Sittler Calls Pathos, Not Tragedy, 'Motif of Our Self-Consciousness'

"Pathos and not tragedy is the motif of our se sefl-consciousness," the Rev. Dr. Joseph Sittler concluded last night. Exploring "The Context of Confirmation" in his third Noble Lecture, Sittler proposed that the Christian story calls for an "organic" human response "as rich, as supple and as unpredictable as the story itself."

"While "high tragedy requires an heroic alternative rejected," pathos emerges from a feeling that no alternatives exist. To say that "God is dead," as Nietzsche did, is tragic, because if He were alive He could save us. But to declare that God is absent is a "weary dismissal of all alternatives."

Defining Grace as God's "will-to-the-restoration, fulfillment, and blessedness of man," and Nature as "man in his actuality in the matrix of nature and in the human community of his fellows," Sittler drew a sharp distinction between "verification-as-proof" and "as-authentication." The "Narrative-character of the Christian story is a way of speaking about God, he said, but not necessarily a way of knowing God.

Further, while "antiseptic and astringent criticism of the form of Christian affirmation" leads to clarification, it also brings about a "humorless constriction of the very terms it brings under analysis." In short, said Sittler, the context of confirmation is the "massive and organic story of man--in his analysis and anguish, his vision and his dread, his lusts, longings, loves, and loneliness."

Like this analysis, "reigning and radical existentialism" is an "invitation to construction," for the existentialist not only ignores the "transcendent dimension," but also"performs the more amazing feat of ignoring the actual historical dimension of self."

Illustrates Discontinuity

Setting forth phases to suggest the "awkward discontinuity" in human drives, Sittler said that within Possession--"the fire of nature and the creator of culture"--there operates a dialectic called Immolation. As C. S. Lewis writes, "To attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object."

The phrase Actually and Surprise, said Sittler, suggests that God's Grace, meeting us in community with a neighbor, also meets us in the actuality of world as nature. As Augustine wrote, "Thou hadst not sought me hadst thou not already known me." And Pathos and Passion illustrates man's condition and Christ's sacrifice, as in Gerald Manley Hopkins' lines:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since He was what I am.