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  • From Catharsis to WonderTragic Mimêsis in Aristotle’s Poetics and the Catholic Imagination
  • William B. Stevenson (bio)

I. Loss and Gain: Why a Recovery of the Poetics?

Amongst the abundance of contemporary reflection on the patrimony of the Enlightenment, one radical transformation effected in the eighteenth century continues to go almost unremarked upon. Up to that time the tragic poets of ancient Greece were regarded as serious teachers of things divine and human, of the things that matter most to thoughtful people.1 Even after Christianity transformed the West by proclaiming a divinely revealed and universally binding doctrine, the poets of antiquity continued to be viewed by many as the representatives of that doctrine’s noblest alternative.2 Moreover, inasmuch as they depict the plight of excellent but unredeemed men and the powerful longings attendant upon their lostness, tragedies could be seen as adumbrations of the original catastrophe whose full dimensions God would finally disclose and overcome in Christ.3 If Christian objections to it were often strident, it was because the allurements of the tragic view were all too evident. Even its fiercest critics knew that tragedy purports to be an education concerning man’s nature and his place within the world. [End Page 64]

All this began to change in the wake of the Enlightenment. With Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment, in which the beautiful is sundered from the good and the true, the tragedians lost their status as educators and became the almost exclusive province of literary and philological scholarship. Philosophers would occupy themselves with other matters. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, but in the main the makers of tragedy were transformed from knowers and artful teachers into “creative artists.”4 Consequently, the study of Aristotle’s Poetics, which contains the first sustained account of the nature of tragic poetry, was relegated to the artificial realm of Aristotelian “aesthetics.” Practically speaking, this has meant that a student is more likely to become acquainted with the Poetics in a course on literary theory than in a philosophy class. And more often than not, Aristotle finds a chilly reception amongst academic aesthetes and literary hermeneuts. Joe Sachs, an extraordinary commentator and translator of many of Aristotle’s works, describes the predominant tone of the contemporary conversation: “Much of this talk has been critical, to the point of denying that Aristotle had any business daring to speak of something so foreign to his own specialties.”5 The Poetics, on this assumption, is an embarrassing case of overreach by a philosopher who naively supposes that the beautiful and the sublime can be a fruitful subject for thinking.6 Even worse, Aristotle seems unaware that thinking must perforce ruin the immediate experience of poetic beauty. The Poetics is a noble but finally unsuccessful thought experiment that, lucky for Aristotle, may be detached from the rest of his oeuvre, without prejudice to his real achievements.

Not surprisingly, then, very little attention has been paid to the fact that Aristotle wrote his Poetics as an appendix to the Politics. It was intended as the indispensable complement to his treatment of the comprehensive and architectonic human good. Aristotle does not partition aesthetics as an independent field of inquiry. The totality of his work reveals a guiding fascination with the soul, its powers, its activities, and the conditions for its flourishing. Sachs says simply that “[Aristotle’s] only specialty was thinking hard about anything that [End Page 65] matters to a human being,” which is another way of saying that he was the very opposite of the academic specialist. Each of his particular inquiries contributes to an articulation of the whole, insofar as the whole is knowable by reason. If we are permitted to take Aristotle on his own terms, we make the enticing discovery that the Poetics treats of things that human beings, not just Athenians or literary critics, care most about.

That Aristotle’s thought is woven into the very fabric of the Catholic intellectual tradition might be a sufficient reason for a Catholic to take an interest in the Poetics, but I think it a poor one. There is a less abstract, more humanly compelling motive for...

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