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
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