“Antigone and Greek Tragedy” — Dr. Kent Lasnoski

This lecture was recorded on February 19, 2022 as part of an academic retreat entitled “Greek Comedy and Tragedy,” led by Dr. Kent Lasnoski of Wyoming Catholic College.

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The Valor Institute for Studies in Person and Community exists to promote an adequate philosophical anthropology and capacious understanding of the human person flourishing in authentic community.

Transcript

I hope to move us through a consideration of both Antigone and The Frogs that will show us the fundamental distinction between comedy and tragedy. Tragedy presents a character undergoing a raw experience that no audience member can ever fully share, while comedy presents imitations of actions common to the audience in one way or another. From there, we will think about how tragedy benefits the audience and the common good. Who knows? We might find that from our beginning among the dead, we make our way back to the heavenly heights themselves.  

So, let's start by asking a surprisingly complicated question. How do I know whether I'm reading a comedy or a tragedy? Well, The Frogs began this way: “Shall I tell them some of the usual gags, then, Master? The things spectators always find so funny?” Antigone’s first lines are these: “My sister, my Ismene, do you know of any suffering from our father that Zeus does not achieve for us survivors?” Both of the first lines are questions. The first offers a silly meta-conversation between people fully conscious of being on stage representing something; they're joking about what kind of jokes to make. The tragic opening, however, simply is the pouring forth of a great cry from the depths of a suffering woman’s heart, a woman who has lost her father, mother, and two brothers. Worse yet, she knows one of her brothers must suffer the fate of becoming food for dogs and scraps for vultures, and to top it off, she knows she will inevitably die unwed without children. But The Frogs, too, has death on its mind from the start. In the first scene, Aristophanes shows us two clowns, one being the god Dionysus, stopping at Heracles’ house seeking counsel for getting down to Hades. “Well,” ponders Heracles, “there's one that starts with a rope and a bench to stand on.” So the order of death then surrounds the opening of both plays Yet, for Antigone, it occupies the stage in an obviously heavier way. One play has the aroma of fresh spun cotton candy. The other, incense rising from a thurible. The contrast is striking. 

We might be tempted to say that tragedy can't be funny and comedy can't be serious. But that would be reductive. What this opening, and I would claim any section of these plays taken at random points out, is a difference in center of gravity or a difference in density. One way or another, come hell or high water; comedy floats. Tragedy, though, either sinks or offers a view of the surface from the man who's already drowning. Tragedy's center of gravity is the heart, the interior. In other words, tragedy is somehow private and turned inward despite the public nature of the events that it puts on stage. Conversely, comedy's center of gravity lies outside itself in the possible flourishing of the community, despite often depicting private or even intimate happenings, such as falling in love.  

Consider the standard plot line of The Frogs. The play contains a good many events, though we might divide the play into three parts: introductory setup regarding the journey, the journey itself, and then the final trial of the tragedians. Each of these sections is a comic reflection about something. The first section is about how to and why someone might go to Hades. The second is what it might be like to travel through Hades itself. The third represents an oblique reference to the final judgment but more obviously represents the way we make aesthetic and moral judgments. Even more precisely, the trial of Euripides and Aeschylus is about how to judge the value of poetry. Someone might object that The Frogs puts forward or represents the act of judging poetry. It's not about judging poetry; it's showing us the act of doing it. I would respond that Dionysius and the chorus do judge poetry, but the focus is on the ambivalence dominating the entire project. The clearest judgment seems to be that they don't know what they're doing. In fact, Dionysius is chosen as a judge because “there's a shortage of expert men from them to choose from. Aeschylus took the view that the rest of the people were useless at judging poets.” Furthermore, Dionysius makes a mockery prayer to the muses for help in judging. And when the scales for their words come out, he can't resist noting how ridiculous the whole enterprise has become: “Come here then, both, if I really have to do this, and treat the art of poets like cheese for sale.” 

So, what I'm trying to show is that every event, every statement is not only what it is, but more so a comment about something else. It's always pointing us beyond itself somewhere, whether it's to a laugh or to an aesthetic, moral, or even political question. But comedy is always about these events or ideas more than it is these events and ideas. Aristotle says something similar about comedy. “Comedy,” he says, “is mimetic.” That is, it represents, it presents to us imitations or representations of real actual human events and doings. This is as true of The Frogs as any comedy. Each of us is aware of the way we are performers in life, like Xantheus and Dionysus. Each of us makes aesthetic moral decisions, whether heroic or mundane, hopefully for our good and the good of the community. At a deeper level, each of us must face a road to death, the experience of death, and ultimately final judgment. Finally, it's sometimes the case that we do something quite in keeping with the plot of The Frogs. What might start off in our lives as an attempt to satisfy our own selfish desires, for example, going to find Euripides because you really desire him, might just end up doing something that aids the common good. Such is the world we live in, a world fundamentally oriented toward the harvest of life, even amidst its thorns and thistles. Interestingly, each of the imitated humans' actions in The Frogs is strangely inverted. Our confrontation with death, which is serious, becomes Heracles' joke about hanging or poisoning ourselves. The final judgment experience, which we dread, turns into an almost arbitrary game of weighing words. The heroic action, which we so ardently desire, ends up being about as sure as a coin toss. Real human anxieties and fears become the subject of a good laugh, instead of being an existential terror.  

Speaking of existential terror, let's aim our telescope away from the comedic terrain and toward the tragic abyss. What is so different about tragedy? Is tragedy really about anything? Is tragedy mimetic? Does it imitate life experiences? Consider Sophocles' Antigone. Her father has suffered a maiming, an exile, and a death fated by the gods after discovering that he has married his mother and borne children by her. Antigone's mother has also committed suicide. Her brothers have killed each other in a skirmish to control the same city that her father both cursed and saved. Now she faces the choice of honoring her fallen brother Polynices, as well as the gods, or keeping the law of the city. The choice is more complicated still, since a choice for the gods is also a choice for her own death sentence, and a death knell for the Oedipal line that she somehow sees as ending with herself. She will have no spouse but Death himself. Added to that, she must decide now. The birds and stray dogs won't wait to make a meal of her brother. Who has ever faced such a choice? Antigone's situation, I think, is inimitable. Her sister Ismene suggests as much, saying, “you crave what can't be done.” Antigone replies, “when strength runs out, I shall give over.” Ismene comes back: “wrong from the start to chase what cannot be.”  

Tragic characters, I say, unlike comedic ones, face the truly impossible situation. But what's so impossible about this situation? Well, why while The Frogs gave us a slantwise version of the final judgment, a version of a heroic or lucky deed, Antigone just plants the final, ultimate absolute right in front of us, naked, as it were. The jig is up, the net is drawn, the snare tripped. Antigone, and possibly Creon, are like so many deer frozen in headlights. In Louise Cowan's words, “confronted with their imperfection, which they discern as an external depth into which they've fallen, and finding themselves to blame for everything, they are stunned into immobility as from a sudden blow.” We, the audience, have an intuition that the deep imperfection of the cosmos is not only real, but also something we will be ultimately held accountable for. Tragedy dramatizes this potential judgment, an event which can only be intuited and never actually experienced. So, the reason tragedy is not mimetic is that no living person has, or ever can, go through the event that tragedy puts before us. Tragedy can't remind us of the final judgment we experienced; it can only incarnate the experience of one who in fact does go through that judgment.  

Now, some interlocutor might challenge my thesis that tragedy is more metaphysical than dialectical. How can it be less about something when there are so many laments and complaints of the characters regarding their supposedly impossible situation? The objector might say, moreover, that these reflective meditations remind us of our own reflections on life and its myriad contradictions. Take for example Antigone's keening at her own death without marriage. Linking her own death to those that have gone before, she cries out, “the destruction where my mother lay with her husband's son, my father. These are my parents, and I, their child. I go to stay with them. My curse is to die unwed. My brother, you found your fate when you found your bride found it for me as well. Dead, you destroyed my life.” She sees her death as somehow caused by her father and mother's fate, and secondarily her brother's death. She can't bear being an innocent victim. There's no way out, no way forward. A few lines later she exclaims, “alive to the place of corpses and aliens still, never at home with the living nor with the dead.” She's reflecting on the normal experience of loneliness, isn't she? The drama is about loneliness, alienation, then, isn't it?  

 I don't think Sophocles is talking about the greater and lesser alienations that we experience; he's putting in front of us utter and complete alienation that is both inevitable and victimizing, and yet also my fault. We must here have complete and total metaphysical alienation. Antigone must stand completely, utterly apart, hermetically sealed in her suffering. She's alienated first from her family. Her mother chose death over continued life with her. Her father was exiled to save her and the rest of Thebes. Her brothers broke the bonds of blood in their fight for control of Thebes. Her sister Ismene won't bury her brother's bloodied body with her. She's cut off from family, and her family, and her family's future also ends with her. Now, how about her belonging in the city? The city Oedipus saved has made a law that forces her into exile or death. Let's look at her transcendent belonging, then. Is she one with the gods? Well, while she seeks to honor the gods with the proper burial rites, they sit silent, while the Thebans unjustly immure her in a tomb as a spectacle. Even the gods have rejected her. Only Haemon, her fiancé, stands by her. Yet, we're not off the hook here either, because we find here in a deep alienation as well Haman commits suicide upon seeing his bride to be hanging by her maiden's veil. These two are only made one in their mutual alienation from life, which, ironically, is marriage's purpose to bear forth.  

So, tell me again: who feels as alone, as cut off, as severed from all goods as Antigone? We can't be reminded of the last time we were buried alive for choosing the highest good, the only good available to us. No, Sophocles simply presents the actions and words themselves as absolutes. Antigone wails, “o tomb, o marriage chamber, hollowed out house that will watch forever where I go, to my own people, who are mostly there. Persephone has taken them to her. Last of them all, ill-fated past the rest, shall I descend before my courses run? Still, when I get there, I may hope to find I come as a dear friend to my dear father. To you, my mother, and my brother too. All three of you have known my hand in death. I washed your bodies, dressed them for the grave, poured out the last libation at the tomb. Polynices knows the price I pay for doing final service to his corpse.” Antigone's laments aren't spoken to us the way that Dionysus and Xantheus' dialogues are. Those characters are both aware of being watched and openly speak about and to the audience. Antigone's speeches, on the other hand, are raw reality into which we the audience vicariously, even voyeuristically, prod and peer. In other words, Antigone's wailings aren't cautionary tales or words of wisdom spoken for us but are simply the spontaneous outpourings of the soul as it falls from the edge of hope into the abyss. Louise Cowan, for her part, agrees, saying “without Job's lamentations, Oedipus's grave and noble protests, Lear's howls of remorse, Hamlet's anguished theatrical meditations, there could be no tragedy.” The tragic hero suffers not in silence, but in the most opulent and expressive language the world has known.  

Now, if I were to put the distinction between comedy-tragedy in religious terms, I would say that tragedy is a sacrament, while comedy is a sacramental. What do I mean here? Well, a sacrament is a liturgical action that makes present what it represents. Think of a trumpet as Louis Armstrong blasts out a tune. The trumpet's not only a sign of music, but it's also doing music. On the other hand, a sacramental is merely a sign. Think of a green light and an intersection. The green light represents to you the idea of going, but its effect is entirely dependent on getting you to see something that's already inside of you. It communicates an idea virtually, but it doesn't somehow incarnate the idea itself. Said differently, the green light doesn't move your car; you have to move the car, once the signifying power of the light has been achieved. Comedy is like a green light. It communicates to us the idea of motion toward flourishing. It shows us a world where if we wink and squint, we might be able to make it by, where, in order to bring someone back from the dead, we might have to dress up as someone strong enough to actually do it. In other words, to perform the great deed, we may have to pretend we're the kind of person who could. It shows us a world where life goes on, not always because of our efforts, but never without them. The effect of comedy is slow. We have to apply it in our own lives and remind ourselves of how rowing across the river of the dead is like something we did yesterday, and in all likelihood are going to do again tomorrow. Putting the comedic lens in effect takes time.  

Tragedy, on the other hand, has its effect immediately. Like liturgy, that is, public prayer of a religious community; its goal is internal to itself. We don't, or shouldn't, attend public worship primarily for effects that will happen later. It's not for getting good moral advice from Jesus or the preacher or for feeling good about my worship songs as I think about them later in the day. It's not about the rest I get so I can go back to work. Liturgy is its own work. Liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia, meaning public or common work. The work of true worship is the offering of ourselves to God, along with Christ's sacrifice on the cross. In making that offering, we receive the life of God Himself in the Eucharistic feast. Liturgy, then, is a taste of Calvary and the heaven that it gains for us. I attend liturgy because it's the closest thing I have, this side of death, to complete union with God. The event makes present what it signifies, namely salvation itself. That this sacrament happens in the context of community is also key, because salvation is social. It's worked out together; it's experienced together. Tragedy too makes present what it signifies in a communal event. It makes present, however, the converse of religious liturgy. If religious liturgy makes present our personal and communal salvation, tragedy makes present our personal and communal damnation. Recall Antigone's lament. She saw the irony that the deaths of her family also decided her own death. Yet not without her free choice. In case we weren't aware, Ismene early on warns Antigone that her fault is her craving for the impossible situation. Antigone seems to wish upon herself absolute judgment. The chorus, too, while lamenting Antigone can't let her off the hook: “you showed respect for the dead, so we for you, but power is not to be thwarted so. Your self-sufficiency has brought you low.” Tragedy allows the audience, along with Antigone and Creon, to see into the sheer canyon of ultimate judgment, the cliff of a decision that cannot be avoided, a collision of values from which there is no swerving and a martyrdom that's concomitantly a just punishment. Yet for all this, the audience of a tragedy can walk back from the precipice. The audience experiences a splash in the face from the abyss that submerges Antigone whole.  

Now, it might be obvious to us that religious liturgy happens for its own sake. It is, after all, for those who celebrate it, a taste of heaven. But, why, then, is a taste of final judgment and final damnation done for its own sake? Why spend any time in the presence of the absolute truth that we are inescapably implicated in the failings of the cosmos and that we cannot finally avoid our responsibility? Wouldn't watching a tragedy just make us depressed? If tragedy were the only literary genre, in other words, the only way or view of the world seated in our psyche, I think the answer would be yes. Tragedy would lead to the destruction of our personal and communal life together in despair. In brief, the answer to the question “Why tragedy?” is that the audience of tragedy must encounter authentic humility.  

Let me expand on that a bit. We need to go with Antigone and Creon to the brink, because the truth that they painfully bring near to us is one from which we like to remain distant and buffered. It's a vision to which we'd rather be blind and a verity we hope to finally avoid, if we could just ignore, claim ignorance, or do enough good things to outweigh our cooperation with evil. In glimpsing the abyss, the audience has awakened from the sleep of self-induced moral and spiritual rectitude together. We look at the person next to us and see my, his, and our guilt on display, and we accept it. We're humble, which fundamentally means not that we hate ourselves, but that we know the truth about ourselves. That's all well and good, but the audience also turns away from the abyss. They leave the theater nad put down the book. How can they do so without putting the blinders back up? Learning an uncomfortable truth isn't enough in itself. In order for tragedy to benefit anyone, it must imply a step beyond itself, precisely because we don't fall into the abyss with Antigone. We don't we don't kill ourselves with the veil of our own maidenhood; we walk out of the tomb and take the next step into daylight. Why? Beholding the abyss, beholding the moment when definitive choice can no longer be put off inevitably and necessarily raises in our minds and in our conversation with each other a new question: What now? Since we haven't been torn apart yet, what can we do to remain whole? 

 Now, this question constitutes a bridge over the gap between tragedy and comedy. Tragedy, if it is good for the community, must imply comedy. If it is cathartic and restorative in any way, it's because it wakes us up to the fact that we need salvation. A monster's coming from which we cannot run, but it isn't here yet. Something impels us ahead, maybe because we have to believe there must be a way forward. In other words, The Frogs is a kind of strange and weird answer to Antigone. Antigone infects us with a disease that forces us to look for a cure. The restoration that the chorus in The Frogs sings about is possible. Now, for the typical Greek audience, that restoration might have meant something like what's implied in The Frogs. Namely, if we confront our failings, we might progress to a future informed by a return to the values of the past, to the values of a foundational era, so that we can have more temporal success now and in the future. For the Greek philosopher, that restoration might have meant something like an eternal disembodied contemplation of the good. That's not half bad, but it doesn't seem like enough either. 

So now I'm going to double down on the essential nature of genre, that genre transcends all cultures, times, and places, and that we have this sort of intuition about genre. And I'm going to return to that religious theme we brought up when we spoke of liturgy. Greek comedy and tragedy suggest a metaphysical reality within the movement of the soul, every person's soul, a movement from despair to hope. And that same movement of the soul is confirmed by the narrative of Christian salvation history, which is itself tragicomedic in shape.  

The story of salvation history begins with the tragic potency of the cosmos. Of course, we're all familiar with Genesis' account of the Fall, but less known is the important passage from Genesis 6:5. It undergirds the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” The world is trash, and it's our fault. Even Noah, with whom God starts over, can't make it right. Sin hits us again right in the face with his son's irreverence toward the father's nakedness. God eventually calls forth a people to himself from the gods of Egypt. Giving them an intricate yet simple Law. And sadly, perhaps excellently, those who attempt to follow this Law experience its impotence to offer them final salvation. The more and the mere attempt to follow the Law, however, has the hidden grace of making my sinfulness all the more apparent. Not only do I, the Old Testament Jew, violate my natural conscience frequently, but I also fail to complete God's explicitly given laws related to food, clothing, and almost everything else under the sun. The ultimate inefficacy of the Law, its tragedy, is revealed to the Israelites in the Babylonian exile. Their own failure has led to the collapse of the Temple, the loss of their land, and the destruction of their offspring. A seemingly irreparable inversion of the three covenant promises given to Abraham. They sit in their humble helplessness and wait, panting like a deer in search of water, like the cracked and caked desert ground crying out for rain. Along the way to the Babylonian exile, and in the years after their return from it, the Hebrews may have occasionally thought they had arrived at the good life. Solomon's peace and wealth, his construction of the temple, might have been tempting. The Maccabean independence from the Greeks, and the founding of a truly Jewish kingdom, might have been another moment of quasi-salvation. Yet, each of these failed under the power of sin (e.g., Solomon’s polygamy and idolatry or the Maccabean internal grasping for power and loss of religious zeal). The Hebrews always woke up to the reality that they were guilty and couldn't bring salvation to themselves. Yet they always knew God had promised salvation. So what is it? Is history tragic or is it comedic? The Hebrews waited and waited to see. 

The history of Israel has many of the hallmarks of tragedy, as we've said before. It has a fundamental sin, a revelation of guilt, and multiple changes of fortune, often at the hands of themselves and their own kin. Joseph is sold by his own brothers and then has to choose whether or not to forgive them. The priest Aaron, Moses' own brother, is the one who makes the golden calf that his people worship just days after having been delivered from Egypt. Samson wastes his vocation and power sleeping in the arms of a concubine who is not among his family. David is sent into exile by his own son, who rapes his wives in public. There's a tragic thread running through Israelite history. At the same time, however, characters managed to turn back from the abyss, Joseph forgives his brothers. God has mercy on the Israelites in the desert. Samson is given strength for one more final heroic act. And David humbly leaves Jerusalem, hoping God will show mercy to him by resolving the rebellion without the cost of his son's life. The deeply comedic nature of the universe somehow shows through the mire, even if only for a single beam of light, like one coming through a window and visible only because it hits the dust moats floating in the air. Eventually, salvation history answers our question. The cosmos is comedic. Furthermore, the comedic resolution is a salvation beyond long life in a prosperous polis or a promised land, beyond a disembodied contemplation of the philosopher. The comedic turn of the cosmos is that the supposedly definitive victory of death and judgment has been overturned. The comedy of the Gospel dives into the abyss and emerges on the other side. Jesus' way to the cross, strangely, is analogous to Antigone's choice. Christ's choices to heal on the Sabbath, renounce the Pharisees, and cleanse the temple make his death imminent. He's asking to be handed over, right? Those decisions seem a lot like Antigone's decision to bury Polynices. Christ's death is in many ways like Antigone's. He and she are both led to a tomb, morally innocent yet legally condemned. Both are condemned, moreover, by a conflicted ruler, attempting to avoid riots. Both are subject to the jeers and cheers of the people around them. The difference is that Antigone rips life away from herself in a suicide, while Christ meekly lays down his life. Now, why this distinction? Well, Antigone ends up going to death in despair, because she cannot take up her life again. Her life ultimately will not and cannot bear fruit. Christ goes to death victorious, because he can take up his life again. Interestingly, the cross not only bears the tragic marks of inevitability, like Antigone. It also bears the comic marks of The Frogs. Christ, after all, accomplishes Dionysius' declared goal in The Frogs. Dionysus has claimed a strong desire for Euripides and hopes to bring him back from Hades. Christ has a spouse's love for his imprisoned bride and hopes to release her from death's shackles. Dionysius is harrowed by hell, but by good fortune returns with something like what he wanted. Christ harrows hell and returns with exactly what he sought.  

We see, then, that the Christian narrative confirms the Greek story of tragedy and comedy while also advancing it. Humanity cannot live in the tragic abyss. We must peek over its edge. If only so that the question boils up within us: is salvation possible? And when we look up from that abyss and strain off, gazing toward the distance, we will humbly see the comic terrain calling us forward, through a valley of tears, a land of slings and arrows, toward a mountain where the lion lies down with the lamb, to a land where the child plays with the adder, a land reached by suffering one's way into the truth and joy of a broken but redeemed cosmos.