With maturity one’s honour and love of truth can deepen. I’ve found, for instance, that my appreciation of a man born some 469 years B.C., has increased with experience. His resonant voice touches me now with its vivid blessing, emphasizing the continuity of true spirituality. Today he kindles more ardent fire in me than he has ever done, his message a testimony to the ever renewing youthfulness of this world, and to the eternality of the truth.
I refer, of course, to Socrates. I’m not alone, I know, in my admiration of his character. He brought the quality of living honour out of the obscurity of human fancy into the light of concrete example in his own life, and put to flight forever the excuses of those who would serve the false god of commodity. He was an odd little figure of a man whose features were so peculiar they inspired the potters’ joke of shaping his likeness on their wares. Born in the golden age of Athens at the height of that city’s political, cultural and moral self-esteem, he offended his fellow citizens with his good-natured simplicity. Nevertheless, out of this homely little figure flowed a fountain of true beauty into the desert of the human heart. The first to really feel his impact was the great Plato, who called him Master. It has been said that more than two thousand years of Western philosophy are as a footnote to the works of Plato. The character of Socrates, a sometime stonecutter, who never wrote a word of his own, was Plato’s central inspiration.
But why do I dwell on such a figure when my theme is the “thorny problem” of honour and commodity in human affairs? I offer Socrates’s example because he makes tangible for us what we would otherwise relegate to abstraction. We have a misguided sense of concrete practical realities and need to see “abstractions,” such as honour, fleshed out before we will admit their supremacy over the apparently more tangible asset of having learned to live expediently. In this man’s life honour and commodity come to issue, and we see which is in fact substance and which is shadow.
Socrates – truth teller and lover of life
Socrates was executed by the Athenian council in 399 B.C. for his shuffling around Athens barefoot, wrapped in his only possession, a simple robe, and teaching the truth. The accusation laid upon him was that of his “corrupting the youth of the city,” which he apparently accomplished by declaring his conviction of his own ignorance—and astutely demonstrating that of others. In the name of expediency he was sentenced to death in a trial which was a travesty of justice even in Athenian terms. Interestingly, the trial was apparently concocted more to scare him into silence than to execute him, for almost immediately he was offered his life if he would refrain from further teaching.
This droll character fooled them all, slipping easily out of the trap they had laid for him and from the cell in which they had thought to confine him, and slipping into the hearts of all who have since loved truth. He did so, much to the consternation of his persecutors, by turning his back on expediency, thus making the point he had wished to make all along. He willingly and without complaint drank the cup of poison they had prepared for him. It has since been said that he taught men how to die. I do not think so. He taught men how to live. Life and honour were in him inseparable.
He was a great lover of life and no self-righteous prude. He was known on occasion to discomfort the pious—who might otherwise have gone along with his teaching to a point—by drinking the lustiest youth and warriors of Athens “under the table” while at the same time discoursing eloquently and profoundly from dusk till dawn in praise of truth and beauty. We’re so prudish about the packages our blessings come in. We worship the appearances of respectability and miss the substance.
Expediency vs. honour
Commodity is not so intangible to us. “What,” for instance, we say to ourselves, “must be done in my situation to produce the most desirable results?” This, I have often thought, may be the most commonly asked question on Earth. “The most desirable results” may, of course, mean many things to us, from the most gross self-centred interests through the more altruistic ones, right on to and including acting in the interest of maintaining what we may believe to be the state of honour in ourselves. But, though this may be difficult for us to see, so long as we approach honour as a commodity in any sense of the word, we’re in a vicious trap.
The everyday occurrence of man’s trying to shape events to suit himself points to the great delusion of human experience. At the root of this is the fear of want, the fear of diminishing life. It is fear that to cease manipulating circumstances, to stop milking life of its value to us according to our imposed purposes, is to lose control of one’s destiny. To look upon acting honourably while understanding honour to be anything other than a useful commodity which gives one an atmosphere of advantageous respectability is thought to be extremely impractical. The crux of this is that expediency is still the god and honour, for “greater gain,” may be sacrificed on the altar of self-centredness.
Honour as the fire of life
Honour is the real quality, the key to the very fire of life in us. This intuition is well founded and needs to be nurtured to sufficiency, for the delusion of commodity is deeply entrenched in human feelings. In such case the practical inspiration of a Socrates comes to our aid. In this character we see the quality we love made flesh in its utter beauty. The shadow of delusion is routed. In the light of such example we’re left naked of excuse—which is why I love the spirit of this man.
He tells me that by constantly admitting my own ignorance I begin to come awake. For to know one is ignorant is the beginning of wisdom. Not to know this is perpetuation of folly. He tells me that a persistent and honest questioning of the roots of human belief and motivation bring me in the end to the reality of honour. That reality is simply humility before the wonder of truth. For in the end, must we not admit that it has been truth, the very substance of life, we have thought to use as a commodity? Have we not believed we can with impunity manipulate and shape our life experiences to our own imaginings? We find we have a real alternative. There is a true honour, a righteousness which cannot be compromised. Here is the true motivation for all our actions. So passionately substantial is this honour and wonder, that death, the ultimate purchase which all human bargaining and manipulation cannot gainsay, has no power over it.
Loving life
Socrates loved the vivacious tenor of his life in Athens, teaching in the streets to those who would listen to him (and there were many) and being invited to discourse in the houses of the great. He was always pure simplicity, a great lover of life and no death worshipper. He did not barter his honour to cut out an image of martyrdom for posterity. His passing was unpretentious, and could it have been avoided it would have. But when events came to the issue they did, because of the discomfort the radiant loveliness of this man brought to the self-esteeming and to the self-righteous, he faced the situation genuinely. He took the course that true honour of life and not expediency or commodity prescribed.
“So we shall all be surely martyred in the end in the name of honour!” our commodious minds cry. No. For, when we have admitted our ignorance and put aside our facile worldly wisdom, we discover there is another wisdom. The life that heretofore we have used to serve our own misguided ends, when untampered with, can very well direct the course of the events of our lives wisely and with honour. But even if events should come to the particular issue they did with Socrates, then we shall still ask what it is that really counts. Do we sell out and trade our life for existence, or does our honour of life have no price? Such idealism! With our heads in the stars we shall scarcely avoid the puddles on the road! Not so. Wonderfully, we have living examples of the practicality of this in all facets of life, in men such as Socrates. Provided honour is put first there is no distinction between honour and practicality.
The true light of life
Do you know how this man ended his rich and fulfilling life in Athens? How he passed the last moments of a life that had been devoted to freeing man from the great delusion? He had pointed out to them their own ignorance and, what is more, assisted them in fulfilling themselves, by acting, as he so humorously saw it, as the “midwife” to their souls, to bring to birth through them the true light of their lives. He declared he had no doctrine to teach, but this one task to be accomplished. He passed from this commodious world with no condemnation of those who had wrongly accused, judged, used and sentenced him, but rather with a reminder to a friend to pay a debt of honour for him to Asclepios, the god of health. “We owe a cock to Asclepios; pay it without fail.” What did he stand to gain, one might say, in his final moments by paying a tribute of thankfulness to the god of health, the god of life?
It was an expression of reverence for life and an act of compassion for his friend Plato, who was ill and could not attend. With this final gesture of his love for the true qualities of Being, in utter selflessness and incomplete disregard of death he put to flight forever the possibility of conviction in the omnipotence of the god of commodity and passed out of time into the eternal youthfulness of our heart of hearts. His life is a triumph. We need more such men.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Hugh Malafry is Fulbright and emeritus professor of mythology and world literature. He is the author of Blue Shaman – Stone of Sovereignty, The Light at Lindisfarne and other books. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
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