Christ said "know the truth and
it shall set you free." This seemingly straightforward dictum brings
about apparent paradoxes expressed in literature. For example, in
Sophocles’s play "King Oedipus" when Oedipus learns of the truth he does
not rejoice or thank the gods for the freedom it has brought; instead he
stabs his eyes out and loses his honor and his kingdom. Can this
be freedom, and if in fact it is, are those who discover a dark and tragic
past destined to suffer as Oedipus did?
Oedipus, in fleeing home and the oracle can
be seen as fleeing his past. He says he is a man of fortune, a self-made
man, with no ties to family or place. The freedom he believes he
has is unbounded, yet unbeknownst to him it is bound by his fate.
Oedipus believes in reason, and insists on knowing the truth throughout
the play, even when his wife, the prophet, and the shepherd warn him against
the truth. Saying "I cannot leave the truth unknown," he threatens
the latter with physical torture, accuses the prophet of committing the
murder, and his wife of superfluous pride. He becomes tyrannical,
accusing his advisor Creon of plotting against him. Angered by the
realization that he is not, as he put it, "the child of fortune," he will
make any excuse rather than be forced to face his own past. Believing
that pure analytical reasoning can outwit fate, he tells Teiresias, "Living
in perpetual night, you cannot harm / Me, nor any man else who sees the
light." Teiresias is indeed blind but Oedipus means more than physical
sight; ‘light’ here is the light of knowledge and reason. He sees
the concept of fate as a superstition, and by saying the seer lives in
perpetual night he is casting the idea of predestination aside as a triviality
when compared to logic, reason, and human knowledge. Oedipus’s refusal
to accept his past as fact seems to go against his self-proclaimed thirst
for knowledge, but it is in fact a fear of the past that has kept him from
it. The prediction of the oracle and the question of his true parents
are more truth than he would like to know, and his aversion to the truth
of his own life is rooted in this fear. The real truth of his past
and the freedom that comes with it are in fact so unbearable that Oedipus
puts out his eyes in order to be plunged into the very darkness that he
chided the blind prophet for. Explaining his deed to the chorus,
he cries "Apollo, Apollo, but that hand that did it was my own," stating
that Apollo, representing his fate and past, brought him truth and with
it freedom, but it was too much for him to bear.
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor would argue
that Oedipus needed someone to shield him from the truth. Though
Teiresias knew that "when wisdom brings no profit, to be wise is to suffer,"
he did not wield the power to stop Oedipus’s quest for wisdom. The
Grand Inquisitor claimed that the people would give up their freedom in
return for the illusion of reason, for someone to follow. He "shall
be forced to lie" that there really is someone to worship, that "the universal
and everlasting craving of humanity - to find someone to worship" (301)
could never be satisfied if the people knew the truth, because, having
"wasted his whole life in the desert" he found that there is no god, no
perfection, and that the goal he had been seeking throughout his life had
been in vain. If the people were to discover this deception, they
would have regained their freedom but would become ‘unhappy, pitiful creatures’
as a result of this knowledge. In sight of "his incurable love of
humanity" he "will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony
they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves" (308).
Having experienced the sufferings of a free man, the "freedom of choice
in the knowledge of good and evil," he knows the horror of finding that
there is no meaning to life, and consequently spent the last years of his
life shielding his subjects from this truth.
If the Inquisitor’s argument is to be taken
literally, should we give up our search for truth based on the fear that
the discovery will be painful, if not, as in the case of Oedipus, deadly?
What the Grand Inquisitor left out of his argument, what he didn’t know
or wouldn’t admit, is that the truth, no matter how bitter, is only unbearable
when it must be endured by an individual. When Oedipus learned of
the oracle’s prediction that he was destined to kill his father and marry
with his mother, he sought the truth from his foster parents, but they,
fearing that the truth would offend his pride, kept the secret of his birth
undisclosed. Had they spoken the truth, the tragedy might have been
averted. The Inquisitor himself begged Christ to speak to him, to help
him bear the weight of the same truth that he was withholding from his
people, for although the ruler claimed to have godlike reign over his subjects,
he suffered from the same need for the "community of worship" that he provided
to them.
The freedom that truth brings is not the absence
of physical restrictions but an enabled state of mind; though the character
Sethe, a freed slave in Morrison’s novel Beloved, was physically no longer
a white man’s property, her thoughts and actions were constricted by memories
of the past. She feared the truth, as illustrated by her habit of
telling only half a story, for that story brought up memories too painful
for her to endure. This is the same aspect of freedom that the Grand
Inquisitor spoke of; the people were free to choose whether or not to follow
the Inquisitor’s deceptive miracles, but in following him they gave up
"the freedom which they have found so dreadful" (301). Though knowledge
of the truth and the freedom it brings can be overbearing, Beloved encapsulates
a paramount example of how the truth of a terrible past can be acknowledged
and accepted when it is shared. The most haunting aspect of Sethe’s
past is the murder of her child, and the guilt that she feels towards Beloved.
When Stamp Paid told Paul the truth about Sethe, that she had killed her
own child, he regretted it when Paul left Sethe for what she had done.
Yet only by learning this key part of Sethe’s past can Paul truly understand
what she has suffered through, and why she was not able to recover from
it, not able to accept it and move on. With this knowledge, Paul D. can
help Sethe accept the past and look forward to the future - "we got more
yesterday than anybody," he tells her. "We need some kind of tomorrow"
(173). This tomorrow is only possible for Sethe because with Paul
to help her, she can "trust things and remember things because the last
of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank" (18).
For Oedipus, the contrast between perception
and reality was overbearing. The Grand Inquisitor, though the discovery
of the truth did not harm him physically, endured severe mental strife
(as Ivan argued) and his subjects were to suffer the physical manifestation
of that pain. Sethe came to terms with the past, with truth, gradually,
and only with the help of others. Consumed by her love for Beloved
and by the past, as Oedipus was, she could only begin to look forward and
truly be free when the community exorcised the ghost, just as Oedipus overcame
his past by putting his eyes out. Sethe and Paul D. proved the Grand
Inquisitor wrong; though the truth haunted them, they shared the burden
of freedom rather than taking it all upon themselves. In this fashion
the truth can be either enabling or embittering, depending on how it is
undertaken, whether alone or in company of others, in either case changing
the lives of those it sets free.
Author: Pieris Maida Berreitter
Document: www.pmb.net Last
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