FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 659 8/12/15 SOCRATES: HERO OF OUR TIME

OUR FOOLISH EPOCH SHOULD LISTEN TO PHILOSOPHER SOCRATES, A TIMELESS CHAMPION OF REASON AND VIRTUE.
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Socrates awaits execution in prison. A young supporter visits him the night before the judicial murder: ‘I have bribed the guards, all is ready for your escape. To a pleasant, extradition-free country.’ ‘No, thanks’, Socrates answers, with full equanimity. ‘I will not take up your offer. To do so would be morally wrong. I have willingly obeyed my country’s laws all my life. If I ran away now I would be breaking those laws. My being sentenced on the evidence of liars and perjurers is neither here nor there. You know my views: no one ought to return a wrong or an injury, regardless of the provocation. I will not therefore injure the laws of my country by flouting them.’ Next day the death penalty is dutifully carried out and Socrates becomes a corpse.

Our hero really was that sort of rare bird: a true philosopher, a.k.a a lover of wisdom.

In the Platonic dialogue ‘Gorgias’ Socrates reiterates his implacable ethics. Doing wrong is worse than suffering wrong. Nothing can harm a good person, either in life or after death. Not being justly punished is worse than not being punished. Wrong-doers, dictators, tyrants and the like, no matter how successful and triumphant, are most miserable creatures, more wretched than their innocent victims. And he also showed up an early version of the doctrine of the Superman for what it is: bilge.

Diogenes Laertius terms the philosopher ‘demokratikos’. The Athens in which he lived was ruled by the people, hence a democracy. Moreover, Socrates was patriotic. Dr Johnson’s quip, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrels’, he would not have approved of. He served bravely in his country’s wars and fulfilled his citizen’s duty most scrupulously. Not quite the material flag-burners and anti-war demonstrators are made of.

Athenian democracy was ungrateful. The philosopher was brought to trial, aged 70, on charges of atheism and impiety. The first charge, denial of the gods, would hardly raise an eyebrow today. Western society has ‘come of age’. Secularist maniacs like Dawking apart, it often does not bother to deny God any more. As my boy Linus observes: ‘No need to rebel against religion: no one gives a damn about it.’

The second charge may still be serious. Impiety meant ‘corrupting the young’. (The media and the British government manage that pretty well nowadays.) Actually, he taught shocking, subversive truths. Such that it is better to be in love with a beautiful mind than with a beautiful body. And, to prove it, he resisted physical seduction from someone endowed with both characteristics. I guess Socrates would not be popular today with squalid TV talk-show hosts like Graham Norton or Alan Carr.

So, the philosopher was found guilty by majority vote of a jury consisting of 501 citizens of the Athenian republic. Everything was done by the book. Possibly one of the earliest, most egregious felonies committed by popular vote of a representative assembly. (Jesus Christ also suffered something similar, I recall.)

That democracies can be guilty of great crimes of course should come as no surprise. Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iraq: these infamous names are not forgotten. And 19^th Century Western colonialist robberies were largely managed by countries run by elected parliaments, not fascism. A disagreeable truth to Labour warmongers like Hilary Benn but the truth.

Our hero was complex. A staunch rationalist and a dialectician, Socrates also had a  marked irrationalist streak. Fell inexplicably into long trances – once he remained standing, rooted to the spot, plunged in Zen-like, immovable meditation, for as long as 24 hours. To the men who had just sentenced him to death, he told of his divine guide, a daimon, or a good genius, who spoke to him and directed his steps through life. A symptom of insanity. Or was it the voice of conscience? Certainly it was not simply a sneeze or even a disease of the ear, as Plutarch somewhere suggests!


Handsome Socrates was not. Snub-nosed and pot-bellied, he was poor, did not usually bother to dress properly and went barefoot. Yet, he was a most sought-out and idolised chap by a host of wealthy, aristocratic young Athenians. His physical fitness was prodigious and it lasted well into his old age. He had total mastery over the passions. Never a lush, yet when he drank he would out-drink everybody, while still remaining totally self-controlled. Bertrand Russell calls him ‘the perfect Orphic saint’. Within the soul-versus-body duality, the philosopher’s lofty soul ruled majestic over his bodily, cage-like prison.

Platonist hagiography may have exaggerated Socrates’ virtues. But as I look back with melancholy on the golden age of the Greeks, the man thrills me. Twilight - no - darkness, rather, is rapidly descending on the West. But voices like Socrates’ voice will never be extinguished, as long as human beings live and think aright. At the end of the ‘Gorgias’, as the captious chatter of the sophists falls silent, this brave champion of reason still speaks, argues and exhorts thus:

‘Let people despise you for a fool and insult you if they will; nay, if they inflict the last indignity of a blow, take it cheerfully; if you are really a good person devoted to the practice of virtue, they can do you no harm…the best way of life is to practice righteousness and virtue, whether living or dying. Let us follow that way and urge others to do the same, instead of the way the wicked, in mistaken confidence, are urging upon us. It is quite worthless, know that.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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