2005 Summer Reading
The Burial at Thebes
Religion and the State

by Prof. Mary Stange, Religion and Women's Studies

The idea of a separation between “Church” and “State,” as we conceive it today, would not have made any sense in the ancient world. Indeed, the name for the Athenian citizens’ assembly, ekklesia, a gathering-together of equals (in this case, all male) would subsequently be used by the early Greek-speaking Christians for their developing religious institution (hence the English “ecclesiastical”)—a usage based, for them, on an age-old cultural self-understanding regarding the sacred order (“hierarchy”) infusing human power relationships. As Professor Mechem’s essay on Religion makes clear, religious ideas and rituals had permeated every 5th Century Athenian’s life and worldview. Yet at the same time, as Professor Arnush suggests in his essay on Law, there was a degree of ambiguity regarding the relative force of those laws which were man-made, as opposed to those which were divinely ordained.

The Greeks were among the earliest peoples in Western intellectual and political history to begin to conceptualize distinctions between civil and religious duties. The Jews were another such group (hence Jesus of Nazareth’s “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”). Yet whereas for them this conceptualization largely arose from the experience of exile and religious persecution, for the Greeks it was a consequence of their political and intellectual innovations: the invention of democracy on the one hand, and subsequently of philosophy. The world of Athenian politics emphasized the role of the individual in the government of the polis, and evolving philosophical discourse began to provide a conceptual framework for posing questions relating to individual rights and responsibilities. It is fair to say that as soon as people have developed a mental construct which can meaningfully distinguish between civil and religious obligations, or “lower” and “higher” laws, they will necessarily discover areas of conflict between them. One sees the early stages of this process in the Antigone.

For it is just such a conflict that spurs, and sustains, Antigone’s revolt against Creon’s decree. She tells him:

I disobeyed because the law was not
The law of Zeus nor the law ordained
By Justice, Justice dwelling deep
Among the gods of the dead. What they decree
Is immemorial and binding for us all.
The proclamation had your force behind it
But it was mortal force, and I, also a mortal,
I chose to disregard it. I abide
By statutes utter and immutable—
Unwritten, original, god-given laws. (p. 29)

Antigone’s appeal to a higher law, and her assertion that it is both her right and her duty to abide by it, are surely among the factors that not only account for the play’s persistent fascination down through the ages, but also for the fact that in every age the issues it engages feel particularly relevant—and not simply in the sense of their being “timeless,” whatever that might mean, but in their specific relevance to the here and now.

As much as we Americans pride ourselves on the First Amendment’s separation of church and state, a quick scan of contemporary news events shows the intermixture of religious and civil interests to be every bit as murky in our own society as it was in ancient Greece, and the clash of religious and civil responsibilities remains as heated as it was for Sophocles’s Antigone and Creon. Take, for instance, the recent controversy over the posting of the Ten Commandments on public land and in courthouses. The Supreme Court upheld the former, but not the latter (even though the commandments are posted in the Court itself). Surveys consistently show that many Americans believe (erroneously) that the Constitution is based upon the Ten Commandments. And even for many of those who do not, the appeal to a higher law undergirds a faith that God is in one way or another on the side of the courts and Constitution: As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed to protestors in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, “If we are wrong, the Constitution is wrong. If we are wrong, The Supreme Court of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty himself is wrong.” King’s logic, which he later spelled out in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was that there is a higher moral law, which is encapsulated in the teachings of religion, however short religious as well as secular leaders may fall in its implementation. The spirit of that higher law trumps the letter of unjust human-created laws. In articulating this claim, King joined a venerable line of nonviolent political activists, most notably Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi. Antigone would feel utterly at home in their company.

Or take last spring’s controversy over the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. Her husband claimed a legal, as well as moral, right to bring her biological life to an end. Her parents had several Catholic and Protestant supporters and spokespersons, including civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his brother the President sided with the family, and the United States Congress attempted to legislate on their behalf—a move which turned out not only to be unconstitutional, as far as the courts were concerned, but wildly unpopular among the American people. What we all witnessed was a bizarre wrestling match between her husband and her parents over who, ultimately, had the right to Terri’s body, and what constituted the desecration and/or proper disposition thereof—a scene in some ways eerily reminiscent of the precipitating action in The Burial at Thebes.

Seamus Heaney writes that he took on the task of translating the play because of its relevance to political events playing out in our world: Creon, he notes, has much in common with George W. Bush. But he sagely goes on to remark that the modern predilection to sympathize more with Antigone’s “human rights” position over against Creon’s “law-and-order” approach can itself be short-sighted, when it comes to Creon’s own, very real suffering at play’s end. Heaney does not add, although he might have, that while freedom fighters appeal to higher laws to justify their actions, so, too, do terrorists. Reading the Antigone particularly in Heaney’s politically informed translation, against the backdrop of current world events provides a profoundly fresh perspective on the complex, and often conflicting, claims that religion and society exert on each of us.