1

Darwin, Tragedy, and the Bible

Leonard Moss

Biblical authors and serious playwrights have explored in some detail and depth the problem

of conflicting evolutionary motives, advancing positive solutions or analyzing negative conse-quences. They describe in their differing vocabularies the paradox that Darwin outlined when he observed the coexistence in organisms of a drive for permanence and a contrasting capacity to deviate from, modify, or transform established identities. The Hebrew Torah, the Books of Ec-clesiastes, Job, and Matthew, and plays by Shakespeare, O’Neill, and Beckett, for example, en-compass the convergence of constancy and variation. Their principal literary mechanisms—their challenge-response narrative design, rhetorical repetitions, and metaphorical associations—translate that biological dualism into a recurring ethical dilemma. An evolutionary contradiction sets the template for a problem repeated in belief systems transmitted by masterpieces of West-ern literature.

Biological existence wavers between the preservation and metamorphosis of identity. So too does cultural life. In order to flourish, nature’s organisms and civilization’s ethical or reli-gious models require stability, and when stressed by social or environmental challenge they also require flexibility.

But reaction to challenge can push them to extreme positions, preservation of an established identity clashing with departure from or negation of embedded “laws.” They jeopardize the co-herence of their community when they uncritically support an obsolete standard, or else rush into ethical aberration, or vacillate between those contraries. Like the welfare of an animal or plant species, the welfare of cultural models and the populations they represent depends upon the reso-lution of this challenge to integrity.

A recurring sequence begins with the test of integrity, opens out to a trial between stability and change, and climaxes with one of four possible conclusions—retention (reiteration of estab-lished structure or function), dissolution (anarchic deviation from the norm), suspension (unre-solved fluctuation between retention and deviation), and adaptation (beneficial modification of the norm). Literary figures in crisis, like an animal or plant species responding to threat, reassert, modify, reject, or corrupt a stereotypical identity. They must strengthen group norms by retain-

2

ing those that work or rejecting or altering those that do not. Surprisingly, tragic drama, commonly thought to celebrate commendable Western values,

actually centers on the subversion of those values by unstable heroes. Most tragedies clearly il-lustrate suspension, an “intermediate” condition linking mindless affirmation of a stereotypical identity with mindless deviation. Obsessive extremists conceive authority and plasticity as irrec-oncilable polar absolutes in ceaseless opposition, a polarity that in the absence of secular or su-pernatural intervention usually leads to evolutionary failure.

Tragic figures, reacting incoherently to their perception of threat, vacillate between rigid re-assertion of an invariable belief and uncontrolled digression. On one hand, they resist the chal-lenge of change by stubbornly upholding a sacred value; on the other hand, they lack emotional and ethical consistency. They give way to fluctuating moral positions or uncontrollable feelings while at the same time reasserting their dedication to an immovable standard. Resolution of the contradiction between contrary behaviors becomes inconceivable without secular or supernatural mediation. The discord can be lethal.

Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy envisioned that toxic outcome in a Darwinian pattern of actions. A civic or military celebrity committed to an aristocratic code dictating personal ex-cellence (stage one) is put at risk by accident, disease, war, unstable temperament, environmental intrusion, or most often by aggressive rivals, oppressive officials, or disloyal allies (stage two). He reacts (suspension, stage three) by vacillating between allegiance to his inflexible code of honor and turbulent emotional states marked by cynicism, self-pity, fear, and irrational aggres-sion. A compulsion to defend at any cost a rigid standard of social order and individual conduct (a conservative extreme) interacts incongruously with limitless mutability (a liberal extreme).

Tragic characters strive to maintain a constant identity, but their radical reaction to stress compromises it. A more useful response would be to alter a stressed commitment with a revised agenda, but adaptation, the effective revision of identity, remains beyond reach. Tragedy, far from confirming an age-old concept of laudable masculine authority, portrays its rigidity, ambiv-alence, violence, and self-destruction.

In contrast, many characters in both Testaments are more successful, while responding to social, environmental, or ethical challenges, when they take advantage of the productive revi-sions offered by a benevolent presence. The Hebrew Torah and the Gospel of Matthew, common-ly thought to be at odds with Darwin’s discoveries, feature adaptive variation!

Biblical stories generally record a positive stance: when a radical threat motivates religious leaders to either implement constructive behavior or else preside over the extinction of a com-munity, the acceptance of a revised moral order promises a favorable outcome. A transcendent mediator explains, adjusts, and supervises a system of standards and its essential modifications. The proposed variants reconstruct, not simply reiterate, an established identity.

3

Unfortunately, that adaptation does not get followed consistently. Despite frequent, forceful guidance, deviant human attitudes or activities regularly imperil survival, threatening a tragic conclusion. God and the Hebrew people in the earlier Testament, or Jesus and the Hebrew peo-ple in the later Testament, conduct a spirited exchange that predicts a successful relationship but sometimes ends adversely.

Nevertheless, both biblical chronicles offer a solution to the paradox confronting cultural as well as organic life. In contrast to the profitless impasse reached in tragic drama, they attest to the idea that the safety of a population depends on its ability to adapt an endangered identity. Most biblical outcomes, whether positive or negative, are entirely compatible with the narratives of evolution. The stories, images, and rhetorical techniques of religious chronicles project Dar-win’s paradox and its varied consequences.

These essays, then, will examine extremes of rigid integrity that never engage in moral revi-sion, and monstrous mutants that have dissolved integrity, and ethical models and their commu-nities that toil mightily, often with limited success, to integrate the certainty of inherited dogma with the originality of useful change. The supreme necessity to implement a balanced adaptation will serve as our central subject, and Charles Darwin, though silent on literary or religious ac-counts of that endeavor, will serve as our guide. The Origin of Species provides a unique way to understand tragic and biblical literature.

“Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject [my] theory,” Darwin wrote (Origin, 453). There is so much to be gained when we observe a number of facts in order to an-swer a perplexing question: how do skilled writers narrate the transformation of a biological puz-zle into a cultural issue?

[Next postings: “A Guide to Recent Evolutionary Theory” and “The Hebrew Origin of

Species”]