“IRONY. THE OPPOSITE OF WRINKLY” reads the message on a sweatshirt wife Harriet gave me, perhaps in reaction to my probable overuse of a topic. The word “irony” appears in the title of at least one book, one article, one chapter, one column, and one review that I’ve written through the years. They all take off from reflection on a concept fostered by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), the last century’s foremost public theologian.
A Protestant who chummed with atheists, Niebuhr said that “the Christian faith tends to make the ironic view of human evil in history the normative one.” He spoke not of literary irony but of “historic” or “dramatic” versions of irony applied to American history. God, for him, is the “divine judge who laughs at human pretensions, without [note this!] being hostile to human aspirations.” So such irony is not about “what fools these mortals be!”
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