The Striking Similarities between Socrates and Jesus!

Socrates' Children. My first talk is on Socrates versus the Sophists. I entitled my history of philosophy, Socrates' Children, because Socrates is the father of philosophy. Socrates is the first great philosopher, the first to clearly know when a point was proved to be true and when it was not, the first person to consciously practice the art of logic and the quest for wisdom, which by the very definition and literal meaning of the word is what philosophy is supposed to be. Logic and wisdom, clarity and profundity, Socrates was the first to combine them. Socrates is the archetype and touchstone for all subsequent philosophers.

Every one of the many schools of philosophy in the ancient world claimed to be the true disciples of Socrates, except for the materialist and atheist Epicureans. Socrates is the first to combine them. Socrates is the archetype and touchstone for all subsequent philosophers, just as each of the 30,000 different Christian denominations today claimed to be the true disciples of Christ. If there had been no Socrates, there would be no Plato. And without Plato, no Aristotle. And Aristotle laid the foundations not only for almost all subsequent philosophy, but also for most of the sciences, which gradually split off from philosophy, like children leaving home to set up a new family. And the rest of the history of of Western philosophy flows from these three, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The history of Western philosophy can be usefully oversimplified by a geographical image. Think of two rivers arising from a swamp, flowing separately for about 500 years, then blending into a single river for the next 1500 years, separating again for another 500 years, and then ending in another swamp. The two rivers are philosophy and religion, reason and faith, centering on Socrates and Jesus, the two most influential human beings who ever lived. Both rivers emerge from the swamp of pagan mythology and polytheism. Socratic reason and Judeo-Christian faith were not just two new teachings, new thoughts, but two fundamentally new ways of thinking, one in Israel and the other in the Middle East. One in Israel and the other in the Middle East. Both distinguish themselves from and criticize the teachings of the myths that surrounded them, but also from the mythic, imaginative, intuitive, dreamlike, subjective way of thinking that produced the myths. Both Hebrew faith and Greek reason opposed not only the teachings of the polytheistic myths, but also its mode of thinking, its epistemology.

Faith, for the Hebrews, meant not mythological, but mythological, and not mythological, but mythological, and not mythological, and not mythological, and not mythological, but a public revelation of the one true God in two new forms miraculous and providential historical events and the moral writings of the prophets. Both of these two objects of faith were objective and public, exoteric instead of esoteric. One needed no special talents to understand the visible works of God in history, some of which were miraculous and all of which were providential. Or to understand the moral writings in the Law and the Prophets. The object of the other new kind of thinking, from Athens, was also not imaginatively invented myths but reason, that is, defining terms clearly and proving controversial conclusions logically, two things that had simply not been done before Socrates in any conscious or consistent way.

Both of these two new ways of thinking were objective and realistic in that they were public and democratic, not private and esoteric.

Neither of these two new ways of thinking, Hebrew faith or Greek reason, could marry the myths. That would be like a man marrying an animal. But they could marry each other.

That would be like a man marrying a woman. And that's what they did. And that's what produced Christian culture. Or Greek culture. Or Christendom, which is not primarily a political order but a spiritual order.

And that is the culture that is now dying in Europe and North America, though it is continuing to grow everywhere else in the world.

To go back to our geographical image, the mingling of these two rivers happened in the Roman world, which was the only time the Western world was unified in a single republic and later an empire.

It was like the marriage between two missions. It is a map of the most important missionaries. Philosophical missionaries of the Socratic reason and religious missionaries of the Jewish god who had become incarnate in Christ.

The claims of both missionaries were universal and not just for one race or nation. The truths revealed by reason were universal truths and the laws revealed by God were universal laws.

The name for that marriage was Christian culture, or Christendom. It was a stormy marriage. but a fruitful one, especially in its two giants, Augustine and Aquinas, the two most

brilliant Christian minds who ever lived. And it lasted for 1,500 years, until the Reformation and the Renaissance began to pull it apart in a kind of divorce. On the one side, the

Protestant Reformation wanted to divorce religion from Greek rationalism and Roman legalism, and on the other hand, the humanistic and scientific Renaissance wanted to divorce science and art from religious faith and dogma. Although they destroyed the medieval marriage and thus created the so-called modern world, both were nostalgic, backward-looking movements. The Reformation wanted to restore the simple gospel and free it from its marriage to Greek reason and Roman law, to free the divine from its marriage to the human. Whereas the Renaissance wanted to free the human from its marriage to the divine, and restore the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

Both the Reformation and the Renaissance began as relatively modest reforming and purifying movements, but they soon became increasingly rebellious and independent, and eventually became the two post-Christian cultures of, on the one hand, the scientific and humanistic rationalism of the early 18th century, and, on the other hand, numerous protests against that in the name of a subjective romanticism or irrationalism, especially in the 19th century.

And this has left us with our present split culture and split personalities, typified by C.S. Lewis's complaint in his autobiography that, quote, the two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth.

On the other side, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved, I believed to be imaginary. Nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.

For faith has collapsed into feeling, and reason into computing, which are only two ghosts of their former robust and vibrant medieval selves. And two ghosts cannot marry.

That is my X-ray of the skeletal structure of the modern mind. And what is the so-called post-modern mind that now surrounds us?

Well, there is no consensus. In fact, there is an increasing division and distrust.

The only thing common to all post-modernisms is the loss of faith in modernism, that is, the adequacy of either objective reason or subjective feeling.

It is as structureless a swamp as the swamp of mythology that both biblical faith and classical reasoning emerge from.

To see the ongoing importance of Socrates for our present world, look at Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the two founders of modern existentialism, which is the only really interesting school of modern philosophy.

These two are as opposite as any two philosophers can be in what they value.

Kierkegaard said that his whole extremely diverse philosophical output is about only one thing, what it is to exist as a Christian.

Nietzsche called Christianity the synthesis of all errors, the most total and loathsome falsehood in human history.

Yet for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, all of Western civilization circles around Socrates and Jesus, like planets orbiting a double star.

They are Kierkegaard's two greatest heroes and Nietzsche's two greatest villains. Nietzsche is profoundly right to see Socrates' worship of truth as religious. It is his Lord.

It is God without a face. That's why Nietzsche hates and fears Socrates almost as much as he hates and fears Christ. He called himself the Antichrist.

He could equally have called himself the anti-Socrates. Obviously, Socrates and Jesus are profoundly different. But they're also profoundly similar.

Two profoundly different people can be more profoundly similar than any two shallowly different people can be. For the deeper you go down into the canyon, the closer you get to the single river that is at the bottom.

Socrates was very different from Jesus.

He was not virgin born, was not predicted by prophets, performed no miracles, did not claim to be divine, was not crucified, did not resurrect, and did not promise to return to judge the world at the end of time.

Jesus did. Yet they are strikingly similar in a number of ways. First of all, they were similar to each other in their very difference from all others who ever lived.

C.S. Lewis says somewhere that there are three people whom it will be impossible to mistake for any others when you meet them in heaven. Jesus, Socrates, and Samuel Johnson.

I think he's one third wrong because G.K. Chesterton is the new Samuel Johnson. But two out of three ain't bad. A second similarity is that both Socrates and Jesus are very similar. Socrates and Jesus were monotheists.

That was a universal cultural requirement in Israel and a unique countercultural achievement in Greece.

Socrates always speaks seriously when he speaks of the god in the singular, but never when he speaks of the gods in the plural.

In fact, Socrates was martyred because he could not honestly profess publicly that he believed in any of the gods of the state.

Socrates was the only person that Athens, the world's first democracy, ever executed for religious reasons.

Like the Rome of the Caesars, Greece was very tolerant to all religions except the three examples of monotheism in the ancient world. Jews, Christians, and Socrates.

So a third similarity is that both Socrates and Jesus were martyred for their so-called impiety, their religious nonconformity.

Socrates for being too monotheistic, Jesus for apparently not being monotheistic enough.

In an exquisite irony, both were executed for impiety, even though both were by far the most pious persons in their culture. A fourth similarity is that both were saints.

If the definition of a saint is simply one whose whole life is devoted to obeying God's will, that was the ultimate reason they both accepted martyrdom.

Both were led by and obedient to the Holy Spirit. Socrates spoke of a spirit, a daimon, a divine voice that spoke to him.

It was literally the only thing he never questioned, even when it gave no reasons, and forbade him to do what others in his culture saw as honorable, for instance to enter politics.

Here is a fifth similarity. Both Socrates and Jesus endured mistrials. And both were executed.

Both were martyred for religious offenses that were draped in the disguise of political offenses, although most men were apolitical. A sixth similarity. Both never published a word.

Jesus' only writing was in the sand.

And Socrates wrote only poetry, the last night of his life, to exalt the god of light, Apollo, and to festoon Aesop's fables, the most childlike of all Greek writings.

The sands of time have blown these writings away, as surely as it blew away the words Jesus literally wrote in the sand. Socrates would never get tenure at a typical American university.

No research, no publications. As to what Jesus would meet as his fate in a typical American church, well, read Dostoevsky's Fable of the Grand Inquisitor.

A seventh, deeper and more mysterious similarity. Is that both were remarkably humble, yet both made outrageous, astonishing claims. This is obviously true for Jesus.

But how is it true for Socrates? Well, in his Apology, Socrates was so honest that after he was declared guilty of the crimes of not believing in the gods of the state,

and corrupting the youth by teaching them to question as he had questioned, he had to propose a counter penalty that he thought he deserved, rather than either death, or exile.

And he proposed, as his counterclaim, to be honored by the state by free room and board in the town hall, because he was its greatest benefactor.

No one else in history comes even close to either Jesus or Socrates, in the contrast between the enormity of their claims, and the humility of their personalities.

An eighth similarity. Both were hated by both the political right, and the political left of the time, the traditionalists and the progressives,

which in the case of Socrates was the establishment on the one hand, and the sophists on the other hand. More about them in a minute. And in the case of Jesus, it was the dogmatic and legalistic Pharisees on the one hand, who added to the Jewish law and the prophets, and the skeptical Sadducees on the other hand, who deleted much of it.

Jesus was also hated, both by the Herodian collaborators, with Rome, and by the zealot revolutionary rebels.

Both Socrates and Jesus fit the description Chesterton gives of Jesus by this analogy. He says, Imagine someone described by some as far too fat, others as far too skinny, by some as ridiculously tall, by others as ridiculously short. Either he is a very strange shape, or he is exactly the right shape, and nobody else is.

Similarity number nine. Both were enemies of moral relativism, which was taught in one way by the sophists, and in another way by the Pharisees, who actually fulfilled all the fears of Jesuitical casuistry that Protestant critics specialize in, by not demanding perfection in the heart, only in the hands, in correct behavior.

Similarity number ten. Both defended traditional values, but in an untraditional way. Both were truer than their culture was to the culture's own origins and foundations, and yet both seemed radically new and threatening to those who thought they were defending the culture against them. Similarity number eleven. Socrates taught by systematic questioning, the famous Socratic method, and so did Jesus. The rabbinic method of teaching is the closest thing to the Socratic method that we find anywhere in the ancient world.

The classic Jewish joke for me is this one. Why does a rabbi always answer a question with another question? And the answer is, why shouldn't a rabbi answer a question with another question, eh?

That's only a funny description of what Jesus habitually did, even as a boy. When his parents lost him for three days, they found him in the temple, doing what? Asking and answering questions to the rabbis.

Like the rabbinic method, the assumptions of the Socratic method are the opposite of the assumptions of the Sophists. First, that truth is the end, the goal. It is an intrinsic and absolute value.

That we must have a respect for truth and an honest intention when we argue. Second, that truth is objective and universal. And third, that it is knowable by ordinary human beings, using ordinary human reason, especially by defining our terms clearly, and arguing logically. Similarity number 12.

Both taught paradoxes. For Jesus, to save yourself is to lose yourself, and to give yourself away is the only way to save yourself. God turns us upside down, exalting the humble and humbling the exalted. Why? Because we fallen human beings all begin by being upside down. Nose to the earthly grindstone and heels kicking up in rebellion against the heavens. So that when God turns us right side up, we feel upside down. Since when we were upside down, we felt right side up. Let's look at this more closely.

Socrates famously taught four paradoxes. First, that no evil can ever happen to a good man, either in this world or in the next.

For evil does not just happen like thunderstorms. It is chosen and embraced by our mind and will. Second, that man is not a body that happens to have a soul, but a soul that happens to have a body. That's his answer to the Delphic oracle's great riddle, Know thyself. The Greek word for soul, psyche, meant ghost before Socrates.

It was the less real aspect of yourself, a kind of pale copy of the real you. But for Socrates, the real self was your psyche, your invisible self, your mind and spirit.

It was the body that was the ghost-like copy of the soul, not vice versa. The soul was heavier than the body, not thinner and lighter. It was immortal.

Socrates' third paradox is that knowledge is a kind of virtue, and virtue a kind of knowledge. That the origin of all evil is ignorance. That to truly know the good is to do it.

And the fourth paradox is that learning is really remembering. That beneath the conscious mind of every individual and temporal person lies the power to know the eternal and universal truth.

These four paradoxes that Socrates taught sound at first quite contrary to Christ's teachings. Yet all four can be interpreted in a profoundly Christian way.

The first, that no evil can happen to a good man, is almost St. Paul's point when he says that all things work together for good for those who love God. Sin does not just happen,

as suffering does. But suffering is not evil, because it gives us the opportunity to be more wise, more humble, and more courageous. Suffering is usually not a punishment for sin, it is therapy for sin, an opportunity for sanctity. Even death is not evil, because if we are wise and good, it ushers us into heaven. The second paradox, that the essence of the self is the soul, is Jesus' point when he says, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? That is, I think, the most practical sentence ever spoken in the essence of economics, the science of profit and loss. Yes, Socrates was wrong by discounting the body, but he got the soul right, and that's even more important than getting the body right.

The third paradox, that evil is ignorance, and that to truly know the good is to necessarily love the good, is true at least with two qualifications. It's true of the most important kind of knowledge, what Newman calls real assent, as distinct from merely notional assent. And it is also true of the most important kind of objects of knowledge, that is, values, rather than mere facts.

Jesus himself defines our ultimate good this way, this is eternal life, to know you. The only true God.

And it will certainly be true of our knowledge of God in heaven, the beatific vision, which will eliminate all sin, and even all temptation, because it will eliminate all darkness, all ignorance.

If we truly knew God and his goodness now, with the full real assent that we will have in heaven, we would not be able to sin, because we would see both sin and virtue as they truly are.

Sin as misery and virtue as joy, not vice versa. And the fourth paradox, that learning is remembering and that truth is innate, can be applied to innate moral knowledge by conscience, and perhaps also to our subconscious memory of Eden. Why else do we feel that this world is not enough, if we don't subconsciously remember being in a better one, an unfallen one? Pascal says, compare two poor men, one is a deposed king, the other was born poor.

Which one is going to be dissatisfied with ordinary life? What does the deposed king's dissatisfaction prove? That he remembers a throne. And which of those two are we?

What origin do we unconsciously remember? Did we fall from Eden, or did we rise from the primordial slime pools? One last similarity between Socrates and Jesus, and I think this is number 13, is their appearance. Socrates resembled nothing more than a squashed frog. He was one of the ugliest men who ever lived. And Jesus, at least in his passion, was described by Isaiah in these words, He had no beauty that we should desire him. He was one from whom men hide their faces. On the cross, Jesus began to quote Psalm 22, which begins, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?