Suffering and death are universal. They are the basal experience that tragic art addresses. But is tragic art in one form or another also universal? Are there times and places on which tragic thinking can have no purchase? If so, is our anti-mythic age of science and reason, of democracy and rapid technological progress an era unsuited to tragic art? The modern world is largely optimistic despite the massively destructive violence of the last century. Terrible things still happen to individuals, to families, to whole peoples. Yet when no wrong seems fully beyond prevention—an unforeseen possibility that with due diligence might have been planned for and averted—or at least beyond reconciliation, perhaps there can be no properly tragic sensibility. With the spread of democracy, literacy, interdependent trade relationships, and education, we increasingly govern our darker impulses more effectively. We empathize with others, discredit ruinous ideologies, and use our powers of reason to diminish the enticements of violence. This optimism has a long history of its own. Tragedy was a specifically Greek form that hinges on the centrality of fate and destruction. But even in ancient Greece tragic art met with skepticism. Emphasizing the cool use of reason over the passions as expressed and aroused in art, Socrates and Plato took a dim view of tragedy’s public influence. Tragedy lay also at a far remove from Hebrew and Christian Scripture and thought. In an act of supreme Vergangenheitsbewältigung, God undoes Job’s sufferings by rewarding him with a new wife, a new family, and riches. Christ rewards believers with the abolition of death and suffering under the sign of divine redemption.

A distant echo of this gift occurs in modern German literature, in the demonically achieved, divinely sanctioned resurrection of Faust’s youth. Goethe’s Faust does not quite abolish death, but it takes a step in that direction. Modern science has begun to treat old age and death as a fate that may become optional, a biological design flaw that may eventually be corrected by technical means: genetic modification, cloning, or some other intervention. We remain similarly optimistic about human perfectibility in other dimensions of human experience. Our law courts and political institutions seek to rectify wrongdoing and prevent future suffering wherever possible.