Justified True Belief

(●) The stonemason’s son who turned philosophy toward how to live, wrote nothing, and died rather than stop asking questions. + Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator who read the Greek philosophers closely more than three centuries later, said that Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens, set it in the cities, bring it into people’s homes, and make it ask about life and conduct and what is good and evil (Tusculan Disputations V.10). Before him the Greek thinkers had mostly asked what the world is made of: water, said one; air, said another; tiny indivisible atoms, said a third. Socrates asked a different question of everyone he met, from generals to shoemakers: do you actually know what courage is, or justice, or piety, and are you living as though you did? Almost every school of moral philosophy that followed in the ancient world claimed descent from him, and the West has been arguing with him ever since. For Christian readers he matters for two further reasons. Within a century and a half of the apostles, Justin Martyr was pointing to him as a pagan who had lived by the divine Word as far as reason could carry him. The Word here is the Logos of John’s Gospel, a Greek term that means both reason and speech, which John uses for the Son of God who became flesh (John 1:1, 14); Justin’s thought was that the same Word had been quietly at work in the best of the pagans, and that Socrates had been put to death for exposing false gods, exactly as Christians were being put to death in Justin’s own day. And his death has been set beside the death of Christ ever since, sometimes to honor him and sometimes to measure how far apart the two stand. His conviction that the god must be obeyed before the city, spoken to the jury that was about to kill him, sounds to Christian ears very much like Peter before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high council in Jerusalem, which had ordered the apostles to stop preaching and was told that God must be obeyed rather than men (Acts 5:29). He is also one of the strangest cases in the history of thought: a founder who wrote nothing. Everything we know comes from other hands, chiefly two students, Plato and Xenophon, who wrote about him after his death, along with a comedian who mocked him on stage while he was alive and a philosopher, Aristotle, who was born fifteen years after he died. Scholars call the puzzle of finding the man behind these portraits the Socratic problem. So whenever Socrates is quoted, the words are really Plato’s or Xenophon’s record of him, and a careful reader always asks which of the two is holding the pen.

(●) 470 BC: Born in a village outside Athens to a stonemason and a midwife, as the city entered its golden age. + Socrates was born around 470 BC (Diogenes Laertius, who compiled lives of the philosophers in the third century AD, dates the birth to 469, and modern reference works give 470 or 469) in Alopece, a village just outside the walls of Athens. His father Sophroniscus worked stone, a sculptor or a mason depending on which ancient writer you read, and his mother Phaenarete was a midwife, a fact Socrates would later turn into the best-known description of his own work (T1). It was not a grand family. His parents were citizens of modest means, and Socrates kept his means modest for the rest of his life. The Athens he grew up in was the most exciting city in the world. The Persians had been beaten back a decade before his birth, the fleet ruled the Aegean, Pericles, the statesman whose name the whole age now carries, was coming to power, and on the hill above the city the Parthenon went up during Socrates’ twenties and thirties. A later tradition, recorded by Diogenes Laertius, says he followed his father’s trade for a while and even carved a group of statues that stood on the Acropolis; another says he studied with Archelaus, a natural philosopher, which is what the Greeks called a man who asked how the physical world works. In Plato’s Phaedo he tells his own version. As a young man he was gripped by the new science of nature and got hold of the book of Anaxagoras, the boldest of those thinkers then in Athens, the man who taught that the sun was a huge fiery stone rather than a god, hoping to learn why things are as they are. He put it down disappointed, because it explained everything by airs and waters and never once by what is good. Nobody who met him ever forgot his face. He was snub-nosed, thick-lipped, and round in the belly, with eyes that bulged and seemed to look sideways; his friends compared him, affectionately, to a satyr, one of the snub-nosed, pointy-eared wild men of Greek myth who run with the wine god. In Xenophon’s Symposium he defends every one of these features with a straight face, arguing that eyes which stick out can see sideways as well as ahead, and that a flat nose lets in smells from every direction.

(●) 432–422 BC: He fought as a heavy infantryman in three campaigns of the Peloponnesian War, and his friends never forgot his nerve. + The war between Athens and Sparta broke out when Socrates was nearly forty, and like every able-bodied citizen he served as a hoplite, a heavily armed foot soldier who bought his own bronze and fought shoulder to shoulder in the line. He was at the long siege of Potidaea in the north (432–429 BC), at the rout of the Athenian army at Delium (424 BC), and at Amphipolis (422 BC); he names all three to his jury as places where he stood his ground when ordered. The most vivid account comes from Alcibiades, the brilliant and unreliable young aristocrat who loved him, in Plato’s Symposium. At Potidaea, in a winter so hard that men wrapped their feet in felt and fleece, Socrates walked out on the ice barefoot in his ordinary cloak. When Alcibiades fell wounded, Socrates stood over him, saved his life and his armor, and then urged the generals to give the prize for valor to Alcibiades instead of himself. At Delium, in the panic of the retreat, Alcibiades watched him walk off the field beside the general Laches at an unhurried pace, glancing calmly from side to side at friend and enemy alike, so that it was plain to everyone that this was a man who would fight if touched. The pursuers let him be. Alcibiades also tells of a morning at Potidaea when Socrates stopped to think about a problem and stood in one spot, thinking, through the whole day and the whole night until the sun rose again, while soldiers dragged their bedding outside to watch him. Whether or not the story grew in the telling, it is how his friends remembered him: a man whose attention, once caught, could not be pried loose.

(●) 423 BC: Aristophanes put him on the comic stage, and by then all Athens knew the barefoot man who asked questions in the marketplace. + At the festival of Dionysus in 423 BC, the spring festival at which Athens watched new plays compete for a prize, the comic poet Aristophanes staged the Clouds, and its villain was Socrates: a pale, unwashed guru running a school called the Thinkery, first seen dangling in a basket so he could study the sun without the earth drawing off the moisture of his thoughts, teaching a farmer how to cheat his creditors and how to worship the Clouds in place of Zeus. The play came third out of three, and another comedy that same year also put Socrates on stage. A later story says the real Socrates stood up in the audience so that visitors could compare the mask with the man. Twenty-four years later, on trial for his life, he told the jury that the old slander came from a comedy, and that the Socrates who walked on air and talked nonsense about the heavens had nothing to do with him. The real man was a fixture of the agora, the open market and meeting ground at the heart of Athens. He went barefoot, wore the same cloak in summer and winter, ate whatever there was, and spent his days at the tables of the money-changers, in the workshops, and in the gymnasia, the exercise grounds where young men trained and older men came to watch, talking with anyone who would talk. Unlike the sophists, the traveling professors who taught rhetoric and success for a fee, he took no money, and he told the jury that his poverty was the proof. A circle grew around him: Chaerephon, the impulsive friend who had gone to the oracle at Delphi to ask about him (T1); the well-off Crito; young Alcibiades and young Critias, both of whom would break the city’s heart; and in time a young aristocrat named Plato and a young soldier named Xenophon. He also, late, became a family man. His wife Xanthippe, whose name suggests a well-born family, bore him three sons, the youngest still an infant when he died at seventy. Xenophon records the friends teasing him about her temper, and Socrates answering that a man who wants to handle people should practice on the most spirited horse he can find. The later portrait of her as a shrew grew from that joke; Plato shows her only once, weeping in the prison with the baby beside her.

(●) 406–404 BC: Twice, under the democracy and then under the tyrants, he alone refused to take part in an injustice. + Socrates held public office exactly once, and it was enough. In 406 BC, after the naval victory at Arginusae, the Athenian fleet failed to rescue its own shipwrecked sailors in a storm, and the furious assembly moved to try the generals together on a single vote, which Athenian law forbade. Socrates happened to be serving that year on the Council of Five Hundred, the body chosen by lot to prepare the assembly’s business, and on the day the motion came up he was one of the presiding officers. He refused to put an illegal question to the vote. Xenophon records him saying he would do nothing except according to the law, while the crowd shouted for the presiders to be indicted along with the generals. He was overridden, the six generals who had come home were executed, and Athens soon regretted it. Two years later the city lost the war, and Sparta installed a junta of thirty men, remembered simply as the Thirty, who put some fifteen hundred citizens to death in about eight months. Their leader was Critias, who had once sat in Socrates’ circle. The Thirty summoned Socrates and four others to the Rotunda, the round building in the agora that served as the government’s headquarters, and ordered them to bring in Leon of Salamis, an innocent man they wanted put to death. Orders like that were deliberate, Socrates said: the point of them was to implicate as many citizens as possible in the regime’s crimes. The other four went to Salamis. Socrates went home. He told his jury later that he had known perfectly well his refusal might cost him his life, and that he was not going to do anything unjust or unholy to save it. The two stories are the two halves of one man. Democracy in a fury and oligarchy in cold blood (the rule of the many and the rule of the few, and Athens had now seen the worst of both inside two years) had each asked him to join in a wrong, and he had said no to both. Critias, for his part, helped write into the laws of the Thirty a ban on teaching the art of words, and when he and his colleague Charicles summoned Socrates to hear of it, Charicles forbade him to hold any conversation at all with the young. The Thirty fell in 403 BC, the democracy returned, and an amnesty (the word is Greek and means a forgetting) barred prosecutions for what had been done under the tyrants. But Socrates’ former companion had been the tyrant, and Athens had a long memory.

(●) 399 BC: Tried for impiety and corrupting the young, he refused to plead for his life and was condemned by a narrow vote. + In 399 BC a young poet named Meletus, backed by the democratic politician Anytus and an orator named Lycon, swore out an indictment: Socrates does not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges, introduces new divinities, and corrupts the young; the penalty proposed is death. Anytus had fought to restore the democracy, and many historians believe the real grievance was political: Critias and Alcibiades had both been Socrates’ companions, the amnesty made those years unmentionable in court, and religion was the charge left open. Socrates himself said his prosecutors were the mouthpieces of an old resentment against the man who made important people look foolish in public. The trial took a single day before a jury of about five hundred citizens. Socrates, seventy years old and speaking in a courtroom for the first time in his life, did not plead for his life. An Athenian defendant was expected to weep, to beg, and to bring his children up to weep beside him, and Socrates told the jury he would do none of it. He told the story of the oracle at Delphi (T1), cross-examined Meletus in front of the jury until the young man contradicted himself, and said that if they offered to let him go on condition that he stop philosophizing, he would refuse. He called himself a gadfly the god had set on a great sluggish horse of a city, and said the Athenians would not easily find another. Xenophon, who was away in Asia, heard that the whole speech was pitched deliberately high, and concluded that Socrates had decided death at seventy was better than the decline to come. The jury convicted him, but only just: he remarked that if thirty votes had gone the other way he would have walked out free. Athenian law then let the convicted man propose his own penalty against the prosecutor’s. Socrates said that what he really deserved was free meals for life at public expense, the honor given to Olympic victors. Then, more soberly, he offered a fine of one mina, a sum of silver worth roughly a hundred days’ pay for a skilled workman, which was all he had, and his friends, Plato among them, raised it to thirty. The jury chose death; Diogenes Laertius adds that eighty more jurors voted for the death penalty than had voted to convict. Socrates told them that the hour of departure had come, that he was going to die and they were going to live, and that which of the two was better, only the god knew.

(●) 399 BC: After a month in prison, having refused to escape, he drank the hemlock among his friends. + Ordinarily he would have died the next day. But the day before the trial the city had garlanded the sacred ship that sails each year to the island of Delos, a mission the Athenians had vowed to Apollo, and the law required the city to keep itself ritually clean while the ship was away, which meant that no execution could take place until it returned. The winds kept it away for about a month. Socrates spent the weeks in chains and in conversation, and his friends came every morning. In the Crito, his old friend arrives before dawn with the news that the ship has been sighted, and with money and a plan: a quiet crossing to Thessaly, where hosts are waiting. Socrates hears him out and then asks whether escaping would be just. He has lived seventy years under the laws of Athens and has left it only on campaign, apart from one trip to the games at the Isthmus; to run now, when the laws have gone against him, would be to answer a wrong with a wrong (T3). Crito has no reply, and Socrates stays. The Phaedo tells the last day. Xanthippe was led home weeping with the baby. Socrates spent the afternoon arguing with his friends about whether the soul survives death, and when they broke down he chided them gently, saying he had sent the women away for exactly that reason. Toward evening he bathed, so that the women would not have to wash his body, saw his three sons, and then, while the sun still stood on the hilltops, took the cup of hemlock, the plant poison Athens used for its executions, from the jailer, who was in tears. He drank it steadily, walked until his legs grew heavy as the man instructed, lay down, and covered his face. His last words were a request to Crito to pay a debt: a rooster he owed to Asclepius, the god of healing. That was the offering a man made when he had been cured of something, and readers have wondered ever since what cure Socrates had in mind. Plato, who was ill and not present, ends the account with a sentence that has carried Socrates down the centuries: of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best. A later tradition, again from Diogenes Laertius, says the Athenians soon repented, put Meletus to death, drove the other accusers into exile, and set up a bronze statue of Socrates by Lysippus, one of the great sculptors of the fourth century BC. Historians doubt all of it. What is certain is that within a generation half a dozen of his companions had founded schools and written dialogues to keep him talking, and the barefoot man who published nothing has never since gone out of conversation.

What He Taught

(T1) Wisdom begins with knowing what you do not know. + Socrates told the story himself, to the jury. His friend Chaerephon once went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the priestess answered that no one was. Socrates was baffled, because he was sure he knew nothing of any importance, and a god cannot lie. So he set out to refute the oracle by finding one man wiser than himself. He went to a politician with a great reputation and found, after some questions, that the man knew nothing worth knowing and believed he knew a great deal. He went to the poets, who could not explain their own poems. He went to the craftsmen, who really did know their trades, and who therefore assumed they knew about everything else as well. And he came home understanding the oracle. He was the wisest only in this: he did not imagine he knew what he did not know. The tool he used has a name, the elenchus, which is Greek for a cross-examination or a putting to the test. It works like this. You say what you believe: piety, say, is doing what the gods love. Socrates asks a question or two and draws out other things you also believe, for instance that the gods quarrel, so that Zeus loves what Cronus, the father he overthrew, hates. Then he shows that your beliefs cannot all be true together and leaves you to decide which one has to go. That is the whole of the Euthyphro, conducted on the courthouse steps with a man on his way to prosecute his own father. Aristotle, who never met him, records that Socrates asked questions and did not answer them, since he admitted he did not know. In the Theaetetus Socrates compares himself to his mother the midwife: barren of wisdom himself, he helps other men deliver theirs and then tests whether the child is sound. A young Thessalian named Meno, put through it, compared the experience to touching a torpedo fish, the flat electric ray that numbs whatever brushes it. He came away unable to say what he had been so sure of an hour before. Christian thought has always been at home with the first half of this. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), and Paul warns that anyone who imagines he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know (1 Corinthians 8:2). Where the roads divide is on what comes next. For Socrates the god is a silent standard: the oracle spoke once, in a riddle, and never explained itself, so the human task is to keep testing for as long as one lives. Christians hold that the God who knows has also spoken, which turns knowing what you do not know from the end of the road into the beginning of listening.

(Q) "He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing." + Source: Plato, Apology 23a–b (Jowett translation). Socrates is explaining to the jury what the oracle meant. The sentence begins with the god: only the god is truly wise, and the oracle used the name of Socrates merely as an example of a man who knows what human wisdom is worth.

(T2) The care of the soul comes before money, reputation, and the body. + Picture a prosperous Athenian on his way to the bankers’ tables, stopped by a barefoot old man who asks him, in front of everyone, whether he is not ashamed to spend his life piling up money and honor and reputation while giving no thought at all to wisdom and truth and the state of his soul. That was Socrates’ daily work, and he describes it to the jury in almost those words. He compared himself to a gadfly, the biting fly that keeps a big lazy horse awake, and said the god had fastened him on Athens for the city’s own good. The word to learn is psyche, the soul. For Socrates it was not a ghost but the self: the part of you that becomes better or worse depending on how you live, the thing your choices are actually doing something to. His claim was that this is the one possession that matters, because it is the only one that cannot be taken by accident and the only one that goes wherever you go. Virtue, he told the jury, does not come from money; money and every other good come from virtue, or are worthless without it. He had a picture for how this sounded to Athens. He was like a doctor prosecuted by a pastry cook before a jury of children. The cook says: this man cuts you and burns you and makes you drink bitter things, while I give you sweets. What can the doctor answer? The examined life, then, was not a hobby for people with leisure. It was the soul’s medicine, and refusing it was refusing to be well. Christian readers hear the echo at once: what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul (Mark 8:36)? The two do not say quite the same thing, since Socrates thought the soul could be tended by questioning alone, and the gospel says it needs to be forgiven. But on the priority itself, that the soul outranks the bank balance and the body, Athens and Jerusalem speak with one voice.

(Q) "The unexamined life is not worth living." + Source: Plato, Apology 38a (Jowett translation). Someone, Socrates imagines, will ask why he cannot simply hold his tongue and go live quietly in another city. He answers that this would be to disobey the god, and that daily to discourse about virtue, examining himself and others, "is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living." He adds that he knows they will not believe him.

(T3) It is worse to do a wrong than to suffer one, and a wrong must never be returned. + Every playground knows the defense: he hit me first. Most of the ancient world agreed with the playground. Helping your friends and harming your enemies was the ordinary Greek definition of a decent man, and paying back an injury was simple justice. Socrates denied it, and he may have been the first Greek on record to deny it outright. In Plato’s Gorgias a young man named Polus laughs out loud when Socrates says that the king of Macedon, who murdered his way to the throne and now enjoys everything, is the most wretched man in Greece. Socrates does not blink. If he had to choose between doing injustice and suffering it, he says, he would choose to suffer it, because injustice damages the one thing he cannot afford to damage, his own soul, and no one can do that to him from outside. The argument runs on the teaching about the soul (T2). A wrong done to me hurts my body, my property, or my name. A wrong done by me hurts the self that does it. So the man who harms me has, if anything, harmed himself more than me, and if I harm him back I have simply joined him. In the prison, with the escape plan on the table, this is the principle Socrates puts to Crito: we agreed long ago that one must never do wrong, so it cannot be right to do wrong in return, whatever has been done to us. Crito agrees, and that agreement is the reason Socrates drank the hemlock. Christians have noticed for eighteen centuries how close this comes to the Sermon on the Mount, where an eye for an eye is set aside and enemies are to be loved (Matthew 5:38–45), and to Paul’s plain instruction to repay no one evil for evil (Romans 12:17). Justin Martyr thought a man who reasoned his way this far had been taught by the same Word that later spoke in Galilee. The difference is where the two ground it. Socrates argues from what injustice does to the one who commits it. Jesus points to the Father, who sends rain on the just and the unjust alike, and then goes and does it himself, forgiving from the cross.

(Q) "Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him." + Source: Plato, Crito 49c–d (Jowett translation). In the prison, at dawn. Socrates has just asked Crito whether their old agreement still holds, and then adds a warning: very few people have ever believed this or ever will, and those who do and those who do not have no common ground, and can only despise one another when they see how widely they differ.

(T4) Virtue is a kind of knowledge, and no one does wrong on purpose. + Think of the second slice of cake. You know you should not, you eat it, and you say afterward that you could not help it. Socrates would have said, with perfect seriousness, that you did not really know. If a person genuinely saw that an act was bad for them, all the way down, they would no more choose it than they would drink poison knowing it was poison. Wrongdoing, on this view, is always a mistake about what is good, and the cure for it is the same as the cure for any mistake: knowledge. This is why Socrates could spend his life asking what courage and justice and piety are. If virtue is knowledge, then defining the virtues is not an academic game. It is how a person becomes good. He pushed the thought further than most of his followers would go. The separate virtues, he argued in the Protagoras and the Laches, are at bottom one thing, knowledge of good and evil, so that a man cannot really be brave and unjust, or wise and cowardly. Aristotle, a generation later, reported the doctrine carefully and then rejected it, saying that it plainly contradicts the observed facts: people do act against their own better judgment, and the Greeks had a word for it, akrasia, weakness of will, the condition of knowing the better and doing the worse. Christian thought sides with Aristotle here, and goes further. Paul describes himself as a man who does not do what he wants but does the very thing he hates (Romans 7:15, 19), and Scripture locates evil not first in ignorance but in the heart (Jeremiah 17:9; Mark 7:21–23). That is why the gospel offers not a tutor but a Savior, and not more instruction but a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26). Even so, Socrates saw something Scripture also sees. Jesus prayed for his executioners on the ground that they did not know what they were doing (Luke 23:34), and Peter told the crowd in Jerusalem that they had acted in ignorance (Acts 3:17). Sin is more than ignorance, but it is never less.

(Q) "No wise man, as I believe, will allow that any human being errs voluntarily, or voluntarily does evil and dishonourable actions; but they are very well aware that all who do evil and dishonourable things do them against their will." + Source: Plato, Protagoras 345d–e (Jowett translation). Socrates is working through a poem of Simonides with the sophist Protagoras, and pauses to say what he takes every thoughtful man to believe about wrongdoing. By the end of the dialogue the two have traded places: Socrates is arguing that virtue is knowledge, and Protagoras, who teaches virtue for a living, is no longer sure it can be taught.

(T5) The god is to be obeyed before men, whatever it costs. + From childhood, Socrates said, he had heard something that no one else heard: a sign, a kind of voice, that came to him at odd moments and always told him not to do something, never what to do. He called it his daimonion, "the divine something," and he took it with complete seriousness. It had kept him out of politics. On the morning of his trial, he noticed, it had said nothing at all, and he took the silence to mean that what was coming to him was not an evil. The charge of introducing new divinities pointed at this voice; Xenophon says so plainly, and Socrates never denied having it. He understood his whole career as a service commanded by the god at Delphi, and he told the jury so in a sentence Christians have been quoting ever since: he honored and loved the Athenians, but he would obey the god rather than them. Offer him acquittal on condition that he stop, and he would go on. Threaten him with death, and he would answer that a man worth anything does not calculate his chances of living or dying but asks only whether he is acting rightly or wrongly. Nothing in Greek literature sounds more like Peter and John before the council in Jerusalem, ordered to stop preaching and answering that they must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). The likeness is real and so is the limit. Socrates’ god was the god of Delphi, or simply "the god," and Socrates kept the city’s religion to the end; his last request was a sacrifice to Asclepius. His voice only forbade. It never told him who the god was, or what the god wanted with him, or what lay beyond death. On that last question he offered his jury an either-or, that death is a dreamless sleep or a journey to where the great dead can be questioned at leisure, and said that either would be a gain. Christians face death with a similar steadiness and a different reason, because the God they obey has spoken, and has come back from the grave to say so (Philippians 1:21–23).

(Q) "Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy." + Source: Plato, Apology 29d (Jowett translation). Socrates is imagining the jury offering to release him on condition that he give up his questioning. The Greek says "the god," meaning the god of Delphi whose oracle set him to work; Jowett’s "God" makes the sentence sound more like Scripture than it is, though the shape of the conviction is the same.

(Q) "Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods." + Source: Plato, Apology 41c–d (Jowett translation). The sentence has been passed. Socrates turns from the jurors who condemned him to the ones who voted to acquit, gives them his reasons for calm, and asks one favor: that when his sons grow up, the Athenians will trouble them as he troubled Athens, if they seem to care more for money than for goodness.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The first Christian apologists claimed him as a forerunner: a pagan who lived by the Word and was killed for exposing false gods. + Justin Martyr had been a philosopher before he was a Christian. Around AD 155 he wrote to the emperor to defend a persecuted church, which is what makes him an apologist in the old sense of the word: not a man saying sorry, but a man making a reasoned defense before a hostile audience. When he needed an example the emperor would respect, he reached for Socrates. When Socrates tried by true reason and examination to bring these things to light and to deliver men from the demons, Justin wrote, the demons arranged his death through men who delighted in wickedness, on the charge that he was an atheist and was introducing new divinities, and they are doing the same to us (First Apology 5). The parallel was exact enough to sting: an old man, a jury, a charge of impiety, a refusal to recant. Justin went further and said that those who had lived by reason, by the Logos, the divine Word, were Christians even though they had been called atheists, naming Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks (First Apology 46). He also drew the line. Nobody, he observed, ever trusted in Socrates enough to die for his teaching; whereas for Christ, whom Socrates knew in part, not only philosophers but artisans and the wholly uneducated have despised glory and fear and death (Second Apology 10). The idea underneath is what theologians call general revelation: the knowledge of God open to every person through creation, conscience, and reason, as distinct from the special revelation of Scripture. Justin’s way of putting it was that the divine Word who became flesh in Christ had sown seeds of truth in every human mind, so that whatever the philosophers said rightly was Christian property. Socrates, who obeyed a god he could not name and died rather than stop, was the seed that had grown furthest. Luke may have drawn the parallel before Justin did. When Paul comes to Athens in Acts 17, he argues every day in the agora, exactly where Socrates had, and the philosophers complain that he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities, in language so close to the indictment of Socrates that many commentators think the echo is deliberate. Athens had killed one man for that. This time it mostly laughed, and a few believed.

(†) The later fathers honored the man while keeping their distance from his gods and his famous calm. + Not every one of the church fathers, the name Christians give to the great teachers of the first several centuries, was so warm. Tertullian, the fierce North African rhetorician writing around the turn of the third century, asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem and meant the answer to be nothing. He granted Socrates his reputation and then picked at it: the wisest of the Greeks had taken his orders from a demon, since that is all a pagan "divine sign" could be, and even his celebrated composure in the death cell was a performance, put on by a man who had a cock sacrificed to Asclepius with almost his last breath (Apology 46; On the Soul 1). Where Justin saw a martyr, Tertullian saw a philosopher playing one. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa and the most influential of the Latin fathers, gave the fairest ancient Christian verdict two centuries later. In the City of God (VIII.3) he records that Socrates was said to be the first who turned the whole of philosophy toward the correction and regulation of conduct, all his predecessors having spent themselves on the study of nature. He offers two guesses at why: either Socrates was weary of questions the human mind cannot settle, or he was unwilling to watch minds soiled by earthly desire reach up for divine things, since the causes of things rest in the will of the one supreme God and only a cleansed mind can take them in. Augustine also noticed that Socrates hid his own views so well, confessing ignorance and refuting fools, that his followers went off in every direction and each took from him whatever he liked. It was Plato and his school, Augustine judged two chapters later (VIII.5), who came nearest to Christianity, and it was Socrates who had made Plato possible.

(†) His way of teaching by questions passed into Christian hands, from Augustine’s dialogues to Kierkegaard and the Oxford Socratic Club. + The most durable thing Socrates left behind was not a doctrine but a method, and Christians took it up almost at once. Justin wrote one defense of the faith as a dialogue with a Jew named Trypho. Augustine, newly converted, spent the winter of 386 at a friend’s country house writing philosophical conversations, and a few years later his On the Teacher recorded a dialogue with his own teenage son Adeodatus, in which the boy is led by questions to see that no human teacher can put truth inside another person; only the inner Teacher, Christ, can do that. Boethius, a Christian statesman of the sixth century waiting in prison to be executed, wrote his consolation as an argument with Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the eleventh century, worked out why God became man by letting a monk named Boso raise every objection he could think of. In 1522 Erasmus, the Dutch scholar who was then the most famous man of letters in Europe, published a dinner conversation, The Godly Feast, in which one guest repeats what Socrates said to Crito a little before he drank the poison, saying he had never read anything in a pagan that came nearer to a Christian, and another, moved, exclaims: Saint Socrates, pray for us. It was half a joke and half not. Three centuries later Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian who spent his life attacking a church that had made Christianity comfortable, wrote in the last year of his life that the only analogy he had before him was Socrates, and that his task was a Socratic one: to audit the definition of what it is to be a Christian, in a land where everyone assumed they already were one. At Oxford in 1941 a chaplain named Stella Aldwinckle founded a club where Christians and unbelievers would argue the faith out in the open, and C. S. Lewis served as its president from the first until he left for Cambridge in 1954. It was called the Socratic Club, and Lewis explained the name in the first issue of its journal: Socrates had exhorted men to follow the argument wherever it led them, and the club existed to apply his principle to one subject, the case for and against Christianity. Lewis spent twelve years of Monday nights doing exactly what the old man had done in the agora, except that he believed the argument had somewhere to arrive.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the heart, the Savior, the body, and the God who speaks. + Honesty requires the other column of the ledger. Christians who love Socrates have also had to say, at four points, that he was wrong or that he could not go far enough. - The heart. Socrates thought wrongdoing was a mistake and knowledge its cure (T4). Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9), that evil comes out of the heart rather than out of ignorance (Mark 7:21–23), and that a man who knows the good may still find himself doing the evil he hates (Romans 7:15–19). The remedy is not more examination but a new heart, given (Ezekiel 36:26). - The Savior. Socrates called himself a midwife and told the jury he had never been anyone’s teacher: the truth, when it came, came out of the person questioned. The gospel says the truth came in from outside and became flesh (John 1:14), and that no one comes to the Father except through the Son (John 14:6). Kierkegaard built his Philosophical Fragments on exactly this contrast: the Socratic teacher is an occasion the learner could in principle have done without, while Christ is the teacher without whom there is no learning at all, and so must be called Savior. Self-examination, however unsparing, is not grace, and salvation is by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8–9). - The body and death. Socrates met death with an argument and an either-or, and in Plato’s telling he welcomed it as the soul’s release from the body. Jesus wept at a grave (John 11:35), sweated in agony in a garden (Luke 22:44), and treated death as an enemy to be destroyed rather than a friend to be greeted (1 Corinthians 15:26). The Christian hope is not a soul escaping but a body raised, on the strength of one body that already has been (1 Corinthians 15:20–22). Rousseau, the eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher and no orthodox Christian, put the contrast sharply in Emile: Socrates died gently among friends, philosophizing, while Jesus died in torment among enemies, mocked and cursed, praying for his executioners; and he asked how anyone could dare compare the son of Sophroniscus with the son of Mary. - The God who speaks. Socrates’ god gave him one oracle and a voice that only ever said no (T5). He obeyed it magnificently, and he never learned its name. Christians hold that God has spoken through the prophets and finally in a Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), so that obedience is not a lonely fidelity to a silent standard but an answer to a Person who has made himself known. Socrates walked to the edge of everything a human being can find out by asking honest questions, and he did not flinch at the edge. That is why the church has kept him. He is the proof of how far the examined life can go, and the clearest picture in pagan literature of a man waiting for a word that had not yet been spoken.