A tragic vision of the world

I once worked as a hired pen on a difficult project plagued by creative differences. In one conversation, I was told that my services had been solicited because I was a “fun” writer—punchy and light and easy to read—which made it unexpectedly frustrating that I was guiding the project in a heavier, sadder direction.

I could see how someone might form that impression based on a limited slice of my work. But taken in totality, my writing is noticeably informed by a tragic vision of life. My hope as a Christian is built on Christ, yet I’m always exploring the spaces between hope and lament, between the anticipated joy of the not yet and the sorrows of the now. Even as we are called to labor toward the healing of what is broken and the restoration of what is lost, so often we are confronted with the hard truth that certain things are irreparable, unrecoverable.

Many things in my own life have contributed to this realization, but not least among them are the books that have shaped me. Three works come to mind—one nonfiction, two fiction—that on the surface are quite disparate. Yet each in its own way has contributed importantly to my tragic vision.

The Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell

An insoluble problem

Thomas Sowell’s classic work The Vision of the Anointed indelibly impressed my high school mind with the insight that the world’s great tragedies are not “solvable.” It’s just politically convenient for people to act as if they are, so that they can cast their political opponents as venal and uncaring.

This is not to say that callousness or injustice never play their role in the persistence of suffering and social ills. But there is no simple fix that would cure those ills if people simply banded together and cared hard enough. “There are no solutions,” Sowell reminds us, only numerous trade-offs and compromises.

Once I saw this, wherever I looked I couldn’t unsee it. From the war on poverty domestic and global, to the immigration debate, to gun violence, to wars—wherever there are human suffering and devastation, there are always two visions contending over it all: the “anointed” vision versus the “benighted” vision, otherwise known as the tragic vision. The keepers of the anointed vision declare moral superiority as a function of their certainty. The keepers of the tragic vision understand that there is no golden key, no secret passcode, no one neat trick that will untangle the great knotted mess our race has made of the world this side of Eden.

Small gains and small victories are possible, to be sure. But Sowell taught me that such gains and victories belong to the humble, not to the proud.

The Chosen Chaim Potok

The pain of humanity

Chaim Potok is one of the great Jewish writers of the 20th century. His work focuses on the particular struggles of the urban Jewish American diaspora. Though filtered through a progressive lens, often questioning the authenticity of Jewish Scripture, it still made a great impression on me as a young reader. Particularly noteworthy is his debut novel, The Chosen, a coming-of-age story about the friendship between two teenagers growing up in mid-20th-century New York. Reuven, the son of an Orthodox scholar, has a dramatic chance encounter with Danny, the son of a Hasidic rabbi, and from that day on their fates are powerfully intertwined. Reuven quickly realizes Danny is a genius, but that extraordinary gift has grown in the shadow of an extraordinary pain: He is being raised in silence.

In Judaism, the word tzadik means “righteous one,” a title given to those who have completely sublimated their will to God’s. To be “a tzadik for the world” is to bear the burden of the world’s suffering. This is how Danny’s father suffers, and he wants his son to learn how to share it. This silence gradually emerges as a metaphor for the silence of God—a silence Danny tells Reuven you can “learn from,” if you listen closely enough. It doesn’t talk, but sometimes it cries, and in that moment you hear the pain of the whole world.

It is then, when the silence is most unbearable, that you must listen most closely. For, as the rabbi teaches his son, “the world needs a tzadik.”

A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter M. Miller Jr.

The dissolution of the world

Apocalypse is a hot topic these days, but a book from 1959 remains surprisingly fresh and relevant. A Canticle for Leibowitz was Walter Miller Jr.’s first and last novel to be published in his lifetime. A “fix-up” work, built out of three novellas tracing the fate of a Western American monastery through three historical epochs, it became a benchmark for the postapocalyptic fiction genre. It is deeply infused with Miller’s Catholic faith, though his relationship with the church was complicated, and he took his own life in 1996 after a long battle with depression. This is especially heartbreaking in light of the powerfully pro-life, anti-suicide message he left behind in his work.

This novel will consistently find a place on any short list of books that shaped me, across many topics—Christian humanism, nuclear war, euthanasia and suicide, the clash of church and state. And in its cyclic story of history repeating itself, the human race self-destructing and rebuilding and self-destructing again, it is a fundamentally tragic work. At the same time, tragedy is strangely mingled with hope. On one hand, there is a very real sense in which the good guys lose. The fiery abbot of the last novella fights valiantly, but everything is slipping out of his hands, and by the end, the world is quite literally caving in on him. On the other hand, we are reminded that at the end of all things, there is always a remnant.

—Bethel McGrew is a teacher, math Ph.D., and widely published freelance writer. She writes on faith and culture at her Substack, Further Up.