Ancient Greek tragedies relate to the eternal and the possible through external and accidental means. They lacked self-subjectivity and inwardness. Thus the ancients set their subjectivity outside of themselves. If anxiety is dialectically defined as fate, it is impossible to arrive at the concepts of guilt and sin as that would lead to the contradicting affirmation that one becomes guilty by fate. Sophocles’s Antigone is all immersed in the present and certainly her anxiety concerning her fate can be traced back to the same oracle that spoke to her father. Her subjectivity is entirely external and preordained by her descent. The Tragedy according to Kierkegaard is explained in the essay that explicitly names it: “The Tragic in ancient drama reflected in the Tragic in Modern drama.” For Kierkegaard truth is subjective. Antigone is a passionate commitment to truth, hers is a decision for which she is willing to live and die. Kierkegaard insists on the importance of choice as a means to acquire one’s own self. He writes in his journal: “It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” According to Kierkegaard, Antigone would cease to be a Greek tragedy; it would be an altogether modern tragic theme. What is at stake for reflective grief? Truly for Antigone “the stage is inside, not outside; it is a spiritual stage.” Her story deviates from the Greek Antigone, in so far as her subjectivity shifts from external to inward. The modern Antigone becomes an internal and self-reflective character, moving from fatalism to auto-determinism. She is utterly and painfully bound by inner anxiety. The common element is that both are victims of the contradiction between externality and inwardness, between the objective relations that constitute fate for the ancient world and subjective uncertainty and guilt that are the modern’s prison. Antigone becomes his literary alter-ego, his literary creature that allows Kierkegaard to live his life a second time, taking the time to explain, to reveal his pain to the spectators.

Kierkegaard begins to make his distinctions between antiquity and modernity, saying of the latter, “To a degree, existence is undermined by the subjects’ doubt; isolation continually gains the upper hand more and more, something that can best be ascertained by paying attention to the multifarious social endeavours.” The distinction between ancient and modern tragedy has to do with the degree to which self-consciousness marks subjectivity. He insists that “the ancient world did not have subjectivity reflected in itself,” whereas “the modern tragic hero is subjectively reflected in himself and this reflection has not only reflected him out of every immediate relation to state, kindred, and fate but often has even reflected him out of his own past life… The vigour, the courage, that wants to be the creator of its own good fortune in this way, indeed, its own creator, is an illusion, and when the age loses the tragic, it gains despair.” Despair, and not the tragic, because the ancient notion of the tragic carries “ambiguous guiltlessness,” which is to say that, because the hero of ancient tragedy has a divine fate, he or she is both guilty and not guilty. “Even if the individual moved freely, he nevertheless rested in substantial determinants, in the state, the family, in fate.” “The troubled one” is the one with the aesthetic experience; she is both actor and audience to her tragic experience. Kierkegaard is not suggesting something therapeutic. We must recall this statement of his: “intrinsically, the tragic is infinitely gentle; aesthetically, it is to human life what divine grace and compassion are.” The tragic is not only that the ethical is wholly unliveable and unwelcome, but that the religious possesses a unique desirability. The resurrection of her Greek consciousness can only take place in the theatre of the half dead. The ancient story of Abraham’s sacrifice is also a deep story of the consciousness of faith. It was a battle in his consciousness for the other. Kierkegaard offers a version of Abraham’s trial: It was a battle for the other in his subjectivity. As Abraham drew the knife, a shudder went through his whole body. Yet Isaac’s brief glimpse of his father’s despair secures a significant narrative departure, for the story continues: “Then they returned home again, and Sarah hurried to meet them, but Isaac had lost the faith. Not a word is ever said of this in the world, and Isaac never talked to anyone about what he had seen, and Abraham did not suspect that anyone had seen it.”