Many and masterful are the literary works of both tragedy and comedy, but which is truly the higher form of art? Certainly some of the most classical and enduring of all literature are the Greek tragedies, such as the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In the ancient world, many, especially the Stoics and the Skeptics, believed this to be the highest form of literature because it reflected both man’s majestic greatness as well as his terrifying finitude. It presented man as he truly was – a being trapped by fate and the gods in a temporal destiny far too inadequate for his natural potential. Many atheistic or agnostic moderns would also agree with this literary view; I think here especially of the so-called “absurdists” and works such as Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

The Christian, of course, cannot accept this claim. For us, “the joy of the Resurrection renews the whole world,” as the Easter Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer so beautifully says. Thus, many argue that comedy (in its traditional sense of a story with an ending for the good, rather than in the restricted, modern sense of a humorous story) is in fact the highest literary art form. Certainly it is only in the Christian mindset that the greatest comedies are written, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy – quite possibly the greatest literary work ever created. Indeed, some have argued that the Christian cannot even write a true tragedy as the ancient Greeks did because of his hope in the Risen Lord. Even Shakespeare’s masterful tragedy King Lear is, I and others would argue, truly comic in its ending. Yet, perhaps we have asked the wrong question to begin with.

J. R. R. Tolkien had a poignant understanding of how completely the Fall pervades Creation, especially man, and how unconquerable the presence of sin in the world ultimately is for man until Christ’s Second Coming. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that God’s providential design allows men who act virtuously to achieve lives of comedic heroism through which we can see a glimpse of the True and the Good, that is, of God Himself. As he says: “[that] peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful fantasy can be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (Lang Lecture on Fairy Tales). The supreme task of literature is to give the reader that moment of heart-bursting joy out of the midst of sorrow. Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe” to express this concept, and it is a concept that contains both the tragic and the comic.

Perhaps, then, it is in some sense better not to talk of one being higher than the other, but to see them as both necessary to achieve literature’s highest form. True, man is redeemed in Christ Jesus. True also, man is also the source of great evil in the world. Truest of all, God brings a greater good out of every evil, a greater joy out of every sorrow, and a greater beauty out of every imperfection than would otherwise have been, allowing us to cry with the Easter Exsultet, “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam which has gained for us so great a Redeemer!” I answer my original question this way then: in a certain sense, neither comedy nor tragedy is the higher art form because both are necessary for literature to achieve its most powerful presentation of man’s redemption by grace from his sinful state.