This essay has to do with the place of tragedy in the thought of Augustine. His relation to tragedy followed his personal evolution. In his youth, in his Manichean period, he was attracted to it by his passions for the theater and for astrology. In his maturity as a pastor, he was confronted by this reality through the misfortunes of time. His theological reflection, stimulated by Pelagianism, oriented him towards the cause of evil and unhappiness, which Paul assigns to all original wrong. This explanation was to provide Augustine with a definitive key, of which he would make constant use in his dispute with the Pelagians. It is upon a humanity contaminated tit its source by evil that unhappiness is the temporal form of divine justice. It is also therein that divine mercy exerts itself by the mode of gratuitous election in view of salvation. So it is that justice and gratuity substitute for fatality If tragedy is an undeniable fact, Augustine as a theologian attempts to go beyond it and turn it back by, God's inscrutable design.
