What is the Riddle of the Sphinx: Part II. From sight to blindness; blindness to sight

[Reading Time: 17 minutes]

Review

In our last writing, we began with the famous words inscribed at the Oracle of Delphi:

“Know thyself.”

Tracing this theme of self-knowledge vs self-deception through the writings of Socrates’ pupil, Xenophon, we found that if we do not know ourselves, then we can’t truly “know anything else.”

For being “deceived in an estimate” of our own powers and abilities (How common is that!), we become “deceived” regarding our estimate of “other people” and “other human affairs.” We talk endlessly…but don’t know what we are saying nor the people with whom we “converse” … as our self-projection is merely reading a script to another person’s self-projection.

Nor do we actually know what we “need,” nor indeed what we are “doing;” but

“being wholly mistaken (diamartanō: From diá + hamartánō) in all these respects”

we

“fail to come to the good and stumble into many evils” (Memorabilia, 4.2.27).

We then transitioned from Greek Philosophy into the realm Greek Tragedy, entering into the extraordinary drama of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The play, we remember, opens with a priest coming to Oedipus announcing that a “surging death” is now sweeping through the land—a “disease” which “infects” everything and everyone it touches.

And we asked whether this disease was not that “polluting stain,” that “universal, hereditary sickness" … that “horrible, deep, inexpressible corruption” which was…nothing other than…sin itself (Formula of Concord, Article I)?

The city had been saved by Oedipus, who had solved the riddle of the Sphinx, the ‘Devouring Mother,’ who had ruled over Thebes with terrifying physical and psychological power, consuming its people ‘whole’ who failed to answer her riddle.

She was, in modern terms, the overbearing soccer or homeschool mom, keeping her children under such tight control that she prevents any genuine development outside of her dominance

And though, on an intellectual level, the riddle had been solved, neither Oedipus nor the city had come through it to deal with the root issues (Cerberus); and thus, as a result, something far worse had arisen in its place (Hydra).

As we said, there was victory on one level; defeat at another.

And this is where (if we’re honest) most of us actually are. Namely, we intellectually solve an enigma in our life (The reason why I made a mistake at work; Why I had a falling out with a colleague or friend or family member; Why my marriage is struggling; Why my children are acting out, etc., etc.) but we fail to penetrate into the real reasons that remain untouched deep below the surface (again, Cerberus).

And because we operate only with conscious-level, surface solutions without, by the Spirit’s aid, delving into the unconscious world of ourselves or our family or culture (Cerberus’ three heads), the problems only seem to get worse.

It is the Law of Unintended Consequences (Merton, "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action").

And the negative dimensions came to be spoken of, interestingly enough, as the “Cobra Effect” (Siebert, 2001).

It is with this introductory review that we move back into the narrative of Oedipus and Thebes.

The “agony” felt by the King

Upon hearing from the priest and feeling the deepest empathy for his people for their losses, Oedipus opens up is heart to his “poor children” declaring to them,

“For I understand that you are ill, and yet,
sick as you are, there is not one of you whose illness equals mine” (60-61).1

For

“…your agony
comes to each one of you as his alone,
a special pain for him and no one else.
But here in my heart, I sorrow for myself,
and for the city, and for you—all together” (62-66).

His “agony,” however, is more literal than he knows…as his presence in Thebes is the very source of the town's agony and its resultant decay.

The blinding effects of superficial victory

Now at the height of his power and witnessing the bitter suffering of the city’s people, Oedipus declares (as any good King would) that he will next take upon himself the burden of solving the mystery of his city’s downfall. 

That is to say, by the powers of his intellect, and with the praises of Thebes boosting his growing confidence, he will now effect a second, even greater salvation for the people.

Yet, again, not understanding his own history, what he presumes will bring salvation…will, in the end, bring utter, unmitigated disaster.

But how??

The root cause of the Plague

This is where the real tragic irony begins to take dramatic shape.

Assuring them,

“I’ll be a wicked man
if I do not act on all the god reveals” (76-77)

Oedipus sends Creon (the brother of the Queen) to “Apollo’s shrine” to “learn” how he might “save the city” (81-90). 

And upon his return, he (the Queen’s brother…who used to be his uncle but now is his brother-in-law by incest), announces that the cause of the plague is the murder of the prior King Laius (100-110). And the murderer (who, by this point, we know is Oedipus himself), the god,

“Lord Phoebus [Apollo] clearly orders us to drive away”

The reason: This man is

“the polluting stain this land has harbored.”

And

“It will not be healed if we keep nursing it” (96-99).

Irony upon irony.

The “polluting stain” is their Savior-King; yet the people, still riddled by fear and loss, keep looking to him, the root cause of the Plague, to heal them from the Plague…whom they “keep nursing” as their “Savior.”

The ironies continue to deepen.

Questions for a modern audience?

To bring this forward to our modern context, we may ask a few questions:

Can the healing we seek for our children in education with all of the opportunities afforded by it (“I just want them to have the opportunities I didn’t”) become the source of a deadly infection in their adulthood, if received unquestiongly?

Can the healing we seek for our family through our work (“I just want them to have enough…I want them to have what I didn’t”) become the very thing that separates us progressively from them? And will the increased salary become that which enables us to cover over our own issues and insecurities, in a way that drives the personal, familial and generational diseases (Cerberus) deeper?

And continuing on, can the healing we superficially seek in our marriages without dealing with the root issues from our past become the very element that ensure the pestilence is more deeply encoded in our family’s DNA generationally?

Or to make it “spiritual,” will the surface-layer healing we seek in our Christian lives, moving from church to church, small group to small group, spiritual community to spiritual community, become the very means by which the virus is spread?

Kyrie eleison!

But, we could pause, taking a moment to ask,

‘What is happening?’

And

“How did I get here?

And

“What does this all mean”

But instead, we continue operating on the surface, moving from action to action…and solving problem after problem; yet, all the while keeping ourselves blind to the deeper issues.

And so, we repeat the twin question of Jesus,

“Can a blind man lead a blind man?

Will they not both fall into a pit?” (Lk 6:39)

In sight, blindness; in blindness, sight

Oedipus, however, still walking in the dark, begins to question Creon as to the details of the murder of the former King. And without diving into all of the layers of masterful, interconnecting irony that follow, we briefly summarize the main movements of the play in drawing towards our conclusion.

Understanding that the murderer of his predecessor must be identified and brought to justice for the pandemic to cease, Oedipus delivers a speech where he boldly (and foolishly) curses the killer to a life of misery:

“I pray that that man’s life be consumed in evil and wretchedness.”

Going so far as to even declare,

“And as for me, if with my knowledge he lives at my hearth…

may I suffer all the things I’ve just called down upon the others" (246-251).

Utilizing all the powers at his disposal to investigate the crime (“I’m looking into every story,” 292), Oedipus then calls for Tiresias, the “god-like prophet, in whom truth resides” (299).

The “god-like prophet,” who is importantly blind; but who has a depth of understanding that none can question; the blind seer whom, we soon understand, yet has “eyes now” to see (454). In Oedipus’ own words,

“You who understand all things—what can be taught
and what cannot be spoken of, what goes on
in heaven and here on the earth—you know,
although you cannot see” (300-304).

“And seeing you will see and not perceive”

This is where, we might say, the tragedy becomes Biblical.

We remember the words of Jesus in response to the disciples’ question,

“Why do You speak in parables?” (Mt 13:10)

We dealt in Part I of a prior article with the overarching theme of religious systems as being distinct from genuine Christianity (i.e. The true Church and the false Church; the true Christ and the false, cultural Christ; true redemption and false salvation, true guilt vs false mechanisms of shame, etc., etc.). And we will move into Christ’s response in greater detail in the forthcoming Part II.

Very briefly, however, we remember that Jesus’ answer to His disciples directed our attention to the prophecy of Isaiah, revealing therein that the reason He speaks in Parables is itself a blinding paradox:

“Therefore I speak to them in parables,

because seeing they do not see,

and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says:

‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,

And seeing you will see and not perceive;

And why is this the case?

For the hearts of this people have grown dull.

Their ears are hard of hearing,

And their eyes they have closed,

Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,

Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,

So that I should heal them’” (Mt 13:13-15-> Is 6:9-10).

Back again to Oedipus Rex.

Beneath the surface, in the unconscious world of Cerberus, there lies the possibility of healing…but only if we seek that our own blind eyes be opened in the process…

But what we will discover is that the process of discovery will ultimately be too much for the King’s conscious-level mind. And the events that will take place (especially the suicide of his mother-now-wife [1251-1265]) will be too much for his mind to take in and his eyes to view.

So much so that he will not merely “close” his “eyes”—he will, at the climax of the tragedy, gauge them out with his own hands…using the “golden brooches” (long pins) from his own mother’s gown (1268-1271), now dangling dead from a noose.

What the blind prophet says

When Tiresias is led into the royal court, Oedipus asks the “great seer, our shield and savior” to offer his prophetic insight into the murderous intrigue (304).

Yet the blind prophet—his eyes being fully open to the truth—refuses to speak:

“You will not learn a thing from me” (328).

To the degree that Oedipus becomes progressively enraged, then changing his tone from one of praise to that of mocking. Before he had spoken with a degree of humility and respect:

“If you know something, then, by the gods,

do not turn away. We are your suppliants—

all of us—we bend our knees to you” (326-327).

Now, when he doesn’t get the answer he wants (like most of us), he resorts to actually mocking Tiresias for his physical disability—that of the prophet’s blindness… But even in his scoffing, the King does so in a way that still drips with irony:

"Truth is not in you—

for your ears, your mind, your eyes are blind!” (370-371).

To which we are all asking,

“Ok.

Well, if he is blind but knows the truth, then what are you who, who sees with your eyes but remains blind to all the deeper truths?”

And to this question, Oedipus will indeed respond, providing a tragic answer, by both word and deed.

From the riddle of the Sphinx to the riddle of man

Oedipus had overcome the riddle of the Sphinx by the words,

“It is man.”

And from the narrative of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, we find that the real problem—the true deadly pestilence—lies within man himself.

Or, to be more precise, the pestilence lurks within man after the Fall.

“The serpent said to the woman

‘Surely you will not die,

for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened

and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’” (Gen 3:4-5).

Again,

“your eyes will be opened.”

And, ironically, as soon as their eyes are opened, what they see is not some new, utopian paradise (They were already in one!), but the veil is lifted and they take in the absolute horror and bitter destruction and untold agony—which they themselves had produced— not only for themselves, but moreover, for all of their progeny.

So we find in Oedipus Rex:

The engine of the play’s tragedy is not fate or misunderstanding, but Oedipus’ self-deception:

It is he who murdered his father;

It is he who married his mother;

It is he who had children by her, encoding his errors into his family’s DNA;

It is he who drove his mother to suicide;

It is he who reduced himself to blindness; and

It is he who cursed his family line and led himself into exile.

The tragedy of Oedipus is the tragedy of man.

From Greek tragedy to modern psychoanalysis: The “Oedipus Complex”

This tragic drama, written nearly two and a half thousand years ago, was spoken of by Freud as being psychologically revelatory for all mankind. The fate of Oedipus is a psychological archetype for human nature and, therefore, it

“moves us only because it might have been our own,

because the oracle laid upon us before our birth is the very curse which rested upon him” (The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter V, section D).

He continues,

“As the poet brings the guilt of Oedipus to light by his investigation, he forces us to become aware of our own inner selves, in which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed (i.e. A child’s unconscious, murderous jealousy of his father combined with his sexual attraction to his mother).

The antithesis with which the chorus departs:

“...Behold, this is Oedipus,

Who unraveled the great riddle, and was first in power,

Whose fortune all the townsmen praised and envied;

See in what dread adversity he sank! (Ibid. Lines 1524-1528)

Freud then relates this drama to ourselves, asserting that the

“admonition touches us and our own pride, we who, since the years of our childhood, have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation.

Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the desires that offend morality, the desires that nature has forced upon us and after their unveiling we may well prefer to avert our gaze from the scenes of our childhood” (Ibid.).

Now, one does not have to be a “Freudian” to, at the very least, admit that he may have some insight in these lines.

From words that brought salvation to words that now condemn

At the very last, we are presented with a pitiable picture of a truly tragic hero. And we could mock him in shame ("He saved others; himself He cannot save")…if we did not…see ourselves in some way in his tragedy.

For the questions remain to us,

What would we have done, if we were in his place?

What if our own father had sought to kill us to protect his own skin?

What if our own mother cast us out?

And what if we were the one who, by our own strength of skill and intellect, had solved a riddle that no one else could?

What if we had been promoted to heights of power?

What if we—still blind to our own nature—became suddenly viewed as a savior and hero (by people who were themselves blind)?

And what if we (maybe coming to actually believe this narrative) continued to operate under this mounting pressure with every decision of ours to “save others”?

Kyrie eleison!

But still further, when the truth finally came out,

How would we respond?

Would we simply and calmy admit it all?

Or would we, like Oedipus, use our position and power to keep hiding in the darkness?

And when this was no longer possible, would we, like him, condemn ourselves…as if such self-condemnation could actually expiate our mounting guilt?

Again, Kyrie eleison!

All of these questions, it seems, are taken into account in the final admonition of the Chorus.

The closing warning to us

“O generations of mortal men,
how I count your life as scarcely living.
What man is there, what human being,
who attains a greater happiness
than mere appearances, a joy
which seems to fade away to nothing?” (1187-1192)

[“Vanity of vanity, says the preacher, All is vanity and grasping for the wind” (hevel)]

The closing warning to the “hero”

“Poor wretched Oedipus, your fate
stands here to demonstrate for me
how no mortal man is ever blessed.

Here was a man who fired his arrows well—
his skill was matchless—and he won
the highest happiness in everything.

For, Zeus, he slaughtered the hook-taloned Sphinx
and stilled her cryptic song. For our state,
he stood there like a tower against death
and from that moment, Oedipus,
we have called you our king
and honoured you above all other men,
the one who rules in mighty Thebes (1524–1535).

But what about this towering king now?

But now who is there whose story
is more terrible to hear? Whose life
has been so changed by trouble,
by such ferocious agonies?
Alas for celebrated Oedipus,
the same spacious place of refuge
served you both as child and father,
the place you entered as a new bridegroom.
How could the furrow where your father planted,
poor wretched man, have tolerated you
in such silence for so long?

Time, which watches everything
and uncovered you against your will,
now sits in judgment of that fatal marriage,
where child and parent have been joined so long.
O child of Laius, how I wish
I’d never seen you—now I wail
like one whose mouth pours forth laments.
To tell it right, it was through you
I found my life and breathed again,
and then through you the darkness veils my eyes (1456–1478).

Darkness. Blindness. Blackness. Tragedy.

The plight of man left to his own devices without a “Mediator” (Job 9).

And with these lines, we move towards our conclusion.

From the place of his birth to the place of his death

Oedipus who began the play as a powerful, confident king is now a "pollution" that must be cast out. He who acted to save the city of Thebes, acted also in a way that brought the “deadly pestilence” into it.

In Tiresias’ summation:

“That success of yours has been your ruin” (442).

And so, he being blind but his eyes finally open to the ruin and chaos he has caused, at the last begs Creon to exile him in one desperate—and ironic plea—to Mount Cithaeron, the very place he was supposed to have died as an infant.

“Forth from your borders cast me with all speed.

Set me within some vast desert where no mortal voice shall greet me any more” (1446–1449).

Yet the fact remains that self-imposed exile in “some vast desert” will not get rid of his guilt. His heroic self-condemnation will in no way cleanse him.

There can be no “geographical cure;” for he takes himself and his guilt wherever he goes. And cast out from the world of men, in the “vast desert” blind and alone, his guilt will endlessly consume him.

This is a picture of Hell.

The Day of Atonement: Two goats

This is a picture from the OT of the two goats brought before the High Priest and taken into the “Holy Place”:

The first is sacrificed in a redemptive ritual as a “sin offering” (Lev 16:9, 15-16)—that is to say, his sins are atoned for;

The other, however, is kept “alive” (Lev 16:10) as a “scapegoat” with

“all the iniquities…all the transgressions…all the sins…upon” confessed over him and literally placed on his own “head.”

Then, guilty and unredeemed, he is cast forth

“away into the wilderness” where he “shall bear” in his person “all the iniquities” both of himself and his people “into an uninhabited land…” (Lev 16:20-22).

And there he is kept alive to wander the deserts lands alone, ravaged for all eternity by the deadly pestilence of his own making.

Kyrie eleison!

Lord have mercy!

So Oedipus.

Into the deepest abyss of Tartarus, the once victorious King is driven to forever bear his own guilt without any hope of redemption.

So us.

Into the darkest uninhabited landscapes of Sheol.

Without a Mediator; Without a Redeemer.

Hopeless. Blind. Infected. Ravaged.

Yet there may be a different way; A different King; A different Scapegoat.

Conclusion: From King Oedipus to King Solomon to the King of Kings

The tragedy of Oedipus Rex is a terrifyingly honest look into the deepest and darkest riddles of mankind.

And these can’t be solved with our intellect or with our position or with our power or with our money and human resources.

The wisest King came to see this.

He whose own bloodline had been infected by hidden sin and adultery (II Samuel 11)…which sin would not be fully dealt with, but would become magnified by the end of his reign (I Kings 11:1-11) and thus, encoded into his family’s DNA in the generations to come.

That is to say, the wisest of Kings had himself spread the virus.

Adversaries then came (I Kings 11:14-25). Rebellion broke out (I Kings 11:26-40). A false religious systems arose (I Kings 12:25-33).

What now??

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury (T.S. Eliot, East Coker, Section III).

Yet for one thing:

The “King of Kings”; Who is both the “Sin Offering” for His people and the “Scapegoat”

Who bears “in His own body” for all eternity the marks of “all the iniquities…all the transgressions…all the sins” of His people.

And it is to Him that we come—we who

“like sheep, totally deceived (planáō), who have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer (Epískopos) of [our] souls” (I Pet 2:25).

Amen!

So may it be!

[1. Note: There are two sets of line numbering for the play:

The numbers in [brackets], which refer to the original Greek line numbers (often based on the Oxford Classical Text or Perseus); then

The numbers by themselves, which refer to the English translation.

The divergence between the two is due to the fact that Translators often break a single Greek line into two or three shorter English lines so as to maintain a specific rhythm, poetic feel, or clarity. Additionally, the line grouping may further diverge in the “Choral Odes,” long speeches (rhesis), etc., where more lines are added to the original numbering. The result is that the Johnston text (where most of the quotations have been taken) has a ~70-line difference from the original.]