I’m gratified that it’s not just Burke that has critiqued the implicit tragedy in humanity. There’s Alice Miller, of course, and Hannah Arendt. But their solution is unsatisfying and decidedly secular.
They don’t go quite as far as the groups that Jim Wallis calls “secular fundamentalists” — those who say that the best solution to religion in the public sphere is no religion in the public sphere. That itself is another kind of tragedy–an expulsion of the most obvious and the most inspiring.
Walter Wink’s myth of redemptive violence is more satisfying. While Burke only sees comedy (tradegy’s antidote) as a momentary pivot away from the precipice of victimage, Wink puts the fiction in the lines of tragedy. The true story is comedy. It’s the persistant one. It lingers. It saves!
I love that Jim Wallis, Phillip Yancy, and Walter Wink see Christ as the only hope for comedy. Tragedy is “finished,” as Christ said. Grace now reigns.