Conformity In Antigone
“We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.” The words spoken by Charles Dudley Warner couldn’t be any more true as conformity has become as common as going to sleep after a long day of work. Throughout time people have always had different opinions on conformity. Back in the time of the Ancient Greeks, a playwright named Sophocles based one of his plays on the topic of conformity. The play was called Antigone and was based on a girl with a royal background who purposely defies the law to stand up to their beliefs and buries her brother Polyneices despite the king’s proclamation. Many centuries later, Martin Luther King would be delivering a sermon on the topic of conformity which reflected many of Sophocles’
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In Scene one of the play Sophocles expresses his own ideas when he writes, “Antigone: ‘It was public. Could I help hearing it?’ Creon: ’And yet you defy the law.’ Antigone: ‘I dared. It was not God’s proclamation. That final justice that rules the world below makes no such laws. Your edict, king, was strong, but all your strength is weakness itself against the immortal unrecorded laws of God’” (Sophocles, 355,361). Similarly, King states, “As Christians, we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or Earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his Kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed,” (Martin Luther King, 1). Both King and Sophocles feel it is necessary to defy those who ignore the laws of a higher power. Diction like ”the heart of our universe is a higher reality,” and “...all your strength is weakness against the immortal unrecorded laws of the Gods,” reflects their own beliefs that loyalty to a higher power is the most important thing in a society and no one has the right to take that from you. These aspects are directly related to the theme because violating these kind of beliefs are exactly what they were referring to when they say that conformity shouldn’t have to infringe your own beliefs, which ultimately leads into
In Scene one of the play Sophocles expresses his own ideas when he writes, “Antigone: ‘It was public. Could I help hearing it?’ Creon: ’And yet you defy the law.’ Antigone: ‘I dared. It was not God’s proclamation. That final justice that rules the world below makes no such laws. Your edict, king, was strong, but all your strength is weakness itself against the immortal unrecorded laws of God’” (Sophocles, 355,361). Similarly, King states, “As Christians, we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or Earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his Kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed,” (Martin Luther King, 1). Both King and Sophocles feel it is necessary to defy those who ignore the laws of a higher power. Diction like ”the heart of our universe is a higher reality,” and “...all your strength is weakness against the immortal unrecorded laws of the Gods,” reflects their own beliefs that loyalty to a higher power is the most important thing in a society and no one has the right to take that from you. These aspects are directly related to the theme because violating these kind of beliefs are exactly what they were referring to when they say that conformity shouldn’t have to infringe your own beliefs, which ultimately leads into