If the book does not fully diagnose the problem, it is also arguable that the logic animating the method of tragedy and history does not fully respond to the present situation. In particular, it might be that a full response needs illumina- tion from theology. Such an impulse seems at time present in the book. There are echoes of transcendence in DeGirolami’s account of tragedy and history, but the book contains unexploited resources for drawing a theological imaginary more fully into the jurisprudential task.

His account of tragedy…rests on the insight that we inhabit a moral universe in which it is not possible to fully instantiate moral goods. Yet in so proposing, DeGirolami is not simply commenting on the quandaries of practi- cal ethics, but describing what it means to act responsibly, to judge rightly and prudently, in a world defined by such limits. A jurisprudence grounded not in abstract principle, but in the lived experience of the world, cannot but confront the need to make tragic choices. “In law,” DeGirolami writes, “it is necessary that one side win and the other lose, yet the inevitability of loss does not preclude choice.” Law, DeGirolami adds, might even be “centrally about the sacrifices entailed by choice making” (p. 99). In encountering such language, one thinks of Augustine’s judge in Book 19 of City of God. Confronted by the “darkness” of making tragic choices, the judge yearns to escape the misery of the office. Yet, impelled by duty, the judge submits to unhappiness, executes the violent decisions of law, and cries out to God with the Psalmist “From my necessities deliver Thou me.” Tragedy finds a paradoxical if limited coherence only within this divine economy. Though DeGirolami never frames his account of tragedy on such express theological turns, an Augustinian impulse never seems far from the surface of his account.