Socrates as Lord God

Claire Dwyer

Historians are people who exist in their own particular historical contexts and attempt to look back objectively at the past. I think it is somewhat easier to separate myself from the medieval Iberian history that I study than it would be if I studied the history of the American civil war. But there is something culturally about the Classics that has always made it a little bit harder for me to do this for some reason. In class, I finally realized what that was.

Many people in American society are raised with Protestant cultural values, a good American Protestant work ethic, a mild to moderate affection for Christianity. Our country is deeply diverse but this is the “white American ideal”—the archetype that white America is shown in movies and TV shows, or at least was historically shown until quite recently. 

I wasn’t raised this way. I was raised going to avant-garde theatre. I was encouraged in my skepticism. My parents didn’t punish—no time outs, no “being grounded,” only natural consequences. I was rebellious, but only intellectually. As it turns out, if you expose your kids to the diversity of the world, they don’t end up confused but open minded. They end up intellectually inquisitive. You produce curious scholars.

 Both of my parents had grown up hating the Christian church for different reasons. My mother’s parents had to elope because one was Protestant and one was Catholic. My grandfather rejected the familial expectation that he become a Protestant minister and instead chose to be a doctor. He had to join the military to afford medical school. My mother was raised to question authority and question religion as a result. My father was raised in a strictly Roman Catholic household, and his hatred of organized religion came from it being forced upon him.

They raised me to think Socrates was the Lord. I kid you not. Of course, they did not literally teach me Socrates was God. But they did bring him up and teach me loosely about the history of intellectual inquiry and the Socratic method. They taught me that it was the best way to learn—to question, to attempt to understand the world around you, to learn by thinking, to create new and fantastic worlds in your mind. They taught me that there was never an answer, to liberate me from Christian creeds. They taught me values like honor and justice came from within, and were not something dictated to me by God, a religion, or any system of belief–including that of being “American.”

Socrates came to represent something for me. He came to represent intellectual liberation. My parents used the name Socrates without even really understanding what Socrates was. The Classics had also been a part of both of their educations in various ways, and they had latched onto them as a way to liberate themselves from creedal religions. 

That is why I decided to “question” whether or not Socrates was guilty of “mansplaining.” I saw this in these texts. I knew it was anachronistic to place such a designation on this material. I knew it was anachronistic to challenge Socrates in the way that I was challenging him. But it was oddly necessary to me. Plato and Socrates had become cultural symbols to me in my childhood, much like how Sappho has become that for many of us in the queer community. I decided to make a conscious decision to challenge my own belief system, and the cultural values upon which my sense of self was constructed. The Classics are a big part of why I am like I am, for the simple reason that they include the strong value of being taught to question and to never stop doing so.