It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one would say, by the attraction of opposites. He must have owed some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things familiar. Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was comically ugly. The Athenians were one of the best-educated populations of ancient or modern times—far ahead of ourselves; and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher. He was hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very subordinate and submissive one; and he was the butt of all joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all. And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges, for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in 404, disobeying them at peril of his life. But Strip him of the "thing of sinews and muscles," as he called his outer self; forget the queer old personality that appears in the Clouds of Aristophanes, or for that matter in the Memorabilia of Xenophon—and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see? The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face. So the humor would remain; and with it there would be … something calm, aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of "the peace which passeth understanding"; native to "the eternity that baffles all faculty of computation";—something that drew all sorts and conditions of Athenians to him, good and bad, Plato and Alcibiades, by "that diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn."—In point of fact, to get a true portrait of Socrates you have to look at the Memnon's head. The Egyptian artists carved it to be the likeness of the Perfect Man, the Soul, always in itself sublime, absolute master of its flesh and personality. That was what Socrates was.
Well; the century ended, with that last quarter of it in which the Lodge makes always its outward effort. Socrates for the Lodge had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally. The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a moderate in politics. And the democracy was conventional-minded in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a disturber and innovator. And the democracy was still smarting from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides, understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the treacheries of Alcibiades, another. And there were vicious youths besides, whom he had tried and failed to save; they had ruined themselves, and their reputable parents blamed and hated him for the ruin, not understanding the position. And he himself had seen so many of his efforts come to nothing: Alcibiades play the traitor; Critias and Charmides, the bloody tyrant;—he had seen many he had labored for frustrate his labors; he had seen Athens fallen. He had done all he could, quietly, unfailingly and without any fuss; now it was time for him to go. But going, he might yet strike one more great blow for the Light.
So with quiet zest and humor he entered upon the plans of his adversaries, accepting his trial and sentence like—like Socrates; for there is no simile for him, outside himself. He turned it all masterfully to the advantage of the Light he loved. You all know how he cracked his grand solemn joke when the death sentence was passed on him. By Athenian law, he might suggest an alternative sentence; as, to pay a fine, or banishment. Well, said he; death was not certainly an evil; it might be a very good thing; whereas banishment was certainly an evil, and so was paying a fine. And besides, he had no money to pay it. So the only alternative he could suggest was that Athens should support him for the rest of his life in the Prytaneum as a public benefactor. Not a smile from him; not a tremor. He elected deliberately; he chose death; knowing well that, as things stood, he could serve humanity in no other way so well. So he put aside Crito's very feasible plan for his escape, and at the last gathered his friends around him, and discoursed to them.
On Reincarnation. It was an old tradition, said he; and what could be more reasonable than that the soul, departing to Hades, should return again in its season:—the living born from the dead, as the dead are from the living? Did not experience show that opposites proceed from opposites? Then life must proceed from, and follow, death. If the dead came from the living, and not the living from the dead, the universe would at last be consumed in death. Then, too, there was the doctrine that knowledge comes from recollection; what is recollected must have been previously known. Our souls must have existed then, before birth. . . .
Why did he talk like that: thus reasoning about reincarnation, and not stating it as a positive teaching? Well; there would be nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks. They knew of it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries: that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans. But it was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge. (So scientific discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality now of Christian presentations of ethics.) So that to have announced it positively, at that time, would have served his purpose but little: men would have said, "We have heard all that before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from the Mysteries or Pythagoras?" What he wanted to do was to take it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness. So once more, and as ususal, he assumed ignorance, and approached the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus: I do not say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma. Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or any authority may tell you. But as reasoning human beings, does it not appeal to you?
And the very spirit in which he approached it and approached his death was precisely the one to engrave his last spoken ideas on the souls of his hearers as nothing else could. No excitement; no uplift or ecstasy of the martyr; quiet reasoning only; full, serene, and, for him, common-place command of the faculties of his mind. The shadow of death made no change in Socrates; how then should they misunderstand or magnify the power of the shadow of death?—"How shall we bury you?" asks Crito. Socrates turns to the others present, and says: "I cannot persuade Crito that I here am Socrates—I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse. He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and by, a corpse."—So the scene went on until the last moment, when "Phaedo veiled his face, and Crito started to his feet, and Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out into a loud and angry cry which broke down everyone but Socrates."
Someone has said that there is nothing in tragedy or history so moving as this death of Socrates, as Plato tells it. And yet its tragic interest, its beauty, is less important, to my thinking, than the insight it gives us into the methods and mental workings of an Adept. Put ourselves into the mind of Socrates. He is going to his death; which to him is about the same as, to us, going to South Ranch or San Diego. You say I am taking the beauty and nobility out of it; but no; I am only trying to see what beauty and nobility look like from within. To him, then, his death is in itself a matter of no personal moment. But the habit of his lifetime has been to turn every moment into a blow struck for the Soul, for the Light, for the Cause of Sublime Perfection. And here now is the chance to strike the most memorable blow of all. With infinite calmness he arranges every detail, and proceeds to strike it. He continues to play the high part of Socrates,—that is all. You might go to death like a poet, in love with Death's solemn beauty, you might go to her like a martyr, forgetting the awe of her in forevision of the splendor that lies beyond. But this man broadly and publicly goes to her like Socrates. He will allow her no fascination, no mystery; not even, nor by any means, equality with the Soul of Man. . . . And Apollodorus might weep then, and burst into an angry cry; and Crito and Phaedo and the rest might all break down—then; but what were they to think afterwards? When they remembered how they had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the Athenian agora? And when Death should come to them, what should they say but this: 'There is nothing about you that can impress me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I saw you pay your respects to Socrates.'
Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical ecstasy endued—with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime: these are but the appearances they assume as we look upwards at them. What they are in themselves is: (1) Compassionate;—it is the law of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2) Impersonal;—there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we have our passions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires. They are, in the Chinese phrase, "the equals of Heaven and Earth";
"Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they
Endure while they shall be to be."
So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens, entered with some gusto on that great coup de main of his death: to make it a thing which first a small group of his friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine in man, it might be worth.