Socrates Mission

BYU Studies Quarterly
Volume 55 Issue 4 Article 9
2016
Socrates' Mission
Daniel W. Graham
Brigham Young University
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq
Part of the Mormon Studies Commons, and the Religious Education Commons
Recommended Citation
Graham, Daniel W. (2016) "Socrates' Mission," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 55 : Iss. 4 , Article 9.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol55/iss4/9
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been
accepted for inclusion in BYU Studies Quarterly by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more
information, please contact [email protected], [email protected].
Graham: Socrates' Mission
Socrates’ Mission
Daniel W. Graham
S ocrates is the quintessential watershed of ancient thought. He is

known as the thinker who turned philosophy away from cosmo-
logical speculation to ethics and value theory. In his own time, he was
hailed by Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi as the man who was wiser than all
others, and he was lampooned by Aristophanes on the comic stage as a
quack, a sophist, and a fraud. His followers included two of the greatest
traitors Athens produced, Alcibiades and Critias, and two of the great-
est thinkers and moralists, Plato and Xenophon. In the end, he was tried
on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth and was condemned to
death. His enemies saw him as a heretic, while his friends saw him as a
paragon of piety and righteousness. Who was Socrates and what was he
up to that he should polarize his city?1 I will argue, with his friends, that
Socrates was a man of God who, in his own idiosyncratic way, brought
about a philosophical and religious revolution.
Recent scholarship has helped to rehabilitate Socrates as a major
philosopher,2 and my own research on his life and thought have
1. There is no authoritative biography of Socrates. But see W. K. C. Guth-

rie, Socrates, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); see also W. K. C.
Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 14–26.
2. See especially Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). I will follow this author in taking
the early dialogues of Plato as evidence of views of the historical Socrates. (In the
middle and late dialogues of Plato, Socrates arguably becomes a mouthpiece for
Plato’s views.)
BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2016)141

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 1
BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 55, Iss. 4 [2016], Art. 9
Daniel W. Graham
In the summer of 1981, I had the privi-

lege of studying the philosophy of
Socrates with Gregory Vlastos, the
world’s foremost scholar of Socrates.
I came to appreciate the paradoxes of
the Athenian philosopher, who does
not lecture or expound doctrines but
asks questions and more questions
of anyone he met. Usually, however,
Socrates did not talk about himself
but about the ideas of his companions.
The one place we can learn something
about what motivated Socrates is Plato’s Apology, in which Plato,
the follower of Socrates, records his master’s speech at Socrates’
trial. Here Socrates tells the jury that he was inspired by an oracle
to realize he had a mission to the people of Athens.
The notion of Socrates having a mission is often taken with
a grain of salt by scholars. But it may offer us the only chance of
understanding the philosopher’s motivation in a statement that
comes from his own mouth. Whereas many scholars are puzzled
or dismissive of Socrates’ religious tendencies, I find them to be
sincere and heartfelt. His sense of mission seems to drive him to
go to his fellow citizens, one by one, to encourage them to take
care of their souls rather than their wealth and reputation. He
maintained that the one way mortals can honor the gods is to live
upright moral lives. In the process, he fairly invented philosophi-
cal ethics.
Socrates was put on trial, condemned, and executed for alleged
crimes against the state. He became a martyr to his followers. In
the early Christian era, Christian thinkers came to see him as a
fellow seeker of truth and a martyr in the cause of righteousness,
a kind of proto-Christian disciple. In my research, I was surprised
to find that the day of his death coincided with what was in effect
the Athenian Day of Atonement. He was, in his historical setting,
a type of Christ. This, then, is the story of the mission, death, and
triumph of Socrates of Athens.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol55/iss4/9 2
Socrates’ Mission V 143
convinced me that there is method in his madness: It makes sense to

think of Socrates both as a thinker and as a man, both as a creature of his
time and as a man for all seasons. To study Socrates is to confront the so-
called Socratic paradoxes. Socrates found his truth in unexpected places.
He found wisdom in ignorance, truth in opinions, virtue in knowledge,
and piety in human affairs. In solving his own puzzles Socrates was, as
I shall attempt to show, the first thinker to turn philosophy to a study of
human good, to a study of man as an autonomous individual, or, as he
was wont to say, to the care of one’s soul. And in the process, he carried
out what he regarded as a religious mission, one that redefined the place
of both God and man in the cosmos.
A New Kind of Education

Socrates grew up in the glory days of Athens. After her defeat of an Asian
superpower (the Persian Empire), Athens pioneered a radical democ-
racy and built an empire of her own. Democracy required widespread
literacy, and Socrates was a beneficiary. Socrates learned his ABCs qui-
etly in a small school in which he was taught reading and writing, music,
and physical education for about seven years.3 Like his peers, he was
expected to memorize long passages of Homer’s epic poems to recite. He
was also expected to absorb the heroic ideals of the poems, peopled by
anthropomorphic gods and goddesses who ruled the world from Olym-
pus but often mingled with mortals, and their religious background.
As the son of a stonecutter, Socrates also learned the rudiments of
the craftsman’s trade, a technē or applied science of the sort that was
making great advances. The magnificent architecture of classical Athens,
the lifelike but idealistic statuary, the brilliant red-figure pottery, the
swift war galleys, all were products of human crafts that came into their
own in the fifth century BC.
3. John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997),

Crito 50d–e, 51c; compare Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.6.14. Aristoxenus, the first
biographer of Socrates, claims he was poorly educated and barely literate; see
Plutarch, The Malice of Herodotus sec. 9; Plutarch, Moralia 856c–d; Aristoxenus
fr. 55 Wehrli. But this is not the view of those who knew him best. See also
Plato, Phaedo 97b–c, 98b; compare Plato, Apology 26d–e; and Plato, Protago-
ras 339a–347a, in which Socrates holds his own in a discussion of a poem of
Simonides. All quotes in this paper that come from the Greek texts are my own
translations, except as otherwise noted.

144 v BYU Studies Quarterly
When he was a young man, Socrates left his father’s workshop to

study with a philosopher, Archelaus, who was a student of Anaxagoras
and a practitioner of scientific philosophy.4 This philosophy consisted of
a cosmological theory about how the world arose out of chaos and came
to embody an orderly cosmos. In this context, human beings were seen
as a part of natural history, arising out of the primeval mud and advanc-
ing to develop communities, language, and crafts.
When Socrates was a young man, a new kind of educator appeared
in the Sophists. Sophists were itinerant teachers who traveled from city
to city teaching short courses for money. They were good at advertising
themselves and at teaching subjects that young men wanted to study. In
fact, they were a by-product of the new democratic governments that
were appearing all over the Greek world, inspired and encouraged by the
Athenian democracy. What the Sophists offered for the most part was an
education in the arts of government: public speaking, political science,
and financial management, all of which would allow the have-nots to
participate effectively in government alongside the haves. What the young
men lacked in experience and family connections they could make up by
learning at the feet of an expert in political science and public speaking.
As a bright young thinker, Socrates could choose among several
paths to knowledge.
A Mission from God

In the end, Socrates confronted the educational programs of his day—
traditional religion, craft technology, scientific philosophy, and political
studies—and found them all wanting. In particular, each seemed to lack
an account of human goodness. Traditional Greek religion taught that
one should not try to be too good. Euripides tells the tale of Hippolytus,
who lives a life of perfect chastity and honors the goddess of chastity,
Artemis. At the beginning of his play, the goddess Aphrodite vows to
destroy Hippolytus because he slights her, the goddess of lust. If mortals
are too chaste, they will offend the goddess of lust; if mortals are too sober,
they will offend the god of wine and strong drink; if they are too just, they
will dishonor the god of deceit.5
4. Diogenes Laertius 2.23; see also Andreas Patzer, “Sokrates und Archelaos:
Historische und fiktionale Texte über den jungen Sokrates,” in Sokrates im Gang
der Zeiten, ed. Wolfgang von der Weppen and Bernhard Zimmermann (Tübin-
gen: Attempo, 2006), 9–56; Daniel W. Graham, “Socrates on Samos,” Classical
Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2008): 308–13.
5. Euripides, Hippolytus 1–22.
Technē, human technology, is all about applying knowledge to make

things or bring about better states of affairs. Of itself it has no morality.
It aims to satisfy the needs of patrons who pay for buildings or health or
ships. As for scientific philosophy, it holds that morality arises with the
invention of culture by human beings. Morality is a mere convention
or custom, nomos, designed to keep order; indeed, perhaps even the
gods are a human invention. And sophists are more than happy to take
the anthropology of the scientific philosophers as an excuse to dismiss
morality as a mere artifact of a given culture that can be accepted or
rejected at will. Thus technology, scientific philosophy, and sophistic
rhetoric seem to offer no clues to the important questions of what is
right and wrong, good and evil. And the theologoi, the religious writers,
imply that human goodness is utterly impossible, possessed securely
only by the gods and at best intermittently by humans as a divine gift.
Socrates went around asking questions about the virtues: justice,
piety, moderation, wisdom, courage. He sought for definitions of the
virtues and an understanding of what they were and how to acquire
them. How far Socrates progressed in his search for goodness is unclear.
He evidently gained a reputation as a wise man and won a following
among young men of the city. At some point, his good friend and age-
mate, Chaerephon, took it into his head to make a pilgrimage to the
Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. He asked the oracle if anyone was wiser than
Socrates and received the answer: no.6 This confirmed Chaerephon’s
faith in his friend. He reported the oracle’s answer to Socrates as a vin-
dication of the philosopher’s project.
But Socrates was deeply disturbed by the answer. How could he be
outstanding in wisdom when he had no special knowledge? Socrates
was sure that something was wrong. He set out to find someone who was
clearly wiser than himself so that he could bring this knowledge to the
oracle and point out that there must be some misunderstanding.7
Socrates relates in his trial speech how he interviewed several poli-
ticians who were renowned for their wisdom and found them to be
ignorant. He then went to the poets and discovered that while they were
gifted in their writings, they could not explain their works intelligently
to others. Finally, he went to the craftsmen and discovered that, though
they had great skill at their crafts, their success led them to think they
were experts in everything, and hence they showed their own folly. In
the end, Socrates came to recognize that he had one small advantage
6. Plato, Apology 20e8–21a7.

7. Plato, Apology 21b1–c2.

over these reputed wise people: he knew his own limitations. He did not
deceive himself into believing he had knowledge that he did not have.8
“What is likely, gentlemen,” Socrates explains to his jury, “is that only
the god is really wise, and in his oracle he means to say this, that human
wisdom is of little or no value. And he seems to speak of this guy Socrates—
using my name—in making me an example, as if to say, He is wisest
among you, O men, who like Socrates knows that he is truly of no value in
wisdom.”9 Unlike most people, Socrates knew what he knew and what he
did not know. This modest discovery of Socrates would have a profound
impact on his life. He began to see his lack of expert knowledge—his great-
est weakness—as his greatest strength. Socrates came to see himself as
having a mission from the god to share his wisdom—to show others the
limitations of their understanding. Socrates was no longer seeking for his
own enlightenment, but seeking to point out to others the limits of human
knowledge.
In his trial speech, Socrates goes on to explain the substance of his
mission:
Men of Athens, I appreciate and love you, but I will obey the god rather
than you, and as long as I draw breath and have the ability, I will not
stop philosophizing and exhorting you and appealing to any one of you
I happen to meet, saying what I always say, “Good sir, since you are an
Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city and the one most renowned for
wisdom and power, aren’t you ashamed of yourself for devoting yourself
to maximizing your wealth, your reputation, and your rank, while you
show no interest at all in how to improve your wisdom, your honesty,
and the state of your soul?”
And if any of you protests and says he does care about these things, I
won’t just quit and go away, but I will ask questions, examine, and cross-
examine him. And if I find he has not acquired virtue, but only claims
he has, I will accuse him of valuing the most important things the least
and the least important things the most. I will do this to anyone I meet,
young or old, foreigner or citizen, but especially to you citizens, since
you are my kindred. Know well that this is what the god commands,
and I believe that no greater good has ever come to this city than my mis-
sion [hupēresia] for the god. For I spend all my time doing nothing else
but urging you, both young and old, not to worry about your bodies or
your possessions in preference to or as much as your soul, how it may
be as good as possible, declaring, Goodness does not come from wealth,
8. Plato, Apology 21c3–22e6.

9. Plato, Apology 23a5–b4.
but from goodness comes wealth and every good thing that men possess,
whether in private or public life.10
Socrates’ message is that virtue or moral goodness is more important
than any other object in life. Moral character outweighed all the other
advantages that might be accumulated. If that is right, Socrates’ mis-
sion was to be a moral reformer to Athens—to teach the Athenians that
something was more important than the material and social advantages
they all pursued.
The Method in His Madness

Yet there is a problem here. What actually occurs in Plato’s Socratic
dialogues is not Socrates’ exhortations to Athenians to care about their
souls. Rather, Socrates seeks for definitions of various virtues, which his
interlocutors duly offer, only to have Socrates refute them. The inquiries
never seem to bear fruit, and Socrates never seems to improve anyone.
Listening in as Plato’s audience, the audience can well sympathize with
the sophist Thrasymachus, when he interrupts a typical Socratic conver-
sation after Socrates has refuted several definitions:
What hogwash this is, Socrates! Why are you people carrying on
like nitwits, bowing and scraping to each other? If you really want to
know what justice is, don’t just ask questions and refute what someone
answers to show off, knowing as you do that it’s much easier to ask ques-
tions than to answer them. No, answer for yourself and tell us what you
say justice is!11
Socrates seems to have no answers, but only to ask questions that neither
he nor any of his associates can answer. Socrates can point out the incon-
sistencies of other people’s conceptions, but he can’t provide his own
answers, much less defend them. How, then, can he be what he claims
to be at his trial, which is the gods’ gift to Athens? How can Socrates, the
refuter of definitions, be Socrates the moral reformer?12
10. Plato, Apology 29d2–30b4. See John Burnet, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology
of Socrates, and Crito (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), ad 30b3, which makes
agatha in b4 the predicate; however, this requires changing the syntax of the
second clause in the middle of a parallel construction.
11. Plato, Republic 1.336b–d.
12. For a recent helpful discussion of this question, see Roslyn Weiss, “Socrates:
Seeker or Preacher?” in A Companion to Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and
Rachana Kamtekar (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 243–53.

This problem perhaps lies at the heart of the Socratic paradoxes. For
want of an answer to the question, most scholars view Socrates as a bril-
liant social critic but a philosophical failure. He asks penetrating ques-
tions of his peers, but because he cannot answer his own questions, he
must leave his work to someone like Plato, who can found philosophical
ethics on the rock of metaphysics and epistemology. This is, of course,
what Plato would have liked readers to think.
But there is a way to rehabilitate Socrates’ program. The evidence
is in Plato’s Apology, hiding in plain sight. Socrates says he has only
one small advantage over his peers, namely his awareness of what he
knows and what he does not know—the limits of his own knowledge.
He points out that he has never shirked his duty, either on the battlefield
or in the forum. If he had done so, he could indeed be said not to believe
in the gods because he feared death.
To fear death, gentlemen [he says,] is nothing but thinking you are wise
when you are not; it is thinking you know what you don’t know. No one in
fact knows whether death may be the greatest of all goods, but men fear
it as if they knew for sure that it was the greatest of all evils. And how
is this not the most reprehensible ignorance, that of thinking you know
what you don’t know? For my part, gentlemen, perhaps I stand out from
the majority of men in this one thing, and if I should claim to be wiser
than anyone it would be precisely in this, that inasmuch as I have no
adequate knowledge about the afterlife, I recognize that I do not know.
But to do wrong and to disobey one’s superior, whether god or man,
that I do know to be evil and shameful. Consequently, in place of those
evils which I know to be evils, I shall never fear or flee from events that,
for all I know, might actually be goods.13
Cowardice results from fearing death. Fearing death amounts to

thinking death is the greatest of all evils. But no one actually knows
whether death may not be the greatest good. Hence, cowardice results
from what Socrates calls “the most reprehensible ignorance.” Now it
appears that Socrates’ courage results directly from his awareness of
his own ignorance. He knows that he does not know that death is the
greatest of all evils, and so he does not take death into consideration
in his moral deliberations. If someone were to threaten Socrates with
death (as at his trial), he would say that this issue was moot. What is
really important is what is good and bad. Obedience to moral authority
is good, and the god is a moral authority, so the philosopher will fulfill
13. Plato, Apology 28d–29c.
the godly mission without regard to the question of whether it leads to

life or death.
By dismissing concerns about life and death from moral delibera-
tion, Socrates focuses on the purely moral issues: is the proposed con-
duct right or wrong? If it is right, he does it; if it is wrong, he avoids it.
So, by knowing what he knows (disobedience to authorities is wrong)
and what he does not know (death is the greatest evil), Socrates is free to
make a purely moral decision, untroubled by issues of his own personal
welfare or even survival.
Consider what happens after the trial. In Plato’s Crito, Socrates is sit-
ting in prison awaiting execution. His rich friend Crito comes to visit him
and offers more than comfort and companionship. He has hatched a plot
to break Socrates out of prison, having bribed the guards and arranged for
a getaway vehicle. He makes a series of arguments to persuade Socrates
to cooperate with the plan so that Socrates can save himself, support
his family, and continue his philosophical mission. “I, you see,” says
Socrates, “am not just now but always and forever committed to follow-
ing none other of my ideas than the principle that seems to me to be most
reasonable.”14
Socrates asks his friend if he still holds that living well is more impor-
tant than just living. He does. He further questions if living well means
to live nobly and justly. Yes, it did. “Since the argument demands it, we
for our part must take into account nothing but what we just now talked
about: whether we shall be doing right in paying money and giving
thanks to those who help me break out of here, and whether everybody
will be doing right in making the escape—or whether in truth we shall
be doing wrong in this action. And if it becomes clear that we are com-
mitting injustice, it will not be right to weigh in the balance whether we
shall die if we stay and behave ourselves, or whether we shall suffer any
other fate whatsoever, against the cost of committing injustice.”15
Again, issues of moral rightness trump personal welfare. But up to
that point, Socrates and Crito are talking only in generalities. What is
right in the present situation? Socrates invokes a moral principle that he
and Crito have often agreed upon: “one should never return harm for
harm or do wrong to any man, no matter what one suffers from him.”16
Socrates asks Crito if he still accepts the principle, and Crito reluctantly
14. Plato, Crito 46a–c.

15. Plato, Crito 47d–48d.
16. Plato, Crito 49c.

assents. This is a powerful principle, reminiscent of the precepts of the

Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule. But what is the evidence
for this moral precept? In the present dialogue, Socrates does not argue
further for the precept—though he would have if Crito had abandoned
the principle.
In the opening Socratic book of Plato’s Republic is the argument for
following through with the precept.17 When Polemarchus defines justice
as doing good to friends and harm to enemies, Socrates challenges the
second half of the definition. He leads Polemarchus to see that to harm
someone is to make that person worse. To make someone worse—really
worse—is to make that person less virtuous, and in this case, less just. But
how, he asks, can it be the work of justice to make someone less just? There
is a kind of practical contradiction in the course of action being recom-
mended. Surely justice is not about promoting injustice. Thus it is never
right to harm anyone.
Armed with this no-harm precept, Socrates goes on to show that
if he should break out of prison, he would be doing his best to harm
the city of Athens, which has provided him countless benefits. To do
so—even if Athens has wronged him, which Socrates declares the city
has not—would be to do harm to another. The principle of avoiding
all harm prevents him from acting in the way that Crito recommends.
Again he can say that he does not know that death is a great evil, but he
does know that seeking to harm another is a great evil. He turns down
Crito’s offer and awaits his fate.
Thus, Socrates’ actions are shaped by his awareness of his own igno-
rance. He makes moral decisions on the basis of moral principles, not
on the basis of his own expected advantage or disadvantage. Far from
being a hindrance, his ignorance and his knowledge of his own igno-
rance guarantee that he will act in an ethically appropriate way—that he
will do what is right—despite pressure from his friends or community
to act otherwise. Socrates is just, and he owes his justice to his knowl-
edge. He knows what is and is not to be done. He must not inflict harm
on anyone, not even on the Athenian state, and so he must obey its laws.
17. Plato’s Republic develops Plato’s own theories, but the first of the ten
books in the dialogue gives a typically Socratic treatment of justice that makes
no reference to Platonic theories. Some scholars think it was originally com-
posed as a free-standing dialogue, but then incorporated into the Republic as
an introduction.
Morality and Religion

The dominant reaction by scholars to Socrates’ philosophical project is
disappointment. Socrates seeks for moral knowledge. He fails to find it.
He repeatedly fails to improve any of the interlocutors he questions in the
dialogues. He has a wonderful objective, but he cannot carry it to frui-
tion. Given his objective, “nothing that Socrates can truly claim to know
would count as making him possess that which is most precious: moral
wisdom.”18 He is on this account a quixotic figure. Yet this pessimistic
interpretation cannot be right. There is at least one individual in the
Socratic dialogues who is a spectacular success in his moral life: Socrates
himself. Scholars accuse Socrates of failing to establish any theoretical
basis for his own actions because he fails to correct others. But Socrates
provides a compelling vindication of his own actions in his defense
speech. And he shows in his conversation with Crito that he recognizes
moral principles that he can defend logically, and he demonstrates fur-
ther that he abides by those principles without deviating, even when he
is face to face with his own execution. Crito blinks, but Socrates does not.
At the conclusion of his dialogue Phaedo, Plato has his narrator,
Phaedo, say of Socrates, “This . . . was the death of our companion, the
man, we would declare, who was of those of his generation whom we
knew the noblest, the wisest, and the most just.”19 Another illustrious
disciple of Socrates, Xenophon concurs in the judgment.20
Socrates had a profound effect on the people who followed him, and
through them he had a far-reaching effect on intellectual and cultural
history. Before him there was no moral theory worth the name. Socrates
invented moral theory, the study of ethics. Socrates concentrated on ques-
tions of right and wrong, good and evil, and he turned his followers’ atten-
tion to them. But he did more: he came to see his apparently negative
method of refutation as a positive way of improving character. By his own
lights, his every refutation was an act of moral regeneration.
Socrates came to see the individual—the soul, as he put it—as the
sum of all the person’s opinions. When Socrates’ questions led the inter-
locutor to contradict himself, they revealed an inconsistency in that
person’s beliefs. Logically speaking, this is right: contradiction in the
conclusion of an argument results from an inconsistency in the premises.
18. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Plato’s Socrates (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 72.
19. Plato, Phaedo 116c–118a; quotation from 118a15–17.
20. Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.8.11; Plato, Apology 34a–e.

To get rid of the contradiction in the conclusions, eliminate the premise

that is incompatible with the others. Socrates allowed his interlocutors
to advance as premises only opinions they personally held, and with
good reason: he designed his questions to test the answerer’s beliefs.
To get rid of contradictory beliefs, people must identify and elimi-
nate the false belief that clashes with their true beliefs. To hold that
belief is to think they are wise when they are not, to think they know
what they do not know. Once they have purged themselves of all false
beliefs about what is right and wrong, good and evil, they will naturally
use their true beliefs to make correct moral judgments. Socrates will not
have taught them anything, but he will have removed the roadblocks to
correct reasoning, and hence he will have helped them to recognize the
appropriate action.
“What kind of person am I?” Socrates asks in the Gorgias. “I am one
who would gladly be refuted if I say something false, and who would
gladly refute (elenchein) another if he says something false; but I would
just as soon be refuted as to refute. For I consider it to be a greater good
to be refuted inasmuch as it is a greater good for one to be freed from
the greatest evil than to free another. For I believe that there is no greater
evil for a person than to have a false opinion about the subjects we are now
discussing.”21 (Those subjects are what is right and wrong.)
Socrates’ study is perhaps significant in not purporting to be a science
or a craft comprising expert knowledge. Rather, it purports to be a very
human type of wisdom based on a kind of self-knowledge and aware-
ness of one’s limitations. Having tested the sophists’ essays in politikē
technē, political or social science, and found them wanting, he does not
try to invent his own social science, but rather retreats to a project of
nonscientific, nonexpert understanding. He envisages a self-reflective,
self-correcting discipline, a critique of other kinds of knowledge. It is
this study alone that demonstrates what is really important and points
people in the direction of the good life. He pursues a critical, nonexpert
kind of wisdom—a kind of humanism, one might say.
What then is the good life? A life of morality, pure and simple.
Morality is achieved by testing one’s moral beliefs every day, preferably
in the company of others. As for power, money, and reputation, these
are all unimportant in relation to the true values. What then should
philosophy teach? It should teach how to examine the soul to determine
what is truly important. What is the most important study of all? Moral
21. Plato, Gorgias 458a–b.
philosophy, which teaches how to live the good life. As for science and
technology, these studies are well and good, but until people come to
know what makes life worth living, these studies are at best a distraction
and often a seduction. Socrates invented the study of ethics and he was,
arguably, the first ethical man—the first individual to live his life by a
logical system of moral rules and to make those rules the foundation of
all his actions. There were many before Socrates who lived highly moral
lives, but no one before Socrates had essayed to live ethically by the
application of rigorous moral reasoning.
Even Socrates’ relationship to deity seems to be governed by ethics.
While Socrates expresses reverence for the gods and admits to being
inspired by a divine voice, he does not study religion or theology. Yet
he seems to have strong views about certain religious topics. In the
Euthyphro, Socrates explores the meaning of the virtue of piety, or
reverence with the gods, with Euthyphro, who professes to be a reli-
gious expert and accepts the traditional Greek myths, including those
recounting wars among the gods. “This is the very reason,” Socrates
confides, “that I am brought to trial. For when someone says these kinds
of things about the gods, I find it hard to accept his views. For this rea-
son, apparently, people will say I am wicked.”22
Though he claims no expertise in religion, Socrates feels uncomfort-
able with a view of the gods as fighting among themselves and acting
immorally. Socrates asks Euthyphro to define the virtue of piety. It is
what the gods love, replies Euthyphro. But Socrates reminds him that
his gods quarrel among themselves, so they may disagree on such things.
(He may have had in mind something like the conflict between Artemis,
goddess of chastity, and Aphrodite, goddess of lust.) Well, then, piety
must be what all the gods love, Euthyphro replies. But is something pious
because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? To
Socrates, it is the latter. Then there must be some further reason that it is
pious. Perhaps piety is that part of justice having to do with how mortals
act toward the gods. But the gods are self-sufficient without mortals; so
what do gods need from them? Euthyphro lapses back into saying things
are pious because the gods love them. The two inquirers arrive at no
solution.
There are strong hints, however, that Socrates has an answer to the
puzzle. The gods do not need anything for their own welfare. But what
they require is that humans treat their fellow humans with justice. That
22. Plato, Euthyphro 6a.

is precisely why Socrates can claim to be the best thing that has ever
happened to Athens: his questions lead his hearers to recognize their
responsibility to act justly and morally towards others. Wealth, power,
and reputation do not produce virtue, but virtue produces all other
good things. Whatever else is true of the gods, they are moral beings
who delight in the moral behavior of humans. To be pious requires
mortals to serve and help other mortals; that is what the gods want, and
so by serving others, mortals act piously and please the gods. In the end,
then, moral behavior and piety are inseparable: the gods, if they truly
are worthy of worship, are moral beings, who want humans to emulate
them in behaving justly to one another.23 As one scholar puts it, for
Socrates “piety is doing god’s work to benefit human beings.”24
Socrates has strong religious convictions that operate in the back-
ground of his philosophical activities. Students of Socrates recognize
that he participates in the religious practices of his community, that
he sees himself as a servant of the gods, and, most remarkably, that he
receives inspiration from divine sources.25 Socrates comes to view him-
self as receiving a calling from the god through the oracle at Delphi. But
even apart from this experience, he professes to receive promptings from
his daimonion, “a sort of divine voice,” explains Socrates, “which, start-
ing from childhood, comes to me, whenever it comes, always to turn me
away from what I am about to do but never to tell me what to do.”26 He
always obeys the prompting, though he is left to determine for himself
why it came to him. Further, he feels himself called to do one thing, to
carry on his philosophical inquiries. “To do this,” he affirms, “I have been
commanded by the god, through oracles, dreams, and every way that a
23. Plato, Republic 1.379a–b; 10.613a–b.

24. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 176, emphasis in original.
25. See especially Mark L. McPherran, The Religion of Socrates (University
Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); with further studies in
Nicholas D. Smith and Paul B. Woodruff, eds., Reason and Religion in Socratic
Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Pierre Destrée and Nicho-
las D. Smith, eds., Socrates’ Divine Sign: Religion, Practice, and Value in Socratic
Philosophy (Kelowna, B.C.: Academic Printing and Publishing, 2005); Apeiron
38, no. 2; Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 157–78. On follow-
ing the religious practices of the community, see Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.1,
4.3.16, 1.1.2, 1.2.64.
26. Plato, Apology 31d2–4.
divine mandate has ever directed a man to act.”27 There are examples of
prophetic and instructive dreams Socrates had near the end of his life.28
As to oracles and other forms of divination, Socrates holds that one
should not bother the gods about things that one can know for oneself,
but about important questions that cannot be answered by reason—
such as the outcome of a future event—one should consult the gods.29
He advises Xenophon to consult the oracle at Delphi before setting out
to join Cyrus’s military expedition, allegedly to subdue some rebels (but
in reality to overthrow the Persian government), for Socrates recognizes
the action might be seen as hostile to the aims of the Athenian govern-
ment. Xenophon consults the oracle, but instead of asking whether he
should go, he asks what gods he should sacrifice to in order to prosper in
his project. Socrates is displeased that his follower had avoided the real
question, but advises him to go, since he had in effect already made that
commitment to the god.30
For all his belief—faith, one might say—in the gods, Socrates has
no systematic theology to teach. He professes no knowledge about an
afterlife, and it is dubious whether he believes in a creation account
and divine providence.31 He firmly believes that the gods are moral and
beneficent to humans, that they need nothing from humans, but that
humans can and should serve the gods by doing good to their fellow
men. He seems committed to a belief in a thoroughgoing moral order in
the world, but beyond that he has no interest in cosmology or scientific
inquiry. It is enough for humans to know that it is rational to be moral
and irrational to be immoral, and similarly it is pious to be moral and
impious to be immoral.
27. Plato, Apology 33c4–7.

28. Plato, Crito 44a–b; Plato, Phaedo 60c–61b.
29. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.6–9.
30. Xenophon, Anabasis, ed. Maurice W. Mather and Joseph William Hewitt
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 3.1.5–7.
31. On the afterlife, see Plato, Apology 40c–41c. Plato’s Phaedo provides
multiple arguments for the immortality of the soul, but this work seems to
express Plato’s psychology and theology rather than Socrates’. On Plato’s reli-
gious theory, see Michael Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in
Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Xenophon
has Socrates teach an account of the gods as creators and nurturers of humans,
offering a teleological proof for the existence of the gods; see Xenophon, Memo-
rabilia 1.4.1–19, 4.3.1–18. McPherran, Religion of Socrates, 272–91, defends this
as a Socratic view, but here Xenophon’s Socrates seems to become too didactic
and theoretical.

Revolutionary Implications
With these convictions, Socrates passionately pursues his mission of
turning people to the care of their souls and the recognition of moral
imperatives. His mission brings him into conflict with powerful indi-
viduals who think he is trying to subvert the state. Socrates uses his trial
as a forum to promote his mission, with predictably bad results. He is
put to death as a malefactor, and there, one might have expected, is the
end of his program of reform.
Yet it was not. Socrates’ disciples met together in the nearby city of
Megara, hosted by Euclides, and planned a response.32 Soon afterward
several Socratics began publishing dialogues re-creating the conversa-
tions of Socrates, and at the same time inventing a new genre of lit-
erature. They showed Socrates seeking for definitions of virtues, asking
questions, refuting, inquiring. The power of the written word carried
Socrates’ arguments far beyond the confines of Athens. Soon almost
everyone in Athens, and many abroad, came to know Socrates in a way
few had known him in his lifetime. Antisthenes, Aeschines, Euclides,
Aristippus, Phaedo, Plato, and Xenophon portrayed Socrates plying his
trade on the streets of Athens. Most of these Socratic dialogues are lost,
but there are fragments of the “lesser” Socratics’ works and the com-
plete Socratic works of Plato and Xenophon. Socrates’ disciples waged a
propaganda war for the memory of Socrates, and, by the middle of the
fourth century, they won. Socrates became a culture hero, a martyr and
saint to philosophy.
And the philosophy that the hero presided over was not the phi-
losophy he grew up with. Gone were the cosmological speculations and
the sophistical refutations. Philosophy became imbued with morality.
Ethics was now the centerpiece and the proof of any theory. To be a
philosopher was to be committed to the moral life. Logic, epistemology,
metaphysics, psychology, and political theory emerged or reemerged as
handmaids to ethics. A theory that did not make people better was not
philosophy but sophistry (which then became a pejorative term). Phi-
losophy became an honorific title to be associated with thoughtful and
virtuous people. And Athens, for the first time, became known as the
mother-city of philosophy.
32. Diogenes Laertius 3.6.
When, in the second and third centuries AD, learned Christians

looked about for some common ground they could share with pagans,
they found philosophy, and particularly Socratic philosophy, to be espe-
cially attractive. Justin Martyr observed, “Socrates, who was more zeal-
ous in [philosophy] than all of [the other Greeks], was accused of the
very same crimes as ourselves. For they said that he was introducing
new divinities, and did not consider those to be gods whom the state
recognised.”33 Justin saw Socrates as a martyr to the truth, who was
persecuted because of his piety in accepting what he understood of the
true religion. Clement of Alexandria, head of the first Christian institu-
tion of higher education, the Catechetical School of Alexandria, Egypt,
also saw Socrates as a pre-Christian martyr, quoting his words from
the Apology in defense of Christian martyrs.34 Clement claimed that
by looking forward to death, Socrates pursued the true philosophy.35
Indeed, Clement argued that as the Law of Moses was a guide or school-
master to bring the Jews to Christ, so philosophy (and he had in mind
Socratic-Platonic philosophy) was a schoolmaster to bring the Greeks
to Christ.36 Socrates was, the early Church Fathers saw, a type of Chris-
tian living, of Christian sacrifice, and of Christ himself.
There is an even more striking parallel between the life and mission
of Socrates and the life and mission of Jesus Christ that the Church
Fathers were unaware of, as, I think, are most scholars of ancient phi-
losophy. The Greeks organized their years using lunar months, starting
the civil year after the summer solstice. The eleventh month of the
Athenian year was called Thargelion, roughly May to June, getting its
name from the festival of Thargelia, which occurred in the eleventh
33. Justin Martyr, “Second Apology,” 10.5, trans. M. Dods, in The Ante-
Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland
Coxe, vol. 1, Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (Grand Rap-
ids, Mich.: Eerdmanns, 1950). Christian thinkers were, however, sometimes
ambivalent about Socrates; see Michael Frede, “The Early Christian Reception
of Socrates,” in Remembering Socrates: Philosophical Essays, ed. Lindsay Judson
and Vassilis Karasmanis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 188–202.
34. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.11.80.
35. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5.11.67.
36. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.5.28, alluding to Galatians 3:24; in
the image, obscured by the KJV translation, the law is a servant (paidagōgos,
a “child-leader” or chaperone) conducting the pupil to the teacher, Christ. See
Edgar Früchtel, “Eine Bemerkungen zum Sokratesbild bei Clemens Alexandri-
nus,” in Weppen and Zimmermann, Sokrates im Gang der Zeiten, 57–76.

month. On the sixth day of Thargelion, two elderly men were paraded
through the streets, each wearing a necklace of figs representing the
sins of the community. At the end of the day, the two men were driven
out of the city as scapegoats, pelted by vegetables in a playful ceremony.
(In earlier times in some cities a criminal was chosen as the scapegoat
and was first fêted and then executed.)37 This was, in effect, the Athe-
nian Day of Atonement, reminiscent of the ritual of the Israelites in
which two goats were chosen, one to be sacrificed and the other, the
scapegoat, to be driven out of the camp into the wilderness, carrying
the sins of the community.38 Socrates was condemned to death about
a month before Thargelion, on the seventh of Munychion. He should
have been executed soon after. But on the day of his trial, a sacred boat
sailed to the island of Delos for an annual festival. No one could be put
to death until it returned. Because of adverse winds the boat took thirty
days to return home. Consequently Socrates died, not by design but by
chance, or perhaps by divine allotment, on the sixth day of Thargelion.39
He was, then, the Athenian scapegoat, the old man who bore the sins of
his city. In later years, Socrates’ life was celebrated in Plato’s Academy
on the sixth day of Thargelion, in a hero cult that saw him as the patron
saint of philosophy and a martyr to philosophy and the truth. It seems
especially appropriate, then, that the early Church Fathers should see
him as a type of the Savior.
In the end, Socrates was not an enemy of religion, of science, of
technology, or of moral order, as his critics claimed. But he saw the
most important knowledge of humans as human goodness and moral-
ity, and he saw himself as having a divine mission to promote human
goodness. The proof of piety toward the gods was justice toward men.
Science and technology existed for the good they could do for humans.
People should not look to some scientific anthropology to tell them
where values came from, but should search their own souls. As Cicero
37. On the scapegoat ceremony, see Ludwig Deubner, Attische Feste, ed.
Bruno Doer, 2d ed. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966 [1932]), 179–98; Jan Brem-
mer, “Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philol-
ogy 87 (1983): 299–320.
38. Leviticus 16. A similar ceremony was practiced by the Hittites with a
ram: Bremmer, “Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece,” 305–6.
39. See Stephen A. White, “Socrates at Colonus,” in Reason and Religion in
Socratic Philosophy, ed. Nicholas D. Smith and Paul B. Woodruff (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 151–75.
famously put it, “Socrates for the first time called philosophy down from
the heavens, set her in cities, introduced her into homes, and taught her
to inquire into life and morals, good and evil.”40 Socrates for the first
time made philosophy human and made human affairs the proper study
of man—and the welfare of man the concern of deity.41
Daniel W. Graham is A. O. Smoot Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young

University, where he has served as department chair. He has an AB in phi-
losophy from Davidson College in North Carolina, an MA in classics from
BYU, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. He also
spent a year studying classical archaeology at the American School of Classical
Studies in Athens. He does research in the history of philosophy and the his-
tory of science, and has written, translated, or edited seven books on ancient
philosophy and one book on early Greek science. He has also published numer-
ous scholarly articles on Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, the Presocratic philosophers,
and ancient astronomy. He is currently working on a biography of Socrates. He
is president of the International Association for Presocratic Studies and also
president of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology. He has taught
at Grinnell College and Rice University and been a visiting fellow at Clare Hall,
Cambridge, and a visiting professor at Yale University. He has been awarded
two NEH fellowships. He and his wife, Diana Summerhays Graham, met in a
Greek class at BYU. They have two children.
40. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.4.10.

41. This paper grew out of a lecture, Daniel Graham, “The Barefoot Human-
ist: Socrates and the Science of Man,” P. A. Christensen Lecture, College of
Humanities, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, February 26, 2015; see
also Daniel Graham, “Socrates’ Mission,” lecture, Society for Mormon Philoso-
phy and Theology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, October 9, 2015.
I received valuable comments on both occasions.

Socrates Mission

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Socrates Mission

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Socrates Mission

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

BYU Studies Quarterly

Volume 55 Issue 4 Article 9

Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq

S ocrates is the quintessential watershed of ancient thought. He is

1. There is no authoritative biography of Socrates. But see W. K. C. Guth-

BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2016)141

In the summer of 1981, I had the privi-

­convinced me that there is method in his madness: It makes sense to

A New Kind of Education

3. John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997),

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 3

When he was a young man, Socrates left his father’s workshop to

A Mission from God

Technē, human technology, is all about applying knowledge to make

6. Plato, Apology 20e8–21a7.

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 5

8. Plato, Apology 21c3–22e6.

The Method in His Madness

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 7

Cowardice results from fearing death. Fearing death amounts to

13. Plato, Apology 28d–29c.

the godly mission without regard to the question of whether it leads to

14. Plato, Crito 46a–c.

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 9

assents. This is a powerful principle, reminiscent of the precepts of the

Morality and Religion

18. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Plato’s Socrates (New

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 11

To get rid of the contradiction in the conclusions, eliminate the premise

21. Plato, Gorgias 458a–b.

22. Plato, Euthyphro 6a.

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 13

23. Plato, Republic 1.379a–b; 10.613a–b.

27. Plato, Apology 33c4–7.

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 15

32. Diogenes Laertius 3.6.

When, in the second and third centuries AD, learned Christians

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 17

Daniel W. Graham is A. O. Smoot Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young

40. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.4.10.

Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016 19

You might also like

BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2016)141

convinced me that there is method in his madness: It makes sense to