put Catholic France to shame.
He notes that no fewer than 220 jurors voted against the death penalty. Some 220 enlightened philosophers in a single city? As Voltaire remarks, 'That is quite a lot.' Moreover, as we learn from Diogenes Laertius, the Athenians were soon ashamed of having killed Socrates and erected a temple in
his memory. Voltaire concludes, 'Never has philosophy been so well avenged, nor so brilliantly honoured.'
Voltaire associated his own activities with those of
Socrates, but only up to a point. In his play La Mort de Socrate, the names of the priests who bring down Socrates recall Voltaire's own personal enemies. Socrates is, like Voltaire himself, a deist, who lectures his prosecutors about his faith
in a single God. This famous trial for impiety provided an obvious pretext for attacks on contemporary intolerance and the corruption of clergy.
But Voltaire remained reluctant to idolise Socrates, who had far too little common sense to be his ideal philosopher. Even in the play, he pays surprisingly little attention to
Socrates' actual death. He invents a lot of extra stage busi-
ness that has nothing to do with the trial. Socrates has a young female ward with a troubled love life; it eventually gets sorted out. It is as if Voltaire cannot imagine that his audience will care enough about Socrates to sustain their
interest in him for a whole evening.
In private, Voltaire viewed Socrates as a show-off, calling him in a letter to Frederick the Great 'this snub-nosed sage', the 'Athenian chatterbox'. He deliberately challenges the notion that Socrates preserved his moral integrity by his will- ingness to die. For Voltaire, the truly intelligent philosopher was one who could stay alive. He claimed triumphantly, 'I am cleverer than Socrates' ('Je suis plus sage que Socrate'). After all, Voltaire was smart enough to have challenged reli- gious authority and survived. In the Treatise on Tolerance, he remarks that Socrates' willingness to make enemies of pow- erful people 'was hardly worthy of a man whom an oracle had declared to be the wisest on earth'. In other words Socrates, for all his wisdom, was a fool.
moses mendelssohn: faith, reason and the jewish socrates
In Germany, debates about the dying Socrates were ostensi- bly centred less on the role of philosophes in society than on the relationship of faith to reason. But here too the death of Socrates raised important questions about the social position of the modern intellectual.
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), a celebrated Jewish writer, thinker and theologian, was dubbed 'the Socrates of Berlin'. His rewriting of Plato's Phaedo (Phaidon, 1767) was a sensation in its own time. Mendelssohn uses the same basic structure, situation and characters as Plato had done. But he radically alters the Platonic arguments for the immortality of the soul. He presents an image of the dying philosopher who, even more vehemently than the Platonic original, denies human mortality and asserts that reason, virtue and human dignity can rise above all worldly spheres. Mendelssohn's new 'proof' of the soul's immortality depends primarily on belief in a benevolent Providence that allows no evil thing to happen to us. We are all protected by a good God: not only the philosopher, but all humanity is under his eye.
Mendelssohn's Socrates is a humanitarian, a benefactor to mankind: one who 'gave up, in the most loving fashion, health, power, comfort, reputation, peace, and in the end, life itself for the well-being of his fellow humans'. Socrates died to prove to us that we need not die. He died to save us all from the sins we might commit, were we unsure of the ultimate welfare of our souls. Mendelssohn's dying Socrates is a secular, ecumenical kind of new Messiah. He sacrifices himself for our redemption.
The Phaidon became the locus for debates about the scope and limits of natural reason, unilluminated by Judaeo-Christian faith. It prompted the notorious 'Lavater Affair' of 1769, in which Johann Kaspar Lavater challenged Mendelssohn to convert to Christianity. Lavater presented conversion to Christianity as the Socratic path: Mendelssohn, he said, should 'do as Socrates would have done', had he read modern defences of Christianity. He would have converted. Lavater implied that Socrates was not, after all, an ecu- menical hero equally available to both Jews and Christians. Socrates - and perhaps the whole heritage of classical antiq- uity - belonged only to Christians.
But Mendelssohn refused to convert. He replied with a defence of both religious and philosophical toleration. He distinguished revealed from natural religion, arguing that only the latter was an appropriate topic for philosophy - and natural religion was common to Jews and Christians alike.
The Lavater Affair was an important moment in the modern cultural reception of antiquity. Mendelssohn had, through his rewriting of the death of Socrates, shown a way to reconcile the heritage of Greek philosophy with both Judaism and Christianity. But Lavater insisted that the Christians, not the Jews, were the cultural heirs of the Greeks - and in particular of the dying Socrates. In his later writings, Mendelssohn addressed a purely Jewish readership and
abandoned the attempt to create an ecumenical theology.
Mendelssohn's Phaidon had been an attempt to reclaim the death of Socrates - as well as Socrates' views of death - for all the people of Europe, Jewish and Christian alike. It failed, and with its failure, marked by the Lavater Affair, came the awareness that the death of Socrates could not be used to create a new kind of companionship between all intellectuals, whatever their race or religious beliefs.
David's painting marked a moment of change, from a time when the dying Socrates was seen primarily in relationship to his own social circle - as an intellectual leader, teacher and friend - to a time when he was seen primarily as a solitary individual who stood up against the will of the masses and who was destroyed by them. We are, in this respect at least, the heirs not of the French Enlightenment, but of the French Revolution.
The Marquis of Condorcet (1743-94) remarked in 1793 that the death of Socrates was 'an important event in the history of humanity: it was the first crime which marked this war between philosophy and superstition, a war which still continues among us, as does the war of philosophy against the oppressors of humanity'. By the time Condorcet wrote these words, the association between the death of Socrates and crimes against individual human freedom had become well established as a core myth of the Enlightenment. But Condorcet's aphorism was, of course, a radical simplifica- tion of Voltaire's view about the death of Socrates. Voltaire was interested in the squabbles between one philosopher and another, and specifically in his own superiority over Socrates. By the 1790^ the battle lines had hardened and there was no longer room to admit that 'philosophy' could mean more than one thing.
A year later, in 1794, Condorcet was himself arrested and condemned by the radical party in the French republican government, led by Robespierre. His death is mysterious, but he probably drank poison in prison - like his hero before him. Condorcet's own death was also an important event in the history of humanity. It marked, as Edmund Wilson has noted, the end of the French 'Enlightenment'. After the killings of 1794, the dying Socrates lost much of his cultural
popularity. The possibility of calm, philosophical death no longer seemed realistic. Artists and writers turned back to the more brutal, and far more directly political, death of Cato the Younger. Cato's hands-on death, by self-disembowelment (see Guerin, page 123), corrects the false politeness of that poor, fey, wizened old man sipping his polite little hemlock drink. The painting seems also to invert the earlier model of the master who can teach his disciples how to die by his friendship and his example. Cato is not setting an example. He is not a teacher surrounded by devoted followers, but a rebel trying to escape. In Guerin's painting, he leans away from the other figures as he searches for his entrails with his own fingers. The painting rejects not only the calmness, but