THE RECOVERY OF A COMPREHENSIVE VIEW
OF GREEK TRAGEDY
© Paul Epstein
1 An accurate view of Greek Tragedy
is currently very much a desideratum. While in the poetical
world of Tragedy, a human individuality is formed through the imitation of the gods by
participation in the life of Family and State, contemporary views obscure this divine-human
dialectic. Falling within the logic developed by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, they assume a
human individuality complete in itself and make it the subject of the tragic action. [1]
2 At stake in the recovery of a
comprehensive view of Greek Tragedy is not mere archaeological
exactness, but a right understanding of our spiritual history, ancient and modern. Tragedy has
played an essential role in the development of that Hellenic spirit which together with the Judaic
has animated our Western and Christian civilization. Moreover, a profound enthusiasm for Greek
Tragedy has captured the European imagination since the end of the eighteenth century, and a
deeper interpretation than that of Nietzsche is necessary to make that enthusiasm comprehensible.
3 This article proposes, therefore,
first to locate Tragedy in its general spiritual context, by presenting
it as a further development of the spiritual world that the war between the Titans and Olympians
has established. Second, it will argue that the Nietzschean view of tragedy does not respect the
primacy of the Olympian gods in the formation of human individuality. Third, in a consideration
of Antigone it proposes to suggest an interpretation of one tragedy in accord with the principles
expressed more generally in the first two parts of the article. Lastly, it will seek to show that in its
discovery of a rational humanity imitative of the gods lies the true interest of tragedy both as part
of our history and our contemporary life.
4 First, the world of Tragedy, as
that of Homeric Epic, assumes the result of the war between the
Olympian gods and the Titanic powers, i.e. the more rational powers such as Zeus, Apollo and the
like have overthrown the nature powers, and the undeveloped spiritual gods such as Dike and
Nemesis, associated with them. The poet then shows a collision that is at once human and divine
within the spiritual world that the triumph of the Olympians has created. This collision can result
from a conflict within the polis or between an essential aspect of the polis and the earlier Titanic
realm. The result is a unified divine-human cosmos.
5 The differences among the three
great tragedians arise from their peculiar treatments of this
unification, and especially from their differences in presenting the particular balance of divine and
human through whose action the unification is accomplished. This can be best illustrated by
well-known examples from each tragedian. In the Oresteiaë of Aeschylus, the conflict appears
first as a human conflict, between Orestes and his mother Clytaemnestra; the son asserts, on behalf
of his father, the rights of marriage, by killing his mother, while Clytaemnestra asserts the
inviolable tie of mother to son. This conflict is clarified first by the collision of the gods who
embody these different rights, Apollo, who represents the Olympian right of marriage, and the
Furies, who represent the more Titanic right of the blood-tie. Only Zeus' daughter, however,
acting for her father, can reconcile these rights. She does so by giving the primacy to what Apollo
represents, and then acknowledging the Furies by drawing them into the polis of Athens as
necessary supporters of this Olympian institution. Thus, while the reconciliation can be effected
only by Athena, only the polis can be the locus of that reconciliation.
6 Sophocles does not like Aeschylus
show the realm of the Olympian gods in its foundation through
the drawing of the Titanic realm into itself. Rather, assuming the establishment of the Olympian
world, he shows the tragic hero discovering that he must reverence equally the gods of the upper
world and the lower world, by living in both the State and the Family: the gods of the upper world
protect the State. while the gods of the underworld protect the Family. Thus in Antigone, for
example, Creon learns to his ruin that he cannot so govern the State as to make it sovereign over
the family obligations of Antigone, and she learns that she cannot disregard the State in so fulfilling
them.
7 This catastrophe joins together human activity with the realm of divine essentiality. Both Creon and Antigone have a total experience of divinity, which is revealed thereby as itself radically one. Creon has experienced first, the rational and active subjectivity of the ruler, which belongs to the gods of the upper world, and in the course of the play comes to experience the opposite extreme, the pure potentiality of Hades and the Family; the movement between these two extremes constitutes his tragic career. Antigone experiences the same unification of opposites but begins from the side of the Family, and ends with particular subjectivity. Thus in Sophoclean tragedy humanity realizes itself by experiencing at the same time catastrophe and actual imitation of the gods. Thus Sophoclean drama ends with the ambiguity that, while human subjectivity has no reality independent of divine life, humans and not gods make the divine reality actual.
8 Euripides presents a tragic world
in which, at the same time, the division between Titanic and
Olympian again appears and the relation between the drama and the spectator becomes explicit.
In the Bacchae Dionysus himself causes the collision between the Bacchic unification with
nature and the institutional life of the Family and State. At the beginning of the play the god
announces to the audience, a type of address unique to Euripides amongst the tragedians, that his
divinity has been slighted by his own family. Since he is a son both of Zeus and a mortal woman,
this means that not only is participation in the life of family and State part of the due worship of
Zeus, but also the mystical union with nature made real in his son. The play shows the dreadful
consequences for humanity of not properly integrating this mysticism with the life of the polis, but
as indicated before, the absolute necessity of this happening if the gods are to be properly
acknowledged. The play ends with this dilemma facing not only the characters of the drama, but
the audience as well.
9 Aristophanic Comedy then
indicates that only an actual individual can unite the Titanic and
Olympian elements concretely. No god and no merely poetic hero can accomplish this, but only
the comic hero, drawn from the most vulgar elements of contemporary Athenian life, and then
purged of this vulgarity. The comic hero reduces all divine essentiality to moments of his activity
and thus marks the end of Greek religion. [2]
10 In each of the tragedians only the entire drama indicates to the hero and the spectator the true nature of human and divine life. At the beginning of the drama, the central characters have a limited, one-sided view of divinity, and their action is animated by a similarly partial view of humanity. Only the hero's (or heroes') experience of an opposed aspect of both human and divine life then indicates the true nature of each. Often the revelation of a deeper view of both humanity and the gods comes only at the expense of the heroes' death. In the Women of Trachis for example, both Deianeira and Heracles experience the whole realm of divinity; yet Heracles ends by commanding his own death, while his wife has already killed herself. Thus while it is always human action that leads to the disclosure of the divine and human natures, this action always arises only as a certain imitation of the gods.
11 If, then, one should imagine an
allegedly complete and self-subsistent human individual as from
the beginning the subject of the drama, this would altogether obscure the meaning of Greek
Tragedy. Such an assumption, however, animates the various interpretations of Tragedy offered
over the last century and a half, and has rendered tragedy altogether opaque to contemporaries.
The Birth of Tragedy [3] by Friedrich Nietzsche offers the deepest expression of this
contemporary view, and an examination of it, although brief, will go far in indicating why our age
can little understand that Tragedy which draws us so powerfully.[4]
12 Nietzsche's view of tragedy is based
on a distinction seemingly original with him, between the
Dionysian and the Apollonian.[5] The latter is the principium individuationis, the former the
ground of the human's sense of himself as joined to `being', which is really a `becoming'.
Normally, says, Nietzsche, these two principles operate separately, but in Tragedy they are brought
together. There, he argues, the human being in his assumed individuality has the veil removed
from his eyes and discovers that his true existence is as nothing less than Being itself; the existence
of a world over and above the truly free individual is thus revealed as utterly illusory.
13 The excellence of Nietzsche's view
lies in his knowledge that Tragedy reveals a truth not
previously known about human nature, and that this truth is the relation of humanity to ultimate
reality. However, as the argument supra has indicated, Nietzsche misconstrues the nature not only
of man and ultimate reality but the relation between the two. The nature of the gods and of men in
Tragedy assumes the victory of the Olympian gods over their predecessors, the Titans; there then
occurs both a human and divine movement toward a more concrete relation of these elements than
indicated in this myth. While the hero moves toward a concreteness analogous to the gods, the
action always revealed his action as depending on the gods as its ground. Thus Nietzsche's idea of
`being' as that which describes the human individual's true existence as the ultimate reality does not
properly acknowledge the concrete rule of reason which is essential to Tragedy's account of both
divinity and humanity. Nor can Nietzsche account for the difference between man and god that
Tragedy also maintains.
14 Nietzsche's obscuring of the
divine-human relation has its ground in his distinction between Apollo
and Dionysus. Apollo does not simply represent a principium individuationis, nor Dionysus
simply the union with Being. In Oedipus the King, Apollo illumines not only the man who solves
riddles by human reason, but the seer who has an unmediated knowledge as a servant of the god.
Apollo is the god both of the individual par excellence and of him who proves to be his nemesis.
Nor is Dionysus alone the god who leads men to find their individuality in a mystic union with
nature. As the patron of both Tragedy and Comedy, he leads men to a deeper sense of that
individuality, in Tragedy to know their dependence on the Olympian gods whom they imitate, and
in Comedy to know themselves as the true actuality of these same gods.
15 If the Bacchae of Euripides
were the only tragedy extant, one might be moved to agree with
Nietzsche's definition of the Dionysian. In that play Bacchus does lead those women oppressed by
the rigidities of life in the polis away from the city to Mount Cithaeron, there to enjoy the
wholeness of union with nature. The king who would rule by a purely technological reason
nevertheless is attracted to the god but can experience his cult only at the expense of his utter ruin.
Yet even the Bacchae does not fully support Nietzsche's position. Dionysian exaltation is
presented not only as a great good but as the ruin of ethical institutions, King Pentheus suffering
death at the hands of his unknowing mother. This ambiguous conclusion points to the need for a
more comprehensive world that can do justice at once to realm of the institutions of the polis and
a Bacchic mysticism of nature.
16 In Frogs the comic
playwright
Aristophanes shows that this need for a more inclusive world is not
something imposed from outside on the god Dionysus but lies in the very reality of the god
himself. This play, produced about the same time that Euripides produced his Bacchae (405 B.C.)
shows Dionysus in search of himself. He finds himself as he experiences those festivals that lead
men to a knowledge of their individuality, and in all three of these, he communicates the life of the
gods to men. First, as associated with the mystery cults, he helps men to participate in the life of
nature. Then he experiences Tragedy as the festival of his that leads men to a knowledge of
themselves as citizens. Since Dionysus does this as the hero of a Comedy, he has experienced the
unification of both these ends, the mystical union with nature, and the political realm of
citizenship, for human enjoyment.
17 A brief analysis of the Antigone will illustrate the points made above. The action of the drama shows the discovery of a total human individuality through the collision of the two central characters. Each begins the drama with a one-sided view of both community and the gods but discovers in catastrophe the fulness of both. The drama shows that only by a total imitation of the divine life on which humans depend can they realize a full humanity.
18 The action and the knowledge of the
main characters is initially divided. Antigone knows only the
Family while her action presupposes the principle of the State. Creon knows only the State, while
his action presupposes also the Family. This duality governs not only the two heroes but all
characters, and from the beginning the movement toward the overcoming of this one-sidedness
animates the action. Antigone tells her sister Ismene that despite Creon's forbidding it, they must
both undertake to bury Polyneices. Antigone takes no interest in the question that concerns
Creon, of whether Polyneices died fighting nobly or traitorously; nevertheless, not with the
inwardness of family feeling, she makes Ismene's willingness to act on behalf of their brother the
measure of her being a true sister, not only to Polyneices but to Antigone as well. Thus from the
beginning she implicitly unites the givenness of family life with the active principle of the State,
while avowing consciously only the principle of the family.
19 Creon, from the directly opposite
view, announces, as he enters to forbid burial for Polyneices,
and to command it for Eteocles, that only in the ruler of the State can one see the full exercise of
the powers of reason. Yet he demands complete obedience to his edict from all the citizens. He
decides on the edict as a king, according to political reason; but he expects the kind of obedience
that a father expects from his children, given out of trust and love, not self-conscious thought. He
unites in his management of the State the givenness that belongs to family life with the activity that
moves the State. Thus like his adversary, he acts only in part on a known principle, ignorant in his
case of the family principle that also moves him.
20 Between the entrance of Antigone and
that of Creon, Ismene and the chorus express views that
fall between these two extremes. Neither seeks to sum up the whole world of Family and State
according to the logic of one of these realms, but consciously to unite aspects of both. Thus while
the allegiance of Ismene is primarily to her brother, she recognizes if not the authority, at least the
power, of Creon. The chorus, while it abhors the deed of Polyneices, cannot approve the
proposed punishment; they hate his attacking the State, yet revere his family's right to bury him.
These intermediate characters, although they recognize more directly the two realms that do the
heroes, also do so less comprehensively than the heroes eventually do.
21 From the beginning of the play, then,
each character potentially unites the two realms of Family
and State. The totality of these characters and their activity depends on Zeus, whose being
underlies the entire drama without his very directly appearing. Antigone appeals to him as the god
whose reality is the underworld and the Family; she makes him actual by burying her brother in
obedience to the dictates of that realm. For his part, Creon worships Zeus as the god who defends
the State and the upper world; he gives reality to the divine essence by decreeing that no traitor
can be given honour by anyone in the State, even his family.
22 While the two central characters make
Zeus present in the most radical way, the other characters,
although less comprehensively, also do so, through the peculiar form in which they unite Family
and State. An entire spiritual world thus presents itself to the imagination of the spectator. He
sees the divine essence diversely and yet entirely realized through human activity in the two main
institutions.
23 As indicated above, the first of the
play's three parts shows the positions of' the opposed heroes as
they are in themselves. The second part then shows them in direct conflict, and the third in
catastrophe and knowledge, as the ruined heroes acknowledge the realm that each has earlier
rejected. Thus after the exposition of their views as indicated above, Antigone and Creon confront
each other, the guard having caught Antigone in the very act of performing the forbidden deed.
Creon asserts his devotion to the political realm, and the gods above, against Antigone, his own
niece, who is made guilty of a capital crime by this measure. Antigone, by saying that Zeus
belongs truly to the world below, and that the family is the true institution, thus declares Creon's
rule to be illegitimate, and this to his very face.
24 The third part sees Antigone coming
gradually to recognize the State, and the gods above, and
Creon to acknowledge the family and the gods below. The first stage in this transformation
involves their conflicting attitudes to Ismene. She appears in order to claim some share in her
sister's condemnation, and immediately upon seeing her, Creon declares her guilty of the crime.
This can arise only from Creon's implicit sense of family solidarity, which is altogether new; he
acknowledges the family, if only as a force opposed to him. Antigone, for her part, refuses to
allow her sister to share in her punishment. Just as Creon had not decided to punish Antigone
until he knew her guilty of an intentional act, so she regards feeling alone as insufficient and makes
the commission of an external act the condition of Ismene's suffering punishment; after being
prompted by the chorus, Creon agrees. Here then Antigone looks to the more active principle of
the State as her measure.
25 The next scene, between Creon and his
son Haimon, shows how both have been involved in the
realms that their explicit theories cannot understand, and how each will suffer by following his
view to the end. We see that Antigone, silent here, by being betrothed to Haimon has involved
herself in the beginning of a new family, and does not live only in the community that she has
received from her parents.Creon has also lived in the realm that he has not consciously defended,
by founding a family. When he argues with his son the latter says he speaks on behalf of the
world below, a position that Creon violently rejects. Yet the only position that Creon advances in
this argument is that of obedience, both in the Family and State. This is the principle, however, of
a patriarchal community, which can as truly be described as a family as a State. Like Antigone,
Creon assimilated the one community to the other. Also like her, he has not sensed the
contradiction to his original position that he has been living, and now articulating.
26 Only in catastrophe do the heroes come
to explicitly reverence that which they had earlier spurned.
Antigone's reversal comes first, as Creon sentences her to death by being immured in a cave.
Before she is led away, she bemoans her unmarried state. Since she had defended the
brother-sister relation, she now desires that state of marriage which is the actuality of this given
state. She had earlier spoken as if this tie to a brother, received from their parents, were sufficient
to define her. The scene with Ismene had shown her making action a necessary part of the familial
tie, and now she completes this by stating her desire for marriage. In choosing her defence of her
brother as her greatest good, she has deprived herself of that which necessarily develops out of this
good. Moreover, Antigone says that she would defy the State only in this regard, on account of
this relation's uniqueness; thus at the end she recognizes that the family relation forms one aspect
of a spiritual whole. By being true to her one-sided devotion to her brother, she deprived herself
of the enjoyment of the fulfilment of that relation, but has a deep knowledge of the whole world of
ethical relations. The untimely loss of her particular life is the cost of this comprehensive insight.
27 Creon's ruin results from the opposite
one-sidedness. Because he has tried to govern the family
according to the principles of the State, he loses his entire participation in the life of the Family, his
wife and son. The catastrophe begins after Creon has reached the culmination of his one-sidedness
when he has sent Antigone away to die in a tomb. Teiresias then arrives to denounce him; he
accuses Creon of confounding the upper and lower worlds, i.e., the realm of the State and that of
the Family. Creon's attempt to free Antigone, urged by Teiresias, is unsuccessful, with her suicide
having preceded his arrival. His wife and son thereupon also kill themselves, and Creon is left, as
his son earlier had sarcastically said, as the ruler of a desert.
28 Thus both Creon and Antigone attain,
in one way, what they have desired. Creon, having asserted
the State as the governing principle of community, lives only in the State, his family having died.
Antigone, for her part, having asserted the givenness of family life, is left only with that, the
beginning of family life in marriage being impossible for her. At the same time, however, each
realizes what he has lost. Through this realization, each has a knowledge of what he has not
originally taken account of. Since each has begun with one of the two opposite forms of
knowledge, each now has a knowledge not only of the family and the underworld gods associated
with it, but also the State and the gods of the upper world associated with it. Therefore, each has in
his ruin a vision of the totality of human community and the gods who underlie it.
29 The limit of this vision lies in the
starting-point of each of the two central characters. Antigone
begins with the family and underworld, Creon with the State and upper world. Thus only in their
complementarity, do they fully join the two realms together. It belongs more then to the spectator,
than the heroes to draw the requisite conclusions. The division between family and state, lower
gods and upper, as well as between female and male, are now seen to fall within a prior unity, fully
manifested only in the catastrophe of the heroes. Human activity has shown this prior unity, but
since humans reveal this only in their ruin, the true priority of the divine is also thereby shown.
30 Thus the Nietzschean view of Tragedy
as showing the identity of the particular individual with
`being' cannot withstand the examination of a play central to the tragic world. The category of
`being' is sufficient neither to man nor to the gods, and it cannot describe the peculiar imitation of
the gods that defines tragic humanity. Nietzsche's identification of man with ultimate reality
belongs to his own time, not to the original world of Tragedy.
31 An accurate knowledge of that Tragedy
in our time no more serves a merely antiquarian curiosity
than did the intellectual interest in Greco-Roman culture of previous ages in our Western and
Christian civilization. Whether to find a model in art and politics or to discover a philosophy
ancillary to Christian theology, our ancestors saw their relation to aspects of the ancient world as
necessary to their own self-understanding. In a similar vein, we cannot understand the historical
origins of the Christian religion nor the nature of a Christian secularity without understanding the
world that Greek Tragedy presents to our imaginations.
32 A knowledge of the peculiar form in
which Greek Tragedy unites humanity with the divine is
essential if one is to see the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as arising not from Judaism nor
Hellenic ideas alone but a perfect unification of the two. As was indicated above, Tragedy can
show men finitely imitating the gods that despite their movement away from a natural beginning,
remain limited. The concept of the Trinity integrates a divine-human unification with an absolutely
originative and creative first principle.[6] Tragedy, therefore, can indicate the finite moment of
this concept, which Judaism cannot, and at the same time, show the need for its grounding in an
originative principle, which only Judaism can supply.
33 Similarly the need to discover the
relation of a Christian secularity to its origins has also been
moving in the last two centuries' deep interest in Greek Tragedy. As the argument has shown, the
hero in Tragedy experiences a deep unification of ends in his action. Through the hero's joining
of family and State, and his experience thereby of the totality of the gods, the spectator has seen
the relation of his own ethical world to the absolute world of religion.
34 The need for an analogous unification
of ends has been a moving, if unconscious, force in the
cultural and institutional life of the last two hundred years. Several factors are at work here. First,
now that all social institutions are felt to correspond to the subjectivity of individuals, the need to
know the objectivity of institutions arises very strongly. Here, the reader of Tragedy would see
individuals moved by a pathos that was at the same time his own and a divinity. Second, the
world of the last two centuries has very much asserted the rights of the family and civil society
against the sovereign power of kings and the like. This is felt however not only as liberation, but
also the atomizing of society. The nature of the tragic collision, whereby the hero learns that he
has onesidedly identified himself with only one community, can speak very strongly to those who
feel this atomization.
35 Third, and perhaps most important,
modern society has felt the need not only to be independent of
ecclesiastical authority, but also to know the relation of a free society to religion.[7] The argument
has indicated that in Tragedy the communities uniting men and women together are the very
presence of the gods themselves. To an age struggling to find an analogous presence of the
Christian god, Greek Tragedy is an ever-present beacon.
Notes
[1] This does not imply that contemporary critics are professed Nietzscheans or even have read him. Rather it means that in their treatment of the divine-human relation they are able no more than Nietzsche to maintain the centrality of the gods but instead put humans centre-stage, and reduce the gods to being expressions of human emotions and states, the remnants of a mythological world, or a senseless fatality. For example Denys Page (Agamemnon, eds. Denys Page and J. Denniston, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957, p.xxii) can call the reconciliation of Athens and the Furies in the Oresteia only "an artificial contrivance." Sir Richard Jebb (Sophocles, Part III, Amsterdam, A.M. Hakkert, 1971, p. xx) reduces the Antigone to a conflict between the "duty of obeying the State's laws" and " the duty of listening to the private conscience." E.R. Dodds, in his edition of Bacchae ((Oxford , Clarendon Press, second edition, 1960, p. xiv) says that we see in this play that "we ignore at our peril the demand of the human spirit for Dionysiac experience." Dodds has thus reduced the awful worship of a god to human psychology.
[2] Birds indicates this explicitly; at the end of the play , the sovereignty of Zeus passes to the mortal hero.
[3] F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals, tr. F. Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956.
[4] George Steiner's book Antigones has a wealth of quotations to show the hold of Antigone on the modern imagination.
[5] Nietzsche, op. cit., pp. 19-24.
[6]John 1.
[7] At the very dawn of the contemporary period The Sorrows of Young Werther shows the striving of an individual to live out the logic of the Trinity in his daily life.