The Quest of God . . .

SOCRATES: GOD’S GADFLY

In this series we are defending the thesis that the nature of God is such that He is always in loving pursuit of the human heart. His mercy is so great and so enduring that no man is ever beyond the pale of His loving concern. He is “the Hound of Heaven” who pursues man even when he does not want to be pursued. It is therefore God who is in quest of man more than man who is in quest of God. In many different ways He does not let us forget that we are His, and every gesture He makes towards us is intended to gain our response, so that He might conform us into His own likeness.

We have thus far argued that God seeks us through nature, intuition, reason, and our own self-consciousness, as well as through the Bible. Last time we pointed to the poets and philosophers as envoys of God to a pagan world, not only in pointing towards a Redeemer who was to come, but by teaching a morality that helped to attune Greek and Roman culture for God’s entrance into humanity through Christ. We affirmed that the philosophers have spoken for God, and that the scriptures themselves recognize this and draw upon them as witnesses of heaven. We are saying, as do the scriptures, that God has never left Himself without witness, and that His witnesses may well range from “the starry heavens above and the moral law within man,” to use Kant’s words, to a Greek poet and a Roman philosopher.

Now we speak more particularly of a single witness to the ancient world, Socrates of Athens, who was born about 470 B.C. and died as a martyr in 399 B.C. It is our conviction that God was in Socrates preparing the Greek mind for the coming of His Christ. At a time when the Greeks were steeped in superstition and ignorance and engulfed in idolatry and moral decadence, it was Socrates, who called himself “the gadfly of God,” that so aroused the Athenians to think critically about themselves that Greek culture turned in a new direction, a direction that was to meet Paul halfway when he came to Athens to witness for the Christ.

To appreciate Socrates as an envoy of God one must realize the darkness that engulfed Athens in those times. There was no knowledge of God. Immorality was rampant, homosexuality being almost as common as marital sex. A bitter, cruel war raged on and on with neighboring Sparta. The gods men worshipped were more immoral even than themselves, committing incest and rape as well as murder. And yet it was a period of great minds, for no less figures than Sophocles, Herodotus, and Pericles were contemporaries of Socrates. But these men believed in a reason void of God. The Jews had not yet been dispersed, so their moral and prophetic teachings were not yet known. The great prophets of Israel had done their work in faraway Palestine, but insofar as we know Socrates had no way of knowing about them.

Yet he was God’s gadfly to Athens, and he believed he had a mission that was not essentially different to that of the prophets of Israel. He sealed that mission by choosing to die as a martyr, believing as he did that “God so directs us.”

From an early age he displayed the kind of mind that is attracted to spiritual values. Even as a boy he listened to what he later called his “divine sign,” an inner voice that warned him of impending dangers. His powers of concentration were remarkable, for he could get lost in thought for hours at a time, completely insensible to what was going on around him. Alcibiades, one of his students, tells how his master once stood from early morning on one day until sunrise of the next, absorbed in thought. It was also Alcibiades, a handsome youth admired by the men of his acquaintance, who tells how he once laid down with Socrates while he slept, offering himself sexually, only to learn that the master was more interested in ideas than sex, that kind of sex at least. It was Alcibiades that likened Socrates to a satyr, being as wise, crafty and mysterious as he was.

He was perhaps the first man in history to teach the immortality of the soul, a doctrine somewhat different from the scriptural view of the spirit of man, for Socrates believed that the soul is uncreated and eternal, which gives place for the idea of reincarnation. But he had this exalted view of man’s nature at a time when the Greeks had only a sensual view of man. He urged the Athenians to nurture their souls as they did their bodies, and pointed them to spiritual values at a time when they were so crassly materialistic.

Like Jesus of Nazareth who was to follow him, he spoke the language of love, a love that begins with the beauties of this world and then soars on to the beauties of mind and spirit in worlds beyond. He was also like Jesus in that he left no writings behind, but moved about as a freelance teacher with a band of disciples, using the simplest of language to convey profound truths. He was also like the Christ in that he gave his life for what he believed to be right, being innocent of the charges made against him.

He was proud of being an Athenian, but he believed that loyalty to one’s country implied a critical attitude towards its ideals and institutions. He was intent upon improving the culture that he loved, not in merely preserving the status quo, and he applied his free and inquiring mind to this task. Since he was teaching fresh concepts, the youth of the city was attracted to him; and since he questioned the religious practices of his neighbors, many became skeptical of the old ways of thinking. Thus he was charged with corrupting the youth and with teaching atheism, and was hauled into court where he was found guilty and sentenced to die.

Socrates’ crime was in being different. He wanted to know about man and the universe, and he was not content with the easy answers that had so long been given to serious questions. He believed it to be his task to re-complexify the oversimplifications. He wanted to know about goodness, reality, justice, and the essence of human existence. So he asked a lot of questions of those who were supposed to know, but found them more ignorant than himself, for they presumed to know when he knew he did not know. He humbly conceded “I know nothing.” And for such reasons the oracle at Delphi, the official seer, proclaimed Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

His mission was to call people to repentance, to cause them to examine their lives, nurture their souls, and cultivate the higher values. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he insisted, and he would use innuendo and irony to get his point across. He feigned to be ignorant of grave issues in order to draw those who presumed to know into conversation. To a young man who had the audacity to sue his own father in court on the charge of impiety, Socrates said: “Anyone who would sue his own father for such a charge surely knows what it is, and I have always wanted to know. So, please, teach me about piety.” After such encounters, with Socrates always asking searching questions and never being satisfied with the superficial answers, such ones would usually turn away with a deflated ego or frankly admit that they did not know what they were talking about, or both.

Socrates was convinced that he was called of God to convince his fellow citizens of their ignorance, and he spoke of one God, while those around him paid homage to all sorts of gods. Believing as he did that God has placed universal truths deep within man’s moral consciousness, he explored the mind in search of ideas, using the technique of question and answer. And so he gave to the world what is known as “dialectic” or “the Socratic method,” which assumes that truth will emerge from the morass of error and superstition in the crucible of competing ideas, somewhat like churning produces butter.

When Socrates heard that the oracle has pronounced him to be the wisest of men, he accepted it as the voice of God. And so he asked, “What can God mean by this saying?” His conclusion, after interviewing all those who presumed to be wise, was that only God is really wise and that human wisdom is of little value. So what God really means, Socrates observed, was that only he is wise who realizes that he knows nothing at all.

And so he says: “I still go about testing and examining every man whom I think wise, whether he be a citizen or a stranger, as God has commanded me; and whenever I find that he is not wise, I point Out to him on the part of God that he is not wise.”

Like an Amos or a Jeremiah he would say: “I am in very great poverty by reason of my service to God.” This was so because he dared to tell a culture that was proud of its wisdom that “I believe that only God is really wise.”

His friends could have arranged his escape from prison and from death, but he refused this by explaining: “It would be very strange conduct on my part if I were to desert my post now from fear of death or of any other thing, when God has commanded me, as I am persuaded that he has done, to spend my life in searching for wisdom, and in examining myself and others.”

Socrates urged the Athenians to give more care to the soul and less to making money and reputation. When this call to repentance threatened his safety, he said: “Athenians, I hold you in the highest regard and love; but I will obey God rather than you: and as long as I have breath and strength I will not cease from philosophy, and from exhorting you, and declaring the truth to everyone of you whom I meet …”

When he spoke of “the truth” he had reference to man’s dependence upon God. The Greeks had assumed themselves adequate without God. Socrates believed that if he did not warn them of their misdirected lives no one else would. “I think that I am the gadfly that God has sent to the city to attack it,” and since Athens would not likely find anyone else to do such a thankless task, he urged them not to sin against God by executing him. He went on to prophesy that if they did destroy him Athens would be overtaken by tragedy. Even up to the hour of his death the old philosopher, now 70, believed that “the sign of God” was directing his life.

Few in the pagan world before Christ could have talked as Socrates did in the hour of death. To those who condemned him he said: “Now the time has come and we must go hence. I to die and you to live. Whether life or death is better is known to God, and to God only.” And when he was asked about how he wanted to be buried he gave an answer that is far more Christian than pagan.

“Bury me as you please,” he answered, “only you must catch me first.” He explained that he was not his body, that his body might be buried, but not Socrates himself. “I shall not remain with you after I have drunk the poison, but shall go away to the happiness of the blest.” And so he urged his disciples to watch their language since wrong ideas can do evil to their soul, and to make it clear that it is Socrates’ body they are burying rather than Socrates himself. As for his body, they could bury it as they pleased.

And so Socrates died, talking about the immortality of the soul to the very last.

The old gadfly showed more faith in death than many of us Christians, and certainly a more responsible attitude toward the destiny of both body and soul. And his subtle humor was present even in death—telling his disciples that they would have to catch him first if they wanted to bury him, indicating that the soul would quickly make its flight.

As much as we admire one who can die as nobly as did Socrates, it is going too far, as do some humanists, to say that Socrates’ death was more exemplary than the Christ’s. He died more like a man, they say, while Jesus weakened under the ordeal. Socrates could pass jokes, bathe and dress himself for burial, and even console the executioner who brought him the poison to drink. But Jesus prayed that the cup might be taken away, and he suffered agony in the garden as he awaited his executioners. Who died the better way?, the humanists ask, looking as they do to Socrates as a father of humanism.

As I point out to my students at the university, there is no comparison between the experiences of the two men, and the humanists’ effort to make a comparison only reveals that they understand neither the death of Socrates nor of Jesus. Socrates was an old man who had lived a fruitful life with a minimum of frustration. He had fulfilled his God-given mission, so death lay before him as his next great experience, one that would take him to the presence of God. Jesus, on the other hand, had taken upon Himself the sins of all mankind, and His ordeal was in bearing God’s judgment against sin, not in the experience of death itself. And there is, to be sure, a vast difference in drinking poison in the presence of your friends and being crucified by the Romans in the presence of your enemies.

We have a better perspective of Socrates when we see him as a tutor unto Christ, preparing the Greek mind for the implantation of the gospel. He made them conscious of the soul and the need for spiritual values. He taught them how to die without fear. He spoke of God and immortality, laying the groundwork for the idea of revelation: that God is both real and one who reveals himself to man. He taught them the meaning of a prophetic mission, that he himself was called of God to bring them to repentance. He placed faith alongside reason. He was not merely a gadfly (a term the Athenians themselves used of Socrates), for there were always troublemakers around, but he was God’s gadfly. Once he did his work, it was easier and more consistent for Paul to do his. God’s gadfly was an envoy for God’s apostle.

How are we to account for a Socrates in the ancient world, centuries before Christ, isolated from Judaism, and having never seen a Bible? Yet he comes up talking about man’s Soul, urging his fellows to reform, and preaching about the one God of heaven, and even laying down his life confident of immortality. And all this in a pagan world that worshipped the impossible gods of Homer, and that still had its idols centuries later when Paul walked through its streets.

Our conclusion is that God made Socrates a hound of heaven, pursuing the Greek mind in an effort to capture it for God and to prepare it for the gospel of Christ. God used Socrates to keep Greek thought from going so far astray that it could not be an instrument of heaven for the promulgation of the gospel. Socrates is one reason why it was possible for the gospel to be preached and written in the Greek language.

So the mind of God touched Socrates just as it has touched others in the divine quest. God inspired him for his work, enabling him to do for coming generations what God’s plan called for. Socrates came to know God through the longing of his own soul, through reason and intuition, through nature, and perhaps even through some of the literature of his time, lost to us.

If ever you visit the ruins of ancient Athens and see the remnants of the glory that was Greece, you will no doubt think of the apostle Paul standing on Mar’s Hill. But think also of old Socrates, five centuries earlier, walking those same streets and telling the Athenians, “I must obey God rather than you,” and dying for that faith.

The Hound of Heaven has long been in pursuit of man.—the Editor