Articles From The Classical Teacher

The Tale of Two Kings: The difference between God and the gods
by Anthony Esolen

Every society portrays its gods as knowing what men do not. They may hoard up their knowledge to punish the wicked, or to bring innocent men to destruction; or they may parcel it out, little by little, to teach men the hard lessons of humility and wisdom. An example from ancient Greece will illustrate the point.

One day on the road to Thebes a young man fell into a quarrel at a three-way intersection and killed the man in the chariot who had struck him and tried to hustle him aside. As the play by Sophocles opens, this same passionate Oedipus, who freed the Thebans by solving the riddle of their nemesis, the Sphinx, now plies his considerable power of mind and his almost unruly energy to solve a new riddle: Why are his beloved Thebans dying of the plague? Says he to the people who come crying out to him:

II grieve for you, my children. Believe me, I know
All that you desire of me, all that you suffer;
And while you suffer, none suffers more than I.
You have your several griefs, each for himself;
But my heart bears the weight of my own, and yours
And all my people's sorrows. I am not asleep.
II weep; and walk through endless ways of thought.
But I have not been idle; one thing I have already done—
The only thing that promised hope. My kinsman
Creon, the son of Menoeceus, has been sent
To the Pythian house of Apollo, to learn what act
Or word of mine could help you.

Let us pause to note the king's tragic virtue. Though Oedipus is a man from the ancient myths, Sophocles has him speak with the fervor of an Athenian of his own time, one for whom the city is an object of religious devotion. Were it not for Oedipus' intellectual acuity and restlessness, and his care for the people, the tragedy would not unfold; he would never learn that he himself was the cause of the plague. Nor should we wriggle out of the difficulty by attributing to Oedipus a haughty overvaluing of human knowledge, a refusal to submit to the wisdom of the gods. Here at least we learn that Oedipus has admitted being stumped and has sent to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi to find out what he can.

When the messenger Creon returns with word that the plague is a punishment for the unavenged murder of the late King Laius, Oedipus determines to ferret out the murderer. We in the audience know—we are Greeks and have heard the tale before—that Oedipus is himself the killer. Thus, when he delivers his first proclamation to the people, we are aware, as we are throughout the play, of a web of irony, a trap that will close upon him and catch him by his own words:

And it is my solemn prayer
That the unknown murderer, and his accomplices,
IIf such there be, may wear the brand of shame
For their shameful act, unfriended, to their life's end.
Nor do I exempt myself from the imprecation;
IIf, with my knowledge, house or hearth of mine
Receive the guilty man, upon my head
Lie all the curses I have laid on others.

We are aware, after the fact, of what the gods know and what Oedipus does not know; and we also know that, were we in Oedipus' place, we would know as little as he. Man is a marvel, says Sophocles, taming the waves and furrowing the land with wheat, tracking the paths of the stars and building his gleaming cities of marble; but eternal laws bind us, and the gods who know the future and seldom tell it will deal out their justice as they please, and not as we determine.

Sophocles' play is a tissue of ironies of knowledge and of the dreadful plotting of the unseen gods. Were it not for the equivocations of the oracle at Delphi (a notoriously anti-democratic oracle, hostile to Sophocles' Athens), there would have been no tragedy. The gods begin by playing with, meddling with, the incomplete knowledge of men. They seem to enlighten, yet bring darkness. For Laius and his wife Jocasta had learned from Delphi that the son she bore would kill his father and marry his mother. To avert this unspeakable wickedness, they committed wickedness of their own, laming the child (hence his name Oedipus, or “Swollenfoot") and instructing a trusted servant to expose him in the mountains nearby. Such exposure was thought of as returning the child to the gods—a perilous chance, it seems, when the gods are malign, leading you on to commit the deed for which they will crush you. For Oedipus did not die; he was taken up by a shepherd and brought to Corinth, where he was adopted into the home of Polybus and Merope, whom he took for his father and mother.

But people will talk. Young Oedipus, hearing it whispered that those good people were not his parents, went in person to Delphi—as always, impetuous to know. The oracle, however (as oracles will), did not exactly reply. Instead, the priestess informed Oedipus that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified by the prospect of this sin, Oedipus leaves Corinth. If he is to be blamed for thinking he could avert the evil, he is also to be credited with wanting so much to avert it that he would sentence himself to exile. However we judge his flight, it is clear that the gods have put him in the way of the sin: had he been less pious, less desirous to know the truth, and less courageous, he never would have left Corinth, and therefore never would have sinned. The gods have given him what he thinks is reliable knowledge, knowing that he would misinterpret it and believe he knew what he did not know. We know this and, watching the plot unfold, know that the gods may do the same to us.

Many and subtle are the changes that Sophocles rings on the fundamental irony of Oedipus' situation: his accusing the blind seer Tiresias with conspiracy when all along it is he who is blind; Jocasta's impious attempt to comfort him with the unreliability of oracles, telling him about how she and Laius averted a prophecy by doing what (as she has yet to learn) would fulfill it; how Oedipus rejects her womanish advice to leave bad enough alone, once she has seen what he does not yet see; how for his crime he puts out his eyes. Yet, it is one moment I wish to examine, early in the play: Tiresias, a prophet of Apollo, has been summoned. He knows what Oedipus does not know, but in his desire to spare him (no matter for the plague that devastates the city) he will not speak.
Oedipus, naturally enough, accuses Tiresias of hiding knowledge for his own sake:

II tell you I believe you had a hand
IIn plotting, and all but doing, this very act.
IIf you had eyes to see with, I would have said
Your hand, and yours alone, had done it all.

To which the seer replies with the most devastating line in the play:

You would so? Then hear this: upon your head
IIs the ban your lips have uttered—from this day forth
Never to speak to me or any here.
You are the cursed polluter of this land.

“You are the man!" Oedipus will not believe it—why should he? What reasons has Tiresias alleged? The accusation only enrages the king, drawing from his lips the condemnations that will come thundering down upon him when the truth, the how and where and why of it, is finally revealed. We watch in amazement and comprehending horror as the ruler of Thebes does what we know we might do, denying what he cannot understand, in his ever greater stridency pressing against the truth he cannot help but suspect, the truth that cannot be but is. Indeed, Oedipus learns nothing from his contentious meeting with Tiresias, and is meant to learn nothing; the clue rather leads him to pursue false suppositions, as, for instance, that Tiresias has connived with Creon to steal the throne.

The man is being crushed by the gods.

The moral that the chorus draws from the terrible finale is one of resignation, even despair. The lofty will fall, not necessarily because they are proud (though they usually are), but because they are lofty. Best to keep to the unobtrusive middle; best to know when to duck. We live in relative ignorance, and do not even know, as Oedipus certainly did not, whether we shall escape this twilight life with something like happiness. Only the end makes us sure: and at that end we do not rejoice, but breathe a sigh of relief:

Sons and daughters of Thebes, behold: this was Oedipus,
Greatest of men: he held the key to the deepest mysteries;
Was envied by all his fellow-men for his great prosperity;
Behold, what a full tide of misfortune swept over his head.
Then learn that mortal man must always look to his ending,
And none can be called happy until that day when he carries
His happiness down to the grave in peace.

Now compare the Oedipus story with this account from the Old Testament. David, King of Israel, is a married man; once, and not happily, to Michal, daughter of the late King Saul; then again to Abigail, a woman who had assisted him when he fled Saul's wrath. And there were at least two others. Then one evening David, rich in wives, “arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look on" (2 Sam. 11:2).

The king learns that she is Bathsheba, wife of his loyal soldier, Uriah the Hittite. He sends for her, and lies with her, “for she was purified from her uncleanness" (11:4). The inspired author does not need to mention that neither she nor David is purified of the uncleanness of adultery; and the sly detail leads us to suspect that the good and clean time for a husband to have relations with his wife is not exactly the best time for David to have relations with Bathsheba. For “the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, I am with child" (11:5).

Now David finds himself in difficulties. He schemes; he knows a secret and thinks he can keep it hidden. Immediately he summons Uriah from the battlefield, asking him pertinent (but to David quite unimportant) questions about the war. Then he commands Uriah to go home and “wash his feet" (11:8), a euphemism for bathing the genitals, as prelude to more delightful battle with his wife. David even sends a rich meal down to Uriah's house, hoping that a full belly will set the man to it.

That should have been enough. David wants Uriah to lie with Bathsheba, that the child already conceived may be passed off as Uriah's own, given the vagaries of gestation and reckoning the calendar. But he does not reckon on Uriah's great loyalty: the soldier knows his duty and will not go home: “The ark and Israel and Judah abide in tents; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and drink and to lie with my wife? As thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing" (11:11). The hearer of these words in the synagogue must consider the irony. Here we have David, who danced for joy as he brought the sacred ark of the covenant into Jerusalem—dancing with such abandon that his skirts rose up over his shame. But David has forgotten about that covenant. Uriah has not forgotten—and he is Uriah the Hittite, an alien, one who has chosen to worship the God of Israel and to fight as a soldier for Israel's king.

David's hand is forced—so he thinks. He's given Uriah a decent chance; now there is nothing to do but shoulder the husband out of the way: “And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to [his general] Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the foremost of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die" (11:14–15). The letter, in politic fashion, leaves the means to Joab. That general—who made a virtue of placing political considerations above piety, even though he knew right from wrong—obeys, and the plot succeeds. Uriah would never return alive.

By comparison with the gods of the Greek play, the God of Israel seems to have kept free of the scene. He does not meddle, nor use oracular chicanery to elicit the wickedness he will punish. David's sin has its birth in David's mind alone. But in another sense, God is all the more intimately involved by his apparent absence. Uriah's reference to the ark reveals God's presence: that precious box, so humble that David thought it unworthy, was the dwelling place of the Lord among his people. How the Creator of all things seen and unseen could take up special habitation in a cedar chest, we are never told; not until, as Christians believe, that same Creator would take flesh of the Virgin and dwell within her womb, whereof the ark was but a type and a shadow. However it may be, the Lord is near, as David of all people ought to know. He and Joab know what others do not, but the Lord knows all and will bring it to light.

And here marks one critical difference between the classical irony of Sophocles and the ironies of the Jewish and the Christian faith. The Greek gods know many things that men do not; they do not know everything; they too submit to a mysterious Fate. One of the things they do not know, or do not care to know, is the human heart. But the Lord does know the heart, because there is the temple where the Lord wishes to dwell, pleased with the only sacrifice that means anything: the burnt offerings of love. So the Lord sends a messenger to David.

The king does not send for the prophet; the prophet comes to the king. Tiresias speaks in riddles almost perversely designed to enrage Oedipus and check his understanding; Nathan speaks in a parable designed to capture the heart of David before he is aware. We who are aware watch as the scene builds to its climactic irony:

And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and he said unto him, there were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.

And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him.

And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.

And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.

"You are the man!" That accusation again—with a difference. The parable has summoned David's sympathies. He feels in his heart the betrayal of the poor man, what he did not feel in Uriah's case, as he shuffled and connived and ducked. The vision he is granted, by the mercy of God, and by God's justice, which does not veer from his mercy, is meant to convict him, and, by convicting him, to redeem him. Nathan does deliver a terrible prophecy of punishment to come, duly levied upon David's offspring, in that David had violated the womb of another man's wife. War shall fall upon David's house, and the child conceived by Bathsheba shall die. What David did in secret the Lord will ironically and appropriately enough do in the open, to David's shame, before all the people. But even as he hears the punishment, David is struck to the heart, not urging excuse, but saying simply, “I have sinned against the Lord" (12:13).

That is the key moment, right there. For God works to bring David to life again; he is God of the living, not the dying. Nathan replies at once: “The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die" (12:13).

And David does penance, fasting, lying prostrate upon the earth, praying to no avail that the Lord will alter his punishment and let his child live. The halfunderstanding counselors see this and try to advise the king to be reasonable, but he, wiser than they, refuses. Then the child dies, and David lifts himself from the ground and bathes and changes his clothes, to the astonishment of those same counselors who still do not see. Why mourn now, says David? What good will that do? The king's trust is once again like a child's. He has submitted to the Lord. And so, far from believing that Bathsheba is unclean territory, he understands not only his sin but the Lord's forgiveness. After night comes the morning: “And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon: and the Lord loved him" (12:24).

How strange that the son of the adulterers should become the next and most glorious king of Israel! But he is the son not of the adultery, but of the repentance and the forgiveness. He is the son of the new knowledge, not simply that mankind is nothing before the gods, but that man who is nothing before God is, by the grace of God, “a little lower than the angels" (Ps. 8:5), crowned with glory and honor. Nathan ratified the event, for David sent for that good prophet, who looked upon the baby and “called his name Jedidiah [beloved of the Lord]" (2 Sam. 12:25).

That story of David and Bathsheba reveals the workings of a God whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts, but who made us to walk in his ways, and to be fulfilled in the intellectual vision of his glory. If it is not irreverent to say so, he is a God who swindles man into his restoration. He dupes man into truth. He becomes flesh, to raise man to himself.

We see that in the biblical account of David's sin and in Sophocles' play of Oedipus, the ironies result from a dramatic severance between what God or the gods know and what man knows. The sinner makes much of his cunning (David) or intellect (Oedipus), only to find with a shock that he has already been found out, and that not only does he know less than he thought he did, but the truth is other than what he had suspected. In both cases the sinner comes to a humiliating (for Oedipus, also horrifying) knowledge of who he is, and how small he is before the divine. In both, the punishment will extend into future generations: Israel will be divided into two kingdoms, reflecting the division foretold for David's family. Thebes will fall to civil war when each of the incest-born sons of Oedipus attempts to oust the other.

Yet Oedipus is the archetypal tragic hero, while David is celebrated as a great king. David's sins and unhappy old age could never, for the Jewish people and their prophets, efface his glory as Israel's greatest ruler and the progenitor of the Messiah. Why the divergence? One reason is that the irony instructs David in a way it cannot instruct Oedipus. The sinner gains knowledge of himself, true. But he also gains knowledge of God, and of God not as an external and mystifying will, but as a person, a Being to whom one can pray, before whom one can dance. He is a God who reveals himself because he wishes to be known.

So for Jews and Christians there is an added dimension to the irony of incomplete knowledge, a liberating depth, where otherwise all would have been flat confinement. A single act of love from the heart of the Almighty explodes the tense yet static confrontation between the classical heroes and the gods. For no matter how heroic or pious the man was, he could never know more about the gods than was already given him to know: they were immortal, powerful, beautiful, ruthless. Greek philosophy serves rather to highlight what man cannot know for certain about the gods than what he can know or even suppose with a fair probability. The alley is blind.

So the terrible irony is that man, whose mind can search the stars, “raiding the fields of the unmeasured All," as Lucretius says in overpraise of his master Epicurus (1.74), is the single being in creation whose faculties are quite in vain. It is as if a malign fate had ordered it so. We long to seize the fulfillment of our intellects, finite though we are, but because we are finite yet can apprehend the infinite, we neither can nor will. That, say the grim sages, ought to teach us a lesson.

But what if the One we wish to know knows us and wishes to be known by us? That is no idle fancy but the startling claim that Judaism and Christianity make: it is an assertion of a fact. Such a God either exists or he does not. There is no third possibility. And if he does exist? Suddenly and with a fearful abandon he may free us from our resigning and comfortable limitations. He may knock loose the iron fetters forged by what we think we know and what we think we cannot know.

This article is exerpted from Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature. Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He has translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (John Hopkins Press) and Dante's Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone magazine.