ABSTRACT
Ulrich Simon himself was to write a book on tragedy and Christianity entitled Pity and Terror in which he acknowledged that Christianity, in its preaching of the cross, has finally denied the tragic reality of the human condition. Theology remains, silent, arrested by the impossibility of forgiveness in the face of utter evil. Hannah Arendt has suggested, without apparent irony, that 'the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth'. Speaking against the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus is clear that it is not only God who has the power to forgive but, in Arendt's words, the power of forgiveness 'must be mobilized by men towards each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God'. Already theology is rendered silent, its narratives enslaved to form and its false, helpless, even pointless consolations. Confronted with the brutal, pure logic of the Final Solution and its absolute demands, theology simply ceases to exist.
