Socrates’ QuestSocrates rejects these ideas. Quite reasonably he thought that
if we can see that the actions of Zeus and Hera are arbitrary and
unjust, then they as gods must be able to see that too. So they
cannot be like that to start with. That they are popularly taken
to be so smacks of human mistake. Similarly, on the matter of
bargaining with the gods, Socrates thought that whatever the
heavenly realm might be like it must be one of moral consis-
tency and divine harmony. So, whatever it might be to commu-
nicate with the gods, it is ridiculous of people to think that they
can be bargained with. This was actually a far more dangerous
idea than straightforward atheism. It implied that one city-state,
like Athens, might not have the gods on its side when pitted
against an enemy, like Sparta, which did.
Having said that, Socrates is depicted in Plato’s dialogues as being
quite conventional in his religious practice. He makes sacrifi ces,
attends feasts, pours libations, offers prayers and pursues oracles.
Partly, he seems to have believed that religious practice should be
respected since it opens the mind and cultivates the agnostic spirit;
it is an exercise in intellectual humility. Partly, he is acknowledg-
ing that reason alone is limited and that for all someone might be
infl uenced by rational argument, the care of the soul – the holistic
aim of his philosophy – clearly takes more than sound logic.
Inner daemons
There is another aspect of Socrates’ spiritual sensibility that
we cannot pass over – simply because of the number of times
that Plato and others refer to it. This is what Socrates calls his
daimonion or daemon. ‘It’s a voice that, when it comes, always
signals me to turn away from what I’m about to do, but never
prescribes anything.’ Although the voice is intimate and only
ever heard by Socrates, he was well known for it: the charge of
introducing new gods that he faced at his trial probably referred
to this suspiciously private apparent access to the divine.
What the daemon tells Socrates not to do ranges from the
trivial to the life-threatening. Most often, it tells him simply to