Socrates Agrees with Me on Rational Religion

In which the author tag teams with the philsopher to advance a Romantic view of religion.

In the Platonic dialogue, “Phaedrus,” Socrates and a friend walking along a river come across a spot associated with an ancient religious tale.

“Tell me, Socrates,” says Phaedrus, “isn’t it from somewhere near this stretch of Iliisus that people say Boreas carried Orithuia away. . . . ?”¹

Orithuia was a princess who, legend says, was abducted by the Boreas, the north wind, while “playing with Nymphs along the banks of the Ilisus River.”²

After Socrates points out that the spot is a few hundred yards away, Phaedrus asks, “Do you really believe that that legend is true?”

Socrates’ answer, I was surprised to discover, anticipates my response to “rational religion” by some 3,500 years.

Here’s what I said:

Now here’s what Socrates said:

Actually, it would not be out of place for me to reject it, as our intellectuals do. I could then tell a clever story: I could claim that a gust of the North Wind blew here over the rocks where she was playing. . . and once she was killed that way, people said she had been carried off by Boreas.

Socrates is alluding to the very sort of natural explanation of divine miracles that thinkers, great and small, from Maimonides on down to rationalist Substackers ascribe to events such as the parting of the Red Sea or the Egyptian plagues, or the Flood. There was a big wind that blew all night and split the sea, coincidentally, at the moment the Jews needed to cross.³ The Nile turned blood red because of a bacterial infection, a “red tide,” and the mabul, the Flood, which was just a localized Mediterranean tsunami, which primitive folk, naturally, believed was worldwide.

Individually, all these explanations can do the work of reassuring rationalists that Biblical miracles are “real.”

But there’s a problem here, as Socrates points out:

No, Phaedrus, such explanations are amusing enough, but they are a job for a man I cannot envy at all. He’d have to be far too ingenious and work too hard—mainly beause after that he will have to go on and give a rational account of the form of the Hippocentaurs, and then of the Chimera, and a whole flood of Gorgons and Pegasuses and other monsters, in large numbers and absurd forms, will ovewhelm him. Anyone who does not believe in them, who wants to explain them away and make them plausible by means of some sort of rough ingenuity, will need a great deal of time.

A great deal of time, indeed, has been spent on rescuing the six days of Creation, Adam and Eve, the talking serpent, Moses checking out God’s backside, and much much more.

I’m not saying it’s wasted time. I, myself, have enjoyed and been inspired by apologetics—which is not a dirty word, which only means “defense”—from the likes of Ramban to Gerald Schroeder, who not only argues that relativity can explain the six-thousand/15 billion year discrepancy between religion and science⁴ but also accommodates the creation of Adam and Eve with the existence of “cavemen.”⁵

But let’s be honest, once you head down this road, it’s a full-time job. You’ve got not only to explain every gigantic Og, every talking donkey, every angel, every resurrection, every discrepancy with the apparent historic and scientific record, you have to explain why God wants to you to shake a $150 lemon for eight days a year—or, for my co-religionists why he wants you to count beads or eat wafers; or leave tasty snacks for your ancestors; or whatever. . . .

No thanks. Not for me. I don’t come to religion for rationality. I come to it for inspiration, for tradition, for guardrails and signposts, for community and comfort, for poetry and stories, for meaning and purpose.

I’m with Socrates, who says,

I have no time for such things. . . I accept what is generally believed. . . . I look not into them but into myself.

I understand why people try to rationalize miracles and make the Bible make sense. But, honestly, I think it’s a lost cause. Religion doesn’t make sense, not in the left brain, Spock/Data sense of sense. It makes sense in the right brain, big picture, Blakean Romantic sense—at least for me.

Because, like Socrates, I’m not looking so much to make sense of religion as to make sense of myself.

Socrates allowed the Oracle of Delphi to send him on a mission. I let Moses do as much for me.

Did it matter to Socrates if the Oracle of Delphi was an eruption of ethylene gas that inspired hallucinations? I doubt it.

Does it matter to me what precisely happened on Mount Sinai? Not so much.

I may not agree with Socrates/Plato about woke philosophers ruling the world, but I’m good with him on this.

My advice. Don’t go chasing after naturalistic centaurs. Chase your own good self.

1. Translation from the Cooper/Hutchinson Complete Wo,rks for which I plunked down some $45—and that on Kindle.

2. Ibid.

3. Though, admittedly, this doesn’t explain the twelve paths and the reaching into the walls of water to grab apples and the like, that midrash portrays.

4. My recent investigations into physics, btw, have seriously called into question this explanation as it depends upon the universe having a center, like the center of a bomb explosion, which is not, apparently, the way the Big Bang works.

5. It’s not that Adam and Eve were the first humans, but that they were the first humans with souls. When I heard him say that back in 2005 at Aish Ha Torah, it was like a revelation; he didn’t use the word “cave man,” by the way.