[ the main topic page ] [ the main page ]

Vasile Datcu - thinker, writer, Romania

Socrates, Jesus and the European spirit

Western Europe’s spirituality has been preoccupied lately with an important issue: two individuals with similar lives and destinies lived in different historical eras, separated by almost 400 years (a long time in terms of human perception, but short one in terms of historical perception). They both lived in small towns but the influence of their doctrines was worldwide; neither of them ever wrote anything and their teachings were spread by their disciples; they were both school creators; they were both condemned to death and died for their ideals that were not accepted by their fellow citizens. They both became myths shortly after their deaths, they were both advised to leave their towns in order to but, in the name of a morality representing their very reason for existence, they refused; they both lived humbly and they were humiliated and mocked at by most of their fellow citizens but they did not give up their faith that guided their lives. The most interesting similarity is that they both influenced those who were listening to them, in an unconscious and promoting love not through rational arguments.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these similarities, one of them created a religion and the other one did not! Why? This would be the question, with several proposed answers, all of them unsatisfactory, some of them apparently enlightening, but none of them reassuring.

In this paper we are not trying to present these answers according to pre-established criteria, or to add a new granite block to the pedestal of truth, but we intend to see if this question is justified, and if there is a more justified question that we might ask.

During early Christianity, when most Western Europeans worshipped Wotan, they discovered, humbly and amazed, the greatness of Jesus’ teachings, and were living, through their most fervent representatives, a life of penitence and prayer. They were thus searching for their peace of mind, for accepting themselves, and, sometimes, they even succeeded in doing so.

Nevertheless, around 500 AD, an Italian monk, Benedict of Nurcia, in spite of all his efforts to live of penitence and prayers, could not find his inner peace and invented instead a new totally unusual conduct related to his faith, focused on the motto: “Pray and work”. The paradigm shift caused by this monk was to have incalculable consequences for Western spirituality. The reason is that praying implies a contemplating attitude, while working implies, on the contrary, a dynamic nature-oriented thinking in a positive way, based on rationality.

So, this monk’s anxiety brought Christianity to the point where it inevitably intersected Socratic individualism.

This fact, apparently unimportant, caused a revaluation of Socrates during the 19^th and 20^th centuries which transformed Western Europe into a cultural space with two religions instead of one: Jesus’sacred one, for the needs of the soul, and Socrates’ secular, profane one, for the usual needs, the latter being as terrible in determination, and as rigid in precepts, as the former.

This state of affairs could only lead the European spirit to a profound crisis. The situation is highlighted by all the important philosophers of anxiety of modern times. However, the cause is not at all related to worshipping two divinities out of which only one is identified as such. In our opinion, the cause is related to the fact that, absolutely surprisingly, Western Europe has forgotten, during its spiritual evolution, one of the essential precepts of the world that promoted thinking, the concept of measure (metron), that was worshipped by the ancient Greeks. Measure is that category of the dialectics that represents the interval in which the quantitative changes of a thing do not alter its quality.

Lack of measure (hybris) brought the European spirit to a crisis involving both the sacred dimension of man, and his reconciliation with the environment. When measure is disregarded, all human actions lose their human character becoming their opposite, regardless of the nature of the actions, be they either sacred or profane.

Man is not the measure of all things, as Protagoras would have liked, but man’s deeds are the measure of man’s sense or lack of sense. Eventually, both Socrates’ rationality and Jesus’ Christian love are in fact knowledge tools.

Lack of wisdom does not depend on the use of one tools to the detriment of the other or both, but on their abuse. The European spirit that combined Socrates’ teaching with Jesus’ teaching does not follow the profound significances of what they each preached, deceiving thus both. Therefore, the question to be asked is this: Why did the Western European spirit not use these tools to find truth, with measure?

We should remember that, throughout the ages, the Eastern spirit glided from the measure (metron) of the ancient world to the oikonomia of the Byzantine era, remaining thus forever within the frames of the limitation imposed on the being by spiritual and temporal authorities that were accepted as incontestable, and were placed beyond it.