Date: September 22nd, 2026 5:13 PM Author: smoky base
Greek tragedy offers a strikingly non-redemptive vision of existence, in which suffering does not necessarily lead to salvation, progress, or ultimate restoration. Across the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, human beings gradually discover the limits of their agency within a world governed by fate, divine powers, inherited guilt, and chance. Set against the modern redemptive expectation that suffering should ultimately be resolved or given a higher purpose, these tragedies instead explore what it means to recognize and endure a world whose deeper order may be intelligible without being benevolent.
Date: September 22nd, 2026 5:33 PM Author: smoky base
...which in turn undermines nietzsche, because the descent into secularism already existed under Aeschylus long before euripides (and the latter's bacchae basically blows up nietzsche's schematic from the other side)
Date: September 22nd, 2026 6:03 PM Author: gold station rigpig
"Greek tragedy offers a strikingly non-redemptive vision of existence, in which suffering does not necessarily lead to salvation, progress, or ultimate restoration."
i mean, if you're trying to say that suffering isn't always guaranteed to be imbued with meaning, well yeah ok good but i'm not sure that's a point worth making.
Date: September 22nd, 2026 6:05 PM Author: smoky base
it is a point worth making, because the christian/post-christian worldview assumes that suffering is ultimately redemptive, that god or mankind will correct the scales
Date: September 22nd, 2026 6:10 PM Author: smoky base
christianity has a remainder problem, afterlife redemption is *required* to explain this-world suffering
"Once you adopt privatio boni, an afterlife is no longer optional - it is logically mandatory. Why? Because an all-good God governing a world of manifest injustice creates an accounting problem. If God is good and sovereign, then unresolved suffering in this world cannot be final. It must be deferred, compensated, reversed or explained away. The afterlife is the balancing ledger that keeps God morally solvent. Heaven redeems what history destroys, Hell punishes what history rewards, meaning is backdated after the fact. This is not primarily about comfort, it is about protecting God’s goodness from empirical falsification. Without an afterlife God appears either weak, unjust, or nonexistent. With an afterlife God remains all-good, history becomes probationary, not decisive, victims are promised restoration without requiring justice here. This is why Christianity can tolerate centuries of horror without revising its God-image: the real story is postponed. Once Abraxas enters, this entire edifice collapses. If God contains both good and evil there is no moral imbalance to correct, no cosmic apology forth- coming, thus the afterlife loses its compensatory function. It may still exist, but it can no longer justify anything."