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(2016
final exam assignment) Sample Student Final Exam Essays 2016 Essay 3. Special Topics on Tragedy Special Topic # 5. Classical Humanism and Judeo-Christianity or other religious traditions in Tragedy |
LITR 4370 Tragedy
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The Benefits and Dangers of
Religious Doctrines in Literature
One
of the central concepts of this course is that literature is intended to
entertain and educate. I believe this is exactly what religious doctrines can do
for us in the classroom. With all of the religions inhabiting the world and the
population continually melding together, religion can bring much conflict. The
war between belief in fate and free will rages on. Therefore, it is imperative
that students be able to recognize and understand the many kinds of religions
and doctrines that can cause people to act in the way they do. Ancient Greek
tragedy is a great place to begin.
Nothing is more dangerous than a man who is led by a force he does not
understand. Operating based on mysterious doctrine as opposed to morality and
logic can yield disturbing results for our behavior. For example, in Agamemnon,
our title character is instructed by his medium to sacrifice his child in order
to garner wind for his military fleet to travel by sea to Troy. Let us introduce
logic. If, for instance, one’s best and most trusted friend, who can also speak
to God, said, “God spoke to me and said you should kill your son.
If you do, you will get an A on your mid-term and final, and go on to be
the most important writer of your generation, changing the lives of many for the
better.”, it would not be wise to kill your own son.
Granted, Agamemnon’s action did garner
wind and this is a work of fiction, but the wind could also have been a strange
coincidence. The danger of this text is that in ancient Greece, people
did believe the gods would give
orders to mediums and it would be their duty to carry out the “will of the
gods”. That being said, a medium was the most powerful person in all of Greece.
These texts were teaching blind obedience to power.
A
similar story in Judeo-Christianity is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham
is instructed to sacrifice his son to God as a testament of his absolute
obedience. As the story goes, an angel stopped Abraham just before was going to
impale his son. However, humanity as a whole cannot look away from what could
have been the goal of such a text. If the population can be convinced to be
fearful and absolutely subservient to the word of a God, then the mediums who
speak to such a God exclusively would have the power to convince the followers
of this faith to do anything at all, including the unthinkable act of killing
their children. Going back to Isaac, this had the makings of one of the greatest
Oedipal complexes of all time. It must have been difficult to go on in life
knowing his father would have killed him.
Discussions have been conducted in class on the topic of fate versus free will.
Greek tragedies, such as Agamemnon and Oedipus the King are great examples for
this discussion. Some have argued in class that the characters in Agamemnon and
Oedipus the King do not have free will. If that is the case, then there is no
tragedy. It is the duality of human beings and the choices made that yield
tragedy. When Agamemnon made the choice to kill his daughter, it was tragic. If
we are saying that he would have done it anyway because it was the will of the
Gods, then this is just a story about how terrible gods are. Oedipus and his
parents were told of a prophecy. The fact that it was carried out is not tragic.
There is nothing to learn from the will of the gods. It is the fact that
Oedipus, being full aware of the prophecy, decided to kill an older man and have
sex with an older woman that makes the story tragic. Free will is what makes
tragedy possible and religion tragic.
In
Hippolytus and
Phaedra, readers can see the
progression of culture and humanity by the fact that the gods are more
humanized. They are not seen as these governing beings of power, but more like
intolerant older brothers and sisters. In fact, many scenes in these plays use
the gods as comedy. From this, we can defer that civilization was beginning to
take more personal ownership for their actions. This indicates a gravitation
towards the idea that people were beginning to believe more in free will than
the fate of the gods at this point.
There
seems to be something in every early civilization that draws them towards
reliance on intangible gods of power and fate. Though many great minds existed
in early civilizations, education was not widespread. Religion, standing in the
company of the widely uneducated, is a convenient replacement for science and
logic. Though many monotheistic and some polytheistic religions claim that
God(s) created man in His own image, it is interesting to read the ancient Greek
tragedies with the knowledge that man too can create God in
his own image.
To
build on the aforementioned comment, we can read
The Oresteia and now deduce that
perhaps Agamemnon was a murderous, crazy person who found it convenient to say
the Gods ordered him to kill his daughter after the fact. After all, he and his
men left for war right after and no one would speak against their king or the
will of the Gods. Creating Gods in our own image makes these Gods flawed like
humans. This means that their orders are also sometimes flawed. It also means
that the characteristics of the Gods will match our own and conceal our flaws
because their orders take away our responsibility in the situation at hand. If
it were not ordered by Gods, Agamemnon would have been killed or imprisoned for
murdering his daughter.
This
is important because this same passing of the responsibility of action can be
seen in religion today. Religion is not inherently a bad thing. However, it
should never been allowed into a situation where something wrong has been done.
Religion should never be used as motivation to harm anyone. It is this reason
that needs to be taught to young minds while reading ancient Greek texts and
current religious doctrines. We may read, discuss, and attempt to understand the
values and morals of religion, but never be allowed to hide behind it.
Regardless of fate or free will, we and we alone are responsible for our
actions.
The
world has since moved away from believing in the Greek gods and they are now
known as being mythological. Humanity is now in a place to look at ancient Greek
religion and mythology as a way of studying itself in that place and time
objectively. It is easy to see the ludicrous nature of these ancient texts now.
Moving forward, there is an obvious undercurrent of secular humanism and atheism
that is gaining strength in today’s society. Many can now see the texts in
The Holy Bible and
The Quran as moral allegories that
have some value, but should not be used to dictate one’s morality and life as a
whole. There is much to learn from
Oedipus the King, but that does not mean I should follow it explicitly and
go have sex with my mother. What is important about teaching ancient Greek
texts, as well as currently followed doctrines of Christianity, Islam, and other
religions, is the lesson of how blind people can become when following a
doctrine simply because they are subservient to an ideal. Much like Agamemnon
sacrificing his daughter or Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac, the real world is
full of examples of murder in the name of God, such as The Crusades, the
Holocaust, and the current state of radical Islam. The merit of teaching
religious doctrine to students is to eventually lead them to autonomous
morality. As author Kurt Vonnegut states, “Being a
Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or
punishment after you are dead.” The reward for being good is that you are good.
Be good because you should be.
