Letter #29: We’re the Lunatics Here
The Gap Before Agape
Senor Spence,
In 2001, during the last few months of his life, I got to know Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We got into a discussion once about comedy, and whether it dated more or less quickly than drama. I paraphrased the opinion of the famous 19th century critic William Hazlitt: “Shakespeare’s tragedies are greater than his comedies because tragedy is greater than comedy.” Douglas replied tartly, “Shakespeare’s tragedies are greater than his comedies because Shakespeare wasn’t funny!”
He was a witty guy. But I’m with Hazlitt here. My new piece on Shakespeare for City Journal (Shakespeare vs. The Transhumanists), points out that King Lear and The Tempest are similar stories about an old man and his daughter. The first is a tragedy. The second is a comedy of grace. And there is no question in my mind that King Lear is the greater play. This is not a matter of taste. You may well enjoy The Tempest more and even find it deeper in meaning. But King Lear is theater at its best. It shatters the soul with grief and beauty. It is the heart of life brought to life onstage.
Likewise, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written in the midst of mental strife in the aftermath of World War I, is greater than his Four Quartets, written after he became an Anglo-Catholic. The Waste Land writhes with a parched thirst for the water of baptism, even just “the sound of water only.” Four Quartets has a majestic melancholy wisdom born of faith. But as poetry, The Waste Land is incomparable.
Tragedy is greater than comedy for the simple reason that life is a tragedy and life is all the artist knows. This is why so many religious stories seem false and hollow, and why the greatest stories of faith are either fantastical, like Lord of the Rings, or drenched in misery and death, like The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky was fascinated with Hans Holbein the Younger’s brutally realistic painting of The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb precisely because he wanted his faith to stand in the face of tragic mortality. He understood that Crime and Punishment is the stuff of life. Salvation is “the subject of a new story.”
All of which is to say this. When we talk about agape and the movement of the heart toward love, we are talking about a commitment to a process that risks everything on a bet. We have set ourselves on a trajectory toward the edge of a cliff in the belief we will sail off it into eternity — into a divine comedy greater than the tragedy that is the story of our lives.
There is no reason to condemn the unbeliever after such a commitment. It’s we who have taken the mad gamble — on hope, faith and a daring leap at everlasting love.
Yer own
Dad
This brings to mind one of my favorite G.K. Chesterton quotes: "Tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human life." When I first came across it, I immediately understood something that had bothered me a long time. Why do we privilege the tragic over the comic in art? His answer, like yours, points toward the fact that tragedy grounds us in an undeniable truth: life is good and meaningful. Comedy suggests this truth to us, but tragedy confronts us with the undeniable reality of it.
Is it a mad gamble to choose the hope of eternity? Life is both—tragedy and comedy. I can survive the tragedy because I know there is also comedy. If life was just one or the other how could any of us want to live one more day? I am an optimist because I see the good even in the midst of the evil. It isn’t always easy but that is what believing in the goodness of God is all about. To live a pious life is practically impossible but many live lives of perpetual debauchery. Is that more hopeful? More sustainable? Only those afflicted with mental illness can earnestly say they have no regrets, and even then, some of these individuals can and do. Because when you are left to yourself, even the least self-reflective of us knows right from wrong and longs for improvement. That is what redemption and the quest of it is about. I know I’m rambling but I just can’t agree that faith is a gamble. Plummeting off the cliff with the craggy bottom looming large is more a gamble to me. I choose faith and my hope of eternity for $100, Alex.