Sophocles Antigone: Play Analysis

The quality of wisdom is one that has a debatable connotation. While it is true that most people would associate it with feelings of peace, happiness, or enlightenment, I have come to look at wisdom as a source of unrest. Observing wisdom and its cause of human disturbance in literary works such as Antigone, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and Genesis, it is evident that wisdom is the direct cause of anxiety rather than the feelings of peace or enlightenment that are generally associated with the term. In Sophocles’s play Antigone, it is the character of Creon that is affected most by the trouble that wisdom brings. In the beginning of the play, it is he who disrespects the gods by his decision not to bury his nephew, Polynices, and indirectly, …show more content…
In the story of Creation and Fall from Genesis, the main characters of Adam and Eve gain wisdom through the realization of sin which Eve exposes by eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and Adam later uncovers by eating the same fruit that Eve tempts him with. The unrest that follows their eating of this fruit was avoidable, for God had warned the first two people on Earth that eating this particular fruit would mean what he described as “death.” Although this fate was a bit more dramatic than the actual fate the main characters faced in the end, that does not mean that the anxiety that was caused directly by the wisdom of sin was any less real. Due to this realization, God punishes the two main characters and the future of mankind with awful consequences such as pain in childbirth, the promise of work until death and the condemnation of the serpent as an enemy to all of human kind. As a follower of the Catholic religion, this story is one that really drives home the point that wisdom is not at all the cause of happiness and peace like it is popularly made out to be. Ironically there are proverbs within the same religion that refuse to accept the fact that wisdom could possibly be a bad thing as it is portrayed in Genesis. Proverb 3:13 of the King James Bible reads “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.” (Proverbs 13). What this proverb is attempting to say is that those who achieve wisdom do find happiness, which is completely contradictory to what the story of Genesis of the same religion portrays. But perhaps this just goes to show that most people have a false perception about wisdom in that it is a direct cause to their