It has been a fascinating process to read Sophoclesis play, Oedipus the King , with fresh eyes, mentally carving away the things I “know” about the story, in particular Freudis application of it to human psychology and my own spiritual take on it (in part derived from the popular show “The Gospel at Colonus”). As my preconceptions dropped away, several dramatic ways in which this extraordinary drama moves away from the early Akkadian cosmgony, “Enuma Elish” and Hesiodis “Theogony” revealed themselves.
These pivotal stories illustrated clear ways in which the peoples of Babylon, early Greece and classical Greece differed from one another, especially with regard to their relationships to their deities. In the earlier writings the gods are the only players in the story they are clearly central to the lives of the Akkadians and the early Greeks. Oedipus the King, on the other hand, features human beings as the central figures – the players of greatest interest. While Sophocles mentions the gods and even allows his characters to invoke them, he keeps them on the sidelines with regard to the meaningful events of the story.
Closely connected to this shift in emphasis, the gods in the later Greek work seem to be losing their power. At several points the characters threaten to lose faith in the gods and oracles unless their guidance and information prove accurate. When Oedipus learns that his adoptive father has died a peaceful, natural death, exultant at his apparent vindication, he declares, “But they, the oracles, as they stand heis taken them away with him, theyire dead as he himself is, and worthless. ” (Oedipus the King, p. 1)
This kind of questioning of the Godsi power would have been unthinkable in the earlier cultures. We might confidently infer that the classical Greeks had their basic needs met. They lived in a period of relative peace and plenty, free from external threat. This undoubtedly allowed them to begin posing the larger more troubling philosophical questions in safety and freedom.
In another dramatic shift, patricide and incest, which in the previous writings are essential aspects of the cosmogonies acted by the gods, critical to the birth of the cosmos and, in fact, the very actions from which order arises become human taboos. If enacted, even unwittingly, they carry the gravest, indeed the most tragic consequences for those involved. When it is confirmed that Oedipus has murdered his father and married his mother, his lament is most pitiful. “O marriage, marriage, you bred me and again when you had bred bred children of your child and showed to men brides, wives and mothers and the foulest deeds that can be in this world of ours. ibid P. 170,171))
In Sophoclesis play, humans have wrested the big emotions and actions away from the gods. Suffering, fate, life and death become issues for humans to grapple with not by removing them and projecting them onto the gods but by acknowledging their humanness and attempting to pose questions and propose answers around those eternal mysteries. The classical Greeks have taken an enormous step in the expansion of human consciousness.
There is something noble and mature about a people who would allow one of its cultural icons to speak these words: “You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus, – him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful, – not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him. Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain. ” These words would never be found in the mouth of a Babylonian or an early Greek.
