A Socratic Response to Revelation

A truly Socratic response to revelation—passive surprise, perplexed skepticism, clarifying refutation, heroic confirmation, relative exceptionalism, creative revision, and persistent service—offers us, perhaps, a way out of the cultural impasse we are in.

The parties of reason and revelation seldom treat one another well: Those fond of reason all too often do not believe in revelation (pick your own favorite secular atheist); those fond of revelation all too often ignore or distort reason (pick your own favorite Christian fundamentalist). Not everyone, of course, but enough to make one wonder if anyone could bring them into genuine dialogue. And, let’s be honest, perhaps we ourselves, in the inner dialogue of our souls, have trouble adjudicating reason and revelation. Perhaps we might understand ourselves and our debates better if we could throw ourselves beyond the traditions of the impasse and go back to a moment before Christianity and atheism altogether.

What I would like to do is simple, even naïve. I would like to examine ancient Athenian Socrates’ account of his own response to a Delphic revelation. If Socrates is imitable, what shall his example teach us? The account comes in Plato’s Apology (20d-23e).[1] Socrates is defending himself against the actual legal accusations of having invented new deities and corrupted the young—for which he will be found guilty and executed—but he realizes that he must first refute an earlier reputation for obnoxiousness earned through his customary activity of questioning people. He suggests that he must have some kind of “human wisdom,” and calls as a witness “the god of Delphi”—Apollo himself—to confirm Socrates’ human wisdom. This begins his narration of a past revelation and his own responses to it. Notice that the wisdom or sophia Socrates acknowledges may arise from his very response to the oracle.

A friend of his, one Chaerephon, went to Apollo’s oracle in Delphi, and asked it if there were anyone wiser than Socrates. “Now the Pythian replied there was no one wiser” (21a). It is clear that Chaerephon is not acting on Socrates’ orders here, but acting of his own accord and even impetuously. Our first characteristic of a Socratic response to revelation is that the revelation is not sought, but received. Revelation is a passive, not an active experience. The oracle reveals that there is no one wiser than Socrates, but it was not Socrates who sought that; indeed, he is surprised, as we will see. The first response to revelation is passive surprise, for revelation seeks you, not you revelation. A question asked by another concerned him.

But Socrates does not remain thus:

For when I heard this, I thought to myself: “What in the world does the god mean, and what riddle is he propounding? For I am conscious that I am not wise either much or little. What then does he mean by declaring that I am the wisest? He certainly cannot be lying, for that is not possible for him.” And for a long time I was at a loss as to what he meant…. (21b)

It is true that Apollonian statements are famous for being often, if not always, enigmatic: riddles. (In the museum in Delphi, the most impressive of its many statues is a towering one of the Sphinx, and there is in the Apology always a dark double of another, less Socratic response to revelation, Oedipus’, but I won’t explore that here.) The second response to the revelation is that Socrates notices that his reason cannot fathom the revelation. Socrates knows empirically that he is not wise, but the god says that he is so. Since the god cannot lie—an assumption Socrates believes without demonstration, interestingly—Socrates is confused. He knows that he is not wise, but the truthful god says that he is. The second response of reason to revelation is perplexity. Socrates knows two, irreconcilable propositions: the god appears wrong; the god cannot be wrong. The perplexity comes with not a little impiety since, at least provisionally, Socrates doubts the god’s veracity. The oracle cannot be true. The length of time within “for a long time” is a disorientation of the soul when Socrates is at a loss as to what the god means.

However long that time of disorientation was, he does not remain content with it:

[T]hen with great reluctance I proceeded to investigate him somewhat as follows. I went to one of those who had a reputation for wisdom, thinking that there, if anywhere, I should prove the utterance wrong and should show the oracle, “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was wisest.” (21b-c)

Socrates now begins an investigation. The third response to revelation is to examine the perplexity by trying to prove revelation wrong. If he discovers someone wiser than he, the oracle will be wrong. Notice that he assumes he will discover such a person, and he is trying to refute the oracle to maintain his own self-understanding. This is not mere submission to the divine. Reason interrogates revelation to refute it. Socrates sets out to show Apollo that he is mistaken.

What did the interrogation look like? It took the form of Socratic dialectic, the questioning of an interlocutor’s response to a question until the response’s weaknesses are evident:[2]

So examining this man… and conversing with him, this man seemed to me to seem to be wise to many other people and especially to himself, but not to be so; and then I tried to show him that he thought he was wise, but was not. As a result, I became hateful to him and to many of those present; and so, as I went away, I thought to myself, “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” (21c-d)

Socrates naturally approaches someone known to be wise, who, he thinks, will prove the oracle wrong. Surprisingly, he discovers in conversation that the one thought to be wise is not. In one sense, the investigation is a failure. Socrates failed to prove the oracle wrong. In another sense, the investigation makes progress. Wisdom is now understood in two ways, actual and reputed: to seem wise is not necessarily to be wise. This progress is modest, though, since Apollo might only think Socrates is wise, while he is not so.

Here, however, we come to a truly radical feature of Socratic response to revelation. In order to accept the oracle’s veracity, and this is the fourth characteristic we are seeking, he will recast it. Revelation is changed to be understood. Socrates realizes that his interlocutor does not know, but thinks that he does, while he himself neither knows, nor thinks that he does. So he concedes the oracle’s claim—he is wiser than his interlocutor—but only by first refining what wisdom is. The truly devout Apollonian would argue that Socrates is increasing his understanding of what Apollo said: “That is what Apollo meant all along.” Perhaps. The oracle is refuted in one sense, confirmed in another. Perhaps, though, the oracle intended the sense confirmed. How would Socrates know? Through reason. If neither Apollo is mistaken in his formulation that Socrates is the wisest, nor Socrates is so in his own that he is not wise, then the god must have meant what Socrates discovered. As Socrates recasts it, “‘I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either’” (21d). Wisdom is now knowing that one does not know. The term is defined to be accepted, now commensurate with Socrates’ own self-understanding and the god’s earlier, presumably intended meaning.

At this point, one might be forgiven for imagining that the Socratic response to revelation has ended since Socrates now understands what the oracle meant. But that is not the case. Even though he is becoming hated by those reputed to be wise, he continues to go about “the god’s business” of “investigating the meaning of the oracle” (21e). This firth characteristic of Socratic response to revelation is surprising. Having already discovered what the oracle must have meant, Socrates continues to try to refute it by seeking through dialectic to find someone whose true wisdom will refute the oracle’s elevation of him:

After this then I went on from one to another, perceiving that I was hated, and grieving and fearing, but nevertheless I thought I must consider the god’s business of the highest importance. So I had to go, investigating the meaning of the oracle, to all those who were reputed to know anything. And… this, I do declare, was my experience: those who had the most reputation seemed to me to be almost the most deficient, as I investigated at the god’s behest, and others who were of less repute seemed to be superior men in the matter of being sensible. So I must relate to you my wandering as I performed my Herculean labors, so to speak, in order that the oracle might be proved to be irrefutable. (21e-22a)

And this continual testing is not only divine service, but also divinely requested service: “I investigated at the god’s behest”! How has Socrates discerned that Apollonian vocation? He must presume that Apollo, knowing Socrates’ character, knew how he would respond to the oracle’s pronouncement and wanted him to respond thus. Revelation seeks refutation. And it seeks continual refutation since Socrates continues to engage in dialectic. Only by doing so can the oracle be seen to be not simply un-refuted, but un-refutable. Reason’s hero will wander, and like Hercules, engage in divinely mandated labors of refuting the god.

At this point, allow me to concede that “refutation” here does not mean only, in any simple sense, “shown to be wrong.” The Socratic elenchus is not only a “refutation” in the standard sense of the Greek term; it is also a “clarification”—that is, a refutation of one casting of understanding and a clarification that it is a new understanding that is required. Of course, the new understanding must now undergo Socratic interrogation, as well, and indeed Socrates narrates going not only to the politicians, but also to the poets and the craftsmen to do just that. Socrates’ Apollonian vocation is a life-long service to clarifying what Apollonian wisdom is. The next two characteristics of a Socratic response to revelation, both of which may seem like afterthoughts, are actually astounding.

The sixth characteristic of a Socratic response to revelation is that sometimes Socrates does, in fact, show that revelation is mistaken—not misunderstood, but mistaken. It turns out that craftsmen do actually know something Socrates does not about making things (22d). Even though they presume that knowledge means that they are knowledgeable about much, if not all else, leading to foolishness, they are wiser than Socrates in that he does not know how to make the things they do. Sometimes, revelation is simply mistaken. Refining our understanding of revelation entails discovering a portion of error in revelation.

Socrates’ narration of his past in Plato’s Apology ends up with his re-writing revelation:

I am called a wise man. For on each occasion those who are present think I am wise in the matters in which I confute someone else; but the fact is, gentlemen, it is likely that the god is really wise and by his oracle means this: “Human wisdom is of little or no value.” And it appears that he does not really say this of Socrates, but merely uses my name, and makes me an example, as if he were to say: “This one of you, O human beings, is wisest, who, like Socrates, recognizes that he is in truth of no account in respect to wisdom.” (23a-b)

The oracle first said that no one is wiser than Socrates (21a); now, Socrates revises that to mean that only he is wise who (like Socrates) has little or no wisdom, and knows it. Human sophia is a recognition that there is little or no sophia for human beings. The Apollonian dictate to know thyself now means, “Know that you do not know.” The seventh characteristic of a Socratic response to revelation is that it revises revelation.

The eighth and last characteristic, persistent service, follows from the others:

Therefore I am still even now going about and searching and investigating at the god’s behest anyone, whether citizen or foreigner, who I think is wise; and when he does not seem so to me, I give aid to the god and show that he is not wise. And by reason of this occupation, I have no leisure to attend to any of the affairs of the state worth mentioning, or of my own, but am in vast poverty on account of my service to the god. (23b-c)

There is always the possibility that Socrates will discover, in the next interlocutor, the refutation or clarification through elenchus of the oracle, so he cannot rest from his divine calling to respond to revelation.

A truly Socratic response to revelation—passive surprise, perplexed skepticism, clarifying refutation, heroic confirmation, relative exceptionalism, creative revision, and persistent service—offers us, perhaps, a way out of the cultural impasse we are in, where, as Matthew Arnold might have it in “Dover Beach,” ignorant armies of atheists and fundamentalists clash by night, armies often (remember) within each of our own souls. Why? Because it is neither an atheism nor a fundamentalism, and because it makes its progress through the instrument of reason that must be the path of discourse, be it public or private discourse, for human flourishing. It’s not as easy as Plato’s Socrates makes it look, but the Apology is the one Platonic work with a claim to historical veracity. What has happened can happen. So there’s hope for us all.

Notes:

[1] The Loeb Classical Library trans. H.N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982).

[2] For a wonderful, clear account of that dialectic, see Ward Farnsworth’s The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Boston, MA: Godine, 2021).

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is a photograph of  marble bust of Socrates, Roman artwork (1st century), perhaps a copy of a lost bronze statue made by Lysippos. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.