itself is alien to him; it has been assigned to him so that he can be sacrificed to God’s own purposes.¹⁹ He does not so much enact the role as the role enacts him. Early Christian monastics could fully identify with the dilemma Gregory Nazianzen described. In the deserts of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and elsewhere, they too were actors in an eschatological theodrama. Ascetically, the monk’s role was defined by the tandem disciplines of contemplation (θεωρία) of God and the performance (πρᾶξις) of God’s rigorous commandments. Theodramatically, that role was stretched between heaven and earth, between the highest, quasi-angelic vocation of assimilation to God and the most mundane exigencies of survival, manual labor, and caring for the earthly body while mortifying it. The desert might have been its own dramatic stage, but that stage overlapped with the Church’s larger stage, such that monks were not to be mere solo artists of the “philosophical life” questing after their own salvation in isolation from all others. They were to be tragic heroes fighting the Church’s battles against demons and all the forces of darkness at an advanced level of spiritual prowess but in the most abased of physical conditions, from which position they would also model contemplation and ascetical performance for non-monastic Christians.

Plotting the Cosmic Tragedy and Its Resolution Von Balthasar built his theodramatics on the premise that the Trinity set out the plot of creation and redemption not as a transparent sequence of mighty ¹⁸ See above, Chapter 4, p. 109. ¹⁹ See above, p. 118 and n. 81 in Chapter 4, citing De vita sua, ll. 87–90 (White, 16, 17).

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divine deeds but as the mystery-laden revelation of Jesus Christ, whose incarnate work makes sense of everything that comes before and after and discloses the depths of divine kenosis within the tragic condition of the human race. And if “the Word becomes flesh” more and more profoundly, unto death on the Cross, it follows that, in the drama God enacts with mankind, not the least particle of the human and its tragic dimension will be lost. If we experience this for what it is and claims to be, we shall find that all dramatic categories of worldly drama will help us to get a better view of the content, the seriousness and the sublimity of the divine-human drama . . . 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; thus, without drawing its teeth or imposing an extreme solution on it, he overcomes it.²⁰

Like his theological kinsman Karl Barth, von Balthasar is not one to obsess over what might have eventuated for creation, and whether the incarnation would ever have taken place, had the Adamic fall never occurred, though he knew full well the historic speculations of certain patristic and medieval authors on such things. Von Balthasar is a realist who largely sympathizes with Maximus the Confessor’s view that, with Adam’s lapse happening virtually the instant he was created, as he immediately squandered his freedom, “the bronze doors of the divine home are slammed remorselessly shut at the very start of our existence.”²¹ “The entire order of sin and redemption appears inclusively integrated” into the scheme of divine revelation.²² History moves relentlessly forward as salvation history. There can be no return to prelapsarian paradise, even if longed for by various theologians and mystics. This would not even be desirable since only the Word-made-flesh introduces paradise in its fullness. Von Balthasar acknowledged here a strong debt to Irenaeus of Lyons, whom he credited, in the early history of Christian thought, with inventing “theological form” by projecting the cosmic drama in terms of a graphic and tragic realism, centered on the raw, visible fact of “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).²³ Von Balthasar quotes the provocative passage where Irenaeus declares that before the foundation of the world, it was only to “the Lamb who

²⁰ Theo-Drama, 2:53, 54. ²¹ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe according to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 187, referencing Maximus, Qu. Thal. 61 (CCSG 22:85). ²² Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, 2nd ed., trans. Aidan Nichols (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 12. Cf. Theo-Drama 2:269–70, where von Balthasar seeks to avoid implying that the Creator was under compulsion to create a world in which he would show all his redemptive benefits through the blood of Christ, lest sin become a necessary condition of its creation. It is enough that he created this world by his ineffable, sovereign freedom. ²³ The Glory of the Lord, 2:43–4, 45–6, 55.

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was slain” that the Father-Creator opened the “book” of the secrets of creation (“heaven and earth”).²⁴ Creation’s unfolding history is, at its core, a progressive manifestation of the unseen Father who becomes visible only through the Son (Word) and Spirit (Wisdom), according to a gracious demonstration (ostensio) of divine self-sacrificial love.²⁵ What especially draws von Balthasar to Irenaeus is the ancient Gallican bishop’s intuition that this revelation is “concentrated” in the historic (and tragic) life and death of Jesus Christ, which is a recapitulation (cf. Eph. 1:10) of all God’s creative and redemptive purposes. This is what gives thickness to the plot of the drama of revelation, since so much is going on, so many theophanic forms are intersecting, in the Son’s incarnate work: the perfecting of the Law and prophets; the drawing of all created things to the fullness of their purpose in Christ; and the healing and exaltation of the fallen Adam in the New Adam.²⁶ For von Balthasar, Irenaeus effectively identifies history’s great tragedy, the wasting away of Adam’s posterity, which had held such great promise in virtue of being stamped with God’s own image. It is the tragedy that Irenaeus himself contrasts with the fictitious “tragedy” Gnostics spun in their exotic redemption myths.²⁷ Irenaeus also helps bring to light the tragic heroics of Jesus Christ, although, in his ebullient confidence that the incarnation was the concrete resolution of the plot of the theodrama and the clear fulfillment of all the sacred prophecies, von Balthasar believes that Irenaeus was liable to envision progressive revelation (from Old to New Testaments) “too much as a single line, and not nearly enough in dramatic and dialectical form.”²⁸ In other words, if I understand von Balthasar correctly, Irenaeus borders on being too hermeneutically innocent for his own good. The correspondences that he projects between events or prophetic types and their future christocentric fulfillments are too interpretively tidy to do justice to the dissonances, the complexities, the contingencies, the twists and turns, the ironies, the suspense, and revelatory surprises that are the stuff of tragedy and of all authentic drama. Surely if the work of Jesus Christ ultimately fulfills the original purpose of creation, this does not mean that his incarnation, death, and resurrection are mere instantiations of an immanent law of divine balance-keeping in the world, or that the “script” of the universal theodrama elicits a divine tour de force wherewith all human tragedy is an accident simply awaiting an eschatological “fix.” At this point von Balthasar’s assessment of Irenaeus forces us back to the key question hovering over all early (and modern) Christian tragical vision, ²⁴ Adv. haer. 4.20.2 (SC 100:628–30), quoted in The Glory of the Lord, 2:46. ²⁵ The Glory of the Lord, 2:46–9. ²⁶ Ibid. 2:51–5; Theo-Drama 2:140–9. ²⁷ Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 2.12.3 (SC 294:100–2), cited in Theo-Drama 2:140. ²⁸ The Glory of the Lord, 1:91–2. See also Frances Young’s critique of the alleged flatness of Irenaeus’s approach to Scripture and history in The Art of Performance: Toward a Theology of Holy Scripture (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990), 45–69.

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that of whether and how the divine oikonomia, God’s governing of creation according to his providence and ineffable will, can truly accommodate all the haunted horizons of human freedom and experience. Is real “tragedy” even possible under this economy? George Steiner and other modern critics have answered no, but largely because they lean solely on literary rather than broader philosophical or theological preconceptions of tragedy.²⁹ Still, is tragedy, with its relentless plumbing of the darkest caverns of creaturely existence, compatible with a faith so confident of God’s conquest of sin, suffering, and death through the work of Christ, a faith further linked with the primitive churches’ “realized” eschatology whereby Christ has already unleashed power over evil and death into human history even if its future consummation remains mysterious? Von Balthasar famously suggested that if human tragedy is not taken up into the very life of the Trinity, and God does not fully appropriate the tragedy to which Jesus Christ is subjected, then the answer to the above question must be an emphatic no. Not only in the Theo-Drama series but in his Mysterium Paschale, he determines to show that the definitive tragedy arises within the Trinity in the form of the Father’s abandonment of the Son to humiliation and death on a cross for humanity’s sake. True sacrificial love, as kenotic love, is birthed within the Trinity, not ad extra.³⁰ Wanting to avoid theological abstraction, von Balthasar extrapolates from the horizon of the Gospels and their patristic interpretation, which together dramatize the incarnation as antecedently “ordered to” the cross, and which point to the inner compulsion of divine love consistently expressed in the Greek δεῖ/ἔδει (“it is/was necessary”) in connection with Jesus being driven to his passion (Mark 8:31 et par.; Luke 17:25; 22:37; 24:7, 26, 44; John 3:14; 12; 34; 20:9).³¹ Von Balthasar draws as well from the graphic depiction of the Son’s abandonment by the Father to death on the cross (Mark 15:34 et par.). This is further punctuated by the Son’s descent into hell, the realm of utter human despair and hopelessness, on which we have a rich tradition of early Christian speculation. Von Balthasar’s postulation of an intra-trinitarian tragedy or rupture has been among his more controversial proposals, no doubt.³² More to our ²⁹ As noted by Graham Ward, “Steiner and Eagleton: The Practice of Hope and the Idea of the Tragic,” Literature and Theology 19 (2005): 100–3. ³⁰ A point on which von Balthasar was to a degree positively influenced by the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov: see e.g. Theo-Drama 2:313–14, 323. ³¹ Mysterium Paschale, 17–23. ³² Of late, see Karen Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), esp. 66–79. Rowan Williams remains cautiously appreciative: “In Balthasar’s framework, to say that Christ is the supreme tragic hero is to say not that he is a human being who happens to suffer more than anyone else in history (though Balthasar can sometimes write as if this is what he is claiming), but that there could be no more radical a rupture in the fabric of reality than God alienated from God. And for Balthasar it is the Christian doctrine of the trinity that—by positing eternal differentiation with the divine life—allows for this ‘tragic’ rupture to

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interest, however, is his turn to the tragical vision of ancient Christian theologians to support this claim, starting with John the Evangelist’s portrayal of the incarnate Word seamlessly fulfilling the Father’s mission for him from beginning to end, and Paul’s preaching of the scandal/folly of the cross (1 Cor. 1:22–5) and of the reconciliation of all things through the blood of Christ, the very mystery established by God before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:3–14).³³ I have mentioned von Balthasar’s appeal to Irenaeus’s assertion that God’s final revelation of Christ the Paschal Lamb was the original secret behind creation. But he is furthermore convinced that a number of patristic thinkers were virtual kenoticists who had already perceived the radical selfemptying of the Father through the Son and recognized the preeminence of the cross in the incarnational economy. He cites, for example, various authors who judged that the death of Christ determined the conditions of his incarnation, not vice versa.³⁴ He evokes Gregory Nazianzen’s dramatization of the Son taking on humanity’s curse (Gal. 3:13) and “becoming” its very dereliction (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21),³⁵ and Maximus the Confessor’s declaration that the cross holds the key to the primordial reasons (λόγοι) according to which God created the world in the first place.³⁶ Von Balthasar further references an array of early and medieval Christian thinkers who imagine “hell” as the hellish alienation from (and abandonment by) God in the dark night of souls,³⁷ or else “hell” as the realm of death—both of which must be vanquished through the Father abandoning the Son to his passion and descent into Hades.³⁸ In my view, even if von Balthasar is unable to prove definitively that early Christian tragical visionaries, however radical their notions of divine kenosis, gave precedent for conceiving a tragic rupture within the Trinity itself, he is at least able to elucidate their intuitions of a theodramatic plot in which the Son decisively assumes and inhabits human tragedy once for all on behalf of the Godhead. Patristic understandings of the theologia crucis were not restricted exclusively to theories of divine atonement for sin. The cross, in all its tragic

occur without entailing a kind of tragic division within God that would have somehow to be overcome, a collapse of divine integrity into contradiction and opposition” (The Tragic Imagination, 123). ³³ Mysterium Paschale, 18–20; Theo-Drama, 2:267. ³⁴ E.g. Tertullian, De carne Christi 6.6 (SC 216:236): forma moriendi causa nascendi est; Athanasius, De incarnatione 44.2 (SC 199:424–6); Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica 32 (GNO 3/4:77, ll. 21–4), all cited (and other patristic texts as well) in Theo-Drama 2:247–8. ³⁵ Or. 30.5 (SC 250:232–6), cited in Mysterium Paschale, 21; also Or. 37.1 (SC 318:270–2), cited in Theo-Drama 2:248. ³⁶ Capita theologica et oeconomica 1.66 (PG 90:1108A–B), cited in Mysterium Paschale, 21–2. ³⁷ See Mysterium Paschale, 76–9; cf. Theo-Drama 5:301–2, 303–4, 308–11. ³⁸ Mysterium Paschale, 148–81; also Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Descent into Hell,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 4: Spirit and Institution, trans. Edward Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994; German ed., 1974), 401–14.

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proportions, climaxed an entire itinerarium of the work of the Son; and while, for fairly obvious reasons, early Christian writers were reticent to proclaim Jesus Christ an explicitly tragic hero, they exploited all manner of mythic imagery to dramatize his vanquishing of the powers of evil and death from within their own domain through the “weapon” of the cross, and his total selfsacrifice for the sake of “new creation.”³⁹

A “Play of Freedoms” There is one area, in particular, where von Balthasar strongly indulges the early Christian imagination of cosmic tragedy and the Savior’s tragic heroics. This is the “play of freedoms,”⁴⁰ the dramatically-charged intersection of infinite divine freedom and finite human freedom in Jesus Christ, which constitutes the central play-within-the-play of the cosmic theodrama. Von Balthasar fully realizes that the christological formulas espoused by Fathers and Councils—including the Council of Constantinople of 681, which affirmed the coexistence of divine and human wills in Christ—were not just stand-alone, scholastically frozen definitions.⁴¹ They had no force in the early churches apart from the dramatic plot, the mythos, of the incarnation, where God’s unbounded freedom-in-love interplayed with human freedom, the latter not only bounded by mutable creaturely nature but also deformed by sin. The aftermath of the fall, most patristic authors agreed, included the deepening obfuscation of human freedom and the moral ambiguity that came with it. In Greek patristic thought, notwithstanding variations in individual authors, the tragedy of freedom was largely one of free will (rational desire) failing to operate in concert with the mind’s clear spiritual vision and thus habituating itself to vice. In the West, under Augustine’s lead at least, that tragedy was the nightmare of pure self-determination, manifesting as raw rebellion against the gracious God and as the self-imprisonment of original sin. In spelling out “finite freedom” as a presupposition of theodrama, von Balthasar emphasizes its two “pillars” or poles, the relative self-determination (possession of self-knowledge and will) granted to humanity by God, and the “missional” or existential mode (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) in which it is exercised visà-vis other personal agents. Here he credits a whole cluster of early Christian theologians—Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Nemesius of Emesa, Ephrem the Syrian, Maximus, and Augustine—with having pioneered the Christian understanding of creaturely freedom in the ³⁹ See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 263–81. ⁴⁰ Theo-Drama 2:63, 189–334. ⁴¹ See von Balthasar’s review of dogmatic and conciliar Christology in Theo-Drama 3:208–20.

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interest of theodrama.⁴² Von Balthasar principally focuses, however, on five authors whose distinctive perspectives on the two poles of finite freedom register powerful dramatic effect: Irenaeus, with his view that humans must grow into their freedom through experience;⁴³ Origen, with his projection that creaturely being is the quest of free will;⁴⁴ Gregory of Nyssa, with his ostensibly more radical view of “birthing” oneself through free choice (προαίρεσις),⁴⁵ alternatively either assimilating oneself to God or else “inventing” moral evil as did Adam;⁴⁶ Maximus, who dramatizes the tension between a human’s “natural” will, predisposed toward conformity with God’s will, and his postlapsarian “gnomic” will that vacillates in choosing between good and evil;⁴⁷ and finally Augustine, with his dilemma of human freedom itself needing to be “liberated” by God’s own eternal freedom.⁴⁸ Here, it seems, we are squarely in the territory of the “tragic self” discussed at length earlier in Chapter 4: the self both gifted with freedom and imperiled by it; the self blessed with the divine image (εἰκών) but struggling to be perfected in ultimate likeness (ὁμοίωσις) to God;⁴⁹ the self chiseled, but hopefully not crushed, by miseries of its own making or entirely out of its control. On the other side of the theodramatic equation, von Balthasar argues that the infinite freedom of God, while hinted at in the Old Testament, truly divulges itself only with the New Testament, since now this infinite freedom is seen to penetrate finite human freedom without compromising its own transcendence. And yet in Christ the total absence of reciprocity between the two freedoms is broken down,⁵⁰ for in the incarnation “infinite freedom shows its ultimate, most extreme capability for the first time: it can be itself even in

⁴² Theo-Drama 2:215–16. ⁴³ Ibid. 2:140–9, 216–17, 324–5. ⁴⁴ Ibid. 2:218–19. ⁴⁵ See Gregory’s Hom. in Ecclesiasten 6 (GNO 5:379); De vita Moysis, lib. 2 (GNO 7/1:34); also von Balthasar, Theo-Drama 2:220–2, 234–8. ⁴⁶ De virginitate 12 (GNO 8/1:298–9). ⁴⁷ This is Maximus’s christologically reframed distinction, wherewith Christ modeled natural human will but did not exercise gnomic will, as do all of us, since his own humanity remained ever perfectly united with the divine nature: e.g. Opuscula theologica et polemica 6 (PG 91: 65A– 68D); Opusc. 7 (80D–81D); Opusc. 3 (45B–49A); Disputatio cum Pyrrho (PG 91:308D); see also von Balthasar, Theo-Drama 2:222. ⁴⁸ Theo-Drama 2:222, 231–4 (with citations from Augustine); also Theo-Drama 5:402, quoting two texts of Augustine: “The arbitrium that can no longer fall victim to sin is all the more free” (Enchiridion 105); “The first freedom was concerned with the ability to avoid sin; the last freedom will be far greater: not to sin at all . . . not to be able to forsake the good” (De correptione et gratia 12.33). ⁴⁹ See above, pp. 107, 127–8. Cf. von Balthasar’s reflections on early Christian understandings of the “image” and “likeness,” in the context of the interplay of creaturely freedom and divine freedom, in Theo-Drama 2:316–34. ⁵⁰ Concerning this reciprocity, Balthasar (Theo-Drama, 2:202) favorably quotes Maximus the Confessor’s provocative statement: “For they say that God and humanity are paradigms (παραδείγματα) of each other, and just so far as God in his philanthropy becomes human for humanity’s sake does humanity, enabled by love, deify itself for God . . . ” (Amb. ad Johannem 10, PG 91:1113B; my own translation).

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the finitude that ‘loses itself ’”—precisely what Paul recognized as a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:23).⁵¹ This is the sublime abandon of divine love, infinite freedom expressing itself as the self-giving which is of the very nature of the triune God, both immanently and economically. There is no training, no rehearsal here. As von Balthasar writes: The play does not exist in advance, but is conceived, produced and acted all in one. The Incarnation is not the nth performance of a tragedy already lying in the archives of eternity. It is an event of total originality, as unique and untarnished as the eternally here-and-now birth of the Son from the Father.⁵²

Precisely in the pure freedom of its enactment by the Son/Word, the incarnation opens finite creatures to a generous participation in God’s infinite freedom—not purely according to a philosophical-ontological paradigm of individuals participating in universal Being, but by a dynamic providence in which the Word reaches out to and “calls” persons, in their uniqueness and proper dignity, into bodily communion with Christ (in all its facets), the only trajectory in which their freedom can thrive to perfection.⁵³ And yet this hopeful picture is invariably sobered by the tragic specter confronted by Christ, who, in his incarnation and passion, had to comprehend every disastrous misplay of finite freedom, “right down to its ultimate abysses.”⁵⁴ Certainly one such abyss opens up in a creature’s free and conscious rejection of the Creator’s salvific call.⁵⁵ The tragedy of theodrama with its “play of freedoms” is greatly intensified when the Son’s obedient “Yes” to the Father’s will collides with a creature’s “No.” This is the eschatological crisis and “finale” of theodrama to which von Balthasar devotes considerable attention in his works, and where he once again turns to early Christian tragical vision for insight. In his long essay on “The Final Act as Tragedy,” he ponders the extent to which God himself is drawn ever more deeply into tragedy, “compelled to judge where he wished to heal.”⁵⁶ Does God feel emotion over the tragedy of human defiance? Von Balthasar is satisfied that the patristic thinkers whom he references prove that the “impassibility” (ἀπάθεια) of God is relevant only to the destabilizing passions characteristic of mutable creatures.⁵⁷ Divine emotions are a function of God’s profound love and mercy, ⁵¹ Theo-Drama 2:243–4. ⁵² A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1963), 39–40. ⁵³ Theo-Drama 2:28–33, 282–4. ⁵⁴ Ibid. 2:54. ⁵⁵ Cf. von Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible, trans. David Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004; German ed., 1963), 91: “The ultimate abysses of man’s freedom to oppose God open up at the place where God, in the freedom of his love, makes the decision to descend kenotically all the way into the forsakenness of the world. With his descent, he reveals this forsakenness: to himself, insofar as he wants to experience abandonment by God, and to the world, which only now measures the entire breadth of its own freedom to oppose God against the dimensions of God’s love.” ⁵⁶ Theo-Drama 5:193. ⁵⁷ Ibid. 5:216–23.

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which, as Origen discerned early on, belong to the Father but are revealed primarily through the Son, whose incarnation is unthinkable apart from a deep, antecedent compassion.⁵⁸ But what of the divine wrath? Can theodrama end with God’s “No” to those free creatures who have remained defiant and recalcitrant? If so, would this not be the final victory of tragedy over hope? On the other hand, as von Balthasar confesses, “the prospect of universal salvation seems to empty God’s involvement in the world of every last trace of tragedy.”⁵⁹ Here as elsewhere, what draws him back to certain ancient Christian authorities is their allowance for mythos (dramatic plot) as well as logos (theological interpretation), and especially their conviction that the Creator’s (Christ’s, the Spirit’s) own everfree performance in the world governs all theodramatic outcomes. Tragic heroics remain in play, since “it is the Mediator, the Reconciler and Savior of the world, who conducts the final Judgment himself,” having been given this prerogative by the Father (John 5:22),⁶⁰ and having already demonstrated it to the thief on the cross (Luke 23:42–3).⁶¹ In von Balthasar’s view, Eastern visionaries like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, even Maximus the Confessor later on, all with whom he is in significant sympathy, already sensed the New Testament’s mixed signals concerning divine judgment and universal salvation and yet affirmed, with their respective qualifications and resistance to a purely systematized eschatology, a final restoration of all creatures (ἀποκατάστασις παντῶν), a final christocentric resolution of cosmic tragedy. Conversely, von Balthasar is skeptical of Augustine’s ostensible overconfidence in the eternally decreed election that became for many the lone orthodoxy in the West.⁶² This foregoing exercise of projecting early Christian tragical vision through a theodramatic lens does not, in my view, force that vision into utterly foreign categories of analysis, even though von Balthasar was a twentieth-century theologian confronting a vast array of challenges specific to his own context. The theodramatic paradigm not only had deep inspiration from von Balthasar’s patristic sources themselves, but helps to foreground the strong dramatic aspiration reflected in all the forms of early Christian tragical mimesis that we have studied. Whether it be the interpretation of tragic narratives in the Bible, the exposition of individual “tragic selves,” or the Christian moral engagement with specific social groups saddled by unrelenting tragedy, the tragical vision that both informed and was matured by these mimetic forms invariably looked on the peculiar instantiations of “the tragic” in terms of a much larger theodrama (or “Christodrama”) intersecting, from beginning to ⁵⁸ Ibid. 5:221. ⁵⁹ Ibid. 5:269. ⁶⁰ Ibid. 5:271, 283. ⁶¹ See ibid. 5:312ff., where, on the basis of this story, von Balthasar projects that Christ retains the power to restore the forsaken even beyond the cross. ⁶² Dare We Hope? 47–50.

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end, with the human creature’s own horizon (finite freedom, fallenness, the prospect of forsakenness, etc.).

THE THEOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE A ND ACCOUNTABILITY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN TRAGICAL VISION Early Christian tragical mimesis, we have discovered, entailed substantial rhetorical and literary artistry; but inevitably it required theological anchoring and accountability. Attention to mythos, both the dramatic plot of scriptural revelation, with its many tragic sub-plots, and the suspense of present Christian experience in the continuation of that drama, warranted an accompanying logos, an elucidation along philosophical, metaphysical, and theological lines. In much patristic literature, the two projects of amplifying mythos and expounding logos were already seamlessly intertwined. Precisely this integration of mythos and logos was crucial to the coherence of Christian tragical vision, whether the context be preaching, catechesis, liturgical and sacramental ritual, or ethics. My purpose now is to examine more closely the logos dimension of tragical vision and its theological intelligence in contemplating and interpreting Christian encounter with the tragic. We will need to keep in mind that the tragical vision that we have been describing set its sights not just on edification but on salvation itself. It looked for believers to be redeemed (intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, morally) through their experience of tragedy, not simply from it.

Identifying and Authenticating the Tragic The quest to define “the tragic,” we know, began at least with Attic tragedy if not earlier, in Homeric epic, and the debate over its meaning has repeatedly resurfaced in cultural history. Aristotle may have identified certain elements and criteria for effective dramatic tragedy, but he did not exhaustively define the tragic in itself, certainly not to the satisfaction of the scores of philosophers, theologians, playwrights, and literary and drama critics who have joined this debate for centuries. One is easily led to conclude that a comprehensive, pan-cultural definition of the tragic is both impossible and unnecessary. The flexibility of its meaning is precisely what has driven its cultural and religious utility in diverse (including non-Western) contexts. Obviously the early Christian tragical visionaries that I have examined did not obsess over an all-inclusive definition of tragedy in the Bible or in Christian experience. We can confidently say that they would never have

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countenanced what George Steiner terms “absolute tragedy,” in which human life is grimly depicted as a victim of “ontological unwantedness” and dystopia from the outset, such that it is better for a human being not even to have been born into the world.⁶³ A glance back at patristic interpretation of Job suffices to show that such nihilism was unacceptable to the Christian imagination. If Job cursed the day of his birth (Job 3:1–3), it was a momentary expression of anguish, not of a bitter fatalism, or else it held some deeper allegorical sense.⁶⁴ If, moreover, Jesus indicated that it would be better for the one who betrays him not to have been born (Mark 14:21 et par.), this had to do with the grievousness of prospective judgment, and encouraged those who remain faithful; it hardly propounded that life is intrinsically meaningless or unlivable. This is not to suggest that early Christian tragical vision failed to perceive creaturely existence as ontologically traumatized—or “stunted” (κολοβουμένος), to borrow Maximus the Confessor’s description of humanity’s state after Adam’s lapse.⁶⁵ We have repeatedly revisited the harsh, even toxic chemistry of finitude and fallenness which tragical mimetics, in its ancient Christian forms, fairly consistently amplified rather than averted. At various points I have noted the influence of the Apostle Paul’s original tragical image of the Creator subjecting the creation to “vanity,” an image that had a rich history of interpretation in the early Church, whether that vanity (echoing Ecclesiastes) signified the vapidity of all human endeavor in its own right or else the futility and languishing characteristic of human and non-human creation after the fall. Later, in the Eastern patristic tradition, writers like Irenaeus and Athanasius played up the underlying ontological vulnerability of human creatures apart from divine grace, which, combined with the Adamic fall itself, thrust the race into a state of attrition and gradual relapse into non-existence.⁶⁶ In the West, Augustine, who had spent almost a decade as a disciple (“hearer”) of Manichaeism, ultimately repudiated its dualist cosmology and its materialist assumptions concerning the provenance of evil; but his mature views on evil’s viral infection of corporeal nature, in the form of original sin and human moral disability, were severe enough to incur his Pelagian nemeses’ accusations that he had never left Manichaeism behind. Still, the consideration of the ontological conditions binding created beings scarcely exhausts the definition of the tragic, which perennially evokes associations with the harsh contingencies of concrete human experience, the ferocity or atrocity of the human encounter with multiform evil, and the ⁶³ “A Note on Absolute Tragedy,” Literature and Theology 4 (1990): 147–56. Steiner admits that the specimens of “absolute” tragedy are relatively scarce (e.g. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Euripides’s Medea and Hecuba; Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) because this kind of tragedy is seemingly unbearable for its audiences. ⁶⁴ See John Chrysostom, Expos. in Job 3.1–3 (SC 346:198–202). For Didymus’s allegorical explanation, see above, pp. 82–3. ⁶⁵ Qu. Thal. 65 (CCSG 22:279). ⁶⁶ See above, Chapter 2, pp. 44–5.

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paradoxical coexistence of helplessness and free will. For comparative purposes, let us divert momentarily to the discussion in modern theology, where the power of contingent circumstances to devastate the human self and to deracinate its moral bearings has been instrumental in determining what is authentically tragic. The question of intractable tragedy, the sort that threatens the human capacity to extract any meaning at all from it, has been a central debating point. For example, the late British philosophical theologian Donald MacKinnon (d. 1994), who espoused the decisive, even paradigmatic role of tragedy in Christian theology (all the more so in a post-Holocaust world), confronts head-on the intractably tragic. For MacKinnon this intractability consists in irreparable human loss, and in the moral jeopardy that has always arisen from human beings making decisions and choices that have unintended and irrevocable consequences. Such tragedy, MacKinnon avers, defies naturalistic explanations and instead presses humanity toward a metaphysically transcendent referent, which, by a Christian account, is the God revealed through Christ’s own total embroilment in tragedy.⁶⁷ Paul Janz has similarly identified how “the tragic” in human experience presents us with a fearful “finality of non-resolution, a sheerly intractable, non-negotiable, empirically and morally indefeasible finality that ‘stumps’ every conceivable theodicy, rationalization or apologetic strategy.”⁶⁸ Rowan Williams, while strongly critical of George Steiner’s notion of “absolute” tragedy since it verges on absurdism,⁶⁹ shares MacKinnon’s conviction that Christian theology is inherently obliged to narrate irreversible loss in a world where there has never been any “calculus” of recompense, where moral loose ends are endemic, and where social and political systems also have sometimes unbridled power to destabilize the moral habitat.⁷⁰ Williams also sympathizes with von Balthasar’s assertion that in the incarnation and death of Christ, the consummate tragic irony, the Father abandoned his Son precisely to a disastrous set of contingencies in time, space, and culture.⁷¹ Turning again to the early Christian sources, even if there is no continuous analytics of “the tragic” we do encounter a pervasive sense of the perilously contingent state of human existence, since not only is creation itself intrinsically contingent, formed ex nihilo, but it is also, as a dwelling place, fraught with the profoundly variable prospects of thriving and of languishing. To borrow yet another image from Maximus the Confessor, postlapsarian human existence is perennially entrapped in a dialectic of pleasure and pain,⁷² and human ⁶⁷ See esp. MacKinnon’s The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 122–35; also “Atonement and Tragedy,” in his The Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 97–104. ⁶⁸ God, the Mind’s Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174. ⁶⁹ The Tragic Imagination, 82–107. ⁷⁰ Ibid. 108–20. ⁷¹ Ibid. 121–3. ⁷² See esp. Qu. Thal. 61 (CCSG 22:85–97).

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activity of all kinds has invariably adapted to this intractable reality, even though there are so many uncontrollable factors that bounce human beings back and forth between these poles. A moralizing preacher like John Chrysostom, discoursing on the vagaries of wealth and poverty, is quick to point out that the supposed pleasure of wealth may in fact merely mask an underlying poverty of spirit, a moral pain of profound consequence. The dialectic of pleasure and pain, thriving and languishing, is not transparent, and the unstable relations and shifts between them apply not just to the physical but the spiritual sphere.⁷³ Existential circumstances as such are only one aspect of the tragic dimension of contingency, however. Another still is human agency itself in all its complicatedness, and the possibility of human beings choosing or acting out of a seemingly fateful ignorance or blindness (ἄτη). Aristotle’s hamartia (Poetics 1453A) is the subject of extensive analysis in classical philosophy, and many experts rightly discourage translating it as a “tragic flaw” since it has to do with error of judgment, not an inherent culpable trait of the protagonist.⁷⁴ Early Christian tragical visionaries, to the extent that they approximated the specific notion of a tragic hamartia beyond the generic meaning of hamartia as “sin,” were nevertheless far more inclined to downplay mistaken judgment and to accentuate moral culpability and the surfacing of a latent flaw on the part of a tragic villain or hero. Certainly we noticed this in the speculation on the exact vice that induced Adam and Eve to balk at the Creator’s command. If they acted out of ignorance of what they were really doing, a moral sin still had to be in play, be it envy, pride, sloth, or some other tragic flaw. Scripture was only too yielding of other cases that early Christian interpreters dramatically amplified: Cain’s envy, Esau’s gluttony, Saul’s insane envy and jealousy, the greed of Ananias and Sapphira. But for all of these, other cases remained far more difficult to explain along the lines of an antecedent moral defect, such as the ambiguous motivations of Jephthah with his sacrifice, or the ostensibly random bad choices of Samson. In the case of Judas Iscariot, although some interpreters targeted his greed, the question remained why Jesus would ever have called one with such a tragic flaw into his company of disciples. Could one not simply grow into wickedness over time? All along the way in assessing tragic behavior in the Bible, patristic interpreters were saddled by larger and embracing questions of the nature of evil and its insemination in human subjectivity and action. Let it suffice to recall ⁷³ See above on Chrysostom’s interpretation of the rich man and Lazarus, Chapter 6, pp. 147–9. ⁷⁴ See Nancy Sherman, “Hamartia and Virtue,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 177–96; Eckart Schrütrumpf, “Traditional Elements in the Concept of Hamartia in Aristotle’s Poetics,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 92 (1989): 137–56.

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that numerous interpreters East and West clung to a Christianized Neoplatonic view that moral evil had no “being,” no ontological status as such in God’s good creation, but was a purely existential phenomenon, a human contrivance that took on many lives of its own. But even the most enthusiastic endorsers of this view knew that it was difficult to maintain a strictly a posteriori focus on the moral evil manifested in concrete human choices and acts, especially when the “thickness” of the biblical narratives themselves appeared to them to beg for ontological and metaphysical speculation. Augustine revealed the risks of moving in that direction. Claiming not to abandon his anti-Manichaean, Neoplatonic view of evil as a “nothingness” voiding the good, he found himself drawn, against the Pelagians, toward granting evil an entitative status within fallen human nature and will. His mature doctrine of divine grace demanded that salvation is not a mere correction of bad human choices but a radical uprooting of sin’s infectious power.

Wisdom, Providence, and the Artful Flirtation with Necessity and Fate The theological intelligence of early Christian tragical vision depended, in my estimation, not solely on its capacity potently to convey the severity of the alienation between the Creator and the fallen creation. It depended also, and especially, on its ability to dramatize that alienation in ways that helped the Christian faithful to reimagine the fallen world and the instabilities of creaturely existence as the theatre in which the Creator, true to form, was still demonstrating his wisdom, providence, justice, and salvific will. To this purpose, I believe, tragical mimesis was at least as effective as—and possibly even more effective than—the patristic homilies, treatises, and other writings on divine providence that appeared fairly regularly in the late ancient and early medieval era.⁷⁵ Often in a strongly apologetic tone and reflecting ⁷⁵ This literature is extensive, but for the post-Nicene period see esp. Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana 5 (De providentia), Greek text ed. Claudio Moreschini; trans. D. A. Sykes, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Poemata Arcana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 22–7; Basil of Caesares, Hom. quod Deus non est auctor malorum (PG 31:330A–353A); Gregory of Nyssa, Contra fatum (GNO 3/2:31–63); De infantibus praemature abreptis (GNO 3/2:67–97); John Chrysostom, Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso (SC 103); Ad eos qui scandalizati sunt (= de providentia) (SC 99); Hom. in Rom. 15 (on Rom. 8:28ff.) (PG 539–48); (Ps?) Chrysostom, De fato et providentia (PG 50:749–74); Theodoret of Cyrus, De providentia (PG 83:556B–773B). In the West, Augustine’s dialogue De ordine (386) constituted a major Christian challenge to pagan views on providence and evil. The profound cultural and political shifts attending the barbarian invasions gave new urgency to thinking about divine wisdom and providence: cf. Augustine’s classic De civitate Dei (CCSL 47–8); Prosper of Aquitaine’s eloquent poem De providentia (Latin text ed. Miroslav Marcovich, Leiden: Brill, 1989); Salvian of Marseilles’s De gubernatione Dei (SC

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turbulent times, these writings targeted specific questions of divine providence and addressed them using biblical prooftexts to secure faith in the all-wise God. But tragical mimesis, spread across biblical commentaries and other literary genres, had the advantage of taking its start from within the tragic realism of scriptural narratives and from within the fray of lived Christian experience of the tragic. In all cases, however, theological coherence was imperative since, again, salvation and not just edification was at stake. So far as the theological coherence of tragical mimesis is specifically concerned, I see three thematic “axes” in play. The first is Paul’s own “glory– vanity” axis from Romans 8:15–25, which, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, helped shape the mimesis of tragedy in a cosmological and soteriological idiom. The second, also having a distinctive variation in Paul, is the “wisdom–folly” axis, which includes considerations of divine providence as manifest precisely in the profound ironies and paradoxes that attend the movement of creation toward redemption. The third is the “justice–injustice” axis that considers the tragic in terms of theodicy and the moral integrity of the cosmos under the Creator’s provision and direction. I will not analyze in any detail here Paul’s glory–vanity axis because it has already been treated intermittently; but I will simply reiterate its importance as a biblical anticipation of tragical mimesis. As with other images he uses (e.g. the passing away of the world’s present σχῆμα, or “form,” 1 Cor. 7:31), this vanity (ματαιότης; vanitas) captured Paul’s sense of the inglorious sinfulness of humanity and, concurrently, God’s punitive subjugation of all creation, marked still with hope for creation’s ultimate transformation to glory accompanying humanity’s adoption and bodily redemption (Rom. 8:20, 23–5). This is one of the strongest images in the New Testament of locating hope within tragedy, and in my epilogue, I will consider that hope itself as a tragical emotion in the Christian repertoire. Let us look in more depth at the related wisdom–folly axis. Paul juxtaposed the divine Wisdom revealed in/as Jesus Christ with worldly wisdom (1 Cor. 1:19–21a), and so too juxtaposed the “foolishness” of God conveyed in Christ’s passion with the “foolishness” that the Greeks perceived in such a gospel (1 Cor. 1:18, 21b–25). The synthetic upshot was a juxtaposition of God’s 220); and Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae 2.1–4 (ed. Claudio Moreschini, Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000). For a useful anthology, see James Walsh and P. G. Walsh, eds., Divine Providence and Human Suffering, Message of the Fathers of the Church 17 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985). For close analysis of early Christian understandings of divine providence, see Mark Elliott, Providence Perceived: Divine Action from a Human Point of View (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 5–54; David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 43–62; Goulven Madec, “Thématique augustinienne de la providence,” Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 41 (1995): 291–308; Christian Parma, Pronoia und Providentia: Der Vorsehungsbegriff Plotins und Augustins (Leiden: Brill, 1971); Hal Koch, Pronoia und Paideusis: Studien über Origenes und sein Verhältnis zum Platonismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1932).

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absolute Wisdom (σοφία) and the world’s foolishness (μωρία). And yet the later patristic engagement of pagan philosophical sources adjusted this wisdom–folly axis, since some Christian writers discerned favorable elements in Stoic and Neoplatonic teachings on divine wisdom and providence—albeit in the belief that the philosophers had already either received inspiration from the universal Logos or else plagiarized biblical revelation. Authors like the Stoic Seneca in his treatise On Providence (ca. 64 CE), or the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias in his treatise On Fate (ca. 200 CE), or the Neoplatonist Plotinus in Ennead 3.2–3 (Περὶ Πρόνοιας, pub. ca. 270 CE), or much later the Neoplatonists Hierocles of Alexandria (fifth century CE) and Proclus (d. 485 CE) in their works on providence, fate, and free will, were seen to have broken through more archaic mythical perspectives that lay behind the Attic tragedies, where the gods could act toward human beings out of benevolence, vice, caprice, or ignorance, or else remain totally impotent. Whereas Seneca had been pleased to designate “Nature” (natura), “Fate” (fatum), “Fortune” (fortuna) all as names of the one God who uses his powers in various ways for human benefit,⁷⁶ Neoplatonists much later emphasized the need for properly subordinating fate. Hierocles, in extracts of his treatise On Providence preserved by Photius, indicates that fate bespeaks only the lower end of divine providence in the hierarchy of being, the “divine will and law of god’s justice” or “material providence” that renders partially embodied beings their due.⁷⁷ Proclus states, “Providence is per se a god, whereas fate is something divine, but not god. This is because it depends upon providence and is as it were an image of it.”⁷⁸ The maturing of pagan philosophical monotheism bolstered confidence in a unitary providence, although patristic devotion to the trinitarian and christocentric divine oikonomia required critical distance from Greco-Roman thinking on the relation of Creator and creation. I mention this because the tragical mimesis that we have studied had in its background a longstanding and broad-based debate on the nature of divine wisdom and providence, and the character of God’s (or the gods’) involvement in the contingencies of the world. The tragic peripeteia of the Adamic fall, as we observed in Chapter 2, prompted abundant speculation as to the deeper divine wisdom operative beforehand and afterward. The urge to show that tragedy could be redemptive was strong from the outset. We have seen it in Irenaeus’s extraordinary claim that death itself, the punishment for the lapse, was already in the divine plan as a means to new life, this because the death of the New Adam was already

⁷⁶ De beneficiis 4.8 (LCL 310:218–20). ⁷⁷ De providentia, extracts from Photius trans. Hermann Schibli, Hierocles of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 342 (codex 251 § 9), 351 (ibid. § 20). ⁷⁸ De providentia 14, trans. Carlos Steel, Proclus: On Providence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 48.

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projected as the agency of a new and transformed creation. Athanasius similarly portrayed a divine wisdom and grace operative from the beginning in the bosom of creation to sustain it, come what may. Gregory of Nyssa imagined the imposition of the “garments of skins” (Gen. 3:21) on fallen humanity (mortality, liability to passions, etc.) as indicative of a punitive but benevolent providence, such that the same existential condition that exposes human beings to moral evil and tragic suffering is also the matrix for retraining their desire for God. Clement, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Ambrose, Augustine, and many other Christian writers of late antiquity subscribed in their respective ways to Irenaeus’s vision of a divine pedagogy renewing and reeducating the human race through the experience of all manner of tragic experience. Many of our tragical visionaries relied on this and other stock arguments about divine providence, such as the incomprehensibility of God and the inscrutability of God’s ways (Rom. 11:33–6). Still, the specter of the senseless and intractably tragic never completely receded. What kind of divine wisdom or providence was ultimately on display in the tragedy of Jephthah and his sacrificed daughter?⁷⁹ The ancient interpreters’ struggles to squeeze redemptive meaning from the story were of mixed and limited success. At its outset Jephthah was not a self-evident villain; indeed he had the “spirit of the Lord upon him” (Judges 11:29). His sacrificial vow (11:30–1) had the classic shape of a tragic hamartia, a decision made in ignorance of its horrific consequences. But was that ignorance morally innocent or culpable? The ambiguity here was staggering, enhanced all the more by the death of the obviously innocent daughter. No wonder, then, that some interpreters looked to vindicate God’s wisdom in these events by appealing to a figural meaning, as in Jacob of Sarug’s extravagant claim that Jephthah deliberately sought to prefigure the sacrifice of Jesus by sacrificing his only child. But John Chrysostom, among others, did not give up on reading the story, at the literal level, in the light of traditional views of divine providence, and suggested that God used Jephthah as an object lesson to future generations of Christians on the foolishness of rash vows. Many of the cases of tragical mimesis that we have examined predictably deferred to traditional views on divine wisdom and providence in order to save a tragic narrative in the Bible or Christian experience from being totally lost and forgotten. As I noted in Chapter 3, Chrysostom had precisely this concern for the tragic demise of Jephthah’s daughter, emphasizing that had it not been for Israel’s pious virgins who continued to lament the girl’s death well after the fact (Judges 11:39–40), it would have been “consigned to oblivion” (λήθῃ παραδοθῆναι).⁸⁰ Remembering it, mourning over it, was half the work in processing its meaning over time—a point on which Chrysostom anticipates ⁷⁹ See above, Chapter 3, pp. 67–72. ⁸⁰ See Hom. de statuis 14.3 (PG 49:147) and above, Chapter 3, p. 70, at n. 13.

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Rowan Williams’s recent claim, in sympathy with Gillian Rose, that remembrance and lamentation are vital for Christians as a way of responding to tragedy without being reduced to utter speechlessness and impotence in its wake.⁸¹ Where tragical mimesis, in certain cases, enjoyed an advantage over formal treatises defending God’s wisdom and providence was its artful capacity to grant an audience more latitude to imagine a world in which the Creator is not truly sovereign over evil and suffering. Some of our ancient Christian tragical visionaries artfully flirted with the power of necessity (εἱμαρμένη; ἀνάγκη; necessitas) or fate so as provisionally to meet tragedy on its own terms and thereby to galvanize Christian hope precisely by exposing it to a worldview where the human being is passive to arbitrary cosmic forces from beginning to end. Whatever the level of their literacy in classical tragedy, patristic authors were fully aware of the ancient cults of the Fates (Μοῖραι; Parcae) and of Fortune (Τύχη; Fortuna) and of the pagan philosophical criticisms of fate extending back to the Academic Skeptic Carneades (d. 129/8 BCE), who rebuked the astrologers for a fatalism that exploded true religion and the Stoics for sanctioning a determinism that negated human free will and moral responsibility.⁸² Christian authors also knew that the philosophical discussions of necessity and fortune were not all pedantic debates about the experienced fickleness of fate but dealt with complex issues of divine causality, cosmic order, and human agency. Gregory of Nyssa even composed a categorically philosophical treatise Against Fate reworking arguments from Carneades,⁸³ and the Christian Platonist Calcidius (late fourth century) also revisited the problems of fate and freedom in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus,⁸⁴ proving just how live these issues remained in late-ancient Christianity.⁸⁵ Though we have not studied him among early Christian tragical visionaries, Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy (524) presents the most famous and ambitious flirtation with fate in all of patristic literature. Indeed Boethius ⁸¹ See Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 144–8. ⁸² For the patristic reception and use of Carneades, see David Armand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque: Recherches sur la suivance de l’argumentation morale antifataliste de Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatre premiers siècles (Leuven: Library of the University, 1945). ⁸³ Contra Fatum (GNO 3/2:31–63); and for analysis see Beatrice Motta, Il Contra fatum di Gregorio di Nissa nel dibattito tardo-antico sul fatalismo e sul determinismo (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2008); also Claudio Moreschini, “Goodness, Evil and the Free Will of Man in Gregory of Nyssa,” in Pieter d’Hoine and Gerd van Riel, eds., Fate, Providence and Moral Responsibility in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 343–56, at 349–52. ⁸⁴ In Platonis Timaeum commentarius, Latin text ed. and trans. John Magee, DOML 41 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and for analysis see Jan den Boeft, Calcidius on Fate: His Doctrine and Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1970). ⁸⁵ See also Ken Parry, “Fate, Free Choice, and Divine Providence from the Neoplatonists to John of Damascus,” in Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou, eds., The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 341–60.

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ignores traditional Christian suspicion of the ancient poets and at first gives standing to Fortuna as a goddess and lets her speak in her own defense before turning her into an allegorical expression of the chance or fate that rules contingent human affairs; he even allows Lady Philosophy to reproach him for his complaints against Fortuna after praising her when times were good.⁸⁶ Fortuna chides Boethius that he should have learned from the tragedies that reversals are an inherent part of life: “What else is the cry of tragedy but a lament that happy states are overthrown by the indiscriminate blows of fortune?”⁸⁷ Going well beyond Augustine, Boethius accommodates fate, albeit as subservient to the higher power of providence which governs all things and oversees the pursuit of heavenly rather than earthly goods.⁸⁸ The Christian authors we have examined, however, fearing any deification of fortune as sheer blasphemy, flirted with necessity and fate principally for rhetorical, literary, or dramatic effect, being anxious to convey the raw force of circumstance and the human bewilderment with unknown causalities. We saw this in the heavy tragical language of Theodoret of Cyrus, bemoaning in multiple letters the bad luck (δυσκληρία) that had befallen the Christian senator Celestiacus, and reflecting on the arbitrariness of human fortune (εὐκληρία). We saw it in Gregory Nazianzen’s depiction of the capriciousness of fortune which catches up the indigent and the diseased as though they were pawns in a game, and in his autobiographical musings on the relentless “twists (στροφαί) of fortune” in his own career. But such flirtation with fate was quite often a ruse so as to build trust in the overriding power of divine wisdom and providence. Nazianzen makes this clear in a poem On Providence. After deriding the inanity of astrological fatalism, he stands his ground theologically: But this much I do know: it is God who steers the course of this universe, the Word of God guiding here and there what his designs have placed above and below. To the world above he has granted concord and a fixed course lasting firm for ever. To the lower world he has assigned a life of change which involves many varying forms. Some part of these he has revealed to us, the other he preserves in the hidden depths of his wisdom, willing to prove empty the boast of mortal man.⁸⁹

In the seventh century, the Byzantine poet laureate George of Pisidia, in his somber On the Vanity of Life, having clear resonances from the Cappadocian Fathers, confirmed that Lady Luck was in fact a seductress, a dancer who is ⁸⁶ De consolatione philosophiae 2.1.1–2.4.29 (Moreschini, 28–41). ⁸⁷ Ibid. 2.2.12 (Moreschini, 32, ll. 36–8), trans. S. J. Tester (LCL 74:183). ⁸⁸ Ibid. 4.6.1–57 (Moreschini, 121–9). See Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 5.21.45 (CSEL 28/ 1:165), who disputes those who would confine providence to higher realities and allow that fate rules the lower, material realm. ⁸⁹ Poemata arcana 5, ll. 34–40 (Moreschini, 24; trans. Sykes, 25).

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constantly turning her eyes to another person willing to be duped by her attractiveness.⁹⁰ In another piece George mocks human beings for ignoring their true origins and going with luck’s flow: Cease your vaunting in destruction-bringing pride, its bulk precipitate, its throne of slipperiness. Seeing Fortune’s flux, cut the adverse streams, laughing through tears at the runaway roll of the human vortex, where with twisting paths just as they came into being from earth, men enter again their mother earth, forgetful of their birth, as if they were forever.⁹¹

In some instances that we have examined, however, Christian tragical visionaries preempted fatalism by framing the Creator’s wisdom and providence in terms of a “benevolent necessity” that manifested itself not only in the punitive and remedial constraints imposed on fallen creatures but also in the often severe mercy with which God intervenes in contingent human events to work out his will and to combat the manifold resurgences of evil. In the view of some interpreters, the conquest of Christus Victor over sin and death carried with it a peculiarly redemptive violence that Jesus himself announced as accompanying the transition to his new Kingdom (Matt. 11:11–12; Luke 16:16). John the Baptist is the model of this pattern, called to be a unique witness to Jesus Christ and yet dangerously caught in the powerful momentum of the transition between old and new dispensations, his destiny subservient to a larger salvific strategy that he will never see to climactic fruition in the death and resurrection of Jesus.⁹² The same holds true earlier with the murder of the Holy Innocents, witnesses for Christ in their very passivity to the violence of King Herod, which, by bitter and tragic irony, was “necessary,” as Gregory of Nyssa suggests, to expose the worldly evil coming to a head in advance of Christ’s redemptive tour de force. This is the same benevolent necessity that von Balthasar observes in the Gospels and their patristic interpreters, where Christ himself is “driven” to his death under the compulsion of the Father’s sacrificial love. It is also the same benevolent necessity that some ancient authors discerned in the saga of unbelieving Jews, who, though punitively exposed to violence and disenfranchisement, could prospectively take this as the goad to find a new destiny through faith in Christ. ⁹⁰ George of Pisidia, De vanitate vitae, ed. Giuseppe Querci (PG 92), text reproduced in Luigi Tartaglia, Carmi di Giorgio di Pisidia (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1998), 438–40, ll. 172–85. ⁹¹ De vita humana, ll. 8–14, ed. Fabrizio Gonnelli, Il “De vita humana” di Georgio Pisidia (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1991), trans. Mary Whitby, “A Learned Spiritual Ladder? Toward an Interpretation of George of Pisidia’s Hexameter Poem On Human Life,” in Konstantinos Spanoudakis, ed., Nonnus of Panopolis in Context (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 436, 439. ⁹² See above, Chapter 3, pp. 89–92.

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Augustine for his part developed over time a unique perspective on God imposing a benevolent necessity in the fallen world as a function of his graciousness. For him, the human race, in its rebellion, had incurred the fate or necessitas of original sin, a yoke that can only be broken by a greater force, the power of sovereign divine grace which alone brings order out of chaos. As I noted in Chapter 2, Paul Rigby finds in Augustine’s thinking here both a rational/penal dimension, wherein the necessitas of original sin is God’s punishment for the Adamic fall, and a distinctly tragical dimension, wherein God appears under an archaic tragic guise showing his favor to some sinners but not to others. These are putatively modified by a third perspective in which the sheer fact of God’s superabundant grace relativizes everything else. In a provocative recent essay, David Tracy has nevertheless argued that Augustine’s tragical perspective may have an even broader compass: Original or inherited sin for Augustine served as the surest explanation of the mystery of iniquity—the mystery that always most tortured him. But against Augustine’s official teaching, why could this inherited necessity not be read as a tragic inheritance, not personal sin (which should always involve personal consent)? It is plausible to say, with Augustine or not, that there is some mysterious inherited evil in which we all participate and through which we all must suffer, even though we are not personally responsible for the origins of this mysterious inheritance. Augustine’s penetrating sense of some strange and powerful inherited evil afflicting humanity can, however, also be read, contra Augustine, as an inherited necessary, tragic evil but not as original sin. Inherited evil, along with an inevitable inclination toward evil, is not as such (i.e., before one acts upon it) sinful. That inevitable aspect of our situation is better described as tragic, not sinful . . . There is an intellectually skeptical and existentially dark side to Augustine, where sin and tragic necessity seem to exist uneasily side by side.⁹³

Tracy’s point is well taken. Augustine fully understands that the human inheritance, the fate that we all know, is the suffering of evils not all of which are of our own making. We are implicated in a cosmic tragedy which, as Tracy adds, would have left Augustine “a radical pessimist, a tragedian of hopelessness,” were it not for the prevenient and provident reality of grace, for which reason we must include a “grace-tragedy” dialectic with Augustine’s “nature-grace” and “sin-grace” dialectics.⁹⁴ What Tracy discerns here in Augustine could apply to other early Christian tragical visionaries as well in their struggle to square divine wisdom, goodness, and providence with the experienced randomness and disproportionality of

⁹³ David Tracy, “Augustine, Our Contemporary: The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self,” in Willemien Otten and Susan Schreiner, eds., Augustine Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 27–73, quoted at 62. ⁹⁴ Ibid. 27, 50–69.

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evil beyond the “just” consequences for inherited or personal sin. This brings us to our last axis of the theological intelligence of tragical vision: the justice– injustice axis.

The Limited Function of Theodicy More than once I have referenced George Steiner’s memorable statement that ancient tragedy was an “enacted testing of theodicy,” a sustained confrontation with the justice of the gods or the lack thereof. But theodicy was scarcely foreign to the Bible itself. Divine justice is an implicit or explicit theme in the Hebrew Scriptures, Second Temple Jewish literature, and even the New Testament.⁹⁵ Tragical mimesis proved a way for some early Christian biblical interpreters to consider questions of divine justice or injustice obliquely and contemplatively rather than by frontally attacking their logical difficulties in a purely apologetic fashion. Tragical realism in the interpretation of troubling scriptural narratives helped the Christian faithful to weather the storm of inexplicable evil and to confront the harsh fact that no surefire calculus of fair recompense is operative in the cosmos, where God’s justice is hardly ever selfevident. Genesis alone, as we discovered back in Chapter 2, contained a number of interpretive landmines related to theodicy. With the story of Cain and Abel and the strange divine rejection of Cain’s sacrifice, the various biblical recensions already evidenced attempts to tweak or “rewrite” texts to address disconcerting gaps or silences, and patristic interpreters continued in kind, scrambling to show some antecedent culpability on Cain’s part. By and large these expositors refused to allow their interpretations of the narrative to bog down in justifications of God’s ways. The overriding concern was Cain as the antagonist of the protagonist (and Christ-figure) Abel, Cain as a broken and tragic figure, consumed by envy and jealousy, who elicited the surreptitious character of the moral evil “couching at the door” (Gen. 4:7), an evil capable of plunging humankind into chaos, and even, by Abel’s blood, polluting the earth itself (4:10–11). The sibling rivalry of Jacob and Esau, which like much classical tragedy was a family affair,⁹⁶ nonetheless also posed a much greater dilemma of divine justice in view of the favor shown the deceiver Jacob, further amplified by God’s claim to have loved Jacob and hated Esau (Mal. 1:3; Rom. 9:13). The sustained contention over this narrative in later, ⁹⁵ For background, see the essays in Antti Laato and Johannes C. de Moor, eds., Theodicy in the World of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2003). ⁹⁶ As Aristotle comments in Poetica 1453B, “What tragedy must seek are cases where the sufferings occur within relationships, such as brother and brother, son and father, mother and son, son and mother—when the one kills (or is about to kill) the other, or commits some other such deed” (trans. Halliwell, LCL 199:75).

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centuries-long debates about divine predestination and foreknowledge, on which Origen and Augustine (among others) took such strongly contrasting positions, is a testament to its scandal. And yet patristic exegesis pressed well beyond fixation on theodicy, since the tragic alienation of Jacob and Esau, and Jacob’s deception itself, were teeming with types and symbols related to the larger economy of salvation, even if these could only be fully drawn out through figural or allegorical interpretation. The putatively most vexing injustices in the tragic narratives that we have discussed—for example, the moral fiasco surrounding the death of Jephthah’s daughter, the devastation of the righteous Job in a divine wager with Satan, the exposure of innocent babies to a bloody proto-martyrdom, or, as in the skeptical view of Porphyry of Tyre noted by Macarius Magnes, the outrageously disproportionate punishment of Ananias and Sapphira for their “crime” against the Jerusalem church—frequently met with little in the way of urgent response. Sometimes the more egregious cases of injustice were circumvented by piously admitting ignorance of God’s mysterious ways, or by exposing extenuating circumstances or contextual factors in the biblical narrative that proved the injustice to be only apparent or temporary. Yet another strategy was to appeal to a deferred divine justice, though in the case of Job some interpreters like John Chrysostom recognized that such an appeal could ring hollow if used simply as an apologetic reflex, as in the platitudes of Job’s three comforters. Meanwhile, the early Church continued patiently to construct a workable theodicy that would fend off the worst assaults on the Creator’s justice;⁹⁷ this included refuting cosmological or ontological dualism; playing up the role of human abuse of free will in the spread of cosmic evil; reasserting and recontextualizing biblical notions of divine retribution and of rehabilitative suffering; and emphasizing God’s identification in bitter human tragedy through his pre-incarnate, incarnate, and post-incarnate Word/Wisdom.

SALVATION ’S F OLLY: WHERE TRAGEDY A N D CO M ED Y ME E T Tragical mimesis was one among other ways that early Christian interpreters enhanced the drama of human salvation unfolding from the primeval past into ⁹⁷ For good background on early Christian (and medieval) theodicies, see Elliot, Providence Perceived, 5–103; Paul Gavrilyuk, “An Overview of Patristic Theodicies,” in Verna Harrison and David Hunter, eds., Suffering and Evil in Early Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 1–6; John Behr, “Learning through Experience: The Pedagogy of Suffering and Death in Irenaeus,” ibid. 33–47.

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the “now” of Christian experience, the denouement inaugurated in Jesus Christ. I have repeatedly emphasized that, while it definitely served moral parenesis through the appeal to tragic exempla (and I have only very briefly touched on its liturgical dimension), its principal objective was to illuminate the strenuous path to salvation and transformation through the refiner’s fire of existence itself. Literarily and rhetorically, Christian tragical mimesis did not operate according to any fixed conventions, though it did take some important cues from the ancient tragedians, from Aristotle, and from the philosophical traditions (beginning especially with Plato) that provided substantive criticism of the value of tragical poetics. But because they sought to represent the tragic in sacred history and in mundane life rather than just to mimic Greco-Roman tragedy or project a tragic worldview, early Christian authors took their own liberties with the genre. Rendering tragedy flexible for communicating the gospel served the ultimate goal of revealing that the tragic, though part of the history of redemption, did not have the last word on the destiny of creation. Looking back across the quite variant forms of tragical mimesis that we tracked in Chapters 2 through 5, I am struck by the fairly consistent appearance of a tragical-comical mode. Tragic events are presented as shot through with a sublime sort of folly—not in the sense of comic relief but as the gratuitous epiphany of an at least potential good, a hopeful prospect, “ridiculous” by its contrast with the evil or suffering that preceded it or in which it was couched. For example, though no early Christian interpreter labeled the sibling rivalry of Jacob and Esau a comedy, and some like John Chrysostom recognized it explicitly as a sad tragedy, the comic features of the story, readily recognized by modern exegetes, were unmistakable even to the ancients. If Jacob was the protagonist, his (and Rebekah’s) deception of Isaac and Esau was an outlandish means of securing a coveted inheritance. By Aristotle’s definitions, Jacob hardly debuted as the “serious” (σπουδαῖος) hero of tragedy but as more of a “simpleton” (φαῦλος), the hero of comedy.⁹⁸ Whether or not patristic interpreters perceived Jacob’s antics as a comical plant in the midst of a tragedy, several treated the narrative’s scandalous comical elements as pointers to a deeper significance related to Jacob’s strategic importance in the economy of salvation. I am reminded of Ambrose’s insistence that Jacob’s deceit was altogether virtuous since it paradoxically displayed his zeal to fulfill God’s will, or his and Augustine’s prolific figural interpretation of Jacob as a Christ-typus or a typus of the Church or of God’s elect. In the long run, even if the alienation between Jacob and Esau had a tragic dimension (as Esau and his progeny irreversibly lost the Abrahamic-Isaacic inheritance), the brothers still parted as reconciled friends, in a happy ending characteristic of comedy, not tragedy—an ending that confirmed Jacob as a virtuous hero.

⁹⁸ See Poetica 1448A, 1449A.

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For at least one of its patristic interpreters, Peter Chrysologus, the story of John the Baptist, as we found in Chapter 3, was a good example of the mixing of tragedy and comedy in disclosing God’s saving purposes for the human race. Chrysologus plays up the tragic spectacle of the Herodian banquet (Matt. 14:6ff.; Mark 6:21ff.) in which the great forerunner of Christ, thrust into circumstances altogether out of his control, was beheaded at the simple whim of a seductive dancer and her scheming mother. But it was also, in Chrysologus’s own words, an outrageous comedy, a sacred farce. According to Peter’s Eastern contemporary Hesychius of Jerusalem, the Baptist posthumously enjoyed the last laugh as it were, since his own prophetic oracle against the Herodian court was what prompted the whole episode in the first place, laying bare a wickedness that desperately needed full exposure. Tears preempt laughter here, but the tragic seriousness of this scene went hand in hand with a most sublime folly. The Baptist not only announced the Messiah, his story in fact anticipated the tragicomedy of Christ himself, an ending both horrifyingly tragic and rapturously comic. Chrysologus, Hesychius, and other early interpreters might well have sympathized with the words of one modern theologian and related them to the Baptist as well: “Christ signals a reversal of fortune, irrupting tragic reality with a cosmic comedy even though both the tragic and comic characters intermingle and even switch back and forth, wearing each other’s costumes.”⁹⁹ Moving to live Christian performance (πρᾶξις; praxis), itself a mode of embodied or “enacted” biblical interpretation, much the same tragical-comical dialectic was operative in the witness of various ascetics or monks in late antiquity. As I pointed out in Chapter 5, they staged their performances precariously but evocatively between tragedy and comedy, between ascetical dramatization of the death-to-self requisite for salvation, and the calculated (even sometimes exaggerated) amplification of the joyous folly of the Christian gospel. Whether or not we place individual figures within the historic classification of “holy fools” like Abraham of Qidun with his pious seduction of his prostitute niece, or Symeon of Emesa with his cynic ruse, many monastics and ascetics of this period enacted a godly satire of the fact that the path to salvation and to a glorious deification was paved through loss—loss of face, loss of family, loss of connection with worldly securities, loss of a prosperous future, etc. And yet, by proactive self-mortification, in the various performances of fasting, exposure to the elements, sleeping on the ground or on rocks, attending to simple forms of manual labor for survival, and the like, they played a deadly serious jest on those, within and without the Church, who remained attached to the fleeting allurements and vanities of the present age. We have record of outsiders scoffing at such ascetical performances as ⁹⁹ Craig Hovey, “Participating in the Tragedy: Emplotting the Dionysian in Christian Thought,” in Taylor and Waller, Christian Theology and Tragedy, 167. For this image of shifting tragic and comic guises, Hovey credits William Cavanaugh.

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ludicrous, not falling for the monks’ “inside” joke, for which reason it is little surprise that the subsequent collections of Apophthegmata and the multiplying hagiographies recast these alleged simpletons as the “serious” heroes in the cosmic tragedy of human fallenness, worthy of veneration by emperors, bishops, and the faithful alike. The image of monks as tragic comics of a uniquely heroic type, playing out the folly of salvation, stands in a sharp (and intriguing) contrast with the portrayal of social parasites as tragic comics in the works of John Chrysostom and Valerian of Cimiez. Though working with stock caricatures, John in particular went to great lengths to profile this pervasive and vulnerable group of people within Roman society whose lives and struggles to survive epitomized the hazards—both economic and moral—of getting by. Parasites and flatterers pulled out all comical stops to entertain patrons in order to see another meal, another day. John, with significant rhetorical effect, put social parasites “on stage” for his Christian audiences, fully displaying their buffoonery and their moral debauchery, but recontextualizing their comedy within a much deeper tragedy of desperation and degradation. Chrysostom’s sermons on the theme are a monument to the effective mixing of tragical and comical mimesis, as he plays the fine line between compassion and revulsion in order to press his Christian listeners to the awareness that hope may yet be had for society’s most depraved characters, that they too are actors in a tragi-comedy in which the divine Dramaturge is still effecting salvation from out of the folly, vanity, and chaos of human strivings and human systems. Meanwhile, we hardly need to remind ourselves that John Chrysostom and other tragical visionaries of Christian antiquity were neither literary nor drama critics. What I have been describing throughout this study is, indeed, their intentional mimesis of the tragic and the darkly comic, occasionally calling up motifs, images, techniques, or even verses from the classical tragedians, and drawing on Aristotle’s insights into tragedy and Plato’s critique of it, but more often than not working from within the (theodramatic) horizon of the tragic in sacred revelation. As I said earlier, we are dealing with a theological artform and with a mode of contemplation of the vicissitudes of creaturely existence with an eye to the Creator’s (Dramaturge’s) self-manifestation—which could so often seem as much a self-concealment. Let me conclude this discussion of the tragical-comical “folly” of salvation by referencing an apropos and highly nuanced image from Gregory Nazianzen and his devotee Maximus the Confessor, that of the “playful” divine Word implicating himself in humanity’s “game.” The Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus had likened the Aeon (“Time” or “Life”) to “a child who plays, moving his pawns” in ruling human existence,¹⁰⁰ while Plato imagined humanity as a divine “plaything” (παίγνιον), probably helping to inspire Plotinus’s vision of ¹⁰⁰ Heraclitus, Frag. 52 (= 22B52 in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 10th ed., Berlin: Weidmann, 1952).

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human beings as “living toys” (ζῶντα παίγνια) under the eye of the provident God.¹⁰¹ Nazianzen reworks the image in one of his Poemata moralia entitled Precepts for Virgins: “For the Logos on high plays in all sorts of forms, mingling with his world here and there as he so desires.”¹⁰² Although similar imagery of the Word appears elsewhere in Gregory, it is this particular line that caught the attention of John of Cyzicus almost three centuries later, prompting a long commentary on it by Maximus the Confessor.¹⁰³ For Gregory, the image befitted his sense that the Logos is always providentially “at play” in the universe; as he says elsewhere, the Logos is the steersman coordinating the security of the intelligible cosmos and the radical change endemic to the sensible cosmos.¹⁰⁴ Maximus in his turn came up with multiple plausible interpretations, or contemplations (θεωρίαι), of Gregory’s image.¹⁰⁵ Certainly it remains for Maximus an evocative image of the Word’s mysteriously immanent providence, but it also bespeaks the sublime “foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:25) of the Word’s incarnation,¹⁰⁶ which for Maximus always entails not only his enfleshment in Jesus of Nazareth but his embodiment in the principles (λόγοι) of creation, in the words and meanings of Scripture, in the Church and its sacraments, and in the virtues of the Christian. The foolishness of God is an inverted metaphor of the supreme prudence of divine involvement in the world¹⁰⁷—folly indeed to those who are dying (1 Cor. 1:18) but salvation for those who “play along” with the Logos-at-play. For both Gregory and Maximus, this divine play provocatively conveys the gracious and loving “abandon” of the Creator toward his creation.¹⁰⁸ As I see it, it also powerfully brings to a head the perception among other early Christian theologians that the Creator’s pure freedom toward creation is expressed most radically by his self-insinuation in the tragedy and comedy of human existence.

¹⁰¹ Plato, Laws 644D–E, 803B–C; Plotinus, Ennead 3.2 (LCL 442:90). ¹⁰² Gregory Nazianzen, Poema 1.2.2 (PG 37:624A–625A): Παίζει γὰρ λόγος ἀιπὺς ἐν ἔιδεσι παντοδαποῖσι, κἰρνας, ὡς ἐθέλει, κόσμον ἑόν ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα. ¹⁰³ Ambiguum ad Johannem 71 (PG 91:1408C–1416D). ¹⁰⁴ See Poema arcana 5 (= Poema 1.1.5, De providentia) (Moreschini, 24). ¹⁰⁵ For analysis of all of these, see Paul Blowers, “On the ‘Play’ of Divine Providence in Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Confessor,” in Christopher Beeley, ed., Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 183–201. ¹⁰⁶ Ambiguum ad Johannem 71 (PG 91:1409A–B). ¹⁰⁷ Ibid. (PG 91:1409B–C). ¹⁰⁸ In his interpretation of the Logos-at-play in Gregory, Maximus draws in the image from Dionysius the Areopagite of the Creator who is so beguiled by his own love for human creatures that he reaches out to them “ecstatically,” “condescending to penetrate all things according to an ecstatic and supernatural power wherewith he can still remain within himself” (Dionysius, Div. nom. 4.12 [PTS 33:158–9], quoted in Maximus, Ambiguum ad Johannem 71 [PG 91:1413A–B]).

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Epilogue Hope and the Christian Tragical Pathos

As I bring this book to a close, it should be quite clear that I have offered nothing approaching a final verdict on the legitimacy of tragical mimesis and tragical vision in the service of Christian faith, though my sentiments in their favor have doubtless been betrayed. Certainly there is no historic consensus here on which to draw, and my assumption is that debate over it will continue to erupt. Just as there are those contemporary theologians, like David Bentley Hart¹ and John Milbank,² who have been sharply critical of the usefulness of tragedy for Christian theology, there were early Christian authors, especially prior to Constantine but after him as well, who, for very different reasons (namely, the perception of residual moral decadence), never fathomed a theological negotiation, let alone appropriation, of the language, themes, or images of classical tragedy. Where these ancient and modern critics might have agreed is in ascertaining that tragedy is at last about a hopelessness utterly foreign to the Christian gospel. On the other hand, most of those Christian thinkers, ancient and modern, who have encouraged or exercised tragical vision for theological (including ethical, pastoral, catechetical, and liturgical and devotional) purposes are generally agreed that tragedy’s dead-ends must ultimately be penultimate. Christian eschatology, both as “realized” in the world through Jesus Christ and as “futuristic” in its expectation of a fully transformed creation, will not allow faith to be indefinitely or permanently stranded in an epistemological and ontological cul-de-sac. Imaginatively and contemplatively visiting that cul-de-sac, not alone but with other believers, and for the sake of others (believers and non-believers alike) is nonetheless indispensable to the ¹ See his The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 373–94; David Bentley Hart, “The Gospel according to Melpomene: Reflections on Rowan Williams’ The Tragic Imagination,” Modern Theology 34 (2018): 220–34. ² See his The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 18–24. Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature. Paul M. Blowers, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paul Blowers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854104.001.0001

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Christian witness in the world. To borrow an apt statement of Ben Quash (himself citing Paul Janz), tragical vision serves as: …a propaedeutic to a properly theological orientation to transcendence. And the key thing here is that this tragedy-moved orientation to real transcendence returns us more fully to history. The love of God is not some timeless, ultimate coherence theory, not a supremely authoritative resolution, not “the grandest, all embracing holism.” All of these are fundamentally ahistorical notions: leaps out of history to a fictive God’s-eye view. But “the ‘referent’ we seek for theological discourse will be found fundamentally nowhere else than in the empirical history of God-with us.”³

For early Christian tragical visionaries, this “propaedeutic” included, not a testing of divine providence, wisdom, and justice—trust in which was a matter of essential religious conviction—but instead a strong tempering of Christian hope through confrontation with the manifold and ever-deadening effects of evil and moral chaos. I wish to propose that we are justified in speaking of hope (ἐλπίς; spes; Syriac ‫ )ܣܒܪܐ‬as a Christian tragical emotion in its own right, an emotion cleansed, trained, even clarified through the experience of the tragic, albeit empty apart from its fellow and co-inherent “theological virtues” of faith and love (1 Cor. 13:13). Proinde nec amor sine spe est nec sine amore spes, nec utrumque sine fide.⁴ But before I consider whether hope might hold such a place in the early Christian tragical pathos, let me say a brief word about hope’s rather dismal pedigree in Greco-Roman moral philosophy, for here we can see, through comparison, just how much the stakes were raised for early Christian authors seeking to elevate hope as at all morally useful or virtuous. Albrecht Dihle puts it bluntly: “For all Hellenistic philosophy, right knowledge of the structure of the world is the sole basis of right action, which should not rely on hopes, expectations, or presumptions.”⁵ Or as Douglas Cairns states of ancient Greek evaluations of hope, “It can sustain or nourish you; it can be sweet and warm, or be your friend in adversity. But it can delude you when there is no realistic expectation of success; it can float off, miss the target, or lead you into inaction or excess; and the gulf between aim and outcome might feel like falling from a great height.”⁶ Much like the fear of death, irrational hope for or in the future was a set-up for self-delusion and potentially disabling. “Cease to hope…and ³ “Four Biblical Characters: In Search of Tragedy,” 19–20 (quoting Janz, God, the Mind’s Desire, 180). ⁴ Augustine, Enchiridion de fide et spe et caritate 2.8 (CCSL 46:52, ll. 61–2): “For there is no love without hope, nor hope without love, nor both without faith.” ⁵ “Hoffnung” (A. Allgemeines), Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1991), 15:1159. ⁶ “Metaphors for Hope in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry,” in Ruth Caston and Robert Kaster, eds., Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13–44 (quoted at 44).

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you will cease to fear,” writes Seneca.⁷ Indeed for Stoics, the most astute analysts of human emotion in Greco-Roman antiquity, hope had a place, but not very much of one. It was a thoroughly expendable emotion, a waste of psychological time for the philosophical sage,⁸ but perhaps useful for the novice, in the form of a kind of aspiration to virtue amid suffering that fully displaces the fear of future death and allows one justifiably to anticipate a future joy simply in being able to reflect back on those sufferings as past.⁹ Epicurus similarly decried the futility of investing in fear of death or in future hope.¹⁰ And while Stoics considered future-oriented “caution” (εὐλάβεια) as one of the eupatheiai,¹¹ Epicurus, who wrote wills, seems by this to have conceded that planning for the future, in expectation of contingencies after death, was rational.¹² There was absolutely no room, however, for hope of a beatific afterlife, which is why some New Testament scholars believe that Paul especially had Epicureans in mind when he spoke of “those who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13).¹³ Plato seems to have been one of the few ancient philosophers who found some legitimacy in reasoned hope of future enjoyable states,¹⁴ and meanwhile hope’s role in Greco-Roman religion was overall quite mixed.¹⁵ But patristic theologians began, of course, with the apostolic injunctions concerning the hope grounded in the work of Jesus Christ. And they never looked back.¹⁶ Paul may well have had the philosophers’ pejorative assessment of hope in mind when he avowed that Christian hope does not put one to shame (ἐλπὶς οὐ ⁷ Ep. 5.7–8 (LCL 75:22–4). Negative evaluations of hope certainly accrued in the later history of Western philosophy and literature too. For a review of its mixed record, see Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 39–89. ⁸ See esp. Seneca, Ep. 101 (LCL 77:158–66). ⁹ Ibid. 78.15–16 (LCL 76:190). For these Senecan texts I am indebted to Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 235. ¹⁰ See his Ep. ad Meneceum 124–7 (Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 2:149–50 [24A]); Epicurus, Ratae sententiae 19–21 (ibid. 2:150 [24C]). ¹¹ See Diogenes Laertius 7.116 (Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 2:407 [65F]). ¹² This despite Cicero’s criticism of Epicurus’s philosophical inconsistency: see De finibus bonorum et malorum 2.94–8 (LCL 40:184–90). ¹³ E.g. Norman DeWitt, St. Paul and Epicurus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 42. ¹⁴ Especially in his Philebus, as demonstrated by Katja Maria Vogt, “Imagining Good Future States: Hope and Truth in Plato’s Philebus,” in Richard Seaford, John Wilkins, and Matthew Wright, eds., Selfhood and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 33–48. ¹⁵ See Basil Studer, “Hoffnung” (B. Nichtchristlich. I. Griechisch-römisch), Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 15:1161–9; François van Menxel, Ἐλπίς, espoir, espérance: Études sémantiques et théologiques du vocabulaire de l’espérance dans l’Hellénisme et le judaïsme avant le Nouveau Testament (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1983); also H. S. Versnel, Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 1981), especially regarding expectations of the gods. ¹⁶ For an excellent survey of patristic expositions of hope, see Studer, “Hoffnung” (C. Christlich, § II–V), Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 15:1188–244.

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καταισχύνει, Rom. 5:5). Clement of Alexandria, who also doubtless knew the earlier philosophical disparagements of hope, early on mounts a strong apologia of hope as the very life-blood of Christian faith,¹⁷ notably hope refined through suffering (cf. Rom. 5:3–5).¹⁸ Clement recruits Plato from the classical heritage in support of his view that, for the Christian gnostic, hope aspires to the unseen, and to final assimilation to God which is the goal of all divine paideia.¹⁹ Especially striking, however, is Clement’s appeal to the tragedians to demonstrate that hope is annealed precisely by storms and stresses. From an anonymous tragedy he quotes a character—a woman “acting manly” (ἀνδρεϊζομένη)— who balks at a threat of torture,²⁰ as well as Sophocles’s Antigone defiantly standing up to Creon that his ban on burying her brother Polynices was neither of Zeus’s doing nor in keeping with higher Justice.²¹ Clement quotes a fragment from Aeschylus that the glory begotten of hardship is from the gods.²² He furthermore expresses pleasant surprise that Euripides, normally a witness to the ancient Greeks’ conviction that events happen by “irrational necessity” (ἀνάγκῃ ἀλόγῳ), has a character in his Hypsipyle claiming that toils are inevitable but that mortals can (freely) stand up to necessity.²³ Clement perceives that, at the end of the day, tragedy is about a testing both of freedom and of hope. Donald MacKinnon more recently has much the same impression, though even stronger, when he remarks of the classical tragedians: “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. Both Sophocles and Shakespeare take for granted, even if they do not explicitly admit the fact, the reality of a ‘freedom of open possibilities.’”²⁴ In point of fact, while classical tragedy is often purported to be obsessed with the most egregiously hopeless of circumstances (and Steiner’s “absolute tragedy” has no place for hope other than as a “contamination”²⁵), hope still intrudes itself into the intricate plots of many a tragic drama—even if it is only dashed hope or a more promising eventuality that never materializes. Euripides’s Heracles, for example, masterfully teases its audience with a surging hope, only to bring it round again to despair. Heracles (Hercules), a son

¹⁷ Paed. 1.38.4–5 (GCS 12:113); cf. Strom. 2.53.1–2.54.5 (GCS 15:141–2). ¹⁸ Strom. 4.145.1 (GCS 15:312). ¹⁹ Ibid. 4.144.2–3 (GCS 15:312); 4.52.1–4.53.1 (p. 272); 5.14.1–5.15.3 (p. 335). On Clement’s doctrine of hope, and his claim upon Plato therewith, see also Eric Osborn, Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 226–31. ²⁰ Strom. 4.48.1 (GCS 15:270). ²¹ Ibid. 4.48.1–2 (GCS 15:270). The quotation from Sophocles is Antigone, l. 450. ²² Strom. 4.49.2 (GCS 15:270–1). ²³ Ibid. 4.53.2–4 (GCS 15:272–3), quoting Euripides, Hypsipyle, frag. 757. ²⁴ “Atonement and Tragedy,” 101. ²⁵ “ ‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” 4, 6, 13.

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of Zeus, performs duties in the Underworld and then returns in hopes of rescuing his equally hopeful wife and children from the illegitimate Theban King Lycus, who has condemned them to die. Amphitryon, husband of Heracles’s mother, reminds the hero’s wife, Megara, that “The bravest man is he who always puts his trust in hope. To surrender to helplessness is the mark of a coward.”²⁶ In a horrifying reversal, however, Zeus’s wife Hera has a spell of madness cast on Heracles, who in turn unknowingly murders his wife and children. When Heracles regains his wits and Amphitryon reveals to him what he has done, his anagnôrisis is bitter and he falls into lamentation and thoughts of suicide.²⁷ The Athenian king Theseus, whom Heracles had freed from Hades, arrives on the scene and seeks to console him, insisting that their bond of friendship overcomes any fear of being tainted by one who murdered his own family.²⁸ Theseus’s consolations and his promise to give Heracles a home and restore his good repute at last resurrect hope for the stricken hero.²⁹ To the merciful relief of the audience, hope has not been finally annihilated, even by the gods! This scenario is hardly paradigmatic for Greek and Roman tragedy, but it does betray how the dialectic of hope and despair had tremendous capacity to move an audience. By contrast, this dialectic is far closer to being paradigmatic in early Christian tragical mimetics. It is exploited to the fullest in many cases, insofar as the saving gospel is understood to be about the Creator, in a show of unfathomable love, relentlessly seizing hope from the jaws of despair as he also produces a new creation out of the attrition of the present one. There are atypical exceptions, of course, as with Saul and Judas Iscariot, whose selfdestruction and fall into despair, for many early Christian interpreters, seemed to have no redeemability, no hope delayed. But some of those same interpreters, together with the Septuagint translators before them, strained to read Cain’s end redemptively, to hold out hope for his reconciliation with God. Origen even refused to shut the door finally and absolutely on Judas Iscariot. In some instances the hope was very much encrypted, as in Job’s struggle to know the meaning of his travails but also to press beyond the hackneyed ideas of hope-amid-suffering offered him by his three comforters. In other instances the hope was eschatologically deferred, as with the Holy Innocents and John the Baptist, all of them protomartyrs destined to a glorious reward. In still other instances, typological or allegorical exposition became expedient to wrestle hope from despair, as when Augustine strained to interpret the wretched Jephthah as a Christ-figure.

²⁶ Heracles, ll. 105–6, trans. David Kovacs (LCL 9:318, 319). ²⁷ Ibid. ll. 1130–62 (LCL 9:420–4). ²⁸ Ibid. ll. 1214–28 (LCL 9:430–2). ²⁹ Ibid. ll. 1322–39 (LCL 9:442–4). On hope as a theme in the Greek tragedians more generally, see van Menxel, Ἐλπίς, espoir, espérance, 63–7, 71–87.

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The pattern holds as well for the three “tragic selves” whom we profiled in Chapter 4. Gregory Nazianzen pulled out all sorts of rhetorical and dramatic stops in his autobiographical writing in order to engross audiences in his unfolding personal tragedy as a beleaguered ascetic, priest, and bishop. Putting the panoply of his emotions on full display, he looked to drag audiences with him to the emotional precipice, amplifying the chaos of his career as illustrative of the instability of human existence as a whole. But it was all a controlled maneuver to divulge the deeper providence operative in his own life and in the life of the world—the “playful” Logos insinuating himself into the unpredictable fray. Hope, then, was meaningless apart from severe testing, but all hoping, Gregory clarified, was ultimately relative to Christians’ “primal hope” (πρώτη ἐλπίς), the true knowledge and confession of the Holy Trinity. This definitive hope, along with the other theological virtues of faith and love, was simultaneously the fruit of constant striving toward God and God’s pure and gracious gift.³⁰ John Chrysostom, though more concise than Gregory in his reflection on the self-designated tragedy which closed his episcopal career, and which implicated his intimate friend Olympias, attacked the threat of despair (ἀθυμία) full-force.³¹ Despair might be a moral training ground, but it was also the nemesis of the healthy soul, for which John prescribed a robustly “philosophical” hope as the remedy. The Christian was called to embrace triumph over tragedy, not explore its psychological and emotional darkness—a point on which he greatly differed both from Nazianzen and from Augustine. Meanwhile, Augustine’s plumbing of the tragic abyss of human existence was uniquely his own, but its pattern was still a variation of seizing hope from the jaws of despair. By his account, the soul distended or scattered through time, with its freedom undermined by original sin, had nowhere to turn save to the gracious God, the only possible hope for the self ’s reintegration from out of its fragmentation. Christian hope of course takes on a whole new dimension when it is vicarious hope, hope for and on behalf of others, especially when the “other” is truly alien experientially, socially, or religiously and, worse yet, snared in a tragedy outside the Christian’s immediate purview or presumably outside her zone of moral responsibility. Raising the “tragical conscience” of Christians in late antiquity was a work of expanding the reach of hope and mercy alike. When episcopal preachers like the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and Augustine gripped their Christian audiences with the tragic realities facing the poor and the diseased in their foreground, the hope that they projected was less for a future of socio-economic equality than for a revamped relationship between haves and have-nots, a whole new kind of reciprocity that only the ³⁰ Or. 32.23 (SC 318:134); Or. 2.40 (SC 247:142). ³¹ According to TLG, the term ἀθυμία appears 75 times in the Epp. ad Olympiadem.

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Church could ultimately sponsor and nurture. Hope, as Chrysostom stressed, had to be held out even for the most morally suspect in society, epitomized by parasites and sycophants who exploited the social systems of patronage and, much like actors, sold themselves into the slavery of licentious theatrical display. Perhaps most remarkably, however, given the profound estrangement between Christians and the “unbelieving Jews” alleged to be caught in a tragedy of their own making, hope still had to be held out for the ultimate reconciliation of all children of Israel through Christ’s mysterious eschatological workings. Instilling a tragical conscience in Christians, I have argued, was not a matter of training them to stand in moral judgment of what people deserved in life, the justice or injustice of the tragedies that befell them. Rather, it entailed the stretching of a Christian’s moral vision and the disciplined contemplation of solidarity with all other human beings in the common vanity to which the Creator subjected all creation in hope (Rom. 8:19–25). The tragical conscience also depended on the cultivation of a Christian tragical pathos, a whole repertoire of emotions instrumental for “cleansing” that conscience and thereby rousing Christians to virtuous responses to the tragedies that surrounded them, struck them, or implicated them. These, we observed, included the classic tragical emotions of fear and pity (transmuted by mercy), but also a gamut of emotions of grief and compunction. Hope should be added to this constellation of tragical emotions, I believe, not because it introduced some heady “optimism” amid tragedy (such as would be a perversion of Christian hope³²), but because, for most of its early Christian exponents, it served to cleanse or reframe fear, and, much like properly modulated sorrow, it helped to clarify the Christian’s ultimate desire, or love. Augustine’s hope is the classic example here. Emotionally, it was a sort of sublime desperation. It modulated his fear of the final and fatal fragmentation of his sinful self, and refocused that fear on reverence for the pure gift of divine grace: Et tota spes mea non nisi magna valde misericordia tua.³³ And it drove his sober but confident expectation that his transcending desire would be fulfilled on “that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together to merge into you.”³⁴ Having this cathartic and stabilizing role in the Christian tragical pathos, such a hope, of course, had to be more resilient than a fleeting emotion. Other early Christian tragical visionaries besides Augustine, on whom Aquinas depended substantially, would surely have agreed with Thomas’s estimation that there is hope and there is hope. There is that hope which is an emotion ³² Eagleton reiterates this point quite forcefully in his Hope without Optimism. ³³ Confessiones 10.29.40 (CCSL 27:176): “My whole hope is solely in your exceedingly great mercy.” ³⁴ Ibid. 11.29.39 (CCSL 27:215), trans. Chadwick, 244.

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operative in the judgment of future goods and the difficulty and possibility of attaining them;³⁵ and there is that hope which, in its secure and mature Goddirectedness, becomes a disposition of the soul and qualifies as a genuinely theological virtue.³⁶ No matter how morally useful the former might prove to be, only the latter, by its unique interrelation with faith and love, could stabilize the Christian’s vision of an existence in which tragedy and new creation are mysteriously bound up with each other. Such hope, integrated and “scripted” along with the other tragical emotions, confirmed the complexity of the Christian tragical pathos, the hard psychological work involved in maintaining the cruciform Christian witness in a world fraught with multitudinous tragedies. Indeed, this hope, doggedly resistant both to triumphalistic presumptiveness and to abject despair, manifested the Christian’s perseverant embrace of her or his role in God’s redemptive drama, in salvation’s tempestuous but wondrous folly.

³⁵ Summa theologiae I-II, Q. 40.

³⁶ Ibid. II-II, Q. 17.

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Select Bibliography Primary Works Series of Critical Editions Corpus Christianorum, series graeca. Turnhout: Brepols, 1976–. Corpus Christianorum, series Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953–. Gregorii Nysseni Opera. Leiden: Brill, 1952–. Griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; Walter de Gruyter, 1897–. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. Leuven: Peeters, 1903–. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 1866–. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912–. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970–. Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen. Bonn: Habelt, 1968–. Patristische Texte und Studien. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966–. Patrologia Graeca. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857–66. Patrologia Latina. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1844–55. Patrologia Orientalis. Turnhout: Brepols, 1903–. Sources Chrétiennes. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1944–.

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Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, Latin text ed. Claudio Moreschini, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana. Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000. Diomedes, Ars grammatica, in Heinrich Keil, ed., Grammatici Latini 1. Leipzig: Teubner, 1857. George of Pisidia, Carmi, Greek text ed. with Italian translation by Luigi Tartaglia. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1998. George of Pisidia, De vita humana, Greek text. ed. with Italian translation by Fabrizio Gonnelli, Il “De vita humana” di Georgio Pisidia. Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1991. Gregory Nazianzen, Autobiographical Poems, Greek text ed. and trans. Carolinne White. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana, Greek text ed. Claudio Moreschini, trans. D. A. Sykes, Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Gregory Nazianzen, De vita sua: Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, Greek text ed. Christoph Jungck. Heidelberg: Winter, 1974. Hesychius of Jerusalem, Les homélies festales d’Hésychius de Jérusalem, Greek text ed. Michel Aubineau. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1980. Jacob of Sarug, Homilies, Syriac text ed. Paul Bedjan, Homiliae selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis. Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1910. Jacob of Sarug, Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre, Syriac text ed. and trans. Cyril Moss, Le Muséon 48 (1935): 87–112. Jacob of Sarug, Homily on Jephthah’s Daughter, Syriac text ed. and trans. Susan Harvey and Ophir Münz-Manor, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 22. Piscataway, NJ: Georgias Press, 2010. John Chrysostom, Les cohabitations suspectes; Comment observer la virginité, ed. Jean Dumortier. Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1955. Justin Martyr, 1 and 2 Apologies, Greek text ed. Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies, OECT. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, Latin text ed. and trans. J. L. Creed, OECT. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Leontius of Neapolis, Le Vie de Syméon le Fou et Vie de Jean de Chypre, Greek text ed. A. J. Festugière and Lennart Rydén. Paris: Geuthner, 1974. Libanius of Antioch, Declamationes, Greek text ed. Richard Foerster, Libanii Opera. Leipzig: Teubner, 1911. Macarius Magnes, Apocritus, Greek text ed. Richard Goulet, Macarios de Magnésie: Le Monogenes, Textes et Traditions 7. Paris: Vrin, 2003. Maximus the Confessor, Capita de caritate, Greek text ed. Aldo Ceresa-Gastaldo, Massimo confessore: Capitoli sulla carita. Rome: Editrice Studium, 1963. Nestorius, Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius, ed. Frederich Loofs. Halle: Niemeyer, 1905. Origen, De Principiis libri IV, Greek and Latin text ed. Herwig Görgemanns, and Heinrich Karpp, Texte zur Forschung 24. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976. Palladius, Historia Lausiaca, Greek text ed. Cuthbert Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, Texts and Studies 6/2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904.

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General Index Abel (see Cain and Abel) Abraham 52, 62, 69, 71, 148, 193 Abraham of Qidun 166–7, 251 Adam 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 63, 81, 100, 113, 127, 128, 210, 215, 221, 229 see also fall Adam and Eve (see fall) Aeschylus 7, 26, 62, 138, 257 Alexander of Aphrodisias 242 Alypius 22 Ambrose of Milan 47–8, 50, 52, 63–4, 70–1, 73, 158, 161, 195, 203, 243, 250 Ambrosiaster 71, 174, 197 anagnôrisis (see “recognition”) Ananias and Sapphira: alleged greed of 97, 239 possible injustice to 98, 99, 249 tempting/quenching of the Spirit 97, 98 as tragic villains 97–9, 222 Andronicus, Livius 7–8 anger 76 Antony of Egypt 159 apatheia 18, 160, 168, 180–1, 188, 214, 234–5 divine 140 Aphrahat 69, 77 Apollinaris the Elder 2 Aristotle 4, 10, 37, 53, 105, 180, 182, 184, 193, 250 on comedy 61, 250 on tragedy 7, 10, 15–16, 17, 18, 22, 34, 37, 109, 111–12, 143, 184, 217, 236, 239, 252 Arnobius of Sicca 24, 35 Asterius of Apamea 41 Athanasius of Alexandria 44, 137, 232, 237, 243 Augustine of Hippo 19, 22, 25, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36, 45–6, 47, 49, 50, 62, 64–6, 71–2, 73, 89–91, 95–6, 100, 101, 103, 107, 158, 174–5, 176, 194–5, 197–8, 199, 204, 208–9, 224, 232, 233, 235, 237, 240, 243, 245, 249, 250, 258, 260 early addiction to tragedies 30–1, 192 definition of “the self ” in 124–6, 130 distension of the soul (distentio animi) in 117–18, 129–33, 135, 259 on original sin 127–8, 129, 247, 259 profile of the tragic self in 126–33, 134–5 Avitus of Vienne 38, 47, 48–51, 56, 101, 221

Balthasar, Hans Urs von 219, 223–35, 238 Barth, Karl 228 Basil of Caesarea 46, 54, 55, 56, 59, 63, 76, 111, 115, 134, 146, 165–6, 183, 192–3, 195, 196, 201–2, 203, 232 Basil of Seleucia 84, 88, 92 Boethius 244–5 Caesarius (brother of Gregory Nazianzen) 108, 109, 227 Caesarius of Arles 74, 86, 195 Cain and Abel, rivalry of: Abel as Christ-figure 58, 174, 248 Cain’s hamartia (=envy and jealousy) 53–6, 76, 239, 248 Cain’s murder of Abel 54–5, 56, 57, 58, 76, 99 Cain’s rejected sacrifice 52–3, 57, 58, 248 curse (“mark”) of Cain 53, 58, 59–60, 175 potential repentance of Cain 60–1 as tragedy 51–61 Calcidius 244 Carneades 244 catharsis 16, 17, 18, 32, 102, 114, 135, 139, 179, 184–5, 196–7, 205, 209, 214, 260 see also tragical conscience; tragical pathos Celestiacus (Christian senator) 138–9, 245 Christus patiens 3 Church, the: Christians as actors or players 29–30, 38, 42, 217, 222–3, 226–7 as mirror opposite of theatre 26, 31 as “spiritual theatre” 29 Clement of Alexandria 1, 19, 26–7, 36, 106, 185–7, 194, 209, 217, 225, 232, 243, 257 comedy 2, 3, 8, 13, 19, 23, 24, 27, 31, 159–60 see also folly/foolishness; irony; tragical comedy Constantine 25, 28, 31, 39, 41, 223, 254 contemplation (θεωρία; contemplatio): as a function of tragical vision 5–6, 42, 43, 149, 177, 220, 221, 225–7, 252, 253, 254 as a mode of biblical interpretation 42–3 “natural” 47 see also tragical conscience; tragical vision creation 36–7, 112, 116–17, 124, 134, 135 chaos of 118, 121, 134, 247 indignation of creation toward human vice 58–9, 88, 97

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creation (cont.) new 45, 118, 227, 232, 261 vanity (futility) of 6, 32, 102, 107, 117, 118, 119–20, 122, 134, 136, 176, 177, 185, 202, 207, 212, 216, 218, 222, 237, 241, 252, 260 curiositas 49–50, 160 Cyprian of Carthage 23, 56, 76 Cyril of Alexandria 52, 55, 66, 171, 174, 190, 208 David 30, 40, 70, 75, 76–7, 196 death (mortality) 4, 12, 14, 15, 16, 44–5, 100, 127, 148, 177, 201, 202, 205, 213, 214, 216, 230, 231, 232, 243 Delilah 74 desire, mimetic 55–6 despair (hopelessness) 3, 15, 74, 82, 83, 87, 102, 117, 121, 123, 135, 140, 174, 176, 177, 203, 211, 222, 230, 247, 257, 258, 259, 261 Devil (Satan) 47, 48–9, 50, 51, 53, 54, 76, 77, 80, 82, 92, 93, 94, 100, 127, 201 Diadochus of Photiki 208, 213 Didymus the Blind 52, 82–3 Diodore of Tarsus 174 Dionysius the Areopagite 36 Dionysus, cult of 4, 19 emotions: in Greco-Roman moral philosophy 180–3 as intelligent 181–2, 183, 194, 203, 216–8 moral “use” of 180–1, 185, 191, 204 “scripts” of 182–3, 196, 204, 206, 210, 216–7 see also apatheia; envy; fear; jealousy; mercy; tragical pathos empathy (see mercy) Ennius, Quintus 8, 18, 25 envy (φθόνος; invidia) 43, 47, 53–6, 63, 76, 81, 87, 100, 155, 156, 183, 195–6, 215, 239, 248 Ephrem the Syrian 45, 52, 53, 59, 63, 232 Epicharmus 151 Epicurus 256 Esau (see Jacob and Esau) Euripides 2, 7, 19, 25, 26–7, 108, 138, 139, 237n63, 257–8 Eusebius of Caesarea 19, 25–7, 39, 41, 84, 170 Eustathius of Thessalonica 2 Eutropius 119–20, 135 see also John Chrysostom Evagrius Ponticus 188–9, 211 Evagrius Scholasticus 137 Eve 2–3, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 57, 60, 81 see also fall

evil (vice) 6, 13, 15, 32, 46–7, 48, 51, 53, 58, 87, 97, 99, 110, 111, 139, 176, 217, 230, 232, 233, 237, 239–40, 244, 247–8, 249, 250, 255 see also original sin Ezekiel the Tragedian 1, 27 fabula praetexta 9, 12 fall, the primordial 43–51, 83, 100, 127, 134, 160, 193, 210, 211, 216, 228, 232, 237, 239, 247 as epistemological crisis 46–7 as fateful breakdown of communication 47–51 as raw choice of evil 48 as “reversal of fortune” 44–5, 47, 48, 51, 65, 99, 242 fate 80, 120, 172, 242 rhetorical flirtation with 244–6 fear: as caution (εὐλάβεια) 186, 188, 190, 256 of divine capriciousness 83, 221 of divine judgment or punishment 186, 187, 188, 212 “fear and trembling” 188–90 Jesus’s own 189–91 of miseries or death 182, 185, 186, 189, 190, 195, 217, 255, 256 as reframed and transcended by love 187–8 as reverential fear of God 127, 147, 164, 182, 186, 187, 217 tragical 16, 17, 33, 101, 102, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146–7, 150, 184, 260 folly/foolishness: of the cross 231, 241 of God 241, 253 of the gospel 163, 168, 177, 241 of the incarnation 253 in monastic and ascetic performance 162–8, 251–2 of salvation 6, 249–53 of worldly wisdom 241, 242 see also tragical comedy Fortune (Τύχη; Fortuna) 111, 242, 244, 245–6 human 139, 145 free will (human freedom) 32, 33, 43, 46, 53, 62–3, 66, 71, 73, 75, 77, 94, 96, 99, 100, 104, 106, 128, 129, 134, 156, 173, 186, 188, 221, 228, 230, 232–6, 238, 242, 244, 249, 257, 259 freedom, divine 39, 66, 128, 173–4, 232–6, 253 George of Pisidia 245–6 Girard, René 55–6

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glory: divine 224 eschatological 122, 207, 212, 223, 241 of the gospel 92 human 202, 257 of the Law 92 paradisiac 47, 49, 50, 116, 120, 163, 193 grace, divine 55, 65, 66, 74, 75n42, 77, 82, 86, 87, 118, 124, 127, 129, 131, 132, 161, 169, 174, 175, 177, 191, 195, 197, 210, 214, 223, 237, 240, 243, 247, 259, 260 Gregory the Elder (father of Gregory Nazianzen) 111, 115 Gregory the Great 83, 212 Gregory Nazianzen 1, 3, 19, 27, 32, 36, 69, 86, 103, 124, 126, 138, 143–6, 146–7, 149–50, 160, 161, 165, 190, 199, 231, 252–3 personal life as tragedy 107–14, 121, 227, 258 profile of the tragic self in 114–18, 134–5, 199 reversals of fortune in 111, 245 tragical pathos in 110, 113–14, 118, 143–4, 146–7, 258 tragical “recognition” in 111–12 Gregory of Nyssa 19, 36, 46–7, 87, 88, 106–7, 108, 117, 134, 146–7, 149, 150, 160–1, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 207–8, 209, 217, 220, 232, 233, 235, 243, 244, 246 Gregory Thaumaturgus 106 grief, tragical: acedia 211, 217 (see also sloth) bereavement 81, 85–6, 201–2, 204–5 as coextensive with joy 212, 213, 215 compunction 6, 204, 207, 209–15, 217, 260 consolation of 202, 203 dejection 208, 211 as ecclesial lamentation 88, 206–7, 244 as emotional anguish 13, 15, 33, 57, 58, 59, 81, 85, 143, 161, 182, 202 as filter of deepest human desire 203, 205–6, 207, 217, 260 “godly sorrow” 6, 209, 215 Jesus’s own 208–9, 215, 216 melancholy over vanity of creation 6, 119, 207–8 tears (and the “gift of tears”) 145, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216 see also despair

as tragic flaw or vice 16, 46, 53–5, 83, 92–3, 100, 239 see also envy; jealousy; original sin; pride; sloth Heracles (Hercules) 30, 257–8 Heraclitus 252 Herod Antipas 91, 93 Herod the Great 84, 85, 86, 87 as consumed with envy and jealousy 88 as tragic villain 88, 222 see also Holy Innocents Hesychius of Jerusalem 83, 91, 251 Hierocles of Alexandria 242 Hilary of Poitiers 90, 92, 95 “Holy Fools” (see Abraham of Qidun; Symeon of Emesa) Holy Innocents: massacre of as tragic spectacle 84–5, 88, 222 as protomartyrs 84, 86, 101, 249, 258 as subjects of tragedy 84–8, 99 as victims of dispensational transition 86–7, 246 see also Herod the Great Holy Spirit 40, 73, 77, 89, 98, 221, 235 Homer 2, 12, 13, 26, 151, 223, 236 hope 32, 102, 117, 127, 133, 174, 176, 185, 186, 202, 203, 204, 212, 235, 241, 244 as antidote to optimism and triumphalism 260, 261 as clarifying desire 260 in classical tragedy 257–8 in Greco-Roman moral philosophy 255–6 refined through suffering 257, 258, 259 as sublime desperation 260 as a theological virtue 255, 259, 261 as a tragical emotion 255–61 as vicarious 259–60 Horace 9, 11, 22 hypocrisis 23, 29–30, 108, 109, 227

hamartia: Aristotle on 16–17, 239 as fateful miscalculation 16, 68, 71, 239, 243 as guilt 16–17 as original sin 127

Jacob (see Jacob and Esau) Jacob of Sarug 30, 69, 100, 243 Jacob and Esau, rivalry of: as comedy 61, 66, 250 divine “hatred” of Esau 62, 248 Esau’s envy 63

imagination, moral 6, 100, 176, 218, 220, 222, 226, 237, 240, 244, 254, 260 Irenaeus of Lyons 44–5, 52, 106, 228–9, 231, 232, 233, 237, 242–3 irony, tragical 10, 44, 45, 76, 78, 91, 145, 163, 238, 246 Isaac 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 250 Isidore of Pelusium 171, 173

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Jacob and Esau, rivalry of: (cont.) Esau as figure of Jews 65, 101, 174 Esau’s gluttony 63, 239 Esau’s “recognition” (ἀναγνώρισις) 62, 99 Jacob as Christ-figure 64, 65 Jacob’s deception 63–4, 249, 250 Jacob as figure of the Church 65, 174, 250 as tragedy 62, 64–6, 99, 250 jealousy 53, 54, 56, 76–7, 81, 87, 90, 183, 195, 239, 248 Jephthah: as Christ-figure 72, 100, 258 hamartia (=fateful vow) of 68, 69, 70, 71, 100, 243 “recognition” of sin 68, 99 as tragic hero 68–9, 71–2, 92 as tragic malefactor 69–72, 221, 239, 243 Jephthah’s daughter: as ascetical martyr 68, 70 sacrifice of 68, 69, 70, 71, 249 as tragic heroine 70, 99, 100, 221, 243 Jerome 30, 79–80, 90, 158 Jesus Christ 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 64, 72, 74, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 106, 113, 129, 140, 156, 167, 172, 173, 177, 189–91, 193, 205, 207, 208–9, 215, 250, 254, 256 betrayed by Judas Iscariot 94–6 descent into hell 74, 78, 230, 231 as end of the Law 173 as God incarnate 45, 83, 87, 96, 140, 141–2, 168, 187, 189–90, 200, 222, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233–4, 235, 238, 249, 253 as New Adam 41, 45, 60, 65, 129, 216, 221, 229, 242 passion and death of 45, 150, 221, 228–9, 230, 231–2, 238, 242–3, 246 presence in the poor 145, 149, 150, 157, 177, 199 as tragic hero 224, 229, 232, 235 tragical comedy of 251 Jews, “unbelieving,” 66, 92, 168–76, 193 prospective reconciliation of 173–6, 246, 260 reversal of fortune of 169 tragedy of Jewish mother Maria 170, 171 as a tragic people in Josephus 170 Job: as dark comedy 78 friends’ envy of 81 moralizing interpretation of 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 221 as transcendent “gnostic” 82–3 “recognition” (ἀναγνώρισις) 81, 99 reversal of fortune of 78, 79, 80, 81, 249

as tragedy 79–81, 113, 135, 237 wife as tragic heroine 81 John the Baptist: “ignorance” of 89–90 as protomartyr 89, 92, 258 as tragic figure 89–92, 99, 222 tragical “comedy” of 91–2, 251 as victim of dispensational transition 92 John Cassian 181n9, 187–8, 194, 197, 212 John Chrysostom 22, 28, 29–30, 32, 46, 52, 62, 63, 64, 70, 75–6, 77, 80–2, 85, 90, 91, 95, 96, 107, 124, 140, 142, 147–9, 150, 152–9, 170–1, 172–3, 174, 193, 194, 195, 196, 202, 239, 243–4, 249, 250, 252, 259, 260 profile of the tragic self in 118–23, 134–5 reversal of fortune in 120–1, 123 see also Eutropius; Olympias John Climacus 213–14 John Damascene 2–3 John Scottus Eriugena 36 John the Solitary 212 Jonah 113 Joseph (patriarch) 196 Josephus 170, 171 Judas Iscariot: ambiguous role in the economy of salvation 94–5, 98–9 capacity for repentance 94, 95 exoneration in the Gospel of Judas 93–4 free will of 94 hamartia (=greed) of 92–3, 94, 97, 239 as irredeemable 95–6, 258 as tragic villain 92–7, 99, 222 Julian the Apostate 2, 3, 108 Julian of Eclanum 83 justice, divine 6, 32, 33, 45, 51–3, 62, 72, 75, 79, 81, 85, 98, 100, 119, 128, 139, 140, 173, 176, 178, 193, 240, 241, 242, 249–50, 255 see also theodicy; wisdom, divine Justinian 28 kenosis, divine 168, 177, 190, 191, 200, 215, 228, 230, 231, 234n55 Kierkegaard, Søren 16–17, 203 Lactantius 24–6, 136–7 Lazarus (pauper) 147–9, 150 Lazarus (of Bethany) 40, 113, 208 Leontius of Neapolis 167–8 Levinas, Emmanuel 141, 198–9 Libanius of Antioch 110–11, 153–4 Lives (biography, autobiography, hagiography) 102–3, 167 logos (exposition) 6, 37, 99, 235, 236

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General Index Macarius Magnes 98, 249 Macarius, Pseudo- 210 MacKinnon, Donald 238, 257 Macrina 19, 106, 204, 205, 206 Marion, Jean-Luc 124–5, 133, 141 Mark the Hermit 210 marriage: as tragedy and comedy 160–2, 205 see also tragical conscience, married persons as objects of Maximus the Confessor 36, 47, 188, 190, 198, 200, 215–16, 225, 228, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 238, 252–3 Maximus the Cynic 110, 112 Menander 2, 152, 153 mercy (pity): Christian 6, 31, 81, 142, 145–6, 147, 149, 157–8, 191–6 as condescending pity 169, 183 divine 6, 32, 58, 60, 63n118, 66, 79, 83, 118, 130, 194–5, 215 as empathy 6, 196–200 human 76, 77, 81, 243 “re-scripted” as empathy 196–200 role of moral judgment in 192–4, 195 Stoic views of 191–2 as tested by envy 195–6 see also tragical pity mimesis 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 29, 31, 32, 34–8 and “reality,” 34, 109 see also tragical mimesis Minucius Felix 21 Moses 2, 27, 39, 40, 41 mythos (see plot) Naevius, Gnaeus 8, 9 necessity (ἀνάγκη; necessitas) 59–60, 66, 71, 94, 134, 137–8, 165, 171, 173, 244, 245, 257 benevolent 87, 94–5, 168, 246–7 original sin as 128, 247 see also Fortune; fate Nemesius of Emesa 232 Nestorius 137–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich 165 Nilus of Ancyra 40 Novatian 20, 23, 29 Oedipus 25, 62, 80, 237n63 Oenomaus of Gadara 25 oikonomia/economy, divine 5, 36, 40, 64n131, 65, 66, 86, 87, 94, 95, 99, 100, 107, 160, 173, 174, 175, 178, 204, 225, 230, 231, 242, 249, 250 see providence, divine

285

Olympias 120–3, 135, 259 see also John Chrysostom Olympiodorus of Alexandria 83 Origen 27, 36, 39, 41, 46, 53, 60, 62–3, 74–5, 78, 89, 94–5, 96, 106, 173–4, 187, 217, 232, 233, 235, 243, 249, 258 original sin 66, 80, 127–8, 129, 176, 232, 237, 247 Palladius 159–60 parasites: as abused by Christian patrons 154–5 prospective friendship with 157–8 as stock characters in ancient comedy and satire 150–4 as tragic comics 155, 157–9, 252 see also tragical conscience Paul the Apostle 39, 54, 62, 87, 93, 120, 122, 132, 152, 160, 168, 173, 174, 175, 188, 197, 200, 204, 207, 209, 212, 215, 222, 224, 231, 234, 237, 241, 256 Pelagius 174 performance/practice (πρᾶξις) 6, 42, 43, 140, 163–4, 226, 251 peripeteia (see “reversal of fortune”) Peter the Apostle 97, 98 Peter Chrysologus 86, 91–2, 208, 251 Peter of Damascus 210 philosophia 14, 15, 109, 114, 116, 121–2, 201, 259 see also tragedy and philosophy Pindar 2, 223 pity (see mercy) Plato 4, 19, 206, 252, 256, 257 criticism of poetry and tragedy 12–15, 16, 26, 34–5, 109, 191, 250, 252 Platonism and Neoplatonism 36, 104, 126, 127, 131, 180, 225, 240, 242 “play,” divine 118, 224–5, 234, 252–3, 259 see also providence, divine plot (μῦθος; ὑπόθεσις) 5, 6, 16, 24, 37, 139, 235, 236 “probability or necessity” of 10, 16, 37, 111 of sacred history 37–8, 42, 43, 64n131, 100, 226, 227–9, 232 see also oikonomia, divine Plotinus 242, 252–3 Plutarch 153 poor, the (see tragical conscience; “the tragic”) Porphyry of Tyre 98, 249 Potamius of Lisbon 208 pride 43, 48, 113, 239, 246 Proclus 242

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286

General Index

providence, divine 6, 26, 32, 33, 43, 45, 69, 72, 74–5, 77, 79, 83, 86, 90, 99, 118, 119, 123, 134, 135, 136, 139, 145, 176, 215, 216, 217, 220, 225, 230, 234, 240–7, 253, 259 see also oikonomia/economy, divine Prudentius 28–9, 53, 84, 101 Rebekah 61, 62, 250 “recognition” (ἀναγνώρισις) of sin or loss 16, 38, 44, 45, 48, 62, 65, 99, 111–12, 135, 161, 258 see also Jacob and Esau; Jephthah; Job restoration (ἀποκατάστασις), cosmic 235 “reversal of fortune” (περιπέτεια) 10, 16, 38, 65, 99, 111, 119, 135, 139, 146, 148, 161, 169, 242, 251 see also fall; Job Ricoeur, Paul 7, 130n135, 131, 146 Rigby, Paul 66, 72, 127–8, 129, 247 Romanos the Melodist 38, 87–8, 96–7, 101, 207, 221 Rose, Gillian 244 Sampson as Christ-figure 74 as failed ascetic 73, tragic downfall of 73, 99, 239 Satan (see Devil) Saul, King hamartia (=envy and jealousy) of 76–7, 99, 196, 239 and the “witch of Endor,” 77–8 as tragic hero 74–8 Scripture: dramatic interpretation of 32, 38–43, 67, 70, 99 figural (and typological) interpretation of 38–43, 50, 62, 64–5, 67, 68, 72, 74, 83, 85n106, 99, 100–1, 103, 149, 175, 221, 243, 249 self, the: in ancient philosophy 103–4 in epic and tragedy 104–5 in the “image” and “likeness” of God 105–7, 125, 126, 233 as independent or individual subject 104, 105, 124 “objective-participant” 104–5, 114–15, 116, “tragic” (see tragic self ) Seneca 10–11, 18–19, 25, 117, 242, 256 Shakespeare, William 152, 168, 257 sloth 43, 46, 211, 239 Socrates (historian) 2 Socrates (philosopher) 12, 14, 26 Sophocles 7, 19, 26, 62, 80, 114, 202, 257

Sozomen 2, 122 “spectacle,” 8–9, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 91, 98, 144, 147, 148, 251 Steiner, George 1, 45, 100, 230, 237, 238, 248 Stoicism 18, 36, 104, 180, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191–2, 194, 195, 225, 242, 244, 256 suffering, human 1, 6, 14, 15, 16, 17, 38, 83, 85, 100, 117, 139, 140, 141, 142–50, 176–7, 192, 195, 217, 221, 224, 230, 244, 249, 250 Symeon of Emesa 167–8, 251 Tertullian of Carthage 21–3, 25, 29, 30, 49, 75, 109, 223 theatre, pagan: Christians discouraged from 1, 20, 22, 23, 29–30 cultural function of 8–9 demise of 31 gladiatorial and circus games 11–12, 22, 24, 27, 28, 31 ludi 21 theodicy 33, 45, 79, 83, 99, 100, 102, 123, 127–8, 140, 248–9 see also justice, divine Theodore of Mopsuestia 79, 90, 174 Theodoret of Cyrus 70, 138–9, 174, 245 Thomas Aquinas 260–1 time (see Augustine of Hippo, distension of the soul in) tragedy: “absolute” 237, 238, 257 in the Bible 3, 5 Christian criticism of 19, 21, 23, 24–31, 137 Christian events viewed as 136–9 Christian works of 1–3 in classical historiography 10 cultural utility of 3, 4, 9–12 definition of 4, 5, 7 gods’ roles in 15, 19, 21, 24, 30, 45, 67, 242, 248, 257, 258 Greek 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12–14, 19, 20, 24, 26–7, 34, 45 mimed or danced 11, 12, 25 and philosophy 4, 12–20 pre-Christian 87 rhetorical 5, 10–11, 18, 19, 23, 79, 110, 113, 118 Roman 7–12, 20, 23, 24, 25, 34 “tragic, the”: definition of 3, 4, 5, 7, 99, 216, 219, 222, 236–40 as a dialectic of pleasure and pain 238–9 intractability of 238–9, 243 as ontological condition of humanity 4, 5, 44, 82–3, 87, 100, 120, 131, 134, 200–1, 221, 237

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General Index as the power of contingent circumstances 237–8 tragic faces and bodies 32, 141–2, 144–5, 146, 147, 149, 150, 159, 177–8 as worldview 15, 244, 250 see also creation, vanity (futility) of tragic self 6, 32, 104–5, 107–35, 145, 176, 222, 233 see also Augustine; Gregory Nazianzen; John Chrysostom tragical comedy (and comical tragedy) 61, 91–2, 108, 112, 159, 163–5, 166–8, 211, 250–2 see also comedy; folly/foolishness; marriage tragical conscience 6, 32, 140–2, 146, 149, 157, 166, 176–8, 179, 214, 216–18, 220, 222, 259–60 Christian ascetics as objects of 162–8, 177 the indigent and diseased as objects of 142–50, 178, 259 Jewish unbelievers as objects of 168–76, 177–8, 260 married persons as objects of 159, 160–2, 178 social parasites as objects of 150–9, 178, 260 see also catharsis tragical mimesis 5, 6, 13, 15–16, 17, 33, 42–3, 50, 51, 55, 61, 66, 136–40, 146–50, 176, 219, 220–3, 225, 235, 236, 240–1, 242, 244, 249–50, 252, 254 in biblical interpretation 43–101, 147–8, 150, 220–1 in biography and autobiography 102–35

287

as theological artform 220–36, 244, 252 see also Scripture, dramatic interpretation of; fate, rhetorical flirtation with; tragedy; tragic self; tragical vision tragical pathos 6, 16, 19, 32, 33, 55, 56–8, 65, 81, 84–5, 101, 108–9, 110, 111, 113–14, 138, 143–4, 179–218, 220, 222, 260 see also fear, tragical; grief, tragical; hope, as a tragical emotion tragical pity 13, 17, 31, 33, 81, 94, 101, 139, 143, 144, 145, 184, 191–6, 260 tragical vision 4, 5–6, 33, 42, 136–42, 148, 149, 170, 181, 216, 218, 219–220, 222, 223–36, 255 as theodrama 223–36 theological intelligence and accountability of 236–49 see also contemplation; Scripture, dramatic interpretation of; tragical conscience; tragical mimesis Valerian of Cimiez 152, 154, 155, 159, 193, 252 vanity (see creation, vanity of ) Varro 25, 26 Virgil 28 Williams, Rowan 128–9, 176–7, 205–6, 219, 238, 244 wisdom, divine 6, 33, 45, 66, 95, 140, 212, 220, 240, 241–2, 243, 245, 246, 247, 253, 255 Zacchaeus 113

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Index of Scriptural References Genesis 1:24–31 45 1:26 106, 108 1:26–7 30, 106 2:7 58 2:16–17 45 2:17 44 3:2–3 45 3:5 48 3:7 44, 46, 48 3:9 45 3:17–19 58 3:19 58, 83 3:21 243 3:23 58 4:1 53 4:1–8 55 4:7 51–2, 58, 113, 248 4:8 55 4:9 55 4:10–11 248 4:9–15 58 4:9–16 174 4:10 58 4:10–11 59 4:11 59 4:11–12 58 4:12 59, 60 4:13 60 4:14 60 4:15 59, 60, 175 5:5 44 15:10 52 18 193 19:15–26 50 22 58 25:22–6 61 25:23 61 25:29–34 61, 63 25:34 63 27:1–40 61 27:1–41 64 27:30–41 62 27:34 63 27:38–40 63 27:41 63 30:1 85 32:3–20 63 32:3–21 61

32:22–32 64 33:1–15 61, 66 33:1–16 63 33:3 64 Exodus 4:21 62 7:3 62 9:12 62 10:1 62 10:20 62 10:27 62 11:10 62 14:4 62 14:8 62 Numbers 21:8–9 40 Deuteronomy 11:26–32 79 27:9–28:68 79 28:56 171 29:4 173 Judges 11:2–7 67 11:29 67, 243 11:30–1 243 11:31 71 11:35 67 11:36 70 11:36–7 67 11:39–40 67, 70, 243 13:2–23 73 13:25 73 14:6 73 14:12ff 74 14:19 73 15:4ff 74 15:14 73 16:29–30 73 1 Samuel 9:21 75 10:6 74 12:11 67 13:9–14 75 15:1–9 75 15:11 74 16–31 76 16:14 74, 100 16:23 77

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Index of Scriptural References 18:6–9 76 18:9 77 18:14 77 19:9 74 19:9–10 77 24:5–8 77 24:17 77, 196 26:17 77 26:21 77 2 Samuel 1:11–16 77 1:17–27 77 1 Kings 6:1ff 40 2 Kings 16:3 171 Job 1:14–19 80 2:9 (LXX) 81 3:1–3 237 3:1–26 82 3:3–42:6 80 3:11–12 144 14:1 (LXX) 83 42:7–17 80 42:14 (LXX) 79 Psalms (LXX numbering; Hebrew numbering in brackets where different from LXX) 2:11 188 6:6 212 13[14]:2–3 87 17:36 [18:35] 130 18:10 [19:9] 188 24[25]:17 128 25[26]:7 130 26[27]:4 130 30:11 [31:10] 130 33:10 [34:9] 188 40:2 [41:1] 198 50:19 [51:17] 209 58[59]:12 175 62:4 [63:3] 130 62:9 [63:8] 130 68[69]:23–4 173 73 [74]:13,14 87 88:21 [89:20] 75 89[90]:4 44 105[106]:37 171 106[107]:10 87 108[109]:8 95 108[109]:9–10 95 110[111]:10 186 114[116]:5 193

Proverbs 1:7 186, 187, 188 15:27 188 Ecclesiastes 1:2 107, 117, 119–20, 177 1:18 213 3:4 207 7:3 145 Isaiah 9:1 87 29:10 173 40:6 202 53 39, 58 Jeremiah 7:14 17n177 20:7ff 75 30:9 128 31:15 85 Lamentations 2:18 202, 212 4:10 171 Daniel 3:1–30 20 Malachi 1:2–3 62 1:3 174, 248 4:2 87 Wisdom of Solomon 2:24 47, 53 11:24 62 Sirach 1:18 186 Matthew 2:16–18 84 2:18 85 3:3 92 3:11 89 3:14 89, 90 5:4 204, 207 5:7 194 10:15 171 11:2–3 90 11:11 89 11:11–12 92, 246 11:14 89 14:3–12 91 14:4 91 14:6–11 155, 251 15:34 230 18:22 64, 98 19:1–12 160 21:25 89 22:37–9 149

289

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290 Matthew (cont.) 23:35–7 87 23:37 208, 216 24:40 199 26:2 95 26:36–46 189 27:3–5 94 27:3–10 93 27:51 59 Mark 1:7 89 3:19 92 6:17–29 91 6:18 91 6:21ff 251 8:31 230 8:35 164 9:35 200n118 10:44 200n118 14:21 93, 237 15:10 76 Luke 1:5–25 89 1:36 90 1:79 87 3:16 89 7:19 90 7:28 89 9:23 164 11:51 87 13:34 208 16:16 92, 246 16:19–31 147 16:20 150 16:22–3 148 17:25 230 19:41 212, 216 19:41–4 208 20:4 89 22:3 94 22:37 230 23:42–3 235 24:7 230 24:26 230 24:27 72 24:44 230 24:45 72 John 1:19–20 89 1:27 89 1:29 89 1:30–1 89 1:33 89 1:36 89

Index of Scriptural References 3:14 230 3:30 89 5:1–9 140 5:6 140 5:6–7 150 5:22 234 6:70–1 93 7:12 95, 100 12:6 94 12:27 190 12:34 230 13:2–11 96 13:26 95 13:27 93, 94 17:12 95 20:9 230 Acts 1:16–20 93, 95 1:18 93 1:18–20 93 1:25 93 2:44–5 97 4:32–7 97 5:1–11 97 5:3 97 5:9 97 5:17 76 11:18 209 13:45 76 16:1–5 172n178 17:30 87 20:31 212 Romans 1:29 54 3:11–12 87 5:5 257 5:3–5 257 5:12ff 129 5:12–21 39 6:4–8 164 7:17 128 7:20 128 7:24 129 8:15 187 8:15–25 241 8:19–22 107, 117 8:19–23 122, 222 8:19–25 260 8:20 61, 120, 207, 241 8:20–1 32 8:21 120 8:22 6 8:23–5 241

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Index of Scriptural References 8:29 106 8:32 94 9–11 173–6 9:1 209 9:10–18 62 9:12 62 9:13 62, 174, 248 9:15 174, 175 9:22–3 66 9:22–4 175 10:2–4 173 11:8 173 11:9–10 173 11:11–12 173 11:17–22 173 11:25 173, 175 11:25–6 174 11:33–6 243 12:10 56 12:15 196 1 Corinthians 1:17–25 163 1:18 241, 253 1:18–2:5 164 1:19–21a 241 1:21b–25 241 1:22–5 231 1:23 234 1:25 168, 253 2:2 228 2:15 46 3:18 168 3:22 40 4:9 222 4:10 168 7:28 160 7:31 241 9:19–23 152, 177, 197 9:20 172n178 9:20–2 198n102 10:11 39, 40 10:21 155 13:13 255 15:21–7 39 15:45 39 15:22 129 15:49 106 2 Corinthians 2:4 209, 222 4:4 106 4:7 72 4:8–18 164 4:18 123

5:17 164 5:21 231 6:16 40 7:10 204, 209, 213 8:9 199 8:14 200 11:20 152 11:29–30 164 12:5 164 12:9–10 164 13:4 164 Galatians 2:11–14 172n178 2:20 41, 164 3:13 231 3:22 87 3:23–5 186 3:24 185 5:24 164 Ephesians 1:3–14 231 1:10 229 4:20–4 164 5:31–2 60 Philippians 2:6 187 2:12 188 2:12–13 188 3:12–14 130, 132 Colossians 1:15 106 3:3 164 1 Thessalonians 4:13 205, 256 5:19 77 5:21 46 1 Timothy 2:14 47 Titus 2:11 87 Hebrews 1:3 106 2:10 189 2:11 190 2:15 187, 190 4:15 190 5:7 189 5:7–9 190 5:7–10 189 5:8–9 189 6:4 210

291

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292 Hebrews (cont.) 6:20 89 7:27 190 9:12 190 9:13–14 179 9:26–8 190 10:10 190 10:33 222 11:32 67 12:16 63 12:24 58 12:28 190

Index of Scriptural References 1 Peter 2:24 164 3:19–20 95 2 Peter 3:8 44 1 John 3:10–12 53, 100 4:18 187, 188 Revelation 1:5 86 3:14 86 12:3 87