Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Euripides, Bacchae

Kurzinhalt: Dionysus, Pentheus, Athen: Sackgasse zw. Mythos u. sophistischer Rationalität, Lonergan: social surd, Einstimmung in den leidenden Gott

Textausschnitt: § 3 A TRAGEDY OF CHAOS: EURIPIDES' BACCHAE
1) Dionysus' intent: punishment of Pentheus' revolt against his divinity
2) Pentheus attempts suppression of the apparently helpless Dionysus
3) Dionysus destroys Pentheus' palace and 'escapes'
4) Dionysus tempts Pentheus to spy on the Bacchae
5) The women of Thebes, including his mother, destroy Pentheus
6) Dionysus' triumphant vindication?
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Euripides, it would seem is so affected by the Athenian spiritual crisis that it's not easy to discern whether he was simply its most brilliant carrier or its diagnostician.
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Pentheus shows the 'honest narrowness' of one who stands for rational civic order. For him, Dionysus is a fraud ...
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The destruction of Pentheus is perhaps for Euripides the fate of sophistic intelligence too, an intelligence whose lack of understanding of existence, including its disorder, has led to its defeat.
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The Bacchae is the only tragedy in which someone banished has nowhere to go. Is this part of the meaning of the tragedy? That the Greek people themselves have nowhere to go, that both their mythic traditions are shown, in Dionysus, to be spiritually bankrupt, and their sophistic enlightenment is equally incapable of providing a form of human existence?
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The greatness of Euripides' last tragedy, I would suggest, is, that he has found a way to exhibit the cul-de-sac at which Hellenic culture had arrived, incapable of offering a way beyond the century-long impasse between myth and sophistic intelligence.
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Euripides' greatness is to have, like Dostoevsky's Devils, conveyed the chaos of personal and communal order by exposing its inherent contradictoriness and moral lostness. More than any other work of the great Hellenic fifth century, the Bacchae illustrates the need to go beyond the [eg: sic] this impasse into a new and deeper cultural form, the form of philosophy.
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And Euripides provides us with the diagnostic inverse insight into what Lonergan calls the social and historical surd. For all of the tragic poets, achieving our genuine humanity calls on us to lose what seems to be our humanity. That suffering brings us, in the case of Aeschylus and Sophocles, to attunement with the suffering god who is the ground of order.