Oedipus Rex

The trend in contemporary scholarship has been to embrace Oedipus as the good man, even as an innocent, caught in an intolerable situation. His words to the suffering populace at the play’s opening suggests as much: “I would willingly do anything to help you; / Indeed I should be heartless, were I to stop my ears.”[i] Viewing him thus allows us to see him as a modern: an isolate trapped in an irrational and unsympathetic universe. Such a strategy also, regrettably, robs Oedipus of his free will and returns the play into the hands of fate from which it had escaped eons ago. In making Oedipus an unwitting victim, we cannot help but dump responsibility for his calamity on the gods, as does Oedipus himself, which is an unsatisfying premise both intellectually and metaphysically.

This is our present, unhappy dilemma. We want Oedipus to adhere to the modern conception of man, a complex being who would act rightly if he could. We also want him to determine his own destiny, but in a universe in which actions turn out as predicted, freedom of action appears infeasible. Given the horrors that Oedipus and his family endure, it appears we are faced with two unsatisfactory conclusions: either that Oedipus and his immediate circle deserve their awful fate, or that the capricious gods hold dominion over a cruel world where ineffectual innocents are subjected to unwarranted suffering. It is this intellectual schism at the heart of Oedipal scholarship that has never been satisfactorily broached.

Contemporary scholars have made one propitious choice, however, in their reevaluation of Oedipus. It is their consensus to abandon hamartia as a method for resolving it. Even in Shakespeare where tragic flaw feels most appropriate, as in Macbeth’s brutish ambition or Othello’s morbid insecurity, Aristotle's hamartia is reductive. In Sophoclean drama it is even more so. Oedipus has long been viewed as a casualty of his own expansive egoism, but a list of other essential flaws could easily be compiled: arrogance, anger, obstinacy, narrow-mindedness, impetuosity, and cruelty, to name a few. And these imperfections are offset by qualities that elevate him: compassion, duty, honor, kingliness, and even craft when his small self is uninvolved. So, where does this leave us? How can we account for Oedipus's moral and physical disaster if we deny the gods final causation, eliminate tragic flaw as the impelling force, and cleve to the hero’s innocence?

To resolve Oedipus with satisfaction, we must turn to an element in the play both universally acknowledged and paradoxically dismissed—namely Greek religion and its logos underlying every moment of the play's action.[ii] In one respect this is not a revelation; all scholars accept paganism, the raison d'être for Oedipus Rex, as an essential feature. It exists in fact as the catalyst of the play, in the original inquiry Laius makes to Apollo. It exists in Oedipus's summoning of the priest Teiresias and Iocastê’s prayers to the gods. The Chorus emphasizes this spiritual element by calling life without the guidance of religion lawless:

These and numerous other religious references, however, are routinely dealt with as the ambience against which the drama of free will and determinism is played out. Treating religion in this modern manner, as mere backdrop, is not unlike Renaissance scholars who read Greek literature to unearth models of Christianity. Nevertheless, I’m not proposing we read Sophocles' play in an un-contemporary way, a proposition both fatuous and untenable. And yet it only makes sense to scrutinize Oedipus Rex in the religious spirit it was conceived. The primacy of religion begins in Oedipus with the most famous augury in history.

As the furies close in, Oedipus relates to Iocastê: "I must marry my mother, / And become the parent of a misbegotten brood, / An offense to all mankind—and kill my father" (47). The difficulty this edict held first for Laius, then Oedipus, and finally Sophocles' audience, is that it has universally been taken too literally and made too binding. Let's examine these issues separately. First, the literalness of Apollo's decree is a mater of exegesis, the occupation of both religious and secular scholars. In all religions, certainly that of Greek paganism and Christianity, spiritual proclamations exist as a kind of shorthand that must be unraveled. Take this Biblical example, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Is God telling us he is vengeful? Or is he saying that vengeance belongs to him and not to human beings whether he will use it or not? Both of these hermeneutical readings are currently en vogue and others are possible as well. We may presume that those with developed consciousness, those closest in the spirit of God, will best know how such proverbs are to be taken.

Now to my second assertion on the Pythian oracle—that it is too binding. This is the mistake both Laius and Oedipus make when they first hear it. What they fail to comprehend is that the oracle is a religious/literary statement in need of interpretation, the kind found everywhere in, say Shakespeare. When Hamlet misinterprets the Ghost, through his obsessive search for his mother's fraility, he gets off on the wrong track, and yet he cannot help himself. He has already prejudged his mother for her hasty marriage, even before speaking with his Ghostly father. So when he hears of foul play by Claudio, Gertrude's current husband, Hamlet also implicates his mother, ignoring the Ghost's charge to "leave her to heaven." Laius, hearing the news from Delphi that he will be both murdered and usurped in his marriage bed by his son, reacts with similar prejudice. Instead of contemplating whether Phoebus’s decree has any latitude, Laius thinks only of self-preservation. How can I prevent these miseries from falling on my head? His conclusion, like Exodus's Rameses', is I will kill the child before he grows up and kills me.

Now we must ask ourselves, does Laius have a choice other than killing or being killed? I believe he does, but before I say what that choice might be, I would like to put forth a modern prophecy as an analogy. There are many kinds of prophecies: a minister may foretell a parishioner’s destiny in the after life; mystics may look into the future through such aids as astrology, tarot, palmistry, or the i-ching; and modern prophets may predict outcomes based on facts or trends—"If you hold onto a weak stock during a bull market you will lose your investment." The example I have chosen, however, has to do with the contemporary secular religion of medicine, for which the doctor is a kind of high priest.

A patient goes to a physician complaining of certain symptoms that might suggest an ulcer: severe heartburn, stomach pain, loss of appetite, dizziness, etc. The doctor performs an examination and returns to tell the patient she is suffering from inoperable cancer and has no more than six months to live. As moderns, we might not view the doctor’s dire prediction as a prophecy at all, but rather the expert opinion of a professional based upon certain repeatable criteria. However, it is a prophecy just as Phoebus Apollo’s words to Laius are a prophecy, and just as the doctor’s opinion is founded on a solid bed of knowledge, we must assume that Apollo’s judgment has an even more solid foundation. Apollo is after all a god.

The doctor’s prediction, however learned, is not beyond dispute. His prognosis is predicated on current forms of available treatment and, therefore, vulnerable to interpretation. Patients are thus free to and do seek second opinions. They often change their behavior or diets and evade the doctor’s predicted outcome by months or years. New treatments are discovered. Patients turn religious and elicit divine intervention. Some even enjoy full remission with no explanation whatsoever. The doctor’s prophecy, then, turns out not to be binding.

But what of Apollo for whom there exists no barrier to past and future; what of his oracle? More to the point, because Oedipus’s life patterns itself exactly as Apollo foretells, is not Apollo’s prophecy infallible? This is the conclusion of earlier audiences of Sophocles that led them to see Oedipus’s fate as determined. However, thanks to a long intellectual history, philosophers, including Boethius,[iii] have clarified that God’s knowledge of how an event will unravel does not preclude freedom of human action. It simply means that God’s mind is different or more expansive than a human being’s. Therefore, in spite of the unassailable fact that Apollo's revelations first to Laius and then to Oedipus are correct does not preclude them from turning out differently.

What Apollo decrees is that Laius ‘s son will kill his father. What he does not say is Oedipus will survive an attempted murder; the father will think his son dead; the son will believe he has escaped from his birthplace Corinth into another country; at an appointed hour where "three roads meet" the father will not recognize the son; the son will not recognize the father, and the son will kill the father with his staff at a cross roads following a trivial disagreement. Apollo is an infallible god and his prophecy must come true, but within this certainty lies enormous elasticity. Imagine, for example, Laius as a kindly and loving parent who raises Oedipus to be his successor, and in old age when the king is dying of a severely painful malady, the devoted and compassionate son shortens his father’s life to relieve his suffering. Or perhaps Oedipus grows up somewhat willful and makes a choice so odious to his father that it gives Laius a fatal stroke. Would not either one of these scenarios fulfill one part of the Delphic oracle? There exists an almost unlimited number of ways the father’s death at the hands of his son might be accounted for. There must also be an equally large number of ways to interpret the half of the prophecy pertaining to the mother. For example, a Freudian might envision a story in which Oedipus so under the influence of his mother cannot distinguish any woman on her own terms. All women for him are variations of his mother. Therefore, when he marries he is actually engaging in a kind of intellectual or symbolic incest, and his offspring will be the misbegotten brood of a dysfunctional marriage.

Apollo’s oracle is not only a prophecy, it is also a riddle, one of numerous in the play. Oedipus with good scientific logic[iv] has objectively unraveled the riddle of the Sphinx and freed the people of Thebes from its grip. His answer of "man," however, is not the only solution to what crawls on all four in the morning, walks on two legs in the afternoon, and walks on three in the evening. The answer is also Oedipus himself who escapes death as a baby on all fours, walks on two legs into Thebes to become its hero-king, and in the darkness of his life hobbles away with the aid of a staff in blinded infamy. Tragically, neither Oedipus nor his father is capable of treating Apollo’s decree figuratively. Laius’s choice of attempting to murder his infant son, his very literal response to the oracle, reveals a calcified consciousness way too inflexible to perceive events imaginatively. He thus compounds his sin of misreading Apollo with the sin of attempted infanticide.

What might Laius have done differently? If he would have been a more perspicacious king, a more compassionate father, and a more religious man, he might have supplicated the gods, asked them how he might mitigate Apollo’s judgment. He might have begun a regime of paying proper devotions to the gods. He might have reassessed himself in an attempt to live a better life (though Laius owns even less self-awareness than his son). If nothing else, he might have done nothing. That would have been preferable to believing he could outwit the gods. Laius, as we know, does none of these things. The results are that his sins are visited upon his son and grandchildren,[v] or as Teiresias says of Oedipus, "Your mother’s and your father’s curse, shall sweep you / Out of this land . . . you shall be trodden down / With fouler scorn than ever fell on man." (37).

Interestingly, Oedipus’s morality is far superior to Laius’s, but the gods treat his sins equal to his father’s and heap upon him even greater punishment. But Oedipus's penalty is not as unjust as it first appears. Although his action upon learning his fate is less criminal than Laius’s, that is, escape rather than attempted murder, it is nonetheless of a kind. Both father and son see Apollo’s prophecy not as valuable knowledge to guide their lives but as a snare to be circumvented. What both fail to understand is that what the gods see is what will be, avoidance is futility and ignorance. Moreover, each sets in motion an unfair conflict between his own limited humanity and unlimited divinity that neither can win. Each should understand this. They are, after all, without duress dealing with a god they have solicited.

But why is Oedipus’s fate of patricide, incest, blindness, banishment, personal and familial infamy so much worse than Laius’s comparatively uncomplicated death at the crossroads when Oedipus's sin is seemingly far less? We may never fully answer this question because we do not know enough of Laius’s history. We might as well ask why the innocent Antigone must share in the pain and humiliation of her father’s sin. What we finally do see is that Oedipus deserves his fate because he alone is responsible for it.

In every step of the play Oedipus compounds his faults with increasingly blind action. Learning his fate, he parries the oracle's prophecy and in doing so arranges events so he will fulfill it. Through his human logic and limited judgment, Oedipus flees Corinth with the belief that having avoided his parent’s country he will avoid harm, an almost exact replication of Laius’s misreading of the oracle. But rather than escape, his actions propel him head-on into the country of his birth parents and his appointed destiny. At the junction of the three roads, Oedipus's pettiness, anger, and pride cause him to fulfill the first part of the oracle, the killing of his father. Earlier scholars have suggested Oedipus would have been wise not to kill older men nor sleep with older women. However, even if Oedipus had thought of this solution, it would not have helped him avoid the Delphic prophecy any more than running did. Not killing at all would have been his wisest action. But the prophecy is not simply a reading of future events; it is a reading of Oedipus's very self. Given who he is, he will act in a certain way, and that action will fulfill the prophecy.

At the play’s beginning, Oedipus is more a savior than a sinner, magnanimous in his pledge to deliver Thebes from the plague. However, this magnanimity is the voice of his pride, swollen from having earlier saved the Thebans from the Sphinx’s riddle—the only riddle Oedipus ever solves. This act, like the false escape from his parents, serves as the means for completing the second part of the prophecy, becoming king and qualifying as bed partner to his queen/mother.

Apologists routinely point out Oedipus's sincere desire to relieve the suffering of the people of Thebes at the play’s beginning. But even in these first moments, when Oedipus’s good nature shines brightest, he cannot act without error. He should patiently examine the case Apollo has set before him—"There is an unclean thing, / Born and nursed on our soil, polluting our soil, Which must be driven away" (28)—and reserve judgement until all evidence is in. Instead, Oedipus, in his uncompromising and reckless manner, sets in stone a punishment that will fulfill not only Apollo’s oracle but will inflict the worst kind of human misery.

Not allowing for extenuating circumstances, Oedipus prejudges and presentences the suspected wrong doer, and damns anyone associated with him. Sophoclese' original audience, unlike a modern one, may not have accepted a defense based on ignorance of the law, but they would have judged Oedipus much less harshly than he judges himself.

From here on, Oedipus’s actions become ever more repugnant. He summons Teiresias, the priest of Apollo, against his will; he badger’s him into speaking; he insults him; and he accuses him of criminal acts against the king. Moreover, he charges his loyal retainer, Creon, his wife’s brother, with treason; and, finally, he threatens his personal savior, the good old shepherd, with physical harm if he does not speak.

True, Oedipus’s actions are not those of a man under ordinary circumstances. He feels threatened, as it becomes increasingly clear that he himself is the "unclean one." We may, therefore, justify his actions as those of someone emotionally unstable. However, to do so is to interpret his actions in a modern, tendentious, sense that is not part of Oedipus's world. He is a literalist, and this is why his punishment of himself is so severe. Instead of taking the easier way out like Iocastê, Oedipus forces himself to accept a punishment equal to what he feels is the crime, even though he still places final blame on Apollo and the gods.

So what is gained by interpreting Oedipus from beginning to end within the broad scope of religion? It is the only way of accounting for all the variables of the play satisfactorily. Accepting Oedipus's and Laius's actions as the violations of their sacred code, allows us to finally see Oeidpus's behavior as increasingly improper but without malicious intent, to view his fate as the effect of his own actions howsoever ignorant (free will), and to see the gods not as villains but as benevolent beings who operate within an ordered and responsible universe (foreknowledge without determinism).

Laius’s and Oedipus’s greatest follies are their attempts to out maneuver the gods who exist as the fundamental intelligences of nature. By not allying themselves with the gods they set themselves up as adversaries, greatly augmenting any harm that might originate from their own actions. Ironically, both Laius and Oedipus seek out the gods for intelligence, but then use that intelligence in a completely secular way that opposes the gods. With every step, Oedipus acts more and more in isolation, further and further distancing himself from the spirit and the force of the laws of nature embodied in the Pythian Oracle. In a world as complex as ancient Greece, logic and good intentions are not enough to keep one from incurring sin. A person needs to act with the support of the gods, who not only know how things will turn out, but what one must do for them to turn out in the most propitious way.

Once the final shoe has fallen, and Oedipus knows what everyone in Thebes and everyone in the audience has long known, that he is the son of Laius, the miserable king who has fulfilled not only the prophecy of Delphi but Tieresias's prophecy as well. Oedipus's calamity appears to have transformed him into, like Tieresias, the blind man who sees. But has it? Yes, Oedipus now understands that it is he who has propagated children by his mother, that it is he who has clubbed his father to death, and that it is he who is the scourge that he has been seeking, the one solely responsible for his people's onerous plague. But this revelation, like all of Oedipus's knowledge, is the product of reason. It was reason that allowed Oedipus to unravel the riddle of the Sphinx; it was reason that caused him to flee Corinth, and it was reason that sent him in pursuit of the "unclean one" who turns out to be himself. And in Oedipus Rex, reason is unquestionably a lower form of knowledge gathering.

Tragedy and understanding, arrived at through the process of reason, hasn't led Oedipus, therefore, to real anagnorisis. At the play's end, he still cannot see himself as responsible for his crimes and, hence, deserving of his punishment. Like a child who looks everywhere for the cause of his sorrow but within his own being, Oedipus simplistically sees himself as the man the gods hate (63). He curses the shepherd for having saved him; "Did you shelter me for this? Could you not let me die that instant" (64), and he blames Phoebus for his horrible calamity; "Apollo, Apollo, friends, has laid this agony upon me" (62). Oedipus never gets it! Like Iocastê who disparages Apollo's oracle at one moment and prays to the god the next, Oedipus is a king for whom his religion is a convenience, a tool he draws upon, a means to an end. He never appreciates that besides information, religious law brings spiritual succor to the righteous, and great suffering to those who abuse it. Oedipus's opacity never varies even unto the play's end. As a result, he is truer to his own law than Apollo's. He blinds and banishes himself, not out of tragic awareness, the byproduct of a spiritual awakening, but out of a belief in the absolute sanctity of his own imperial decree.

[i]Sophocles. The Theban Plays. Trans. E.F. Watling. New York: Penguin, 1974, p. 26. Further reference to this edition will be found in parenthesis within the text.

[ii] Kitto, H.D. Greek Tragedy. New York: Doubleday and Co. 1954, p. 149.

[iii] Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Richard Green. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. 1962, p.118. Boethisus says, "all things God sees as present will undoubtedly come to pass; but some will happen by the necessity of their natures, others by the power of those who make them happen.…these things are necessary if viewed from the standpoint of divine knowledge, but if they are considered in themselves, they are free of the bonds of necessity."

[iv] Gould, John. "The Language of Oedipus." Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views: Sophocles. New York: Chelsea House, 1990, p. 214. Gould states plainly that Oedipus solves the riddle with his mind not through any form of visionary insight, which underscores his spiritual blindness.

[v]Phrixus, fragment 970. Euripides. "The gods / Visit the sins of the fathers upon the children." The New English Bible, Exodus 20:5. "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god. I punish the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generations who hate me."