Since Ancient Greece, the classics seem to attribute tragedy directly to fate or, at least, to an affronted god. The vision of God as the origin of the tragic can provoke numerous objections, since it postulates a disordered and Manichean idea of divinity. Besides the fact that a life without tragedy is surely the closest thing to heaven that human beings are capable of imagining. This is the negative vision of tragedy: the result of a disastrous exile from a golden place in prelapsarian times, when men, after the fall, would have added the capacity for tragedy by becoming accustomed to violence and rivalry.

But what if we conceive tragedy as something positive? Because it represents human dignity. Because the tragic hero is someone who suffers and learns from suffering. Cassandra, Dido or King Lear are sublime in their willingness to withdrawal and loss, in their conscious and voluntary power to sacrifice themselves. We could say, in fact, that the martyr is in flesh and blood what positive tragedy resembles. He is not a victim, he participates of good Degree in the divine disposition. In his solitary solidarity with his kind, the tragic hero heals a culture and generates a positive good for all. Aeschylus, Sophocles or Shakespeare never intended to represent losers, but heroes: Iphigenia, Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth or Madame Butterfly embody humanity at its peak. If we appreciate, moreover, that tragic heroes are unique individuals, while the protagonists of comedy are no more than examples of a subject, we will then agree that tragedy is a virtue, not a defect. And that, as a characteristic of human nature, the tragic sense of life precedes evil itself.

The "First Tragedy" would be that of a God making everything in creation tragic, without any negativity. It is the positive tragedy of the law of life created through sacrifice, imitating the selfless love and the submission of self proper to the Trinitarian God. This genre, therefore, brings us closer to divinity. If we look at revelation, we will see that the knowledge of God is contrary to rational inferences about causality. Jesus, in his Passion, is a God willingly and eternally crucified for his creation. Christ does not know tragedy only by becoming man, He knows the sublime tragedy of the pure withdrawal in His divine and eternal nature. The noble capacity for tragedy is imprinted in human nature because our human nature is configured by and upon the Son. But the original "Adam", by discarding his God-given identity and character, introduced into the tragic action an ugliness that it originally lacked, turning human history into the negative tragedy as we know it today: an action both beautiful and ugly at the same time. This is the human nature that Christ comes to redeem, without erasing its nobility.

To say that God is at the origin of tragedy, and even to say that there is a Crucified Lamb from before the beginning of time, does not mean in any literal sense to attribute tragedy to God. Our genres and experiences flow unidirectionally from Him: God defines what we mean by tragedy and not the other way around. In the Bible, it seems as if early humanity perceived God predominantly in his terrifying face. After the fall he saw God, metaphorically speaking, with his back turned. The Hebrew psalmist often pleads with God to show his face, as if that face is indeed known, but not revealed. In Christ crucified we see the culmination of what we might metaphorically call the dark side of God. In the Son of God risen from the dead we see something entirely new and glorious. Just as art imitates natural bodies, so the tragic human story is an echo and image of the Trinitarian God.