Francesca Murphy: "The slightest glimpse of the submission total love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit would leave us dumbfounded and horrified".
The professor from Notre Dame University in the United States offered a lecture in which she connected the human experience of tragedy with the totally generous love of God.
The theologian Francesca Murphy, professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana (United States), wondered whether tragedy, which in one way or another is always present in human life, behind its negative aspects such as suffering, violence, rivalry, guilt or victimization, does not in reality possess a positive aspect that reveals something of the nobility of the human being and of the original goodness of God.
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"The creators of tragedy," Murphy pointed out, "did not intend in their stories to depict losers, but heroes. Cassandra, Iphigenia, Hamlet, even Macbeth and Madam Butterfly are human heroes because they show the nobility, the superhuman quality of humanity. He explained that, the nobility that underlies tragedy, the goodness implicit in the humanity of the tragic hero is "his conscious and voluntary power to sacrifice himself." |
For Professor Murphy, the tragic hero basically refers to the figure of the martyr. The martyr, as in a certain sense the hero, is not a victim but someone who participates in good Degree in the events that occur permitted or arranged by God. His conscious and noble sacrifice is healing, his sublime solidarity heals. Not because the tragedy is resolved with the "hedonistic fantasy of a cooler full of nectar on a lazy Saturday afternoon", but because it refers to a love that is submission completely.
To answer the question with which he titled his lecture - "Is God the cause of tragedy?"-, he introduced the idea of a "positive tragedy", which imitates the nature of submission of itself proper to the Trinitarian God. "The slightest glimpse of the submission total love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit would leave us dumbfounded and horrified," he said. He also suggested that God is the positive and absolutely good source of all tragedy, because his life consists of total - and therefore sacrificial - submission love. And he recalled that "to say that God is at the origin of tragedy does not mean to attribute tragedy to God, but to affirm that God defines what is tragedy and not the other way around".
The lecture was framed in the initiatives that the School of Theology of the University is carrying out to promote the recently created Diploma Theology. A new degree scroll that offers all students of Degree of the University of Navarra the opportunity to enter a path that for more than twenty centuries continues to open horizons to the vision we have of the world, of God and of the human being.
