sises his own ignorance, but also reports his discovery that nobody else is any wiser than himself. Rousseau goes even further than Plato's Socrates in denying the value of con- ventional human wisdom: 'The only thing we absolutely do not know is how to refrain from knowledge.' The Vicar can begin to learn only when he shuts all his books and turns instead to the book of nature.
But then Vicar launches a fierce attack on Socrates, asking how anybody could dare to compare his easy death - facile mort - with the truly horrible, and truly admirable, suffer- ing of the divine Jesus: 'If this easy death had not honoured his life, we would be unsure whether Socrates, with all his esprit, was anything other than a sophist.' Rousseau seems to hesitate even as he condemns Socrates. On the one hand, his death is admirable; on the other hand, Socrates was, in life, nothing but a sophist. His death was the only admirable moment of his life - and even that moment was not so great, after all.
The problem with Socrates' death is that it was too easy: Socrates was too theoretical, too little rooted in the body. He did nothing but talk about what other people had actually done. The philosophical calm of the dying Socrates, which had been for Diderot a major reason to admire him, was for Rousseau a mark of his inadequacy. Socrates had become associated with rationalist contemporary philosophers - including Rousseau's one-time hero Voltaire. Socrates, despite his claims to know nothing, remained tainted by Voltaire's pretence that he had mastered the whole world by reason.
The most extensive discussion of the death of Socrates by Rousseau comes in a strange, unfinished work that was not published in his lifetime, the Fiction or Allegorical Fragment on Revelation. It describes how a terrible false temple, represent- ing Fanaticism, is challenged by three people in turn. The first challenger is the first philosopher on earth - a brave but feeble figure, who can see the truth but is instantly slaugh- tered by the priests of intolerance.
The second is not named, but he is clearly identified as Socrates: 'an old man with a fairly ugly face, but attractive manners and an intimate, profound style of conversation which soon made one forget his physiognomy'. He tries to explain to the people why they should turn from false idols, urging them, 'Worship the one who wants universal happi- ness, if you want to be happy yourselves.' Rousseau then offers a brief but highly sympathetic summary of the death of Socrates as described in Plato's Phaedo. Socrates comments that he has to die in order to prove that he is more than a sophist: 'I would be suspected of having lived as nothing but a sophist, if I feared to die as Philosopher.'
But this noble death is marred by the old man's last words, which were 'a distinct homage' to Fanaticism itself. Rousseau suggests that Socrates' death represents a lack of integrity, since it fails to match the great deeds of the char- acter's life.
The third figure to combat the great evil is, predictably enough, Jesus, who seizes the false idol and stands up in its place, and speaks in such a simple, convincing way that eve- ryone listens and believes. Jesus is ultimately a more admi- rable model than Socrates: his teaching is more effective, and his life and death are more of a piece.
For Rousseau, Socrates is admirable as a representative of philosophical ignorance; and yet he is still too confident in his own mental powers, too reliant on his mind. Jesus beats Socrates at his own game. Similarly, Socrates is admirable for his willingness to face death, to defy priestly supersti- tion and to stand up for the truth. But again, Rousseau sus- pects he may be still in league with the powers he seems to oppose; and hence, again, Jesus is a more trustworthy repre- sentative of the virtues for which Socrates is celebrated. The sources of Rousseau's admiration for Socrates' death are also the sources of his suspicion.
the battle against fanaticism
The Enlightenment critique of the dying Socrates became part of the Enlightenment's own mythology. Nicolas Freret (1688- 1749) was a talented scholar who devoted much of his energy to challenging false myths. He was confined to the Bastille for his claim that the Franks, and hence the modern French nation, were not descended from the ancient Trojans, but were in fact a league of south German barbarian tribes, with no particular classical association or claim to free blue blood.
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In 1736 he gave a lecture at the Academie Royale that aimed to debunk the idea of Socrates as a martyr to truth, unjustly condemned by sophists, intolerant politicians or priests. He presents his own work as a challenge to precon- ceived ideas: 'The idea of the wisdom and worth of Socrates that we acquire in the first years of our education gives us an illusion which our more adult reflections have difficulty in dissipating.' Freret argues that the real grounds for the trial were politicaclass="underline" Socrates was charged with impiety, but he was really hated as the teacher of Alcibiades and Critias. This reading has recurred many times over the years since Freret; the most famous recent example of the genre was I. F. Stone's Trial of Socrates, published in 1988 (discussed in the following chapter).
Freret based his conclusion on a careful analysis of the ancient sources. Like later scholars who adopt this reading, he presented it as truth to challenge generations of myth. The lecture is a classic example of Enlightenment rationalism, although turned in this instance against an Enlightenment myth. Freret was troubled by two aspects of Socrates as depicted in Plato's Apology: his reliance on the daimon and his defiant attitude towards the jurors and towards the Athenian government in general. He was aware of what modern scholars call the Apology-Crito problem, and was deeply disappointed that the Socrates of the Apology seems to betray the principle so eloquently expressed by the Laws in the Crito, that the citizen must always submit to the rules of his own society. Socrates' reliance on his daimon seemed a betrayal of Socrates' rationalist principles. Even worse, it set a precedent that might do untold political harm: 'By means of the daimon, Socrates opened the door to fanaticism.'
Paradoxically, then, Freret presents Socrates himself as the representative of fanatical religious belief, fanatisme. He died not because he was a philosophical free-thinker, but because he favoured superstition and hated democracy. For Freret, as for Voltaire, Socrates' death undermines his identity as a wise philosopher. Freret thus produces an inverted version of the idea that the death of Socrates was a philosophical 'apotheosis'. Truth and reason triumphed not through the defiant challenges of one brave gadfly, but through the judi- cial system that put to death a man who threatened the well- being of the state.
Even Voltaire (1694-1778), the Enlightenment intellec- tual who made most extensive use of the death of Socrates as a political myth, had surprisingly deep reservations about whether he could really admire the man. Voltaire celebrated Socrates as one who spoke truth to power, while corrupt priests, popular ignorance and an oppressive gov- ernment were blamed for his death. 'The death of this martyr was in effect the apotheosis of philosophy', Voltaire declared.
But he had relatively little sympathy with Socrates himself. Voltaire's account of the death of Socrates is con- flicted because he wanted to see the death of Socrates as a precursor to the deaths of innocent victims of intolerance in his own day, such as Jean Calas, a Huguenot who had recently been tortured and executed for the murder of his son, which he almost certainly did not commit. But Voltaire refused to beat the Athenians with the stick he aims at his own contemporaries. He insisted on a difference between his own age and that of classical Athens, even when he drew the parallel. Socrates was 'the only person the Greeks ever killed for his opinions'. The Athenians put only one philosopher to death, and an irritating one at that - and then they felt bad about it afterwards. The pagans thus, as often in Voltaire,