Tragedy and Irony in Religious Ethics

Recent interest in tragedy in religious ethics—exemplified by Kate Jackson-Meyer’s _Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics_—suggest ongoing interest in the topic. This paper attempts to connect these recent researches with earlier philosophical, theological, and literary debates about tragedy, to argue that irony may offer a clue for thinking about tragedy in ways heretofore underappreciated.  Scholars such as George Steiner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams and Jonathan Lear suggest important resources.  This paper arguest that a category of irony, deployed by Niebuhr in theological terms and Lear in psychoanalytic terms, offers some insight into how Christianity, with a high providential view of Divine agency as supervening over the human situation, can accommodate the ontological insights of tragedy as a "broken knowledge" alongside a theological claim that such tragedy is always a partial knowledge, thus opening the space of irony for further affirmation and investigation of the phenomena under study.