Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Great Soul Robbery

12. Heracles: Deus ex Machina

12 Heracles Deus ex Machina Renunciation is the cornerstone of wisdom, the condition of all genuine achievement. The gods, in asking for a sacrifice, may invite us to give up not a part of our food or our liberty but the foolish and inordinate part of our wills. The sacrifice may be dictated to us not by a jealous enemy but by a far-seeing friend, wishing we may not be deceived. If what we are commanded to surrender is only what is doing us harm, the god demanding the sacrifice is our own ideal. He has no interests in the case other than our own; he is no part of the environment; he is the goal that determines how far we should proceed in order to realize as far as possible our inmost aspirations. When religion reaches this phase it has become thoroughly moral. It has ceased to represent or misrepresent material conditions, and has learned to embody spiritual goods. George Santayana, The Life of Reason There is a human loneliness; A part of space and solitude, In which knowledge cannot be denied, In which nothing of knowledge fails, The luminous companion, the hand, The fortifying arm, the profound Response, the completely answering voice, That which is more than anything else The right within us and about us, Joined, the triumphant vigor, felt, The inner direction on which we depend, That which keeps us the little that we are, The aid of greatness to be and the force. Wallace Stevens, “The Sail of Ulysses” 190 T he most problematic issue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the epiphany of Heracles with which the play concludes. One of the stage devices used in the ancient Athenian theater was a platform that could be rolled out above the heads of the human actors when a god made an appearance in the play. Whence the Greek phrase, which has come into English via Latin as deus ex machina, “the god (speaking) from the machine.” Plato introduced this idiom into our vocabulary, both naming the device and explaining its dramatic function. In the Cratylus, in the discussion on the origin of human language, he has Socrates say that in human affairs we must always search for a human etiology. To invoke the gods as the ultimate causes would be no explanation at all but a confession of failure. We must not, Socrates says, do as the tragic poets do: “When they are in a state of aporia, they flee to their machines, bringing out the gods on high.”1 Heracles’ appearance in this play is this machine in its most flagrant use. While this epiphany would certainly earn Plato’s condemnation since the god’s interference aborts the process of human reason, it also seems plainly a violation of simple dramatic plausibility. When Plato has Socrates speak of the tragic poets’ machine, he uses it as a metaphor to refer to a principle that was indeed fundamental in the thinking of the tragic poets, one to which he was vigorously opposed, that gods would interfere in human action to cause human failures or suffering. But without the gods supervising, scheming, or interfering, there would be no Athenian tragedy. Whether the tragic poet employs the machine or not, every tragedy depends ultimately on the ideological machinery of the gods. Whether visible or invisible, malign or benevolent , the gods are the operators in the human drama, turning the cogs and wheels and tripping the levers of human action. In many of the tragedies that we possess today, some god is the agent who precipitates the catastrophe. In the Philoctetes, however, Heracles is brought in on the machine not to precipitate the tragedy but to prevent it. This is doubly problematic. A god who instigates a human tragedy may be unacceptable in Plato’s cosmology, but the concept has a certain human plausibility . Human actions, however well intentioned, can be undermined by what humans in times of stress are likely to call the will of the gods. Heracles’ action in this play is implausible in that the action has been proceeding inexorably in one direction, and only when each human character has reached his final and irrevocable position does Heracles appear, and with one short pronouncement he effectively erases the Heracles 191 whole development of the plot. The issues of this play could certainly have been resolved in human terms, but the point of the play...