Abstract: How can we make admissible, from a Christian point of view, morally ambiguous, and perhaps scruffy stories, even extracted from the Sacred Scripture? This is the challenge that Racine takes up in Esther and Athalia. Will the notion of Providence be enough to clear up any misunderstanding? Racine, like Bossuet, borrows from Saint Augustine a musical conception of history that gives it a spectacular dimension by playing on its effects of dissonance and asymmetry. Evil is part of the manifestation of a beauty wrapped in darkness. Is it not this Augustinism that ensures, in Esther and in Athalia, the foundations of a theological aesthetic deployed in dramaturgy?
