I wish to argue for two related theses. Both concern the debate that has been conducted in recent times about the compatibility of Christianity and tragedy; as typical protagonists we might select Steiner from the side of those viewing an unbridgeable chasm, and MacKinnon as a seeker of common ground. The first thesis for which I am arguing is that much Christian defence of the compatibility of the tragic insight with the truth of the gospel too easily accepts the definition of the tragic insight supplied by critics such as Steiner; a brief survey of actual texts, for the purposes of this article the works of the Greek tragedians, uncovers a far more intricate and ambiguous picture. The study of this new picture paves the way for the second thesis: that the core of the good news, the resurrection of the crucified one, only constitutes the negation of tragedy in so far as it remains its perfection, its completion, its limit, and to that extent its affirmation.

At the heart of the argument lies the question of evil, of how, if at all, it is to be understood. In tragic drama, evil appears with three faces apparently alien to Christian faith: the face of incomprehensibility, the face of ineluctability, and the face of irrevocability. We shall take each of them in turn.

As far as the first aspect, the incomprehensibility of evil, is concerned, it would seem that this must be denied by Christianity. Christianity is the religion of a God who is at once transcendent and benevolent, i.e. providential.

We are told in the First Letter of Peter: ‘Come to him, to that living stone rejected by men, but in God’s sight chosen and precious, and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’

In 1984 Christians in the village of Ibillin, in Galilee, said to a British group of pilgrims that visitors to the Holy Land should not confine themselves to visiting the ancient shrines of past ages; they should also visit the ‘living stones’ of the Land. From this originated the setting-up of an ecumenical organization in Britain called ‘Living Stones’.

Last year a group associated with this organization, but predominantly made up of Vincentians (namely, priests of the Congregation of the Mission, founded by St Vincent de Paul), decided to make ‘a retreat through pilgrimage’ in the Holy Land. It was my conviction that the Land, its peoples, and its history combine to provide an extraordinarily powerful context in which to ‘make a retreat’. What would be unique about this one was that it would include meetings with indigenous Christians, living in the throes of the intifada.

Some idea of what that meant both for the group and for the Christians that the group met is best conveyed in the words of some of those Christians.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Waldheim is one of a generation of Austrians and Germans who have a vested interest in excusing themselves from guilt by association in mass murder, in the absence of hard evidence that they pulled the trigger or signed the warrant or turned the gas on. But the evasions and moral insensitivity of the Austrian President do not merit further discussion here. What is more important is whether it is the case that ‘there is no such thing as collective guilt’, because if there is not then certain aspects of traditional Christian theology are in big trouble.

Of course, collective guilt is a deeply unpopular idea. It involves the suggestion that someone who has not perpetrated a crime or some other shameful act in some way carries the guilt for that act by virtue of sharing a social identity with the criminal. Is our reluctance to accept this idea the result of genuine moral difficulties with attributing guilt to someone who might with some justification claim to be innocent, or is it the result of two centuries of social conditioning in a liberal individualistic society? It may be both.

Western liberal democratic society is individualistic in a cultural tradition that was traced by C.B. Macpherson some years ago to Hobbes and John Locke, who had prepared a philosophical account of the lone individual who observes the world and constructs a language to talk about it.

In words that tried, but failed, to temper growing contempt with resignation, John Henry Newman in Tract XC wrote this of the Thirty Nine Articles: ‘let the Church sit still; let her be content to be in bondage; let her work in chains; let her submit to her imperfections as a punishment; let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies...’. In Newman’s ears the language of the Via Media had come to seem deceitful. It took pride in plain speech, yet its words were so framed to include heresy with orthodoxy, false with true. The assured tones of the Articles and Prayer Book, cadences in which generations of Englishmen had come to find comfort and devotion, now seemed in 1841 to belong to a Church that would not listen to the sterner, clear, voices of Church Fathers. Such tones seemed instead to lull their hearers into complaisance. The lips of the Church could be said with irony to stammer, for assurance was only the proud veneer that smoothed over, as it smooth-talked, doctrinal confusion and hesitation. Newman’s words were those of Isaiah, who prophesied that the ‘stammering lips’ of foreign conquerors would command the sinful Israelites, as a result of their desertion of the Law’s clear precepts. Such words hit home: those who complained that the allusion to Isaiah fell wide of the mark could not do so except by excluding broad interpretations of Scripture and Creed of this kind, Newman’s very targets. But if not thus, how are we to proclaim our faith?