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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we welcome back the great Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos of Wyoming Catholic College to discuss Plato's Dialogue, the Credo. The work tells us of Crito visiting his friend Socrates in prison and discussing law, politics and piety, and most of all, why Socrates will not escape prison even if he has the opportunity to do so. We have a good conversation on Achilles and Socrates, the role of piety in the political and cosmic order, and the challenges of Athens and of a modern liberal democracy. For those living a philosophic life. We'll touch a bit on how Socrates and Jesus Christ were both dangers to the political orders of their day and end with a comment on the role of myth, the sacred stories in Plato and I just want to say thank you. Thank you to all of you who are following along on the podcast, those who are supporting the podcast on Patreon, using our guides, engaging in the community chat. It's overwhelming. I just want to say thank you. This is a fun, fun intellectual journey to be on with all of you and so please know that I am incredibly grateful and we look forward to years of studying the Great Books together. But today join us for a great conversation on Plato's credo with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos. 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 are recording on a beautiful and chilly 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 Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and now we are venturing into Plato. We have read first Alcibiades together, also Euthyphro, also Aquinas on the euthyphro dilemma with Dr. Prudlow and the Apology with Father Justin Barofi, a Dominican out of the Providence College. Go check those out. You can also check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. You can go to the great bookspodcast.com where we have written guides on a lot of these works that you can use for your own studies or for your small groups. Today we are discussing the Crito a conversation between Socrates and his friend Crito in prison as Socrates awaits his day of execution. Today we have a wonderful guest joining us again from Wyoming Catholic College. We have Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos. Did I say it correctly again?
- [02:48]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
You did again.
- [02:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Again. Got it. Good. He is the assistant professor of humanities and the faculty representative to the board at Wyoming Catholic College. He holds a BA in the Liberal Arts from St. John's College and a MA and a PhD in Politics from the University of Dallas. You can check his essays out on politics, culture and education, and First Things, the American Conservative and the American mind, and elsewhere. Dr. It's good to have you on the podcast again.
- [03:18]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Thank you so much for having me back. It's great to be back.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I greatly enjoyed our conversation on the Odyssey, and I was very happy that you'd come back and kind of guide us through the Crito. Do you. Do you have any particular love for Plato?
- [03:32]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I do, yes. I actually wound up writing my dissertation on Plato, and I get to teach him pretty often. Not every semester, not every year, but pretty often here at Wyoming Catholic. I read him first in College at St. John's and I think I was just immersed and loved it at the time without yet knowing that I was going to study him seriously later. But he raises, through his dialogues in this really engaging format, he raises the most fundamental intellectual and moral questions. And one of. I wind up teaching a lot of Aristotle as well here, and I have a great fondness for Aristotle as well. But one of the wonderful fun things about Plato is that the dialogues are always dramatic and argumentative. So there's always an argument going along, but there's also characters and personalities whose particularity, whose personalities influence and texture the course of the conversation. And so the whole thing feels like a more immersive and embodied experience than other forms of philosophical writing. And so I've always had a great fondness for him. He also, through Socrates, goes to those most fundamental questions just about how we should live, and then winds up presenting to us large philosophical questions in light of that fundamental question that everyone can agree is vital. And so he Plato really drew me into philosophy, and I'm forever grateful to him for that.
- [05:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Any particular work that originally kind of captured your imagination?
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I can't. Well, I think the first Plato I read was the Meno. That's read pretty early in the St. John's curriculum, and I understand you'll be reading that a little bit later in this group. And he was fascinating from the beginning. But the Gorgias, I think just the discussion of the good and pleasure and justice and as it was, and the nature of the soul and the eternal punishments or rewards of the soul in the Gorgias really Captured me when I was a teenager when I read it for the first time. But I've really come to love the Republic. It's not a very original answer. It's the magnum opus. It's sort of the obvious answer for his greatest work. But I've been able to teach that and study that many times over the last decade. And the thing you hear about great books is that you can read it once, it's amazing, and then you can read it a second time and you get more, and you read a third time and get more. And I've found that to be the case with many works, but I have. I think I found that most to be the case with the Republic. Each time it does feel like I am. I am gaining more and more and more, and I've. I've had the opportunity to read and teach it about a dozen times. So I actually have the track record of not just taking on faith that great books grow and develop and deepen as you return to them again and again, but actually having experienced that.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's amazing, too, how much you come to learn a text if you have to teach it. I shouldn't say have to, maybe, if you have the delight to be able to teach it. I think there's a. There's a certain mirroring there, too, if you read it in a group or if you actually try and express your ideas to others to help them or to be helped by them. It's amazing how that iron sharpens iron and you kind of get drawn into the text, into a passage. You're like, oh, yeah, I've got this. And then someone else brings up different perspectives, and it just kind of continues to somewhat unfurl for you. And that's what I feel like reading Plato again on this way is there's these dialogues, you know, the. The apology to Euthyphro, even this one, Crito. These were dialogues I would tell you that I was very familiar with. But now then, this read through, reading them in our My Sunday Great Books group, reading them here on the podcast. It's amazing how many more insights that you kind of draw from them each time that you read, particularly if you're reading them in a group or with friends, certainly.
- [07:27]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
And again, the form of Plato's dialogues themselves reflect that, that thinkers engaging with one another or ordinary people engaging with one another are having that experience. And then you have the opportunity to imagine yourself as one of those characters or construct another dialogue with the dialogue that's unfolding in front of you.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
So, yeah, it seems to. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves because we're so used to reading like treatises now. Like, we read things like Aristotle, right? We read like instruction manuals. Even though I think most of our, like New York Times bestsellers are written on like a fifth grade level. But, like, that's what you're used to reading, is it like a treatise? And I think we have to remind ourselves that actually it's the question answer format that's most natural to human learning. I'm like a child to a parent. And so the dialogue really mimics that, right? Mimics that natural way that we learn and we see that some of the best texts, I mean, even the Summa, which at times can be incredibly dry, is still mimicking that kind of seminar question answer, iron sharpening iron format, which seems to be very natural way for the mind to kind of drift and journey into truth.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Definitely.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
So correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, we, we typically think of, we kind of think of Socrates as this like, old guy that's like harassing people in the marketplace, right? Like, that's at least that's what he gets accused of, right? That everyone in Athens is just trying to live their life and, you know, go buy bread and do whatever else you're doing. And here's this, I guess, ugly older man that's like harassing you and be like, do you even know what it means to buy bread? Like, what does it mean to exist, right? And like this poor guy is, you know, is trying to do something. But it occurs to me, as I kind of study more into Plato, is that yes, Socrates had these conversations with his friends that we get in all of the dialogues. But there's a whole other aspect I don't think we talk a lot about, which is Socrates gathered with his friends to read great books and to discuss them. He, he gathered together to read the great books of his day and to discuss it with his friends. And I think that sometimes we, we forget this. Like, we think he's just in the marketplace harassing people. But I think that you could probably make an argument that like, one of the ways that he actually taught his inner circle the most was, was actually sitting down and reading texts with them in friendship.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
The ones that come up most frequently in Plato's dialogues, which the dialogues do not themselves purport to be perfect, historical, factual transcripts of something that happened. Maybe the apology is the closest to that, maybe the crito is the second closest to that perhaps. But there is an imaginative element that, that Plato admits to but the closest we come to what you're describing Socrates doing in the dialogue seems to be the engagement with the Homeric tradition and, and maybe also the, the trains as well. I, it's my suspicion, I haven't confirmed this, but I'm almost certain that is true, that Homer is the, the authority or just the text the author quoted most often throughout the Platonic dialogues. And that's for very good reason. Homer in some way, Homer and Hesiod together in some way are standing in the place of scripture for the, for the ancient Athenians. They're the closest they have to an authoritative account of the nature of things, of the nature of the divine, of the human in relation to the divine, the hero sort of standing between ordinary humans and the gods. And so the conversations themselves are peppered with allusions and sometimes direct quotations and then sometimes direct discussions of quotations of Homer above all others. He's certainly Plato through, through the dialogues, is certainly engaging with, with other sources and it tends to be the poets and, and Homer as the, the king of the poets. But that is, that's an interesting comment for you to make starting out the Crito, because there's, there is a sophisticated and very high culture already present in Athens by the time Socrates comes along. He doesn't become a philosopher ex nihilo. He doesn't simply turn himself from an ordinary person like every other person on earth at that time, into the person that we, we know. There's a, there's a context there that is a. Culturally, imaginatively to some extent, in some, certain, some ways, philosophically, certainly poetically, religiously rich culture that he, he grows in. And, and so your, your comment to that effect makes me think, oh, that, that sheds light on part of the Crito, because part of what's going on in the Crito is Socrates's argument to his friend Crito that he, Socrates is indebted to Athens. And we might initially think, what do you mean, Socrates? I mean, you're, you're like, you're like no one else in Athens. You're not the typical Athenian. Athens didn't make you Socrates. Sure, Athens gave you, you know, bread in some way and gave you security in some way, but you made yourself the philosopher Socrates. And so this is actually a question I always have with the Crito is in what sense is Socrates obligated to Athens? Is it for just keeping body and soul together in him for 70 years, somehow enabling that? It seems like there's something much richer going on there. And what you just alluded to that Socrates has had his own great books podcast or something like that in ancient Athens is maybe a move in that direction that there's a deeper and richer debt than even one that is directly discussed in the Crito that Socrates is aware of that Athens didn't just give him birth, it gave him birth, an education. And sure, it didn't give him the education ordered towards philosophy in his understanding, but the pieces in some way were there in Athenian culture, which is so indebted to Homer and the tragedians before them.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's something that we're gonna have to look into and kind of unpack a bit. Is that almost this politics of gratitude and what is the gratitude that Socrates has towards Athens? Because it really does stand in contrast to the apology, right? There tends to be this, this almost antagonistic contrast in some of these previous dialogues that we've read between, you know, the great souled man, the philosopher and the demos, the people. And under the democracy. There seems to be so many antagonisms here. I think sometimes for first time readers, the Crito can throw you for a loop that all of a sudden when Socrates is given an option to leave, he's like, no, I'm, I'm so indebted. I have this deep gratitude to the polis. I think, like, that's something we're gonna have to explore because you're correct. What is it that he has received? What is it that actually has actually kind of cultivated in him this type of gratitude? The beginning. Let's look at the beginning, right? So Crito, he's in prison, right? Socrates is in prison and Crito, his friend has, has come to visit him. And there's this kind of like little interesting thing at the beginning in which, you know, Socrates is still alive. They haven't killed him yet. Actually he sits in prison, I think for up to a month before they do that. And so we get this kind of line of like, why, you know, why is this? And so we see that they're waiting for the ship, the ship to come back from Delos. And so my understanding of this is, is that there, this is a, it's a religious ritual, right, that Athens has, that goes all the way back to Theseus, right? Kind of their, that's kind of their King David, they're King Arthur, Theseus, when he went and defeated the Minotaur. So remember, if you remember Athens, and they had to give over these youths, they had to pay tribute and the Minotaur would eat them over in Crete. And so Theseus goes with them and defeats the Minotaur and comes back hero and a victor. And I think one of the things he did is he prayed to Apollo. That. Or actually, I think it's the people, maybe either him or the people parade to Apollo saying, oh, if you gain him victory, like, you know, we'll continue to have this sacrifice for you. So this is a religious thing. It's like almost a pilgrimage. So they. They have the ship and it's. It's blessed and it goes off to the island of Delos, and then it comes back. And one of the oddities of the ritual is that there can't be any public executions until the ship comes back. And of course, like, this is not like today's ships. They have to rely on the wind. It might get delayed. Things, all kinds of things that happen. So Socrates is sitting here for up to a month, and this has now allowed for him to have further dialogues, you know, with his friends. But I think for those of us who are coming to understand how to read Plato, as you said earlier, I think you said an imaginative. You know, I would say there's a. There's a pedagogical veneer on the dialogues. They're not just simply a transcript. Plato's trying to teach us things. What is happening here? I mean, any thoughts on, like, why do we have this myth? Why does Plato give us this myth as a beginning? And how does it play into Socrates the philosopher, you know, awaiting his execution?
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, that's great. There's. I feel like there's a lot going on in these first few pages even. Even before the mention of the ship. But I think something in the first line itself ties in with that, with the. With the ship returning from Delos. So the ship returning from Delos is in gratitude for the Athenians ages ago being freed from this kind of tyranny from Crete in the minute in the form of the Minotaur and having to send their youth and so on. Who's Minos? Minos is a. He appears in other Platonic dialogues, including the. The Gorgias, as a judge in the underworld. He's a. He's a sort of godly figure who is credited by the Cretans as being the divine founder of their own political order. Maybe in the way that, you know, Romulus is kind of like the divine founder of. Of Rome, though he's a man who becomes a God. There's something somewhat analogous to that. Minos, or maybe Minos is standing in. As God in relation to Moses or something like that. He's the divine source of law and justice. And so he's. He appears, Minos appears as a. As a embodiment of divine justice. And then. Yet you have, in the course of Cretan history in relation to Athens, you have this terrible monster emerge and you have the Minotaur, and there's this horrible perversion of justice, and Athens is suffering. Why do I mention all this? Because the very first line, these, like, first few lines of the dialogue, it seems like it's just window dressing. They start up the conversation like, Crito's in the jail cell really early. What's going on with that? Okay, he bribed the judges. That seems to be what's happening here. But the very first thing that Socrates says, he says, why have you arrived at this hour, Crito? Or isn't it still early? Crito's own name is. Is related to the Greek word for judgment or judge. And so it's almost as if the first line of the dialogue is, hey, justice, why are you here early? You're. You're actually here too early. The executioner, even though that's not who Crito is, but his name conveys judge. Judgment is coming for Socrates earlier than expected. It's not yet daybreak, even. And that's. That's odd because it's in fact, as you pointed out, this has in fact been a delay because of this convention with the ship going and coming back. And so from the beginning, just through those two dramatic moments in the first few pages, Plato's raising the question, is Socrates being executed prematurely? Is there something unjust and sudden and unwarranted about this? Or is he in fact in a position of gratitude towards coincidence? Or maybe it's providence that his, His. His execution sentence came when the ship was absent, and so he has another month to live. And in fact, he should be in a posture of gratitude to the gratuity of the gods or the city, or whatever it is that has given him even more life and time than. Than he deserves. So, right, right there, I think that's an example of. Of Plato using the literary devices, the dialogue, to raise the. The dialectical question, the logical question of the dialogue, which is, has Socrates lived too long or has he lived not long enough? Has he actually exhausted life, and does he deserve to die for corrupting the youth? Or is he, in fact, should he just be grateful for every single day that he's received on this earth and in this city?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that a lot. Thank you for drawing the attention to the first line, which is probably something that we should always do when reading Plato. So maybe to kind of build upon what you said, just a few things that occurred to me. You know, one, it's a religious festival to Apollo. And so, you know, we could draw all kinds of connections there. Apollo, particularly in the oracle, Delphi, seems to be the only Olympian God that Plato, or Plato, Socrates ever seems to give any kind of credence to. So it's. It's a theory feast to Apollo, the God of light that is actually delaying his execution. I think one might be able to push into that a bit. I'm also curious. I don't. This is kind of a raw thought. I'm curious here. You know, the relationship between poetry and philosophy. We saw this so clearly in the Apology. His accuser, his main accuser is a poet. And the poets and the philosophers are kind of vying against each other to be the teachers of the people, who are the actual teachers of the people. And they're antagonistic towards one another to a certain degree. Even though I think Socrates, the. Borrow a phrase, tries to baptize poetry in a lot of ways, I don't think it's against poetry per se, but rather a poetry that can be submissive to philosophy and teach what's actually true. So here, what's really interesting to me is, you know, they vie for the polis. And here's the polis basically under a religious myth, right? The poet that the poets have given them. And so you kind of. You can kind of really maybe ask, like, you know, what is dominant in the polis? And what do we have? Well, we have a polis that is highly referential to the poetics, to this, like, religious myth, while the philosopher is in prison awaiting his execution. If you look at its face, like, which one is actually dominative in the polis? Well, it seems that poetry is winning. It's the one that sets the rhythm of life. It's the one that sets the. The rules and customs and rituals. Meanwhile, philosophy is down in the dark prison. So I wonder if there's things in contrast that can be drawn out there.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, I really like that way of framing it. I think you're right about that. And of course, the surprising thing is that the philosopher uses some kind of philosophy to justify his own execution in the course of this dialogue. So that's not what you may have expected, right? You may have expected him to use his rhetoric, his philosophic power somehow channeled into. Because there's a striking contrast with the apology where Socrates says, I'm not the guy who gives great speeches. And then he gives a great speech in here to persuade Crito to not liberate him. But yeah, it seems like actually there's another connection with the Apology which might be worth mentioning in, in relation to what you just pointed out about this struggle between poetry and philosophy and the fact that Socrates and certainly Plato do not simply reject poetry. Despite some appearances in. In the Apology, there's a striking moment when Socrates is, is temporarily accepting the possibility of paying a great fine instead of, you know, before he's actually given the death sentence. And he says, I don't have much money, but I'll give you the money that I have. And also he mentions that his friends in the audience are speaking up and saying that they'll. They'll sort of pledge their own wealth, which is considerable, on his behalf. So that he. Though he's good for the money, he's good for a great deal of money because several members of the audience are very wealthy and are his friends. And I think he mentions four names, but it's. But Plato, Crito are among the two of them. This is really striking because Plato does not insert himself into the dialogues. That's the only. There's another place where he's mentioned because of relatives and so on in the Platonic corpus, but he doesn't put himself as a character in the dialogues at all. The only place where he, Plato does anything in the dialogues is in that passage in the Apology where Socrates reports that Plato will, will help pay for this, this fine on behalf of Socrates. And it, it. And when we get to the Crito, we think, okay, Crito is a man. He seems to be of considerable wealth. He's able to bribe the guards here and there. He's able to give Socrates a home in Thessaly. And, and everything's going to be taken care of because he can, he can pay his way through anything. What is Plato's way of, of paying for Socrates? What can, what can Plato actually do to secure Socrates? My own theory on that and the way to read that, that passage in the Apology is that Plato's payment on behalf of Socrates is to create a poetry memorializing and almost an epic poetry memorializing Socrates as philosopher. And so Plato's great payment is not actually gold or silver or anything like that so that Socrates won't be executed. It's to write these dialogues. And that's his way, which is, it turns out it's a much superior way to what someone like Crito can do or really any of us could do. Plato is able to, as he says in one of his letters, make Socrates beautiful and young and present him in that form. And that's the ultimate apology, the ultimate defense of Socrates is the whole Platonic corpus, all of the dialogues where, as Socrates says in the apology, look, I'm not going to be able to justify myself to all of you, all 500 and whatever of you Athenians in this context, you're prejudiced against me, I'm not, I'm not a lawyer, etc. But what we can do is we can follow Plato and see Socrates's life imaginatively reenacted in, with attention to his core activity, which is philosophizing. And that becomes a kind of new poetry which stands as a real rival to the heroism that's at the center of the epic and tragic and maybe comedic poems of the time as well. You've got a new epic, a new poetic hero who happens to be a philosopher. And then you've got the poems or the dialogues in which you get to see the drama of Socrates's own heroic quest, which is for wisdom rather than for, for glory or, or something that's beautiful.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that a lot. I mean, let's maybe push into that more, because I think it serves as a good segue, because if that is, you know, because I agree Plato is offering us poetics. I mean, that's one of the things that, like, if you read the Republic, some people walk away saying, like, see, Plato doesn't like poetics, he doesn't like the poets. And it's like, well, how did you know this? You read what, a dialogue, you read a drama. So he, he provides a certain poetry and not only in dialogue, but then we get just republic. You have Gius ring, you have the cave allegory, you have the myth of Ur, constantly using myths, stories, etc, to express these things. But I, I thought what you said was really fascinating of like a new epic, a new heroism, because we have, maybe that gives us a little context because we continually get from Plato illusions or comparisons or juxtapositions between Achilles and Socrates. We saw this almost comedically in the apology, right, where Socrates himself compares himself to Achilles and not having a fear of death. This was something that he, when he talks about patroclus and etc. Here though, to push into the text a little bit here, like, what is this like 44A, 44B? We get this narrative of a dream, very short narrative, but we get, oh, a woman. Socrates says, a woman came to me and she basically said in three days, right? Socrates, may you arrive at fertile Pythia on the third day. And so basically just a few high level things. One, so he's saying, I know when I'm going to die. I've been told by this kind of divine messenger. One, I'd like to know who she is, what does she represent? Like what, who is this, this kind of mysterious female character. Two, we get another, this is, this is an allusion to the Iliad. So just to give some context, if you remember during our year with Homer and we read the Iliad, Achilles is given two fates. He has to choose. One of them is to go back home, right? To a life of peace, a life of family, but of obscurity. He doesn't have the chaos, he doesn't get the glory, but it's home to Pythia. He can return home to this. However, his other choice, his other fate is to die in Troy because then he gets eternal glory out of this death. And obviously he chooses to stay and fight in Troy. So here then we have another illusion, another comparison between Socrates and Achilles. So what is happening? Like what is this dream supposed to be teaching us?
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, that's wonderful. And it, and all of those allusions that you just mentioned to the Homeric stories and the Homeric heroes are there. It seems like the, the most basic reading, which Crito's immediately immediate response is this is a strange dream. And Socrates immediately denies that. He says no, it's pretty clear to me which is, which is itself odd that he sort of dismisses any mystery or something about it. But so the low hanging fruit of course is that he's going to die soon, right? He's returning to Phthia. And in that, in that sense he's, there's a way in which Socrates is being called home and his home, it seems to be, is in the next life or in the realm of the divine. He, he develops this further in the next dialogue in the Phaedo when he talks about the relation between the activity of philosophizing and, and dying. So I don't want to spoil that for your, for your readers, but just look out for that, maybe connect this to, to that discussion in the, in the next dialogue. I don't, I don't have a thesis for the, the specific identity of the woman. She's, she's, she's a beautiful woman dressed in, in white. She seems to be divine in some way. And, and I'm not sure if we're supposed to think of a particular person beyond that I don't have a. I don't have a developed theory there, but this is. Go ahead.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, yeah, no, no, I mean, I'm just kind of spinning my wheels too. I mean, just, you know. Yeah. I mean, obviously, like lady philosophy. Obviously. That's a. That's a more matured phrase. We don't. We don't get that in Plato. But you see this both in the Hebrew tradition, philosophy is. Is wisdom, particularly as compared to woman. Lady was lady wisdom. In the Old Testament literature, we have lady philosophy and Boethius.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's hard not to think of the Symposium with Eros and erotic love. The way that, you know, he talks.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
About with the priestess.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, right, the priestess. That. The fact that this, you know, the beloved can kind of open your eyes, can actually kind of launch you on the ladder of love and your ascent towards the divine beauty itself. I mean, there's a lot of things I feel like you can kind of connect it to. I even try to do a little bit of research to see if he ever contextualized his daemon in like a female context. It doesn't seem that he. He ever did. He does talk about the God talking to him in dreams. It is one of the ways that he says that the God speaks to him. It's not entirely clear it's the daemon that does anything because usually a Damon just checks. It doesn't say positive things. This is a positive thing that this messenger is saying, which doesn't seem to be the role of his daemon. So, yeah, it's just, you know, I don't have a developed theory either, but I just wanted to just maybe par some things out real fast because it's just a fascinating character. Right. And yeah, you're right. He's just like, yeah, it's not weird, and then just moves on. You're like, well, I would like you to tell me more about this dream. I'd like to know who this female character is. But we don't get it. I don't have a strong tethering outside of maybe just some kind of personification of wisdom itself.
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Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah. Just to make a few more notes on those Homeric connections. Right. The Homeric equivalent might be fetus. Right. Who's. Who's the. Who's the mother? Right. Of. Of Achilles. And so there's actually a kind of return home element, which maybe we should keep that in mind when we get later into this dialogue. Because the. The city is presented as the fatherland and it's compared to the father and duties to. To father and so maybe there's. He's sort of balancing out the discussion of the father there with an allusion to the mother. But the other thing happening in, in the Iliad in book nine that this seems to be referring to is when Achilles says to Odysseus that I could return to Phthia. The context for that is him saying it's the embassy scene, it's him, Achilles denying Odysseus invitation to be reconciled to Agamemnon. And so if Agamemnon is the sort of unjust superior over Achilles here, it seems like is it all of Athens is the unjust superior over. Over Socrates. But Socrates is going to complicate that, even though that. That's the way that Crito might be thinking about it. That's the way that we readers might be thinking about the situation. Socrates seems to be alluding to that and yet then going on to complicate that immediately afterwards.
- [33:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Do you, do you think it's interesting though? I really like the Thetis. I really like that a lot. I like that a lot. Do you think though, so, so maybe just pushing more into that. Do you think it's interesting though that it's the Pythia side of the fates that Socrates gets compared to? Because Achilles doesn't choose to return to Pythia. Excuse me, Achilles doesn't choose to return to Pythia. Right. He chooses to die in Troy. So it's interesting here that, like, I mean, I don't want to. I don't. They're all analogies are analogies because they're not the same. And so, you know, to a certain extent, you don't want to stretch them too thin. But like, does Socrates have two fates here? It seems like it, right? One is to maybe to escape. Right. Maybe that maybe this is an illusion, like to escape. But what's interesting here is, is like for Achilles, the escape seems to go home to Pythia, it's reversed. Does that make sense? So for Achilles, the escape is to go home to Pythia, but he decides to die in Troy here with Socrates, his escape would be to go with Kaido to run away, but he contextualizes staying to die not as dying in Troy, but returning to Pythia. Does that make sense? And I'm not sure entirely what to make of that.
- [34:50]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I see exactly what you're saying, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it either. Except. Except to say it, that although it's inverted, there's a way in which Socrates is, is doing the Achilles thing by embracing the. The action that will win him immortal glory. And like Achilles, he needs the help of a poet to memorialize him or else he's just going to die and there's going to be no clios there because no one's going to know about it. And so you. Achilles needs a Homer and, and Socrates needs a. Needs a Plato. And it's by standing his ground, though that here is. Is. Is characterized as not returning to Pythia or returning to Pythia rather than not. So it's inverted in that way. And yet he's, he's somehow saying that he is achieving the kind of thing that Achilles did, though in a radically different and maybe apparently opposed way. And so maybe that maybe the. The meaning of that is to signify that he. He is achieving her heroism, embodying the heroic, almost divine state through speech and contemplation, rather through. Primarily through deeds and, and war. And so maybe it's, it's his way of indicating the parallels, but also the, the inversion of the active life and the contemplative life, if that's how you want to describe the warrior and the philosopher.
- [36:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. I like that a lot. Yeah. Let's push into a little bit into Crito and his kind of argument. So this, you know, so this starts. Let's see. When does Crito actually start? So somewhere around like 44C or so, crito seems to start to give his arguments. I might summarize it just broadly in like two main strokes, you know, one is, what are the majority of men going to think? They're going to think like, I'm wealthy, I could have got you out of here. They didn't. And what are they going to think about you? Like, you could have escaped. Like. So he kind of, he appeals to this majority of men. What will the majority of men think about? And then which I. I laughed out loud. You have to laugh out loud when you read the dialogues. But I really laughed out loud when he said this. Then it down at like 45C. He says, besides Socrates, I do not think what you are doing is just. I always laugh because like, you might as well just set off an atom bomb in the dialogue. Right? Like, and accusing Socrates himself of not being just.
- [37:09]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
You should know better. Yeah, yeah.
- [37:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, Crido. So actually this is actually a question I had.
- [37:13]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Right.
- [37:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So these are kind of the two questions that I think that then Socrates around. Oh, what is that? 46B kind of gives some more structure to Crito and says, okay, these are the Two things I hear from you, the majority of men, is that an opinion that we want? Should we adhere to that? And then two, you know, is what I'm doing just. And so these are the two questions that seem to give structure to the dialogue. One question I had, assuming you think that's a fair summary, is, do we really think, like, do we really think Crito, like, this is gonna work? Like, I guess my question is, is this really an argument of logos? Like, you're really trying to convince Socrates, or is this actually an argument of pathos? Are you really just trying to give him, like, an emotional appeal? Because these things of, like, you know, you're betraying your sons, you're choosing the easiest path. Cowardice, unmanliness. Like anyone who's been reading Socrates up to this point, like, you just have to think, like, none of these arguments are going to work. And so I didn't know, like, is Crito really trying to make an argument, like a logical argument here, like an appeal to logos? Or is this like the one last ditch effort of like, pathos, of like, I'm your friend trying to appeal? And maybe it's a mixture thereof. But the thing is, like, you have to think like Crito. Did you really think this is going to work?
- [38:28]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I think Crito is doing the best he can. And I don't want to be cruel to him because he is, he's really well intentioned. And I mean, gosh, he's going out on a limb here. He's trying to do the right thing as he sees it. But let's think about the little clues that we have about who he is in his character. He's of comparable age to Socrates. They're from the same deme, they're from the same sort of neighborhood of Athens. So they've got a kind of connection, same age. They seem to have known each other for a very, very long time. They seem to have been friends of some kind for a very long time, maybe for their whole life. But we have to keep in mind those qualifiers. Friends of some kind. Is Crito a real philosophic peer with Socrates? Is Crito like one of the young men who often flock to Socrates and are on fire with the desire to gain wisdom, or at least to show up their elders. And then that, that angers everyone and Socrates gets executed for it is, does he have the intellectual chops and the dedication and the. And the focus to really pursue philosophic question in Socrates's mode, over the course of the decades he's lived, it seems like, no, it seems like he is someone who has been friendly with Socrates for a long time. And Socrates many times says, when we were having all of these conversations all these years, were we serious or not? Socrates directly alludes to the fact that Crito has been a participant in, or at least present in the kinds of dialogues that we have through Plato's writings. But he does not seem to have been the lead member, the lead interlocutor, the brightest tool in the tool shed for any of those conversations. And so in a way, Socrates is, is quite gentle with him. And in a way, Socrates is quite generous with him. What Socrates does in this conversation is he gives Crito one of, during the last days of Socrates own life. He gives Crito an intimate opportunity to have a real Socratic conversation with Socrates. And he, he has to help him out a lot. But he's not just there to, to. He's not. Socrates is not just refuting Crito and then sending him on his way. He's treating him with the gentleness that is due to a friend that one has had for a very long time, even if that friend is not on the same level in the kind of activity that they're engaging in right now. So he's being quite polite, I think, to, to, to Crito and being generous and inviting him into a proper conversation that Socrates has to do a lot of the lifting on both sides. He, he in fact has to create a dialogue that Crito can sort of witness and just behold because Crito himself maybe couldn't, couldn't rise to that level. But I see it as, as a, as a very generous response by Socrates, which is ironic because Crito comes off initially as the generous one who's putting his. He's risking breaking the law for Socrates. He's risking all. He's, he's giving all his money for Socrates. And yet Socrates seems to be paying him back by, by saying no thank you, but then also by giving him the experience of sort of taste of, of the philosophic life, which in Socrates estimation is the very best thing. And in Crito's own estimation, apparently Credo had this sort of fuzzy idea that Socrates, his life is worth living and he should, he should keep doing the thing that he does. And so he tries to set him up in the country somewhere, even though there's all kinds of problems with that that Socrates sees and he doesn't. So, so I, he has this. I think it's an, a, a very flawed argument that Crito provides. But Socrates is, is gentle and generous in his response to it, which is really amazing.
- [42:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, imagine that you are sitting in jail unjustly. You just got. Well, not just got done, but you had this amazing speech that you pulled off and then your friend shows up and says, hey, you know what? I think you should abandon everything you said and I think you're being unjust. Like, so actually I. One of the things I found too is not only is Socrates, like over the overarching narrative, is very generous towards Crito, but even like Socrates's initial response to him is very unmoved. It's not, it's not a response of pathos or emotion, which I think it would be for most of us. Like, how dare you? Or who are you? Or were you not paying attention? I, I wonder too then if, if there's like a really a deep care for Crito on behalf of Socrates. Because to be quite frank, I'm still not sure Crito ever gets it. I think Crito makes his appeal and then he gets sucked into a dialogue. And then I think he just stays there to listen to Socrates because he doesn't really give anything of substance, the entire dialogue, just maybe some yeses. Yes, Socrates, I agree, if you say so, whatever. And like you mentioned, this is one of the dialogues in which the interlocutor cannot keep up. And so basically Socrates creates an interlocutor for the dialogue so these conversations can continue to move forward. So, no, I agree with you. I think it's a very generous, it's very kind towards Crito and I don't know, you know, one of the questions is, for whose benefit is this? You know, I think while Socrates does appreciate being tested to a certain degree to make sure that what he's doing is just. It seems to be that like the euthyphro and like for Stalzebiades, the. The benefit is to. Towards the interlocutor. And I'm not really sure Crito is actually open or malleable to it. I think at least my intuition is once he realizes that Socrates isn't going to leave, which is pretty early in the dialogue, I think you can tell, like, this guy's not leaving. Krato doesn't seem to really engage. He's just kind of there with his friend kind of playing it out.
- [44:17]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah. And so perhaps Crito actually understands himself to be benefiting Socrates in that situation. He's like keeping him company or something like that, letting Socrates do the thing that Socrates likes to do, which is have a philosophic conversation. And yet I think you're right, that ultimately it's Socrates attempting to benefit Crito. And if we think about the bigger picture of the dialogue, both back to the meaning of Crito's own name as he's a judge, and we've just seen that in, in the apology, judges can get things grievously wrong. So judges need to be educated. Justice, Athenian justice, needs to be educated. Crito, in some ways, just by the reference of his name is embodying that. But maybe also in the substance of his argument that we need to care a lot about what the many think in, in the context of his argument, that's, he doesn't want the many to think poor, poorly of him and Socrates. But if you, if you keep going with that mentality, maybe the many are the ones who decide what justice is instead of the one who actually knows what it is. And so maybe the way Plato's constructed this dialogue, he's, he's using it as an occasion to, to show Socrates's interest in educating the judge, the embodiment of political justice, even though that that embodiment might be in some way well disposed to him, but really not understanding what, what he's doing or, or the meaning of his life or, or, or the dignity of philosophy or anything like that.
- [45:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So why, why don't we care about what the majority of men think? Right. This is his first argument. So Socrates takes us on, he takes it on. I think he sets up the question around 47A and then the dialogue kind of goes back and forth. So why don't we care about the majority of men? Why is that not a good standard to understand how to live our life?
- [46:12]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, he refers to gymnastics, the doctor and the trainer. This is a clear cut area in which there are right and wrong answers. And you need some kind of sophistication, some kind of expertise to correctly discern the right answer. In medicine or in gymnastics and athletic care, it's a field of excellence in which by definition a few will excel. And it's a field in which Greek culture has made progress to have a somewhat systematic approach to the care of the body and the perfection of the body. And so this is a clear example of how what the many, what the man on the street, or what an opinion poll will tell you about, about what to do in caring for your body is going to be much less reliable than what the person who has dedicated himself to learning this science will be able to tell you. And then of course, Socrates makes the move, as he so often does in his dialogues, of, okay, if we have an expert in medicine, why don't we have an expert in the soul? Who's that? Like, if we have an expert in fitness, why don't we have an expert in justice and nobility and so on? And. And he here just suggests that there is such a person and that it would be that person that we should look to, not. Not the many, not what they happen to think. And so we should not care about their opinions of justice. We should not care about their opinions of us. The standard they're holding us to for whether we're just or unjust is an unreliable and false standard. And so we need to discern the correct standard. And he then suggests very strongly that he's already found that and in fact, that they, Socrates and Crito presumably was there. He should have been following the conversations over the years. And their other friends, they know better what justice is, and they know better what. What we should pay attention to and what we should ignore or at least set aside.
- [48:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very good. It is interesting that he, as he does so often, he couples and juxtaposite, juxtaposition, opposes the body and the soul, right? So that's at 47E, he talks about the body, and then at 48A, he talks about the soul, right? Is the life worth living for us with that part of us corrupted, that unjust actions, harm and just actions benefit? Or do we think that the part of us, whatever it is, that is concerned with justice and injustice is inferior to the body, you know? No, not at all. So, yeah, he. I mean, this is a clear way that he typically thinks, right? So he gets his interlocutor to understand about what we're gonna do about gymnastics or, you know, music or something that they understand. And then he draws an analogy out to the incorruptible right to the soul, to the spiritual, if you want to use that. And, you know, so this falls pretty flat, right? Like, I don't. Again, you're like, krito, did you really. I mean, the guy just stood up against 500 of his countrymen, right? And. And basically, at times critiqued them. Like, do you think he's really gonna fall for a critique of, like, hey, the majority will think poorly of you? I think they already do. I mean, that's why he's in this position, right? So he. This falls pretty quickly. And then it kind of gets into what I think is the meat of the dialogue itself, which is the accusation that, Socrates, you're not acting justly. And this, I mean, this is I think to maybe defend Crito. I think this is a good argument. Or maybe we could phrase it this way, like, if you are unjustly condemned, is it unjust to escape? If you are unjustly condemned. Right. You're put in prison for a clearly unjust reason. Is it not just then for you to escape? And, I mean, I think maybe at its best, this is Crito's argument. It seems to make sense to a lot of people. When I read it in my Sunday small group, you know, we had one or two people that were like, yeah, I would escape. I don't know why he's not escaping. Like, what does it matter why? Like, why give into this? You know? And the Catholics were thinking, an unjust law is no law. Why do I need to obey this? I can leave. So I think this is a good argument. And actually now, as you mentioned earlier, we get the fascinating component of the philosopher who's unjustly in prison awaiting his unjust execution, is going to now explain why it would be unjust for him to leave.
- [50:47]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, and, and part of what's, what's so striking about that. Well, well, okay, so the, the, the comments around the edges of this argument, Crito's plan is, I will. I've got a safe house for you off in Thessaly, which is not exactly as fertile ground for philosophic conversation as Athens. I mean, it's, this is the boonies he's talking about of Greece. It's not a great cultural center like imperial Athens at the turn of the 4th century BC. It's not Socrates's home. It's also not a place where he could, where there's orderly laws and a high culture, where he could do the thing that he lives for, which is philosophize. And so around. So the context for the whole, this whole argument is, well, the option that Crito is giving, giving him is actually not really consistent with Socrates's own primary concern, which is to philosophize. In addition, Socrates makes comments several times about his age. I mean, he's been around for a while, and Athens gave him 70 years. And it, it took. He wasn't philosophizing and stinging them like a gadfly that whole time, but it's been quite a while. And so he, maybe he's ready to die. Right. He's had the, he's had the dream that in the third day he's going to be going home. And that seems to be. He's going to be going to Hades. And so he's Lived long enough. And so, so there's also that in addition to the argument itself, I just wanted to point out there are these sort of dramatic factors that are, that are laid around it, that it's not as simple. Do you disobey the unjust law or do you obey the unjust law? It's also, Socrates is a particular man who's living in a particular place under certain conditions and has his own history. But yeah, he develops this into the, this is where he has to construct the dialogue with the laws of Athens, right? He has to himself become the laws and answer. Answer himself, but answer Crito's objections by saying this is around. I'm looking now at 50B and C. Should we tell them, should we, Crito, tell the laws that the city was doing us injustice and did not pass judgment correctly? Shall we say this or what? And Crito gets really enemy. Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, yes, this is what we've got to say. This is his most, his. His moment of most greatest excitement, right? And this is what you're pointing to, that maybe the city is doing injustice. And so if it's doing injustice, then it's, it's not just to, to go along with it. And his, his answer to this is the laws of Athens that Socrates is, is channeling in this dialogue. Pull, pull back the camera, right? And then they zoom out and say, think about the entirety of your existence, the entirety of your. Who gave you that? Who. To whom are you indebted? And it's a little bit of a strange argument to us because we might think, well, my parents, period. But Socrates speaking in the voice of the laws instead says, well, yeah, your parents, because the city has marriage laws, something like that, that your, your parents were married in the city according to the laws and customs and presumably the religious aspects of that of Athens. And so there's a way in which Athenian law was there from the beginning at your very. At the condition for your conception, which is to say that the marriage of your parents, and also in your nurture and your education, our city, the laws of our city commanded your father to provide you an education in music and gymnastic. And so even though there wasn't a public school system or something like that educating you, you're still indebted to the city because it was the, it was forming the people who were forming you. And so really you're formed by, by the city ultimately. And this becomes. At 50e. It seems almost excessive because at one point he says, you, Socrates, are Athens offspring and slave. Slave. That seems Quite excessive offspring, I was persuaded by a little bit. But the way I understand that comment is that Socrates's debt to Athens is the kind of debt that can never be repaid. And the thing that was really striking to me reading this through is this seems to anticipate the way that the tradition, millennia later will speak about piety. St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa speaks about the virtue of pietas as doing justice to those to whom we are indebted to such an extent that we can never repay the debt. And Thomas talks about God, country and parents as the three creditors who we can never fully repay for everything they have given us. And this whole speech in 50 and 51 ending around 51c, Socrates even talks about how it's not pious to do violence to parents. It's not pious to violate the city's commands. And that. That again, is just a striking anticipation of the way that Cicero and then later St. Thomas Aquinas will. Will think about this, that there's a kind of piety that's proper to. To parents as well as to God and indeed to city in between those two.
- [56:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that. I like that a lot. Yeah. We've been tracking this kind of threefold piety since we've read Homer, right. Because he's not as explicit about it in a philosophical sense. But I think a lot of ways you see this in Hector, right? Hector is pious towards the gods, towards Troy and towards his parents. And actually, I think a lot of the tension in the Iliad is what happens if this hierarchy starts to try and pull you in different ways. What if your parents and the polis are contrary? What if the gods are contrary to the interests of the polis? Where do your interests lie? And you can see this too, even in things like Antigone, the play Antigone by Sophocles, with Antigone arguing with Creon about what to do with her brother's body. The polis is under the divine. There's a certain piety that we're supposed to have this. Well, how dare you strike out, you know, little girl, against Creon. I am the king. Yes, but we're both subject to the divine. We have piety. And what's the divine wants to do. So we've had this idea that. That piety really is an act of gratitude. But it also, it seems very flat in our culture. Like when we talk about someone who's pious, it's like, well, they say their rosary every day. Sometimes pious even can mean like aloof or overly Innocent or something like that. But piety here has a very thick understanding of something that even gives political structure, cosmic structure, even structure to the soul. And so, no, I think this threefold piety is incredibly important, and it's played out, I think, very explicitly here. You owe a piety to your parents, to the polis, and to the gods, and in that order, in that hierarchy. And I really like this. I mean, I think it's a politics of gratitude. I mean, this is something that's completely foreign and alien to us as modern Americans, right under our liberal democracy. I mean, we talk about rights. Our entire political language is saturated in rights. I mean, as soon as we wake up, it's, what am I owed? This is what is owed to me. We don't ever talk about, like, my duty, a duty that. That blossoms, that. That is nourished, that is brought forth from my gratitude about what I have received from the polis. I mean, we don't even think about this towards the polis, much less the divine anymore. But there's something that. And I really like this. I think Cicero plays it out too much. And I'm trying not to maybe make this argument overly mature by looking down the line at cicero and. And St. Thomas Aquinas. But, you know, there really is a common good. I mean, one way, like, a really simple way to look at it is you're a child. You can't do anything. You. You cannot take care of yourself. You can't do anything. And yes, you rely on your parents, but your parents rely on society, right? You're born in a hospital. You participate in a society that has, you know, medicine and food and transportation. You do all these things, and all you're doing is soaking it all in. You have not contributed a single bit towards the common good. And for us, like, you know, we become adults, and that doesn't matter to us at all. We just claim, okay, well, this is what I'm owed. And we. We invent new rights all the time, and our rights, you know, are antagonistic to one another. And we fight out whose rights are dominant. And this is really where all our political discourse comes from. But the ancients, and particularly think of maybe like Cicero, you know, talk about you become an adult, and it's like, what can I give back? Like, finally, I've been nourished by the common good of the polis, not to the exclusion of the divine, but just to focus on the polis, right? I've been nourished by the common good of the polis. I've been nourished by my parents, the gods have taken care of me, and now I have capacity. And the gratitude I have in my heart is an impetus, an invitation to give back. What, what great deed can I do? What, what, you know, Arete, do I have that could give back to Rome, that could give back to Athens? I mean, this is just an insanely alien political thought to us today.
- [60:11]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
And it's. That's all of that, I think, is a true ground for patriotism, which is something that, that it's a. It's a value that you could mention. And people will say, oh, yeah, of course it's a good thing, but that's the proper ground for it. It says, understanding that I. I owe an unrepayable debt to my country as well as my parents and to God. And the manifestation when I start to act rightly and in a rightly ordered way on that gratitude, on that sense of obligation, then I'm acting in a patriotic manner. And you mentioned the contrast between the ancient view and our contemporary view. And I think a big part of that could be explained by the fact that we conceive of society is something that we have made in some sense. So this is to dip into the political philosophic tradition way forward from Plato and Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The modern social contract theorists, who I mention in part because the Crito comes strangely close to articulating this, but I think departs in a very important way. The social contract theorists posit that we're all naturally individuals instead of naturally social. And so there's such a thing as a state of nature which is. Which is not political, not social, not civil. And we humans, at some point, individuals get together and create through a social compact. We construct a society by an agreement with one another. And then this new thing exists, the government comes into being out of a bunch of isolated individuals agreeing to make something together, agreeing to construct something together. And if, if that's the. If that's the way we imagine that political society works, not just governments, but society itself, the nation itself, which then has. Has a regime, then it's our inferior because it's something we made. And so a tool that I made is a tool for me. And I'm. I'm a God in relation to it, and so it's below me. And so of course, I ought to. I ought to think about what it can do for me and not what I can do for myself. Country. I mention that, though, in relation to the Crito, because Socrates winds up arguing in the voice of the laws that he, Socrates implicitly consented to the laws by being formed by them and then not moving away. Right. So the argument is that you have incurred this debt because the laws and the society of Athens raised you and made you who you are in some way. And if you really wanted to, to get away, you could have. The laws do not prohibit you from moving away and even, even taking your property with you and just relocating. So you have tacitly consented to the laws being your authority, in addition to the fact that you just, you just owe this debt of gratitude. And so that starts to look like a social contract theory. But I would want to distinguish them at the root. They're radically different in that for Socrates, what comes first is the city standing in position of fatherland to the citizen. It's as a father. And it begins in total dependency and total formation. As you were describing, a child is dependent upon parents and then the broader society. And that seems to be what is primary. You could, you can remove yourself from your country. Whether that's actually a just thing to do or not, you're permitted to do it. And then you wouldn't be under its authority anymore. But Socrates has not chosen to do that. And there's a really interesting comment to this effect. This is, I'm, I'm looking at 52B Socrates again speaking to himself in the voice of the laws. The laws say, right, at 52B, Socrates, we have great proofs that both we and the city were satisfactory to you. You would never have exceeded all the other Athenians in staying at home in it, unless it had satisfied you exceedingly. You never went out of the city to see the sights of, except once to the Isthmus, to the Isthmian Games, nor did you ever go anywhere else except when you were with the army on campaign somewhere, and so on. What's really interesting about that line. So Socrates is a homebody. He, he doesn't get out much. And the only time he gets out is one time he goes the Isthmian Games, which is a little bit like the Olympic Games. It's a religious festival at the Isthmus of Corinth. And then he's also, he serves in the army. And so he goes on campaign and fight, but that he doesn't get out from Athens other than that. But the phrasing that Plato uses here is that you never went out of the city to see the sights, which is epitheorean. So this is the area is the verb for seeing or beholding. And it's where we get our word for theory or contemplation. And so the phrasing of this is that you, Socrates, you never went somewhere else to contemplate. Like, you didn't travel around the thing that your own way of life is centered on, contemplation, philosophic contemplation, you thought Athens was adequate for that. And so not just as in the ordinary manner of a. Of a man traveling to foreign countries and just having a good time getting to see the sites, but in this. There's an allusion here to Socrates's philosophic activity that the laws are saying to him that you didn't need to go somewhere besides Athens in order to be the philosopher that you were. And so even if we, the laws of Athens did not directly form you to be a Socratic philosopher, we didn't intend for you to found the tradition of Western philosophy when we were raising you in music and gymnastic. Nevertheless, your own life in becoming a philosopher and doing all the wonderful things you did in that was conditioned by Athens, and Athens was adequate for that, that. And so you should be grateful to us, to Athens, not only for your life, not only for your education in the ordinary sense of that, but even perhaps for your. For your development into Socrates the philosopher in the way that Plato, Plato's readers understand him.
- [66:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. Yeah. A couple thoughts or a few thoughts, one going back to your comments on, like John Locke and things like that. And I do have a question kind of when we get to that point. But it seems though, that modern liberalism, maybe they put this in this context in a lot of ways, is the political theory that we can run a polis without piety to the divine right, which actually sounds very normative to us, but it actually would have been an incredibly bold and striking claim at that time, because everyone from, you know, Aeschylus to Aquinas believed that for the polis had to be aligned, right? That the soul, maybe it's a little bit much, but the family, the polis and divine had to be aligned for there to be true justice in the cosmos, right? And Plato comes in and really adds the soul to that. So you have a soul, you have a family, you have a polis, and you have the divine. And these things have to align for there to be this kind of justice in the cosmos. In a lot of ways, liberalism is an argument that we don't have to have that anymore, that the polis can actually be detached and can somewhat rebel or even that we can fracture that piety to the divine into a million different pieties, and it won't matter. I think that's an interesting way maybe to look at the. Look at liberalism and its experiment. The other thing that occurs to me, too, is, you know, again, piety is so odd to us. You think, well, how does piety. How do problems in piety even cause political problems? And this is what we have to think about the apology that he was actually being charged with impiety. He denies the gods and he invents new ones. And in doing this, he corrupts the youth. I think again, here it's hard not to think of Aristophanes, the clouds. That kind of shows you, like, okay, well, you know, Socrates, that kind of caricature of him over and over again says, I don't believe in Zeus. I don't believe in Zeus. It winds up happening. Well, your oaths don't matter. Anything, nothing matters. And so what ends up happening? There's chaos. What was the guy's name? Not Strepsides. His son. Yeah, Fidipides. He's, like, beating his own parents and, you know, meeting creditors, you know, so you. You don't have to pay your debts. You don't have to listen to your parents anymore. And it devolves into chaos. Why? Because there's no piety. It's that piety towards the divine that kind of holds everything together. You almost think of another example would be guest friendship, maybe. And, Homer, how does guest friendship even work? Why. Why do guest and host have these vulnerabilities towards each other? Well, you know, one reason is. Is that, you know, the stick there is Zeus, that if one of these parties violates this. Remember when Menelaus, I think, goes against Paris the first time in the Iliad, he cries out to Zeus like, let me win. To show what happens to guests who violate guest friendship. Right. I mean, absconding with your host's wife is typically a negative. Right. Let me show what happens to a man who does this. So I think that, you know, I'm reminded of this, particularly. This is at, like, 51A or so he's talking about all the different ways because he said there's a line in here that it's repeated over and over again. You will destroy us. Yeah, right? If you escape Socrates, you will destroy us. You know, something on this read through that really caught my attention. Like, how? How. I think that's a good question, right? How will this destroy the polis? And I think thinking back to the clouds is One good example that if you have this impiety even towards the polis, in that people see that in piety, like, oh, look, Socrates can run away. Because think about, like, play this out, right? Socrates can run away when he thinks Athens is being unjust to him. Well, great. What do you think the next guy is going to think? What do you think all the people think that get sentenced to death? They all think it's unjust, so now they all can escape. They. That's the precedent that's set. So I think one thing too here is to think about, like, the precedent that's being set. What would Socrates be teaching the people in the polis if he did this? And how would this kind of deconstruct or destroy the order, the political order that the laws have founded? Yeah.
- [70:32]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
One brief comment on liberalism. I think we could do several podcasts on this. But to tie in with that, Thomas Hobbes is quite consistent here. He says that you have absolutely no rights in relation to the sovereign, except when the sovereign tries to kill you. And then you could resist. And there's like, you're allowed to run away. You're allowed to kill the man who comes to kill you, the executioner, whatever. There is none of this sort of politics of gratitude argument that Socrates is making. So, so Hobbes has that kind of consistency actually going for him in his own system, playing out the, as you put it, the removal of piety from, from the political order. In terms of the clouds. I mean, that's, that's one of my favorite ancient Greek, Greek texts, actually. And, and reading it in relation to, to Plato. I'm so glad you're doing that. It's so illuminating. On the one hand, Socrates has. Okay, so the, the apology is explicitly answering the accusations of the clouds. But the way in which Socrates answers those accusations in the, in, in the apology is a little bit strange. He claims to be the most pious and best citizen because he claims he has this divine mission and he's actually benefiting the city as much as possible by stinging them out of their slumber. They're the great horse that's asleep and he's the gadfly stinging them. And he's sort of surprised that they're not thanking him for stinging them all the time. So in a way, he has a, he has a response there that he is the best citizen, not the worst citizen. He's not corrupting the youth, he's actually leading them. He's not accused of that by any of the youth or their parents. And he's actually leading them to justice and so on. Nevertheless, the impression one gets in the apology is that he's angering everyone and he seems to be in a certain way still embodying the caricature of the clouds, which is to say he's living a life that he, Socrates in the, in the apology admits is incomprehensible to most people when he says the unexamined life is not worth living for most people. The context of that famous one liner from the apology is that, look, if I really explain to you what I'm all about, you're not going to believe me. You're going to think I'm joking or something like that, that I would actually rather die than shut up. You don't understand me and I can't make you understand me. The only way I could do that is if you come and live with me for a while and I actually engage in dialogue with you for, for a long period of time. And so there's still a kind of maybe correction that's, that has to happen in, in the Crito, which is that he, when, when push comes to shove, Socrates will walk the walk. He, he will in fact obey the laws. And, and the reason I think, that that argument still needs to be maybe in a sense he is guilty, I mean, corrupting the youth from the standard of Athenian piety. Does Socrates believe in the Greek gods in the way in which the ordinary Athenian does? I don't think so. And does Socrates? He sees piety as a virtue. He understands justice as a virtue. He has better arguments for piety and justice and moderation, courage and everything than anyone else in Athens. But he doesn't understand by them the exact same thing as everyone else does. And so does he introduce new gods? He sort of does. He seems to reconceive Zeus or the divine in through the forms or the ideas, his, his doctrine or a theory of the forms. Those seem to be new gods, and that's certainly the way that they're portrayed in the clouds, is that these are the new gods that Socrates is worshiping and it's not Zeus. And so there's a way in which Socrates is posing a theological challenge to, to Greece. He, he's philosophized and he has come into quarrel with the poets, as we mentioned earlier. And who are the poets? They're not just good storytellers, but they're the bearers of sacred tradition. They're the ones you go to to learn about the gods and the heroes. And Socrates is entered into a quarrel with them and said, you don't fully understand what the human is, and you don't seem to understand fully what the divine is either. And we need to sort these things out. And so there is a sense in which he is guilty. It's not because he's a bad person or harming the Athenians, but he is shaking them up and he's challenging their authorities precisely because he's seen the flaws in their authorities. And yet he can still walk the walk in the crito. He could still say, even though I see the flaws in your foundations of your moral vision and your theology and all of that, your mythology and all of that, nevertheless, you made me who I am, and I am infinitely indebted to you, and I am going to submit to your authority, and I'm not going to do so in such a way that betrays my own vocation. I'm not going to censor myself. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna embrace exile. I'm gonna stand as a kind of witness against your. Your flaws, and yet I am still going to drink the hemlock when it, when it comes to it.
- [75:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. I like that a lot. Yeah. One thing that, that occurs to me down at like 53A, and you kind of mentioned this too, is the, you know, hey, why don't you go to Sparta? Why don't you go to Crete? Like you, like you said, those were good governments. Like, why didn't you leave? Why didn't you go? One of the things that you kind of alluded to earlier that I want to pick up here is maybe by way of analogy is to use Leo Strauss, which is probably a terrible idea because if anyone's more vague and difficult to ascertain than Plato, it's probably Leo Strauss.
- [76:20]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
But I'm going to clear light on this, I'm sure.
- [76:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yes. I'm going to sally forth into this anyway and make everyone upset. But one of the things that people always debate with, with Leo Strauss is that, you know, he critiques communism, he critiques fascism, and then at certain points he critiques liberal democracy and liberalism. And at other points he seems to sing its praises. And there's a lot of questions then about, like, what. What is he. Like, what is his actual ideas about liberalism and democracy and these types of things. It occurs to me that that whole conversation is somewhat analogous to what we're seeing here with Socrates, is like, well, I can tell you what, if I go live under the communists, I'm not a philosopher, and if I go live under the fascists, I'm not going to be able to be a philosopher now. I can live under a liberal democracy and it has lots of problems, but I can be a philosopher, right? I have the freedom, even though that freedom is highly abused and a lot of my citizens are going to become drunk on it and ruin their lives. I can use that freedom to pursue a good life. And it seems like something analogous is going on here of like, well, yeah, I could go to Sparta, I could go to Persia, I could go to the other places, you know, or I could go to the countryside and, you know, a little hideaway hole. But can I philosophize there? Can I be a philosopher? I don't think so. I. I think I have to give up my life of philosophy. And he saw the apology. He won't do that. He won't choose exile if it means the end of the philosophic life. So he stays in Athens even though Athens has all its problems. It has allowed him. I mean, I guess my point here is like, even though it hasn't proactively nourished the philosophic life, I guess maybe that's overly critical, but it hasn't, it hasn't actually nourished it. And if anything, it's a little bit antagonistic against it, you know, particularly here at the end, it still has permitted it, and that's actually more than any other political system currently. So therefore it is the best option of the worst options because it's the only real one we have. Does that make sense?
- [78:22]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yes, and I think that's actually.
- [78:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that's actually somewhat analogous to our current liberal democracy. But that's how I read, like, why he owes this great debt to Athens. It's not even because Athens understands it as a gift it gave to him, it's just that it allowed him to have a philosophic life to a certain extent.
- [78:46]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yes. Yeah, I, I think that's wonderful. I'm glad you brought in Strauss. That wasn't where I expected that to go, but that's actually a really one great place for that to go with, with the comment on Strauss. And I'll just keep going in the Straussian direction and mention Al Farabi, who's the medieval Islamic Platonist philosopher who Strauss was very interested in. There's a passage in one of Al Farabi's works where he's. He's doing a kind of summary of Plato's Republic, though it's not, it's not a strict summary, but he's talking about similar themes and he talks about certain human types arising in a city like weeds. They're not cultivated and they are seen as obnoxious. But it seems in that passage that Farabi is, is thinking about sophists and philosophers, and it's hard to sort of have one without the other. And it seems like that's an image for describing what you just described about Socrates in relation to Athens, that they weren't trying to engineer Socrates when they set up their education system in the Republic, in Plato's Republic, Socrates creates an entire city that is ordered towards the production of philosophers, just order in general, but also philosophers as their kings. And it's very deliberately ordered towards cultivating everything you would need to have the best philosopher kings within it. And that is not Athens. That in no way describes Athens. And yet here, between the lines, as it were, there are illusions that Socrates himself makes that the conditions were there. Not only did Athens permit him, it didn't squash him for 70 years, and then it finally killed, which is a pretty good run. Even more than that, it had the sort of cultural conditions and the freedom without being a Spartan military aristocracy, that would have not permitted Socrates to spend his leisure time in this way. It permitted, in a certain way, indirectly cultivated him by trying to cultivate its citizens into good Athenian citizens. And so I think that point of yours is very well taken. And I like the comparison to Strauss and contemporary liberal democracy, that at a minimum, the case to be made is that this permits a great deal of diversities of ways of life. And many of those are really disordered, but a few of them are pretty good. And that. That's also Socrates in Plato's Republic when he talks about democracy, it's the second worst regime. It's right there on the bottom of the ladder, just above tyranny. And yet he says it's a, it's an amazingly diverse place that permits all kinds of different souls to, to emerge in different, different orders of lives to emerge. And so you can sort of do whatever you want there. And you could even get really serious about virtue and philosophy in such a society. It's not structurally going to help you in the way that you might want, in the way that a better, a more orderly society would directly towards your good and, and the common good and the highest good. It will not do that for you, but at least it's not forcing you towards, towards some ideological idol like a communist regime. Is.
- [82:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. You know, one thing too that occurs to me, and we mentioned this when we, we studied the apology too, is, is like to what degree can a polis, a civilization, survive the advent of a Socrates or a Jesus Christ? And if you kind of just there's that can go very many different directions, but to kind of capsulate it in what we've been talking about here. So you have this threefold piety and it cascades down, right? So we have the divine polis family. And so if something shifts in the divine, it should shift in the polis. And so if you get someone like Socrates who comes in, denies the gods and makes strange gods, is talking about the God and the daemon that's been given to him and all these things, you can see very quickly why that becomes so dangerous to the polis. And particularly what's, what's most dangerous is, is if the guy's right, if it's the individual that's right and the polis is wrong. But the polis would have to restructure to match what's now true. And that restructuring is basically, I guess, certain civilizations have done it well, but typically it's brutal. Typically it's a death and a rebirth, right? And so you look at Athens, you can think of like Jerusalem after our Lord. I mean, how many times in John's Gospel does our Lord prophesy that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed? I mean that because when Christ comes, right, the same thing happens. The piety shifts. The piety, how we give piety to divine shifts. God is now amongst us. This is what he's telling us. He's, he's updating the covenant, he's perfecting it. We get Sermon on the Mount. I mean, a lot of people are like, I really would have liked to live during Jesus day. I think I would, I know I would not have wanted to live.
- [83:54]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
No, I very much pass away.
- [83:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I would not have it. I, I, it's too complicated. Like, I don't know where my piety would have fallen. I very much enjoy 2000 years of saints thinking about these things and handing on.
- [84:06]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
He said he was bringing a sword. Like, what did you think that meant? Like, yeah, he is coming with a sword.
- [84:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like, I just don't, you know, maybe the gospel is played up, but, you know, our Lord talks in parables all the time. And I'm like, no, I would not risk it. I love having the Catholic Church telling me this is what dogmatically believe. This is great. I love this. I'll receive it right? The point there is like, when the individual comes, like Socrates or Christ, that reorients the piety of the divine and the Polis has to shift, that, that's really dangerous and that causes these kind of societal restructures. And so it just, it occurs to me then, you know, in that context, why then the polis then can, can be so violent towards someone like that. And then you think of, you know, obviously the, the list of individuals goes on. You think of St. Joan of Arc, you think of St. Thomas More, right? You think of these people, right, that, that were martyred because, right, they stood up against certain things. And that for the polis to actually say this individual is correct would have admitted that the polis needs to restructure and the polis doesn't do that. It would rather kill the individual and move on. And so I think what we see here too is that, that, that shifting of the piety is difficult and it can really bring violence, particularly on whoever the prophet is, right, to use that term, that's trying to reorient the city.
- [85:30]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I think that's, that's absolutely right. Socrates in a sense, Socrates sets in motion the destruction of, of the, of the Greek polis. It needs to be refounded because it's fundamental concepts at all of these levels from the, from the divine downwards are, are necessarily shifting with this kind of new, new thing that's happening, which is philosophy actually philosophizing. And, and I, I love to remind my, my colleagues in theology that, that the first use of the term theologia is in Plato's Republic, Republic. That's the first record we have of that word. And so Plato came up with that because what precedes it and he see it is theogony, it's the generations of the gods, but it's not yet logos about the divine. And Socrates says in as many words this is something we need to do. And I don't have all the data, but I'm going to do what I can. So he sort of invents natural theology and he doesn't have scripture and he doesn't have revelation, but he conceives of that project of, of thinking through logically what the, what the God must be and what, what his attributes are, what we could say or could not say about, about the God. And so yeah, there's a sense in which Socrates comes along and does that to the Greek polis. And there's a sense in which Jesus, what does he do? Does he put the final nail in the coffin of the ancient city or he, he, he does that in a sense for Rome. The peculiar thing about this is I, I wonder if this means that there has to be a sense in which it was just for Socrates to be executed. And, and if, if that's the. Maybe it's a limited sense, but maybe he actually was violating the laws of Athens, even if he has a wonderful justification for his, his, his way of life. And then we today are the inheritors of this amazing tradition of political philosophy and of, of all the kinds of things that Socrates is doing that was not yet a tradition in his time, that would be, that would be a strange conclusion to reach. That, that there, it's a. Both and it's not that either Socrates or Athens is, is simply right, but that precisely because Socrates, by being right and while Athens is wrong, Socrates is a threat. And so this, the city ought, the city has a kind of obligation to respond to that threat. That would be a very strange and somewhat paradoxical conclusion to reach. But I wonder if it, if we, if we have to go in that direction.
- [88:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Do you think, do you think it's odd that Socrates does not appeal to the divine in this dialogue? What I mean by that is, could he simply not tell. Could he simply not tell Crito, like, you know, my, my daemon's not checking me. Or could he simply tell Crito, by the way, I mean, just, he could just borrow arguments from the apology. I know I can't leave. I have a vocation to Athens. The God has assigned me. I'm the gift, right? I'm the. I'm God's gift to Athens. So one thing that was really interesting to me here, as I kind of reread it, was Socrates seems to be. I don't want to make it like a secular argument because that, that's, that's not the right word. But Socrates could have leaned into the divine much harder in this dialogue and he doesn't. He seems to really want to convince Crito that you need to stay because of this gratitude towards the polis. The polis has nourished you. And even though it's, it's clear from the dialogue, the polis is subject to a piety to the divine. I think that's there the divine is in the dialogue. It's not nearly. I mean it's, it's thick in the apology. And that thickness is not here in Crito. And I wonder, I wonder why that is.
- [89:24]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I think that's right. It is around the edges. So I think the dream, you could think of the dream as some. Something divine. And then, and then at the very end there's this reference to the Corybantes, which maybe we could talk about in a second. But so it's sort of bookending that he makes these quasi, quasi religious, quasi divine invocations. But the heart of it is absolutely what you said. It's something that's going to be more accessible to Crito and portable. It's something he can take with him that he doesn't need a Socrates around to have some revelation from the God in order to reason through whether he should obey the laws or not. So in a way what Socrates is doing is he's giving Crito a private lesson in philosophizing about moral and political duty. And that's the sort of thing that, that in principle is open to anyone more so than, than receiving a private revelation through it through a daemon or something like that. And so maybe it's just more appropriate. Maybe it's, it's also more Socrates's mainstay in terms of he, he doesn't frequently entry or maybe at all introduce premises into his arguments in the course of the dialogues that are revealed premises. He's a, he's a philosopher. And, and so it, it's. I'm not, I'm not saying this is rhetoric in the sense of mere rhetoric, but it maybe is rhetorically appropriate for him to do that in front of the 500 jurymen in, in the apology that I'm being accused of impiety. Let me answer that with, with a direct claim to piety through this, this story of going to the oracle and what it said and so on. And maybe it's, that's the kind of thing that will be more accessible to a huge crowd of Athenians where he can't take them all step by step through a, through an argument. Again, I don't say that to suggest that it, that, that, that that didn't actually happen, that that's not a real story. I don't, I don't know about that. But it seems like this is more his ordinary mode of, of argument. Argumentation and, and the heart of it is going to be reasoning through. He also says he genuinely wants to persuade Crito based on Crito's own opinions. He doesn't want to just assert something that is going to override Crito's thought. Maybe Crito would actually go along with that, given who he is. But this again seems to be Socrates's strange mode of, of generosity, which is he's going to try to elevate Crito as much as possible, even if that's kind of challenging for.
- [91:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I think it's really insightful. I appreciate that. What do you think? What do you think about the ending? So like one of the things that the first time I read it, well, not the first time I read it, but when I read it twice, as I was kind of preparing for this and for my Sunday small groups, my Sunday Great Books small group is at first like my first read through, I was like, oh yeah, this one doesn't end with a myth. Like I said, we kind of get habituated that when we read Plato, like there's, there's like a myth at the end, there's like this supernatural justification. So he tends to make these like philosophy arguments, but then at the end he tends to always like cap it on to like, oh, and by the way, like, you know, here's the myth of er or here's, you know, the myth that's in the Gorgias. But actually he does. I know this on my second ring, right? The laws do 54B here towards the end they be persuaded by us who have brought you up. Socrates do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive in Hades you may have all this as your defense before the rulers there. So it's not a full blown myth, but it is an appeal to the judgment which is what so many of the myths are trying to explain. Right. You think of myth of Ur, you think of the Gorgias like they're extended myths that are very, you know, detailed. But the point there is that being just in this life will be rewarded than the next. Right? You're going to be judged. You can't think of your actions just within the temporal, but rather you have to think about them in the spiritual as well. And so it's interesting here that it's actually the laws that then are appealing back to the sacred stories, to the myth, to explain to Socrates why he needs to be just.
- [93:36]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, and you're right to notice that pattern. And that pattern, I think it's most clearly the case in, in the Gorgias because he says it explicitly there. But that pattern of Socrates arguing philosophically and then capping it, capping it with a myth which is consonant with the conclusions of the argument. That's what Socrates says explicitly in the, in the Gorgias, that, that this myth he's going to tell is. Is. Is a speech which, which reflects the thing that they actually just argued through dialectically or that he at least concluded dialectically practically in, in that work, that there's a kind of. He's try, he's showing that there's a consonance and there's a memorable story that one can take away from this, which will bring you to the same conclusion. That seems to be the case here as well, that he want. He wants to leave us and Crito with that. So that. That's all, as you pointed out, that's in the voice of the laws in 54B and C. There's also this final comment that Socrates makes to Crito, or next to final. This is at 54D. Having finished speaking in the voice of the laws, Socrates says, know well, my dear comrade Crito, that these things are what I seem to hear these things, this whole speech from the Laws, just as the Corybantes seem to hear the flutes and this echo of these speeches is booming within me and makes me unable to hear the others. Okay, so who are the Coravantes? I've got a note in my edition which is very helpful. It reads, in connection with worship of the God Cybele, a rite was developed to cure nervousness and hysteria by means of dancing to frenzied music played on the flute in the kettle drum. Participants in this psychiatric exercise were called Corybantes. The present passage suggests that the music echoes, probably with calming effect, in the memory of those who have undergone the cure. And so to draw out the analogy, the speeches of the laws which Socrates has just gone through and constructed or retold are echoing in his own mind and confirming to him. He's able to sort of replay this dialogue that he just had with himself of laws and him with him trying to argue for the Crito position in Fleeing from Athens. And he's able to somehow play that through his head. And so those speeches echo within him as a kind of something he can repeat to himself, as a kind of like, catechism, a dialectical catechism of here's how I'm going to arrive at these conclusions of the way I ought to act. I've gone through this enough times in my head that it's stuck in my mind and I can appeal back to it. And yet that's described by. With reference to the. To the Coravantes who are worshiping the goddess. And so it's also this kind of liturgical as well as. As argumentative reference.
- [96:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a wonderful insight. Yeah, I appreciate that as like a. A cure for nervousness, a cure for anxiety. Like, that's. That's really telling. Right, Because Socrates will see this in the. The Phaedo too, which we're going to read next. Everyone else is weeping Everyone else is like really, every. It's everyone else that's really distraught about Socrates and the guy that's going to die is like trying to calm everyone down in the room. Right? So no, I like that's. That's a wonderful little illusion. I like that a lot. That, like, hey, there's. I mean, put in different ways, like there's a little mantra that's in my head that is keeping me calm, that's keeping me kind of. I think a Saint Augustine's, you know, definition of peace is the tranquility of order. Right. My soul is just. I think that too. I mean, I was going to note that maybe not to argue against myself, but the very last sentence of Socrates in 54e.
- [97:20]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yes.
- [97:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He says, let it be then, Crito, and let us act in this way, since this is the way that God is leading us. So here, right at the end, then, you know, my reading of this, taking it very literally would be that the daemon has not checked him. Right. How does he know that God is leading us this way? Well, we know he doesn't explain it all here, but we've known from other dialogues and his testimony, the daemon checks him. And so here at the end of the dialogue, he realizes the daemon has not checked me, the daemon has not told me I've gone down the wrong path, therefore I am going the right way. And so maybe there is that, even though he didn't lean as heavily into it in the apology. The divine is here. The divine is, you know, guiding him in this dialogue.
- [98:04]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I think, I think that's right. And again, just to return to the theme of, of piety and the different objects of it, it's. It's striking that what comes to the forefront here is the laws. It's the laws, the city, the community of the city of Athens that, that occupies this major place in the, in the conversation. And there's some kind of connection between that and, and what the, the God is saying. There's a kind of integration there for, for Socrates, although as you just explained, it's actually the absence of the, of the Daimon saying. No, but he, he ends by describing that as, as divine sanction to, to his argument.
- [98:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, just. Just one last thought for me as I, I kind of contemplated this dialogue is when I read it in my, my small group, we had an individual that just died on this hill that Socrates was not being. Just like Socrates needs to leave, like, like his family, like just absorbed Kaido's argument, like this is right, et cetera, and like to the degree that, like, it was really funny. Like, the small group's done, and we always end at the same time, no matter what. Like, the conversation. Like, we're. We're done at 10. I mean, we started, we started at 6:30 having, you know, drinks and scooter boards. At 7, we start talking at 10, this thing's over, people can go home. But if you want to stay and have cigars and pipe and drinks out on the porch, you're fine. Well, you know, this guy afterwards is like walking up to each person being like, you tell me that if your wife was like, falsely imprisoned, you're just gonna be like, well, I'm pious towards the law and I hope she does okay in there and I'm never getting her out. Right. Like, and like, really just in people's face about it. It was, it was really, it's. It matches his character and it worked well. It also forced. It's good to have someone like that because we're all just not sitting here nodding along, saying, Socrates is amazing and not really thinking it's through.
- [99:55]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Right.
- [99:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
One of the things that really. But as I kind of thought about his examples throughout the week, one of the things that occurred to me, as I thought about it, my own life, like, what if I was falsely accused? What if my loved one was falsely accused? How would I do this? What occurred to me is I noticed that Catholics are in an interesting position insofar as Socrates is under the polis and he's making these examples of, of, you know, I have to be pious towards the polis. And. Yeah, if I set this precedent that, like, no, I. I determined the whole polis is unjust and I. Therefore, I can act contrary to it. I destroy it. Because now everyone can do this. It falls apart. It was interesting to me though, that, you know, Catholics can claim that we're also citizens and subject to a second polis, and it's the second polis church that the perfect society that can actually step in and say, no, actually, this civil ruling was actually unjust. And so it's interesting, I think, as we've. Because you play this out with the saints sometimes, and saints that, you know, have escaped false imprisonment, they have, they have run away, they have done these things. One of the things I was trying to think there is that. I think that's one of the distinctions between us and Socrates just from an infrastructure standpoint is that we claim to be part of a different group. Right. That Socrates didn't have. He didn't have an external body outside of the Athenian political order that could make a claim on him and could rule against Athens saying, no, no, this is actually unjust. But we as Catholics have that.
- [101:29]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
I think that's right. I'm not sure that simplifies things that much, however, because what it means is that we're all potentially in the position of Socrates because we ourselves don't have to be Socrates, but that there's a kind of. There is an authority, another. Another society of which we are members and to which we. We owe our loyalty and which is guiding us towards our. Our perfect, final end, our otherworldly end, and in that sense is superior to any. Any other society on earth. But what that means is that we're all potentially in the situation of. Of Socrates and in the apology in Crito, and we don't have any right to say, I didn't know any better. We don't all have to be philosophers like Socrates. We have to be thoughtful and discerning and obedient to the church. And so, in a way that simplifies things, in a way, it radicalizes the problem of Socrates and the conflict between the philosopher and the polis. Because now we're all ought to be philosophers in the sense of lovers, of wisdom, of Sophia, and that is made accessible to us through Mother Church. So we're all in a pickle, like Socrates.
- [102:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. It really is a comment on, I think, the architecture or the infrastructure of the problem, not necessarily that it makes it more simple, because as a cleric, I will tell you not that this is a commentary on the diocese of Tulsa, because everything's wonderful in my local church and we have no problems. Wonderful. Good. Congratulations. But the church's decisions as an institution are not always just. And you actually can find yourself, like Socrates, where it's like, okay, well, now I guess I just simply obey virtue and obedience, because if I. So you actually run into the exact same problem. It's like, okay, well, if I buck up and decide that I can overrule my superiors, I can overthrow the hierarchy, because this is actually unjust. Well, who makes that determination? I do. Well, what about the next guy who makes it, who's wrong? Is there better? Is it better to be obedient? You actually see if you want to see a microcosm of, I think, the Socrates dilemma here in a different setting. Think of Benedictine monks that are in a monastery that are under a bad habit, and so, like, they are obedient to him for the sake of the community, existing and surviving, you know, for a certain period of time. But then have to suffer through, you know, his, you know, his poor leadership, you know, whether it's his weakness or, you know, whatever it is, just being a poor leader. So, no, I don't think. Doesn't really simplify it, but it does. It does show, like in certain situations, it's. Particularly if it's the political, it's a temporal order. Because I was thinking, like, well, I. I do believe the church is teaching that an unjust law is no law and actually that it's not binding on conscience. But the thing is, is that it's not me that makes that determination. The church that actually steps in and makes that determination, that second and higher polis. But then higher polis itself could make it a determination that I find is unjust. I still have to obey that. So it's a different. It's a different internal structure. Not sure if it simplifies it, but as I was thinking about this problem from a Catholic standpoint, I noticed that aspect.
- [104:43]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Yeah, good.
- [104:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, any other, as you kind of look at the end of the Crito here, any other comments or anything we missed or anything you want to emphasize?
- [104:53]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Just my very short way of framing apology in Crito is that we should think of the apology. The emphasis there is what Athens owes to Socrates and the Crito. The emphasis seems to be what Socrates owes to Athens. And so they're a great pair. Obviously they're part of a trilogy or quartet or all 35 dialogues. They all go together in some way, but they're a nice pair in that sense. And. And if we keep in mind that complementarity between those emphases, we can, I think, better appreciate the. The paradoxes of. Of how different Socrates seems to be in. In the two. He's doing a different kind of work in the two dialogues.
- [105:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No. Very good. I appreciate that. Well, Dr. Papadopoulos, I greatly appreciate you coming back on and guiding us through the Credo. It's always wonderful to speak to you. I appreciate everything that you bring to the podcast and that you bring to our studies here on the Great Books. Where can people find more about you?
- [105:54]
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Wyomingcatholic. Edu I can't plug my own institution enough. I love the college that I teach at, and it's just doing wonderful things for young people out here, giving them a Catholic classical education and a sort of embodied, an incarnational vision of what education ought to be. I'm also on the platform formerly known as Twitter, so if you want my less refined and respectable thoughts, you could always suffer through that. If you're needing that.
- [106:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No. Very good. All right. Well, again, we appreciate it, everyone, as we kind of move on in our Platonic studies. Next we'll be reading the Phaedo or the Phaedo. So pick that up. It's a little longer than the other ones that we have read, so get working on it, and we will start discussing it next week. See ya.