Greek Tragedies: From Myths to Sacraments?

Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) made the use of the theatrum mundi (the world as stage)metaphor central to his theological endeavor. A one-time graduate student in German literature at the University of Vienna during the 1920s who later turned his attention to theology, Balthasar also translated and published editions of the plays of Calderón and Claudel through a publishing house that he founded and directed. In his five-volume Theo-Drama (1973–83), Balthasar applies this dramatic perspective to various subfields of Catholic theology, including theological anthropology, Christology, trinitarian theology, and eschatology. Yet even before undertaking this project, Balthasar had examined the specifically Christian implications of ancient Greek tragedy in the fifth volume of his earlier work The Glory of the Lord (1961–69). Balthasar's claim that Greek tragedy provides a foreshadowing of Jesus's death at Golgotha merits careful examination from both literary and theological perspectives.

This article will undertake this examination from the viewpoint of Christian anthropology, and it will show why Balthasar values Greek tragedy so highly. First, Balthasar credits ancient Greek tragedy with achieving a model of anthropological integration. In other words, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides create literary worlds within which human beings are brought into harmony with the whole of being, or with what Hegel would later call the Ganze. Second, the Greek tragedians are the acme of ancient literature, in Balthasar's judgment, because they demonstrate that this integration can only come about through suffering and death. In this insistence, their worldview mirrors the Christian focus on the centrality of Christ's passion. This is why Balthasar claims that the myths of Greek tragedy provide a model of the "tragedy of Christ."

Moving beyond exegesis to a critical evaluation of this project, one can note that Balthasar's claim that pagan tragedy can serve as a "quasi-sacramental" event in a Christian worldview prompts reconsideration of what qualifies as specifically "Christian" literature. If the myths of classical Greek drama are capable of conveying grace, even in an attenuated form, then the boundaries between the world of Athens and that of Jerusalem need to be reconsidered and perhaps redrawn.

1. Integrating Human Suffering within a Literary Whole

Because of creation there is, Balthasar claims, a "universality of the human spirit," a "general human ascent to God," which is in solidarity with Christianity.¹ Christianity reveals a glorious God, and Balthasar insists that glory cannot be defined but only revealed in God's revelation.² Myth, which like Christian revelation resists human subjectivism, exists in an analogical relationship to this revealed glory. Balthasar writes,

If a fundamental biblical concept would have no analogy whatsoever in the common intellectual expanse and if it awoke no close friends in the hearts of human beings, it must remain the absolutely Incomprehensible and as a result unimportant. Only where an analogy (yet even though so remote) rules between human feeling and divine revelation, can the height, the interval, the distance of that which the revelation opens up, be estimated first of all in the grace of God. Where extreme designs of human thought are introduced to it—and these lie perhaps more easily in myth and mythical art than in philosophy—there a man is inwardly convinced that the design presented by God has not been discovered by himself.³

Balthasar credits the Greek tragedians for giving voice to an "intuition" that finds expression in their verses—the intuition that individual instances of beauty reveal that the whole of being itself is beautiful, in accord with Balthasar's own metaphysical conviction."⁴ The objection to this article of faith is obvious and Balthasar states it. What about the ugliness in the world and in the literature of these ancient writers? What about all the human suffering in their work? Balthasar invokes a passage from a letter of Rilke, which, he claims, reveals the worldview of these classical authors: "I know that the Good Lord did not set us down, in order to choose from among things, but in order to pursue so thoroughly...