Parenting & Family Quote by Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bradley drops a cool, almost scandalous claim: you can grind a righteous man into dust and still fail to produce tragedy. The provocation matters. Job is the Bible's masterclass in suffering, a story that practically begs to be filed under "tragic". Bradley, a Victorian judge steeped in moral reasoning, refuses the easy verdict. He draws a hard line between pain and tragedy, between catastrophe and the particular kind of meaning we attach to catastrophe.

The subtext is a critique of the modern habit of confusing extremity with profundity. Affliction, even lethal affliction, is only raw material. Tragedy requires a certain structure of responsibility: an agent caught in a web where character, choice, and consequence grind against each other until the outcome feels both inevitable and agonizingly earned. Job's misery is radical, but it isn't "his" in the tragic sense. It's inflicted from outside, a cosmic test case, not a human-scale collision of will and flaw. In Bradley's legal register, the facts are horrific; the jurisdiction is wrong.

Contextually, this sits near Bradley's broader thinking about Shakespearean tragedy, where the engine is internal as much as external: a person undone partly by what they are. Job, by contrast, is less Hamlet than courtroom exhibit. The drama isn't "how did he bring this on himself?" but "what does innocence mean when the universe doesn't play fair?" Bradley is defending tragedy as a genre of moral causation, not merely of suffering. That distinction still bites, because it forces a question our empathy often dodges: when we call a story tragic, are we honoring the victim, or imposing a narrative that makes chaos feel explainable?