5. Ancient History and Christianity: Part II (Remastered)

Ancient History and Christianity: Part II

R.J. Rushdoony

And Oedipus starts on a journey, and he runs across his father, who sees he as a stranger and challenges him, feeling that there is something suspicious about him, and forces a fight on the young man, and is killed by Oedipus. Well, as the story continues, Oedipus, who is a tremendous young warrior, is made a king by the people of that country, and they married him off to his own mother, and he has two daughters. And then of course comes the time when the thing comes out, he is married to his own mother. And, of course, what is happening is, the Furies are taking out on him. Now, he is innocent you see, he never willfully did any wrong. You see how the story stacks the deck; here is the greatest tragedy of Greece, which reveals their religious outlook.

Poor Oedipus has never done anything wrong, he has been a very good king! He didn’t willfully kill the old king, the old king attacked him, he tried to avoid it! But no, the Furies are now taking it out on his kingdom; that is how he starts the quest, you see. Why are these terrible things happening to his realm? He is trying to rule wisely, and all kinds of horrible things are happening, there must be some evil somewhere.Well, it’s all in him, but he didn’t mean to do anything wrong, so to quiet the Furies and to relieve his country, he blinds himself and begins wandering everywhere, hoping that finally the Furies will leave him in peace. His two daughters leading him, now blind beggar as he goes place to place. At the moment he finds out what has happened, Oedipus says: 

“Oh, oh! All brought to pass--- all true! thou light, may I look my last on thee, I who have been found accursed in birth, accursed in wedlock, accursed in the shedding of blood!” ⁸

And the chorus, the Greek chorus, comments as he rushes into the palace to blind himself, so that the Furies will stop destroying his life, and then goes; no more king, just a homeless beggar: 

“Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! 

Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and after the semblance, a falling away? 

Thine is a fate that warns me,--- thine, thine, unhappy Oedipus--- to call no earthly creature blest.” ⁹

Now there you have the Greek system. All this business about them being ‘happy pagans,’ and how happy the Greek outlook was is nonsense. There you have the Greek outlook. “Call no creature blest.” No one is happy. “Live it up, you are going to be dead soon. Whether you do right or wrong, life stacked against you.”

The last words of Oedipus: 

“Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he hath crossed life's border, free from pain.” ¹⁰

And so goes, the poor man until he finds deliverance in death, and then his poor girls carry on the curse. No fault in them, two innocent girls. This is tragedy. This is why tragedy is not Christian. It is anti-Christian because it says that the universe is stacked against man, that whatever god may exist is radically perverse, so he picks someone, Oedipus, who is especially innocent, and brings him about to a position where he is involved in all kinds of horrible things through no fault of his, and then enjoys blinding him, driving him as a suffering beggar all over the face of the earth until he dies. 

Tragedy implies a hostile universe that is against man. It does not see man as sinner, but as victim. The universe is neither God-created or God-ruled. Significantly, in the modern world, tragedy is regarded, beginning with Shakespeare, as a great art form. And today ninety percent of what you get on television, and in the movies, and in novels, is tragedy. And if you think it is not religious, you’re kidding yourself. It is the most poisonous, the most venomous kind of anti-Christian religion. It is giving us something that is radically, totally stacked against any view that sees God behind the universe, that says man is not a sinner, man is a victim and therefore, “What’s the use of it all? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

Thus, the Greek picture is something that no Christian can accept, but it is the picture with which we are surrounded day and night. Virtually every program represents a militant anti-Christian religion, crusading in its fervor.

1. Simon, André Louis. A Concise Encyclopedia Of Gastronomy: Complete And Unabridged. Harmondsworth, 1983, 434f.

2. James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Third Edition with Supplement. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969, 276.

3. James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Third Edition with Supplement. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969, 281.

4. James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Third Edition with Supplement. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969, 305.

5. James Bennett Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament , 3rd ed. with Supplement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 309.f

6. H. and H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Penguin Books, 1949), 210.

7. H. And H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin. The Intellectual Adventure Of Ancient Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946, 210 f.

8. R.C. Jebb, trans. Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1887, p. 155.

9. R.C. Jebb, trans. Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1887, p. 156, 157.

10. R.C. Jebb, trans. Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1887, p. 199.