Re-Learning the Tragic Lessons of Secularization, Pt. 1
Sophocles's Antigone and the Temptations of Insularity
The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it.
Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable of realizing that this would in fact be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?
— C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (R.F.C. Hull translation)
But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt is purer, where it is already acquainted with the law and power that it confronts, where it takes these to be violence and injustice, something ethically arbitrary, and, like Antigone, it commits the crime knowingly.
The movement of the ethical powers against one another, and the movement of the individualities that put them into life and action, have only reached their true end when both sides experience the same downfall.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel Translation Group)
Thus an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare draw pictures of family life that provide us with such penetrating and authentic portraits of the social upheavals of their age that it is only now, with the aid of historical materialism, that it has become at all possible for theory to do justice to these artistic insights.
G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (R. Livingstone translation, p. 176)
This essay was originally written for presentation at conference convened by a Catholic dioceses “in response to the overwhelming secularizing trend in American political life and culture.” Of course, there is a straightforward sociological claim imbedded in that beckoning: namely, that there is indeed an “overwhelming secularizing trend” abroad today in America. It does not fall into my expertise to verify those sorts of claims from the philosopher’s proverbial armchair, but I am assured that a broad spectrum of data suggest that secularization is up and running, maybe even overwhelmingly so, today in the U.S., and certainly more generally in the West. Thus, the conference call’s implicit claim that we are facing an overwhelming secularization is plausible enough.
If this secularization is “overwhelming,” one wonders what we were really up at a conference full of concerned observers of its unfolding. I take it that I am safe to presume that few, if any, of the attendees and presenters would count themselves as being on the winning side of this secularizing juggernaut. That is, the conference wasn’t populated by a very secular lot of people, and that’s why they came together to discuss this overwhelming secularization. On the one hand, that fact isn’t at all curious, as we wouldn’t expect secular people to be troubled by an overwhelming secularization. Who else would convene to discuss this problem, at least taken as a problem? When people about about to be overwhelmed by something, they might get together to talk it over. On the other hand, our convening to discuss an overwhelming secularization is a bit curious. If secularization is in fact overwhelming, then what do we see as the very point of our convening? We shouldn’t expect that there are very many people left who are likely to listen to what we have to say. They’ve mostly already been overwhelmed, or at least they are about to be — our stipulation as that the secularization is overwhelming after all. Was the audience of our conversation merely us, those who are not yet overwhelmed by secularization? To what end? If the point is to come up with something to do about all this secularization, then one wonders what we can seriously think our convening can do. A response to an overwhelming secularization is an implicit admission that the game is all but up, and there is thus an air of narcissism or naivete surrounding these sorts of conversations, i.e., we have either greatly overestimated our place in this newly secularized world or gravely underestimated the threat it poses to us. Since this was a Catholic conference, it’s fair to point out that recent data on mass attendance paint a pretty grim picture, so it’s not hard to conclude that those hoping to resist the secularizing trend have missed just how overwhelming it has been. When you travel in tightly knit anti-secular circles, you can understandably miss how small those circles have become. Someone who surrounds herself mostly with likeminded people might not realize that that there is nobody really listening to her beyond that steeply diminishing network. Maybe the idea is not to do anything about secularization, but to discuss how we might learn to live with it. Here too, I wonder if that is at all plausible, if secularization is overwhelming. There is no living with what is overwhelming us, and that may well put us in the “fiddling while Rome burns” category. Once again, those statistics I just mentioned about mass attendance certainly bear this out too. I realize that these considerations are a bit discomforting, and maybe ungracious to my hosts at the conference, but I will return to them in a way that will be fruitful for our thinking in the closing of this essay.
If we are to discuss our plight in the face of an overwhelming secularization, then we do well to begin by getting clear on what we mean by “secularization.” That, however, is a fraught question. On the face of it, secularization has something to do with a culture or civilization becoming less religious, but that only raises the specter of coming up with a non-question-begging definition of “religious,” which proves to be no easy task. Moreover, the suggestion that secularization is straightforwardly the decline of the influence of religion over a civilization has been called into question by some of the best thinkers who have taken up this problem; the prime example being Charles Taylor, who argues effectively that secularization is not the eclipse of religiosity or spirituality, but its fragmentation and proliferation (what he calls the “nova effect”).1 Just to get the ball into play, I will then aver the following definition:
Secularization is the revelation of a certain local perspective as a local perspective, in contrast to a more universal claim or a variety of other competing local perspectives.
In other words, secularization is the process of a certain tradition or worldview coming into confrontation with either a broader (less local or more universally appealing) tradition or worldview or other equally local traditions or worldviews. In either case, secularization comes about when a certain perspective, which may have once enjoyed a de facto hegemony – that’s the revelatory piece – is for the first time asked to justify itself in response to a more universal (and therefore more generally defensible) perspective or other equally particular (and therefore less externally binding) perspectives. In other words, a worldview is secularized when its previously privileged cultural standing is called into question, and it is therefore required to justify itself (and thereby maintain its privileged standing) by standards that are foreign to its own norms. The degree to which the previously hegemonic worldview fails to make this case for itself, is the degree to which the culture is secularized.
Another way to put this notion of secularization, is to say that a certain stance on what is most fundamental, which was previously taken as given or foundational, is revealed as, at least psychologically, optional. That is, to be secularized is to realize that your worldview is in fact a view of the world, not the world — a take on things, which a reasonable person may or may not hold, as opposed to how things are as such. It may turn out that your view from which you see the world gets to how things are, but the point is that it cannot be taken for granted anymore. There is no longer a comfort or innocence in givenness, because your stance toward things is now confronted by other stances making claims on the world. There are other competing views with prima facie equal right to the world, and which of these is our view is now up for grabs, however that issue is resolved. Moreover, the individual facing secularization has to admit that there are rational, well-informed, and good-willed people who resolve these questions differently. Thus, there is a sense of contingency introduced into ones relation to her fundamental stance toward the world. One has to admit that her basic set of beliefs and implicit attitudes are accidents of birth or history. In short the secularized person can no longer enjoy quite the same comfort or confidence in her fundamental stance as that enjoyed by the pre-secularized individual. It may be that this is the price of self-consciously holding a certain worldview (as Hegel teaches us, self-consciousness only arises in contrast to another self-consciousness), but this does cost us in anxiety. I take it that a disconcerting presence of Others in our midst (competing worldviews held by reasonable people) is what Charles Taylor has in mind with his notion of “cross-pressure.”2
It is one thing to stipulate a definition, and quite another to show that it actually lands on its target. I realize that I’m indulging the crass armchair sociology I disavowed above, but I believe this definition does fit rather well with what I suspect we all have in mind with the “overwhelming secularizing trend in American political and cultural life.”3 Previously, Christians (though Catholics should know better than to take “Christian” in an American context as entirely monolithic, as we’ve been on the wrong side of that presumption) in the United States enjoyed a certain very comfortable cultural standing. Namely, Christianity was taken as a given in the public square such that the Christian was not asked to justify the role his or her closely held principles played in providing a shared public standard. There was no demand that Christianity see itself as one among many local perspectives competing within American (or more broadly European) society, nor was it confronted with some more universal standard demanding a justification in terms of a validity beyond the local norms of Christianity (though the Enlightenment has always been knocking at the door here in the Colonies). Christians in the American (and certainly more broadly European) context were afforded the luxury of not having to differentiate their worldview from the world. That cultural privilege has, it seems, largely dissolved. Christianity is seen as just one among many competing local views of things, all of which are dwarfed by the supposedly universal appeal of the Enlightenment with its standards of reason. Of course, I would have to do a great deal to motivate this take, but I believe it likely fits what many of us feel is happening in the process of secularization, i.e., Christianity is slipping from its place as the given source for norms in our American culture and politics, as more people attach themselves to other local norms or the standards of a supposed universal reason according to which no local norms are taken as authoritative. As this process unfolds (whether it is a decline or not), we are forced to realize that ours is indeed one of among many local perspectives (or at least our claims to the contrary do not have broad resonance), which cannot help but to bring the secularization process ever closer to home. That’s the overwhelming part. Recognizing that secularization is happening probably has a secularizing effect on those who see it in real time.
If this definition of secularization has traction, then secularization is not a one-time occurrence, but instead a process that unfolds whenever a previously hegemonic worldview is forced to confront either a broader, more universal take on things or competing worldviews operating on that same level. Maybe there have been previous situations calling for a response to an overwhelming secularization, which might have much to teach us about how we should so respond in our own epoch. Though it is handed down to us fictionally (or maybe better, allegorically), I believe Sophocles’ tragic drama, Antigone, depicts just such a Bronze Age moment of secularization. Moreover, as Sophocles’ drama is tragic, we might see his tale as gravely cautionary, and I will argue that convening an entirely non-secular audience for a conference in response to an overwhelming secularization is a sign that we are failing to heed the poet’s well-placed warnings, and this can be said for many of our anti-secularizing cultural performances that we stage for our own consumption.4
In the drama, Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, the infamous king of Thebes whose self-inflicted lack of self-knowledge led to his horrific commission of parricide and incest. Oedipus’ foibles drag the entire city into calamity, including a power struggle between his sons, Eteocles and Polynices, culminating in the brothers killing each other in single-combat when Polynices led the army of Argos against Thebes. Creon, who has stepped in to rule Thebes in the absence of Oedipus’ natural heirs, has forbidden, on pain of death, Polynices, a traitor to Thebes, the traditional right of proper burial. As Creon puts it:
But as for his blood brother, Polynices,
Who returned from exile, home to his father-city
And the gods of his race, consumed with one desire –
To burn them roof to roots – who thirsted to drink
his kinsmen’s blood and sell the rest to slavery;
that man – a proclamation has forbidden the city to dignify him with burial, mourn him at all.
No, he must be left unburied, his corpse
Carrion for the birds and dogs to tear,
an obscenity for the citizens to behold.
These are my principles. (220-232)5
As you likely know, Creon does not come off well in Sophocles’ drama. He’s hard-headed, vain, chauvinistic, and bombastic. Indeed, Creon is not a likable character, and we cannot absolve him of responsibility for, albeit partial, the tragedy about to unfold. That being said, we should not miss the point Creon makes here: Polynices did lead an army against his home city, and the stakes were genocidal. He came to “burn them roof to roots” and to “drink his kinsman’s blood.” It is hard to blame Creon for forbidding Polynices the honor of burial in light of the near calamity he nearly brought onto his own people. Creon, for all his vices, does have a good point on this issue! There is more at stake here than the particularities of the Oedipus family. There is the good of the city, something broader or more universal, that is now also at stake.
We meet Antigone as she decides to ignore Creon’s decree so that she can fulfill the ancient obligations of her clan regarding the burial of one’s kin. Antigone is apt to serve the dead against the wishes of even the most powerful among the living, and here I take the “dead” not only to be the literal souls of her ancestors, but also the debt she and the rest of Thebes owe to the founding traditions that have sustained the city up to this point. As she puts it, when responding to her sister’s (Isme’s) apprehension in defying Creon’s order:
I will bury him myself.
And even if I die in the act, the death will be a glory.
I will lie with the one I love and loved by him –
An outrage sacred to the gods! I have longer to please the dead than please the living here;
In the kingdom down below I’ll lie forever.
Do as you like, dishonor the laws
The gods hold in honor. (84-91)
These traditions, “the dead” Antigone serves, are what give life in Thebes meaning and vitality, or at least up to how they have down done so. Without these rituals, obligations, and felt norms of conduct, life in Thebes lacks any meaningful content. What would it be to be committed to a city, unless one was bound to it by a sort of inner commitment like the bond Antigone cherishes with her now dead brother? Antigone sees no point in Thebes, if it has lost these sacred rites and commitments.
Needless to say, there is a confrontation in the offing. On the one hand, Creon (who is the current rightful ruler of Thebes) has demanded that Polynices be denied traditional burial, and we can certainly understand why he has done so. Polynices was indeed a traitor. Of course, that begs the question of who was right in his dispute with Eteocles, but certainly, however that question might be answered, that does not justify Polynices in leading an enemy army to destroy Thebes! On the other hand, who could blame Antigone, especially given the particular religious views that have structured the way of life for her lineage up to that point? Maybe Creon’s decree is more than we can ask of anyone in Antigone’s shoes; it requires her to renounce her entire world of meaning, and without that she has very little for which to live. If Antigone were to give up her obligation to bury Polynices, she would be stripped of any identity; she would no longer know what it means to a member of the Oedipus clan, which has structured her (and that of her progenitors) way of being-in-the-world. Creon has demanded of Antigone that she become de-worlded, homeless and wandering as we will see her father in the final installment of Sophocles’ trilogy. Nihilism is a lot to ask of anyone.
We learn much along these lines by inspecting the justifications for their contradictory positions offered by Creon and Antigone when they confront each other directly. Consider first Creon’s case:
Anarchy—
show me a greater crime in all the earth!
She, she destroys cities, rips up houses,
Breaks the ranks of spearmen into headlong rout.
But the ones who last it out, the great mass of them
owe their lives to discipline. Therefore
we must defend the men who live by law,
never let some woman triumph over us.
Better to fall from power, if fall we must,
at the hands of a man – never be rated
inferior to a woman, never. (750-760)
Notice here that Creon appeals to law and the perspective that is framed by the good of the city. His concern is with a broader, more universal level of social organization than the familial and cultic ties that bind Antigone’s commitment to bury her brother, and he therefor employs a more universal, i.e., less local, rationality. Creon argues in a way that can appeal to reason among those who do not share Antigone’s familial commitments. Think here of Aristotle’s development of the city (the polis) from the household and the neighborhood. We can see in Sophocles’ drama the self-conscious discovery that a new set of norms, newly visible from the more universal perspective of the polis, have come online, and these norms are geared to broader concerns than, and therefor can potentially come into conflict with, the norms and concerns of the previously primary identities of the clan and village. Creon represents the discovery of a Theban identity, as opposed to membership in a traditional clan, the line of Oedipus and the corresponding lineage of pagan religious commitments.
We can see the mirror opposite of such concerns in Antigone’s justification for her defiance of Creon:
It wasn’t Zeus, not in the least,
Who made this proclamation – not me.
Nor did that Justice, dwelling within the gods
beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men.
Nor did I think your edict had such force
that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods,
the great unwritten, unshakeable traditions.
They are alive, not just today or yesterday;
they live forever, from the first of time,
and no one knows when they first saw the light. (500-510)
Antigone justifies herself not in terms of the needs of the polis or a universal moral law, but in upholding “the great, unshakeable traditions.” These traditions do not recommend themselves on the basis of an indifferent rational grounding, but the ancient or primordial decree of the gods. In other words, Antigone stands on the ground of what has been handed down to her, because it has been handed down to her. She makes no deeper appeal than simply to state that this is what the gods have decreed, and these decrees have been passed down to us as tradition. Notice too that these are decrees bound up with familial ties, and she is attempting to defend her brother (despite his betrayal of the burgeoning Theban identity) against an indignity in these terms. Furthermore, it is her family, the line of Oedipus, which previously ruled Thebes in its golden age, i.e., these traditions were foundational and hegemonic. We can see in Antigone’s plea someone facing an overwhelming secularization. Her family tradition, which once ruled, has been revealed as merely a family tradition, at least as viewed by the Creonian perspective of the polis. Furthermore, these traditions to which Antigone clings were not designed to confront secularization; they were the implicit background of a way of life, not apologetic and ideological weapons. Thus, now when Antigone must respond to a competing view of things, Creon’s more universal appeal to the logic of the polis (as opposed to the clan), all she can do is fall back to the authority of tradition as tradition. She has only dogmatism as a last resort.
As you know, the confrontation ends tragically, with Creon’s wife and son (the fiancé of Antigone) dead by suicide, along with Antigone, who likewise dies by her own hand. I believe it is telling that the mode of tragedy in this drama is suicide and not murder – all the mortal wounds in this confrontation are ultimately self-inflicted. It is easy to make Creon into the villain of the play (and Sophocles goes out of his way to make him an unlikeable character). As the reader, you might find yourself asking why he can’t just give the smallest ground on this issue. We should again remember, however, that Polynices led an enemy army against Thebes, which at the time meant that he was prepared to conduct a wholesale slaughter and enslavement of his home town. Is it really so hard to empathize Creon’s position? Surely, we cannot condone that sort of activity, whatever some familial-religious customs demand. Yet, Creon, as the authority with the power to decide the issue, does bear the primary responsibility for the tragedy that looms over the story; at any point he could have stopped the one-way train to the suicidal fate of Thebes. When Teresias, the prophet sent from the Oracle of Delphi, arrives, he does not chide Creon for his stance in principle, but his trenchancy in holding it:
Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you.
All men make mistakes, it is only human.
But once wrong is done, a man
can turn his back on folly, misfortune too,
if he tries to make amends, however low he’s fallen,
and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness
brands you for stupidity – pride is a crime.
No, yield to the dead!
Never stab the fighter when he’s down.
Where’s the glory, killing the dead twice over? (1130-1140)
Tiresias does not question whether Polynices was a traitor, nor does he question whether, as a matter of general policy, traitors should have the honor of burial. That is, Tiresias does not deny the of validity Creon’s secularized perspective. Tiresias does, however, goad Creon to yield to the dead, and he calls his refusal to do so “bullheaded.” The traditions of the clan are passing, so what was the point of publicly humiliating Antigone for adhering to them? Why kill the dead twice? Surely, recognition of the tradition is not itself treasonous, even if it is done in the service of obligations to a royal family whose dominion has now passed. That is not treason, but respect and gratitude for the founding contribution of the older perspective. Moreover, Creon’s position is disingenuous. His very standing as the current king presupposes the original action Oedipus took to save Thebes. Creon and the newly secularized Thebes are, whether they like it or not, dependent on the Oedipus clan. They presuppose the very traditions that Creon would now like to leave to rot as disgraced. These traditions, Tiresias seems to say as the spokesman for the gods, are not indeed dead, but somehow the lifeblood of any future for Thebes. No city is free of its past. Tiresias’ primary accusation against Creon is a lack of “a sense of judgment,” and this is no small failing as “wisdom is the greatest gift of we have” (1165). We are also told a bit later that “Creon shows the world that of all the ills afflicting men the worst is lack of judgment” (1370). We might then conclude that Creon’s sin is really presumption. He presumes that his new perspective, even though more universal, is sufficient unto itself. Creon is deluded to think that following a law of reason as revealed in fallible human thinking, what he can grasp, requires no further guidance. Tiresias foretells that this presumptive lack of discernment will lead to the suicidal death of those Creon most loves, and thereby bring Thebes to ruin.
Creon does, howeer, repent:
I and my better judgment have come round to this – I shackled her,
I’ll set her free myself. I am afraid . . .
it’s best to keep the established laws
to the very day we die. (1235)
Following Tiresias’ advice, he concedes both his stubbornness and the fact that the old traditions, “the established laws,” cannot be forgotten, they are “best kept . . to the very day we die.” Creon recognizes the limits to secularization. The complete abandonment of the grounding traditions of the city will lead only to a suicidal frenzy, and he thinks better of his previously monomaniacal obsession with the higher laws of the polis.
Sophocles’ story is, of course, a tragedy. Though Creon repents, he is too late in doing so. By the time he can reach Antigone to call off her planned capital punishment (by a contrived starvation), she has already hung herself in a vain attempt to spite Creon. Her suicide then triggers the self-destructive acts of Creon’s son and wife (the former kills himself in response to the death of his fiancé, and the latter follows suit despairing over her son’s suicide). In the end, Thebes is ruined. If only Creon had repented earlier, or showed modicum of good judgment in the first place, the suicidal end of the ruling class of Thebes would have been averted. Does this leave Creon as a villain? Is the overwhelming secularization to blame for the Theban cultural suicide? I don’t believe it is quite so easy as all that. Yes, Creon could have stopped the suicidal train at any point, but that is just as true with respect to Antigone. Whereas Creon refused to admit his dependence on the traditions of the dead, Antigone was equally unwilling to recognize the newly revealed, more universal concern of the polis, and we can see that those interests were indeed legitimate to some degree. Polynices was going to raise Thebes! If Creon’s sin is presumption, then Antigone’s is despair. Indeed, it is Antigone’s pre-mature suicide that denies Creon’s well-placed efforts to rectify the situation before Thebes is brought to final ruin. Antigone refuses to see what is actually good and right in this new order, and what these new insights might teach about both the virtues and shortcomings of her own traditions. She will not allow herself to see (a self-inflicted blindness not unlike her father’s) that there may be something good and necessary in this new perspective that Creon, for all his authoritarian faults, has achieved. This very inflexibility may be the greatest symptom of the death of the divinely ordained law she claims to serve, a sort of cultural rigor mortis.
That, I believe, is the lesson that Sophocles’ Antigone has for us as we face our own contemporary “overwhelming secularization.” The degree to which our conversations are self-enclosed, we risk the despairing fate of Antigone, a kind of cultural suicide brought on by insularity. We need to be ever-vigilant against that temptation, and raise questions not just about how we are threatened by secularity (and of course we are so threatened), but further what we have to learn about ourselves as pre-secular adherents to a tradition from the very secularizing forces threatening that tradition. Certainly, as the Chorus tells us, “wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy, and reverence toward the gods must be safeguarded” (1466), but we must be careful that our safeguarding does not itself become a self-imposed threat to our reverence. Despair offends the divinities no less than presumption. Before we can seriously talk about “transforming culture in American” or any such magical fantasy about reversing the overwhelming secularization, we need an understanding of secularization and what it might actually have to teach us, even about ourselves. As I mentioned earlier, self-consciousness requires that one be confronted with another equal self-consciousness. The question then becomes whether our insistence on standing with the dead will enclose us and our society in a suicidal antagonism like that which Sophocles depicts for Thebes. Of course, antagonism is a two-way street, but those of us who find ourselves in the role of Antigone must do our necessary part in diffusing it. You can readily see now why I began my discussion with some gloomy thoughts about the very convening to discuss an overwhelming secularization, because in doing so, without our invitation to learn from the secularizing forces, we run the risk of Antigone’s insular despair.
See Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 299-213.
See Taylor, “Closed World Structures,” pp. 47-48. I plan to explore these themes in detail an essay covering Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture.”
Of course, I am happy to accept correction from those better acquainted with the actual sociology in play here!
The following is a very Hegelian reading of Antigone, and it is far above my pay-grade as classicist to justify as much! For a well-honed classicist reading Antigone along with Hegel, see Seth Benardetre, Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. Robert Brandom’s discussion of Hegel’s treatment of Antigone in A Spirit of Trust have also influenced my argument.
All references to Antigone are to line number in the Fagles translation in Three Theban Plays (Penguin).