The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  The carefully crafted drama introduced mystai to a wholly new dimension of life and put them in touch with a deeper, unconscious level of the psyche so that afterward many felt entirely different. “I came out of the mystery hall,” one recalled, “feeling a stranger to myself.”16 They found that they were no longer afraid of death: they had achieved an ekstasis, a “stepping out” of their workaday selves, and, for a short time, had felt something akin to the beatitude of the gods. But not everybody was skilled at these ritual games. The Athenian philosopher Proclus (c. 412–85 CE) explained that some mystai were “stricken with panic” during the darker part of the rite and remained trapped in their fear; they were not sufficiently adept in this ritual of make-believe. But others achieved a sympatheia, an affinity that made them one with the ritual, so that they lost themselves in it “in a way that is unintelligible to us and divine.” Their ekstasis was a kenosis, a self-forgetfulness that enabled them to “assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.”17

  Some Greeks, however, were beginning to be critical of the old mythology. How could anybody imagine that the gods “are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like our own,” asked the Ionian poet Xenophanes (560–480), or that they were guilty of theft, adultery, and deception? 18 To be truly divine, a god should transcend such human qualities and be beyond time and change.19 The naturalist Anaxagoras of Smyrna (508–435) insisted that the moon and stars were just massive rocks; it was not the gods but Mind (nous), composed of sacred matter, that controlled the universe. Protagoras of Abdera caused a sensation when he arrived in Athens in 430 and delivered a lecture in the home of the playwright Euripides (480–406). No god could impose his will on human beings, and as for the Olympians, who could tell whether they existed or not? “There are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.”20 There was simply not the evidence to pronounce definitively on the existence of the divine, one way or the other.

  Athens was still a very religious city and Protagoras and Anaxagoras were both expelled from the polis. But people were looking for a deeper form of theism. For the tragedian Aeschylus (525–456) the ineluctable pain of human life was the path to wisdom. Zeus— “whoever Zeus may be”—had “taught men to think” and reflect on the sorrow of human experience. It was therefore ordained

  that we must suffer, suffer into truth.

  We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart

  the pain of pain remembered comes again,

  and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

  From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench

  there comes a violent love.21

  Euripides wanted a more transcendent god: “O you who give the earth support and me by it supported,” prays Queen Hecuba in his Trojan Women, “whoever you are, power beyond our knowledge, Zeus, be you stern law of nature or intelligence in man, to you I make my prayers; for you direct in the way of justice all mortal affairs, moving with noiseless tread.”22 Euripides seems to have concluded that “the nous of each one of us is a god.”23 The philosophers of Athens were about to arrive at the same conclusion.

  In the 420s, during the darkest phase of the Peloponnesian War, a new philosopher started to attract a devoted circle of disciples in Athens. The son of a stonecutter and a midwife, an unprepossessing man with protruding lips, a flat, snubbed nose, and a paunch, Socrates (c. 469–399) cast a spell over a group of young men from some of the noblest families in the city. But he would talk to anybody at all, rich or poor. Indeed, he needed conversation to achieve his mission. Socrates was intent above all on dismantling received ideas and exploring the true meaning of virtue. But he was asking the right questions at the wrong time. During this crisis, people wanted certainty rather than stringent criticism, and in 399 Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the young, refusing to honor the gods of the polis, and introducing new gods. He denied the charges, insisting that he was no atheist like Anaxagoras. How could teaching about goodness be corrupting? He could have escaped and was probably expected to do so. But even though the sentence was unjust, he preferred to obey the laws of his beloved Athens to the end: he would die a witness (martys) to the untruth currently in the ascendant.

  Socrates did not commit any of his teachings to writing, so we have to rely on the dialogues composed by his pupil Plato (c. 427–347) that claim to record these conversations. Socrates himself had a poor opinion of written discourse. People who read a lot imagined that they knew a great deal, but because they had not inscribed what they had read indelibly on their minds, they knew nothing at all.24 Written words were like figures in a painting. They seemed alive, but if you questioned them they remained “solemnly silent.” Without the spirited interchange of a human encounter, the knowledge imparted by a written text tended to become static: it “continues to signify just that very same thing forever.”25 Socrates did not approve of fixed, dogmatically held opinions. When philosophia was written down, it was easily misunderstood, because the author had not been able to tailor his discourse to the needs of a particular group. But a living dialogue could transform a person who took part in it, making him “as happy as any human being can be.”26

  It is difficult for us today to appreciate the power attributed to the spoken word in the premodern world. In his conversations Socrates sought not merely to inform but to form the minds of his interlocutors, producing within them a profound psychological change. Wisdom was about insight—not amassing information. To his dying day, Socrates insisted that he had no interest in teaching anybody anything, because he knew nothing at all. At the end of his life, he recalled an occasion when he was attacked by one of the leading politicians of Athens and said to himself, “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”27 Instead of being aggressively dogmatic about his ideas, Socrates was profoundly and determinedly agnostic and sought to show those who came to him how little they really knew.

  This was one of the reasons why he had become impatient with the phusikoi. In a dialogue that Plato set in the prison where Socrates had spent his last days, he makes Socrates explain that as a young man he had been “wonderfully keen” on natural science. He thought it would be splendid to know the causes of everything: “why it comes to be, why it perishes, and why it exists.”28 He discovered, however, that the naturalists were not interested in these matters but concentrated solely on the material explanation of phenomena. He had been delighted to hear about Anaxagoras’s theories of the cosmic Mind but, to his disappointment, found that “the man made no use of Mind, nor gave it any responsibility for the management of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things.” This concentration on the purely physical left too much out. It would be like saying that the reason he was sitting in jail was because “my body consists of bones and sinews,” and that the “relaxation of the sinews enables me to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent.”29 But why were his bones and sinews not safely in Megara or Boeotia, “taken there by my belief as to the best course, if I had not thought it more right and honourable to endure whatever penalty the city ordered rather than escape or run away?”30 Science should, of course, continue, but Socrates felt that the phusikoi were not asking the really important questions. If you were interested in morality or meaning, you would have to look elsewhere.

  Like the mystai at Eleusis, the people who came to converse with Socrates did not come to learn anything but to have an experience and a radical change of mind. The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise. The French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot has shown that unlike modern philosophy, which tends to be purely notional, Athenian
rationalism derived its insights from practical exercises and a disciplined lifestyle.31 The conceptual writings of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle were either teaching aids or merely served as a preliminary guide for those looking for a new way of living. Unlike the phusikoi, Socrates was primarily interested in goodness, which, like Confucius, he refused to define. Instead of analyzing the concept of virtue, he wanted to live a virtuous life. When asked for a definition of justice, for example, Socrates replied: “Instead of speaking it, I make it understood in my acts.”32 It was only when a person chose to behave justly that he could form any idea of a wholly just existence.

  For Socrates and those who came after him, a philosopher was essentially a “lover of wisdom.” He yearned for wisdom precisely because he realized that he lacked it. As Paul Friedlander has explained, there was “a tension between ignorance—that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words ‘what justice is’—and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine.”33 As far as we can tell from Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to have been reaching toward a transcendent notion of absolute virtue that could never be adequately conceived or expressed but could be intuited by such spiritual disciplines as meditation. Socrates was famous for his formidable powers of concentration. “Every now and then he just goes off,” a friend remarked, “and stands motionless, wherever he happens to be.”34 Alcibiades, the famous Athenian politician, recalled that during a military campaign, Socrates had started thinking about a problem, could not resolve it, and to the astonishment of his fellow soldiers “stood there, glued to the spot,” all day and all night, leaving his station only at dawn, “when the sun came out and he made his prayers to the new day.”35 Plato’s dialogues were a model for the type of meditation that Socrates and his followers practiced; it was nothing like yoga but took the form of a conversation with oneself—conducted either in solitude or together with others—that pushed thought to the very limit.

  But this type of internal dialogue was possible only if the self that you were conversing with was authentic. Socrates’ mission was to awaken genuine self-knowledge in the people who came to talk to him. He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Consequently a conversation with Socrates could be disturbing. Even if somebody started to talk to him about something quite different, his friend Niceas explained, he would finally be forced to “submit to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And … Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail.”36 He would discuss only those subjects that his conversation partners felt comfortable with. Laches, for example, as a general in the army, thought he understood the nature of courage and was convinced that it was a noble quality. And yet, Socrates pointed out, relentlessly piling up one example after another, a courageous act could seem stupid and foolhardy. When Niceas pointed out that, on the contrary, courage required the intelligence to appreciate terror, Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future and were unknown to us, so we could not separate the knowledge of future evil from our present and past experience. How could we separate courage from the other virtues when a truly valiant person must also be temperate, just, and wise and good? A single virtue like courage must in reality be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation, these veterans of the Peloponnesian War, who had all endured the trauma of battle and should have been experts on the subject, found that they did not have the first idea what courage was. They felt deeply perplexed and rather stupid, as though they were ignorant children who needed to go back to school.

  Socrates’ dialectic was a rational version of the Indian Brahmodya, which had led participants to a direct appreciation of the transcendent otherness that lay beyond the reach of words. However closely he and his partners reasoned, something always eluded them, so the Socratic dialogue led people to the shocking realization of the profundity of their ignorance. Instead of achieving intellectual certainty, his rigorous logos had uncovered a transcendence that seemed an inescapable part of human experience. But Socrates did not see this unknowing as a handicap. People must interrogate their most fundamental prejudices or they would live superficial, expedient lives. As he explained to the court that condemned him to death: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living.”37

  Socrates was a living summons to the paramount duty of stringent self-examination. He described himself as a gadfly, perpetually stinging people into awareness, forcing them to wake up to themselves, question their every opinion, and attend to their spiritual progress.38 The important thing was not the solution to a problem but the path that people traveled in search of it. To philosophize was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself. At the end of his unsettling conversation with Socrates, Laches had a “conversion” (metanoia), literally a “turning around.”39 This did not mean that he had accepted a new doctrinal truth; on the contrary, he had discovered that, like Socrates himself, he knew nothing at all. Socrates had made him realize that the value system by which he had lived was without foundation; as a result, in order to go forward authentically, his new self must be based on doubt (aporia) rather than certainty. The type of wisdom that Socrates offered was not gained by acquiring items of knowledge but by learning to be in a different way.

  In our society, rational discussion is often aggressive, since participants are not usually battling with themselves but are doing their best to demonstrate the invalidity of their opponent’s viewpoint. This was the kind of debate that was going on in the Athenian assemblies, and Socrates did not like it.40 He told the ambitious young aristocrat Meno that if he was one of the “clever and disputatious debaters” currently in vogue, he would simply state his case and challenge Meno to refute it. But this was not appropriate in a discussion between people who “are friends, as you and I are, and want to discuss with each other.” In true dialogue the interlocutors “must answer in a manner more gentle and more proper to discussion.”41 In a Socratic dialogue, therefore, the “winner” did not try force an unwilling opponent to accept his point of view. It was a joint effort. You expressed yourself clearly as a gift to your partner, whose beautifully expressed argument would, in turn, touch you at a profound level. In the dialogues recorded by Plato, the conversation halts, digresses to another subject, and returns to the original idea in a way that prevents it from becoming dogmatic. It was essential that at each stage of the debate, Socrates and his interlocutors maintain a disciplined, openhearted accord.

  Because the Socratic dialogue was experienced as an initiation (myesis), Plato used the language of the Mysteries to describe its effect on people. Socrates once said that, like his mother, he was a midwife whose task was to help his interlocutor engender a new self.42 Like any good initiation, a successful dialogue should lead to ekstasis: by learning to inhabit each other’s point of view, the conversationalists were taken beyond themselves. Anybody who entered into dialogue with Socrates had to be willing to change; he had to have faith (pistis) that Socrates would guide him through the initial vertigo of aporia in such a way that he found pleasure in it. At the end of this intellectual ritual, if he had responded honestly and generously, the initiate would have become a philosopher, somebody who realized that he lacked wisdom, longed for it, but knew that he was not what he ought to be. Like a mystes, he had become “a stranger to himself.” This relentless search for wisdom made a philosopher atopos, “unclassifiable.” That was why Socrates was not like other people; he did not care about money or advancement and was not even concerned about his own security.

  In the Symposium, Plato made Socrates describe his quest for wisdom as a love affair that grasped the seek
er’s entire being until he achieved an ekstasis that was an ascent, stage by stage, to a higher state of being. If the philosopher surrendered himself to an “unstinting love of wisdom,” he would acquire joyous knowledge of a beauty that went beyond finite beings because it was being itself: “It always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.”43 It was not confined to

  one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that in such a way that when these others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.44

  It was “absolute, pure, unmixed, unique, eternal”45—like Brahman, Nirvana, or God. Wisdom transformed the philosopher so that he himself enjoyed a measure of divinity. “The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”46

  As Socrates finished this moving explanation, Alcibiades burst in upon the company and, his tongue loosened by drink, described the extraordinary effect Socrates had upon him. He might be as ugly as a satyr, but he was like the popular effigies of the satyr Silenus that had a tiny statue of a god inside. He was like the satyr Marsyas, whose music propelled an audience into a tranced yearning for union with the gods, except that Socrates did not need a musical instrument because his words alone stirred people to the depths. He had made Alcibiades aware of how deficient he was in wisdom and how lacking in self-knowledge: “He always traps me, you see, and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention.”47 He tried to stop his ears against Socrates’ imperative summons to virtue but simply could not keep away from him. “I swear to you, the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face.” The logoi of Socrates filled him with the same kind of “frenzy” as the Mysteries of Dionysus; the listener felt “unhinged” (explexis) and on the brink of illumination: “I don’t know if any of you have seen him when he’s really serious. But I once caught him when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike—so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing—that I no longer had a choice—I just had to do whatever he told me.”48