Today’s Ills
Suicide rates are at their highest-ever levels; and numbing out—not facing reality—is evident in all the escapism, that is, addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and home entertainment systems by which we are encased. And if we have not subjected ourselves to suicide or escapism, we also have those extraordinary high levels of depression and despair with which so many in our society are now afflicted.What, then, is the story of Oedipus and why is this so relevant to us? Jungian psychology takes the view, I think correctly, that what we deny inwardly eventually manifests itself outwardly. In other words, what is going on within us, internally, will eventually appear in the real world. This becomes a fate from which we cannot escape.
Faced with this oracle, Laius ordered that his son be destroyed at birth. A servant was ordered to abandon and expose the baby on Mount Cithaeron, with the child’s feet being transfixed by a spike. Hence, the name Oedipus, which means “swollen feet.” However, the servant couldn’t go along with such an evil act, so he passes the child to a shepherd to look after, and so fate is set in motion.
Fast-forward: The oracle at Delphi tells Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother; Oedipus, not knowing his true heritage, assumes he will harm his step-parents at Corinth. Thus, to avoid the prophecy, he flees Corinth and during his flight inadvertently meets his real father at a crossroad. Neither recognizes the other, and following an altercation, Oedipus kills his father.
From there, Oedipus goes on to Thebes, and on the way answers the Sphinx’s riddle. Through this act of superior intelligence, he destroys the Sphinx and is made king of Corinth; in the process, he marries Queen Jocasta who, unbeknownst to them both, is also his real mother. The prophecy of Apollo is fulfilled.
It’s Unfair!
It seems as if Oedipus is some innocent being led to willful destruction for no good reason. After all, his father’s actions—or to use a biblical term, sin—provoked the first curse. Then, having survived birth and exposure, his killing of Laius was in anger, but also in self-defense, as he was being forced off the road by Laius, and Laius struck him. He also had tried desperately to avoid the prophecy by not going near his home city. Finally, he could not know that Jocasta was his mother.But here we remember James Hollis’s comment: “How different was Jung’s puzzling but challenging religious affirmation that especially in the traumatic, the work of the gods may be seen. He wrote, ‘[God] is the name by which I designate all things which cross my wilful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.’” Something, clearly, crosses Oedipus’s path in its violent and reckless way.
And so we come to the middle part of the story. For Oedipus could have lived a happy-ever-after life with Queen Jocasta. He was a successful king for 20 years; they had four children between them. And they didn’t know they were committing incest. But at this point in the narrative, the god Apollo forces the issue. A dreadful plague descends on Thebes, and on consulting the Delphic Oracle, Oedipus learns that the plague will only end when the murderer of King Laius has been killed or banished. Oedipus (ironically, since he curses himself) puts a curse on the murderer and then sets out to find him and end the plague.
Today, we consider it heartless and wrong to suggest that COVID-19 is a plague sent by God or the gods to punish mankind for some sin that we are unaware of. But it is not just the Greeks who held that plagues are manifestations of the gods’ anger. Most famously, the Bible records the Egyptians, the Israelites, the Philistines, the Assyrians, and more besides, experiencing plagues as a direct result of some transgressions. Often these are ascribed to the whole nation or tribe, but sometimes, as in the case of Oedipus, they derive from one sole person’s wrongdoing. For example, in 2 Samuel 24:10 we learn of King David’s sin—a sin that causes 70,000 people to die in a plague.
The point about the sin, however, is that it is not obvious: It is something beneath the surface that has to be revealed through the suffering. Nobody wants it, and in one sense, nobody deserves it. How are we, as humans, to say that somebody deserves to die of COVID-19?
In his book “The Wisdom of the Myths,” Luc Ferry addresses this fundamental question: Irrespective of whether we see ourselves of deserving a certain fate, we must face it. So here is where the Oedipus story reveals the significance of these crises: The ancients did not go into denial to avoid the truth or to evade responsibility. They faced reality; in Eastern philosophical terms, the Tao is right and to go against it is the greater crime.
Facing or Dodging Responsibility?
If we consider COVID-19, the modern world wants to find who is responsible for it. Is it the Chinese Communist Party? Is it some aspect of biological evolution whereby viruses naturally mutate, or have they unnaturally mutated? Is it the leader or government of this or that country who failed to put in place the right measures at the right time? Is it scientists more generally who have failed to give good advice? The list goes on. But this way of thinking is not how the Greeks or the Israelites or the ancients thought.Once Zeus triumphed over the forces of chaos and darkness, and established order and justice (the goddess Diké)—the equivalent to God creating the cosmos and it being “good”—all violations of this order have consequences. It’s not that the sons of the father must be punished for their father’s sin, but rather that in sinning in the first place the cosmic order has been displaced, and so there is going to be collateral damage that may take generations to repair, and to return to its proper and harmonious stability.
In a way, we see this all the time: Parents can create unfortunate legacies for their children, which is not the children’s fault, but for which they have to endure a lifetime of problems. And if we consider the whole Oedipus family story—which extends over several generations—this is extremely apt.
Thus, while we may be looking for who is immediately responsible for COVID-19, the ancient Greeks who recorded what happened to Oedipus would be looking for something deeper: perhaps one person, one family, one tribe, or one nation that exhibited massive hubris at some point in the past, and now collectively we all have to pay the price, as Oedipus’s subjects did when the plague struck them. Alternatively, has humanity itself committed some collective act of hubris for which now a penalty is being enforced?
The herdsman in Sophocles’s play who finally confirms that it is Oedipus who killed his father, says as he is about to make the revelation: “I am on the brink of terrible words.” To which Oedipus replies, “And I of terrible hearing.” What must we in the modern world, as we contemplate the fate of Oedipus, hear that perhaps we don’t want to but, like Oedipus, we must?