chorus reacts to the news that someone (at this point we do not yet know who) has violated Creon’s prohibition and performed funeral rites on Polynices’ body—it is Antigone herself who is implicitly castigated as the “cityless outcast” engaged in excessive demonic acts which disturb the eunomia of the state, fully reasserted in the last lines of the play:
The most important part of happiness
is therefore wisdom—not to act impiously
towards the gods, for boasts of arrogant men
bring on great blows of punishment
so in old age men can discover wisdom.17
From the standpoint of eunomia, Antigone is definitely demonic and uncanny: her defiant act expresses a stance of excessive insistence which disturbs the “beautiful order” of the city; her unconditional ethics violates the harmony of the polis and is as such “beyond human boundary.” The irony is that, while Antigone presents herself as the guardian of the immemorial laws which sustain the human order, she acts as a freakish and ruthless abomination—there definitely is something cold and monstrous about her, as is made clear by the contrast between her and her warm and humane sister Ismene. This uncanny dimension is signaled by the ambiguity in the name “Antigone”: it can be read as “unbending,” coming from “anti-” and “-gon / -gony” (corner, bend, angle), but also as “opposed to motherhood” or “in place of a mother” from the root gone, “that which generates” (gonos, “-gony,” as in “theogony”). It is difficult to resist the temptation of positing a link between the two meanings: is being-a-mother not the basic form of a woman’s “bending,” her subordination, so that Antigone’s uncompromising attitude has to entail the rejection of motherhood? Ironically, in the original myth (reported by Hyginus in his Fabulae 72), Antigone was a mother: when she was caught in the act of performing funeral rites for her brother Polynices, Creon handed her over for execution to his son Haemon, to whom she had been betrothed. But Haemon, while he pretended to put her to death, smuggled her away, married her, and had a son by her. In time, having grown up, the son came to Thebes, where Creon detected him by the bodily mark which all descendants of the Sparti or Dragon-men bore on their bodies. Creon showed no mercy; so Haemon killed himself and his wife Antigone. There are indications that Hyginus here followed Euripides, who also wrote a tragedy Antigone, of which a few fragments survived, among them this one: “Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife”—definitely not Sophocles’ Antigone.18
Those interpreters who see Antigone as a proto-Christian figure are right: in her unconditional commitment, she follows a different ethics that points forward towards Christianity (and can only be adequately read “anachronistically” from the later Christian standpoint)—why? Christianity introduces into the global balanced order of eunomia a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to universality (of the Holy Spirit, or, today, of human rights and freedoms)—I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place within the global social order. And do Christ’s “scandalous” words, quoted from Luke, not point in the same direction? Of course, we are not dealing here with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God: family relations stand metaphorically for the entire socio-symbolic network, for any particular ethnic “substance” that determines our place in the global order of things. The “hatred” enjoined by Christ is therefore not a kind of pseudo-dialectical opposite to love, but a direct expression of what St. Paul, in I Corinthians 13, described as agape, the key intermediary term between faith and hope: it is love itself that enjoins us to “unplug” from the organic community into which we were born, or, as Paul put it: for a Christian, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks. No wonder that, for those fully identified with the Jewish “national substance,” as well as for the Greek philosophers and the proponents of the global Roman empire, the appearance of Christ was perceived as a ridiculous and/or traumatic scandal.
So, when Paul writes (in I Corinthians 25): “The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God,” his target is the most fundamental feature of pagan wisdom. This is why one should rehabilitate even Tertullian’s (in)famous credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it is absurd”), which is a misquotation of the key passage from his On the Flesh of Christ: “The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed—because it is shameful. The Son of God died: it is immediately credible—because it is silly. He was buried, and rose again: it is certain—because it is impossible.”19 The first thing to bear in mind here is that Tertullian was not an opponent of reason: in his On Repentance (I, 2–3) he emphasizes that all things are to be understood by reason:
Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing which He has willed should not be handled and understood by reason. Al l, therefore, who are ignorant of God, must necessarily be ignorant also of a thing which is His, because no treasure-house at all is accessible to strangers. And thus, voyaging all the universal course of life without the rudder of reason, they know not how to shun the hurricane which is impending over the world.20
No wonder, then, that Tertullian shows a deep respect for the great pagan philosophers (“Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things as ourselves”) and even calls Seneca “saepe noster / almost one of us.”21 O ne should therefore reject the popular reading according to which Tertullian advocated a crazy and irrational belief in something patently absurd, something that runs counter to reason and the evidence of our senses. The passage quoted above from On the Flesh of Christ is part of a polemic against Marcion who, dismissing as absurd the notion that God could be embodied in human flesh, reduced Christ’s incarnation to a mere phantasm—Christ did not have a real body, he did not really suffer. The measure which makes the belief in full reincarnation appear absurd is thus not logic but custom and convention, not reason as such but common “wisdom,” the space of what is conventionally acceptable—it is when measured by this standard that the death and resurrection of Christ appear “impossible.” “Impossibility” is here meant rather in the sense of: “Impossible! How can you do a horrible thing like this! Aren’t you ashamed!” The idea that God Himself could die in pain on a cross, humiliated and punished as a common criminal, is “impossible”—dangerous, shameful, absurd; it violates the conventional expectation of what befits a god.
However, is not Christ’s resurrection “impossible” in a much stronger sense: while not logically impossible, it nonetheless clearly breaks the basic laws of what we perceive as our (material) reality? Here, one has to insist on the gap that separates the universe of modern science from our everyday understanding of reality; this gap reaches its apogee in quantum physics whose picture of reality simply does not make sense within the horizon of our commonsense perception. This is why a voluntarist/decisionist anti-Aristotelian view finds it much easier to accept the paradoxical results of modern physics than does our everyday understanding: scientific reason and “absurd” Christian theology end up on the same side against (Aristotelian) commonsense. Recall that Einstein provided his own scientific version of Tertullian’s certum est, quia impossibile: “If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Hope of what? That it will be proven true scientifically!
Lacan’s notion of the Real as impossible can be of help here—to render Tertullian’s certum est, quia impossibile much clearer, it suffices to replace “impossible” with “real”: “It is certain—because it is real.” The impossibility of the Real refers to the failure of its symbolization: the Real is the virtual hard core around which symbolizations fluctuate; these symbolizations are always and by definition provisory and unstable, the only “certainty” is that of the void of the Real which they (presup)pose.
