Socratic Spirituality

2500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates started one of the world’s great spiritual traditions.  This tradition has no creeds, ceremonies, or rituals.  Nor does it have a leader whose ideas one must follow.  Instead, it encourages each person on her own to have a direct, personal connection to the divine.  It believes that each person lives a better life if she cares more for doing God’s work in the world than making money, gaining social status, or enjoying sensual pleasures.  Socrates believed that reason and critical thinking helped a person get through the social conditioning that blocked her from having a better connection with the divine.  Thus Socratic spirituality appealed to some of antiquity’s most intellectually capable thinkers, includingthe Greek philosopher Plato and the Neoplatonists.  But the most important proponents of this spiritual tradition were Stoics such as Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics emphasized that people needed to not get swept away by the way things appeared to them, but critically examine their psychological reactions to external events.

When the Christians established their hegemony in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Socratic spiritual tradition went underground. But in the seventeenth century, Herbert of Cherbury started deism by rejecting Christianity and turning back to the Socratic spiritual tradition, especially Stoicism.  Most of the English and French deists were part of the Socratic spiritual tradition.  In America, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were part of this tradition.  (I am currently writing a book, How God became Good: the Spirituality of the English and American deists, that explains how deism was a continuation of the Socratic spiritual tradition.) Deism peaked in the 1790s.  In fact, during much of the French Revolution, deists controlled the government of France.  But the deists could not establish a viable government, and this discredited deism.  Socratic spirituality with its emphasis on using reason to have aconnection to the divine fell out of fashion.

Shortly thereafter, a new kind of spirituality arose which was very different from Socratic spirituality.  This kind of spirituality was associated with the Romantic movement that began in Europe in the 1790s.  The ideas behind this kind of spirituality were most clearly enunciated by the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who emphasized the importance of getting beyond the rational mind to a deeper connection to Nature, God, Being, or the Oneness of all things.   This kind of spirituality turned away from critical thinking to an emphasis on feelings, the power of the imagination, and mystical experiences of oneness with all things.  Nowadays, this kind of anti-rational spirituality is often labeled New Age spirituality, and it is advocated by numerous teachers including Eckhart Tolle, Shirley Maclaine, and James Redfield.

Many people turned off by the New Age worldview find Buddhism attractive as it emphasizes oneness like New Age spirituality, but it has a longer history and embraces reason and critical thinking.  The Socratic spiritual tradition has Buddhism’s advantages over New Age spirituality, but it does not share the most important drawback of Buddhism: Buddhism’s belief that when a person gets enlightened, she realizes she is one with all reality and her separate, individuality is an illusion.  While the idea a person really has no self is useful to balance out people’s self-centeredness, it is extremely impractical in helping people deal with their special responsibilities to their families or help them deal with their problems with other people.  The Socratic spiritual tradition believes that it is natural for people to care more for their special relationships with people closer to them, and offers more effective ways to help people deal with the problems they encounter in their life.  We are reinvigorating the Socratic spiritual tradition because it offers the best way to have a meaningful, joyful, and even magical way of living.