How To Be An Agnostic
understand the nature of his ignorance more fully, he also knew
that reason alone was not enough; it too has its limits – most
notably when it comes to matters spiritual. So Socratic phil-
osophy did not stop at the point at which reason could go no
further. It engaged the heart as well as the head. It was a more
profound exposé and encounter.
But if Socrates is a key, a problem is raised. The man himself is
almost lost to us. He’s much written about. But he left no words
that are indisputably his own. Plato’s dialogues, our best source,
already mythologise him. They were written far more closely in
time to the life of the historical Socrates than, say, the gospels
were to the historical Jesus. But like the gospel writers, Plato
was not interested in providing an accurate record of the life
of Socrates – though some details, perhaps many, refl ect actual
characteristics and events. Rather, he wanted to capture what it
was like to encounter Socrates.
The historian, then, will be frustrated. But we’re not primar-
ily seeking history and facts. We are, rather, seeking precisely
what Plato has left us: a vivid record of one man’s engagement
with the sage. We don’t seek video clips of Socrates walking the
streets of Athens, as if we were making a documentary; we seek
the experience of what it was like to bump into him on the
streets of Athens. It’s Plato’s genius to leave us with something
very close to that. As Paul realised in Howard Brenton’s play,
how someone changes you is the most valuable echo of that
person’s life, and that can shape the lives of others.
Not that Plato’s conjuring of the charism is straightforward.
It should not be, for then his story could not inform your own
story, which will inevitably be different. Plato does not seek to tell
us what to believe and feel. Instead, he seeks to enable us to catch
a glimpse of the spirit that the historical Socrates embodied, of all
that he constellated so powerfully, so that something of that spirit
might be kindled in his reader’s lives. He presents Socrates to us
in such a way as to nurture a response. As Jesus almost said to the
disciples: it’s good that I go, as then, if you want to follow me, you
will have to do so in my spirit, not in my shadow.