Volume 32, Issue 1/2, 2020
Octavian Gabor
Pages 63-79
Responses to Divine Communication
Oedipus and Socrates
Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus shows that humans' problems do not appear when they listen to the gods, but when they listen to themselves imagining that they follow the gods. Instead of placing themselves in the service of the god, as Socrates does in Plato’s Apology, they only think that they follow the divinity, while they actually act according to their own understanding. If Sophocles’s play is a synopsis of this danger, Plato’s dialogue proposes a different attitude before divinity: instead of interpreting the gods and acting on this interpretation, you would need to enter into their service by studying the meaning of their communication.