Oedipus at Colonus: A Crisis in the Greek Notion of Deity

Oedipus at Colonus: A Crisis in the Greek Notion of Deity Richard Forrer The living nerve of Sophoclean tragedy is man’s heroic en­ durance of irrational and uncontrollable evil. The Sophoclean hero typically labors beneath an intolerable burden of cruelties which rolls and grinds upon the hero until his need to throw it off becomes an inner necessity. He must continually justify a life that is offensive to others. The festering wound of Philoctetes represents such an offensiveness which the gods inflict upon him as a punishment, though he has committed no crime. His com­ rades abandon him on a desert island where, like Oedipus in his wanderings after his banishment from Thebes, he must live in isolation from his fellow men. Thus do both suffer stigmatization by the gods. Each claims that his suffering confers certain rights upon him, and that their fulfillment alone constitutes an adequate justice. Sophocles focuses his lucid vision on the unwanted fate and the quest for justice in order to evaluate the moral and spir­ itual authority of such rights to which the suffering lays claim. Perhaps the events of the latter half of the fifth century, when Sophocles wrote, partially explain Sophocles’s preoccupation with the tensions between man’s desire for justice and the uncontrolla­ ble aspects of life shaping his destiny. Athens, at the height of her power on land, had consolidated her empire. But the pro­ longed Peloponnesian war demoralized the city and finally ended in her defeat at Sparta’s hands two years after Sophocles’s death. Tyrants arose, arbitrary rule prevailed, and men questioned the past notion of justice inherited from the Eliatic philosophical tra­ dition. The Eliatic philosophers had developed a teleological view of life that explained everything according to a divine plan which was rationally comprehensible and universally applicable to all men.l The famous saying of Anaximander is often quoted 328 Richard Forrer 329 to summarize this view of justice: “It is necessary that things should pass away into that from which they are bom. For things must pay one another the penalty and compensation for their injustice according to the ordinance of time.”2 This notion, that an unalterable justice is built into the very nature of things, emerged alongside the rise of the Greek city-state. The early citystate was in fact an effort to give social-political expression to this eternal order of justice.3 The sophists, however, challenged this inherited framework of moral-religious thought. Not only did they argue that divinity is a human projection; given this nihilistic presupposition, they also argued that “justice” is only a convenience of language, a catch-all term for pragmatic expressions of self-interest and power.4 Might makes right, said the sophists, and therewith they tersely summarized the prevailing political cynicism of an era in which city-states fought and tyrants (like Creon in Antigone) made their personal whims the arbitrary standards of right and wrong. The teachings of the sophists are a kind of intellectual barometer. They indicate the Athenian’s rising despair as he witnessed his city’s failure to preserve the ideal of social justice which Athena exacted from Athens in its worship of her. In the midst of political intrigues and war, the individual’s fate was closely linked to the unpredictable caprices of power, and the question of how to survive an unwanted victimization must have been driven home to the individual with painful urgency.5 Per­ haps, as Werner Jaeger suggests, the fact that survival daily required the individual to compromise his best qualities eroded the Greek character and thereby facilitated the collapse of society.6 In any case, the anarchic social, political, and philo­ sophical forces were driving Greek society toward the tragic. Such at least is the testimony of many Greek tragedies, par­ ticularly those of Sophocles. The anarchic cultural milieu of the latter half of the fifth century comprises the moral universe which surrounds the Sophoclean hero. It is actively hostile to­ ward him, and thus leads him—as it does Oedipus—into tragic conflict with it. Not only is the anarchy of the age mirrored in the unwanted fate which the gods...