Was Socrates an atheist?

[tillingborn]

It is arguable that what distinguished Socrates from the Pre-Socratic philosophers was precisely his religious views. Reports of him strongly suggest that he was a monotheist who emphasised humility and duty, qualities the Romans were keen to tag onto their new fangled catholic church a few hundred years later.
Here's some stuff I've written on it:

In 469BC; roughly 150 years after Thales, Socrates was born, and although he wrote nothing himself, a great deal of material has come down to us that is about or attributed to him; most notably the Dialogues of Plato. Apart from the wealth of material, what distinguished Socrates from the philosophers above was that he professed only a passing interest in how the physical world worked. Of much more concern were human issues; the meaning and nature of words and qualities such as virtue and beauty. His usual way of finding out was to find someone who thought they knew and cross examine them. Generally Socrates would find fault with every argument put forward by his interviewee, eventually proving that they didn’t know what they were talking about, which some young aristocrats found entertaining.

Amazingly, for someone who habitually offended people, he managed to stay out of trouble until old age; as Anaxagoras had discovered, Athenians at the time were enthusiastic plaintiffs. A contemporary of Socrates, Aristophanes wrote a play, ‘the Clouds’; in it the hero, Strepsiades, is shown Athens on a map. ‘You are mistaken,’ he exclaims, ‘I see no courts in session.’ Litigants had to present themselves in court and the ability to talk oneself out of trouble was extremely valuable, a situation that was exploited by a group of thinkers called sophists. Whether by conviction or professional convenience sophists were relativists. Although Protagoras of Abdera, accepted as the first sophist, was no doubt sincere when he declared that ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ other sophists made themselves the measure of truth, boasting they could make a case for any position, no matter how hopeless it seemed. As Strepsiades says, ‘If well paid, these men also teach one how to win lawsuits, whether they be just or not.’ Strepsiades own problem is that his son’s love of horses is ruining him, in desperation he turns to a sophist with a view to outwitting his debtors in court and the one he chooses is Socrates.

Strepsiades approaches Socrates’ school, the Thinkery. Inside he finds pasty faced, emaciated disciples, deep in meaningless contemplation; the master Socrates is in a basket, suspended aloft, so that his mind can mingle with the air, ‘in order to clearly penetrate the things of heaven’. When almost inevitably Socrates himself came to court he denied that he had any interest in such things.


Socrates was charged with impiety and corrupting the minds of the young. Being an object of ridicule probably didn’t help his case, more damning though were Socrates’ followers and his politics. For much of Socrates’ life Athens had been engaged with Sparta in a struggle for dominance; there had been a Peloponnesian war lasting 15 of Socrates early years; another started in his late thirties and only ended a few years before the trial. The victorious Spartans had installed a government modelled on and sympathetic to their own oppressive oligarchy. Known as the Thirty Tyrants, their brief reign was one of terror, many of their democratic opponents were murdered, many more were exiled or fled, but with support from other democratic cities the exiles managed to regain control of Athens after only 8 months.

Among the Tyrants, some of the most brutal were disciples of Socrates and in the minds of many Athenians, he had indeed corrupted them. He was convicted by a jury of 500, but the narrowness of the margin was a surprise to him. Having reached a verdict, the two parties were supposed to plead the sentence; Socrates’ accusers demanded the death penalty, possibly assuming that he would beg for mercy and that the jury would agree to banishment as a compromise. Instead, Socrates goaded them and suggested they reward him with free meals. Unimpressed, more jurors thought he should be put to death than found him guilty.

Usually sentences were carried out quickly, but Socrates’ conviction coincided with a period of religious observance forbidding executions. The day before the trial a sacred ship had set sail for Delos and until it returned it was forbidden to desecrate the city with judicial killings. Bad weather slowed the ship and it took an unusually long time to return, several of Plato’s dialogues are set during this stay of execution. One of them, the Phaedo was about Socrates last day on Earth, it ends with his death from the poison he took quite willingly. The Phaedo goes some way to explain the difference between his way of thinking and that of the Pre-Socratics. He talks about a time when he heard someone reading a book by Anaxagoras and was delighted by the idea that the universe is governed by nous, ‘and I reflected that if this is so, Mind in producing order sets everything in order and arranges each individual thing in the way that is best for it.’ Which of course Anaxagoras denied; much to the disappointment of Socrates.

What Socrates wished for the world was the clarity and precision that he admired in Sparta, where everything and everybody had their place, and someone was very definitely in charge. According to the Phaedo, the last thing that Socrates did in any detail was to draw a picture of just such a hiearchical world, as he hoped it might be. He started by arguing that if the world is spherical and in the middle of the heavens it would stay where it is, as there is no preferred direction for it to fall, much as Anaximander had claimed. What is novel is his view about the world the Greeks were familiar with, ‘between the river Phasis and the pillars of Hercules’. Essentially this is the combined basins of the Mediterranean and Black seas, which Socrates believed was just one of many pits on the surface of the Earth that had people living on the edges, like frogs around a pond, to use Socrates’ imagery. He believed that the different regions are all joined by mighty subterranean rivers, some hot, some cold, some of mud and some of fire, their ebb and flow creating springs, rivers and seas, even volcanoes. The mechanics are a bit vague; what Socrates says is: ‘The cause of the flowing in and out of all these streams is that the mass of liquid has no bottom or foundation; so it oscillates and surges to and fro,’ then he adds, ‘and the air or breath that belongs to it does the same.’ So the same process causes the wind. It is interesting that Socrates calls it breath, as though the whole of the underworld were some giant cardio-vascular system. Not only is the world alive, as Thales had said, it is recognisably a living organism, an idea that Plato developed in other work.

On the surface, the air we live in is just one of a series of layers in the universe, which become more rare and more real the higher you go. So it is the world above that is the real world, because as air is to water, so aether is to air. It is a hierarchy based on the separated elements Empedocles conjectured in the time of strife, but in addition to the raw materials Socrates attached the human values of morality and aesthetics that were of such importance to him. If a man could but fly and stick his head above the air, like fish poking their heads above the water:

‘and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognise that that is the true heaven and the true light and the true earth. For this earth and its stones and all the regions in which we live are marred and corroded, just as in the sea everything is corroded by the brine, and there is no vegetation worth mentioning, and scarcely any degree of perfect formation, but only caverns and sand and measureless mud, and tracts of slime wherever there is earth as well; and nothing is in the least worthy to be judged beautiful by our standards. But the things above excel those of our world to a degree far greater still.’

He didn’t insist that this is exactly what the world is like, but elsewhere in the Phaedo, Socrates demonstrates his proof for the immortality of the soul. It isn’t very compelling, but it was enough to persuade him that he could at least hope for a better life once his body was dead. It was as the soul’s environment that Socrates was interested in the universe. Once the souls of the dead were judged in the underworld, the rotten eggs were cast into the pit of Tartarus. The more corroded and debased by physical reality, the deeper it sucked the soul until, for some, there was no escape. The majority of people who hadn’t done anything more serious than murdering one of their parents and been very sorry, got another chance. As long as they could prevail on the soul of the one they had wronged to forgive them, they could be reincarnated, in the Pythagorean manner, and attempt to purify themselves further in a new body. Those, like Socrates, who had spent their whole life in worthy philosophical contemplation, could look forward to spending the rest of eternity in the perfect world above.

Seen from above, Socrates believed his universe to look like a ball made of 12 pieces of leather, essentially a puffed up dodecahedron. This is another idea that Plato developed, as usual with Socrates as his mouthpiece, and one of the difficulties with understanding Socrates is that it is not always clear where his ideas end and Plato’s begin.

[rantal]

It is interesting to me, that some people have such faith that Socrates existed and was not just a literary device of Plato's

Truly, I have not seen such faith in all of...

all the best, rantal

[tillingborn]

It is interesting to me, that some people have such faith that Socrates existed and was not just a literary device of Plato's

Truly, I have not seen such faith in all of...

all the best, rantal

Well I think the evidence is compelling, after all Xenophon told the same stories about him and he was lampooned in the play by Aristophanes that is mentioned. I have to concede though, that I don't know he existed, I wasn't there. His non-existence would make the title of the thread a bit of a logical conundrum, but for the purposes of philosophy it doesn't really matter, what count are the ideas.
I wouldn't be the first to be duped by Plato (assuming he wasn't invented by medieval scholars keen to associate monotheism and the Greek cosmology they believed); some people are convinced Atlantis was a real place.