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Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible.
I’m back, at least in a preliminary sense. I don’t want to spend too much time on this or go too much into the details—there’s a public post on my Patreon page that covers this as well—but I want to apologize to my audience for disappearing for a couple months without much notice or explanation, and especially to my patrons for the same. I needed to make some major changes in my life and this project needed to go on the backburner while that happened. While I wish I’d been more clear with everyone about that, I also wasn’t really in a state of mind to be able to do that.
I’m back to work now but I’ll be making a few changes to how I approach the project, changes which may or may not be temporary. I need to slow down a bit, both in terms of the project and in terms of my life in general, and the main thing I don’t want to compromise on is the quality of my work. There’s always going to be some degree of compromise between the quality of content and the frequency with which it’s created, but between the two, I’d rather the quantity of my work take a dip than the quality. So here’s the plan: I am going to aim to produce at least two episodes every month, and I will aim to release them at approximately the midpoint and the end of the month, but strict release dates are going away. I will update my patreon page as best I can with details about what I’m working on and when I plan to release it. The episodes will probably be a bit shorter, and for the time being, I’ll be focusing on one-offs rather than going with the trilogy format. I hope that’s alright with everyone, but one way or another, that’s what this project needs and so that’s the decision I’m making.
It’s really important to me that I not let down my audience and my patrons in particular, and so I’ll be pausing my Patreon payments until things settle down a bit and I’m back to producing regular content. I can’t emphasize enough how grateful I am for my patrons’ support, which has been instrumental in helping me get through this difficult time in my life. Thing is, most of my patrons are fellow Satanists, and when they support me and stick with me through the bad times, I know it’s not out of pity or because they’re trying to score good person points with Jesus but because they honestly value me and my work, and I find that very encouraging. If you find my work valuable, I hope you’ll consider joining the team, which comes with access to the project Discord channel; you can find out more at patreon.com/asatanistreadsthebible, and once things are fully back underway I’m going to try to be better about adding special features for my patrons.
Prior to the break, I was working on some essays about religion and music. I plan to get back to those at some point, but I thought the best way to get back to work would be to get back to my roots, and indeed to the roots of all Western philosophy, that being the ancient Athenian philosophers Socrates and Plato, whose work is of central relevance to Satanism, as I’ll be exploring in this essay.
The ancient Greeks practiced philosophy prior to Plato, who lived from the fifth to the fourth centuries BCE, but Plato was the first to unite the various strands of inquiry under a single discipline and to write down his thinking on the subject. While philosophy since Plato has almost exclusively taken the form of treatises, essays, and lectures, Plato wrote his own philosophy in the form of dramatic dialogues featuring his teacher, Socrates. Plato likely took this approach because dialogue was the best medium for demonstrating Socrates’ method of philosophy.
Socrates himself never wrote anything down and so what we know of him comes to us entirely from secondary sources, Plato’s dialogues being the most numerous, as well as what we can infer from the historical context of the era in which he lived. Given this context, we know little about the actual life of Socrates, and it is difficult to sort out which of Plato’s writings on Socrates were more biographical and which used a more fictionalized version of the philosopher to express Plato’s own views. More on this further on. We know that Socrates was a hoplite—a Greek citizen-soldier—in the Peloponnesian War, though details of his military service are scant. We also know that, in the year 399 BCE, Socrates was tried for the crimes of impiety and corrupting the minds of the youth, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed.
Socrates lived during a time when rhetorical skill conveyed a great deal of privilege. Public argument played a significant role in Greek social and political life, and so there arose a profession of teachers who would charge a fee for instruction in the rhetorical arts. These were the sophists, and they often commanded great wealth and public respect (Taylor & Lee, 2020). Some Athenians were critical of the sophists, suggesting that they taught their students skills that would enable them to win a given debate regardless of the actual truth of the matter, and this is the meaning that we associate with the words sophist and sophistry today. Among these critics of the sophists was the playwrite Aristophanes, who included Socrates among their number, but while Socrates was not entirely critical of the sophists himself, he was adamant that he was not one of them. He charged no fee for his lessons, and his poverty attested to this.
Plato’s Apology (from the Greek word apologia, meaning a formal defense of one’s position rather than an acknowledgement of wrongdoing) is a transcription (likely a somewhat fictionalized one) of Socrates’ speech in his defense at his trial, and includes an account of how Socrates came to start doing philosophy. According to Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon once went to the oracle of Delphi to inquire as to whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle said that none were. Socrates was surprised by this, as he believed himself not to be the least bit wise, and so thought that the oracle must have intended some hidden meaning. Socrates says of this:
For a long time I was at a loss as to [the Oracle’s] meaning; then I very reluctantly turned to some such investigation as this; I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was.” Then, when I examined this man… my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” After this, I approached another man, one of those thought to be wiser than he, and I thought the same thing, and so I came to be disliked both by him and by many others.
Plato et al., 1997, 21b1-e2
Thus Socrates began his practice of going around Athens questioning whomever he met so as to demonstrate their lack of wisdom.
This account is almost certain to be apocryphal. I think a more plausible account arises from an examination of the historical context of Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. As I mentioned, Socrates served in the Peloponnesian war, which Athens ultimately lost. Prior to the war, during the golden age of Greece, Athens had been a triving and culturally advanced city, and the Athenians thought very highly of themselves—the English word barbarian derives from word used by the Greeks to deride non-Greeks for speaking languages that sounded to them like gibberish, and by the Athenians to deride non-Athenian Greeks for acting, in their perception, like non-Greeks. As a result of the war, Athens was very nearly annihilated and left wondering how things had gone so very wrong for them. In this context, we see Socrates emerge as someone who personally witnessed the excesses and failures of the war and who saw that they were rooted not in the inadequacy of some particular ideology to which some other ideology might be superior, but in the Athenians’ unflappable and unexamined certainty in themselves and in their beliefs. In their dogma, in other words.
The Apology is one of Plato’s early works, and it is in these works (also Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, and Protagoras) that scholars believe we find the most historically-accurate Socrates (Kraut, 2010). Most of these works depict Socrates engaged in a dialogue with the person for whom that dialogue is named regarding the true nature of some abstract concept. No conclusions are ever reached, but Socrates’ interlocutor may leave the conversation a little less certain of things than when it began. This method of inquiry is called the elenchus or the elenctic method, and its objective is aporia, which is a state of puzzlement or befuddlement. We can contrast the elenchus with the dialectic approach to philosophy, about which I’ve spoken at length, in which a similar approach is used collaboratively to arrive at the truth. At the end of a dialectic, assuming it goes well, the participants will walk away saying to themselves, “We have gotten something figured out!” whereas, at the end of an elenchus, the participants will be saying to themselves, “Well, now I don’t know what to think.”
The dialogue Euthyphro is likely the clearest example in all of philosophical history of the actual process of doing philosophy, and even better, it’s approached publicly in a very practical and casual way. Not that there isn’t value to the more cloistered, academic side of philosophy, but I think it’s important to remember that philosophy is something that everyone does and should do in some way or another on a daily basis. Should I join this company? Should I buy this thing? What should I do about this problem? Which is the best Star Wars movie? Any time anyone honestly asks a question beyond those aimed at gaining basic factual information, they’re doing philosophy. It isn’t something reserved exclusively for academics, and we do the best for ourselves when we learn to do it well. For Satanists, the example of Euthyphro presents a clear method for challenging dogma and hegemony through this Socratic method of elenchus, which we’ll examine by looking at Euthyphro in detail.
The Euthyphro dialogue begins when Socrates is on his way to challenge the charges against him and runs into Euthyphro the person, who is returning from pressing charges of murder against his own father. Socrates finds this very convenient: to press such charges against one’s own father is an extreme action to take, and so the one taking such an action must be very certain that what they are doing is right and pious (bearing in mind that, in ancient Greece, murder was a religious offense, Plato et al., 1997). Socrates having been charged with impiety and Euthyphro being so evidently wise and certain on the matter, Socrates asks Euthyphro to educate him on the nature of piety so that he might better defend himself.
Of course, Socrates is being characteristically sarcastic in order to draw Euthyphro into the elenchus; Socrates is not under the impression that Euthyphro really knows what piety is and intends to demonstrate exactly that point. But Euthyphro is quite haughty, declaring himself “superior to the majority of men” (Plato et al., 1997, 5a1) (much as Athens thought itself superior to the majority of the world prior to the Peloponnesian war), and takes the flattery at face value. He begins by defining piety in terms of his present actions: piety is deposing one’s father for murder. He cites religious precident: Zeus, chief among the gods of ancient Greece, had imprisoned his father Kronos for having devoured his other sons.
The obvious problem here is that Euthyphro has presented Socrates with a potential example of piety rather than a definition for it, but rather than point this out directly, Socrates asks a few questions so that Euthyphro realizes this himself, and at the same time asks whether Euthyphro would agree to certain related propositions, such as the gods being in a state of perpetual discord and war. Euthyphro states his agreement and modifies his definition: piety is that which is pleasing to the gods.
Socrates has already established consensus on the point that the gods are in perpetual disagreement, but rather than point that out directly, he asks some questions regarding the nature of the gods’ disagreements: are the disagreements about objective facts which might be verified and measured? Or do they concern more subjective matters of value? Euthyphro concedes that it must be the latter, as objective matters could be verified, resolving the disagreement. But this, of course, presents a problem for Euthyphro’s definition: if there are value disagreements among the gods, then it is possible that the same action may be loved by some gods and hated by others.
“I think, Socrates,” Euthyphro says, “that on this subject no gods would differ from one another” (ibid., 8b6-7). Socrates proceeds from this point to clear up a few secondary matters, and then asks a question that philosophers have wrestled with, in various forms, for the subsequent two-and-a-half millennia: “Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?” (ibid., 10a1-3). The generalized form of this question—whether the good is so because God commands it or whether God commands the good because it is so—is now known as the Euthyphro dilemma. Socrates spends some time clarifying what he means by this through the use of various examples, on which he unfailingly seeks Euthyphro’s assent. When Euthyphro arrives at the conclusion that actions are loved by the gods because they are pious, rather than the other way around, Socrates demonstrates that Euthyphro has contradicted himself.
Euthyphro has claimed that the pious is equivalent to the god-loved. If those two things are equivalent, they must have the same properties. But that which is god-loved is so because it is loved by the gods; it isn’t loved by the gods because it is god-loved. If the pious and the god-loved were equivalent, then the pious would likewise be pious because it is loved by the gods, and not loved by the gods because it is pious, as Euthyphro had said. Therefore, the two descriptors have different properties and must not be equivalent.
The Euthyphro dilemma is, in my estimation, a devastating blow against what is known as divine command theory, the belief that morality is objectively defined and commanded by God. If God commands the good because it is good, then there is something (the Good) to which God is subordinate; but if the good is good because God commands it, then it is conceivable that the good could have been otherwise, that it would be possible for it to be objectively good to eat babies, for example.
There’s further argument in the dialogue, and, again, I highly recommend reading Euthyphro in full, but I think this sufficiently demonstrates Socrates’ approach to philosophy: he makes effectively zero affirmative statements, but rather continually draws out and reflects back on what his interlocutor has already stated using specific questions with a limited number of possible answers. Someone as haughty and arrogant as Euthyphro would never have questioned his own beliefs if Socrates had just plainly presented his own skepticism. But through the method of elenchus, Euthyphro was forced to confront his own ignorance. Assuming that this encounter between Socrates and Euthyphro actually occured at all, its ultimate effect on Euthyphro is unknown: the dialogue ends with Euthyphro acknowledging that he has not been able to present Socrates with a coherent definition of piety but hurrying off before Socrates can ask him anything further, though Socrates leaves him with a few final sarcastic remarks about how disappointed he is to not have learned the truth of piety from the wise Euthyphro. But the effect the dialogue has had on its audience—likely hundreds of millions of people over the course of history—is nothing less than monumental, as it has inspired and shaped Western philosophy throughout its entire 2500 year history.
On May 20th of this year, Florida Representative Anthony Sabatini tweeted, in response to the phenomenon of cancel culture, that, “If Socrates was out philosophizing in American society today, he would be cancelled real quick” (Kane, 2021). This was met by a wave of responses pointing out that Socrates had, as I mentioned earlier, been tried and executed for impiety, which is as cancelled as one can get. Athens was, at the time of Socrates, inhabited by a large, well-educated population of Greeks who held to a wide variety of beliefs. As one can read in The History of the Peloponnesian War by the Athenian historian and general Thucydides, who served in the war himself, the Athenians argued with each other at length over all manner of issues. But it was Socrates, who, by all appearances, made very few assertions at all and who openly denounced any suggestions that he was a wise person, who preferred to simply ask questions, who was tried and sentenced to death. By this account, impiety, for the Greeks, does not even necessarily mean opposing the gods or Greek religiosity outright, as Socrates did neither. Impiety, then, would be a refusal to accept what is said of the gods without question; in other words, to refuse to accept dogma. It is doubtful, however, that the charges against Socrates were genuine; more likely, he simply irritated the wrong people, but a refusal to blindly accept and follow authority is a kind of impiety as well, and on the account of those who accused and tried Socrates, I find impiety to be a great virtue.
After being convicted but prior to being sentenced, Socrates spoke to the jurors by way of contemplating the implications of the potential penalties that might be imposed on him. Would he be silenced? Imprisoned? Forced into exile? Executed? It seems that, for Socrates, these all amount to the same thing: a certain kind of death, whether spiritual or physical, for, as he famously says in this passage, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (ibid., 38a5). What did he mean by this? And why not?
What I’ve just stated is actually not the full quote. Socrates actually says, in my translation, “The unexamined life is not worth living for men,” “men” being translated here from a word based on the Greek root ἄνθρωπος, meaning “a human being,” as opposed to ἀνήρ, meaning “a male person.” I think that this additional word is critical for understanding Socrates’ meaning. Among all the animals, humans alone are at all capable of examining their lives and how they live, and of inquiring into how life should be lived. Humans alone are capable of living good lives or bad lives because it is for us alone that such assessments have any meaning whatsoever. Thus, to live life without examination is to not really live at all. Indeed, from what I can tell, although I’m not certain about this, the verb βιωτός is just the passive form of the verb “to live,” meaning that Socrates’ statement might be better translated, “For humans, the unexamined life is not lived.”
Socrates examined his own life by asking questions of whomever he could. Presumably, unless he was a hypocrite, he asked them just as much of himself, and, it would seem, came to few conclusions… except perhaps that the way he should live his own life would be to go around asking lots of questions.
I don’t want to paint Socrates as someone with no views or opinions. In the Apology, he is quite emphatic in stating that he has done his utmost to act justly and piously. Socrates was not irreligious—he states specifically that he is not an atheist (ibid., 26c4)— though his religion appeared to be of a somewhat unorthodox sort relative to that of other Greeks. He says to his accusers, by way of answering implied question as to why he doesn’t serve in public office,
I have a divine or spiritual sign which Meletus [chief among Socrates’ accusers] has ridiculed in his deposition. This began when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.
ibid., 31c-d4
Curiously, throughout Euthyphro, Socrates uses the words οἱ θεοί and its various declensions, “the gods,” to refer to the Greek gods in general, as they would have been understood by Euthyphro specifically. But throughout the Apology, Socrates makes reference to divinity in terms of his own understanding, and uses the words ὁ θεός, which is the singular form that my translation renders as “the god.” He speaks of ὁ θεός when he speaks of the oracle’s statement, which Socrates thought received by the oracle from the god, that he was the wisest in all Athens: “Whatever does the god mean? What is his riddle? I am very conscious that I am not wise at all; what then does he mean by saying that I am the wisest?” (ibid., 21b2-4). Socrates even goes so far as to say his life of inquiry is a matter of service to the god (ibid., 23b9-10).
It’s worth remembering at this point that the Apology was written by Plato, not Socrates. It is, at best, a faithful rendition of the trial and defense of Socrates. That said, the character of Socrates seems more vivid to me in the Apology than in any other dialogue that I have read, and I do not think that Plato would have fabricated Socrates’ religiousity, especially not in the early dialogues.
I’ve already recommended reading Euthyphro in full, and I have to recommend a complete reading of the Apology as well. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whom I’ll be discussing a bit further on, called it “that masterpiece for whose sake one studies antiquities” (2013, p. 408). Socrates’ treatment of his accusers is biting and, at times, hilarious. On trial for his life, rather than apologizing or recanting, he turns the tables on them and confronts them, as we will see in the following passage. After launching a defense against the various general accusations that had dogged Socrates throughout his philosophical life, he moves on to the matter of the immediate charges raised by Meletus and his associates. Socrates says,
As these are a different lot of accusers, let us again take up their sworn deposition. It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things. Such is their charge. Let us examine it point by point.
He says that I am guilty of corrupting the young, but I say that Meletus is guilty of dealing frivolously with serious matters, of irresponsibly bringing people into court, and of professing to be seriously concerned with things about none of which he has ever cared, and I shall try to prove that this is so.
ibid., 24b5-d
He then engages Meletus in a dialogue, one in which Meletus, predictably, fares very poorly. Socrates provokes Meletus into accusing Socrates of atheism, at which point Socrates points out the contradiction between this accusation and the charges against him: he is accused of teaching “new spiritual things” to the youth of Athens and his accusers say that he believes the things that he teaches, but one who believes in spiritual things must, per the semantics of ancient Greek, believe in spirits, which were believed by the Greeks to be either gods themselves or the children of gods. So it seems that Meletus has accused Socrates either of believing in gods and not believing in gods, or of not believing in gods but believing in the children of gods.
For a contrasting view of Socrates, we can turn to the work of 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is widely believed to have been anti-Socratic in most regards. In Crane Brinton’s 1941 book Nietzsche, Brinton states that Socrates was, for Nietzsche, a “villain” (quoted in Kaufmann, 2013, the bibliography to which notes that Brinton’s book contains “serious errors”). Nietzsche’s faithful translator and biographer Walter Kaufmann thinks that Nietzsche’s relationship to Socrates is much more complex than this.
When Nietzsche lectured during his professorship at the University of Basel, he spoke quite highly of Socrates and the other pre-Platonic philosophers; Kaufmann even goes so far as to describe Nietzsche as self-identifying with Socrates (ibid., p. 396). It seems that what Nietzsche opposed in Socrates and in post-Socratic thought in general was the reliance upon reason above all else. Socrates sought the answers to the most fundamental question of ethics: how should one live one’s life? But in investigating this, he appealed exclusively to reason. In Plato’s later works, as I have mentioned, Socrates becomes less himself and more a mouthpiece for Plato, who includes “both an appeal to reason and an education of the emotions and appetites” in his conception of training in virtue (Kraut, 2010, ch. 1, para. 9). But this attitude was not widely adopted by post-Socratic philosophers and, with Kant and the advent of the Enlightenment, was nearly extinguished. Nietzsche’s opinion of Socrates is thus similar to his opinion of Jesus: a great admiration of the person and the means by which the person lived his life, a skepticism towards his ideas, and a repudiation of his followers.
As Nietzsche assures us in the Antichrist, he reveres the life and death of Jesus—but instead of interpreting it as a promise of another world and another life, and instead of conceding the divinity of Jesus, Nietzsche insists: Ecce Homo [“Behold the human”]! Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another.
Kaufmann, 2013, p. 407
But the attitude of deliberate provocation and the demonstration of the foolishness and unjustified arrogance of his contemporaries… these were undoubtedly major inspirations for Nietzsche’s work throughout his life.
To such a degree as Socrates sought anything, it was truth about how one should live one’s life. To such a degree as Socrates opposed or crusaded against anything, it was unjustified certainty, which, in his day, was effectively all certainty. I’ve said this before, in my episode on dogma, but, while I remain of the opinion, perhaps contra Socrates, that personal conviction, when justified, is of great value, I don’t see that there is any value in absolute, dogmatic certainty. I encourage my readers and listeners to read a few of Plato’s dialogues and perhaps try writing one for yourselves. As you go about your day, imagine that Socrates appears and begins to question you as to the nature of whatever it is you’re doing. See where it leads you. If you find yourself coming to absolute, certain conclusions, you may want to spend some more time with him in Plato’s pages. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in a state of utter befuddlement, you’ve likely done some good philosophy.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Kane, V. (2021, May 21). Florida Republican Thinks Socrates Would Be “Cancelled Real Quick” Today. The Mary Sue. https://www.themarysue.com/florida-republican-worried-about-socrates-cancellation/
Kaufmann, W. A. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (First Princeton classics edition). Princeton University Press.
Kraut, R. (2010). Introduction to the study of Plato. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge University Press.
Plato, Cooper, J. M., & Hutchinson, D. S. (1997). Complete works. Hackett Pub.
Taylor, C. C. W., & Lee, M.-K. (2020). The Sophists. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/sophists/