SOCRATES AND SAINT AUGUSTINE

     Tên peprômenên moirên adunata estin apophugeein kai theôi - "Even to the gods it is not given to escape fate." So men already thought at the dawn of their conscious life. Did they thereby correctly guess the final mystery of creation? Are the gods really subject to an eternal and immutable law? It would perhaps not be useless to raise another question: what did he who first "grasped" the idea of fate and its iron laws wish? Did he wish to have over himself a God whom nothing bound, or was such a free God bound by nothing more terrible for him than all iron laws?

     This question must be raised, for men, as each of us has had opportunities to observe, are inclined to see not what is, but what they wish would be. One can express oneself even more strongly: in those cases where man can see what he wishes should be, he never sees what is in reality. And it seems that all or most men would not for anything in the world accept a God who was not, together with and like themselves, subject to the power of eternal laws. No matter how often they repeat "Thy will be done," in the secret places of their souls there is always hidden a reservatio mentalis: the will of God is nonetheless subject to certain determinate laws and must take account of these. Precisely determinate, that is, well known laws, and known not by some Supreme Being but by us men. Saint Augustine repeats in all kinds of tones: da, quod jubes et jube, quod vis [give what you command and command what you wish]. But he says this only because he succeeded in persuading himself that God would not command him to do what according to his, Augustine's, conception is blameworthy. It is not for nothing that he said that before believing one must know cui est credendum, who is to be believed. And it is certain that he also, before believing, knew whom he had to believe. That is why he wrote without hesitation, Firmissime creditur, Deum justum et bonum impossibilia non potuisse praecipere, "we believe firmly that God, a good and just God, will not demand of man anything impossible." Whence did Saint Augustine know this?

     It is not difficult to guess whence he knew it. This knowledge comes from where all the other self-evident human truths come. If Socrates had posed to Saint Augustine the question he proposed to Eutyphro - is the good good because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is the good? - Saint Augustine would certainly have answered without hesitation that the gods too must love the good, otherwise they would not be gods. The prophets, it is true, taught that the ways of God are inscrutable, but those who accepted these words of the prophets found ways of binding God through the methods of the ancient Greeks and especially of Socrates. The Hellenization of Christianity of which so much has been said in recent times is nothing other than the grafting of "rational" principles, i.e., principles acceptable to human reason, on to the revelation deriving from the Orient.

     The Greco-Roman world expected and demanded a new doctrine. The rulers of the world had lost the ground under their feet and they demanded before everything else of the new religion that it re-establish the shaken foundations. The ancient mythology had grown old and lost all influence over minds; it seemed childish and empty. As for philosophy, it left men too much freedom and independence. Always to think, always to seek, thereby running the risk of not arriving at any final goal and not finding anything - this was too difficult a burden for mankind. Was not Plato a great philosopher? But after Plato there appeared another great philosopher, his disciple, who pitilessly smashed all the sublime conceptions of his master. It was necessary to arrange things in such a way that for a very long time or, according to human terminology, "forever" ("a very long time" in the eyes of men is like eternity), the Platos and Aristotles be deprived of the possibility of shaking the foundations of life.

     The problem, as you see, was already old: from its birth Greek philosophy directed its efforts only to putting an end to the painful doubts of men. But all its efforts ended in nothing. It counted in its ranks many great philosophers whose like we do not find in later philosophy, but the truth, that truth which could oblige all men to worship it, was always lacking.

     And then something unheard of, something which had never yet happened and which did not repeat itself later in history, came about: the Greco-Roman world, so powerful and so cultivated, turned toward a small, weak, and ignorant people of the Orient with a request for truth. Give us the truth you have found by means other than those we use to attain it; the most important thing for us is that the truth be found by processes different from those we use to discover our truths. It is necessary for us that the ways that lead to the truth should be closed to us forever, for the experience of our thousand-year, relentless, and continuous searchings have convinced us that if these ways remain open we can never be sure of the immutability of the truth. Give us the truth and we, by means of our philosophy, this ancient weapon forged by our best minds, will know how to defend it. And the Greco-Roman world brilliantly accomplished its work in creating Catholicism.

     I have said above that men willingly agree to call a more or less lengthy period of time eternity. No less willingly do they call a more or less extended space the universe. Catholicism very quickly felt itself eternal and universal: quod semper, ubique et ab omnibus creditum est - this was its formula. Certainly what Catholicism taught and teaches was not at all recognized everywhere, always, and by everyone, but rather for a long time, in many places, and by many people. And if the Catholics wished to know and spread the truth, it is thus that they should have spoken. They should have admitted that their doctrine can pretend neither to eternity nor to universality. But Catholicism ran up against the demands of Greek philosophy and the Roman state. Rome extended its authority over all the orbis terrarum; Greek philosophy was accustomed to consider itself the mistress of souls.

     Look, for example, at Socrates. Despite his external modesty, despite his apparent lack of pretentiousness - he conversed with artisans, slaves, and children, lived in poverty, dressed poorly, ate whatever came along, bore patiently the complaints and insults of his wife Xanthippe - he defended with all the power of his genius his right to call himself the wisest of men. He yielded to others wealth, honors, and even the handsome Alcibiades, but he would not yield to anyone else his truth: he who wishes to be just, must follow Socrates. And, furthermore, could Socrates renounce his right to this? He renounced, as I have already said, everything for which men live, all sensible goods. He declared without hesitation that it is preferable to suffer injustice than to do injustice oneself. And in his mouth this was not an empty phrase. All the ancient writers confirm that Socrates' words conformed to his deeds, and not metaphorically but in the literal sense of the word. When he had to, he accepted injustice, even crying injustice, but he did not permit himself to do injustice even to one who had hurt him. And since in life one who does not wish to hurt others is obliged constantly to suffer the injustices done by others, Socrates' life was very difficult and painful. This is demonstrated clearly to us by his last trial. It sufficed for two insignificant creatures, Anytus and Meletus, to wish it, and Socrates was poisoned as a mad dog is poisoned.

     How then could Socrates, who had given away everything he possessed, live? He created his own spiritual nourishment. Man lives not by bread, nor honors, nor other human sensual pleasures, but by virtue of the consciousness that he has of being just, of being right. Man can so live as to feel himself always in the right, and when he feels that he is in the right he does not need anything else. This thought of Socrates, this act of Socrates, constitutes the foundation of all Greek philosophy. It is also at the foundation of all the millennial wisdom of men. Socrates taught that philosophy was nothing other than katharsis, purification, that man here on earth can purify himself so completely that he will be able to present himself even before the gods snow white, without a single stain, and that there, in the other life, the pure will be allowed to pass directly into paradise, where no one will ever be able to hurt them any more. As for those who are not purified on earth, it will be too late for them to dream in heaven of salvation, since the fate of man, his eternal life, depends on the way he has conducted his earthly existence. In Plato's Apology Socrates spoke to his judges, but above their heads he addressed himself directly to the gods. He proclaimed his virtue and his rights proudly and assuredly, and not before men - he knew that men would not be willing to listen; he knew that one can and must scorn men - but before the immortal inhabitants of Olympus. The chief meaning of "spiritual good" as Socrates understood it, and as all of Greek philosophy after Socrates understood it, is that it nourishes men and gods alike. Nectar and ambrosia may be found not only on Olympus but also in our poor valleys. To obtain them it is necessary only to understand, and one obtains them not by the methods by which we acquire ordinary "earthly goods" but by exactly opposite methods. You must do not that toward which you feel yourself directly drawn but rather kill in yourself every natural impulse, and the result will be the eternal good.

     After Socrates, European mankind until the present has not been able to free itself from this thought. I do not even know if one can call "thought" that which constituted the very essence of Socrates' philosophy. When Socrates tried to express himself, he certainly gave to his words the form of judgments. He argued with everyone and tried always to convince people that they could live on that on which he himself lived and as he himself lived. He declared that those who lived otherwise than himself were in ignorance and error. Comparing himself to others, he felt in himself a kind of immeasurable superiority which gave him the right to consider others as much weaker beings, as beings not yet completely formed. He, Socrates, already knows everything; he has already attained that degree of perfection which a reasonable being in general can attain - not only a man but a reasonable being - while others must still develop to this point.

     I call the reader's attention precisely to this circumstance, for it has played, I believe, an extraordinary role in the fate of Greek philosophy and consequently in the fate of all mankind. Socrates saw that there was an enormous difference between him, on the one side; and Pericles, Alcibiades, Anytus, and Meletus, on the other side: he and they, one might say, were created out of different substances. It is not enough to say that they were on a lower level of development and had to rise several degrees to arrive where Socrates was. No, it was necessary for them to be reborn, to be transformed. And Socrates himself - must and could he rise still higher? In other words, is there still in the whole universe a reasonable being who is as superior to Socrates as Socrates is superior to Anytus and Meletus? And then, further, above this being is there another still higher? Socrates himself did not raise such a question and in Plato and all his disciples we do not encounter it either, as far as I know. The important thing is that they could not raise it. All of them thought, all of them had to think, that they had discovered a truth such that after it there could no longer be anything unforeseen and completely unexpected. The adult contemplates with a feeling of condescension the suckling child who cries when he is taken from his mother's breast. He knows that the child cries because of his limited knowledge, that he will stop crying and be consoled, and that he will himself later be astonished at having been so ardently attached to a good such as mother's milk and having considered it the good par excellence. Cannot a similar transformation occur in an adult? Socrates, the wisest of all men, was attached to virtue, to the spiritual good that he had discovered: may it not be that he later discovered, like the infant, that his good is not at all the good an und für sich and that that he feels for it the same disgust that the adult feels for mother's milk?

     Socrates, as we know, admitted that men could change: Alcibiades and Pericles were capable, according to him, of becoming quite other than they were. Socrates compared his art, dialectic, to the art of his mother, who was a midwife: he helped men give birth spiritually. But if a second birth is possible, why not admit also the possibility of a third birth, the possibility of Socrates himself being born anew - that is, renouncing the good as he had renounced mother's milk to acquire a thirst for something else? Socrates, I repeat, did not admit such a possibility. He considered himself definitively born. It was in him that the truth which gave him the right to judge not only men, but also the gods, had ripened. For the gods themselves, the Greeks taught, are not absolutely free but are subject to the sovereign laws of fate. Or, as Socrates himself taught, the gods are not free to choose the object of their love; like mortals, they are obliged to love the good and to hate the evil. The good is not good because the gods love it but, on the contrary, the gods love the good because it is the good. And Socrates knows in advance what is beloved of the gods and what is disapproved by them, for he knows what the good is. He also could say, as the Catholics say today, "the good is that which semper ubique et ab omnibus creditum est." His truth was in his eyes universal, ecumenical, and consequently definitive. If someone had tried to take away from Socrates' truth the predicate of universality, nothing would have stopped him from defending it - not even the threat of death, as he many times proved.

     Could Socrates admit that several centuries later a small, barbaric people would forge for itself a new truth, in no way resembling his truth, and that his own Greek world would wrest from his truth the predicate of universality to transfer it to the truth of the Jews, whose name no one even knew at the time the oracle proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men? Could he admit that those who had been instructed by the writings of his own disciples would declare with assurance that virtutes gentium splendida vitia sunt? Saint Augustine, it is true, did not utter this sentence: it was attributed to him by error, as has recently been established, but such is finally the meaning of all his teachings. The virtues of the pagans are only brilliant vices, and Socrates is a pagan like all other pagans. The best and sincerest pages of Augustine's De Civitate Dei are devoted to his polemic against the Stoics on the question whether virtue can replace for man all that is valuable in life. And yet, a very strange thing! Saint Augustine polemicized in all kinds of ways against the pagans. In disputing with them he made use mainly of the customary methods, i.e., he denounced their prejudices, their foolishness, their immorality, being concerned - as is always the case - much more with presenting his adversaries in an unfavorable light than discovering their real errors. In this respect, De Civitate Dei strongly recalls Tolstoy's Critique of Dogmatic Theology. Saint Augustine's work is, in effect, a kind of critique of the dogmatic theology of the pagans. But the most powerful and extraordinary pages of the book, those that make us think most, are not those where Saint Augustine accuses the pagans of foolishness and immorality but where he rises against the rationality and the nobility of paganism. "No matter how intelligent and noble you may be" - such is the meaning of his remarkable objections to the Stoics - "neither your reason nor your boundless devotion to high principles will save you from eternal destruction." I think Socrates would have read the terrible philippics of Saint Augustine against the immorality of paganism with a smile, for he would have immediately understood their true value, that is, that they contained little truth and much exaggeration, that they were only argumenta ad hominem, and especially ad hominem whose opinion could very well be ignored and which Saint Augustine himself did not share. But to accuse Socrates of being reasonable and moral - this is something else! No one in this case could reproach Saint Augustine for being dishonest or even exaggerating. It is true: Socrates was a reasonable and moral man. So said the oracle, so said Socrates of himself. Only neither the oracle, nor Socrates, nor anyone in the world could ever have imagined that to be reasonable and moral is shameful and sinful, and that reasonable and virtuous men would on another level, on a superhuman and divine level, be condemned. But it is precisely on this that Saint Augustine most insists. The virtue of the Stoics provokes his indignation. To be sure, he did not accuse them, any more than did Socrates, of hypocrisy and dissimulation. He knew that they were really virtuous and that they sincerely scorned or at least disdained terrestrial goods. But it was precisely this sincerity that revolted him most. One must not love virtue an sich, one must not see in it the final goal and find in the virtuous life complete satisfaction. "If you declare," he says, addressing himself to the Stoics, "that the consciousness of virtue makes even the most painful human existence happy, why do you permit suicide? Why, in certain particularly difficult circumstances, do you leave life and save yourself from your happiness in non-being? You do not then always find consolation in your virtue!"

     This argument appeared to Saint Augustine absolutely irrefutable. And he used it pitilessly like an experienced warrior who leans his knees on his fallen opponent's chest and seizes him by the throat. He must overthrow the opponent and break his resistance in order to wrest from him the precious talisman for which the struggle broke out. Socrates and his disciples laid claim to virtue, to the right, and had succeeded in convincing the whole world that they knew the secret of virtue, were in possession of it, and that the secret is transmitted from one generation to another only to initiates, only to philosophers. There is no salvation for him who has not accepted from Socrates' hands the sacred talisman, or, to speak more simply, who has not followed the way pointed out by Socrates.

     In engaging in his struggle against Greek philosophy, Saint Augustine certainly did not look down on his opponents, as we look down, for example, on weaklings and children. He saw in Socrates an enemy whom he had absolutely to overcome in order to seize the talisman called right. According to his convictions, which he had drawn entirely from Greek philosophy, there was only one talisman capable of rendering man happy, and if this talisman was in Socrates' hand Saint Augustine could not have it. But whence does he know that there is only one talisman? Saint Augustine did not even ask this. It was, in his eyes, a self-evident truth. Neither did he ask from what source the miraculous power of the talisman came. Socrates was not only a midwife, as he called himself, but also a siren. He had sung with such charm of the divine qualities of his wisdom that the whole world finally' believed him. And the Christian Saint Augustine threw himself into the struggle for the possession of the incomparable treasure with the same passion that Hannibal once displayed in his wars against the Romans for power and riches!

     Dialectic, eloquence, physical force - all means are equally good to attain victory. That is why it seems strange to recall that the same Saint Augustine also undertook that relentless struggle against Pelagius which made his name so famous. Saint Augustine was not afraid to proclaim, following Isaiah and Saint Paul, the doctrine of predestination and of salvation through faith. God saves not those who deserve to be saved but those whom He has chosen out of the multitude of human beings by the act of His free will. That is why man does not obtain salvation by his own works. It is not even given man to accomplish good works by his own powers; he accomplishes them by the grace that is given him without any merit on his part: gratia gratis data. So taught the great prophet, so taught the great apostle. And it is this doctrine, as unacceptable to our conscience as to our reason, that Saint Augustine dared to proclaim urbi et orbi.

     I have already said, and I consider it necessary to say again, that this doctrine, if one does not modify it by explaining it through skillful sophisms, takes away from man the principles on which his existence is founded. Beginning with the moment he admits that God does not take any account of what we consider just and rational, he absolutely no longer knows what he should do for his own salvation and even, in general, if he must do anything for his salvation. The limits between the rational and the absurd, the good and the evil, disappear; all that Socrates and Greek philosophy taught us vanishes without a trace, and we enter a realm of eternal and hopeless darkness. But we recall that Saint Augustine was not willing to entrust his fate even to God without inquiring first about the God who must be believed: cui est credendum? In reality Saint Augustine was not faithless to the Hellenic tradition. Cicero says: Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e coelo et in urbibus collacavit, et in domos etiam introduxit et coegit de vita, de moribus, rebusque bonis et malis quaerere [Socrates, however, called philosophy down from heaven and placed it in the midst of our cities, even introduced it into our homes, and forced it to ask questions about our life, morals, and the good and bad in things.] (Cicero, Tusc., V, 4). At first blush this statement is surprising. It was the opposite, it seems, that happened: Socrates transferred philosophy from earth to heaven. Cicero, however, is right: Socrates wished to bind heaven, to restrain it; he wished to make the whole universe rational. And this doctrine was carefully preserved not only by his disciples and successors but also by the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The defeat of Pelagius did not save Catholicism from the yoke of Greek philosophy. The medieval theologians, like the Greeks, exercised all their powers to obtain the exclusive possession of the miraculous talisman which gave him who held it the possibility of entering freely into a better world. Saint Augustine taught that pride is the beginning of sin, superbia initium peccati. He demonstrated with all the power of his genius and tried to inculcate in the minds of men the great Biblical idea of original sin, which was strange to the pagan world whose ideas had nourished him. But the same Saint Augustine could not, or rather was not willing to, renounce pride and the dream of final justification. He demanded the condemnation of Pelagius and succeeded in having him condemned.

     Saint Augustine could not bear pride in others; the pretensions of man to holiness and righteousness appeared sacrilegious to him. But, just like Socrates, he could not live without being certain of his own righteousness. Others could and did in fact fall into error: this is natural, for it is human to err. But he, Augustine, could not live in falsehood; therefore he knows the truth, and indeed that truth which will necessarily procure him salvation. The distinction between Socrates and Saint Augustine was only apparent, only a verbal distinction. Socrates affirmed that he drew his truth from his own reason, while Saint Augustine said that he had received his from the holy Catholic church: ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae (ecclesiae) commoveret auctoritas [I should truly not believe in the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church would move me to do so].

     If you turn even to the Catholic historians of the Western church, you will be able to become convinced that Saint Augustine had already created a theory which justifies conversions by violence and the right of the spiritual authority to persecute by all means those who have departed from its doctrine and dogmas (relying on the Gospel according to St. Luke 14:23 - compelle intrare). What interests us especially, however, is not so much the doctrine of Saint Augustine as the source of his ideas on constraint understood as the fundamental and inseparable predicate of truth, logical as well as metaphysical.

     In his Confessions he never stops expressing variations on his basic theme: "My heart is restless and will not be at rest until it has found Thee." This theme is as old as the world. The hearts of the pagan philosophers also well knew the terrible and fateful torments of the lost human soul. From Socrates and even from Thales to Plotinus, a whole series of remarkable men reported to the world their insuperable anxieties and also, naturally, the means they had employed to overcome their doubts. But if the anxiety of Saint Augustine was not new to the Greco-Roman world, the solution he indicated was not new to it either. He also taught - as did Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - that the solution consisted in putting an end to anxieties and overcoming them, and that one could put an end to them only by discovering the final truth - that is, a truth after which one would no longer have to search, to torment oneself, to doubt. What is extraordinary is that many hundred of years later, Catholicism, while accepting Saint Augustine, succeeded in preserving in its depths, probably as a kind of indispensable ferment, both doubt and anxiety. This is not the place to inquire how these could coexist with faith and the idea of the infallibility of the Catholic Church. It is certain that the Protestants are right when they speak of Catholicism as a complexio oppositorum. Beside the immutable dogmas there always lived in Catholicism an anxiety which nothing could appease and which raised continuous storms in the souls of its sons, even the faithful. If then it is correct to say that the Catholic dogmatic was determined entirely by the goals that Greek thought had set for itself, it is no less true that Holy Scripture provoked, through its profound disagreement with the spirit of Greek philosophy, the most surprising reactions among those who were destined to experience the supreme anxieties of human existence. Aristotle ruled over the minds of medieval Catholics. And following Aristotle, all the sons of the Church sought to define in clear and indisputable terms the essence of the doctrine they confessed. They wished that this doctrine not offend either their reason or their conscience. But, in reality, if the efforts of Philo to reconcile the Bible with the demands of the philosophically cultivated mind were condemned in advance to failure, it was the same with all the attempts of the first apologists. Whatever may have been the depth and beauty of their philosophical-religious conceptions, they always testified to the absolute impossibility of reconciling Judaism with Hellenism. This appeared already with particular sharpness and clarity in the polemic that Pelagius provoked. The Pelagians declared through the mouth of Julian: Sanctas quidem apostoli esse paginas confitemur, non ob aliud, nisi quia rationi, pietati, fidei congruentes erudiunt nos [Indeed we confess that the pages of the apostle are holy, but not for any other cause than this - that they instruct us, while agreeing with reason, piety and faith]. And Saint Augustine thought the same. It is impossible to "think" otherwise. Saint Augustine declared that a good and just God could not demand the impossible. But to demand of men that they confess a doctrine contrary to reason and conscience - is this not equivalent to demanding the impossible of them? Catholicism never admitted that the dogmas of the church are not reconcilable with reason. On the contrary, the Catholicism that condemned Pelagius anathematized those who declared that faith and reason are irreconcilable. Pelagius was conquered, but the conquered prescribed laws to the conqueror. And still today Saint Thomas Aquinas is considered the normative theologian of the Church.

     Socrates and Hellenism triumphed. Does this mean that it will continue to be so, that it will always be so? This is very possible, and even probable. And if all that is real is rational and speaks to us of what is eternal, the philosophers could calmly fold their hands. But it is not only the real that is rational, and it is certain that what is rational is not always real and that what is not rational is not always unreal. So then, if Socrates is destined to remain forever the conqueror on earth (and I repeat that he has all the chances of doing so), this does not mean anything as far as the "quality" of his truth is concerned. For I hope that there is no need to demonstrate that truths can be of different qualities. Whence do we know that triumph on earth is guaranteed to truth, or even that such triumph is necessary to it?

     History teaches us many things; but when the historian imagines that the future reveals the "meaning" of the present, or when he justifies some idea, as often happens, by saying that "it had the future on its side" and brushes another away under the pretext that it did not have the future on its side, he certainly introduces order and harmony into his science or even transforms history, i.e., a simple account, into a science, but he does not at all approach the truth. The truth is not constituted by the material out of which ideas are formed. It is living, it has its own demands and its own tastes, and even fears above all else, for example, what in our language is called incarnation.

     It is afraid of it as all that is living is afraid of death. That is why only he can see it who seeks for himself and not for others, who has made the solemn vow not to transform his visions into judgments obligatory for all and never to render the truth tangible. As for him who wishes to seize the truth, to grasp it in his crude human hands, to "incarnate" it in order to be able later to show it everywhere and to all - he is condemned to eternal deceptions or even to live in illusions: all incarnated truths were never anything but incarnated illusions.

     Perhaps, I shall be told, mankind has only gained thereby, but it is not a question of this. Must truth also be useful? Was not pragmatism dead the day after it was born?