What's so great about So-crates?
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and as promised we’re talking about Socrates today.
I hope you all went home and read Plato’s Apology. That’s what I did. I hope you had a good time. I don’t know how much of a good time can be promised in reading Plato’s Apology but it’s worthwhile, wouldn’t you say, for knowing what it says? It’s worthwhile to read?
And some of it gives you a glimpse into the culture and the way that they talked. It gave me more a sense of the personality of people.
I’m a sucker for historical figures, just getting to know somebody. It’s like, “Alright, Socrates. He’s kind of winsome. He’s funny. I’m diametrically opposed on every point, but he’s fun.”
Yes. To backtrack a little, because we overflowed into Socrates last time, this is the age of Athenian democracy, which was a blip in Greek history. Most of the time Athens and the surrounding communities were under the thumb of tyrants. All tyrant meant was that someone grabbed power without legitimate authority.
Given the nature of Athens, it’s hard to imagine what exactly legitimate means in that context, but somehow somebody seized power, and people might have liked it or not liked it. The tyrant might have been a good tyrant or a bad tyrant. It just wasn’t who they voted for.
It’s almost like the Roman dictators. Dictator was not a negative term. It was a job that they gave people.
And that dictator could do whatever he wanted until it was over. Then he was subject to review by the senate or whoever. Tyrants in Greece weren’t exactly open to review, but neither did they pass leadership onto their children normally.
So we’ve passed out of that briefly into the thing that history books hail as the Golden Age of Greece, the beginning of freedom and liberty, man getting to know man for what he really is – read Edith Hamilton – and all that stuff, which practically meant that the citizens of Athens ruled democratically their own town.
If I recall right, the citizens were about 30% of the population. They were males past the age of majority, property owners of some sort. There were slaves in Athens. There was a healthy foreign class that did a lot of the work in business, and of course women mostly stayed home unless you were a high priestess or something.
Americans are really shady on this, what democracy is. Democracy meant you got into the same room where you can look each other in the eyeball and yell at each other and plead with each other and then you voted, and 50% + 1 carried the day for that day.
Of course, you could all come back tomorrow if you get everybody back in the same room, and completely change everything. There were no absolutes. There were no moral standards beyond vague feelings of, “But we’ve never done it that way before.”
So into this, people who were wealthy, had businesses, had prospects for the future – it was important to them to be able to sway the assembly because the assembly, not being bound by God’s law, let alone any other law, could pass laws that would affect your business. It would make it more profitable, open it up to wider trade, or shut it down, so you really, really, really wanted to be able to persuade people.
And since by now your boys are coming of age, you finally take an interest in their education, which you haven’t done really yet. We’ll talk about Greek education another day when we want to be sick to our stomachs. You get your boys trained to be able to win arguments, and I think that’s crucial in all this, not just have the logically best argument. Who cares about that.
Yes, it’s not about truth, it’s about persuading people. The traveling teachers/tutors who they hired were called Sophists, from the Greek word Sophia, meaning wisdom, so they were wise men or we would say wise guys, and it’s into this that we find Socrates, who technically was a Sophist because he did all this, except he had this thing about actually being logically right and finding the real truth in everything.
And apparently, according to Plato’s Apology, he wouldn’t take money for it.
No, he didn’t get paid because it’s truth, and truth should be free, which endears him to us a little bit, I suppose. It sounds good on paper.
He was not a handsome man. He had a shrew of a wife, at least that’s Plato’s take on it, so he wasn’t home much. He wandered around asking questions of people, usually of important people, people who claimed to be something and to know something. A crowd of young men did gather around him and follow him around to see the show. They liked to see important people embarrassed when they floundered for answers.
We’re cutting through a lot here, but this eventually leads us to him being brought to trial. The legal formal accusations were that he corrupts the youth – you can see where that comes from – and he teaches gods not sanctioned by the state. It occurs to me suddenly that that is a very odd accusation, and Plato denies it completely except when he doesn’t. It would be interesting to actually go back in time and find out if the real trial, as opposed to Plato’s version of it, deals more with that because actually, given Greek culture, that’s huge. As we’ll see, Socrates is allowed to kind of brush it off and the accusers don’t pursue it.
As he’s brought to trial, first of all he starts by telling everybody that he’s not a philosopher. He doesn’t claim any deep wisdom. He doesn’t claim to know stuff, which is a convenient kind of out here. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know the answer to much. All I do is ask questions.” Yes, that’s the problem.
It’s so interesting, the rhetorical turn that happens during the Apology on that point. He begins by saying, “Listen, I don’t think I’m wiser than anyone. I think you’re all equally stupid and just as stupid as I am.” It’s subtle. It’s a sleight of hand, but that is the gist of what he says.
That’s exactly what he says, except there’s one other thing that goes with that. One of his friends, he says, goes to the Oracle of Delphi, who of course the world held in awe, and asked the question, “Is there any man in Athens wiser than Socrates?” and the Oracle, strangely clear and blunt it seems, says, “No, there’s no man wiser than Socrates.
I think it’s interesting that nobody picks up on the ambiguity of that statement. Does that mean that there’s anybody wise? Does it mean that Socrates is the wisest? Does it mean he hasn’t any wisdom at all? No. It just says that there’s nobody better.
Socrates says that he, being a pious man, doesn’t flat out say, “Boy, did the Oracle get that one wrong,” but he is a little impious in that he thinks, “What can the Oracle possibly mean by that, because I’m not the smartest guy around here.” So he finds someone in Athens who’s renowned for wisdom and intelligence and knowledge and all that, and goes and talks to him.
We’re not given an account of what exactly he asked, but given Plato’s later dialogues it’s probably a series of – we’ve coined the phrase ‘Socratic dialogue’ where Socrates will ask one question after another until he gets an answer or clarification.
“What do you mean by epistemology? What do you mean by ‘know’? What do you mean by not knowing? What do you mean by…” – you keep going and eventually this man he’s talking to, after getting nervous and frustrated and trying to divert things, probably yells at him and tells him to get out of his shop because he’s got work to do, and what kind of fool is he anyway?
Word gets around that this happened, and the man Socrates talked to is not happy, but among the young men who are looking for teachers some say, “Hey, did you hear what happened? Let’s go watch the next one!” So Socrates goes to someone else, someone this time with philosophical pretensions, and begins to ask him the same kind thing and he gets the same kind of response.
What he finds again and again is not that these people are ignorant of all things. They actually know a lot about their own particular field, craft, trade or whatever, but there are a lot of things where they are simply making huge assumptions about life, the universe, and everything, taking a great deal for granted. They don’t have explanations. They don’t have definitions. They have not thought through things.
In the end, Socrates decides that what the Oracle meant was that Socrates at least knows he doesn’t know anything, and these people haven’t got there yet. From this, Socrates says he develops a mission. Apparently he thinks the Oracle by this has commissioned him to go wake up Athens, to prod it into action, to deliver it from its intellectual slumbers. He calls himself the gadfly of Athens. A gadfly is a horse fly. A little fly stings a horse and the whole horse rears up and rushes off, not knowing what’s at him.
“That’s what I am,” Socrates says. “I’m here to sting the state. I’m just this little guy, but if I can wake up Athens and get her people to start thinking about things and making intelligent decisions in terms of an absolute truth of some sort, then I will have done my job. Yes, I’m sure that people are offended, but you know what? That’s their problem. They shouldn’t be. They should be thankful,” which comes across of course when he has to propose an alternative penalty at the end of the trial.
Emily, since you did read that last night do you have any other observations along this line so far before we get to the voice in his head?
I think that was a very good summary, of course. There’s just little details here that I’m sure will come up as we go.
Along the way Socrates, first of all, does answer directly the charge that he’s an atheist, which was not the charge. The charge was that you teach deities not sanctioned by the state.
The accuser is extremely skill-less in this prosecution. He lets Socrates argue him into changing his charges. He says he’s been teaching gods not sanctioned by the state, instead of the state gods, and Socrates says, “Oh, do you mean that I’m an atheist?” and he says, “Yes. I swear by Zeus that you are an atheist.” It’s like really?
Which makes you wonder how much was Plato’s adaptation versus the reality, that he makes everyone else look as foolish as Socrates says they are.
“Well…” and then Socrates takes him on that. “You say I believe in divinities. That means either gods or heroes, demigods, so those are gods.”
And you can’t believe in demigods without believing in their parents, who would have to be gods, so there you go, logically.
He gets his accuser to say, “Yes, you believe that the sun is a stone and the moon is earth.”
Another point is that Socrates had been satirized so many times in Greek plays, comedies at this point. Aristophanes has famous caricatures of Socrates arguing ridiculous things just to be laughed at in his plays, so Socrates is like, “Everybody laughs at that. You know that’s not me, right?”
It’s said that Socrates went to a production of The Clouds and laughed louder than anybody at this caricature of himself. He points out, “Other philosophers before me said things like that. Everybody knows that it’s a matter of the playhouse. We know this and it’s a joke.
“Yeah, these words came from somebody else. You can’t convict me on the strength of these words that somebody else said first.”
Especially since everyone laughs at the idea anyway, so that’s no threat to anybody so get past that. And then he drops it because he still hasn’t really addressed what sort of god he does believe in, but he comes across it later.
“You’ve often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me and is the divinity which ridicules the indictment. The sign I’ve had ever since I was a child, the sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I’m going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and that’s what stands in my way of being a politician” – Socrates’ humor again.
Socrates is saying he hears a voice in his head, and liberal theologians and philosophers and rationalists have all pretty much agreed, “It’s a figure of speech. It’s a joke. He’s putting us on.”
That’s not what he says, and he takes it seriously right to the end. The reason he’s willing to stand trial and even drink the poison at the end is because the voice does not forbid him, which is interesting.
There’s a book, Socrates and the Irrational, by James Hans, published in 2006 by University of Virginia Press. He actually works through all this, and he’s not a Christian. As far as I can tell he’s a thorough-going secularist, and he’s a fan of Socrates in that he wants to know more about the guy. He does not seem to be a fan girl but he listens to what Socrates is actually saying, and his take on this is that this is a voice that is external to Socrates. It’s not his conscience. It’s not him thinking things through on his own. It’s not part of his moral formation. It’s something that stands outside of him and simply says no.
It does not tell him what to do. It doesn’t tell him why to do something or not to do something. It simply puts up prohibitions. So whatever it is, the scholars out there need to reckon with what he actually claims is going on there.
Socrates didn’t really have a name for it, but those who came after him and wrote about it called it a daimon, which is the same word that the New Testament writers used when they wanted to talk about those things that Jesus cast out of people – demons – and they would have known that. It’s not a linguistic or philological accident that they pick that word. They knew how that word had been used in the past.
And in the Greek mindset there’s not a negative connotation. It’s a power. It’s something that is known to be greater than man, supernatural in some sense. The negative connotation comes for us from the Bible.
Yes. It’s a bubbling up of chthonic energies that take brief possession of you. It’s like Agamemnon at the end of the Trojan War when he says, “I didn’t intend any of this. It must have been some god.”
Exactly. “I would never have done this. I’m better than this.” Yeah, right, but whatever he does blame it on not a named god but some kind of supernatural power from beneath it that takes possession of him, and Greek literature is full of this kind of thing. So when Socrates says this he’s not speaking into a void. It’s not like people had never heard this kind of thing before. Yes, there’s no negative connotations.
Basically, I think the Greek people who were there would have said more or less what he said. It’s the voice of a god of some sort, however temporary, speaking in Socrates’ head. “If that’s the case then we probably shouldn’t mess with this.” He doesn’t convince them, but he does say that in the end the vote is more in his favor than he thought it would be. But in making this claim he is claiming a direct channel to deity that bypasses the whole system of Athens – Athena and her formal worship – as well as all the Olympians, even Apollo, although Apollo may have had some part in this, at least in throwing the switch or at least throwing the light on the thing.
He does not claim to be speaking for Apollo. That would have been useful. If he could have said, “I am the voice of Apollo,” that would put him at least firmly within the system, if still kind of a rogue within that system, but at least he’d have the backing of one of the Olympians. But he very deliberately doesn’t say that so we’re left with this weirdness that is a real problem for Western writers.
I don’t remember when I first encountered this in Socrates. It may have been the first time that I read the Apology, which I think was in a philosophy class in college, but certainly none of the history texts I’ve ever read have ever talked about this and about what Socrates actually claimed for himself.
Christians who have known about it have tried to excuse it away, because very early on in the history of the Church – and Rachel, when you write your book on church history I’d appreciate it if you’d spend at least a few paragraphs on this, because this is something that’s come back to bite us a lot – there’s been an attempt to compare Jesus to Socrates, or Socrates to Jesus, depending on how you look at it.
“Look at the similarities! They’re both single men, itinerant preachers. They gather a band of disciples about themselves sort of. They go out and confront people with the truth, the absolute truth.”
Yes, and the political one, until that all conspires together to have the man executed. He is tried and he goes willingly to death. “See? They’re just alike, aren’t they?” – to the point that many of the Church fathers were willing to say that Socrates was a Gentile foreshadowing of Christ, on the same level as Moses or David or some such person in the Old Testament, and perhaps even stronger because the resemblances in their mind were even closer and clearer.
You still kind of get this in some Christian circles today and it is frightening. It’s offensive. It’s ridiculous, and yet try to convince Christians who have university degrees that Socrates may well have been demon-possessed and you get the same look that they throw at fundamentalists when they remind you that Jesus is coming back. It’s just ridiculous to the point of uncomfortable.
“Who let them in the room? Don’t they know that everyone here has to have a university degree in philosophy, history, or sociology? These people have done nothing but read their Bibles, and they’ve come up with the most outlandish things. Socrates demon-possessed?” It’s what he says.
It’s one of those very sinister and sometimes very hard to identify errors that the church has always faced. We want to be able to hold onto some of the worldly philosophy, whether it’s because we studied it before we became a Christian, or somebody that we respect tells us how great these philosophies are, but we always want to hold onto and mix. We want to synchronize and say, “Oh, but I can see how he’s like Christ. I can see how this echoes the gospel.” Yes, because of common grace, but we need to be very clear where their foundations are.
You started describing how Socrates was like Jesus, and you got to the second sentence and I wanted to be like, “I have an objection! He is not a creature!” But we want to “Christianize” lots of things because it allows us to feel more comfortable in lots of different settings and not have to challenge and hold to that very narrow way, as Jesus calls us to.
There is a joke on the internet that has a significant amount of truth in it, and I think it’s easier to see the truth in it when we’re talking about fiction. It’s that secularists often make the mistake of trying to create a secular work in a Christian universe. It’s like, “If you didn’t want to remind us of the truth, you shouldn’t have written something that was so true.”
The thing is, when it’s fiction everyone is acknowledging “this is fake.” It’s telling us something true, but it’s not its ostensible purpose. So when it’s the philosophers, where we can dig through and be like, “Here’s what that actually means. That’s not how they meant it,” it’s a different thing and it has to be treated differently.
Back to one of the reasons we read, and read old books, is so that we’re not bound by people who are – or even our own interpretation of, “Well, if I were saying this, I would mean…” You weren’t the one who was saying it and you don’t have the same thought forms or structure or basis, so it’s just possible that the original speaker meant something very, very different.
One line comes to me as something Rushdoony wrote. When a Roman conqueror was receiving a triumph, he’s going through the crowds and everyone is cheering him and they’re holding the laurel wreath over him, there’s supposed to be a man behind him saying, “Remember you are a man. Remember you are a man.”
Traditionally the West has said, “Oh, they’re reminding him to be humble.” No, that’s exactly what they’re not doing. “You are man full-blown, come of age. In other words, you’re a god.”
“That’s not what that word means.” It’s what it meant to them. It’s how they would understand it. They’re not humbling this guy. They’re reminding him of how great he is. Man is the measure of all things, as a Sophist would say. Knowing background, knowing context is important.
Now if you’ve never heard of Socrates that’s nice and all, but the problem is people that you had as teachers in college have. We can’t really retreat to a desert island and cut off our cultural past and assume that nothing in the past is going to affect us because we’re going to be ignorant of all of it. We’re not even going to get side references, or when we watch Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure …
No, wait, I was going to… When they say, “So-crates” we are expected to know who that is. We are part of a much bigger story than we imagine, and its themes and nuances come to us in a million directions. And oddly enough, pop culture tends to be one of the more powerful ones.
I will lay odds that a lot of – maybe not in this generation because this generation doesn’t remember Bill & Ted, it’s too far back, but in my generation everybody knew who Bill & Ted were, and probably more people knew about “So-crates” from that than from ever having read anything that was ever written about him by Plato, or anything that their history or philosophy teachers ever said. They didn’t know a thing about the guy, and so that literally was their introduction to Socrates.
And although he comes across in that movie as a little bit bumbling, you are left – as you are with some of the other characters – as he’s someone somewhat noble and who really would have fit into the 20th century if he’d had a chance, and would have had things to say to us that would have been fascinating. Too bad we don’t really understand what’s going on here.
That’s from a silly movie that wasn’t really, I don’t think, trying to change our worldview. It was just a plan aimed at teenagers.
And turning it the other way for Christians, we have to remind ourselves that the world is a whole, and that at this time you had Jewish people being dispersed, whether as slaves or not, and so there is a high likelihood that they’re interacting with these people and vice versa, so there can be some sharing of ideas.
But also when we come to the New Testament, like what Emily said earlier about their idea of demons, that’s actually really helpful when we see Jesus go into Gentile territory and cast out demons. It changes our perspective. So even if we don’t encounter Socrates and we don’t read the Apology or Plato, we have to realize that all of that was interacting with what we read in the Bible, and therefore it becomes important partly because it’s what people in the New Testament can be addressing and speaking against.
When Pilate says, “What is truth?” that stands against the whole background of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the failure of their attempt to find answers and the rise of the Hellenistic philosophers – the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, the Cynics – who admitted there were no answers to speak of.
So when Pilate says that, he’s not just a high-school kid who doesn’t want to really get serious about life and says, “What does it really matter?” No, he’s an educated man. He knows who Socrates is. He knows who Plato is. He knows who Aristotle is. He knows of the Stoics and Cynics and he’s willing to say, “Our culture has no answers. It’s ridiculous. So you’re talking truth? Really? What is truth?”
An interesting counterpoint where we can see the contrast is in Japanese literature now, because that does not come from the tradition that had that whole history of Socrates and Greek daimonian. So now there’s a huge conversation about Japanese literature and how to translate the word that we typically translate ‘demons’ because they don’t mean what we mean by it. It might mean monster. It could mean a lot of different things, but for sure it doesn’t mean what the Greeks meant by it.
For sure it doesn’t mean what we mean by what the Greeks meant by it, because the gospel went west.
And yet, you know, there are only so many possible worldviews. My brief introduction to Japanese culture through some of the best anime that there is, Miyasaki and such, you get a peek behind the scenes. In English translation some of it is lost, but the first time I saw, for instance, Totoro, it was with subtitles done by a friend of ours who is thoroughly Western in most respects, and we began to see a little more clearly what’s going on here.
These Shinto shrines were every place. It’s an animistic culture. There are demons everywhere. There are spirits, with or without the negative connotation. This is the basic force behind their culture, and it does pervade anime more than people understand because we’re not tuned to actually take Japanese culture seriously. And Japanese culture has been westernized and humanistic-ized a good deal. It’s felt the acids of Western humanism and rationalism to a point, but since the gospel never won over the people, there’s that constant pull back.
One other thing about this teaching unsanctioned gods, Socrates does say at one point, “For I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them.”
As I ask in the original article, imagine a controversial theologian saying something like this before a church council or a church court. “I believe in Jesus, but at a higher level than any of you do.” Oh wow.
Yes, that’s not the answer we want to hear. In other words, you just rejected our whole system, the system revealed in scripture, for your conception, which apparently transcends human reason, human history, the church creeds, and what the church has been preaching for 2,000 years. You have a better Jesus. You have a better God.
Absolutely. That’s exactly the kind of thing Emerson would say. I forget which of the neo-orthodox theologians it was – it might have been Tillich, but I don’t remember for sure – but he speaks of the God behind God. “Yeah, we know about the God of the west, the God of common Christianity. That’s not the God I’m talking about. I’m talking about the God who’s better than that and behind all that.”
He’s an existentialist, so no, of course he doesn’t know. He doesn’t claim to know. That’s the point. It’s something bigger than human reason.
There’s a bumper sticker I refer to often – I haven’t seen it in a long while but it says, “God is too great to be contained in any one system of religion,” which sounds like it’s appealing to the transcendence of God, but all it’s doing is making God irrelevant.
God cannot reveal Himself completely, which means practically I can give him a nod of the head if I like. I’m not even required to do that because who knows, maybe he doesn’t appreciate that. I don’t know what he appreciates. I don’t know if he’s a he or an it or she or whatever. Whatever God is, is not something I can put in a box, not something I can write anything about meaningfully.
Socrates was not too far from that in this claim, and if the people were listening, if that’s what he really said, that would be grounds right there for conviction. You’re saying that what we have encoded in our laws about the Olympians and about Athena is incorrect and incomplete and insufficient, and you answer to a higher deity of some sort. That would be a confession.
That brings us to his conviction. He is tried and he is convicted. He claims that it’s not by as large a percentage as he expected, and that if he had had more time maybe he could have won more of them over. So the penalty trial goes into place.
His enemies of course ask for the death sentence, which would mean that he’s sentenced to drink hemlock and kill himself, and he as the defendant is told that he has to propose an alternative sentence. The obvious one would be banishment, and they probably would have gotten away with that. He was popular and there were a lot of people there who didn’t really want to see him dead.
“I’ve been loyal to truth all my days, and the truth is I’ve been doing the state a favor. I’m to the state as a doctor, trying to help you all get better. The proper thing would be a pension. You can pay me such and such amount of money.”
“You should take care of me the way you take care of your Olympian heroes that win the games.”
They didn’t like that, so he is sentenced to death. Emily, you told me you read the Crito or some of it last night. You want to tell us what goes on there?
I glanced at it. I have read it in more detail, but not very recently. Crito is Socrates’ friend and he does appear in the text of the Apology, but he’s one of these people that he points out as, “I could have called my sons up to weep and wail and garner your sympathies, but I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to point to my friends who know what’s up out there in the assembly.”
Crito is one of these people, and Crito and his buddies have worked out an escape plan where they want to help Socrates escape the city rather than drinking hemlock and dying. And Socrates, in a dialogue of course, because that’s the way Plato writes Socrates, argues that, “No, that would be contrary to justice.” It would be going back on what he believes about death and the gods and the honor of his position to run out like a rat basically. It’s worth reading. It’s fun, but I don’t think it’s super relevant to this conversation.
There is this. Aristotle will say man is by nature a political animal, and he who by nature and not mere accident is without a state, a polis, is either above humanity or below it. Man is a political animal. Man is a creature who lives in a polis. The polis is the definition of humanity.
Over the centuries we’ve had people try to define man in terms of society. He’s a social animal. He’s a religious animal. He’s a worshiping animal. He’s a tool maker. He’s a word maker. The sciences have all tried to exult some facet of human nature and say this is what makes man man.
To the Greeks it was simple. It was the polis. It was the city-state. That’s what makes you human. If you belong to a city-state you are a man. If you don’t, there are only two possibilities: you’re a god and thus belong to the city-state of the gods, or you’re a beast and have not achieved humanity.
This does bear – not that I want to go there particularly right now, but it does bear on the pro-life arguments. “The baby in the womb is alive because we have all of these checkmarks we can check off.” But the response of the world is, “Yes, but society has not recognized that yet.” As Christians we say, “What? No.”
For lots and lots of centuries that’s how the world looked at things. You’re defined in terms of your relationship to the state and to the society it encapsulates. If you have not been received and accepted by the state, you’re not human. You don’t count. This is something that Christianity rescued us from, and we seem to be willing to go full-fledged back into it.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to combat relativism there was a real simple way. You pulled up the Holocaust because in those days – and that was only 40 years ago – all you had to say was, “Was it wrong for the Nazis to kill 6 million Jews?” and at that moment everybody start backpedaling.
It didn’t matter how relativistic you were, you couldn’t say, “Well, if they wanted to, sure.” You backpedaled. You made up things. You made excuses. “Well, that’s kind of different.” In other words, you weren’t honest with yourself and you weren’t consistent with your presuppositions.
Today more likely you’ll hear, “What’s a holocaust?” and when it’s explained, “Well…”
“That can’t really have happened. It’s too horrific. It must be propaganda.”
“Or if that’s what happened and that’s what their culture decided, then who are we to judge them?” and that’s frightening.
Why do I say all this? Because Socrates is given an opportunity to desert his polis, his city-state, his point of identity. And despite his supernatural connection with something else, he has labored as the gadfly of Athens. It’s Athens where he belongs. It’s Athens where he ministers. It’s Athens that’s the focus of what he does. He can’t give that up because if he does he will be effectively a beast. He’s not willing to claim to be a god.
So he ends up thinking about what people have said about death, and I don’t remember if this is from the Crito. There’s another account also of his death, I forget the name, but he argues, “We don’t really know what lies beyond. If the poets are to be believed, I may find there Achilles,” and he mentions all the people he may see and the wonderful conversations he’ll have and all the questions he’ll get to ask, and if that’s the case that could be good. Now he doesn’t know that that’s the case, but he doesn’t know it’s not and neither do his disciples.
So in the end his farewell is, “I go to death. You go to life. God knows which is best,” so there’s an agnosticism toward death. And since he doesn’t know it’s bad, he has every hope to believe that it’s good and it will be a lot of fun. It’ll be a blast and an intellectual party. He found out he was wrong, sadly enough. This is the man that a lot of Christians have turned into a Christ figure and it should concern us.
Next time we’ll talk about Plato and the Republic and, even more than Socrates, Plato in this last generation or two has become the heart of classical education. There’s a Christian university that I will not name out of courtesy that has as a symbol of their honors program a picture from The School of Athens by Raphael, where Plato is standing with his finger pointing up toward heaven, and Aristotle with his hand stretched down to the earth. That symbol is the symbol of their search for goodness, truth and beauty. What?
So we yet have a few more things to say about Greek culture because right now among thinking Christians, the ancient Greeks are more of a threat than Hegel or Kant or Kierkegaard honestly.
Although we can’t read the ancient Greeks without reading them through the lens of Hegel and Kierkegaard because they came after. It’s kind of a catch-22.
Next time, Lord willing, we will look at the Republic, one of the first exercises in roleplaying as they create their own city in a search for justice. And you thought that role players were all nerds. Well, maybe we are.
Maybe Plato was a nerd, too. In fact, I think that could easily be argued from the text. Speaking of the text, do you have any recommendations for us?
I do. Since you went Bill & Ted, I’m going to go back to the TV series I was talking about last time. That’s Columbo, starring Peter Falk. It was originally a rotating movie series. I think it was the Wednesday night movie.
Hollywood came up with this brilliant idea of, “Let’s not have a series of half hour or hour. Let’s do an hour and a half series and we’ll rotate them. We’ll have 2-4 different ones in rotation so we have more time to do it well,” and they came up with some good things. Out of this came a number of movie series that you may not remember – McCloud and Banacek and I don’t remember all the others. The one I’m recommending is Columbo, starring Peter Falk.
As Emily pointed out last time, yes, he’s the guy who plays the grandfather in Princess Bride, so no one has an excuse not to know who Peter Falk is. He made his first appearance in a Tony Curtis movie called The Great Race, where he played the henchman of Jack Lemmon, the bad guy, and was funny there. His humor in Columbo is the humor of a Socrates.
He plays the simpleton, the honest man, the man who seems poorly educated. He has an Italian background so it’s a little bit of “fresh off the boat” there. He has a wife whose name is Mrs. Columbo. We never find out much more about that, but she seems like a typical Italian kind of wife who makes typical Italian kind of food.
Columbo is constantly being assigned cases that involve the bright beautiful rich people, one of whom who has committed murder. And this was the twist back then – we’re shown the murder up front. We’re shown who did it, how they did it, why they did it and such, so it’s not a whodunit. It’s how is Columbo going to figure this out and prove it, because he’s dealing with someone who is really, really smart.
Yes, and sometimes they appeal to this. “I have a friend called the commissioner who will be dealing with you. I’m going to have your badge, Lieutenant!” and all that kind of thing. Well, he has a track record that is superior so that never goes anyplace, but you don’t get that at all. “If I’ve offended you I am so sorry. I didn’t mean that,” and that kind of thing, until he springs his trap and then there’s no way out and it’s obvious that I’m caught. The series went on for a long time and then later came back when Peter Falk was a bit older, then I think he may have come back again with a last few episodes. Most of them are really good.
We were talking earlier before we started recording about the first season of the series. The first couple Columbos are good, but they don’t really let the character shine so you might want to start 2 or 3 or 4 in. They’re clean. Columbo is a charming character, and the most famous B-list of stars in Hollywood all showed up sooner or later, so if you know that era at all you’ll recognize all the players.
They’re well-written and it’s fun and the movie series has a great theme, which I will not try to hum for you now, so there you go – Columbo, watch it and enjoy it.
As promised, I recommend Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s just a rollicking good time.
“So-crates” is the connection point. His famous line is, “The wisest man is he that knows that he knows nothing,” and Bill and Ted turn to each other and say, “Dude, that’s us!” and I’ve never felt something so deeply in all my life. I’ll leave it there. Rachel?
Mine is two parts because after we finished the podcast last time I realized I forgot to say part of my recommendation. After watching the “Let my people go” video, my husband David and I decided to actually follow up on his petition of the need to confess our sins, so we actually did a specific prayer evening at our church where we did a prayer through the covenant, praying basically the ways that we as a nation have broken the covenant, and specifically praying through the ten commandments.
After we did that, a number of people in the church went, “Wow, we’ve never really prayed that way before. We’ve never thought to pray that way and to identify ourselves with our whole nation and to think through all those things.”
A number of other people have done that as well recently, so that was part of the recommendation that I forgot, which is to think about the ways that we should be praying as groups and as churches to confess our sin as the American church and as the American people, so there’s a little extra on that.
My recommendation for this week is an Alicia Childers podcast that I listen to, where she is interviewing Voddie Baucham about his newest book. His new book came out purposefully at the beginning of the month of June because it’s called It’s Not Like Being Black: How Sexual Activists Hijacked the Civil Rights Movement.
It was really interesting to listen to his initial explanation. I’m still waiting to get the book, of how the whole LBGTQ movement has basically coopted the civil rights movement and made themselves one with that group, and that their suffering is the same as the suffering of those that have experienced racism and these other things. They’ve turned something that should be a moral issue into this social issue.
It was a really fascinating look that I hadn’t thought about before, plus Voddie Baucham is just always an interesting character to listen to, if you haven’t already, on a number of things such as cultural Marxism and ethnic Gnosticism and those sorts of things. That one just came out recently and seemed like a useful tool in our time for people to look into.
It seems very much to follow on the heels of his book Fault Lines about critical theory.
Yes. He said he has tried to publish a version of this book for about 15 years, and every publisher would reply to him within 15 minutes with, “Are you crazy? We can’t publish that. Do you realize what you’re asking us to do? We can’t say that,” so it took him a very long time to get it out there. I think the only place I could find it was on Amazon. Most places are not carrying the book so far.
Thanks very much. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to next time talking about Plato. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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