Tragic posture and tragic vision

by Louis A. Ruprecht

"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 permanen