Sophocles: Antigone- Estrangement, the Divine, and the State
What a coincidence! Today, Mr. Brown and Mr. Carter debate the role of religious belief, or disbelief, and the state- largely about what ground of being provides the best common basis for society- and today we come to the last of Sophokles’s seven complete plays, Antigone, which asks whether we answer to God or the State, and what do we do when they conflict?
Antigone, like Oedipus, is a play about Thebes. You’ll remember that Oedipus, king of Thebes, was self-blinded and exiled for unwittingly committing incest and patricide. Complicating matters were Oedipus’s sons, Polyneikes and Eteokles, who both wanted the throne. In Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus), they went to war, Eteokles fighting with the Theban army and Polyneikes leading an army against Thebes. This is an important detail because both brothers died in the fighting, and into the power vacuum stepped Kreon (literally “ruler”), who is now trying to right the ship of state in Thebes.
Here’s his problem: both brothers are dead. Kreon gave Eteokles a proper burial for defending the state. However, he refused to allow the traitor Polyneikes to be buried. Antigone, sister of both dead hotheads, openly defies Kreon and the state, burying Polyneikes and accepting a death sentence, because she insists that the natural law- the will of God- is higher than the needs of the state or society. The play is about these two orders- the sacred and the social- coming into tragic and hopeless conflict.
So, in the first place, this is a play about the power of the state and how we assert our higher loyalties- to family, to the Divine- in the face of state oppression. The most famous modern production, Jean Anouih’s 1944 Paris version, is so noteworthy because the Nazis occupying France, and the French under them, could not have missed the modern parallels. It is very hard not to sympathize with Antigone.
Today, Antigone is often taken for a feminist, and she’s that too- she defies the male leadership of her society and pays the consequences- and remember also that she’s more than just an underdog, she’s an outsider and the product of incest. Both Antigone and her sister Ismene are fortunate to have been taken in by Kreon to the royal family- he’s letting his son marry Antigone, whose father was infamously the son of her mother! So she’s already something of a social abomination, and now she’s defying the entire social order for a natural law that her very existence defies.
Yet, she’s not simply doing this to assert her will- “empowerment”, if you wish. She’s doing it in obedience to the sacred order. Antigone’s will has nothing to do with it; depending on your opinion, she’s either a religious fanatic or a pious woman. This is what I think gives her the eerie resignation she demonstrates throughout the play. Perhaps she’d rather not die- who can say?- but her desires have nothing to do with it. She has to side with the divine over the social, come whatever may.
This is where, I think, we see the limitations of the old Marxist saw about religion being “the opium of the masses”- there are simply more social revolutions throughout history that were grounded in common religious belief than those of the twentieth century that rejected belief in God; or pretended to at least. Certainly, faith has often served to reinforce unjust social orders, and religious people I think are obligated to admit as much. But it has also quite often served as a higher ground of resistance to oppressive states. If you want to inspire your neighbors to stand against the state, it helps to tell them they’re standing with God. Notably, we hear that the Thebans are siding with Antigone.
The brilliance of Sophokles is that we can’t fully side with her; nor can we fully condemn Kreon. All he’s trying to do is restore order to Thebes, which has been torn apart by the royal family psychodrama. He has a point (probably one reason the Nazis tolerated the Paris production). The great insight of the play, howeverm, is that Kreon is really in trouble first because he’s not a fully competent leader and becomes increasingly tyrannical as his personal flaws come into view. Because he lacks authority, he turns slowly to power. How many tyrants have become tyrannical because they sensed their own limitations as rulers? Certainly, there are more of them than rulers who arrive with visions of gulags dancing in their heads.
As for our debate, notice that Sophokles is writing about precisely the estrangement that results when the Divine is no longer the basis of the social order. One of the more interesting points raised by social conservatives- here I’m thinking of Philip Rieff, the original (and considerably more reactionary) James Poulos- is that all of western culture until very recently served to translate the sacred order into the social order. That is, every work of culture was addressed, in some sense, to the Divine. So, the recent development of secular culture amounts, in Rieff’s term, to an “anti-culture”.
Now, my own opinion is that Rieff went way off the rails, essentially arguing that morally serious “Jews of culture” should reject the anti-culture of Picasso, Joyce, and Mozart, and coming dangerously close to saying that Duchamp prefigured the Holocaust (at this point, my reading the book prefigured it being thrown against the wall). Nevertheless, I think he’s right that the overwhelming majority of art created before the Modern Era does, in some sense, address itself to the sacred and that, by doing so, it simply aims at something very different than art created solely for man. If you want to know why we have no Sophokles today, this might help explain it (Of course, Rieff claims the central motif in Greek tragedy is fate- and not faith- anyway). However, the biggest problem for me with this idea is that I can’t say if Shakespeare was a pious man, but I suspect he wasn’t. Who is Hamlet if not a man outside the sacred order? Does this account for his sliding in all directions? And, if not, I’m not ready to agree that Shakespeare moves me more than any number of “religious” playwrights from the same period solely because I am godless.
But nor am I willing to agree that the Greeks were basically godless. If there is what Jaybird calls a “moral fabric to the universe”, surely it’s represented in Sophokles as fully as in any Passion play, and that’s really what gives Antigone it’s horrible inevitability: she knows her obligation and we know our obligation, in spite of our individual terms for that obligation- we can’t help but know.
Endnote: Believe it or not, we’re finished with the seven complete plays of Sophokles (although maybe it’s a problem that we’re not done with Aeschylus!). Here, then, are the links:
If there is what Jaybird calls a “moral fabric to the universe”, surely it’s represented in Sophokles as fully as in any Passion play, and that’s really what gives Antigone it’s horrible inevitability: she knows her obligation and we know our obligation, in spite of our individual terms for that obligation- we can’t help but know.”
Coming into your Sophokles posts late, you may have already addressed this. In speaking of “moral fabric” and “godless,” how exactly do you mean these terms? They probably would have been anachronistic to the Greek city states at the time of Soph’s writing. Should we understand them slightly different than their connotations today?Report
@E.C. Gach, I’m using the terms in a modern sense because it’s really the only one I have- I don’t really think we can ever fully enter into the Greek mind, so we have no choice but to use our own terms to describe it to ourselves.
When I talk about a “moral fabric to the universe”, what I mean- and maybe Jay does too- is the sense that our ethical ideas actually resonate with something beyond humanity. That Antigone really can’t cross that ethical line without all of nature, personified in the gods, rising up against her. I tend to think of the tragedies as a bit like shasher films in which some aware or unaware transgression- I told them not to go into those woods! sets into motion a sort of doom machine that inevitably kills or mutilates the transgressors. So, for me, the moral fabric is the sense that there really are natural laws that can’t be violated without catastrophic results ensuing.
When I say that I’m godless, it’s because I only suspect such an order, which for a religious person is tantamount to disbelief. Certainly, Sophokles had no doubt that there was a sacred order that enforced certain ethical obligations, and he addressed that order throughout his life. For Jews, Christians and Muslims, that order is, of course, quite different, although the terms are similar. For myself, I don’t claim that the billions of people who have addressed the Divine and obeyed what they saw as its commandments weren’t essentially right, but I have no personal experience of such an order and am deeply pessimistic that anything like “God” would have any interest in me or my sins, or any desire to save me. My suspicion of a moral fabric to the universe is thus something like my suspicion that mothers really have an immediate bond with their newborn children- I have no experience of this whatsoever, but assume they know better I do what they’re talking about.Report
So my current pet theory as to why this play appears to have two tragic figures (Antigone and Kreon): because there are two competing and mutually exclusive sets of “religious obligation”: Kreon may be a statist, but he’s a statist who invokes the Justice of Zeus in his burial decree, and who is constantly citing Zeus’ Justice in his defense. Antigone, while she, too, is invoking a super-human Justice, is invoking something much more cthonic: she goes so far as to invoke Hades in her defense. (I think that’s a dangerous thing for her to do — physically, not logically — but that’s another discussion.)
The problem is that they both seem to have equal claims to rightness. Yes, even Kreon: burial rites were religious rites, and dead ancestors played an important role in the ancient religious life. Kreon wants — I believe he says it explicitly at one point — to prevent sacrilege. (And teach people a lesson about rebellion. But you knew that.) And Polyneikes rebelled against his own city and family — he was the aggressor, and he violated the divine order we’ve spoken of. Kreon thinks that Justice requires some sort of distinction between loyal and unloyal between the self-same brothers who died a self-same death at one another’s hands — and Thebans, even those who maybe personally wouldn’t mind allowing a burial, have the initial reaction of shrugging and saying, “Well, I guess he’s got a point.”
So, even considering the fact that Antigone is ultimately shown to be right*, Sophokles is also making a point about the difficulty in deciding between completing claims to divine justice. It’s not even that there were different interpretations of justice — there were two different justices thrown into conflict. (Note that no one challenges the existence of the cthonic Justice Antigone cites.) They bring in tired old Tiresias — and his sacrifices sputter and are rejected by the gods, who tell him nothing. He sides with Antigone, but as a theory for why the sacrifice was rejected.
*But how right was she? So her Justice trumped Kreon’s; but she’s very much a fanatic — I don’t think there’s any question about it. And I don’t think that Sophokles wants us to look on this positively. She doesn’t just want to bury her brother. She wants to join him. She wants to be a martyr — once she’s in the tomb, she hangs herself and brings down curses on Kreon — even though he has just realized she was correct. Whereas Oedpius is an appealing, charismatic figure you’re pained to see fall, both Kreon and Antigone are barely, if at all, likeable. They both think they’re “The One”: to redeem Thebes, or at least Justice. One certainly (perhaps both) thinks she has heard the voice of God — but her language also betrays an almost incestuous passion to “be with” her brother in Hades (the wordplay in the original is really quite remarkable at times). I think it’s just as likely as not that, as is so often supposed of Kreon, she picked her side first, and fit it into a scheme of divine justice second.
In the end, of course, Thebes loses. Again. But then again, they’re out of Labdakids now, so maybe Thebes wins, after all…Report
@J.L. Wall, These are good points. Let me read it again tomorrow and then comment.Report
I think Kreon’s idea of justice is maybe more tied to the Theban state, while Atingone’s might be more universal. However, your idea of one as the law of Zeus and the other as a more cthonic law makes would work with that. Have you ever noticed how often in these tragedies the women are more closely allied with a more primitive cthonic religion? Here, I think you could almost see Kreon as representing civilization and Antigone as nature, although I don’t know how far I’d want to push that old dichotomy.
Kreon does evoke sacred law as well- Polyneikes was a traitor who probably smashed some temples along the way and Kreon seems to see all gods as local gods, which of course they were. Antigone’s point is that every man is owed a decent burial, which is also a sacred law, but more universal. I just noticed what you mean about her feelings for her brother- the Chorus actually says that she is going to die for love, and her explanation of that love does raise questions. And then there’s Haemon’s death, also for love. One great thing about Antigone- there’s just so much going on there!
Anyway, I guess I’m more sympathetic to Antigone, even if she is a religious fanatic. Kreon’s take on sacred law is too closely tied to the interests of the state for me, and her ideas, while they are a bit self-aggrandizing, are more universalizing as well. She seems disinterested in the fate of Thebes, which is understandable given what happened to Papa.Report