ABSTRACT
Nothing, ‘with one exception’, said the Reverend Benjamin Jowett, sometime Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, resembles the death of Socrates in Plato.1 This judgment, we may say, speaks once for his cloth and once for his gown; but no such prejudice can have induced the cosmopolitan George Steiner to observe that our ‘moral and intellectual history’ is characterized by two deaths, each of which is preceded by a famous supper.2 Nor did it seem whimsical to C.K. Barrett, the soberest of all commentators on the Gospel of John, to compare the saying of Christ, ‘I will not leave you as orphans’, with Phaedo 116a: ‘we were now to spend the rest of our lives as orphans’.3 It is of course unlikely that the Evangelist was acquainted with the Phaedo at first-hand; later Christians were, and they lost no time in deriving the obvious lesson from this martyrdom of which the pagan world had long repented. As we shall see, however, these admirers found in Socrates no doctrine to be baptized, no character to be imitated: his aporetic manner was of necessity less serviceable to Christian apologetic than the apodictic style of the interlocutors in Plato’s later writings. If there were Christian Platonists but no Christian Socratics prior to Kierkegaard, the reason is that Plato shed the precious dew of antiquity on the Gospel, whereas his master seemed to have opened up a luminous void behind the clouds of faith. The early Christian estimate of Socrates
This neglect of the living Socrates would be more remarkable had Christianity been initially, as certain scholars now contend, a Cynic movement born of the intercourse between Greeks and Jews in Roman Galilee.4 The theory presupposes, against the archaeological evidence, that
such towns as Nazareth, Cana and Capernaum had been penetrated as deeply by Greek culture as the cities of the Mediterranean seaboard; it decrees that the cultic elements in Christian thought – the Lordship of Christ, the resurrection, the Second Coming – are increments to a primitive deposit of ethical teaching which has curiously failed to survive without these cultic elements; it requires us to believe that an obscure convict, who had never claimed divinity, was deified by stages against all precedent, until (in contrast to Caesar or Alexander) he came to be regarded by his votaries as the sole God. And even then, the Christians of this fantasy are not Cynics: the Cynic is a solitary, not a sectarian, austere to himself and formidable to others, cultivating a self-sufficient kingship rather than praying for membership in the kingdom of God. Lucian, the pagan satirist, hints at a parallel between the two philosophies only to demonstrate that one is a corruption of the other; in his Runaways he belittles the suicide of Peregrinus, a Cynic turned Christian, as a meretricious parody of Socratic fortitude. Malice prompted second-century clerics to liken the celibate and vegetarian Tatian (fl. 170) to the Cynics, one of whom, Crescens, had denounced his master Justin (d. 165) to the Romans;5 it was only in the fourth century, when asceticism became an institution of the Church, that a less invidious model came to Jerome’s mind. Writing against the libertine Jovinian, he preserves an otherwise forgotten anecdote that Antisthenes, the father of Cynicism, had exclaimed on coming into the school of Socrates that here at last was the man whom he had sought (Against Jovinian 2.14.34). Apologists of the second century tolerated philosophy only when it seemed to confirm a Christian doctrine. Justin, for example, commended Socrates as a champion of reason or ‘true logos’ (1Apology 5.4), yet did not credit him with knowledge of the Logos, as though he had apprehended the truth contained in Christ the Word of God. His service to humanity was to unmask the demons (5.4), not to reveal the Gospel.6 One good saying can be attributed to him – that we ought not to honour a man above the truth7 – but if, with Heraclitus and the sages of barbarous nations, he can be reckoned as a Christian before Christ (1Apology 46.3), it is because, like other Greeks, he employed his reason upon the teaching of the prophets (1Apology 44-45). Christians, who have incurred a similar charge of atheism (2Apology 10) are more worthy of an audience, for they excel all these in knowledge of God.
