Kierkegaard's “A” on tragedy and grace.

“If the individual has no guilt whatsoever, the tragic interest is annulled, for in that case the tragic collision is enervated. On the other hand, if he has absolute guilt, he no longer interests us tragically. It is, therefore, surely a misunderstanding of the tragic when our age endeavors to have everything fateful transubstantiate itself into individuality and subjectivity…

“…In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he becomes ludicrous…

“…Intrinsically, the tragic is infinitely gentle; esthetically it is to human life what divine grace and compassion are; it is even more benign, and therefore I say that it is a motherly love that lulls the troubled one. The ethical is rigorous and hard.”

-Kierkegaard, writing as “A,” in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama,” a section of Either/Or vol. 1. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. (144-145)

How is tragedy gentle? It is absolution without repentance. Oedipus is filled with infinite sorrow, but he does not repent. How can he? It was fate that maneuvered him to ruin. In the tragic, the hero has guilt, but still he lacks responsibility. But the individualist that A (the unnamed aesthete who “wrote” most of the first volume of Either/Or remain.) attacks has rejected fate because he wants to be his own man. And without the consolation of fate, only judgment or mockery remain. “Divine grace and compassion” arrive on the other side of ethical guilt, after the judgment has been made, and require, I think, an understanding of original sin if the analogy is to be complete.