by Joshua Shaw
When we tried in a previous series to take in Eusebius’s apologetic argument against Plato at a glance, we skipped over a few passages in the middle of Book XIII (of the Praeparatio Evangelica). In this book Eusebius is slowly building his case against Plato by thoughtfully curating passages from Socrates’s last days (Euthyphro, the Apology, Crito, Phaedo). By bringing before the jury (the reader) aspects of Socrates’s trial where, by Plato’s and Eusebius’s verdict, Socrates was falsely condemned, he ironically condemns Plato for his failure live up to the standard he set forth in his image of Socrates.
In these passages the Law and laws play an important role: Eusebius tries to show that Plato – here he is following the Middle-Platonist Numenius, himself influential on Plotinus and other later thinkers – knew the right laws (influenced by Moses) by which he cast the poets out of the city (Republic II 377-83); these were, according to Eusebius, the Laws which spoke to Socrates in jail and convinced him to stand by his unjust condemnation and to die for their sakes (Crito esp. 53 – end); and yet Plato nevertheless “confessed” that one “had to believe the traditional myths about the god out of deference to the law” (Timaeus 40d-41a [i]).
“It was a hard thing to undo this knot.”
Eusebius, hard-pressed to justify his rejection of Plato, comes in the end to argue that Plato “put words in Socrates’s mouth” against the latter’s principles, namely, “descending to the Piraeus” in the Republic and “sacrificing a cock to Asclepius” in the Phaedo. He fell into idolatry. (An interesting consideration here is how weak the actual case of ‘idolatry’ is in Chapter 14 of Book 13 – only three vague allusions and an ambivalent quotation. By Eusebian standards – who is fond of quotation ad nauseam – this is shockingly scanty.)
Readers have in any case been drawn towards Eusebius’s unfair treatment of Plato here – who meant ironically the passage in the Timaeus and literarily both of the other passages just mentioned – and thus miss what seems to me a golden little passage about “virtuous pagans” tucked into a little corner of this massive library (I mean the PE). Here we touch on yet another sticking point for Christian Platonism – what is to be said about the greatest of the pagan philosophers regarding their eternal state?
Socrates in Abraham’s Bosom
At this moment Eusebius has just finished presenting the reader a number of long quotations from the Euthyphro, Crito, and Apology, whose salient point are well evoked by T. S. Eliot:
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
T. S. Eliot. The Four Quartets : “East Coker” IV, 147-157.
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grown worse.
Socrates’s only care is to do what is “just” or “righteous” (τὸ δίκαιον) not to please men; he reminds his hearers constantly that death is either just one long night of sleep or else, as he believes, a loosening of the soul from the body in a journey to a better country (ἀποδημοῦν); after posing, in his Apology, the jury’s hypothetical solution that he cease philosophizing, he replies,
I’ll obey God rather than men and, as long as I still draw breath and am able, I will by no means cease to philosophize, exhorting you and teaching…[ii]
He goes on to fulfill this promise quite literally in the Phaedo, where, on his death bed he “sweetly and patiently and wondrously” undertook to aid the failed argument, to rescue the faith of the young men in the immortality of the soul.
I marvelled… at that moment how sharply he perceived our plight at the hands of the arguments, and then how well he healed us, and though we had, as it were, retreated and were defeated, he called us back to the front-line and exhorted us to follow along and examine the argument together with him.[iii]
To the last Socrates gave them the “encouragement and good grounds for faith” in the soul’s immortality which they had asked for.[iv] The “wounded surgeon” kept “questioning” and healing the weeping patients around him till, with his last breath, he ordered a cock be sacrificed to show that death meant his healing.[v]
Eusebius, looking back over this extraordinary picture of Socrates, no less lovingly – though less eloquently – than Eliot, pays him homage after his own fashion and compares the thoughts of Socrates with certain of the Scriptures:
In our writings it has been said “it is necessary to obey God rather than men” and “do not fear those who can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul” and “[you should] know that, if the earthly home of our tent be taken down, we have a dwelling-place from God, an eternal home in heaven, one not made by hands” and that “departing (ἐκδημοῦντες) from the body we take up residence (ἐνδημοῦμεν) with the Lord,” who had promised to all such as had hoped in him would rest in the bosoms of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and spend a long age together with the rest of the god-fearing (θεοφιλῶν) among the Hebrews and prophets and righteous men in a blessed life.[vi]
Socrates, according to Eusebius [now see comment], is perhaps among the saints in heaven, if he may be included (as his doctrines compared indeed imply!) in the phrase “to all such as had hoped in him.” It is worth noting (thinking of our Reformed confessions series) that the default position for Eusebius was the opposite (at least apparently) of the WS (see X.iii-iv). More on this later.
Returning to our theme, may we surmise that Eusebius thought Plato, who sick at the time of Socrates’s last speech,[vii] was never quite healed of his fear of death and so did not obey his dying nurse?[viii] Be that as it may, Eusebius’s overwhelming debt to Plato and his shining tribute to Plato’s Socrates throughout the Praeparatio Evangelica limit and qualify his subsequent denigration of them. He was torn between two equally important aims: changing the ultimate, authoritative source-text (the Bible) and preserving the “Platonic” tradition of biblical interpretation.
An Important Correction: an attentive reader (thank you, Mr. Polk!) made me aware of a not insignificant blunder in my original post, namely, that the text actually reads “together with the rest of the Hebrews [not Greeks!].” This was a simple clerical error, for which I apologize; it does, however, have the advantage of making the argument I made, if more difficult, also more interesting.
The stress would have to lie differently now, which I would briefly sketch thus:
“Also with us” (says Eusebius at the beginning of XIII 10, 13) these doctrines of 1) obeying God before men, 2) not fearing those who kill the body, 3) having an eternal home with God are the same as those propounded in the foregoing quotations of the Apology, Crito and Euthyphro. Since the doctrines thus shared amounted to a “hope in God to live with him when absent from the body” (and in the Greek certain parallels are noted by Eusebius between Paul and Plato in the use of δημ- compounds), my original conclusion indeed seems likely, if not necessarily implied.
Put differently, the “to all such as have hoped on [the Lord]” would in this case include Socrates. The Greek title “Lord” is of course not reserved for Christ but, due to LXX usage, was applied to God as such throughout the Old Testament as well as, of course, Christ in the new (note our strange English conventions of LORD vs. Lord). The mention two other times in this paragraph simply of “God” suggests to me that the broader designation was meant. Moreover, Eusebius’s tendency in the PE is to add “our” and some other epithet (saviour, redeemer, etc.), when Christ himself is meant. One must keep the apologetic context here in mind.
One other justification of this view might be the implication of Eusebius’s statement in XIII 14, 3 that “Plato did not hesitate to make Socrates descend to the Piraeus etc. etc.” That is, Eusebius thought that the idolatry implied in some of these passages was out of character with the real Socrates. We may have a chance to compare Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socrates on this point some time later on.
In any event my original language was happily not over-confident (“perhaps,” “as it seems,” etc.)
[i] PE XIII 1-2. This is clearly how Eusebius understands the passage, though, as Cicero rightly translated (legi morique parere) the idea of custom is present and even perhaps predominant.
[ii] Apology 41a : πείθομαι δὲ μᾶλλον τῷ θεῷ ἢ ὑμῖν καὶ ἕως περ ἂν ἐμπνέω καὶ οἷος τε ὦ, οὐ μὴ παύσωμαι φιλοσοφῶν καὶ ὑμῖν παρακελυόμενός τε καὶ ἐνδεικνύμενος… All translations are mine.
[iii] Phaedo 89a : (ἐθαύμασα αὐτοῦ ὡς ἡδέως καὶ εὐμενῶς καὶ αγαμένως τῶν νεανίσκων τὸν λόγον ἀπεδέξατο), ἔπειτα ἡμῶν ὡς ὀξέως ᾔσθετο ὅ ‘πεπόνθεμεν ὑπὸ τῶν λόγων, ἔπειτα ὡς εὖ ἡμᾶς ιάσατο καὶ ὤσπερ πεφευγότας καὶ ἡττημένους ἀνεκαλέσατο καὶ προύτρεψεν πρὸς τὸ παρέπεσθαί τε καὶ συσκοπεῖν τὸν λόγον.
[iv] Ibid. 70b …ἴσως οὐκ ὀλίγης παραμυθίας δεῖται καὶ πίστεως, ὡς ἔστι τε ψυχὴ ἀποθανόντος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καί τινα δύναμιν ἔχει καὶ φρόνησιν.
[v] Ibid. 118a ὅ δὴ τελευταῖον ἐφθέγξατο – ὦ Κρίτων, ἔφη, τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλκτρυόνα · ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε.
[vi] PE XIII 10, 13 [Mras I.189, 5-15]
[vii] Phaedo 58b10 : Πλάτων δὲ οἶμαι ἠσθένει.
[viii] Numenius had said, for instance, in some kind of commentary on Plato’s Euthyphro (it’s only preserved in a few fragments quoted by Eusebius) that Plato, afraid of getting the hemlock, allegorically made Euthrypho to stand in for the Athenian public.