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Articles/Essays – Volume 05, No. 2
Some Implications of Human Freedom
Let me begin by admitting that my title, and perhaps my entire paper, begs a major philosophical question. I am well aware of the age-old debate over the reality of free will. I am aware of most of the arguments against free will and in favor of predestination or determinism or scientific mechanism. But I write out of a Mormon background that assumes the absolute reality of “free agency,” that sees freedom of the will as an irrevocable gift of God, or as coeternal with Him. I write out of an absolute personal commitment to that belief and an absolute personal assurance that we make meaningful decisions: physical, ethical, moral, spiritual. I know that our freedom is impinged upon from every direction: by physical limitations of all kinds, by internal limitations both genetic and environmental, by social and economic forces, even by God’s will, and by all the other forces that re strict or nullify our choices and actions. But beyond all these I profoundly believe that decisions and actions we sense to be willed are very often actually and meaningfully willed. I can not prove they are. I only “know” they are. And on this partially empirical, partially existential, wholly religious knowledge I premise all that follows.
I take the fact of human freedom to be so fundamental that it can tell us something about nearly every philosophical, moral, social, and religious problem that man can explore. My essay is limited to only a few major problems. It works backward, of course, from the usual discussions of free will, which try to affirm or deny the fact of free will from other facts of the universe and of human experience.
Because so much else depends on our concept of God, I want to begin with implications for that concept. We Mormons have very definite concepts of the God we believe in, probably more definite than those of any other Christian group. Yet these distinctly anthropomorphic concepts of God raise significant questions. In what sense, for example, can God be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and all-good and at the same time be an individual with definite “body, parts, and passions”? Or how can He have these absolute attributes and still Himself be eternally progressing? We have our answers—at least as good as most. But even after the answers are in, we are left with the broad and frustrating difficulty of trying to explain the inexplicable, the ultimate. And sooner or later we have to come to terms with that most fundamental of religious-philosophical problems: how to reconcile God’s absoluteness with the fact of evil in His universe.
Nearly all of our usual answers to the problem involve, whether we recognize it or not, an implicit denial of either the absoluteness of God or the reality of evil. We Mormons, with our stress on the need for “opposition in all things,” tend toward the latter. That is, if we argue that evil is necessary to know good, we are essentially arguing that evil itself is somehow ultimately good, simply because we cannot have good without it. Similarly, if we argue that God permits evil for His purposes or uses it to help bring about His ends, we wipe out the problem by making evil essentially good, or “privative,” or merely the absence of good.
On the other hand, if we see Satan as the author of evil, we have to do so with one of two beliefs: either God permits Satan’s activity (or uses it or turns it to good), in which case we are back to some kind of denial of the reality of evil; or He somehow cannot control Satan, in which case God can not be completely omnipotent. Or if we say that God wills evil without our seeing it at the same time as somehow unreal or positively good, then we are making God the essential author of evil and hence not absolute in goodness. Old Nickles in Archibald MacLeish’s /. B. sums up the dilemma in his jingle, “If God is God He is not good / If God is good He is not God.”
Fortunately, the doctrine of free agency has profound implications for the dilemma. If man is really free, then at least within those limitations in which he is, God cannot be free. That is, God cannot create man free and then retain complete control over him. He cannot tell me, “Thou shalt not kill,” and then nullify the implied choice by either preventing me from killing or forcing me to kill. If I am free, He cannot tell me, “Thou shalt not eat of that fruit” and “Multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it,” and then predetermine which of the conflicting commandments I will obey. He cannot even tell me to “Love the Lord thy God” and to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and then somehow extract that love by force—not if He is to leave me free.
Similarly for that other age-old religious-philosophical conundrum: how to reconcile man’s free will with God’s foreknowledge. Here, too, most of our attempts either fail to satisfy or lead to alternatives worse than the problem. We may argue as energetically as we wish that God somehow exists outside of or beyond time, that in His absoluteness all time is spread out before Him as eternally present. Or we may use perhaps the most common response: that just as a parent “knows” his child so well that he can predict almost infallibly how the child will react to a piece of bubble gum placed within reach, so God can know us, His children, infinitely better because of His infinite knowledge.
But whatever absolute validity either may have, both answers disturb me worse than the original dilemma. We escape the dilemma not by handling the horns but by killing off the bull—or the toreador. For if God really exists outside of time and all time is spread out before Him as eternally present, then I find myself in a universe where one of my most certain perceptions—that I live and think and plan and act in time—becomes some kind of trick, a cosmic illusion. And no reassurance that God’s foreknowledge is absolute and exerts no causative force on events can rebuild my real world for me. A world where time, with all its sense of reality and significance, disappears into mere illusion—this I recoil from. I become a character on a TV tape, capable of unrolling in time and thinking that that time is absolutely significant, but capable of unrolling only as the tape “knows” I will.
But the other is even worse. If God can know me absolutely—as I know my children partially—then this must mean that I am a knowable creature: absolutely knowable. And I recoil from the implications. The positivistic psychologist could accept the picture, without even bothering to posit God as the knower. To be absolutely knowable, predictable, I must be an absolute mechanism.
No, if we are meaningfully free, God cannot see us spread out in a time less and meaningless present. Nor can He know us absolutely. Either way, our choices become illusion, possibly real from our standpoint, but cosmically meaningless except perhaps as they fulfill God’s foreknowledge.
If I thus summarily dispose of these two oldest and most challenging of philosophical dilemmas (and, of course, I haven’t really disposed of them), I do so only from the complete conviction of the meaningfulness of the freedom that poses them in the first place.
Fortunately, I can do so well within the limits of Mormon orthodoxy. For to see the elements as eternal, law as eternal, intelligence as eternal, and the Creation as an organizing of elements (including “intelligences”) rather than as creation from nothing, is to see God as limited by the very materials He works with. To see God as somehow involved in, as part of, as leading us for ward in a process of “eternal progression” is surely to leave room at the ultimate end of that process for God himself to be somehow progressing, to be struggling with forces or laws or conditions—including the effects of freedom itself—not entirely within even His control. What else do we mean when we say that God is Himself subject to law? or that Christ is the God of this earth, under God, and hint at a God beyond Elohim? or that the good Mormon is himself progressing toward eventual Godhood? or when we re peat, as we do so often, “As man is, God once was; As God is, man may be come”? or when we glory in the promise, “For I the Lord am bound when ye do as I say . . .”? I am aware that other emphases can be—and are—put on these concepts. But the broad center of Mormonism, both historically and presently, tends to put the emphasis where I have, though perhaps not really coming to the implication that the concepts ultimately limit God—but limit Him, I hasten to add, only on a cosmic, an absolute scale: His freedom must seem absolute in comparison to ours—thence, of course, part of the reverence and awe and worship we tender Him.
That very fact—the obvious difference between God’s freedom and man’s—carries profound implications for freedom itself. Especially if we stress eternal progress and God’s having developed to what He is now, freedom cannot be static, either quantitatively or qualitatively. As we exercise it (and grow in doing so) it grows and expands too: freedom begets free dom. In this sense, Plato’s early description of the poet fits freedom: “a light and winged and holy thing.” It is worthy of our finest understanding, our deepest commitment, our highest quest.
The fact of man’s freedom also has profound implications for the nature of man. That he makes meaningful, willed choices should perhaps be enough. But the implications reach out from that central fact in many directions. Perhaps the most far-reaching is that man’s freedom, like man himself in Mormon thinking, is not contingent but necessary. Or if contingent, then contingent only on its being exercised. We tend to assume freedom as a gift from God to man. But I suspect the relationship is more complex than that. “In His own image” must surely involve something more than appearance. I have to assume that it refers also to other of God’s attributes: His intelligence, His freedom, even His creativity. I would go further. Perhaps God really had no choice in some of these matters. Perhaps, as is suggested by Mormon belief in free agency as an eternal quality of eternal intelligence, Satan’s plan was not really an alternative at all. Had God created man with out freedom, would He have created man at all? Is not man’s freedom the real measure of man? Is not man’s freedom even the real measure of God’s creativity? Otherwise the creation would have resembled much more closely a manufacturing process than genuine creativity.
But whatever its source, the existentialists are right to conceive man’s freedom as an inescapable part of his condition as man. Blessed with freedom, condemned to freedom: either way man is free, necessarily free. And what he does with that freedom becomes the measure of his being as man. He can choose to ignore it, he can refuse it, he can fritter it away by enslaving himself to habit or to others, he can blanket it under routine: by all these he blasphemes against it. But given normal powers of intelligence and normal capacity, he can also exercise it, expand it, create with it, aim himself (Mormons believe) toward Godhood with it. But escape it he cannot—not and be man. Or not and be.
If inescapably free, man must be largely on his own, much more so than we Mormons usually consider him. That is, man himself carries much of the responsibility for his own affairs and for God’s affairs among men. It is possible, of course, and popular in some recent Mormon thinking, to conceive of this freedom as primarily the freedom to yield oneself to the promptings of the Spirit, who will then take over and guide one’s life infallibly as God would have it go. Such a concept has its temptations and surely some truth. But I distrust it as too easy. The choice, once made, passes the responsibility of freedom to the Spirit. Or if we think of the process as a continuing choice or series of choices, it remains always the same choice: to yield or not to yield—though not necessarily always a decision of the same degree of difficulty. Perhaps this oversimplifies to the point of parody. But the concept asks too little and promises too much and offers too easy a scapegoat: Once one has yielded completely to the Spirit, whatever happens can be credited to or blamed on God. It asks for little of even the strenuous positive exercise of freedom in the multiplicity of choices on the broad scale of complexity that we associate with ordinary life.
Much of this also applies to our usual concept of prayer, which we too often consider a means of wheedling from God the blessings He wants to give us anyway. We pray to fulfill our responsibility in a more or less mercantile relationship; God for His part responds by pouring out blessings on us. Again the choice is to pray or not to pray. But as Huck Finn found out, it don’t work—at least not this way and not this simply. We have no way of really knowing the extent to which God controls events on earth. But, again if man is really free, God cannot control them completely. Perhaps He could end the Vietnam war any time He wants. Perhaps He is only waiting for man to achieve a spiritual condition worthy of such a blessing. But to believe so is to believe that God willed the war and wills it to continue. And this I cannot do, any more than I can believe that He willed my mother’s fifteen years of suffering or the riots tearing at our cities.
No, men are responsible for these things. Or man’s condition as man is. Part of that condition obviously includes forces outside his control: natural forces, group—or mob—action outside the control of any individual in volved and often outside anyone’s control—and the force of freedom itself, which tends to jostle against other freedoms or other men’s freedom. Of course prayer can help. Most of us have seen it help. But we have also seen it fail to help, in any practical sense. We have all prayed for things, for help, for blessings we have not received. Generally we explain this by saying that it was not God’s will that we have them, that He simply said no. But again this makes God’s will often seem arbitrary or whimsical. I prefer two other explanations: (1) We usually pray wrongly when we pray for something (again the mercantile concept of our relations with God). Our prayers should act, I have to believe, primarily as the expression of our reverence, as communion. (2) The fact of man’s meaningful freedom pre vents God from very much overt interference with man’s life. Man can, of course, be free because there is no God or because He does not care about man, or man about Him. But man can also be free precisely because God does care about him—cares too much to interfere under most circumstances with the exercise of that freedom. To be meaningful, freedom needs constant exercise. Man’s constant struggle is the real source of that exercise. Man has to be on his own if his free will is to be more than mere theoretical gift.
It follows that the fact of human freedom implies that man himself is neither innately depraved nor innately divine. He is potentially both, or either. But free will places him, as does the Psalmist, a little lower than the the angels, with dominion over the works of God’s hands. Here is the key: dominion over God’s works, including himself, so long as he genuinely exer cises it, so long as he acts as a free agent.
“Natural man” may be the enemy of God, but only if we limit “natural” to mean that which is most brute in us, only if we assume that somehow the Fall changed man so drastically that God could no longer recognize His own image in man. But free will is part of that image. Surely the Fall did not change that. And the Fall itself we see as part of the original creative act: a most crucial part, because only in choosing to eat the fruit could man make possible other meaningful choices, that is, only through such a choice could man bring the gift of freedom to the level of action. To see man, therefore, as naturally evil brings us back to the position I have already rejected of limiting man’s freedom to the choice of yielding or not yielding to the Holy Spirit. Man largely creates his own goodness or badness by a continuing process of choosing—not merely between good and evil but between good and good, evil and evil, good and lesser good or higher good, God and what ever is not God.
From here the implications of human freedom spread out so broadly that I can indulge myself only with summary treatment.
If we make meaningful choices between good and evil, it follows that both are completely real. The reality of good, Mormons never question. And only by closing our minds to the world can we any longer question the reality of evil, can we see evil as privative, as merely the absence of good. Dachau and Buchenwald have their absolute reality—still. And so do Birmingham and Dallas and Memphis and Watts and Vietnam. Even the basic idea that we need opposition in all things, with its implicit denial of the reality of evil, needs to be reinterpreted in the light of the reality of free will. Evil, of course, has many sources—but never God. Or God only in the fact of His active creativity and of his having created man. Perhaps God could have created a world that had no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no hurricanes, no floods. But He did not. Perhaps He could have made man more peace loving, more honest, more kind. But He did not. Therefore, I have to see both nature’s and man’s awesome powers as built into the very process of creation, especially the process of creating free, and hence meaningful, man.
The implications for education are similarly broad. Let me suggest only one. The concept of dynamic freedom involves not merely the right but the capacity to make meaningful choices. And capacity in this sense involves not merely will but awareness—awareness of alternatives and of their significance. Such awareness is surely the most important product of education. Hence education itself becomes vital and dynamic, not mere preparation for earning a living, not merely the accumulation of knowledge (though knowledge is often vital in how we exercise free will), not even merely preparation for living. Very few periods in what we invidiously call “real life” demand of such constant decision making or present such broad and complex alternatives to choose from—though more may be immediately at stake in real life. Education, then, becomes the process of broadening the base from which significant free will can operate and of providing more or less sheltered situations for it to grow by exercise. And the best education will be that which provides for and encourages the most meaningful and constant decision making.
Similarly for politics and society: that political and social system is best which provides the broadest base and develops the highest capacity for meaningful decision making. Here, especially, freedom must be conceived as being far beyond rights. Personal or internal capacity would be largely meaningless for some kinds of freedom without the external and public right to exercise it. But conceived dynamically and creatively, freedom is much more an internal matter than an external one. Of course we must protect our freedoms and defend our Constitution. But to prize these primarily as property rights or business rights—or merely as the right to use four-letter words—is to misconceive and degrade them. Freedom cannot mean very much to one who simply isolates himself and hoards it, nor can it mean very much to the ghetto child who brings neither understanding nor experience to bear on possible alternatives. Society’s high duty—a free society’s high destiny—is to provide the best conditions for conscious and meaningful exercise of freedom.
For morals and ethics as well, the fact of freedom multiplies the significance of choice and even gives moral and ethical implications to choices that have little such apparent concern. For to see freedom as a fundamentally creative force within both the individual and society is to tinge nearly all questions with connotations of right and wrong: What we create of our selves and our society becomes the ultimate moral question.
The one implication I want to explore is that moral and ethical problems probably should not be resolved in either of the extreme ways often used: the social approach which derives standards from the broad standards of the community, or the absolutist approach that refers all problems to an “idea” of morality or to God’s commandments. This is not to say that communal practice or God’s commandments should exert no moral pressure in our lives. But to have dynamic freedom, we must (again) consciously and meaningfully choose, and choose as aware as we can be of possible alternatives and probable consequences. Put differently, a commitment to human freedom implies distrust of simply going along with the crowd for any reason, and especially a distrust of what Milton calls a “cold and cloistered virtue.” Virtue as mere abstinence may be a way to get through crucial years to ward maturity; but it can never bring genuine maturity. The Pill obviously has its moral dangers. It probably can and does increase premarital unchastity, and perhaps even adultery. But virtue based on fear—whether of social disapproval, pregnancy, or disease—has never been virtue at all. Like freedom, virtue must be conceived as a positive, creative, even healing force: He “knew that virtue had gone out of Him,” at the touch of the hem of His garment. We probably can never un-invent the Pill. What we can do is insist on its significance for positive moral action and let it broaden the scope and meaning of our free moral choices. What kind of a me will result if I commit fornication or adultery? What kind of a society will I tend toward creating? Such questions do not leave behind the fact of God’s commandments. They even intensify, especially for Mormons, the probable per sonal and social results of violating the commandments. But they also squarely place the responsibility where it has to rest anyway: on “me” as agent consciously and creatively willing the act, or the abstention.
And now to implications for literature, which generated much of my interest in the implications of freedom. If man’s freedom involves some kind of limitation of God’s absoluteness, if God had to create man free, if man’s freedom itself, or the way men exercise it, is largely responsible for evil and suffering in God’s universe, then it follows that tragedy is built into the very structure of freedom, the very structure of the universe. On the simplest level, the capacity to choose involves the inevitable capacity to choose wrongly. On a much higher level, the capacity to choose involves a multiplicity of choices. One choice rubs against and influences other choices. My choices rub against and influence yours. Freedom rubs against and conflicts with freedom. King Lear is free to choose Regan and Goneril and to reject Cordelia, Macbeth to murder Duncan, Medea to kill her children. But none of them can escape the consequences of his or her choices. And the choices profoundly involve others until finally they reverberate on the cosmic level.
If God was not free to create man other than free, then man’s capacity for tragic action is part of God’s creativity and God is profoundly involved Himself in tragedy—cosmic tragedy. I have dreamed of, even projected, all this toward a cosmic tragedy in which I envision a series of parallel scenes on earth and in heaven. The central scene will show man poised in agonizing indecision with his finger on the Button. Atomic war, he knows, will destroy his universe. And yet his earlier choices, events for which he must be held at least partially responsible, have brought him to this supreme and terrible choice. Either alternative is terrible, both for him and absolutely. In heaven, God and the angels watch. God, too, knows that atomic war will destroy this part of the universe He has created. He too knows the alternatives. Perhaps he can reach out and stop man’s hand. This the first scene, and the last. In between a series of flashbacks: to the Council in Heaven, to the Garden, to Noah and the flood, to Abraham and Isaac, to God and Satan and Job, to Gethsemane, to Cumorah. And always if man is really free, God is not—not entirely. In this fact may lie the ultimate Gethsemane of a creating, loving God. But also perhaps His ultimate glory. My tragedy has no ending, at least none that I can conceive as dramatically viable. To push the Button ends all choice. Not to push it means the choice must be repeated over and over and over—as indeed it must if man is to be man. But the projection of these ideas as basic facts of man’s condition might be all I could ask.
For all this, I must believe, is built into man’s condition, into his free dom. I can interpret in no other way those conflicting commandments in Eden, the willed suffering of Gethsemane, the panorama of human suffering all along the way, the awesome responsibility forced on man today by the fact of the bomb. It is hardly a comfortable picture. No wonder our existentialist writers contemplating the fact of human freedom dramatize their sense of alienation and angst. Whatever else, the picture tells me that Joseph Wood Krutch is fundamentally wrong when he argues that, because of the shrunken stature of man, we cannot create tragedy in the modern world or even respond meaningfully to the great tragedies of the past. Experience tragedy! If my analysis has any validity, we cannot avoid experiencing it—not if we sense deeply the fact and the implications of our freedom. We experience it the more profoundly in the theater and in our reading, precisely because we experience it in our awareness of life, of what we are as humans, of what it means to be free.[1]
But tragedy, Northrup Frye argues, is incipient comedy. What we recognize as the regenerative—or generative—effects of his suffering on King Lear reaches toward the happy ending at the same time that it intensifies the tragedy. The highest comedy (as in The Divine Comedy) can follow only from the descent into the Inferno. Considered mythically, the happy ending completes the cycle. And I do not want to leave my reader in the Inferno: My essay does have a happy ending.
But we must return briefly to cosmic things. If the fact of human freedom implies a God not fully absolute, not fully controlling man’s universe and destiny; if it implies a heavy burden of responsibility for man himself and less certainly of the outcome of his exercising of that responsibility; if it implies tragedy built into the very structure of God’s creativity and of his universe—it also relieves God of the primary responsibility for suffering and evil in His universe and man of the responsibility of worshiping a God who is the author of evil as well as of good. It relieves our religious leaders of the burden (a terrifying one it must be at times) of infallibility: They too are human, hence free, hence subject to error. And I can honor and respect them far more and follow them far more meaningfully because I do not have to believe that everything they say is absolute. Again, such a response forces evaluation and choice, but these are the very life and meaning of freedom.
But the real happy ending is still more positive. For, I have argued, the struggle itself to choose, to know alternatives, to grow in freedom (as to grow in the gospel), involves us in a self-expanding, self-creating process: freedom begets freedom. We create—always within limits—ourselves, our freedom, our world. And since we do so, man’s freedom itself becomes absolutely meaningful, a light and winged and holy thing, but also profoundly a thing of substance, a kind of self-renewing plastic clay that, even as we mould with it, increases in both quantity and quality: the sculptor’s dream! The sculptor’s dream—suggesting we are all sculptors of our lives—but also his necessity, the necessity of any art.
And I finally come to the significant implications for creativity. The human freedom I have tried to define implies an absolute commitment to creativity itself. Art thrives on freedom, as we all know. But art is also one kind of ultimate exercise and expression of freedom. When Taine posited a deterministic theory of creativity, he may have committed the final blasphemy against art. For no matter how much we can explain about any given work of art by knowing the race, the milieu and the moment that produced it, we still have the work itself that transcends explanation. It stands as achieved, as created fact: the product of a succession of conscious or subconscious choices—a choice in every word of a poem, every note of a symphony, every stroke of a brush. Hence the artist may well be the freest of humans, though most bound by the necessity to impose significant form on his materials. Whatever the internal pressures that help force it into being, the achieved actuality, the created work, has to be the product of choices. This is what we mean by creativity. A magic enough process, to be sure, but largely a very conscious process, a conscious exercise of willed, aware, responsible choices, all directed toward the supreme end: the work of art.
This much for the artist himself. No matter how much he may profess to believe in a blind, deterministic universe, he knows that his own act of creativity is not blind or predetermined—that it is a conscious, willed struggle. And if he consciously believes the universe absurd but man free, then his created work becomes the gauntlet he throws in the face of that absurdity, his ultimate assertion and proof of his freedom. He is driven by what I call, awkwardly enough, the creative imperative: the imperative to create of his freedom meaning in his meaningless universe. I have to see that imperative as forced on anyone really committed to the fact of human freedom. We may know that our universe is not ultimately meaningless, we may know that it is absolutely meaningful in a cosmic scheme. But if we are free we are com mitted to create of it and ourselves the highest meaning inherent in it and ourselves.
I assume that all this applies most fully to the creative artist, the one who finally achieves significant art. But on differing scales it must apply just as absolutely to all of us. Our freedom imposes upon us in our reading or experiencing of any work of art the necessity to involve ourselves actively in a kind of re-creative process that participates somehow in the original creative act. It imposes upon us in our writing, any kind of writing, the responsibility to see writing not as assignments or work to be “done” but as opportunities to engage ourselves in creative activity—for that is exactly what every kind of meaningful writing is. It imposes upon us as teachers and prospective teachers, and even as present students (all Mormons are always students), the imperative to make of our classrooms living demonstrations, somehow, of freedom in action and of freedom’s complex meaning. It imposes upon us in our scholarly work, our business activities, our day to-day labor, the imperative to make these activities help us create an ever higher potential within ourselves. It imposes upon us in our religious activities the imperative to create the profoundest spiritual awareness and spiritual communion and spiritual selves that we are capable of creating. Our freedom imposes upon us the imperative to offer our highest worship through our creativity to the God who used His freedom to create us.
Again, such an imperative will not necessarily make for comfortable, well-adjusted Mormons. It may even make us discontented. But discontented, I would hope, with a measure of what Dr. P. A. Christensen used to call “divine discontent.” Such discontent must be largely the vertu that engenders all creativity: artistic, religious, educational, personal. Such discontent coupled with our sense of the cosmic, public, and personal significance and dignity of freedom, all grows out of the imperatives it imposes. We can not, at least at this stage of our being, be gods. But we can participate on our level and with our capacities (nearly always much greater than we let them be—or force them to be) in His most vital attribute: His creativity. We cannot all write a King Lear or a Paradise Lost or compose a Ninth Symphony or synthesize diamonds or create a General Electric. But we can and do participate in the creativity that produced all these. The joy and glory of our humanness comes in our so participating. And in the process we may even come to know the absolute significance of our commitment to creativity and to meaningful human freedom. We may even come to know, in other words, something of the implications of our human freedom.
[1] [Editor’s Note: In the PDF, this is an asterisk, not a numbered footnote] I wish here to express again my debt to Dr. P. A. Christensen, for many years Chairman of the English Department at Brigham Young University. I cannot know the extent to which his ideas of tragedy infuse those I have just outlined. I do know, however, that I consider his treatment of the relation of tragedy to religion one of the great original essays on tragedy. I do know that he sparked my interest in tragedy and kept pumping oxygen to it. And I do know that I seldom start following an elusive idea down a difficult trail without at some turn meeting the mind of Dr. Christensen. I thank him for having been there.