The Case for God (13 page)

Socrates’ dialectic was a rational version of the Indian Brahmodya, which had led participants to a direct appreciation of the transcendent otherness that lay beyond the reach of words. However closely he and his partners reasoned, something always eluded them, so the Socratic dialogue led people to the shocking realization of the profundity of their ignorance. Instead of achieving intellectual certainty, his rigorous
logos
had uncovered a transcendence that seemed an inescapable part of human experience. But Socrates did not see this unknowing as a handicap. People
must
interrogate their most fundamental prejudices or they would live superficial, expedient lives. As he explained to the court that condemned him to death: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living.”
³⁷

Socrates was a living summons to the paramount duty of stringent self-examination. He described himself as a gadfly, perpetually stinging people into awareness, forcing them to wake up to themselves, question their every opinion, and attend to their spiritual progress.
³⁸
The important thing was not the solution to a problem but the path that people traveled in search of it. To philosophize was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself. At the end of his unsettling conversation with Socrates, Laches had a “conversion”
(metanoia)
, literally a “turning around.”
³⁹
This did not mean that he had accepted a new doctrinal truth; on the contrary, he had discovered that, like Socrates himself, he knew nothing at all. Socrates had made him realize that the value system by which he had lived was without foundation; as a result, in order to go forward authentically, his new self must be based on doubt
(aporia
) rather than certainty. The type of wisdom that Socrates offered was not gained by acquiring items of knowledge but by learning to
be
in a different way.

In our society, rational discussion is often aggressive, since participants are not usually battling with themselves but are doing their best
to demonstrate the invalidity of their opponent’s viewpoint. This was the kind of debate that was going on in the Athenian assemblies, and Socrates did not like it.
⁴⁰
He told the ambitious young aristocrat Meno that if he was one of the “clever and disputatious debaters” currently in vogue, he would simply state his case and challenge Meno to refute it. But this was not appropriate in a discussion between people who “are friends, as you and I are, and
want
to discuss with each other.” In true dialogue the interlocutors “must answer in a manner more gentle and more proper to discussion.”
⁴¹
In a Socratic dialogue, therefore, the “winner” did not try force an unwilling opponent to accept his point of view. It was a joint effort. You expressed yourself clearly as a gift to your partner, whose beautifully expressed argument would, in turn, touch
you
at a profound level. In the dialogues recorded by Plato, the conversation halts, digresses to another subject, and returns to the original idea in a way that prevents it from becoming dogmatic. It was essential that at each stage of the debate, Socrates and his interlocutors maintain a disciplined, openhearted accord.

Because the Socratic dialogue was experienced as an initiation
(myesis)
, Plato used the language of the Mysteries to describe its effect on people. Socrates once said that, like his mother, he was a midwife whose task was to help his interlocutor engender a new self.
⁴²
Like any good initiation, a successful dialogue should lead to
ekstasis:
by learning to inhabit each other’s point of view, the conversationalists were taken beyond themselves. Anybody who entered into dialogue with Socrates had to be willing to change; he had to have faith (
pistis
) that Socrates would guide him through the initial vertigo of
aporia
in such a way that he found pleasure in it. At the end of this intellectual ritual, if he had responded honestly and generously, the initiate would have become a philosopher, somebody who realized that he lacked wisdom, longed for it, but knew that he was not what he ought to be. Like a
mystes
, he had become “a stranger to himself.” This relentless search for wisdom made a philosopher
atopos
, “unclassifiable.” That was why Socrates was not like other people; he did not care about money or advancement and was not even concerned about his own security.

In the
Symposium
, Plato made Socrates describe his quest for wisdom as a love affair that grasped the seeker’s entire being until he achieved an
ekstasis
that was an ascent, stage by stage, to a higher state
of being. If the philosopher surrendered himself to an “unstinting love of wisdom,” he would acquire joyous knowledge of a beauty that went beyond finite beings because it was being itself: “It always
is
and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.”
⁴³
It was not confined to

It was “absolute, pure, unmixed, unique, eternal”
⁴⁵
—like Brahman, Nirvana, or God. Wisdom transformed the philosopher so that he himself enjoyed a measure of divinity. “The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”
⁴⁶

As Socrates finished this moving explanation, Alcibiades burst in upon the company and, his tongue loosened by drink, described the extraordinary effect Socrates had upon him. He might be as ugly as a satyr, but he was like the popular effigies of the satyr Silenus that had a tiny statue of a god inside. He was like the satyr Marsyas, whose music propelled an audience into a tranced yearning for union with the gods, except that Socrates did not need a musical instrument because his words alone stirred people to the depths. He had made Alcibiades aware of how deficient he was in wisdom and how lacking in self-knowledge: “He always traps me, you see, and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention.”
⁴⁷
He tried to stop his ears against Socrates’ imperative summons to virtue but simply could not keep away from him. “I swear to you, the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face.” The
logoi
of Socrates filled him with the same kind of “frenzy” as the Mysteries of Dionysus; the listener felt “unhinged”
(explexis
) and on the brink of illumination: “I don’t know if any of you have seen him when he’s really serious. But I once caught him when
he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike—so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing—that I no longer had a choice—I just had to do whatever he told me.”
⁴⁸

For his followers, Socrates had become an incarnation of divine beatitude, a symbol of the wisdom to which his whole life was directed. Henceforth each school of Greek philosophy would revere its founding sage as an avatar of a transcendent idea that was natural to humanity but almost impossibly difficult to achieve.
⁴⁹
The Greeks had always seen the gods as immanent in human excellence; now the sage would express in human form the rational idea of God that had left the old Olympian theology far behind. Despite his humanity— and Alcibiades makes it clear that he was all too human—Socrates’ unique qualities pointed beyond himself to the transcendence that informed his moral quest. This became especially evident in the manner of his death. Socrates admitted that his conflict with the polis was inevitable. He had approached each of the magistrates of the city personally, trying to persuade him “not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible; not to care for the city’s possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way.”
⁵⁰
This advice would not have appealed to many politicians. Before he drank the hemlock, he washed his body to spare the women, thanked his jailer courteously for his kindness, and made mild jokes about his predicament. Instead of destructive, consuming rage, there was a quiet, receptive peace as he looked death calmly in the face, forbade his friends to mourn, and lovingly accepted their companionship.

The execution of Socrates made a lasting impression on Plato, who became so disillusioned that he abandoned his dream of a political career and traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, where he became acquainted with Pythagorean spirituality. When he returned to Athens, he founded a school of philosophy and mathematics in a grove dedicated to the hero Academius on the outskirts of the city. The Academy was nothing like a department of philosophy in a modern Western university. It was a religious association; everybody attended the daily sacrifice to the gods performed by one of the students,
who came not only to hear Plato’s ideas but to learn how to conduct their lives.
⁵¹

Plato regarded philosophy as an apprenticeship for death,
⁵²
and claimed that this had also been the goal of Socrates: “Those who practise philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.”
⁵³
At the moment of death the soul would become free of the body, so Plato’s disciples had to live out this separation on a daily, hourly basis, paying careful attention to their behavior, as if each moment were their last. They must constantly be on their guard against pettiness and triviality, thus transcending the individualized personality that they would one day leave behind, and strive instead for a panoptic perspective that grasped “both divine and human as a whole.”
⁵⁴
A philosopher must not be a money lover, a coward, or a braggart; he should be reliable and just in his dealings with others.
⁵⁵
A man who consistently behaved as if he were already dead should not take earthly affairs too seriously, but should be calm in misfortune. He must eat and drink in moderation, feeding his rational powers instead with “fine arguments and speculations.” If he applied himself faithfully to this regimen, the philosopher would no longer resent his mortality; it would be quite absurd for a man who had lived in this way to be upset when death finally arrived. If he had already set his soul free of the toils of the body, he could “leave it alone, pure and by itself, to get on with its investigations, to yearn after and perceive something, it knows not what.”
⁵⁶

Like the Pythagoreans, Plato regarded mathematics as a spiritual exercise that helped the philosopher to wean himself from sense perceptions and achieve a level of abstraction that enabled him to view the world in a different way. Geometry was the hidden principle of the cosmos. Even though a perfect circle or triangle was never seen in the physical world, all material objects were structured on these ideal forms. Indeed, every single earthly reality was modeled on a heavenly archetype in a world of perfect ideas. Plato departed from Socrates in one important respect. He believed that we did not arrive at a conception of virtue by accumulating examples of virtuous behavior in daily life. Like everything else, virtue was an objective phenomenon that existed independently and on a higher plane than the material world.

Plato’s “doctrine of the forms” is an extraordinary notion to us
moderns. We regard thinking as something that
we
do, so we naturally assume that our ideas are our own creation. But in the ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to them. It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the “Known” drew one to itself. People said, in effect, “I think— therefore there is that which I think.”
⁵⁷
So everything that was thought about had an objective existence in an ideal world. The doctrine of the forms was really a rationalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy, in which every earthly object or experience here below had its counterpart in the divine sphere.
⁵⁸
For Plato, the forms were in a realm apart. Numinous and timeless, they became manifest in the imperfect realities of our world but were not themselves involved in the endless process of change. The philosopher’s task was to become vividly aware of this superior level of being by cultivating his powers of reason.

Plato’s vision of the transcendent forms seems to have been influenced by his experience of the Mysteries, which, like his philosophy, helped people to live creatively with their mortality. In the
Phaedrus
, he has left us one of the fullest—albeit discreetly veiled—accounts of the Eleusinian experience. Most people, he explained, were unable to see the forms shining through their earthly counterparts because “the senses are so murky.” But during their initiation, the
mystai
had all glimpsed their radiant beauty when,