Christ or Socrates: a reply

PERSONAL COLUMN AUBERON WAUGH

I was first introduced to Socrates at the age of thirteen by a learned monk who would flutter his eyelashes and roll his eyes while his face assumed an expression of benign inanity to imitate the Greek philosopher, whom he much admired. The idea caught on in the Classical Fifth, and whenever one of us started fluttering his eyelashes and asking banal ques- tions we knew that he thought he was indulging in Socratic inquiry. Nowadays I find that prac- tically every social gathering has some mini- Socrates present, but as the gentler manners of the dinner table deter one from stuffing his mouth with blotting paper and telling him to belt up, one has to suffer them. For all that, I agree with my tutor, a doctor of divinity, in liking Socrates. It never occurred to either of us that our admiration must lead us by irresist- ible logical processes `to dislike and even to despise Jesus Christ' Having studied Simon Raven's itinerarium mentis in last week's SPECTATOR. I am still not convinced.

Mr Raven's basic objection to Christ derives from a picture which hung above his bed in the night-nursery, portraying 'an insipid and simpering young man who was blessing and caressing a bevy of wet little children in jerseys and short white socks, while bunny rabbits and similar fauna gambolled on the outskirts.' Later, at school, he was assured that Christ's divine nature was proved by His ability to perform miracles, and this, apparently, was the sum of his instruction in Christian apologetics. When he came to rationalise his emotional dislike, he chanced upon Socrates as the antithesis. Where Christ was arrogant and assertive, Socrates was humble and inquiring.

Either Christ was God or He wasn't. If He was, then surely even Mr Raven would allow Him to be reasonably self-confident in His assertions? Mr Raven feels that Christ should have shown greater deference to his intellect and established his precepts by logical pro- gression from nothing, as he seems to have imagined Socrates did. In this matter, of course, he is misled. Nothing can logically proceed from nothing. In fact, the Socratic monologue is replete with arguable premises, introduced not only at the beginning but at every stage of argument. All that Socrates required to establish a premise was that his listeners should agree with it, and while they were not the ignorant peasants of the New Testament whom Mr Raven disdains, they showed an extra- ordinary readiness to agree. It would be absurd to pretend that his questions are asked for the purpose of discovering the answer. Socrates already knows all the answers and his intention is just as didactic as Christ's. The only differences are that he had less to say and that he found this —to me—rather tiresome way of saying it.

Christ's purposes in preaching were to supply the premises and to establish a Church with the necessary authority to interpret them cor- rectly. Yes, yes, perhaps it was the Church of Scotland He had in mind. From these premises, over the last two millennia, minds subtler— dare I say it?—even than Mr Raven's have constructed a theology which embraces nearly all the conclusions of Socrates and Plato, being, in fact, the logical continuation of them.

But we must presume that Mr Raven does not believe that Christ was God, and a Mernher of the Trinity. If he did, he could scarcely cavil at Christ's saying: 'I am the way, the truth and the life.' Socrates, it is true, had no such pretensions, for the very good reason that he was not God, and did not think he was. If Mr Raven is unprepared even to con- sider the possibility that Christ might have been God, it does not seem to me important whether he prefers Him to Socrates or not, although, in so far as taste can be governed by reason, I shall try to show that the reasons he gives for his actual preference are unsound. But to argue, as it might have been on the tip of his pen to argue, that if Christ had been God He would have been more like Socrates, is clearly illogical. Socrates, by his own admission, was not God, and this, apparently remains his great selling-point.

Let us suppose that Christ was not God. Either He thought He was, or He did not Only in the latter case, can Mr Raven's stric- tures begin to apply. If a man believes himself to be God, while it is apparent to any reason- able person that he is not, that is in itself sufficient to dismiss him from serious con- sideration as a model or pundit or suitable subject for Mr Raven's hero-worship. The absurdity, hysteria and monomania which Mr Raven finds so distasteful are inherent in the situation. There is no need to point to His unhygienic apparel (for which we have only Mr Raven's intuition as our authority— Socrates was famous for his carelessness in this respect), His beard (Socrates, too, was bearded), or His didacticism (Socrates, too, was a teacher) in order to win our sympathy. Mr Raven's energies would be better spent in demonstrating by what process of reasoning he arrived at the conclusion that Christ was not God, since many people of an intelligence, breeding and education which are equal to his own have reached the opposite conclusion.

If Christ did not even think He was God —and there is a robust, neo-Arian school of thought which makes the plea, although I can find no evidence that Mr Raven sdbscribes to it—His teaching methods must be judged, as methods, by the extent to which the teaching caught on. They fail to convince Mr Raven. That is a valid criticism, but has he really studied them? Can his image of Christ—lalk- ing spitefully to a proletarian audience about the weeping and gnashing of teeth in store for those who disagreed with him'—survive even a single reading of the Sermon on the Mount?

Christ's style may not be particularly sym- pathetic to Mr Raven, but he cannot deny that it has been effective. When Christ says—as an ordinary citizen, this is, with no Divine pretensions-1 am the way, the truth and the life,' is He not merely stating explicitly what is implicit in the attitude of anyone who

takes sides in an argument? When Mr Raven writes, so many years after his traumatic ex- perience in the night-nursery, 'I stand firm by my preference, a preference for reason over faith, for disputation over preachment, and (not least) for good taste over bad'—isn't he implicitly making an identical assertion? Or why does he bother to say it at all?

Mr Raven criticises the 'vulgar theatricality' of the crucifixion, which he finds 'distasteful and meaningless.' It is true that Socrates's death from hemlock would make better television viewing for all the family. lithe purpose of the crucifixion had been only to excite tasteful feelings of compassion in twentieth century voyeurs, it must now be judged a failure. But I doubt whether this explains either the event itself or its commemoration by Christians. The manner of Christ's death—to me, at any rate— is a final statement that, despite the Sermon on the Mount, Christ was not one of the Flower People, and that the original purpose of Creation was not primarily artistic.

This is a fact which might otherwise be obscured by the need to vulgarise Christianity. What the young Simon Raven saw hanging in his night-nursery had very little to do with Christ or Christian doctrine. It was designed to feed the piety of simple minds. Inevitably, since few of the world's inhabitants have Mr Raven's intellectual equipment, and since the Christian religion teaches that even the most unhygienic proletarian has an immortal soul equal, in the eyes of God, to Mr Raven's own, it is necessary to produce a simplified version of the Christian religion for the consumption of those who would be unable to master the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. A formidable apparatus exists to ensure that simplification avoids errors, but the apparatus is not in itself infallible—only the truth it protects. I am sorry that his parents misjudged young Simon's sen- sibility, but there are other pictures—by Giotto, Lippi, Perugino, Raphael, Michelangelo --to which he might have turned.

The fact that Mr Raven needs to find a sub- stitute for Christ is possibly indicative of the sadly neglected religious potential inside him. But his God-substitute in Socrates is almost pathetically easy to shoot down. His mental picture of a 'laughing snub-nosed man, arguing about the good and beautiful with gleaming, half-naked boys in the shady porch of the gymnasium' would make exactly such a print as the one he describes in his night-nursery.

The boys in the gymnasium—what sudden prudishness is this?—were not half-naked but naked. I seem to recall that men were not allowed to talk with them there. Socrates, by the evidence of his contemporaries, had the manner and appearance of a bearded loon with a huge paunch and the walk of a stage homo- sexual, throwing sidelong glances at the pretty boys (although he resisted all their advances in bed). He was unbelievably dirty, bald and barefooted. Athens of the fifth century ac was far less democratic than the Johannesburg of today. One can speak of the free and endless debate conducted in the hours of idleness pro- vided by slave-labour, but one must remember that Socrates was poisoned for taking part.

Probably Mr Raven could find a commer- cial artist to paint his mental picture of snub- nosed Socrates laughing in the gymnasium while boys who wear nothing but running shorts gambol on the outskirts. Let him hang it in his own son's bedroom. The lad will he on his knees to the Virgin Mary within a week.

Readers' letters.: page 226.