Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [447]
Of all Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes, only Macbeth dies in total despair. When told of Lady Macbeth’s death, he says:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Act 5, Scene 5)
He begins as a good man, susceptible to his wife’s ambitions, and ends as a villain. Shakespeare usually maintains a moral universe, even in the face of the moral challenges he constantly offers us. Does knowing that the religious belief system we often regard as true and enduring has changed, even changed radically and now seems relative rather than absolute over time, leave us with the despair of Macbeth? Do we live a life, “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?” Most of us do not, even when we know that the terms that we commonly use to signify our greatest aims must surely be false if taken literally. And, indeed, they can be true if taken imaginatively and metaphorically. But then we are acting first and, in our self-consciousness, judging our own performances as actors.
One could affirm our religious lives, even in the face of obvious and overwhelming doubt, as do the fundamentalists. That is a mark of fundamentalism; it is an affirmation of a logically disproved system. It can exist only by flying in the face of scientific knowledge consciously ignored. That is why it thrives in courtroom trials and textbook controversies, demonstrating locally by majority numbers alone in little victories of ignorance what can never be demonstrated to the mind-that their most cherished ideas are literally right. That is why fundamentalists need Satan. They create him, a symbol of their own impulses and doubts which they can thereafter exorcise by orgies of hate. But we know that one cannot convince oneself of the truth of religion by winning victories in school-boards or voting booths or even by killing vast numbers of a hated enemy.
People who live with faith today, whether in the majority or minority, are living in a world that does not need the hypotheses of religion to explain the universe. We can live perfectly complete lives without it if we want. But few do. All the polls show that while Americans are suspicious of religious surety, they still admire sincere faith. At least the case is no worse than it was when Newton came to his physical laws. If a God can coexist with a number of physical laws that seem unchangeable and unbridgeable, He can coexist with a number of complex social laws that seem equally unbridgeable. Human life may be possible without the images that give it purpose but most of us do not want that life.
Antony and Cleopatra, because of their longer lives and experience are privileged enough to “see through everything.” They know the conventions of life and, by failing, come to know the price that conventions demand. But with failure comes the recognition of contigency, a “seeing through everything.” Knowing that culture is but convention written large, we must also see “through” everything, see by means of everything. The symbols of culture point towards something ineffable. And that is what Cleopatra does at the end, using a vocabulary that she wills imaginatively to do the work she needs.
There are important moments in Shakespeare’s plays when his characters speak both within and beyond their characters at once. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy beginning, “To be or not to be,” with which we began