If tragedy consists in this: that ethical nature separates its inorganic [nature] from itself as a fate, and sets it over against itself, so that it may not become entangled with it, and is reconciled, through the acknowledgment of this [fate] in the struggle, with the divine essence as the unity of both – then, by contrast, to carry this image further, comedy in general will fall on the side of fatelessness: either in that it falls within absolute vitality, and thus presents only shadow-images of oppositions, or jests of struggles with a manufactured fate and a fictitious enemy; or [in that it] falls within non-vitality, and thus presents only shadow-images of self-subsistence and of absoluteness; the former [being] the ancient or divine comedy, the latter the modern comedy. Divine comedy is without fate and without genuine struggle, because in it the absolute confidence and certainty of the reality of the Absolute is without opposition, and whatever, as opposition, brings a movement into this perfect security and repose is only an unserious opposition, having no inner truth; this opposition now presents itself either against a divinity that appears foreign and external, yet stands there in absolute certainty, as the remnant or dream of a consciousness of isolated self-subsistence – also as a consciousness of particularity that is indeed fixed and held onto, but is itself in complete impotence and powerlessness; – or else the opposition presents itself within a divinity that is itself self-felt and self-conscious, which with consciousness generates for itself oppositions and games, in which, with absolute levity, it stakes individual members of itself on the winning of a determinate prize, and lets its manifold sides and moments bring themselves forth into complete individuality and form themselves into organizations of their own; just as, in general, it can also, as a whole, take its movements not as movements against a fate but as contingencies – certain of its own invincibility, counting loss as nothing, certain of its absolute mastery over every particularity and excess, and conscious of what Plato says in another connection, that a polis has a nature admirably strong. Such an ethical organization will, for example, without danger or anxiety or envy, drive individual members out to extremes of talent in every art and science and skill, and thereby make them into something special; secure in itself that such divine monstrosities do not harm the beauty of its figure but are comic features that lend a moment’s cheer to its shape; as such cheerful heightenings of individual features we may, to name one particular people, regard Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristophanes, and so on; but we must also fail to mistake – both in the earnest reaction against the ever more serious particularization of Socrates, and fully in the remorse over it, as well as in the swarming multitude and high energy of the individualizations sprouting up at the same time – that this stepping-forth of inner vitality into its extremes announced, in the ripeness of these seed-grains, their strength, but also the nearness of the death of this body that bore them; and that the oppositions which it thereby called forth in general, and which it had previously, even in their more serious and far-reaching appearance – such as wars – been able to stir up and carry on as contingencies and with equal levity, could no longer be taken for shadow-images, but had to be taken for an overpowering fate.

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