Paul Blowers

This essay explores Augustine's capacity to accommodate a tragic vision of human existence within his interpretation of the Christian revelation. Broadly speaking, for Augustine, sacred history combines the tragic necessity of self-inflicted human sinfulness with the benevolent necessity of the economy of divine grace. Augustine to some degree admired the pagan tragedians for compelling the attention and emotion of their audiences in confronting the ineluctability of evil (and other tragic themes), but their mimesis ultimately failed since it could not touch the reality conveyed in divine revelation. Two exegetical test cases, the story of Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter (Judges 11) and King Saul's tragic heroics in 1 Samuel, exemplify how Augustine greatly profited from interpreting Scripture through a tragical lens. A whole other dimension of Augustine's tragic vision appears in his attempt – inspired from his own early experience of staged tragedies in Carthage – to reenter ancient philosophical debates on tragedy and mimesis, and to revamp in Christian terms the tragic emotions, especially tragic pity as Christian mercy.

This article explores whether we can speak of an aggregate Christian cosmology or doctrine of creation constructed by the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa. While discouraging the possibility of identifying a perfectly contoured 'system' of Cappadocian cosmology, I argue that there are certain 'first principles' and doctrinal correlates shared by this triumvirate. More helpful is to approach their constructive theology of creation from the standpoint of its basic epistemological protocols of theologia, which lay down the ground rules for Christian language of Creator and creation, and the^ oria, the church's 'sanctified intuition' of the meaning of the world. The^ oria, as 'contemplation' in the broadest sense, enables the Cappadocians to envision the world, through the lens of sacred history, as a theatre of tragedy and beauty, and as the matrix of the triune Creator's aspiration to bring about an ever-renewed creation.

Blowers’s study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium’s turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus’s career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus’s “cosmo-politeian” worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ’s “new theandric energy.” Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ’s own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a “theo-dramatic” reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric “plot” or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus’s cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century—the repercussions of which cost him his life—and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.

Despite the pervasive early Christian repudiation of pagan theatrical art, especially prior to Constantine, this monograph demonstrates the increasing attention of late-ancient Christian authors to the genre of tragedy as a basis to explore the complexities of human finitude, suffering, and mortality in relation to the wisdom, justice, and providence of God. The book argues that various Christian writers, particularly in the post-Constantinian era, were keenly devoted to the mimesis, or imaginative representation , of the tragic dimension of creaturely existence more than with simply mimicking the poetics of the classical tragedians. It analyzes a whole array of hermeneutical, literary, and rhetorical manifestations of "tragical mimesis" in early Christian writing, which, capitalizing on the elements of tragedy already perceptible in biblical revelation, aspired to deepen and edify Christian engagement with multiform evil and with the extreme vicissitudes of historical existence. Christian tragical mimetics included not only interpreting (and often amplifying) the Bible's own tragedies for contemporary audiences, but also developing models of the Christian self as a tragic self, revamping the Christian moral conscience as a tragical conscience, and cultivating a distinctively Christian tragical pathos. The study culminates in an extended consideration of the theological intelligence and accountability of "tragical vision" and tragical mimesis in early Christianity, and the unique role of the theological virtue of hope in its repertoire of tragical emotions. Jacket image: Vittore Carpaccio, c. 1505, The grave preparation of Christ. Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo 9 780198 854104