Socrates has had an immense influence on Western culture. He was the direct inspiration for a majority of the better known schools of early philosophic practice, including the Platonists, the Stoics, and the Cynics, and for several other, lesser-known schools, like the Pyrrhonic skeptics and the Cyrenaic hedonists, and he was a significant indirect influence on the Aristotelians.

But who Socrates was exactly is a bit of an open question. There is a great deal we don’t know about him. He didn’t write. In fact, he was apparently against most writing. And the things his contemporaries ended up writing about him—especially the satiric playwright, Aristophanes; the soldier and historian, Xenophon; and the famously creative thinker, Plato—often don’t agree with one another. Each of those authors describes Socrates and his teaching a bit differently, and scholars in our day have considerable doubts about those accounts’ historical reliability.

In what I’m writing here I want to reflect on a few things we do know about Socrates, and in particular on their relevance for our conceptualizations of philosophy and religion and, especially, contemplative spirituality.

Among the things we know about Socrates is that he was put to death for the effectively religious crime of asebeia. Asebeia is often translated as “impiety,” and it involved a marked disrespect toward community traditions. And, as just mentioned, we know he inspired a variety of currents of philosophic practice and that he evoked differing accounts of what he was like and what he actually taught. I’d like to offer the suggestion that one thing that defines Socrates most was his practice of questioning definition, and that that is a key for appreciating the central contribution he made to both Western philosophy and contemplative practice.

I’ll start with the “impiety” charge.

Though Socrates is often popularly imagined as a champion of rationality martyred for being the kind of philosopher who challenged traditional religious beliefs, there are several problems with that image. For one thing, how the words “philosopher” and “philosophy” were used in his time was not yet the way we use them now. The Greeks, furthermore, didn’t have a term that immediately corresponds to our word “religion”—the spiritual practices of the Greeks were very much that, practices, and they were not particularly concerned with creedal beliefs. And, finally, in most of the ways that we do typically use the word “religion,” Socrates was actually quite a religious man.

So what got him condemned? It was two things. One was the fact he actively questioned his community’s valued concepts and ideas, and influenced others to do so, too. And he did that, I’m going to suggest, as a core part of his religious practice. The other thing that got Socrates condemned was the fact he had a daimonion. A daimonion is a kind of “spirit signal.” Socrates, in other words, had something like a guardian angel. He possessed a “divine thing” which gave him guidance. And, in the view of a majority of his fellow Athenians, his daimonion constituted an unapproved god.

As recorded by Xenophon and Plato, the formal charges brought against Socrates were these: “Socrates commits a criminal injustice by not recognizing (nomizon) the gods that the city recognizes, and bringing in other novel divinities, and by corrupting the young.”

Again, the Greeks didn’t have a word that immediately corresponds to our modern use of the word “religion.” Closest to it were terms like “piousness” (eusebeia) and the phrases “service to the gods” (therapeia ton theon) or “honors for the gods” (theon timai). Attention was directed more towards pious activities than to creeds, and such activities involved pretty much all aspects of life. An Athenian’s home, for instance, commonly had multiple altars dedicated to a number of deities, and sometimes to more than one version of the same deity. In the marketplace, business transactions were typically begun and ended with an invocation of the gods. There were also family, clan, city, and pan-Hellenic rites and ceremonies; citywide spiritual festivals took place every week or two. And more than half of the laws and regulations deliberated by the Athenian assembly were ones connected to spiritual matters.

How the early thinker, Thales, originally intended his famous saying is debated, but the words were widely applicable in classical Greece: “Everything is full of gods.”

There could be a difference, incidentally, between how people understood the Homeric myths and the way they regarded their own local spiritual customs and rituals. Individuals could question the facticity of Homer’s stories, but such mythic tales served as the poetic soundtrack for the community’s customs and rituals—and those were important. The city’s ceremonial traditions were understood to be meaningful transactions in an on-going relationship between human lives and divine forces.

And there could be a wide range of divine forces—from the Olympian gods, who could affect world events; to the spirits of fallen military heroes, who could still influence battles; to energies within trees and streams. The health, safety, fertility, and prosperity both of individuals and the city as a whole were tied to the benevolence of such forces and people’s respectful engagement with them.

Spiritual duties, furthermore, were a communal, democratic responsibility. Priestly functions at some of Athens’ temples were passed down through particular families, but for many others the priests and religious celebrants were elected, or they were appointed by lot, and their work was then overseen by the public assembly. There also wasn’t much in the way of a fixed pantheon. New deities could be brought into a city’s practice if—and this was a crucial if—the community approved of them.

And that’s where Socrates was a problem. Socrates had his own, personal “divine thing.” His daimonion was apparently rather unique—people in his time and ever since have had different ideas about what exactly it was. Plato, for one, said it involved a “voice” or a “sign” that came to Socrates when he needed to be dissuaded from doing something he was mistakenly about to do. Xenophon described it as like the experience of an omen, akin to what others might see in external occurrences, which would sometimes prompt Socrates in positive ways, too, like suggesting a piece of advice he should give to someone. And though the word daimonion was fairly common in Greece—poets could be inspired by a daimonion, and soldiers, as I mentioned, could become possessed by a daimonion during battle—there wasn’t any fixed understanding of precisely what a daimonion was and what it could do. Here’s how Plato portrays Socrates speaking of his daimonion at his trial:

something god-inspired and spirit-like comes to me. . . . This is something that began when I was a boy; it’s a kind of voice and whenever it occurs it always diverts me away from what I was about to do. (Plato’s Apology 31c–d, Emlyn-Jones, trans., Loeb Classical Library [hereafter: “LCL”], v. 36)

In his Symposium, by the way, Plato calls Eros a daimon and portrays him as a force that can lend inspiration towards beauty and the good, as well as being a kind of go-between through whom deities and humans can affect one another. Later, in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the words daimon and daimonion were used to represent “lesser gods.” And Christian writers, later still, who felt such forces were characteristically nefarious, used that term in a way that’s now reflected in our word “demon.”

Socrates’ daimonion was a problem because it wasn’t sanctioned by his community. And in a time where virtually everything had spiritual significance, for an individual to enact an alternative to the community’s customary ways of doing things could effectively place that community’s valued standards into question. It represented a possible threat to a society’s connection with its past traditions and, by also potentially “corrupting the young,” it could put a community’s future in question, too.

Socrates, moreover, had a habit of questioning things quite explicitly. Everyone who wrote about him describes him as a provocative “gadfly.” He would routinely pose challenging queries, especially ones regarding cherished values. He’d ask things like, what is piety really? And what is temperance? And what is courage? And what is friendship? The conversations he’d have with others are frequently portrayed as ending up in an aporia—which is to say, a mental impasse or a being at a loss—along with a realization that “we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean” by such terms (Plato’s Lysis 223b; see also Plato’s Euthyphro, Charmides, and Laches; and Xenophon’s Memorabilia, 1.1.16).

It’s sometimes suggested that the motivation behind Socrates’ execution was actually political and the spiritual charges brought against him were essentially an excuse. A few years before his trial the Athenians had been badly defeated in a war with Sparta, and the city had subsequently undergone a detested and bloody coup, carried out by the so-called “Thirty Tyrants,” among whom were figures who’d had known connections with Socrates. But, again, though such factors undoubtedly colored many Athenians’ feelings towards Socrates, it would be anachronistic to separate the political factors from spiritual ones. That’s not how the economy of values functioned in his time.

Although a majority of the assembly voted to convict him, there were of course Athenians who admired Socrates. Even his closest associates, though, considered him strange. The Greek word for “strange” often used to describe Socrates is atopos. Topos means “place” (as in our “topography”) and the prefix a- means “without.” Socrates was, in effect, someone who was “off the map.” He couldn’t quite be “placed.” (The modern scholar, Gregory Vlastos, has suggested “outrageous” or “absurd” would be even better translations for atopos.)

Socrates occupied no customary niche within the communal economy. And while he was in fact relatively poor, I have an additional reason for using “economy” here. The “-nomy” part of that word comes from nomos, which means “custom” or “norm” or “law.” And nomos was also at the root of the legal charge against him: “Socrates commits a criminal injustice by not nomizon the gods that the city nomizei.”

Nomizein is “to recognize” and “to acknowledge.” There can be a tendency in our day to presume it meant “to believe”; but “believe,” especially as it’s been used in last several centuries, doesn’t have quite the valence nomizein carried in its original context. Nomos is also part of the word “numismatics”—the study or collection of coins and currency—and I’d like to suggest that that’s a sense which fits well here. Socrates did not traffic in the “customary currency” of his fellow Athenians’ values and interests. And, of course, when someone doesn’t employ the same currency of customs and norms as does the rest of the community, she or he can end up representing a threat to the entire “economy of values.”

And that’s what got Socrates executed. It was also, I’d like to suggest, Socrates’ religion. Here is how I mean that.

While Xenophon and Plato depict the pronouncement regarding Socrates made by the oracle at Apollo’s temple at Delphi a bit differently, they each refer to it, and, whatever the pronouncement really was, and whether it even actually occurred, they both present it as emblematic of Socrates’ life’s work and of his way of being in the world. Xenophon has Socrates report it this way (italics added):

Once on a time when Chaerephon [a friend and follower of Socrates] made inquiry at the Delphic oracle concerning me, . . . Apollo answered that no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent. (Xenophon’s Apology 14, Marchant, trans., LCL, v. 168)

And Plato has Socrates say this:

Chaerephon . . . went to Delphi and had the temerity to ask . . . if anyone was wiser than me. Now the Pythian priestess [who was the inspired spokesperson for Apollo] replied that no one was wiser. (Plato’s Apology 21a) 

I don’t have space to give a full defense for it, but it’s my feeling that Plato’s dialogues—portraying characters questioning each other about what is most worthwhile and what is most real—effectively re-present Socrates’ religious practice. (One treatment of Plato’s work along these lines is A. K. Petersen’s, “Plato’s Philosophy—Why Not Just Platonic Religion?”) In what follows I’m largely going to refer to that representation of Socrates by Plato—i.e., Plato’s “translation” of Socrates’ life’s practice—especially as Plato portrays him in his Apology.

In classical Greece it was understood that we can receive messages from deities, but that those messages often require interpretation. Plato depicts Socrates responding to the Oracle’s statement that “no one was wiser” by making it his mission to then question others who were purported to be wise, as a way to explore the meaning of that oracular pronouncement. Socrates spoke with politicians, and poets, and tradespersons. And he repeatedly found that, while many of those individuals thought they knew important things, once he had examined them it turned out they really didn’t.

Socrates famously concluded that he was indeed wise—to the extent that he appreciated the fact that he didn’t know what he didn’t know. And, in Plato’s portrayal, Socrates thereafter took it upon himself to help other’s understand that they too didn’t really know what they thought they knew, and he did that as a religious mission: “I investigated at the god’s command” (Plato’s Apology 22a).

In the Gorgias, Plato has Socrates say, “I think that there cannot be any evil for a human being so great as a false opinion” (458b, Laks, trans., in LCL, v. 531, p. 365).

(As a humorous aside: while I was working on this essay, a quotation from Yogi Berra appeared in my Twitter feed reflecting a similar sentiment: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” But when I tried to look up the quotation, I found out that not only did Yogi Berra not say it—the saying’s been around since the nineteenth century—it appears that nobody knows who originally did.)

In his trial defense—and “defense” is what “apology” means in this connection—Socrates looked to explain the nature of his religious life and practice. “Whenever I consider someone isn’t [wise], I assist the god and demonstrate that he isn’t wise” (23b), and “I’m still going round exploring these matters, inquiring in accordance with the god” (ibid.). Plato has Socrates go on to say that the sincerity of his commitment to his spiritual mission is reflected in his poverty: “I’ve had no leisure to get involved in . . . my own affairs, but am desperately poor on account of my service to the god” (23b–c).

Socrates, furthermore, tells his fellow Athenians that he cannot not do this: “if you were to say to me: ‘Socrates, . . . we’re discharging you on condition however that you no longer spend your time on this inquiry and have no more to do with [this practice]; but if you are caught still doing this, you will be put to death,’ . . . I would say to you: ‘Much as I have affection and love for you, men of Athens; yet I shall obey the god rather than you’” (29c).

Socrates understood that when we’ve become dislodged from our conceited opinions and mistaken presumptions, that’s not just something which is useful for us, it’s also ultimately a spiritual matter:

Aren’t you ashamed to be spending your time acquiring as much money as you can . . . but show no interest or concern for wisdom and truth and seeing to it that your soul [psyche] will be in the best possible state? And if anyone disputes this and says he does have concern, I shall . . . question him, examine him closely and test him. And if he seems to me not to have acquired goodness, . . . I shall reproach him because he regards things of the highest value to be of least value and inferior things to be of higher value. . . . You see this is what the god commands, . . . and I think that no greater good has come to you in the city than my service to the god. For I go about doing nothing other than persuading both the younger and the older ones among you not to concern yourselves with your physical and monetary needs as a priority nor so intently, as to see to it that your soul is in the best possible condition. (29e–30b)

Socrates was less concerned with breaking rules or abrogating customs than he was with examining rules and customs. His purported “ignorance” was strategic. It was a practice. And, as translated by his follower, Plato, that practice came to be understood as a call to look beyond all assumed appearances.

Other elements of Socrates’ life and activities could be mentioned in regard to his spiritual character—his reported references to being a bit of a mantic seer (e.g., Phaedo 85b), his prayers (Euthydemus 275d, Phaedrus 237a) and performance of sacrifices (Xenophon’s Memorabilia 1.1.2), and his engagement in what sound like meditative or trance states (Plato’s Symposium 220d). But my sense is that a greatest contribution Socrates made to Western philosophy and to Western religious and contemplative traditions was his very basic activity of asking “What is truly good?,” and carrying that out in the form of an interrogated reevaluation of all our presumptions.

Plato translated that Socratic query—that examination of what’s truly good in life—into a philosophic endeavor to realize the truth of the Good, with the latter now poetically portrayed as a timeless Form (Eidos) at the foundational origin of all appearances. Plato’s descriptions of the practice for such a realization—especially, for instance, in his Symposium, where he has Socrates describe the instruction he received from the prophetic figure, Diotima, for inculcating a loving realization of That which is true and beautiful, before and beneath, as it were, all our presumptive conceptual perceptions—would in later centuries decisively influence such religious Middle Platonists as Philo Judaeus, the Neoplatonist contemplative philosopher Plotinus, and, through them, the Christian contemplative theologians Gregory of Nyssa and the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The latter, in turn, shaped the practices and teachings of much of Eastern Orthodox Christian contemplative spirituality, and, in the Latin west, figures like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and John of the Cross.

Plato also shaped our understanding of the word “philosophy.” Socrates appears not to have focused on that term, and before Socrates it had simply meant something like “cultivated thinking.” Plato ended up contributing to the eventual presumed division in the West between philosophy and religiousness by, for instance, drawing a contrast between “philosophy” on the one hand, and myth and poetry, on the other. He alluded to the “ancient quarrel” between them (Republic 607b). The thing is, though, there was no such ancient quarrel. Not only did the word “philosophy” not carry the sort of meaning he, and especially his student Aristotle, would provide it, a number of the figures who then came retrospectively to be viewed as “Presocratic philosophers” were also poets (e.g., Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles). And Plato composed myths himself (e.g., the myth of Er in the Republic [621b]; and the myth of Atlantis in the Timaeus [26e]).

In the generations that followed Socrates and Plato, whether understood as “religious” or “philosophical,” the practice of sincerely examining traditional concepts and questioning our habitual assumptions came to be the heart of the Western via negativa tradition—together, as often than not, with a consequent aporia-like realization that we don’t really know what we typically presume we know. The via negativa is the “way” of negating and letting go of presumptions. It is an exercise in the sort of conceptual honesty which can result in an humbling and transformative clarity. In this regard, Plotinus came to speak of “a presence superior to knowledge” (Enneads 6.9.4; LCL 468) that comes of a “not seeing.” Pseudo-Dionysius subsequently spoke similarly of coming “to see and to know that beyond sight and knowledge” through a “not knowing” (Mystical Theology 1). And, a thousand years later still, the anonymous contemplative author of The Cloud of Unknowing outlined procedures for stepping out from under the impress of our habitual thoughts and concepts, in order to uncover thereby an always already there naked sobriety and what was for him a godly presence—an experience he matter-of-factly states he wouldn’t trade for anything else in the world.

In the end, there are ways in which we simply do not know who Socrates really was. There are also ways in which that in itself was his life’s teaching and his original gift to the Western philosophic and spiritual tradition.