Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 4: The Paradox of Greatness and Wretchedness.

Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.” Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Pascal: “Man is neither angel nor beast .. . Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.”
“This is why life is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a tragicomedy.”

In the commentary portion, Kreeft goes on to list some of the philosophical movements, both before and since the time of Pascal, that have erred on either the side of animalism or angelism.

Animalism: Marxism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Darwinism, and Deweyan Pragmatism. (I would add Psychology and Psychiatry in general which assume that all of our problems can be traced to physical/chemical causes.)

Angelism: Platonism, Gnosticism, Pantheism, and New Age Spiritualism.

Shakespeare, of course, genius that he was, wrote both tragedies and comedies and a few plays that are ambiguously considered to be tragicomedies. The wheat and the tares grow together in this world, and no one can separate the two until the harvest. The ending is hope or despair, heaven or hell, life everlasting or death everdying, and the ending determines the nature of the play. Even if sad, tragic, horrible things happen, if the culmination is a wedding, The Marriage Feast of the Lamb, then the play was a comedy all along. And even if we laugh and grab for the gusto, if the end is death and despair, the play is a tragedy, no matter how many grave-diggers’ jest we insert along the way.

So should a writer or a playwright show only the depths of evil and the hopelessness and sin of which man is capable and to which he is prone? Is this the work of a Christian novelist or poet, to bring the reader into the deepest darkness so that he might begin to look for a light? For some writers, the rather paradoxical illumination of human wretchedness might be the calling. Others are called to articulate and write hope in a dying world. Some, the greatest of writers and communicators, can do both.