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Ontology, Theodicy and Idiom – The Challenge of Nietzschean Tragedy to Christian Writing on Evil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
In this article I want to suggest that Christian theologising about evil cannot avoid the multifarious voices of those who have defined what is meant by the term “tragedy”, even where it seeks to reject this. This is to argue that the “tragic vision” articulates something important about human and worldly reality, and that theologising that does not acknowledge this will inevitably demonstrate it anyway in its own incoherence. This will be shown in relation to the writings on evil of St Augustine of Hippo and Donald MacKinnon, and finally it will be argued that the only possible “theodicy” lies in the area of Christology.
I begin with the man who proclaimed himself the first “tragic philosopher”, Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, produced the most radical and disconcerting (to Christian sensibility) account of tragedy I have yet encountered. Early in that work Nietzsche retells a fragment of Greek mythology, as follows:
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest for a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When at last he fell into his hands, the king asked what was best of all and most desirable for man. Fixed and immovable, the demon remained silent; till at last, forced by the king, he broke out with shrill laughter into these words: ‘Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to say what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be bom, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die.
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- Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 In notes on The Birth of Tragedy written in late 1888. just before insanity. Contained in an appendix to Haussmann's translation (see footnote 2 below) p193.
2 The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism (translated by Haussmann, Wm. A.) T. N. Foulis. 1910.633, p 34Google Scholar.
3 The Birth of Tragedy 025, p. 186.
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10 ibid pp 124‐5.
11 ibidp133.
12 ibidp135.
13 “Ethics and Tragedy” in Explorations in Theology 5, op. cit., p 194.
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