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- [00:00]
A
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, Father Justin Brophy, a Dominican friar and professor of political science at Providence College, returns to discuss the second part of the apology by Plato. The apology gives us Socrates defense at his trial and is often praised as one of the most important speeches in the history of the West. Fr. Brophy and I have a great conversation that includes us musing on death, piety, the meaning of philosophy, and the reality of the soul. So join us as we consider the lessons Plato presents in the apology of Socrates. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father, and serve as the Chancellor and general counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording again on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you are new to Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we are a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. So far we have read together Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and now we are continuing in our studies in Plato. On the Platonic side, we have read first Alcibiades, a wonderful dialogue to introduce you to Platonic thought in the life of the mind. In general, we've read the Euthyphro. We had a conversation with Dr. Prudlow on Aquinas and the Euthyphro Dilemma. And then last week we had a wonderful conversation on the first part of Plato's apology. You can check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. Our supporters have access to guides and articles and other resources to help guide them to the great Books, which you can find@thegreatbookspodcast.com Today we are discussing the second part of the Platonic dialogue, the apology, the famous trial of Socrates. Joining us again, we have Father Justin Brophy, a assistant professor at Providence College, a friar in the Dominican order, He holds a PhD in Political Theory from the University of Notre Dame. He includes interests as ancient and contemporary political theory, philosophical conceptions of the human psyche, the human psyche in modern society, Plato, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and philosophy of psychoanalysis. We also mentioned that he likes Joseph Pieper and Walker Percy and is a fan of the symposium. Father, it's very good to have you back.
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B
Thanks. It's good to be back. Looking forward to our next conversation here.
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A
Yeah, no, I really appreciated our prior conversation on part one of the apology. It gave me a lot to think about. You know, Peter Kreeft talks about the apology as probably the most important speech in the west, like, if you were going to have, like, at least, like, top three contenders, it is probably the most important speech in the history of the West. But speaking of Peter Kreeft, he also speaks often when he speaks of Plato, of Saint Justin Martyr. And this is the saint that you have taken your religious name, Father Justin Brophy. You mentioned him briefly last week on, on the podcast. Can you just tell us, like, kind of the, the elevator pitch, like, who is Saint Justin Martyr? And like, why is he tethered or brought up a lot when we speak about Plato?
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B
Yeah. So, man, I love Justin Martyr. As a matter of fact, it's. It's great that you started a conversation with him. I've got a relic of him right here on my desk. So he's. That is good all times when I'm working. He's a very early saint, an early martyr, and he really is the first saint who tries to reconcile faith and reason in a systematic way. He's a layman and he wants to be a philosopher. And he goes from school to school looking for a philosophy. And of course, in the ancient world, philosophy nowadays we find in ideology we like some kind of ism. And if we agree with it, we kind of tack it on to our name, you know. But in the ancient world, it was a whole way of life. And so he's going from school to school, and he goes to the Pythagoreans, and he goes to the Stoics, he goes to the Peripatetics, and he finds something wrong with all of the meat. He doesn't quite get it right. And then he finally goes to the school of the Platonists, and he says that Plato's thought gives his mind wings. And the specific thing that gives his mind wings is Plato's discussion of the immaterial world. And so he's encouraged by this, and he goes for a walk. Apparently he likes to take walks on the seashore. And he's taking a walk and he runs into an old man who interestingly introduces him to the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament. And he reads these with great interest. And this old man tells him all these things have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And he converts to Christianity and continues wearing the mantle of the philosopher and goes to debate pagans. He seeks out pagan philosophers and others. And, you know, in this sense, he's a proto preacher, too. And by preacher, I mean Dominican preacher. I kind of view him that way. He goes out and he engages the world and seeks to show that the true Philosopher comes to knowledge of Jesus Christ and lives according to the way that is beautiful.
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A
There's a, there's a belief as well, too. Right. That he held, or at least my understanding is that he held the, that he viewed Plato in obedience to or in search of Jesus Christ. Because John's Gospel opens up, you know, in the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and then tells us it's the Logos that becomes flesh and Jesus Christ, it's the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the Logos. It's hard to summarize, but it's the ordering principle of all reality. It is the actual rationale, reason itself, the very structure and order of all existence that not only gave things existence, but actually holds all in existence currently. And my understanding is, is that then he kind of sees Plato as in pursuit of Jesus Christ because he is pursuing the Logos, the truth. And now we've come to understand that the truth is a person.
- [07:02]
B
Yeah. So, you know, I don't want to get myself in too much trouble here, but, you know, so often because of my, my Thomas training, I often think in categories of nature and grace. And, you know, nature can take you so far. And then grace, super added on to this can take us to different places. But for St. Justin, he thinks more in terms of the, the seed of the Logos. And he believes that even in the, the pagans, there is something of the, of, of the Word. And you actually have a rudimentary articulation of baptism by desire. When he talks about Socrates, you know, he, he really wants to say that Socrates is saved, that he's, he's searching for Christ even though he doesn't completely know it. And I love that about him too.
- [07:56]
A
Yeah, you see that too in the, the medieval ages, right. Particularly when the Platonic texts are rediscovered. What is that like in the 1400s? Socrates, particularly for the humanists, becomes like the paragon of the righteous pagan, the one who lived according to nature as best as they could. Even though we have the grace of Jesus Christ and somehow still fall far short. I mean, there are passages and, you know, maybe we can use it as a segue to the text, but there are passages in the apology that here we have, you know, this pagan who's bereft of the teachings of Christ and also the supernatural aspect of grace, who's articulating things that I would love people in my parish to articulate. I would love people in my parish to have these principles. What better Catholics we would be if we didn't fear death? What better Catholics would we be if I actually could embrace certain poverties in the pursuit of the good. So it can be. I think one way is that, you know, the pagans, when we study them, particularly from a Christian perspective, you know, I don't. They're not.
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B
They're not.
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A
They're not antagonistic or they're not a threat. Sometimes you see in certain Christian circles, like, well, we don't. We would never read those. Like, why would I read Homer? Why would I read Plato or Aristotle or really any of the pagan thinkers? I don't really think they're a threat. I tend to take them as Dante took them, in which you kind of embrace them where they are. You show how good they can be, and that in a lot of ways, that just inspires us to be better. How better should I be as a follower of Jesus Christ if this person, by reason and reason alone, can come to this understanding?
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B
Absolutely.
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A
No. That's very good. So let's look at the text. Let's kind of jump back in. So we did part one last week, and so now we are looking at part two. The parts are things that we just kind of artificially impressed on the text just for the sake of the podcast. So where are we, like in the text overall? Well, we're gonna start at 28B, his consideration of death. If we kind of look at the overarching architecture of the dialogue, there's like a preamble, and then he talks about the old accusations, which we really had a good conversation about. How much did you know Aristophanes, particularly in the clouds, kind of drum those up. Like, you know, Socrates, he's on an uphill battle. Everyone already knows who he is, or they think they know who he is. They have this caricature of Socrates in their mind that they've seen on stage. It's an uphill battle for him. So now he's in the middle of addressing the new accusations, or one way to phrase it is these are the accusations that actually precipitated the trial. Right. These are the ones, the charges that have been brought against him. Uh, he's been charged broadly with impiety. He's been charged with corrupting the youth. And then how is he charged with corrupting the youth? What is he doing? Well, he's. He's denying the gods of the city, but he's also a maker of new gods, of strange gods.
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B
Right?
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A
He's also a maker of gods. And so we find ourselves kind of in the middle of this defense. Right? We started in Media Res. He's Already talked about the old accusations. We are now on the new accusations. We ended last week with a fascinating conversation with kind of the relationship between the democracy demos, the many, and then say, the great souled man or the great man. So now we're stepping into this consideration of death. So this is at 28C, and I really love this because again, when I was saying, like, there are moral maxims, not really maxims, but there's moral principles here that I wish, like, even in my own life, like, I would exhibit these better. So he says things like, you know, don't consider death, but consider your actions. What is, what is it that he's actually using? We talked last week, like, what's the purpose? What's the telos of his actual speech? Like, what actually guides him? I think he makes it really clear that it's not death that moves me. It's not a fear of death. You can't use the fear of death to move me off of my vocation that the God has given me, but rather what I am concerned about is, are my actions just like, are my actions pious?
- [11:53]
B
And one of the things I love about 28B going into 28C is the brilliant rhetorical device he uses. So, you know, as he's explaining this, you know, don't think of death. Judge me from what I do. He pulls out an example from Homer, and it's the example of Achilles. It's like, you know, let's take, you know, who is the ancient Greek superstar, who is the. The hero, the model par excellence of the. The ideal Greek man? Well, that's Achilles. And you know what Achilles did? Achilles knew that if he avenged Patroclus, he would die. But death wasn't important to him. What was important to him is that he did what he had to do. I'm like, Achilles. You could be like Achilles too, right? If you're willing to confront death this way. I mean, that's a, you know, that's something. If you're. If you're a younger man in the audience, I mean, that's the kind of thing that might get you. Get you charged up. If you're an older man in the audience, it might make you think, this man, this guy's really hubristic. But I mean, I think it's nice to be attentive to that, to what he's doing there and the effect that it can have.
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A
Yeah, this is one of those times where you just have to laugh. We've talked about, like, you need to laugh when you read Plato And I think that the subtlety here, like, guys, I'm like Achilles. I am like this great, you know, Greek, mythical, you know, character. And he's already compared himself subtly to Hercules as well. So you can almost hear the people groaning, the eyes rolling in the assembly as he tries to make this argument. But it is a good one that he. He's saying, listen, like, here are the people that we praise. You praise someone like Achilles, who's basically this kind of like, spirited, you know, thumotic side incarnate. Does he fear death? Would death, the fear of death, move him off of avenging Patroclus? No, not at all. So neither am I going to be moved. And he segues, you know, from this into what I thought was a really good kind of comparison where he says, like, listen, if a military commander gave you to your post, right, if the military said, hey, you, you need to stay here at your post, and then he ran away for the sake of fear, like, what would we think of that man? Well, we probably wouldn't think very highly of him. Well, I'm like, that man. The God has given me a post. The God has assigned me to Athens. And so here I stand. What kind of man would I be if fear could make me run away from my post?
- [14:33]
B
I have. This is actually the, the. The edition, the Cornell paperback edition that I read as an undergrad way back when. So this is a. You know, this is an old, an old copy.
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A
Is it a. Is it humbling to look at your notes?
- [14:51]
B
It is. And I have, this is the thing. I have years and years of notes layered nice on each other here. You know, some of them I read and I'm like, wow, that was really bad. And then others I read and I say, oh, wow, that, that's kind of insightful. And a lot of it I'm sure I took from my, my teachers as well and then. But I, I wrote down here, you know, a little anachronistic, but I actually have a quote of Kierkegaard on this page from one of his journals. And I think he wrote this when he was in his early 20s. This is Kierkegaard. It is a question of understanding my destiny. The thing is to find a truth, which is. Truth for me defines the idea for which I am willing to live and die. And, you know, I wouldn't misinterpret that truth, which is truth for me. I don't think he means that in a relativistic sense. I think he means that in the sense of. In order to Truly internalize something that I say is true. I have to be willing to die for it. And this passage, an apology, reminded me of that at some point. I thought it was worth bringing up.
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A
Yeah, Kirkegaard is a. Kirkgard's a good read. There's a lot of things. I read Kirkegaard kind of early on, even in, like, high school.
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B
Wow, that's early.
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A
It is early. And I was introduced to him, and it was really without context. And I. I mean, I can't even imagine what I thought I was pulling out of those texts. But he's very poetic, and there's. There's times in there that I think he really does speak to the soul, particularly about having the Thumas being spirited to actually do what is right. I also enjoy it. Just as a side note, like, you talk about writing in your text and the layers of notes and stuff. Yeah, that's something that we promote a lot on. Ascend is like, yeah, writing in your text. Yes, that's what my copy. I have the big Hackett, like, omnibus of Platonic works and my apology covered in. Covered in notes. The thing is too, like, yeah, like, I. I pulled out, like, a CS Lewis text the other day. I had to look at. And I read CS Lewis a lot in undergrad because in a Protestant setting, like, that was like, the most. Like, in an evangelical setting, that was, like, the most intellectual person we were allowed to read. And so I have, like, this little CS Lou Lewis library. And, yeah, like, reading the notes is, like, terribly painful at times. But then you can see where I read it a few years later, and then, like, a decade later, it's really humbling to see, like, that intellectual maturation. And each time you read it, like, what you've written in it kind of serves as a guidepost.
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B
And.
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A
And I always try and use a different color pen. I don't have, like, a color coordination system. But if I'm going to read a text, I'm like, oh, I used a blue pen here. I will use a black pen or a red pen, something. So when I read back through it, I can track, like, okay, for whatever reason, when I was older, like, this really stood out to me. I remember, like, the apology. There's things here, like the political ramifications and, you know, something like this that did not dawn on me at all when I first read it. I think that I would just encourage people, if you're listening to this, like, to write in your text. And people, I think are really worried, like, what if someone reads my notes when Is that ever going to happen? Like, when is it ever gonna, like the ones go pick up your book and, like, give an announcement of, like, what dumb thing you wrote in there, but it really allows you to write. And what I like about it is that then you're not holding these things in your head. You write them out on the text, and then if you go back and reread it, they do serve as, like, these little guideposts to your thought. And then you can, like, build upon them. And I just think there's a beauty in it. And then, like, what I do, like, for Ascend is like, I'll go back and read all of my notes, and then that's what gets extracted into, like, you know, outlines and preliminary questions and guides. Like, it really serves as a wonderful foundation.
- [18:30]
B
Love that. No, I think that's. I think that's important. Hey, if somebody's reading your. Your marginalia after you're gone, that's a good sign. That's true. That's a good sign.
- [18:44]
A
Yeah. And. And they're probably not gonna make heads or tails of it either. I've been looking at the. The new Strauss, like, Euthyphro book book where they, like, tried to extract all of his marginalia from the text and put it in this thing that looks like this crazy Unabomber wrote it. And you're, like, trying to, like, make heads or tails of, like, what he's actually talking about. So don't. Don't worry about it. You just write in your book. It helps you, I think, in your own. Your own maturation. All right, so diving back into Socrates so we don't abandon our post because of fear of death. And he gives then, I think, a really beautiful. A really beautiful talk here that I, again, I think is, like, amazing for someone just coming at this from, like, nature or reason alone, which is, why would we fear death? Death might be the greatest of all blessings. Death is technically an unknown. All I know is that this good thing, life ceases. But I don't know what's behind this. Something great might be here. So why would I fear this unknown? I just think this is an incredible, incredible argument because he's not claiming. I mean, he'll kind of claim later and have some myths and stuff about what happens in the afterlife. But he's also just kind of conjecturing. He doesn't actually, like, know these things. So death really is a great unknown for him. He's like, why would I fear the unknown? It could be the greatest blessing that we have.
- [20:03]
B
Yeah, I Think that's right, and it is beautiful. And I love when he. When he gets to the arguments. But I'll push a little here because I'll say, like, all right, yeah, it could be really good, but precisely because it's unknown, that's gonna. That's gonna make you afraid of it. I don't know. It's coming down the pike. So I mean, that. That, that's sufficient to cause some worry. But I love the contrast that he. That he makes between, you know, I don't know what death is. And it could be the, you know, death could be the greatest of all goods. Hades could be great plays. But here's something I do know, is that it's always bad to be unjust, and it's good to act justly. And so I'm going to worry about.
- [20:55]
A
Yeah, you know, you could push back on him because, you know, the death is not a neutral. So it's not like it's not a completely neutral thing of saying, oh, this. This thing itself is completely unknown. Because for death to happen, a good does have to end, right? So you at least know life is good, right? And that good has to end. So you could. You could push back on him and say, well, we know at least, like, some good ends, but we're not really sure if a good begins. But I think he, you know, it's interesting again, to take in his rhetoric as he's talking to the assembly, this kind of like, you know, group of about 500 men, you know, that are judging him, I think, right here. Right. The rhetorical value, for lack of a better word, and I don't mean that as a pejorative is they think. At least my impression is, I think we get this through the text, too. They think that the fear of death that they should instill in him should cause him to fear and bend to their will. We'll kind of see this later on. But, like, he should be groveling. He should be begging them. He should be bringing in his family and having them cry and their children weep and doing all these things, which apparently was, you know, somewhat normative in these cases. And so I think too, like, when he, you know, maybe the. Maybe this is oscillating a little bit too far because he's. He's pushing back against something. But he is, you know, stating like, listen, this does not even bother me. I am not moved by the fear of death at all. I'm like Achilles. So I think he's. I think we have to take in his audience a little bit. There about what is he doing when he kind of robs them of the capacity to use fear to push him into something that he doesn't want to do, to push him, like you said, maybe into what he sees to be as an unjust act.
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B
Yeah, I like that a lot.
- [22:34]
A
Okay, very good. Well, he said in 29C. Right. I love this because he starts going through these hypotheticals, and I like this a lot. And so he's like, wait, I have an idea. What if you told me that I could give up philosophy? I could give up asking these questions, and therefore I could live, I could just live if I just stopped be being annoying. And he says, no, I will not give up philosophy. But he has a wonderful line in 29D. I will obey the God rather than you.
- [23:07]
B
There's so much about this, these passages here that I love. And I feel obligated to point out as he says this. You know, hey, I love you men of Athens. I think you're great. But if you were to let me off the hook on the condition that I don't practice philosophy anymore, I'm sorry, I won't do it. I can't cease obeying the God. And then as he goes in and describes philosophy, it's clearly interwoven with the life of virtue. And so his conception, you know, academic philosophy in so many places has become so far removed from the what. How Socrates envisions philosophy. That's always refreshing to come back and read this. We're not talking about splitting definitional hairs. We're not talking about, you know, abstractions that are completely removed from everyday life. We're not talking about logic chopping. We're talking about what is the good life, and how do I obtain the virtues necessary to live that kind of life. And in that, you can't stop me from doing, and I won't let you stop me from doing. I love that.
- [24:33]
A
Yeah. I'm not sure he thinks that they can stop him. So we'll get to that. He has a claim later that I think is probably one of the largest claims he makes in this entire dialogue. No, I appreciate your thoughts. The mind moves from grammar to logic to rhetoric. We have to understand terms before we can apply them, and we have to understand them before we can talk about them. And so maybe this is a good pushback. What does he mean when he says philosophy? We talked about this a little bit last week when I gave a brief defense of the philosopher king. Because when we think philosopher, like, just like you said, we think this kind of like, Kind of cold academics. I liked all the little, you know, phrases that you had. You're definitely in academics. You have all these. You have all these wonderful little phrases.
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B
Comment on anything going on here. But, you know, you're in that world of conferences and stuff.
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A
Yeah, I. My brief, you know, stint in grad school for my master's. I went to a few conferences and. Yeah, academic conferences. Yeah. It's like, does anyone here love wisdom? Does anyone here actually, like, you know, have that true arrow set a rock? Desire to know and to satiate. Right. In an idea and have like this ecstatic experience to know things? You think, this is very dead. I was thinking about this too with. With Socrates. Like, what does he mean by philosophy, this love of wisdom. I think it is something, you know, eros erotic in the best sense of the term. It's a pursuit of the wisdom. But one thing that Socrates won't let you do, and we saw this in first Alcibiades. For Socrates, you cannot adhere to an intellectual principle and then not live it. That. That is not an option on any level. But I think there's a. There's a danger, right? Like, you meet people and it's like, oh, I'm an Aristotelian scholar. But in like, no way, shape or form does their ethical life look like Aristotle. Right? It's this. It's kind of reduced into this kind of flat, vapid intellectual exercise. The other aspect I was thinking of is that when we think philosophy, you think about the grace, nature, distinction. You think about philosophy in a modern context. It's. It's atheistic secularism. Like, oh, you're a philosopher, but you believe in God. Like, what is that? You have faith? No, that's. We see that as like something. It corrupts philosophy or pure philosophy doesn't have any of that. Is that what we see in this text? Socrates literally has a relationship with the God. He has a vocation. I mean, these are things that, even if you're used to reading Aristotle, I think are surprising. This is not just simply an unmoved mover. This is someone who has literally given Socrates a vocation. It's these statements, like, this is the philosopher saying, you can't. I will obey the God rather than you. And we really think about this. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, you know, a belief in God and that, that kind of belief in divinity animating your life. This is actually originally what philosophy is. It's not something that's alien to it, that attached to it later, or that Christianity somehow came back when. And like, you Know, know, corrupted it, made it religious. There's a natural religion here that is very explicit.
- [27:25]
B
I think so. I think so. I've got another comment in the margins here that I think is interesting. As he continues to talk. This is, I'm in 30B, he says, not from money does virtue come, but from virtue comes money and all of the other good things for human beings, both privately and publicly. If then I corrupt the young by saying these things, they may be harmful. And then I have in the margin here ask this question. So this is probably written when I was teaching it. Why does the polis so often tolerate a demagogue or a sophist, but not Socrates? And I think what I had in mind there when I wrote that is, you know, we do see tyrants rise and be ousted in Athens, but it seems like there's disproportionate weight thrown on Socrates. And, you know, the problem with the ancient tyrant and the sophist is that in many ways they allow you to keep living your life as you please. Socrates is more of a threat because if you take him seriously, he forces you to change your approach, your day to day approach, to piggyback on what you're saying earlier. You know, philosophy is a way of life for Socrates and there's certainly a religious, vocational element to it. I think that's precisely part of the reason why he's such a threat.
- [28:59]
A
I very much agree. I think this kind of goes back to our conversation last week about, you know, how does a society survive someone like Socrates or Jesus Christ? And they seem to. I was reflecting because as I mentioned last week, I recently read the Gorgias and kind of had time to myself in the middle of nowhere to, to read and to reflect. And one of the things that's really interesting in the, in the Gorgias is that Socrates very much appreciates callicles because he's unashamed, right? He just straight up says, no, I, I, I literally engage in rhetoric to get all the things I want. I want to be a tyrant. I want to just satiate all of my appetites and I don't want to be satisfied. I literally just want to, you know, have all the food and sex I want. And that's what this is for. And it's in Socrates, like in the beginning, praises them. It's like, oh, thank God we have someone who's unashamed. Please, please stay that way so we can have a conversation. Don't give me this kind of like polite veneer, like, allow me to have this conversation. You know, and I, I think that too. Why? Because, well, callicles words and his actions are aligned. And so therefore there's an honesty. And Socrates can, can work with that honesty. And we see Socrates then being on the other side, his words and his actions align on what is the good and just life. I really think that's analogous to our Lord, because our Lord has several comments that sometimes confuse people where he's like, you know, lukewarm. You're going to come and be lukewarm. You get spit out of my mouth. You're neither hot nor cold, right? What do you do with the lukewarm? Like, what do you do with the milk toast? How do you even, like, move them? I think that there's that certain sophistry, right, that can just kind of fall into a soft hedonism. And it's then really hard to move people. I think that sometimes with Socrates, like, he likes the unashamed because they're cold. And he can work with that because they're honest with each other. Okay, so let's look at the. We have the 29D. I will, you know, obey the God rather than you. And this kind of actually just dovetails really well into our current comment is he says, I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed of the way that I live. And then he pivots. And he has a wonderful pivot here. I actually want to, I want to, I want to read this section. I recently went to a conference out in Colorado with my colleagues around the country, serve as general counsel for the Diocese of Tulsa, civil attorney for my day job doing childhood youth protection, legal insurance. HR not reading Plato. This is my, my escape in the evening, if you will. But on the plane, you know, I kind of looked ridiculous, but I brought my giant, you know, complete works of Plato tome. And I was reading the apology because I was going to teach it in our diaconate class. And so I was reading it in this read through. Like, this really struck me. I just want to kind of read this passage. And so this is at 29D. And so this is. It says Socrates. Now this is Socrates giving a rhetorical question to himself. He says, socrates, we do not believe antis and Annatus is that you pronounce his name. We do not believe anytus. Now we acquit you, but only on the condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy. And if you are caught doing so, you will die. End quote. And if I say to you you were to acquit me, on those terms, I would say to you men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the God rather than you. And as long as I draw breath and I am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you in my usual way, to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet. And this is the quote that I really appreciate. This is where there's several times in the apology, he reverses things, like they're supposed to be judging him. And he reverses things and he says, and it's kind of hypothetical, good sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power. Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for, nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul? And this just struck me, I mean, maybe to jump to, like a moral read, but this just. This just struck me because, I mean, to what degree could we not immediately just take out Athens and put in, you know, America? We live in, you know, this greatest nation in the history of the earth. We have all these material goods. We don't. We have all this leisure. We don't have to fight for our daily bread each day. And what are we doing? Completely neglecting our souls. I love it because I think it shows us that Socrates actually cares for the Athenians. And I think he really wants them to convert, to use that word. He wants them to have the transformation. He wants them to have the metanoia, you know, to turn around from the cave wall, if you will, and to live a good, pious and just life. And I think he truly cares, and I think he truly wants Athens, particularly the people of Athens, to live a good and pious life.
- [34:04]
B
I agree. I completely agree. And I think that the. The following pages kind of bear that.
- [34:12]
A
As an aside here, you know, to what degree does. Because we're using it. So you, you were good earlier. You pushed back on, like, a grammatical term. Like, we just keep talking about philosophy. What does philosophy mean for Socrates? So here's another kind of grammatical question. What do we mean by soul? Like, are we reading. Are we reading this into something that. It's not like we. We have this understanding of soul. You know, in the west, when we read Homer and really the playwrights too, there wasn't. There wasn't really a soul yet. I mean, man had like a spirit. He had a Thumas. It wasn't, you know, down in Hades, you become Kind of like a shade, like you're still yourself, but you're not yourself. It's something kind of less real than what you are. But that seems very distinct from what Socrates is talking about here. And I think my suspicion is, is that because we're downstream from Socrates, we're reading about the soul and it seems very normative, us. But I'm not sure that the soul, as he's talking about it would have been normative for the Athenians. Any thoughts on this?
- [35:11]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the word is suke. Where we get our modern psyche from, you know, psychology, literally the study of the soul. Yeah. I think in. In Homer, at least my. And, you know, I'm not. I'm not a super expert on Homer by any stretch, but my read of Homer is that the soul is really a principle of life. You know, the soul kind of leaves the body on death when somebody falls into the dirt. Breeze it out with Plato. And he, he does it differently in different dialogues, of course, but you start to get a parsing out in more detail what that suke is. And certainly for Plato, it contains a desiring element and it contains a thematic, spirited element, and it also contains a rational element. And for him, you know, virtue comes when these things are integrated.
- [36:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. There's a, There's a justice, a well ordering of the soul. Yeah, it's, it's. I appreciate you kind of parsing that out a bit because I think that we're just again, downstream from him. So we hear soul, and that means something to us. Oh, yeah, we know what the soul is. But I think we have to realize that for Socrates and for his audience, the way Socrates is using the term soul and how he's talking about it, it's fairly novel to the Greek mind. The. You read in Homer. A lot of times in Homer, it's, It's, it's not even. Right. The same word. It's. It's the thumas. It's the spirit that then kind of leaves the body. And it's. It's kind of a lesser version of you. Right. It's like a shadow of you. It's not the real you here, though. It's almost a reverse. Socrates is saying, no, no, no, the real you is the immaterial part. The real you is the soul. And that to us, that makes sense because if we talk about, like, oh, he died, like, in a Catholic context, oh, you know, where is he? Well, that's his body. That's not him, though. That's not his Body, his soul. His soul, you know, is, is with the Lord. His soul's in purgatory. His soul's there. That's where he is. But his body happens to be here. And so the real you, that, the you that really counts is that immaterial part. And so I think there's like a subtle thing going on here, though we have to realize that for Socrates, audience, I think would have been unique or not. They're not nearly as habituated to the concept as we are. In which the reason he's holding so fast, right, is that he's not going to allow anything unjust to enter his soul and that the assembly can't put anything unjust there. They don't have the power to do that. Only Socrates can put something unjust in his soul, right, by an unjust act. And he will not do it. I will not do. This comes back to this theme over and over and over again. And so I think it's just something unique, the flag that for Socrates, the real you is the immaterial part. Do what you want to to the body, but you cannot actually do anything to my soul, to what's truly me. Yeah, And I love, I love too, at 30A, where he says that, like, he's like, you know, it's like still talking about death, this consideration of death passage, and he's like, actually like, I'm not corrupting the youth. I am actually the greatest blessing that the God has given to Athens. You just love this because you, you can imagine the assembly, right, rolling their eyes, throwing things at him several times in dialogue where he actually says, you know, to calm down, don't create a disturbance, please listen to what I'm trying to say because it's going to be so antithetical to their own presuppositions. But he really is like a blessing. No, no, no, I'm not. I'm not corruption. I am a blessing because I'm in service to the God and the God has assigned me here. And so here's my. I think I mentioned it last week, but we didn't really parse it out. I just kind of flagged it for a future conversation. One of the things I'm curious about is to what degree the apology is an answer to the euthyphro dialogue. What I mean by that is, like, usually the euthyphro dilemma takes up most of everyone's intellectual heft. And that's great because it's a wonderful dilemma. You know, like I said previously, we've, we talked to Dr. Prudlow about that. We've got two other episodes just kind of walking through the Euthyphro.
- [39:33]
B
It's.
- [39:34]
A
It's very much a dialogue worth our attention. But if you recall, the dialogue ends somewhat in an unsatisfactory way, particularly if you actually want to know what piety is in which Euthyphro chooses the right horn. He chooses the right part of the Euthyphro dilemma. He chooses kind of the realist metaphysic. The ideas exist, the gods are adhering to something that's good because it's good in and of itself. And so it's. And then Socrates pushes the conversation forward a little bit and says, oh, yeah, okay, well, let's take piety as a part of justice. What kind of part of justice is it? Well, Euthyphro, I think, says correctly. He says, well, it's justice towards the gods. It's a certain service to the gods. Now, somewhere in here, Euthyphro is really stretching, and I think his mind's starting to melt, and he's not keeping up with the conversation well. And Socrates is doing that thing where he goes into overdrive and Euthyphro just can't keep up. And so he asked Euthyphro, like, well, what is the service? This can't be like, a man who, you know, services cattle. Like the. Like the cattle are benefited by the service of the man. And he's like, yeah, that's what I mean. And then he has to backtrack that because, like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Like, that doesn't, you know, and the dialogue actually just falls apart because. Because euthyphro gives a definition that then pulls them full circle that, oh, service is, you know, what's pleasing to them. And then we get back to piety just being, you know, what's pleasing to the gods. And so what I'm curious about here is, you know, the question I asked when we. When we read the Euthyphro is you can laugh at him all day long, but an idiot in the hands of Plato can teach you a lot. You got to be careful. So we can laugh at Euthyphro a lot, but Plato using him, I think, is very much an invitation to our own formation. So the question is, like, where. Where did you throw. Go wrong? So you can say he went wrong, but it's actually much more of an intellectual heft to say, no, no, this is what he should have said. So he seems to be okay, like Socrates seems to be okay that it's a service. And that's how we can contextualize this piety. But then Euthyphro falls apart and the whole dialogue falls apart. And hopefully we, you know, we kind of hope that, that Euthro has. Has a metanoia and kind of changes, which I think is the purpose of the dialogue. But here then, particularly when you read them together, it's really clear. Then all of a sudden, here goes Socrates, and he's just left and right talking about service to the God. I'm in service to the God, so how is he different than Euthyphro? How has he not fallen to the same trap? And I think, you know, my thesis right now, kind of my raw thought would be, is that where Euthyphro fell short is that Euthyphro kept thinking that the piety, the service to the gods, rendered some benefit to the God, right to the divinity. And that's a complicated. That's a complicated problem for multiple reasons. What benefit are we actually going to give to the divine? Socrates, I think, makes it very clear here in the apology that his service to the God, his act of piety, is a benefit to him and to Athens. When we serve the divine, the benefit is to the human right, to the server, to the one in service, not the one being served. And so I'm just curious, as I kind of mull these over, to what degree we can contextualize the apology as an answer to the Euthyphro. Any thoughts on this or any mysteries that you would like to illuminate for us?
- [42:43]
B
Yeah, no, I've never really thought of it before. I like it a lot. You know, for me, this dialogue, just because of my own interests, is so enmeshed with both Aristophanes as clouds and also Symposium. So I haven't thought about in that light before, but I like that a lot. I mean, maybe. I guess the only thing I'd. I'd add to it off the top of my head, and I think we mentioned this a little bit last, last week. You know, I do think that Socrates is a monotheist, and I also think that that changes the equation, that changes the dilemma for him as well. So that's not to gainsay anything that you laid on the table. I just add that.
- [43:34]
A
Yeah, no, you mentioned that as a great example last week, as the fact that the dialogues don't push Plato or Socrates's knowledge to its full extent. Like Plato had perfect capacity to recontextualize the Euthyphro dilemma in a monotheistic context and show the problems that arise There he had that capacity because Socrates holds to the monotheistic God, as does Plato, but he doesn't. And again, that raises questions. What's the purpose of the dialogue? What's he actually trying to do? And I think in the Euthyphro, the question is, is he actually trying to give a treatise on piety, or is he really trying to save Euthyphro the same way he saved Alcibiades? I think he's trying to save Euthyphro, but it has a pedagogical purpose. And I think that too, Plato gives you all the tools that you need to have that conversation in the dialogue itself. So it's just as we kind of talk about piety here, it's similar to your pushback, which was good on like, you know, what's philosophy? Well, we can ask what's philosophy? Or what's the soul? And here I think we can ask, well, what's piety? Like? It's hard to forget, particularly on a Sin, the Great Books podcast, as we're reading in chronological order, this is one of the benefits of doing that, is that you read a dialogue and the whole question is, what's piety? And then here there's just a kind of an assumption that everyone understands what piety is. And so you try to align the two and say, well, well, maybe, maybe the way Socrates is using it is an answer to Euthyphro, or at least what Euthyphro should have said. So it's something to think about. It's something that, as we kind of do this, studies into Plato that I'm, I'm mulling over. So Socrates says, it's just a wonderful line. 30C. If you kill me, you will harm yourself more than me. Again, I love it. He's. But again, there's, there's a rhetorical aspect here. I don't, I don't mean that as being non substantive of robbing the audience of the fear of death. You cannot move me into something. But he's not doing it as a sophist just to kind of, you know, deconstruct or disarm them, but rather, I think he's showing them a truth. What is the truth about the soul? What is the truth about death? And if you understand this truth, you'll understand why I'm not groveling. You understand why I'm not crying and weeping for my life because there are higher principles. Whether I'm just is better than whether I would die.
- [45:48]
B
And, you know, a couple lines down, he's gonna get he's gonna lower the hammer a little more. Not only are you doing yourselves harm rather than me if you kill me, but if you don't listen to me, the gadfly who's kind of challenging the. The beliefs of the city, the underlying principles of the law, the God is going to release somebody even worse on you. Like, that's what he says, right? So. And, you know, as we go over these passages, like the last three passages we talked about, I think going all the way back to the Achilles analogy up to this passage you just read, all of them have elements where certain listeners in the audience have got to be fired up, like, whoa, this guy, you know, you know, the board is almost profit. Like, this guy is really challenging in a way. And then. And then you see why people want to kill him. He's. He's gonna provoke both reactions. So, you know, these words aren't mere. Mere rhetorical, you know, tropes. He's. He's actually doing what he's saying as he's saying.
- [47:03]
A
I like that a lot. I mean, yeah, if you look at that passage, or this is all around like 30C to 30E, even a little bit into 31B, he says things like, he's God's gift and I was attached to the city. This is such a funny thing. Can you imagine being on trial and you're like, guys, I am. I'm not a corruption. I am literally a gift to you. I am God's gift to you. Right? I was attached to the city by the God. And yeah, he gives the famous, you know, gadfly. Athens is this noble steed. It's this noble horse, but it's become sluggish and doesn't do what it's supposed to be doing. And so he's the gadfly that comes and bites it. But here's kind of baked in the middle of all that is, is a line that I think is really incredible. And I mean that as it's almost unbelievable. Like, what is the claim that he's making? This is at 30d, he says, for I do not think it is permitted that a better man may be harmed by. By a worse man. This guy, first off, like, all kinds of examples come to you. Like, that can't be true because of X, Y and Z. But also, he's literally on trial. He is the better man being charged with impiety by these lesser men. Right. By these worse men. And he's going to die. Spoiler alert. It's been a while, so I think we can Kind of give the spoilers he's going to die and he's at this trial for his death. So how does this make sense? What does he mean here for I do not think it is permitted admitted that a better man may be harmed by a worse.
- [48:32]
B
It reminds me of a saying somebody else once spoke. Fear not the man who can harm the body, but the one who can harm the soul. And now that's a different formulation. That's not quite the same thing. But there's the suggestion in that line that one can potentially be harmed in body but remain unharmed in soul. And that's my immediate interpretation of it. And that might be, you know, that might be influenced by my reading of the gospel, which would be a good thing. But yeah, I mean there's something internal to us. There's something beautiful about the way we're created, that they're, there's something that can belong to us that is untouched by others. Another example I think of a modern day example is actually Viktor Frankl man's search for meaning. And so you've got psychiatrists, Jewish psychiatrists locked in a concentration camp and the realization that these people may harm me, these people may kill me, but they cannot take away, they cannot touch my interior life and like that is mine, that I can preserve and remain faithful to, you know, with the grace of God. Yeah, with the grace of God, but he believed in God. But you know that that's kind of Christian terminology.
- [50:15]
A
No, I think that's beautiful. I think you're, you're tethering there to our Lord's words is perfect because they tend to pivot on the same point which is man cannot actually harm your soul. They can't do anything. They can't, they can't charge you to commit an unjust act. They can't charge you to let injustice into your soul. They can't do it. They can harm your body, they can exile you, they can do all kinds of terrible things, but they can't force you to be an unjust person. They can't do that because that's actually what he sees. The harm is that I would become an unjust person. That's, that's the harm because people push back and say, oh, you could be tortured and psychologically just like deconstructed and all these things. And I don't think that's the point because the point there is like in all those scenarios, there's a point in which your mind, which is, you know, the, the matter that your soul actually has to use breaks down but in those scenarios, you cease to even be you anymore. Your capacity to even make a free choice is. Is not there. And that's not what he's talking about. Like, certainly the body can be, you know, deconstructed or drugged or all kinds of things. But at the end of the day, we also all claim that that person doesn't have any culpability. Why? Well, because they weren't making a true choice. They didn't actually have the capacity to make that choice. And it goes right back to the fact that you're the person of, you know, you're the captain of your ship, you're the captain of your soul.
- [51:35]
B
You're the captain.
- [51:36]
A
You get to make this decision. And they can kill his body, they can exile him, they can do all kinds of things to him, but they cannot make him an unjust man. And the fact that he realizes this is amazing. I mean, it really is. I think, that Peter Kreef talks about. He makes kind of a bold statement that the soul is really kind of the first idea, like Platonic idea or form that Socrates comes to truly understand. And that's what he's clinging to here, right? Is a true understanding of the soul, that I am my soul. And I think Socrates means that, you know, even more than we do, right. He's. He's not as positive on the role of the body in the human being as we would hold as Catholics as being kind of composite creatures. But even we believe this too, to a certain degree. You know, if our body and soul become separated, it's not like we're split in half. It's not like there's, oh, we're half here and half there. No, you are where your soul is, and you'll exist for a long time just as a soul before the resurrection of the body. You'll never exist as a body without a soul. And so I think that he really here has. Has come in stumble. I don't say stumbled. He's discovered something that is truly amazing, like a real insight into the soul. And that you cannot force me to be an unjust man. And I think that animates. I mean, if you pull anything out of the entire apology, I think, you know, I might argue that. I think that's the animating principle.
- [52:58]
B
I like that a lot. I mean that, you know, I'll extend it to the political a little bit. I think the other side of that insight is, you know, no one's going to deny that the tyrant, for example, can do great damage to other people, can harm Others. But most fundamentally, the tyrant does harm to himself because he's a slave to himself. Like that's a great insight especially, especially for people who kind of worship power in the ability to be in charge, to turn that on its head and say, actually this person's not the master at all. The person who acts unjustly, no matter how much power they might have or might, they might have or ability to get what they want they might have, is in actuality a slave.
- [53:50]
A
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's in the Gorgias when he gives his myth at the end, he had given the example of the tyrant like beating the slaves. So he, he beats his citizens. And so the citizens have these like stripes on their back right from where they've been beaten and abused and. Etc. And so he gives, in his myth, if I'm, if I recall correctly, he talks about then when the tyrant dies or the unjust man dies, they see then these beatings on his soul because the unjust man, the way, phrase it this way, the way the tyrant treats the city is the way the unjust man treats his soul. And so when you then are just a soul, when you're, when you're robbed of the body and your soul's exposed, then you know, these, these mythical judges of the afterlife can see that you've beaten your own soul, you've abused it, it's scarred, it's bruised. And that's an amazing insight that even the tyrant, and the tyrant's always the example because the tyrant seems to be what people want to be because you get to satiate all of your appetites. I get all the food and sex that I want, I have less power. I can say you die, you die, whatever it is. But the, what you're doing then to your soul is that you're abusing it, you're beating it, you're scarring it. And Socrates understands this and what he does. And I think the animating principle here is he refuses to scar his own soul. He refuses to become a tyrant and commit some kind of act of injustice.
- [55:18]
B
Yeah, I think that's right.
- [55:21]
A
Yeah, very good. This too, this whole section is kind of funny too, because on, on 30e, it's really clear that what he's actually trying to do is give a defense of the city. He's actually on trial for, for his own, like being charged with impiety. But what he's trying to do is actually give an apology for the city at times, like what they should be doing, etc. So anyway, he's just. Again, you have to laugh at a lot of these sections. 31D is a famous section, the daemon. We've kind of talked about this before in the podcast. We talked a little bit about it last week. Right. He has this daemon, the spirit that's attached to him ever since he was a child. He sees it as a gift from the God, right? The monotheistic God, the singular God. It's intriguing, right? The. The. The Damon will check him when he does something the Damon doesn't want him to do. It's a. But it's a negative power. It's always a negative voice. It's what not to do. It never tells him what to do. And this daemon has kind of guided him. If you say, well, how did Socrates become the way he is? And I think you really have to turn to the daemon. And let me give, like, two examples of that one. And he has a wonderful line in First Alcibiades, right, Where he said, he tells Alcibiades, you know, everyone needs a teacher. You and I are the same. We both need a teacher. And Al. Spite is like, oh, that's great. And Socrates, like, but we're different in one respect. And he's like, what's that? Well, you know, I'm your teacher. And it's like, oh, okay, well, then who's your teacher? And Socrates is like, God. God is my teacher. And he. I mean, he's saying it, right? It's a funny line because a lot of these things are kind of comical. Yeah, but he's. But he's actually being serious, right? That God is his teacher.
- [57:01]
B
Yeah, I think he is. I mean, there's some people who are going to say that this is all irony. I just, I don't think that hangs together. And, like, there's no need to go into that aside, why I think better. I mean, I just. I don't think you can speak with this kind of conviction and face death in this way if you don't actually believe what you're saying.
- [57:26]
A
Correct. I mean, it's a similar argument that we make with our own martyrs. If this is just a lie to gain some type of power, like, why hold on to it when it's going to cost you your life? You have to be a true believer for this to work. The other example I was going to give that. That simply occurred to me as I was listening to another podcast and they were discussing Plato's Republic, and they kind of critiqued the cave a little bit, showing, like, you know, it doesn't really explain to us how the first person gets free. Like, how does the first person break out of this? And it really dawned on me when they said that. I was like, oh, it's because it's God. God interacts in the cave to free one of the people. I mean, this is Socrates's argument, right, that God has basically interacted in my life. He's. He's. He's kind of invaded history to a certain degree, attached this daemon to me and given me a vocation and has, you know, woken me up, has turned me around from the cave wall, and, you know, here I am. And so God really is, I think, the teacher of Socrates. And I think that then this kind of goes back and tethers and dovetails into our conversation of Justin Martyr, because I think there are a lot of early church fathers that are going to look back and say, yeah, no, we think Providence actually worked through Socrates to start to till the soil. So on the podcast, you know, we're kind of fond of saying, you know, that Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith under Roman order, prepared the world for Jesus Christ. And I think here you. There are strong arguments from early church fathers and also from humanists in the medieval ages that God attached himself, right, or attached this Damon to Socrates and changed Socrates into someone that was incredibly unique for his time period. And this helped kind of create a hellenized culture that then would, you know, flow into Hebrew culture sometimes quite harmoniously and sometimes quite violently. But then under Roman order, this was the world that God chose for the incarnation to occur. That's not an accident. This is an intentional tilling of the soil for these things to, you know, for the Logos to be received, if you will. So, I don't know. I mean, I think there's. I agree with you. There's people probably rolling their eyes or this can't be true, or, you know, so Socrates is just saying this and etc. I think historically, both looking at Socrates life, looking at Plato, and then also looking at just the historical story of what happened. No, I. I think this is very true. You know, how much do you lean into this?
- [59:50]
B
I love. You know, I think last week we spoke a little bit about the relationship between philosophy and the polis, or philosophy and politics. And there's a really interesting question here right after the passage you brought up, where Socrates again asks himself, you know, you might say, if I care so much about the city, if I care so much about the youth, then why don't I enter public life? And first of all, he says, because I wouldn't last very long. But secondly, he knows. He knows that he would be corrupted or there's the potential for corruption to some degree. And I mean, I personally don't interpret that as him saying, don't get involved in political life. What I do take that as. What I do take him as saying is there needs to be a philosopher who can act as a gadfly, who is outside of political life and not corrupted by it, who then comes in and evaluates political life for everybody else. And so there's always going to be this tension between philosophy and politics, between philosophy and the polis. And. And, you know, they can help each other. They're also a threat to each other.
- [61:16]
A
Yeah, no, they. They certainly are. No, I appreciate you kind of leading us into that because. And I. I appreciate you parsing it out because it can be read in an apolitical way, because he makes some strong statements there. He says, yeah, I would have died long ago if I had entered into politics. Which is hilarious, because it's an indictment of the city. He's being charged by 500 Athenians. It's an indictment of the city. Why? Because he's just so. The implication there is that you all are unjust and therefore I would have died, you know, sooner. Yeah. He makes statements like, you know, a just man must live a private life. You know, how do you. How do you start to take that? But I think too, though, the pushback is, we said earlier, like, how. How do these cities survive an advent of someone like Socrates or Jesus Christ? And what ends up happening to culture is that culture then, right, during this time period, we see that culture then ends up aligning more towards Socrates, more towards Jesus Christ. And so then I wonder, like, to what degree then does that open up someone who's living the philosophical life to enter politics? And you could say that this is, and in a certain way, Socrates's own theory, because then you have the philosopher king, right? At what point, right, do these two concepts wed politics and philosophy? What can we find? A ruler who actually is in love with wisdom, understands, you know, how the cosmos is ordered. What would it be like to live in such a society? We saw in Alcibiades, and first Alcibiades, how the polis had failed him. He should have been following form. They give that kind of myth about, you know, in Persia they do this and that, and they're, you know, forming men in the cardinal virtues and, you know, X, Y and Z. And Athens is over here, just like, you know, struggling and not doing anything. I mean, a city that's oriented towards the good would create good citizens. It would create virtue. So it seems like. I like your point because it seems like Socrates on many occasions seems to say that philosophy can make inroads into the polis. And there might even be a way that philosophy can save the polis. But again, can the polis survive that transformation? And the answer, I think is no. There has to be a death and resurrection. It has to kind of realign itself, its own piety towards the divine, towards the eternal truths, like towards the Platonic ideas. It really has to align itself. And that can be both a beautiful but also brutal transformation of civilization. So he gets into his own. He transitions from like talking about politics in general. Then he gives come some examples of the few times he actually had to be political and be engaged. You know, one of them is kind of interesting because he talks about how he kind of stood up during the regime of the 30 tyrants. So if you remember from our history, the Peloponnesian War ends. Sparta beats Athens in this kind of world war of the Mediterranean. Sparta sets up a puppet government, is basically what the 30 tyrants are. And he gives this example like, you know, they're asking everyone to bring in people to be killed, and they, they're, they're spreading their guilt around and these kind of things. And I said no. And I think that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this has this kind of does double work. So it's not only saying, hey, you know, one time I was engaged in politics and I did what was just, you know, thank you very much. But also my understanding is that this is a defense of him against corrupting the youth because one of his alleged students engaged in the regime, engaged in the 30 tyrant regime. And so him kind of showing like, no, no, no, you know, I didn't. When they, when the 30 tyrants came, like, I didn't participate in that. Like, they were unjust and I pushed it back against them as a just man. That's not only saying something about him and his politics, but he's also, I think, giving a defense that like, those guys were corrupt, they were unjust, and I, I take no responsibility for them.
- [64:55]
B
Yeah, no, I think that's right. You know, notice how, notice throughout this how he keeps giving these examples as he, as he gives this defense where he simultaneously angers and provokes and also makes these indictments of the city. He keeps dropping these concrete examples of his own virtue. So first, you know, he mentioned the battles in the Peloponnesian War, in which he participated, in one of which he saved Alcibiades life. So you have an example of how he's a good warrior, and now you have this example of how he faced. Really, he faced death again in another circumstance, because to disobey this mandate is to invite death upon him. And he says, if the 30 tyrants didn't dissolve, they would have taken care of me. So he kind of gets lucky. But he continues dropping these concrete examples throughout the apology, even though they're not the focus. He's dropping them as concrete defenses of his. His virtue encourage.
- [66:08]
A
Yeah, I agree. He, you know, do you just. I don't have anything locked and loaded here, but one of the things that I've really been thinking about as we've read through these, like, Platonic studies, like these dialogues, is really this tension between, you know, what I would call the great souled man, the man of virtue, and then kind of this democratic regime, Demos, the many. And how this kind of like, there can be then this kind of like, false egalitarianism that sets in that I. Sometimes it's like a race to the bottom, if that makes sense. It's like the lowest common denominator. You can only crawl up so high and raise above the people before they want to drag you back down. Like Alcibiades. Let's, you know, let's. I don't know if he actually, you know, no one knows, you know, what he did, but, you know, he's on his way, you know, whether he actually, you know, desecrated the Herms, but, you know, he's on his way to do the Sicilian war, and they bring charges against him in absentia. Right. When he's not there. So a lot of people point out that they. They betrayed him first. I mean, what. And obviously Socrates is also killed by the city. Our Lord is killed by the city. You think of St. Thomas More, St. Joan of Arc. I mean, you can just start stacking up all of these examples. So I know maybe putting you on the spot unfairly, but I. This is something to say. I'm just thinking about, like, what is this tension? Or do you have anything else to add to it from what we talked about last week between kind of the great souled man and the democratic regime.
- [67:38]
B
Yeah. So, you know, last week I think we talked about. I think we used to. Nietzsche and Tocqueville. And you can throw Kierkegaard into that too, because he makes the same criticism that a certain democratic spirit can lead to mediocrity and I think to Plato's description of the democratic man in Republic as a man who's kind of undisciplined in his pursuits. You know, one minute he's a philosopher, next minute he's an athlete. He's the many colored man who, you know, wears a coat, many colors because he can do so many different things and can pick and choose. There's no discipline in his life. And so I think that meshes with the mediocrity point we made last week. But my interpretation, and this is controversial, controversial in the sense that, you know, there's so many interpretations of Plato on democracy. I actually think Plato sees the real dangers. He sees how it can lead to mediocrity. He writes about how it can lead to mediocrity. I think he writes about how it's corruptive. I think he writes about how it leads to lack of discipline. And yet in Republic, he refers to the blessed democratic man. And in the dialogue that chronologically follows this one, in terms of the truth, traumatic date of Crito, when he's got a chance to break out of the city, you know, hey, Socrates, your friends here, we raised money for you. We can spring you out of here and go to another city. His line is, well, you know, Athens has wronged me. They've done me an injustice, but I owe it to the city to remain because it's the city that allowed me to philosophize. And so in a more strict regime, there might be more discipline, there might be more room for greatness, but there's not necessarily more room for philosophy. There's something about the democratic regime that allows freedom to pursue this kind of life. And eventually it will get you killed when you take it too far, when you really drive it home. But you're allowed to do it for a period of time. And so I actually think. I actually think Plato's relationship with democracy is. Is very complicated. I like that no one uses Facebook anymore, but it's like, you know, relationship status.
- [70:22]
A
It's complicated. Yeah. There are two things occur to me. One is it's, it's. This probably won't be a surprise to anyone if, if you're familiar with Leo Strauss, but I was listening to a lecture the other day that basically kind of made the same argument regarding Leo Strauss, which is like, you know, he has all these critiques of liberalism. He has all these critiques of, like, the liberal regime even up and against communism and fascism and etc. But then it's the, it's the democratic you know, liberal regime, liberal democracies that allow the life of the mind to occur. You can't have it in fascism, you can't have it in communism. It's, it tracks incredibly well to what you said. Probably, obviously, if I was a better Straussian scholars, because Strauss is kind of pulling these critiques from Plato. But the problem there is, is that two things. One is that as you said, yes, you can philosophize, but at some point you either get corrupted, right, or you get killed. Those seems to be the two options for the true philosopher inside kind of the democratic regime. The other thing is, is like, you know, where is thy love of neighbor? Because if you look at the democratic regime, are most people living a philosophical life? Can most people navigate this kind of false sense of freedom, right, this freedom of, of satiation? This is, this critique is that most people in this, in the democracy, right, the mini are, want to be a tyrant. That's how they're living. They beat their soul. They're just, they're, they're baser appetites. Aristotle says that man is the worst animal when it comes to food and sex. And so part of me too, like maybe this is, you know, more on the Catholic side is like, yeah, there's certain benefits that I can live a life of a mind, you know, somewhat unmolested if I'm in a liberal democracy. But what's happening to my fellow man? Like, how few of us can actually push back against the current to live this life? And like, what does that mean for my neighbor? Like, what does it mean to try, I guess, to put it back in Platonic terms, like, you know, how many people can I actually free from the cave with this regime kind of needing and working upon them? It's just something, you know, I'm thinking about obviously, because the. Has strong parallels, you know, to our own life and where we find ourselves. And you can see at times too, while Strauss does some dancing because the critique liberal democracy seems terribly unamerican because this is like, this is the best thing that we've ever invented in the history of humanity. You know, is, is liberalism. And then particularly democratic liberalism in America is like the example of this, you know, par excellence. But I actually think to Socrates point and maybe to, to tether us into the apology, you know, when the good citizen doesn't live under a good regime, I think that his piety is not a rejection of the regime per se, but rather it manifests as a love for the regime to be better. So it's, it's not that I actually, you know, fight against the regime or I discard it, but I think what we see here with Socrates is that I think he has a legitimate love for Athens. I think he has a legitimate love for the people of Athens and they're going to kill him. And he pretty much knows that. But his piety, not towards the gods per se, even though it's animated by that piety, but his piety towards the polis. Right. Like you talked about in the Credo. Right. Which is, I think you see that very clearly, the piety, like what he owes the polis. You know, he's a good man living under a bad regime, but he still loves the regime. He loves the polis and tries to make it better. You know, the question is, in today's day and age, you know, what, what does that even mean? But I think here in the apology, I really appreciate your comments because I think it's just a tension that I think is throughout all of Plato and, and one that can speak to us very loudly in our own political setting.
- [74:21]
B
And I think, of course, some of the concerns, as you point out, are still very real. But of course, they're different for you and me too, because I, you know, I belong to more than one polis. I'm a proud citizen of the United States of America, you know, but I'm also a member of the, the Roman Catholic Church, and that's my polis too. And so, you know, I, I look there for my discipline, for my guidance, and, you know, it will come as no surprise, but since you brought them up, I mean, of course I'm, I'm pretty influenced by Strauss in my thinking. I wouldn't call myself a Straussian, but that's, you know, his, his fingerprints are definitely on my thinking about the texts. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out.
- [75:12]
A
No, I appreciate you kind of cracking that back open because I think it's, I think it's something very worth talking about, and I think it has immediate moral principles. So again, being Socratic, if we're going to be Platonic, we can't just sit here and talk about these tensions as an intellectual exercise and then go on with our lives. I mean, this is something that I think informs the way that, that Socrates lives, and I think it informed the way Plato lived as well. And then there's questions, you know, how did Aristotle handle this? So all these philosophers, I think, have to handle this question. And I think it's analogous. Then after the advent of Jesus Christ and incarnation is. Then how do the saints do it. How do the saints, you know, live a good and holy life under a bad regiment? And eventually, though, you know the saying, right, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The, you know, how many of these saints, you know, get crushed by regime? But is that crushing then transformative to the city? That leads us back to the fact of, you know, when you have an advent of a. Of a Socrates or a Jesus Christ, you know, to what degree can the city actually survive? Even if it persecutes these people, there's something transformative that happens.
- [76:17]
B
And by the way, I gotta, you know, I gotta plug them again just because it's coming up. You know, this is Justin Martyr's argument. Part of it, anyway. In the first apology, he's like, listen, you're coming after us. You're coming after us Christians because we do these things that you don't understand. You know, you're accusing us of cannibalism. That's not what you think it is. You're, you know, we're not worshiping the gods of the city. And, you know, what's the problem with that in the Roman context? It's not. It's not a debate over so much over whose God is real and whose God is not and what's a false God. What's not. It's about not participating in the state religion and the cultural unity that binds the state together. You're causing disunity within the city by your practices. And Justin Martyr comes back and says, listen, we're preaching virtue here and living a life of virtue. We are helping you by being good Christians. We are actually helping you maintain the order of the state. We renew the city by doing what we do.
- [77:29]
A
What's a. I should have asked this earlier, but, like, if someone's interested in. In St. Justin Martyr and kind of seeing how Plato flows on an initial basis into Christianity, like, what's a good text for people to turn to and look at?
- [77:42]
B
Yeah. So, you know, first I just have to say. And it's in the Office of readings on June 1st on his feast day. His martyrdom account is wonderful because you will pick up immediately how. And it's historically accurate because it's obtained from Roman court records. But, you know, it. It's clearly written in the style of a Socratic dialogue, which is what he wanted. But the Ancient Christian Writers series has a nice volume of his first and second apologies that I have on my. On my shelf. And I remember actually right before I took my solemn vows, I was up in My cell. And it was, you know, that time beforehand and I said, you know what, I'm gonna read first apology again. So it's the last thing. And then the dialogue with Trypho is really good too. You get his conversion story in there, he tells you about his conversion. But yeah, I think the, the martyrdom account, the first apology and the dialogue with Trifo would be. If I had to pick three things, those would be it. And they're, they're not long.
- [78:58]
A
Good. No, I appreciate you, I appreciate you sharing that. Okay, so gonna anchor us back into the text. So he kind of, he's, we're getting close to the end of, you know, his initial defense in 33D, he kind of makes the argument like, hey, where are all these men? Like, where are all these kids that I've corrupted? Like, have them bring forward? Like, where are they? Like, this is really interesting and it's, it's kind of a brilliant because it catches you sleeping. If you haven't noticed this, these are all third party claims. Oh, you're corrupting the youth. Okay, but where are the youth I've corrupted? Like, where are the ones coming forward saying like, hey, like he did this to me and you know, where are their families coming forward? Now obviously you can push back on this on a few things. Like one, they could be corrupted to such a degree that they don't realize they've been corrupted. Does Plato think he's corrupted? Probably not. So is he going to come up forward? No. So you can still argue that their, you know, self understanding of corruption doesn't actually mean that they, you know, whether they're corrupt or not. Two, what I really caught my attention on this read through is what is everyone thinking about Alcibiades? So that, that seems to be the, the, the example of corruption par excellence. And he's been assassinated. He's not alive anymore. So then Socrates is like, where are all these guys I've corrupted? Let them come forward. Like, I wonder. Like, like it's a weird, like, does that make sense? Like it's like a weird. I was starting to think like rhetorically how that would land because everyone, like, isn't it interesting? Like how would that land rhetorically where everyone's like, guy, the guy that we're most concerned about is dead. Like that. And he, he basically was a giant hassle to our city and we lost this world war because of him. Or at least we're going to blame him for that. And therefore that's why we're blaming you. Like, what do you mean send them forward? He's dead. But I wonder, too, how much that's an indictment of them. Like, well, you. You know, Athens didn't have him assassinated, but Athens threw him out. Athens did these things. Even I can't remember Aristophanes. I think it's his frogs. I think the frogs has like, a few lines there that a lot of people read as an esoteric call for. For the city to recall Alcibiades, that the city needs to. The city needs to recall Alcibiades to win the war, that we need to actually have forgiveness. And so it's just. It's an interesting line in there that I. I'd like to kind of mull over more about how that would actually land with the assembly.
- [81:15]
B
Yeah, that's good. That's a good insight. I haven't thought.
- [81:19]
A
So he comes to his conclusion. This is like 34B. This kind of tethers to a few things we've already talked about. He says he's not going to grovel or make an emotional scene. You know, he says the purpose of the jury is actually to render justice. It's not to have favor because, you know, I cried or my wife cried or, you know, whatever. Like, you guys should actually just do what's just. But he won't do what's, you know, impious or impious. He won't do what's unjust. And so, you know, he renders his conclusion, and then we get and move into the guilty verdict. It's at 35e. What's surprising and also surprises him in the text is that it's a close vote. I think he says there's only 30 votes of a shift. Would need to actually, you know, acquit him. And I wonder how we read that. I mean, I. I read it as I was preparing for tonight and read back over. Struck me almost as a sign of hope, like, the city is not completely lost right now. Granted, like, not wanting to kill this old man who harasses people in the marketplace does not mean they're all ready to become philosophers or, you know, devotees of his.
- [82:31]
B
Sure.
- [82:32]
A
But at the same time, though, like, you know, is this reading as a hope that the polis, as we've talked about multiple times, you know, is philosophy making inroads into the polis? Like, are people's minds starting to change? Has he said things during his defense that has actually started to plant the seeds of metanoia in his audience?
- [82:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, he's. He's had some effect and sure. Like, Maybe not everybody is ready to become a philosopher over overnight, but to vote to acquit the just man is not nothing.
- [83:01]
A
Yeah. Because we've gone back, you know, we could argue. There's two things I think, then to keep in mind. One is what's the purpose of his defense? And I do think. I do think he is trying to address some of the charges. Like, I don't think he's completely just aloof of what he's being charged with. I think he. I think he does bring up, like you said, there's concrete examples, and I think those have a lot of purpose. I think he gives a couple defenses. But I think what is a little jarring for us at the beginning is that he prioritizes sharing the truth in a proportionate way to his audience, but he prioritizes sharing the truth over a certain sophistry or rhetoric that could probably get him off these charges. More so, like, if he just came in and said, guys, it's a big misunderstanding. I believe in Zeus. I believe in the whole pantheon. Like, you know, I'm. I haven't tried to corrupt anyone, by the way. Like, you know, I'm gonna cry now. My family's gonna come in X, Y, and Z. Like, he could have done things if he really wanted to actually address the charges, do anything necessary, that kind of sophistry, to do anything necessary, to kind of move them off. He doesn't do that. But at the same time, I don't think he gives him a philosophical lecture. I think he gives them truth that seems to be proportionate to an audience of 500 of randomly selected Athenian citizens, which is a. That's a hard. It's a hard thing to draw. But then he also, I think, gives them a fair way to look at him to see that the charges aren't just because that second shoe, the drop that I was going to mention is that there's no way to read this and not see that Meletus's charges are a stretch.
- [84:33]
B
Yeah, there's no way.
- [84:34]
A
I mean, he gets out in front of his skis like we talked about last week. Like, his. His critiques don't even make sense even in the dialogue itself, if he would have been paying attention to what Socrates has said. But there's like, you know, there's enough Athenians that doesn't seem to care. That doesn't seem to move them. He needs to die.
- [84:51]
B
And, you know, I wonder, too, how many men in this assembly would just be moved by his manly courage, Right? How many? How Many there maybe don't even buy what he's saying, or maybe do think that he's a little respectful. Ridiculous. But when he gets up and he says, you know what? I know that the custom at this point is for me to grovel and beg for my life and to shed a lot of tears and bring my kids up here and put on a show, but you know what? I'm just not going to do that. I. I wonder if some of those votes are people who are like, all right, I respect that. I don't know, just conjecture.
- [85:32]
A
But no, I. I think that's an excellent point, because I think you could have a conversation there of, you know, know, certainly, maybe certain souls had an epiphany while listening to him. The. The philosophic life, these things he's teaching about. But how many more souls, I think on a more elementary level, simply would have been impressed by his witness? Like, who. What is it? Because this is how a lot of us, you know, those of us who are converts to Catholicism, you know, when you're attracted really to any kind of idea, usually it's not because you run straight into an intellectual principle, and you're like, wow, this really captures me. Usually it's because you've ran into a person. You usually run into a person and you don't quite understand the way they live their life. But there's something about them that speaks to you. Oh, it's like, oh, your. Your life is calm. It's ordered, it's. It's, you know, tranquil. It's disciplined. You're not suffering the same passions that everyone else is. What. What are you, you know, what do you believe? You know, I mean, that was what it was for me. My first kind of gravitation towards a Catholic was because they had similar critiques that I did about my Christian faith. But then they had answers, and I was like, wait, who are you? Like, what do you believe? And so I think. No, I think that's an excellent point of, like, how many would have been moved, even in a preliminary way, just simply by his witness? What is it that this man has? This man. Even if you don't understand the soul, you don't really understand his arguments. This man has clearly discovered something that makes him live differently than we do. I think that's. I think that's very good. Okay, so can we. Can we get into, like, a funny part where he talks about, like, what?
- [87:03]
B
Hysterical.
- [87:05]
A
Why don't you lead us into this? Because I think this is great. This is the funniest Part of the whole dialogue.
- [87:09]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So, all right, he's acquitted or he's not acquitted. He. He's convicted, but it's close. And he says, hey, you know, just a few more, I would have been acquitted. And now after the conviction, you, Meletus, gets to propose a punishment, and he proposes the death penalty. And so now you've got to be thinking, because he was so close to acquittal, he can probably get off with a lesser penalty than death. When you have a vote that close, you know, maybe you can get the. Get those 30 votes by proposing a reasonable penalty. And instead he says, yeah, you know what? I want free meals in the Britannium, which is where, you know, the champions would go, the horse racing champions as a place of honor. He's like, you know, my penalty should basically be to be fed and honored for the rest of my days, which, you know, obviously would have just infuriated people and did, because as we know, the vote on the death penalty is greater. He. More people vote to. To kill him than. Than vote to convict them. So he clearly angers the. Angers the crowd.
- [88:37]
A
Yeah, it's just. It's just a great thing where it's like, oh, what punishment? Because you think, like, oh, maybe exile, you know, maybe a ransom. Like, what do you say? No, I should be welcomed like an Olympic champion and fed and, you know, received into the halls of glory. Like, it's just a. It's. It's. Again, you have to laugh in a certain way. Like, you read that and you're like, brother, you are clearly not trying to address the charges at all. But in a lot of ways, too. I think it goes back to. To kind of detooting them, to disarming of them. I don't fear this, and not, like, just in a rhetorical way. Like, I literally don't. Like, some of this is comical because he's being judged. I mean, again, I apologize. It's just because I read the Gorgias, so it's on my mind. But also, the Gorgias has a lot of very explicit commentary on the apology. But, you know, he talks about this. He talks about, like, well, you know, what. What hope does a man have if he's trying to be like the doctor? And you're judged, you know, by a bunch of people who like pastry chefs. Like, what, what what? Like, you're gonna sit there and tell them, like, no, I'm not giving you the sweets. You need to take your bitter medicine. Like, are they going to accept you? Are you. Are you Going to like them? No. Well, then what's the chance of a just man, right, standing before, you know, 500 unjust men, like, what's your actual chance? And he even says in the Gorgas, like, I can't go in there. And actually, if, you know, because it's hilarious, because the Gorgias has all these hypotheticals like, well, if I was charged with death and if this did happen to me X, Y and Z. But he does say this thing with, like, you know, if I go in there, I can't just tell them that I'm just. I can't tell them, like, what I've been trying to do. They don't understand that. And so here's. And this is a real thing. The unjust man, or excuse me, the just man, is trying to explain why he's lived a certain way to the unjust assembly. And there's no way, like we see here, there's no way he can do that without critiquing them. This is the way I've lived my life, which is not the way that you've lived your life. And that is so counterintuitive to begging for your life. Now, these things about, like, I should be welcomed like a champion, you know, I think he's. He's pushing it here a little bit. And it kind of goes into that same thing of, you know, telling them all that he's God's gift to Athens. But it's, it's a. It's an enjoyable passage.
- [90:45]
B
Absolutely. No, it's, it's. It's good stuff. And it is kinda. I mean, the guy actually is gonna die, so it is. I mean, it's not dark, but it's in some ways emblematic. I mean, it's laughter in the face of death.
- [91:01]
A
Well, yeah. I wonder, you know, to what degree, you know, is it actually, you know, comical that it's not a tragedy? You know, that would be interesting to look at. It's not actually a tragedy. This happens because they can't actually do anything bad to him. Right. So it actually becomes a comedy because the assembly takes itself seriously in a way that they're really not serious. Right?
- [91:24]
B
That's right. And now here's where he gives his extended arguments on debt. So earlier I was a little more circumspect, like, you know, Yeah, I think his lines on death are pretty, are beautiful, but there's still some unknown. I actually, if, you know, if I were a pagan reading what he says about death here, I would find this deeply comforting. It's like, well, look, the way I see it is there's two options. Either this is going to be just a deep sleep, which, great, that sounds good. Just go to bed and that's it, or I'm going to be in. In Hades with all these other shades, and I could basically ask some questions all day and we can do some philosophy. So either way, you know, he. He sees himself in a. In a good place. And I mean, I suppose that that doesn't exhaust all of the. The potential options. And obviously we know from Revelation that there are others, but. Yeah, I mean, I. I actually find. I find those arguments pretty. Pretty convincing.
- [92:34]
A
I love that section where he talks about when he goes and circles back to death and he's talking about Hades and he's like, I would. I can go talk to Homer. I can go talk to, you know, all these thinkers. It's funny because you can tell he's actually truly happy because he thinks that heaven is going to be a continuance of what he's doing here on Earth. He's got to go be the gadfly. He's gonna go start asking a ton of questions. But he's gonna do it in heaven, and he hopes he gets. Or Hades. I shouldn't say heaven. He's gonna go, you know, to Hades and. And ask these questions. And so he's just gonna keep doing the same thing. He's doing what he was doing in the marketplace. He's gonna go do for all eternity. And he loves that idea. That would be awesome.
- [93:10]
B
In which, by the way, you know, I think Dante really, you know, an Inferno, kind of the. The virtuous pagans. That's exactly what he's doing. You've got all the. All of the shades. You know, Socrates is. Is asking questions and inquiring of people. So it's, you know, at least Dante had that in mind, too, and kind of ran with it.
- [93:39]
A
And it's also a funny scene in Dante because he's. He's a poet and he's welcomed by all the famous poets like Homer, and everyone else comes and welcomes him. And so the same thing here, too. It's funny because, you know, Socrates is kind of alluding that, you know, within the great company of these thinkers, like, I will be welcomed and I can go talk to them and kind of do these things. So, no, it's a. It's a funny. It's a funny scene in a certain regard. Kind of taking a step back, you know, looking at the. The guilty verdict, you know, after he gives his Example of being fed and welcomed and things like that. He mentions exile, but he's like, listen, I'm not going to give up philosophy, so that's not going to work. Then he says, and this is where I think, I just want to flag this, because it's like one of the most, you know, kind of iconic Socratic slash Platonic lines, you know, in 38A, where he says, the unexamined life is not worth living. Right. The unexamined life is not worth living. And again, I think he's. He's an example of that. He's an example of the examined life and I think particularly the truth of the soul. I have. I have discovered what it means to be man. I've discovered what it means to actually be wise. He's actually discovered where his wisdom is rooted. According to the prophecy, the oracle, deli. He's. He's discovered, you know, what it is that makes him wise. And I think, one. It's what he does not know. There is a kind of a beautiful deconstruction of tearing down false ideas. But then I think that Plato doesn't stop there. It's not simply a skepticism, it's a rebuilding. And I think what you see here is Socrates is not a skeptic about the soul. His whole. His whole pivot here, his whole animating principle in the apology is that the soul is real. This is a true thing that we can know. And he builds a moral life in service to justice. Upon that understanding, they also try and ransom him, which, you know, he offers, like, what is it? One mina. And it's like a hundred day. It's like 100 drachma. So that's 100 days labor. And then Plato and his friends offer 30 mina. That's 3,000 daily wages. They really wanted to kill him. Like, that's a lot of money to do this. And so that's another question then that goes back to our earlier conversations last week about, you know, is in certain ways is this indirect attack. You know, for Alcibiades, it's a. It's a political revenge. There's amnesty after the Peloponnesian War. They can't attack him directly, and so they charge him with this kind of broad, corrupting youth being a gadfly. But in reality, what we're mad about is. Is ale and losing the Peloponnesian War. But we can't do it directly, so we do it indirectly. So Meletus's charges and him presenting them terribly and having. And kind of stretching and getting out front of his skis. None of that matters. It doesn't matter. Right. And it's not in a lot of ways, if you look at it that way, that can, I think, explain why Socrates certain at times has the demeanor that he does, because in certain ways he might just see this as a given.
- [96:36]
B
If I may, one of my favorite lines in this whole dialogue is, oh.
- [96:39]
A
Yeah, go for it.
- [96:40]
B
39C. I affirm, you men who condemned me to death, that vengeance will come upon you right after my death. And much harsher by Zeus than the sort you give me by killing me. For you have now done this deed, supposing that you will be released from giving an account of your life. But it will turn out much the opposite for you, as I affirm, there will be more who will refute you whom I have now been holding back. You did not perceive them. So he kind of alluded to this earlier. I pointed out, we talked about it and he kind of indicates, you know, you think that I'm out of your hair and I'm not going to question your lives anymore. But I mean, in some ways here he admits his influence, right? There are others now have been holding them back. And, you know, I think this can be many things. It admits of many interpretations. I take of this a recognition that he influenced other young men to see the world the way he does and to strive for virtue. But the difference is that he's an older man and they're adolescent and so of necessity, they're going to be more ferocious in their, in their prosecution.
- [97:59]
A
No, I think it's a, I think it's a wonderful insight. It also reminded me of, I found it broadly analogous to our Lord, as I mentioned last week in the Gospel of John, right, where he's like, listen, you guys are going to do this and then Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, right? This is, this is like destruction is going to come upon you and this kind of goes back into, you know, how, how much can a civilization survive, you know, an advent of a Socrates or, or a Jesus Christ? What are their followers going to do, those that actually see the light and are transformed? Like, can the city? I mean, you see this in both the Christian martyrs and then also, you know, in certain way in the, in the pagan philosophers. If you really take this true, like the, the good man really cannot suffer harm from the wicked, what is it that the polis is going to do to try and stamp this out? So you think of like the martyrs in the Roman Coliseum and, etc, where they all find, that they find this death to be an honor. No, this is actually a crown. It's a glory. You know, what is it that you do? Actually, I think that meant not to play my cards too much, but I think that liberalism has a much better answer to this. You don't actually, you know, persecute the Christianity. You just lull it into a deep acadia through kind of like a soft hedonism, materialism. That's how you kill it. You don't kill it through persecution. You don't kill it through, you know, trying to actually, you know, create martyrs. You actually kill it through a certain, you know, softening and weakening and sluggishness of its purpose. And I think that, you know, you see this then I think with Socrates and our Lord, that they do run parallel in a lot of different ways. Socrates's prophecy here about Athens and, you know, what will occur to it. And then also so many of our Lord's comments, not only about, you know, his followers and things like that, but then also about the destruction of Jerusalem.
- [99:54]
B
Yeah, you know, I, I think a lot about that. You know, Christianity is threatened now, not so much by at least here. I mean, there's parts of the world where Christianity very much, Christians very much are persecuted. We don't face an active persecution in terms of threats to our life, but yeah, just kind of the phasing out of our care about the higher things. And the thing I always fall back on there is, look, I think our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And so I think a person can go a long way, maybe a long time with, with lower things. But I really do believe that we're always in the game precisely because ultimately it's not in human nature to be contented with less. I draw my hope it's beautiful. Christ.
- [100:47]
A
Yeah, no, I think it's beautiful. And you see that too, as I know, you know, in the Symposium, the top of the ladder of love, you know, is a satiation in the divine being. Beauty itself, the natural love of man, erotic desire, is infinite. It's an infinite appetite. I want to satiate in beauty and be happy always. But everything in this life is finite. And so my, my appetite, my eros is designed for an infinite beauty. And that only comes through the divine right. Nothing else actually has, you know, that beauty itself. What Plato kind of contextualizes the Symposium, I think more of the idea of beauty, but then with the Christian tradition, I think very much then contextualizes that as God himself. Right. And yeah, our hearts are restless until they, they rest in Him. And I think it's amazing to me that you can see that in a, in a pagan context as well. Just simply an observation on our natural erotic appetites.
- [101:47]
B
And you can, you can see why Justin, you know, reads this and he doesn't say what he, what he read or what he spoke about, you know, but man, man, would I kill to know. But, you know, it could have just been a conversation. But I wonder, you know, what, what text did he read? You know, what was his Hortensius. But, you know, you can, you can see him picking up something like this or picking up Symposium. That, that would really be a wonderful revelation if it were Symposium that were the text and being confronted with that, like, you know, this is what you really want, what you're really looking for is this thing that transcends earthly existence and you want to possess it forever. I could see how that gives, gives you wings.
- [102:41]
A
It does give you wings. One of the kind of famous analogies of, of Eros. St. Gregory of Nyssa, I think, uses that a lot. Eros becomes these wings that we ascend to God. It all becomes analogies of upward movement, a ladder climbing a mountain, fire wings. He even talks about a great chain that we crawl back up to find God. But here in this kind of the. Anchor us back in the text. So this last section, the jury has voted and incident Socrates to death. You talked about the prophecy, which I think is very good. You also talked about his, his kind of last comments here on death are very beautiful, right? The dreamless sleep or the fact he gets to go around, talk to all the famous people, right, and keep doing like he's, he's. But what caught my attention here, two things is one, he mentions his Damon again. That's it, like 40B or so, where he kind of, It's. It's interesting because he says, you know, the daemon has not checked me.
- [103:41]
B
Yeah.
- [103:41]
A
And what that, what that means is see the demon not checking him, even though the daemon doesn't speak positively. Go do this thing. He only does negative. It. It ends up being an implied approval. So he, he thinks he finds comfort in the fact that the vine, right, the God must approve of what he said here in his defense of himself, his defense of philosophy in a lot of ways. And I think his appeal to the city, right, to live a good life, that, that God approves of this and what he said. And I think, I think that's kind of a marvel. Marvelous statement. I think he finds a lot of hope in that. And I don't know if we can underestimate that, he finds. I don't think Socrates wants there to be a lot of daylight between him and the God. And so I think he finds great comfort in the fact that Damon has not checked him. If we look at this last, like, let's just look how the whole thing ends. We kind of finally. Because I think this is, again, beautiful. So this is at 41D. He says, you two must be of good hope as regards death. Gentlemen of the jury, and keep this one truth in mind, that a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods. Again, this, like, tremendous line one. It's interesting to have a pagan text end in hope. We have to have hope. No, he's addressing the general of the jury here. I think he's, you know, addressing particularly those, you know, that kind of stood with him because they're the true jury. They're the true ones that are trying to, you know, have a justice. It might be to the whole, but he's kind of made a distinction to this point about who's truly acting as a jury and who. Who is truly not. But for him to have, like to end this thing on hope and to again, go back to that line that really the. It's not permitted for the good man to be harmed by the worse. And that kind of then goes back into our whole conversation about him discovering the soul. I mean, this is just a tremendous piece within the Western canon. I mean, I think it would be very difficult to exaggerate the importance of this text, but its principles upon the formation of what we now call the West.
- [105:50]
B
That really is beautiful in the last part, too. The gods are not without care for his trouble. Yeah, the gods care. I mean, man, you can see why Christians pick this up and run with it. I mean, it's all there in seed form.
- [106:05]
A
You know, it's interesting too, how this early philosophy ends up having such recourse to the divine. Yeah, it's really amazing in a natural way. I don't think he's. Like I mentioned earlier, I don't find this to be a corruption philosophy. I don't think he's bringing something alien into philosophy, but rather, you know, obviously, as a good Dominican, you know that St. Thomas Aquinas presents religion, the virtue of religion under justice. It's a natural virtue. Man has a natural desire and capacity to give God his due. And I think we're seeing that played out here very clearly. And not even just in like a. An aristotelian way that's like kind of just systematic observations. But. But this is a manner in which Socrates thinks that the God has spoken to him, the God has cared for him, he's assigned a Damon, he's given him a vocation. This is like, dare I say, a relational understanding of the God inside of a pagan context. And I know for, you know, some Christian traditions that can make us very nervous, but I. I actually think this is very beautiful.
- [107:17]
B
I love it.
- [107:17]
A
Well, then let's look at.
- [107:19]
B
For me, these are, you know, quasi spiritual texts.
- [107:21]
A
For me, they are a spiritual text. I think that Plato. I think that Plato's. I mean, you can see why Platonism led into, you know, what we call Neoplatonism and that a lot of Neoplatonism is highly influenced by the Symposium and these things. And it really becomes like the path to the divine. How do I ascend to the God? You can. You can see very clearly why this became the focus. If I'm going to live this life and I'm not permitted to live it in a way that's coldly abstracted, where I can't just adhere to the principle but not live it, then how do I climb the ladder of love? Like, how do I come to know the God? And you, I think you can see why, you know, basically, what is that? I mean, Plato, you know, is right. Socrates dies in 399. You know, so you got 400 years roughly until Christ, and then basically during that time period and then all the way up until basically the rediscovery of Aristotle in the west in the 1200s. The core presuppositions of the spiritual life in both pagan and Christian contexts is Platonic. It's just hard to exaggerate or overestimate how much this impacted the West. I mean, I guess you could make an argument that the west, and really, I guess, you know, Christendom, to be more specific, became a political order based on this concept, a political order that. That believes that the soul is more important than the body, that the eternal is more important than the temporal, that the spiritual is more important than the material. Like we created a political order that resonates with the principles that Socrates is laying down here in his apology. So let's look at the very end. I'll read it because I think it's probably one of the most beautiful lines. He says, now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one except the God. It's Just beautiful. I think too, that kind of shows you not to push back on it too much, but like that kind of juxtaposition that really, at the end of the day, no one knows. I think that kind of goes into what you were saying earlier of like, how much can we actually charge into the uncertainty of death with just like happiness. Right. It's interesting here at the very end, it's not a full blown confirmation that like, if I die, I go to something better. It's actually more of a. It's, it's a pious statement actually. At the end of the day, the person who knows what's going to happen.
- [109:49]
B
Is the God and there's some trust there. Yeah, I mean it's, it's pretty incredible. It's incredible for a pagan. And I mean literally incredible. You know, how much, how much is in there for, for someone who doesn't have revelation.
- [110:07]
A
Yeah. No. Very good. Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite texts, I think a text that I think is certainly worth, you know, chewing on and not even just chewing on intellectually, but I think that as we study Plato, I think we should echo this core principle of Plato. Like, does the apology invite you to live a better life? If it does, how so? Right. I mean, we have, you know, a lot of listeners that aren't, that aren't Christian and I think just like in a natural way. Right. If you're just looking at Plato, like, how do you see this text? Does it invite you to live a better life? Because so many of us are lulled into that soft tyranny of the soul that we're just kind of this soft milquetoast hedonism. But we whip and beat our souls and punish them, even in ways that I don't think are immediately apparent to us. I think there's a lot of guidance here. I think there's a lot of things that awoke the west. Right. Or even created the West. Do I care for my soul? Do I think it would be better to suffer an injustice than to do an unjust act? That's an important question. Do I really believe that no one can actually harm my soul, no one can claim cause me to actually become an unjust man? I mean, these are things that you can read over and say, oh, that's intellectually perplexing, that's intriguing. But if you look at them as moral invitations, I mean, these can change your life.
- [111:32]
B
It's the danger of great books.
- [111:34]
A
It is the danger of great books. It is the danger. I like you bringing that back. The danger I like that. Okay. So kind of as we look at the apology as a whole, I mean, any kind of, like, final comments or anything that you didn't think we hit or any kind of loose ends.
- [111:49]
B
I mean, I enjoyed our conversations. I think we hit the important stuff. And, you know, apology, one of the things I appreciate most about this conversation is that Apology is probably the most. I would assume it's the most read text of Plato. I mean, I don't know that for sure, but it's a good entryway because it's pretty straightforward relative to the rest of the corpus, and it's also short relative to the rest of the corpus. Corpus. And, you know, sometimes you. You can just get the highlights of the text, but walking through it the way we did and really seeing the little nuances and the arguments and the transitions and the arguments makes you appreciate that, even apology. All right. It might not be as sophisticated as Symposium or Republic, but, man, what a. What a great text. You know, that. That it charges me up. I'm excited. I'm excited to wake up tomorrow and do some work, you know.
- [112:46]
A
No, I agree. It's a. It is a wonderful, wonderful text, and I think it's one that. I think it's one that you can actually invite your friends to read, or if you're trying to invite people to the intellectual life or trying to invite people, you know, to kind of reorder their erotic appetites towards things that are higher. Right. The spirited life, the. The life of the bind, even the divine beauty itself. I think apology is a fun text to read with a group. Right. It's short. You could do it. It brings up a lot of different things, obviously, kind of like sitting there as a member of the assembly. There are things that Socrates does that are perplexing, and to try and figure out why he's doing that is really an invitation to truth. So. No, I. I appreciate all your comments. I appreciate you kind of walking us through these last couple weeks on the apology. It's been a joy to discuss things that are true, good and beautiful with you. Remind us where people can find your work.
- [113:38]
B
So my website is cjbrophy.com and, you know, you could see some of my publications and work there. But like I said last time, it's more important that you read Plato, read Justin Martyr, and then also ccds, Providence. Edu to check out all of the. The great things we're doing here.
- [114:02]
A
Very good. Well, Father, we deeply appreciate it.
- [114:06]
B
Thank you so much, Deacon. I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure all right, everyone.
- [114:11]
A
Next week we will be discussing the Crito. That's the next dialogue that we're reading. If you want to read along with us as we continue in our studies of Plato, you can check us out on X, where we're decently active. And also Visit the great bookspodcast.com and we will see you next week. See you.