Tragic Wisdom
Greek tragedy is a kind of scripture that teaches us by showing,
not telling, what we need to know. I call it a scripture because it is a religious
discourse about human beings and their relationships to the divine realm of
abundance and to the material world of scarcity. But it is also drama, a
scripted matrix of interpersonal words and actions, as human and social as any
conversation in the audience. Like all drama, tragedy is about individuals, but
it also speaks to public life – Thebes and Athens and Corinth are not just
crowded places but living societies with their own crises, wounds, and needs. Oedipus
himself is a gifted man, endowed with an intellectual power that exposes him to
special dangers. But he is also the Everyman that Freud made him. Though most
people are spared the crimes of patricide and incest, and though psychoanalysis
may have been wrong to posit a repressed yearning for them in every heart, it
remains permanently true that nobody is in complete control of his own destiny.
Just as we, the audience, can read the very script which the characters must
live out, so the gods can read the fates which we must live
out. Tragedy puts us (for once!) in the divine position of the invulnerable
spectator, free to experience a safe terror as we identify with the endangered
hero; free to feel a guarded pity for him insofar as we enjoy our blessed
distance from his ruin.
Austere as it is, the art of Sophocles comes
closer to life than any treatise on ethics could. It is free of precepts and
instruction; within it, only experience teaches. Indeed, the work of growing up
and old has in common with these tragedies the power to disclose necessary
knowledge without the distortions that come with direct expression. As
Oedipus learns, direct expression doesn’t work anyway: he and Laius are each
given clear oracles which they cannot successfully exploit. Apollo is not
silent, but mortal persons lack His divine leverage upon their own affairs;
without it, they can’t use what they’ve been told. Any person, couple, family,
or nation that has ever disregarded a prescient warning will recognise the
exquisitely human agony of the tragic hero and his people. It was Nietzsche who
found life in this world so unjust and horrific that it ‘could only be
justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.’ For him, Greek tragedy showed how the
most grievous dilemmas and disasters have a wild beauty which only suffering
reveals. There is a dangerous truth to this Nietzschean idea, because a
misreading might allow interested opportunists to claim that all pain can
be regarded as tragically beautiful, including whatever they or their leaders
may choose to inflict. But tragedy is a picture of human suffering whose
meaning inheres in its absolute inevitability; nothing could be more different
from the sadist’s license to deliberate cruelty.
Apollo destroys Oedipus: not the Sphinx, not
Creon, not some invading army. In Homeric epic, Apollo physically strikes Patroclus
between the shoulder blades, and soon the man dies in battle. In Sophoclean
tragedy, the god wields the man’s own nature as the instrument of his
destruction. Teiresias warns ‘Apollo is enough,’ and in his eventual agony
Oedipus combines this with his own responsibility:
Chorus
O you who have done
terrible things,
How did you endure the
breaking of your eyes?
Which of the Gods had set
you on?
Oedipus
It was Apollo! Apollo, O
my friends –
That brought my wicked
sufferings to pass;
But no one struck my eyes
But I myself in
desperation.
The god creates the conditions for the crimes
which the man commits; then the man, by way of his noble character, punishes himself.
This passage is special because it repeats Homeric motifs – the question ‘which
of the Gods,’ followed by the answer ‘Apollo,’ comes from the opening of the Iliad, and the image of a
blinded man who attributes his mutilation to ‘No one’ comes from the Cyclops episode
in the Odyssey. But the ethical structure is distinctly Sophoclean. In Antigone, the tyrant Creon issues
an edict that criminalises pious acts which the heroine then performs, through her
noble character; she opts for the punishment when she commits the crime, and
makes no effort to avoid capture. Near the end, she tells Ismene that ‘I chose
to die’; but a little later she says Hades is leading her to the banks of the
river Acheron, then says that Creon is leading her captive. The god, the self,
and the other are brought into a special, disastrous kind of contact that
irreversibly changes the people without changing the god at all.
In Oedipus the Tyrant, we’re
told of Laius that ‘fate drove down into his power,’ but we also hear Oedipus
describe the stick-fight that killed the man. In Antigone, the ruined Creon says
‘the God struck down into my head.’ But in the same speech he takes the personal
and human responsibility we recognize from the protagonists of the other plays:
‘The blame of it can never move / And be affixed to some man’s guilt, away from
mine! / It was I . . . ’ It is crucial that the person at the center of the
story be disposed to tragic suffering by his or her nature. What is
irresistible is not simply the might of the god, nor the epistemic traps of
logical entailment that comprise the plot; it is the performed fact of the person’s
life as he or she lives it. The truth here disappears if we hide it in the word
‘character’; nobility is not some constraint that forces Oedipus to wound
himself, Antigone to break a bad law, Creon to keep his word at all costs. Nor
is it a magical property resting on a shelf in the mind until the circumstances
warrant its use. It is an ethically strong moment that becomes aesthetically compelling
when viewed from the safety of the amphitheater or the library. Tragic
decisions are made at the peril of one’s own moral life. The willingness to
endure meaningful suffering – no matter how futile – is the only route to the
salvation (literally, ‘saving’) of that moral life without which meaning is
impossible.
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