A History of Greek Philosophy / SOCRATES

Page 16

Socrates had thus solved by anticipation the apparently never-ending controversy about morality. Is it a matter imposed by God upon the heart and conscience of each individual? Is it dictated by the general sense of the community? Is it the product of Utility? The Socratic answer would be that it is all three, and that all three mean ultimately the same thing. What God prescribes is what man when he is truly man desires; and what God prescribes and man desires is that which is good and useful for man. It is not a matter for verbal definition but for vital realisation; the true morality is that which works; the ideally desirable, is ultimately the only possible, course of action, for all violations of it are ultimately suicidal.

Note finally the suggestion that the man who knows (in Socrates’ sense of knowledge) what is right, shows only more fully his righteousness when he voluntarily sins; it is the ‘unwilling sinner’ who is the wrongdoer. When we consider this strange doctrine in relation to the instances given,—the general with his army, the father with his son, the prudent friend with his friend in desperate straits,—we see that what is meant is that ‘sin’ in the real sense is not to be measured or defined by conformity or otherwise to some formal standard, at least in the case of those who know, that is, in the case of men who have realised goodness in its true nature in their characters and lives. As St. Paul expressed it (Rom. xiii. 10), “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Or again (Gal. v. 23), after enumerating the ‘fruits of the spirit’—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance—he adds, “Against such there is no law.”

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