Initial Thoughts on Antigone: Love Vs. Respect

Our Great Books Round Two class is now working through Sophocles' play Antigone. The basic outline of the work pits the rules of a ruler named Creon against the personal conscience of a grieving sister named Antigone. Bearing the mark of a great work, its themes are universal but as nuanced as individuals.

Prior to reading the work, I knew that Creon was considered a "bad guy," a kind of prototypical dictator. However, when I read his comments and thoughts, my sympathies went out to him. Thebes, the city over which he rules, had just gone through a terrible war between two brothers competing for rule of the city. In the pivotal battle, both brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices die, but Eteocles went down defending the city while Polyneices led foreign forces in an attempt to conquer and raze the city. As a result, Creon honored Eteocles and attempted to dishonor Polyneices by not burying him.

Creon makes a legitimate point - to honor Polyneices would have been to dishonor everyone who had battled to save the city. However, Creon misses the all-important distinction between respecting someone's achievements as either good or evil versus someone's participation as a human being. It is an easy thing to miss as I did it for years.

In my family of origin, achievements were lauded. My parents were ambitious as they both received college educations at a time and place in which the majority did not. They praised achievement and punished sloth. Such training was perfectly sound for me. However I missed one crucial distinction in this training: praise does not equal love. Praise and respect are earnable, but love is not. Praise and respect are extrinsic, but love is intrinsic. For most of my life, I lumped praise and respect into the same basket as love. Creon makes the same mistake.

When Creon wishes to dishonor Polyneices, he crosses the line from extrinsic action to intrinsic. It would not have been a problem, for example, to strip him of money, name recognition or honorary degrees. But when Creon denied Polyneices a burial, Creon denied him an intrinsic form of love that humans cannot lose no matter what their extrinsic actions. This can be a bitter pill to swallow when the extrinsic actions have been horrendous, as they were in the case of Polyneices.

Polyneices's sister Antigone rebels and attempts to bury Polyneices and incurs punishment for violating Creon's rules. I found Antigone's speech to Creon to be of the same smug and self-righteous tone that I have found at different times in my life. Yet despite her tone, she was correct. Creon was wrong in the same way that I had been by withholding love from myself and others which is intrinsically deserved. And like Creon, the consequences of missing such a distinction have been deeply painful

Oresteia Thoughts

Having finished the Iliad, our Great Books class has moved on to the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus. Given a different personal history than many of my classmates, I find it useful to clarify my view of the work prior to the class discussion. 

The Oresteia is a work about family in the context of society. I don't view the work as primarily about gender or race although it seems as if every book is now read through those lenses. "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does that make it sexist or racist?" seems like a poor way to go through life. I believe that the work attempts to look at the relative power of intrafamily loyalties and how they function.  

While boating on a lake in Buffalo, NY when I was engaged to be married, my good friend Monsignor Henry Gugino asked me, "If your wife and your child both fell overboard and you had one life preserver to save just one, who would you throw it to?" I thought for a moment and answered, "my child." He told me that was the wrong answer. He informed me that the marriage bond was more important than the parental bond. 

Since I had not yet experienced the joys of a teen child, I argued that any parent would want to save the child. He argued back that we could always make more children. Further, he made an argument that as marrieds, we were united as one person and should have each other's back. I never really felt like that worked for me and that may have identified me as divorce-bound. For me, The Oresteia presents a similar problem.

First of all, there are three infidelities involved. #1 is background with Thyestes having an affair with his brother Atreus's wife. #2 is also background with Paris having an affair with Menelaus's (Atreus's son) wife. #3 is in the first part of the Oresteia with Aegisthus (Thyestes's son) having an affair with Agamemnon's (also Atreus's son). One takeaway is that if the men in the Atreus family were adequate lovers, then everyone would've been much better off. But they weren't and very different forms of hell break loose in response to infidelities #1, #2 and #3.

Hell form #1 is also background as Atreus calls his brother Thyestes back from exile to a dinner of reconciliation where he serves Thyestes his children as part of the meal. The marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. Hell form #2A is background as Agamemnon carries out a war to retrieve his brother's wife and sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia to do so. Again the marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. Hell form #2B is core to the second part of the Oresteia as Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra kills her husband when he returns home. Here the parental bond violation sets up the marriage bond violation. Hell form #3 is core to the third part of the Oresteia as Agamemnon's son Orestes kills Aegisthus and his own mother Clytemnestra. Again the marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. 

Hell form #1 seems completely insane. Hell form #2A seems unnecessary in terms of the child sacrifice for setting sail in what was going to be a long war anyway. But the real contrast of the Oresteia is hell form #2B versus hell form #3. Which is worse: to be a parent that kills a fellow parent for killing a child or to be a child that kills a parent for killing a fellow parent? The first structure places the parental bond above the marriage bond while the second places the marriage bond above the parental bond.

The first word of the work, θεους, sets up the divinities as the expressive forces at work. The older generation of divinities supported reproductive power, no different than the animal kingdom. These divinities supported condemnation of Orestes for placing marriage bond above parental bond. However, the newer generation of divinities were more concerned with human communal arrangements of peace and prioritized the communal power of marriage. These divinities supported Orestes and the work ends as a celebration of unity of peace.

I understand this concept and those words from Msgr. Gugino, but my heart still is unmoved and I feel 100% connected to Clytemnestra. Those old divinities still seem alive and well in me.

Mηνιν - the Iliad and stages of Grief

As some earlier posts reflect, I have been going through a review of the Iliad with classmates from 40 years ago. My focus has been on μηνιν, a Greek work that depicts a certain sense of rage or fury that is characteristic of Achilles and the first word of the poem.

Since looking at personal experiences of such rage, I have come to the conclusion that "outrage" is the correct translation. Next I spent time reviewing the arc or impact that this "outrage" had an Achilles. My classmates, more sensitive to the pain of others, have viewed his "outrage" as "murderous, pornographic and obscene." In some ways, I view my lack of sharing this view as personal insensitivity and in other ways, I continue to view that they have missed the point of the theater.

Achilles experiences "outrage" due to an injured sense of personhood by Agamemnon. He's being, in effect, called a nothing. The shock and then anger seems to follow the stages outlined by Kubler-Ross in grief. To me, grief is a process of accepting reality. As the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous declares, "acceptance is the answer to all my problems." Achilles' outrage leads him into an existential cocooning in which I believe he explores the question we all explore - what's is all about? and, as always, the endpoint of grief is clouded - what is it he is accepting?

In the midst of this exploration, he is approached by Agamemnon's people. This is the "bargaining" stage of grief. Like most bargaining stages, there is no progress. Achilles cannot recover the sense of meaning that he experienced before his personal affront by Agamemnon. Having been told (in his mind) that he is a nothing, Agamemnon's entreaties do not restore him to somethingness. The restoration would only confirm Agamemnon as the something and Achilles as nothing. 

Then his beloved Patroclus is killed wearing his armor. Of course it is significant that they are lovers. Patroclus is very much one with Achilles as much as contemporary marriage vows where two become one. Patroclus, though, represents his non-injured self. When Patroclus dies, that injured part, that injured self-state dies and receives a reincarnation in the form of Hector wearing Achilles' armor. The killing of Hector drives Achilles into a sadness or depression. Having been told he is nothing, that life has no meaning, he witnesses that nothingness.

To deal with this sadness, Achilles begin to go into a repetition compulsion. Repetition compulsion is driven by an underlying belief that if you do the same thing over and over again, you can get a different result. Everyday Achilles drags Hectors dead body around the camp three times. What finally knocks Achilles out of this sadness phase is the arrival of Priam for Hector's dead body. The power of Priam's kissing Achilles hands moves Achilles into the final phase of acceptance of life on life's terms. Not Achilles' terms. He becomes a part of a larger whole. Herein is the transformation from the fantasy of individual self to the reality of connected self. After that, Achilles expresses his connectedness with love and concern for those around him in the care of Priam and presiding over the games.