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Blind Faith and Political Rationalism in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2008

Peter J. Ahrensdorf
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Abstract

Political conflicts around the world increasingly reflect a religious challenge to liberal rationalism. Given the tendency of modern political rationalism to underestimate the power of religion, it seems reasonable to consider the classical analysis of religious antirationalism set forth with great clarity in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. The play seeks to demonstrate that religious antirationalism—as exemplified by Oedipus—is self-contradictory and self-destructive, but also that it is rooted in such enduring human traits as our awareness of our mortality, our hope for immortality, and our angry refusal to accept our mortality. Sophocles advocates a sober and cautious political rationalism that recognizes the dangers of religious passion to political life, but also the permanence of religious passion within political life. Such a political rationalism, embodied by Theseus, constitutes a middle way between a blind piety which rejects reason and an excessively hopeful political rationalism which underestimates the power of religion.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , Spring 2008 , pp. 165 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

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References

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 282. Tocqueville himself criticized that confidence.

2 For Sophocles' critique of immoderate political rationalism in Oedipus the Tyrant, see, e.g., Arlene Saxonhouse, “The Tyranny of Reason in the World of the Polis,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 1261–75; J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Peter J. Ahrensdorf, “The Limits of Political Rationalism: Enlightenment and Religion in Oedipus the Tyrant,” Journal of Politics 66 (2004): 773–99. Consider, too, Aristide Tessitore, “Justice, Politics, and Piety in Sophocles' Philoctetes,” Review of Politics 65 (2003): 61–88. Interpretations of Oedipus at Colonus have tended to conclude that Sophocles simply celebrates the “apotheosis” of the pious Oedipus (Arthur Waldock, Sophocles the Dramatist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966], 219; Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981], 406; see also David Grene, Reality and the Heroic Pattern [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], 157; Bernard Knox, The Heroic Temper [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964], 162; Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles, trans. Hazel Harvey and David Harvey [New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979]).

3 See 1–4, 20, 140–41, 149–52, 220–36, 324–30, 345–52, 551–59, 740–52, 939–49, 1254–63; also 75–76.

4 Cedric H. Whitman, Sophocles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 196–97.

5 1085–86, 1380–82; on the gods' providence, see 143, 275–91, 864–70, 1010–13, 1544–78. See also C.M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), 349, 351; Josh Beer, Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 155, 164–65.

6 See Knox, The Heroic Temper, 145; Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 365–66.

7 Many scholars stress the age of Oedipus rather than his blindness (e.g., R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 266). But since Antigone is still young after Oedipus's death—in Antigone, she is referred to four times as “maiden [κoρη]” (395, 769, 889, 1100) and seven times as “child [παις]” (378, 423, 561, 654, 693, 949, 987)—and since his uncle Creon is still alive, Oedipus must not be that old in Oedipus at Colonus.

8 See, e.g., Beer, Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy, 167.

9 Compare Oedipus at Colonus 72–74, 576–80 with Oedipus the Tyrant 438–42 and Oedipus at Colonus 864–70, 1370–96 with Oedipus the Tyrant 449–63 and Antigone 1064–86.

10 To solve the riddle of the Sphinx (whose content never appears in Sophocles), Oedipus uses reason to look past the sensible world, and the metaphors of the riddle, but in order to grasp the rationally discernible truth of mortality.

11 See Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 390; Knox, The Heroic Temper, 148; S. M. Adams, Sophocles the Playwright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 176.

12 Since Oedipus is last seen near a road that plunges down into the earth—apparently into a ravine—it is possible that Oedipus leaps to his death and his “tomb” is in the ravine. See 1590–97, 1647–66, 52–58; Richard C. Jebb, Sophocles: Oedipus Coloneus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 256–57.

13 One might think, based on the Antigone, that the gods reward Oedipus posthumously by answering his prayer that his sons kill each other. Yet by presenting in the Oedipus at Colonus Antigone's persuasive argument to Polyneices (1414–46) that he should not attack Thebes, Sophocles invites the reader to wonder whether the fratricide of Oedipus's sons was not caused by a combination of Polyneices' foolishness and chance rather than divine will.

14 Knox, The Heroic Temper, 150; see, e.g., Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 370.

15 Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, 259.

16 427–44, 765–71, 1195–200; see Oedipus the Tyrant 1182–85, 1265–79, 1327–415, 1432–41, 1515–21; Oedipus at Colonus 431–44, 765–71, 1130–38, 866–67, 1197–200.

17 Laura Slatkin, “Oedipus at Colonus: Exile and Integration,” in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 213.

18 Jebb, Sophocles: Oedipus Coloneus, 171–72, 210.

19 See, e.g., Trachiniae 1157–215; Plato Crito 51c2; Laws 869b7–c3; Aristophanes Clouds 1325–41, 1374–90, 1420, 1443–50; Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, 262.

20 For accounts of this thesis that were possibly familiar to Sophocles' audience, consider Thucydides 1.75–76, 2, 5.105, 3.44–45; Plato Meno 77b2–78b8, Laws 860d1–861e1; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1109b30–1114b25, 1135a15–1136b14, 1145b2–1152a36.

21 Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, 314–15; Adams, Sophocles the Playwright, 161–62.

22 See, e.g., Grene, Reality and the Heroic Pattern, 163–65.

23 See, e.g., Reinhardt, Sophocles, 219.

24 See Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, 277.

25 Ibid., 256.

26 Jebb, Sophocles: Oedipus Coloneus, 202–3.

27 Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, 277.

28 See, e.g., Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, 340.

29 See, e.g., Reinhardt, Sophocles, 216.

30 Ibid., 213.

31 See, e.g., Adams, Sophocles the Playwright, 170.

32 Reinhardt, Sophocles, 213–14.

33 J.C. Opstelten, Sophocles and Greek Pessimism, trans. J.A. Ross (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1952), 114.

34 See, e.g., Ruth Scodel, Sophocles (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 113; Whitman, Sophocles, 207.

35 See Jebb, Sophocles: Oedipus Coloneus, 77; Thucydides 2.15; Plutarch Theseus, 24–25.

36 Grene, Reality and the Heroic Pattern, 161–63.

37 Knox, The Heroic Temper, 152.