The vision of Socrates as a comic henpecked husband has resurfaced at various points in western history, to rival the ironic, dying philosopher of Plato. It persisted into the seven- teenth century, when an Italian comic operetta, first per- formed in 1680, evoked La patienza di Socrate con due moglie (The Patience of Socrates with His Two Wives). The libretto (by Nicolo Minato) was based on the story in Diogenes Laertius that Socrates was a bigamist and had to put up with not one but two shrewish wives. The theme was adapted again by Georg Telemann for his three-act opera on the same topic (Der Geduldige Sokrates, 1721).
In more recent times, as we shall see in the last chapter of this book, there seems to have been a return to this vision of Socrates as a generic wise man who struggles to reconcile his work with his home life. The two main reasons for this trend are perhaps the same today as they were in the Middle Ages. First, because few people read Plato, the paradoxes of Plato's Socrates are relatively unknown. In the Middle Ages, the dominant tradition of philosophy was based on Aristotle, not Plato; and few people read Plato in Greek. The same is true today. Secondly, many people became increas- ingly uncomfortable with many of the values that the dying Socrates seemed to represent - including secular rationality.
SOCRATES' HOLY IGNORANCE
In the fifteenth century, European thinkers were beginning to turn away from the more positive, doctrinal, scholastic tradi- tion of philosophy, influenced by Aristotle, towards a more questioning, more Socratic approach. A key figure in this area was Nicholas of Cusa (1404-64), a German bishop and papal legate. His treatise On Learned Ignorance suggested that human senses can never understand God or the universe. Our goal must be to know, like Socrates, that we know nothing.
But the relationship of Socratic ignorance to Christian truth remained deeply controversial in the Renaissance. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), one of the most impor- tant humanist scholars, saw Socrates as a central figure in his attempt to revive the wisdom of the ancients. Many of his contemporaries were shocked by Erasmus' willingness to admire Socrates. He seems at several moments to put Socrates on a level with Christ himself: 'You will find in Socrates' life what is in harmony with Christ's life.'
For Erasmus, Socrates was an example of how far natural reason and moral sense alone can take a man, even without the light of Christian revelation. He emphasises that the pagans, and perhaps especially Plato's Socrates, antici- pated almost all of Christian revelation. As he claims in the Paracelsus (Exhortation to the Diligent Study of Scripture), which was prefaced to his edition of the New Testament in 1516:
Socrates (as Plato mentions) taught many reasons why one should not pay back injury with injury. He taught also that since the soul is immortal, one should not mourn those who leave this life, if they have lived well, because they are gone in to a better life. Finally, he taught and urged all men to subdue their physical passions, and to devote their souls to the contemplation of things which are truly immortal, although invisible to mortal sight.
Socrates was an authority for two central tenets of Christianity: that one should turn the other cheek, and that the soul is immortal. The Phaedo was a cornerstone for defences of pagan learning, because it showed Socrates arguing for the immortality of the soul, and finally submit- ting joyfully to death. As the medieval poet Marguerite of Navarre wrote, 'Socrates received the light when he gently accepted the hemlock, in the right belief that the soul is immortal.' Christian readers were, of course, well advised to ignore the fact that the Phaedo also seems to argue for rein- carnation.
But for Erasmus, Socrates was not merely a representa- tive of ancient wisdom. Other philosophical pagans - like, say, Thales, Aristotle or Plato - would not have served him so well. Socrates seems to anticipate the peculiarly Christian idea that wisdom can invert itself, so that those who seem the most foolish are closest to the truth.
In Erasmus' treatise The Praise of Folly, the allegorical figure of Folly launches into an attack on the supposed wisdom of philosophers that culminates in an account of Socrates, wise in philosophy but foolish in everyday life. She asks finally, 'What wisdom made him, once he had been indicted, drink the hemlock? For while he philosophised about clouds and ideas, and measured the feet of a flea and marvelled at the sound of a gnat, he had no idea of the most common ideas of life.' Folly is here, as so often, being foolish. One marker of this is her reliance on the Aristophanic version of Socrates as an egghead with no common sense. In fact - Erasmus seems to hint - it was indeed wisdom that made Socrates drink the hemlock, a wisdom that went beyond the false wisdom of science or reason, to a kind of spiritual insight.
In Erasmus' Godly Feast, a theologico-philosophical dia- logue in Latin that looks back explicitly to Plato, a group of friends walk through a lovely garden and discuss the beau- ties of nature. The surrounding scenery provokes a debate about the ways in which God reveals himself. How much of God can one discern even from the natural world, without knowledge of Christ? This leads to an important discussion of the authority of pagan writers: how much could those who lived without revelation have discovered of the truth?
One character, Eusebius ('Pious Man'), declares that even the 'pagans' (prophani) should not be called 'profane' if they produced anything good, holy and conducive to goodness in others. When they speak the truth, they have been moved by 'some good spirit'. Cicero and Plutarch make Eusebius feel a better man for reading them.
The friends contrast Socrates' attitude towards death with that of other noble pagans, such as Cato the Elder. They conclude that Socrates is the closest to Christian faith in his willingness to defer to God's ultimate authority and greater knowledge. This is not Socrates the rationalist, but Socrates the faithful doubter: a man who knows he does not know, but turns to God or the gods as the ones who do know. Another character, Chrysoglottus, remarks, 'This man was so diffident about his own achievements that only his eager willingness to do God's will led him to hope that God in his goodness would feel assured of his having endeavoured to lead a good life.' A third friend, Nephalius, replies, 'When I read such things about men of this kind, I can hardly refrain from saying, "Holy Socrates, pray for us" ["Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis"]'.
This final line is often quoted out of context. It is worth emphasising that Erasmus does not himself, in propria persona, declare Socrates a saint; even Nephalius holds back from doing so. But Socrates comes close to sainthood, not through knowledge, but through humility and ignorance. It is because he knows that he knows nothing that Socrates is a man of greater true faith than many a contemporary Christian.
Other humanists, too, presented Socrates as a figure whom Christians could wholeheartedly admire. In this period, more and more scholars were turning to Greek as well as to Latin models. Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) wrote a pair of biographies in Latin, a Life of Socrates and a Life of Seneca. He comments that no Greek can really match the philosophical genius of Seneca; but Socrates is the closest thing. For Manetti, both Seneca and Socrates are valuable as guides to the ethical questions of daily life: 'Their exhorta- tions have awakened men who were asleep or distracted to an incredible love of virtue and detestation of vice.'
Another humanist, Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), treats the dying Socrates as a far more thrilling model. He is interested less in his 'exhortations' than in his joy even in the moment of death: 'Who would not like to be inspired by those Socratic enthusiasms which Plato describes in the Phaedo?' The phrase 'Socratic enthusiasms' - Socratici furores in the original Latin - suggests that Socrates' death is charac- terised not by immense calm, but by overwhelming passion: Socratic death is a sublime pleasure that can carry the reader to levels of ecstasy paralleled only by religious - or sexual - enthusiasm.