Shakespeare's God

The Role of Religion in the Tragedies

Ivor Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135032579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's God investigates whether a religious interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies is possible. The study places Christianity's commentary on the human condition side by side with what tragedy reveals about it. This pattern is identified using the writings of Christian thinkers from Augustine to the present day. The pattern in the chief phenomena of literary tragedy is also traced

III

The Tragic Phenomenon: Literary Tragedy as the Secular Enactment of Theological Principle

Chapter 14

THE TRAGIC NECESSITY

In considering the order which lies behind Shakespeare's tragedies, and of which they are to be seen as manifestations, A. C. Bradley writes in the presence of dilemma. The tragic order cannot be benevolent because of the suffering it inflicts, yet it cannot be indifferent to good because those beholding its operation are not left in despair.¹ The cause of the tragic outcome is invariably evil, and indeed moral evil;² yet we are scarcely witnessing a moral order asserting itself against attack or want of conformity because of our certainty that its evil agents are its parts and expressions – that ‘in their defect or evil it is untrue to its soul of goodness’, and that in their suffering it suffers itself.³ The appearance of tragedy is for Bradley that of

a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste.⁴

In the face of the dilemma Bradley is not prepared to assert that the tragic picture is incompatible with the existence of a personal and kindly God, and therefore with the Christian faith, but his position is yet by no means far removed from such pronouncements of later criticism.⁵ That the presence of evil within the universe should be a stumbling-block to mortal evaluation is not surprising; nor is it surprising that, in the overriding concern of literary criticism to relate the phenomena of tragedy to a moral universe, the intimations of a spiritual universe should receive a certain neglect. For the moral is consistent with the self-centredness of man as it is with his greatness; and to convert the reality of its standards into finality is to obscure the reality of sin, of the soul, and of God. It is to take a creaturely view of those capacities and inclinations which, to a Christian understanding, must lead necessarily to frustration and loss in a creature dedicated to apostasy. Nothing, according to this understanding, can be well with him who does not adhere to the sole good:⁶ the secular condition is, to the mind of faith, almost synonymous with the tragic.

If Shakespeare's tragic heroes can in any sense be said to share a common vocation, it is for each man to be ‘his own artificer’:⁷ in no man of them – with one exception – is to be found a manner of living that would ‘[yeeld] glory vnto him that makes him’.⁸ They exist and strive in what, to the spiritual discernment, must be a state of ‘great error and enormity’.⁹ Unreadiness to forsake worldly desire and ambition is a rejection of the blessedness that alone can constitute desire's fulfilment.¹⁰ Only by a forsaking can human life be properly directed to the glory of Him who is its beginning; and, without such direction, it must relapse into a condition more unhappy than that of any of the brutes.¹¹ The primary instinct of the tragic hero is the assertion of the self; but, by Christian definition, the first duty of man is self-denial:

We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions–. Let this therefore be the first step, that a man depart from himself in order that he may apply the whole force of his ability in the service of the Lord.¹²

A man's gifts of body and mind are not his to possess; they are entrusted to him on the condition that they are used for the benefit of his neighbours.¹³ If he receive evil from his fellow men, he is to contemplate, not their wickedness, but the Divine image within them, and respond with a love that obliterates their faults.¹⁴ And in the life of him who thus finds all desirable good in the Divine benediction there will be no passionate striving for possessions and honours,¹⁵ and not even a variation in response to the various accidents of mortal existence. Happiness, health, want, suffering, disappointment and the receipt of evil must alike be the occasions of thanksgiving.¹⁶ By such standards as these is human activity in the world to be assessed – and condemned.

The abandonment of the self is scarcely possible in this life. Even in the faithful, the flesh, the world and the devil hinder and harass faith; and the striving of flesh against spirit in the saints testifies to man's infirmity. No man can claim more, says Luther, than that he is beginning to be leavened:¹⁷ in the tragedy of unfulfilment which is the human lot the pious also share, being distinguished by little save a ‘blessed hope’.¹⁸ Yet the light of this hope is enough to expose all merely human validities as fraudulent:

If we could fully assure ourselves, and constantly believe that God is our Father, and we his sons and heirs, then should we utterly contemn this world, with all the glory, righteousness, wisdom, and power, and with all the royal sceptres and crowns, and with all the riches and pleasure thereof. We should not be so careful for this life: we should not be so addicted to worldly things, trusting unto them when we have them, lamenting and despairing when we lose them; but we should do all things with great love, humility, and patience. But we do the contrary; for the flesh is yet strong, but faith is feeble, and the spirit weak.¹⁹

Because of human faithlessness, the world is a theatre for assertion and suffering rather than a temple for worship. Worldly man seeks dominance, in a misguided instinct for the imitation of God; yet it is through the submission of worship that man attains the truest resemblance to Him. Man and God do not resemble each other directly, but conversely; only when God has become the eternal object of worship, and man the constant worshipper, do they resemble each other:

If a man wishes to resemble God through the fact of ruling, then he has forgotten God, then God has gone away, and the man plays ruler in His absence. And paganism was like this, it was human life carried on in God's absence.²⁰

This is the condition and quality also of the life that is set forth in Shakespeare's plays. It is with human society and its ordinances, and not with God, that the tragic heroes have made their covenant: Macbeth is not alone in wishing to pay his debt to ‘time and mortal custom’. The worldly bond is constantly threatened and broken by corruption within and without – by man's limited wisdom, his tainted morality, the waywardness of chance, and the decay of institutions; and the attempts of the members of the tragic society to defend and strengthen it can be seen as desperate strivings in a state which is truly penitential:

These are all, in a sense, acts of penance, that is, acts whose deepest intent is to purge us of guilt and the fear of being abandoned.²¹

This fear in tragic man has its origin in his adherence to the worldly passion or desire that Augustine declares to be the evil principle: cthe love of those things which each of us can lose against his will’.²² By it, order is disrupted, not only in the individual soul, but in the society formed by such souls.²³ The fate of those in a Divine univ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• SECTION I THE THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES: A CONSIDERATION OF THE LITERARY PROBLEMS
• SECTION II THE HUMA CONDITION: THEOLOGY'S ASSESSMENT OF THE MEDIUM OF TRAGEDY
• SECTION III THE TRAGIC PHENOMENON: LITERARY TRAGEDY AS THE SECULAR ENACTMENT OF THEOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE
• SECTION IV A THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF SHAKESPEARIAN TRAGEDY: THE HEROIC PREDICAMENT AS THE OPERATION OF THE APOSTATE WILL BENEATH PROVIDENTIAL ORDINANCE
• CONCLUSION
• Appendices:
• List of Books and Articles Used
• Index