2. Orphic Evil and the Apollonian Vision. After the
great tragedians' contemplation of a nonhuman power
of fate, power of this sort appears to become somewhat
more perspicuous to the philosophers and their
Apollonian minds. But although Plato asserted that
philosophers produced the truest tragedies (Laws, VII,
817B), his meaning may perhaps be understood with
reference to the Orphic religion by which, according
to some scholars, he was influenced. The Orphic reli-
gion was a relatively late arrival upon the Greek scene
and represents the evolution of religious feeling and
concepts at a stage where the divine goodness had
become distinct from evil. According to the Orphic
dualistic myth, the gods are perfect and divine. And
in this respect the human psyche is homogeneous with
the gods; human evil is the consequence of the soul's
falling or straying away from its natural domain and
becoming imprisoned in the body. Thus the world of
becoming, the body in particular, is the source of all
evil and of all tragic action which responds to that
evil. Philosophy offers that wisdom or gnosis which can
free the soul from its prison and return it to its heaven.
Hence philosophy is the art of separating the soul from
its body; it is the practice of death.
Socrates, who held that we err only through igno-
rance, and who believed heaven to be blameless, quite
reasonably turned his efforts, in Republic, II, toward
purging the ancient myths of elements which might
lead the youth astray. Suggestions of the gods' injustice,
of their unconcern for human standards of virtue, of
their double dealing, and of their jealousy—in short,
of all those traits which belonged to a Titanic and
uncivilized nature—were uncompromisingly censored
by Socrates. Plato's fanciful mathematics of the mar-
riage number (
Republic, VIII, 546) suggests a convic-
tion of the basic Apollonian character of fate. But
undoubtedly Socrates' career best represents Plato's
feeling for the tragic. In the
Apology, Crito, and
Phaedo
Socrates is presented as reaffirming his life's decision
to struggle against sophistry both within himself and
in others and as achieving again his insight that his
decision was a just one, that virtue is knowledge, and
that the death which frees the soul from its prison is
a good. Moreover, Socrates is presented as the artist
of life; he has the art of manipulating circumstances
and of utilizing whatever misfortune occurs, even death
itself, as a means for affirming the nobility and integrity
of the virtuous human soul.
Even so, Apollo does not triumph completely within
the Platonic dialogues. God still withdraws his hand
from the tiller of the universe for one-half of the cycle
of the Great Year (Politicus, 270A, 273). Also there
remains a scandalous and irrational factor in the
temporal world. With a dash of imagination one may
see an intellectualized version of Dionysian madness
in the a-rational receptacle of the Timaeus (48D f.),
which is the matrix of all becoming and the vessel of
the Demiurge's making. Tragedy for Plato, then, may
not be merely the simple drama of separating body
from soul, for the human soul too is made by the
Demiurge. It is at best an imperfect imitation of ideal
perfection and retains some tincture of the a-rational
character of the receptacle. In short, tragedy for Plato
is the failure to achieve human virtue, but this failure
involves a complex understanding and use of the a-
rational element within the psyche itself.
The Gnostic dualism of soul and body passed into
the Christian West through Saint Paul and Neo-
Platonism and became allied with Stoic doctrine, espe-
cially the doctrine of virtue. This dualism of moral
tragedy remains evident in persistently recurring
Puritan traits, fear of the body, rejection of physical
beauty, and reprobation of sensuousness and emotion-
ality. Puritanism, however, as Nietzsche insisted, did
not give birth to much of the kind of writing which
can easily be recognized as tragic. Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress is not a work of tragic art. However, Racine,
schooled in Jansenism, may fairly be assigned a place
in this part of the tradition. In his theater, for instance,
in Andromaque or in Bérénice, the rule of reason and
morality triumphs over emotions, mainly the emotions
aroused by Venus. Racine's theater is a school of great-
ness of soul where the magnanimous soul succeeds in
neutralizing passion, and in vindicating the aristocratic
conception of virtue.
We should also take notice of a curious sort of re-
verse effect in consequence of which the rejection of
the body came to appear as an inhuman evil that called
for an intransigeant affirmation of the human. The
beginnings of such an assertion might be discerned in
the medieval poem, “Aucassin and Nicolette.” Also it
is possible to read Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, so that
Satan is its real protagonist. This Satan manifests heroic
dignity and virtue in his unequal combat with a frigidly
perfect deity. Finally one may perceive a demytholo-
gized version of this Puritanism in reverse in some of
Bernard Shaw's writings. Evil in his plays, even in Saint
Joan, has been leveled down to ignorance, egoism, and
middle-class hypocrisy. The virtues which he would
inculcate are honesty and objectivity, and their pre-
condition is rejection of the “manufactured logic about
duty.”
