Religion and Tragedy

Abstract

Greek drama and, after it, English drama both have their roots in religious ritual; and the gods have a crucial if unseen role to play in both Oedipus and Antigone. The general problem of the nature of the relationship between religion and tragedy merits some attention here. It is probably true that religious and tragic views of life are incompatible, if the religious view of life is doctrinal or didactic — if that is, it suggests that there is an answer to the riddle of the universe, that there is a comprehensible scheme of rewards and punishments for human kind, that there is an easily discernible moral code which solves the dilemma of how to live. Tragedy insists on the mysteriousness of man’s fate, it presents his situation as a predicament, and enforces the notion that suffering is immitigable and, on occasion, unjustified. Above all, it teaches no easy moral lessons. In the tragedies of Sophocles, for instance, there is no real strain between the religious view of life implied by the presence of the gods and their unalterable laws, and the tragic emphasis on the instability and frailty of man’s life because, though Sophocles in no way indicts the divine powers, he presents them as remote, inscrutable, not necessarily benevolent.