The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (6 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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We might expect the passionate woman to fly into speeches of frenzy. Antigone is certainly capable of it. And we might expect Creon, the clear-sighted, manly ruler, to speak dispassionately about reasons of state, and why we must set personal motives aside. It doesn’t happen. What Sophocles gives us is startling. It is Creon, the “democrat,” the political man, who gradually reveals motives of insecurity and hunger for power, lurking beneath his city boosterism. “There’s a party of malcontents in the city,” he grumbles, “rebels against
my word and law
” (emphasis mine); you might call it a vast right-wing conspiracy of tradition. Meanwhile, Antigone affirms with rational clarity our duty to revere eternal laws which we
have not deduced by reason
and cannot alter by civic assembly:
 
That order did not come from God. Justice,
 
That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law.
 
I did not think your edicts strong enough
 
To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
 
Of God and heaven, you being only a man.
 
They are not of yesterday or to-day, but everlasting,
 
Though where they came from, none of us can tell.
 
 
Creon will not be budged. He condemns Antigone to go down to the underworld gods—to be buried alive in a tomb: “Go then, and share your love among the dead.” In doing so he asserts a radical democratic claim: the old gods may be ignored. Tradition be damned. We can pass laws as we wish. Family rights mean nothing. But the people of Thebes begin to turn in sympathy to Antigone, whom they do not like, but who appeals for a justice beyond self-interest. Even Creon’s son Haemon, Antigone’s betrothed, warns the king that disaster hangs over him. At that, Creon calls upon the same natural law he has been abrogating. For the young should revere their elders: “Am I to take lessons at my time of life,” he scoffs, “from a fellow of his age?” Haemon’s reply cuts to the heart: “It isn’t a question of age, but of right and wrong.”
 
Not until his niece Antigone, his son Haemon, and his wife Eurydice have all committed suicide does Creon see that his wickedness, clothed in the garb of civic virtue, has destroyed him. In denying the fundamental rights of family and blood relation, he condemns his own family to death, and becomes a man accursed, unfit for rule of the city. “I am nothing,” he weeps. “I have no life.”
 
Creon’s mistake is not that he is male. He happens to be male, prone to boastfulness, aggressiveness, and a love of power. He clearly also treats women with contempt. Haemon’s love for Antigone he dismisses coarsely: “Oh, there are other fields for him to plough.” Those are character flaws, and they play a part in his downfall. But the mistake, the trigger, is his abrogation of the natural law. He might have been female, prone to touchiness, guile, timidity, and hatred of men. The Nanny of today’s American politics comes to mind. Make the same mistake, suffer the same fate. The trigger cannot tell whose finger squeezes it.
 
 
 
When Patriotism Was Real
 
“When [the Spartans] fight singly, they are as good men as any in the world, and when they fight in a body, they are the bravest of all. For though they be freemen, they are not in all respects free; Law is the master whom they own; and this master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee.”
From
Herodotus
,
The Persian Wars
(7.104)
 
 
So said a Spartan to the king of Persia, Darius, as he prepared to invade Greece. The Spartans did not produce much poetry or art, and they knew little ease in their lives. But it is not only by poetry and art that a culture can make its impression on the world. For more than two thousand years—until our own slack, effete age—we have had the example before us of that small
polis
and its men who were free because they acknowledged the law and feared disgrace more than death.
 
 
Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder
 
We cannot understand the Greek desire to discover the moral and physical laws that govern the world unless we entertain a few claims that our schools ignore or reject:
 
The world is a
cosmos
, an ordered whole of surpassing loveliness, wherein man, surpassingly beautiful, occupies an especially interesting place. The most inter esting thing about the world is that it is a
world
, not a chaotic soup.
Beauty is not merely a matter of opinion or social convention.
Love, inspired by beauty, possesses a spark of the divine. Love is more than appetite.
Our study of the physical world and of the moral world are not to be severed from one another. They are part of the same longing for wisdom which we call
philosophy
.
Together, these claims constitute a potent attack on our schools and our politics. Good and evil exist. Truth exists, and we can come to know it. The beautiful exists, and we are meant to love it. For the world cannot be reduced to matter alone.
 
The first Greeks to call themselves philosophers strove to understand the physical world, to see what prime element underlay clouds and lions and marble and blood. We should not take for granted their bold assumption that such an element could be found, and that the world was intelligible! Thales of Miletus
14
reasoned that such an element must be capable of assuming the three phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Hence he posited that water was somehow the
arche
or foundation or origin of all things, though he knew well that you couldn’t squeeze water to make iron or clay. His successor Anaximenes voted for air. Others named earth or fire or some combination of the four so-called elements.
 
But there’s a logical problem with all explanations of the world that resolve it into such stuff as water or air.
15
To say that the
arche
of the world is water doesn’t explain anything, since water is itself one of the things that requires explaining. It is circular reasoning. Nor does it help to stretch the circle as wide as the cosmos. The philosopher Anaximander, therefore, reasoned that whatever the
arche
is, it cannot be like the things it explains. It must be beyond predication. So he called it the
ape-iron
or the boundless.
16
 
Historians of science now mutter. “If only the Greeks had remained on the materialist track! They might have made fantastic discoveries in chemistry and physics. But instead we lose ourselves in metaphysical speculation and theology.” They too might have had plastic cities and hearts, centuries before our time.
 
Yes, the Greeks might have made impressive discoveries. Thales noticed that certain signs always preceded a bumper crop of olives. So one year he bought up every oil-press he could find, and made a killing.
17
But let’s pardon the Greeks for assuming that the world, and man, present more important and interesting questions than can a vat of olives. Anaximander’s objection demands to be answered. If there is a cause of the world, it cannot be one of the objects in the world—that collection of things no one of which is the cause of itself. Then it must be radically different from those objects. Then it cannot be material.
 
That observation seems self-evident, but today it would be derided as “unscientific.” “We can have no knowledge of things unless they are material,” says the modern professor. Is that so? Pythagoras, for instance, discovered that strings whose lengths were of certain ratios would sound notes of a certain harmony: a string half as long as another, of the same girth and stretched to the same tension, would sound a note exactly one octave higher, the so-called diapason. He saw such harmonies in all the world, and concluded, with the soul of a mathematical physicist, that all the world was made of immaterial
number
. When we recall that Pythagoras had no numerical system to work with, and that for him and his fellow Greeks the sentence 3 x 2 = 6 meant that “a rectangle made by segments three units long and two units wide will have an area of six square units,” we sense that for him “number” meant
ratio
, exact relationship. We might say, more poetically, that the world is made of harmonic law. Such was the awe with which Pythagoras contemplated this truth, that he attracted a group of devoted followers, who joined him in religious devotions inspired by the laws of numbers. They revered him as a saint.
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