Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve

That one of the dominant prose genres of our era is the jeremiad indicates how widespread is the sense of contempt and disdain for the modern age. We are told in screed after screed that the contemporary world is an arena of moral chaos and turpitude that can be redeemed only by a return to the putatively more virtuous world of the past - the latter usually defined in terms of the "classical" polis as described by Aristole and elaborated by Aquinas.
The current most vigorous exponent of this view is the ethician, Alasdair MacIntrye, whose "story" of Western society is that original "innocence" (Greece) was followed by the "fall" (bourgeois society and the Enlightenment), culminating in "apocalypse" (the modern age).
What Ruprecht persuasively shows is that this romanticizing of the past is based on a misprision of classical texts - Greek drama in its original forms and as reread by Hegel and Nietzsche, and the story of Jesus - so that one must conclude that tragedy is a permanent feature of human life, but not beyond redemption. Thus apocalyptic faddism has both misunderstood tragedy and trivialized it. It has done both particularly with regard to the Jesus story in Mark, which illustrates that classical tragedy and Christian faith are not incompatible.
The major achievement of Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision is to show that the massive literature about "classical" glories and about modernity's malaise has been written by those who have done little primary work with the texts of earlier ages.
"Narratology" has also become a buzzword among contemporary authors of jeremiads; it is the validation of tragic posturing. But what Ruprecht shows is that people begin stories (Greek civility) in such a way that the stories go where their authors want them to go (modern apocalypse). But, this book affirms, if the beginning of the story is wrong or misread, then so may be the intuition about the End.

Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., teaches in the Department of Religion at Emory University.