PITY AND TERROR Pity and Terror Christianity and Tragedy ULRICH SIMON Emeritus Professor University of London Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-20345-1 ISBN 978-1-349-20343-7 ( eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-20343-7 © Ulrich Simon 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-44398-9 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-03237-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Simon, Ulrich E. Pity and terror: Christianity and tragedy/Ulrich Simon. p. em. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03237-1: $35.00 (est.) 1. Tragic, The-Religious aspects-Christianity. 2. Tragedy - History and criticism. 3. Christianity in literature. I. Title. BR115.T73S56 1989 201--dc20 89-10169 CIP For Richard Harries Contents General Editor's Preface ix Introduction X 1 Classical Tragedy and the Old Testament 1 2 The Patriarchal Tragedy 8 3 Tragic Anti-Heroes 18 4 Tragic Heroes 27 5 Job 35 6 Jesus the Christ and Tragedy 42 7 The LossofTragedy 51 8 The Rebirth of Tragedy 61 9 The Claims of the Ideal 73 10 Women in the Struggle for Power 79 11 Othello and Macbeth 90 12 Beyond the Catastrophe 96 13 The Unbridgeable Divide 102 14 Casterbridge and Geneva 114 15 The Paradox of War 123 vii viii Contents 16 The Transcendence of War 129 17 Christian Tragedy 136 Notes 146 Further Reading 150 Index 151 General Editor's Preface This is a remarkable book. Readers expecting another textbook about tragedy and the tragic texts of Western literature will be disappointed. It is more than that, and can claim to be poetic in its own right. Ulrich Simon begins and ends with our place in a world which has, in the space of a lifetime, experienced the trenches of the Great War, and the concentration camps of Hitler's Germany. We have reached, perhaps, the death of tragedy, a despair even beyond the tragic catharsis of the Christian Passion. At best, Christian tragedy's task of redeeming the 'meaningless and heartless horrors' is a daunting one. Never for one moment may we forget the vital and pressing urgency of the things which are here discussed. Great literature is no optional extra to life. From the great texts of the Old Testament to the classical tragedians, to Shakespeare, Racine, and the German Romantics, even to Thomas Hardy, Solzhenitsyn and the modem American novel, Professor Simon explores the survival and the expression of what is tragically necessary and lastingly true in human experience. In this study of literature and religion we are with concerns from which there is no escape. The approach avoids generalities and boring theory. It takes the texture and life of great literature altogether seriously and without the pedantry of much false scholarship. Almost nothing in the Western tragic tradition is forgotten in a deep and lyrical meditation upon the issues of hope, despair, Christian theology, the Cross and the Resurrection. DAVID }ASPER ix