Sophocles and the Commonwealth Covenant Church

If the following verse by Rossetti suggests paterns in your own mind then read further—

"There the dreams are multitudes. Poets' fancies all are there:

There the elf-girls flood with wings Valleys full of plaintive air.

It would not have been a particularly exciting divorce case but for the incidentals it revealed on the church life of Commonwealth Covenanters. And there would not have been anything particularly novel about these details except that they came out in the same week as Sophocles Antigone. In this French version presented by the Repertory Creon as the personification of reason represses Antigone as the personification of feeling. Now reason without feeling is the harsh stilted thing we customarily associate with mosaic law or the puritanic virtues, thus in Creon we have the absurd spectacle of Reason condemning Antigone to death without any "living" reason for doing so. She must die because the formal reason or structure of law demands it, not in the first place because of Creon's wish. The psychological climax occurs when Creon attempts to persuade Antigone not to break the law even though he admits it to be only a facade. But feeling will not bow to any stilted reason.

Creon: "Now tell me in as few words as you can did you know the order forbidding such an act?

Antigone: "I knew it naturally. It was plain enough."

Creon: "And yet you dared to contravene it?"

Antigone: "Yes. That order did not come from God."

But no matter how he may have felt in the first place Creon now begins to act as though the law did come from God, Antigone dies and where feeling is suppressed Reason becomes a God of terror.

"Righteous ... not a Being of Pity or Compassion . . . Delighting in cries and tears and clothed in holiness and solitude." (Blake-Jerusalem.)

The connecting link between Reason and feeling is personified in this play by Haemon, the son of Creon, betrothed to Antigone. Now that feeling is dead he must also die. With his death goes the possibility of Creon regaining contact with feeling. The divorce is now almost complete. Reason is left isolated. To signify the complete sterility of such a reason without a locus left for feeling. Creon's wife also kills herself. The death of Eurydice is the last straw for Creon. His law—once the shadow of his reign—has now become the substance. His spectre, or evil self, in the form of the guards now reigns supreme. There is nothing else left. The triple tragedy has left Creon without a place for feeling in his heart, any connecting link with feeling, and worst of all the existence such a thing as feeling to balance out his mind.

And now we take a leap into the pulpit of the Commonwealth Covenanters. Here law reigns supreme with one of the many literal interpretations of the Bible. But law which exists only by virtue of suppressed feeling is an uncertain law, ever threatened by repressed passion. Its safety can only be assured if a constant viligance is kept and a warfare waged against Antigone. The texture of our sermons therefore is largely anti-sexual. We abhor the sins of the flesh. Daily we lay our passions at the rack and flay their insidiousness. But the snake, symbol of our repressed eroticism, generally contrives to find a back door entrance into our house of lay. Thus our Covenanters are given in their repetitious hymn chanting and bodily rolling to a form of mass hysteria which is just the anarchy of feeling their law denies. But Creon is master . . .

"Every house a den, every man bound, the shadows are fill'd

with spectres, and the shadows wove over with curses of iron;

Over the doors, 'Thou shalt not' and over the chimneys 'Fear' is written:

With bands of iron round their necks fastened into the walls

The citizens ..."

(Blake)

There is no moral to this particular story. Human personality takes many forms. Its forms of integration will be equally variegated.

Circe.