How are we to respond to the ever more frequent collision of our seemingly incompatible belief systems? Mr. Klavan continues, since we too are witnessing an escalation of public conflict between “traditional believers” and those who fancy themselves “secular guardians of government neutrality.” Like Creon, state and local politicians who shutter churches and synagogues while cheering partisan gatherings claim they have public safety in mind, but their actions reveal them to be adherents of “new and unnamed religions,” whose common feature is “faith in the government’s salvific power.” Klavan contends, a closer look reveals that, rather than setting “religion against irreligion,” the story “pits two fanatics against one another.” Antigone’s adherence to ancestral piety is offensive to Creon not because he represents a secular neutrality or pragmatism, but rather because he is a worshipper of the city. Though we are “accustomed to thinking of Antigone as a battle between religious martyrdom and godless statism,” Mr. Citing her duty to the “everlasting” laws of the “gods below,” Antigone proudly defies Creon’s “tyranny,” provoking him to bury her alive in a “rocky chamber.” Intent on bringing this civil war to an end, Antigone’s uncle, the newly crowned Creon, declares it a capital crime to honor Polyneices-who led seven armies against his own city-with any of the customary rituals prescribed for the dead. As the play opens, Antigone’s brothers Eteocles and Polyneices have slain one another in a dispute over their father’s throne. Set in ancient Thebes, Antigone centers on the unfortunate daughter of the accursed King Oedipus. Though his sobering conclusion-that our republic is being rent by the clash of “rival and incompatible theologies”-is worth heeding, a second look at the play reveals that it also contains advice on how we can strive to overcome these divisions. In an insightful essay (“Idolatry in Lockdown,” Law and Liberty, January 28, 2021), Spencer Klavan reflects on the contemporary significance of the conflict at the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone. A key lesson of Sophocles’ “Antigone” is that fanaticism results when public actors fail to practice the one virtue capable of moderating the excesses of human nature: political prudence.
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