Oedipe

Voltaire's first play and a brilliant success.

He wrote the play, brilliant as drama and as poetry, before he was twenty.

The words of the high priest to Oedipus pretty well sum up the burden of this ancient myth.

Au crime, au châtiment, malgré vous destiné, 
Vous seriez trop heureux de n'être jamais né.

To crime, to punishment, destined in spite of yourself, 
You would have been only too fortunate never to have been born.

Or his words later, at the end of the play.

Tel est l'ordre du ciel, dont la fureur se lasse; 
Comme il veut, aux mortels il fait justice ou grâce;

Such is the order of Heaven, whose furor now abates;
As it will, to mortals it exacts justice or offers grace.

Voltaire's entire audience would be familiar with the Calvinist/Jansenist/Augustinian doctrine of predestination and the pitiless God of that strand of Christianity, according to which by far the majority of mankind are foredoomed by God himself to sin and eternal damnation.

Indeed, all are doomed by God to sin and to deserve such punishment, and would be damned were it not for God's unaccountable grace, through which he saves a very, very few who, also only through his grace, believe in the sacrificial death of his Son.

Points which make all the more piquant Oedipus' protests against the injustice of the thing.

Je tombais dans le piège en voulant l'éviter. 
Un dieu plus fort que toi m'entraînait vers le crime; 
Sous mes pas fugitifs il creusait un abîme; 
Et j'étais, malgré moi, dans mon aveuglement, 
D'un pouvoir inconnu l'esclave et l'instrument. 
Voilà tous mes forfaits; je n'en connais point d'autres. 
Impitoyables dieux, mes crimes sont les vôtres, 
Et vous m'en punissez!

I fell into the trap trying to avoid it.
A god stronger than you drew me into crime;
Under my fugitive steps he dug an abyss;
And I was, despite myself, in my blindness,
The slave and instrument of an unknown power.
See all my crimes; I know no others.
Pitiless gods, my crimes are your own,
And you punish me for them!

Thus, the story also points up the irony of fate much as the short, pithy tale by Maugham, The Appointment in Samarra.

Death speaks.

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  

She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  

I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  

Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, 

Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  

That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  

I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

The injustice of the gods shows equally in that they have set plague upon the people of Thebes as collective punishment for not having found and punished the killer of Laius, a plague that passes only with the exposure and punishment of Oedipus.

This, too, is a concept Christians of Voltaire's time would find familiar.

Too, Philoctetes speaks for Voltaire and the early days of the Enlightenment in his angry outbursts at insubordinate priests and peoples who are disloyal to their monarchs out of religious passion.

But Jocaste, equally a dupe made unwittingly guilty by divinely ordained fate, has the last word.

Prêtres, et vous Thébains, qui fûtes mes sujets, 
Honorez mon bûcher, et songez à jamais 
Qu'au milieu des horreurs du destin qui m'opprime, 
J'ai fait rougir les dieux qui m'ont forcée au crime.

Priests, and you Thebans who have been my subjects,
Honor my death and remember always
That in the midst of the horrors of the destiny that oppressed me
I shamed the gods who forced me into crime.

PS.

The Greeks wavered between the two views that the gods control fate and that fate controls the gods.

Every major strand of orthodox Christianity has settled firmly on the former opinion, allowance made for difference in theology.