SOCIOLOGISM: V. SOCIETY.
Diocese of Socorro and San Gil. — In the Republic of Colombia (South America).
It has an area of 12,900 sq. km., with a population of 345,546 inhabitants, of whom 345,406 are Catholics, distributed in 50 parishes served by 69 diocesan priests and 25 religious; it has a seminary, 5 male religious communities and 23 female ones (Ann. Pont. 1952, p. 384).
The diocese of S. was created by Pope Leo XIII on 20 March 1895 under the name and with residence at S. Pope Pius XI, with the apostolic constitution Apostolici officii of 19 January 1928, transferred the episcopal see to the city of San Gil, at the same time elevating the principal church of that city, dedicated to St Egidius, to the dignity and rank of cathedral; it was also established that from then on the diocese would assume the name of Socorro and San Gil. The diocese is a suffragan of Bogotá.
The city of S. arose at Chiaucón, a village of an indigenous chief of the same name. The village was transferred to its present site in 1681 and placed under the patronage of Our Lady of Succour (S.), with an annual feast on 16 June.
SOCRATES. — One of the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece and one of the greatest figures of all time. Born in Athens in 469 BC, son of the sculptor Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, he first practised his father’s art; but the “daimonion” (τὸ σαμόνιον τί), which spoke to him within as a divine voice (Plato, Ap., 29-30), suggested to him the “mission” of teaching, confirmed by the oracle of Delphi.
To this mission, which he regarded as divine and unrenounceable until his death, Socrates devoted his whole life, neglecting everything else, even his wife Xanthippe and his children. He did not hold a regular school but taught by conversing in the squares, the gymnasia, the streets of Athens, wherever he met people willing to listen, ready for “dialogue.” He never left Athens except to fulfil his duties as a soldier (he took part as a young man in the battles of Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis); he abstained from politics, yet powerfully influenced the life of his time with his word. His harsh criticisms of contemporaries and of the democratic regime incurred the hatred of his adversaries. At the age of 70, three citizens (Meletus, Anytus and Lycon) accused him of corrupting the youth and of teaching beliefs contrary to the religion of the State. Brought to trial, he disdained to defend himself against the charges, made an apology for his mission and refused to renounce II. Found guilty by a narrow majority, he might have chosen exile, but in the debate to fix the penalty he declared that he considered himself worthy to be maintained in the Prytaneum, i.e. at public expense, like distinguished citizens. Condemned to death, despite the entreaties of friends and disciples, he refused to escape from prison so as not to offend the laws of his country and wished to bear witness, by his death, to the justice which he had taught all his life to respect. He drank the hemlock with the serenity of the just man (399 BC). Until the last moment he exhorted his most faithful followers to take care of themselves, to be good and not to think of him, for Asclepius, this time a good physician, by freeing him from bodily life, was sending him, to the astonished wonder of disciples and friends, into the empyrean of the just spirits (Phaed., 115-118).
Besides the Phaedo, the Apology and the Crito are the dialogues that have immortalised the life and death of Socrates. His personality is exceptional: his way of living, questioning and answering disconcerted and amazed his interlocutors and hearers. Socrates disturbed minds and generated doubts in them, i.e. forced them to search, to examine themselves (he made his own the Delphic maxim “know thyself”); for him philosophy is “dialogue,” examining oneself in relation to others, an examination that is a lofty teaching. Meno, in the dialogue of the same name by Plato (80 a), says to Socrates, who is questioning him: “you fascinate me, you enchant me, so that I am all perplexity”; and compares him to the torpedo fish, “which makes numb whoever approaches and touches it.” Socrates stirs up: “he breathes into his hearers purposes of changing life; his mouth, says Alcibiades (Conv., 2:18 a), is like a ‘viper’s bite’ in the ‘most painful part,’ in the soul; and this bite is his ‘philosophical discourses.’” And Alcibiades himself likens him to the effigy of a Silenus which contains divine images within; and to the satyr Marsyas, like him “insolent” and “flautist,” who, without instruments, merely by means of naked words, produces the same effect: “to be violently drawn out of oneself and possessed” (ibid., 215 a-216). His personality dominated men of the stature of Alcibiades and Plato, who made him the protagonist of all his Dialogues, almost effacing himself behind the figure of the master. “A man, we may say,” it is written in the Phaedo (118 a; cf. Epist., VII, 324 e), “of those who then knew him, the best, the wisest, the most just.” Subsequently the Greek Fathers of the Church draw a parallel with Christ and see in Socrates the “witness” of the truth, he who not only preached it but embodied it, practised it and bore witness to it with his death. The Latin Fathers of the Church do not share this view, but St Augustine, in a chapter of the De civitate Dei (VIII, cap. 3), introduces him into Christian philosophy as a wise man of high wisdom, contemplated in the light of eternal truth and realised in the practice of life. The Enlightenment (v.), rationalist and anti-Christian, exalts Socrates as “the saint of paganism,” tending to compare him with Christ in a tendentious manner. Rousseau (v.) is an exception, who in a page of his celebrated “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” excessively diminishes the figure of Socrates, but justly concludes: “yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God.”
Socrates wrote nothing, and this is partly explained by his conception of philosophy as living research and dialogue and above all by his profound conviction of fulfilling a divine mission. Consequently, his personality and his doctrine must be reconstructed through indirect testimonies, namely the Dialogues of Plato (v.), the Aristotle (v.) says about him in the Metaphysics. This has given rise to the problem of the “sources” or the “Socratic question,” still not definitively resolved today. It is now almost unanimously agreed not to accept as a historical source the caricature of the philosopher drawn by Aristophanes in the Clouds, with evident polemical intent; to consider Xenophon’s testimony insufficient, incapable of understanding the doctrine and the lofty personality of the master, without however rejecting it; and to accept Plato’s testimony with critical prudence so as to avoid attributing to Socrates what belongs instead to his great disciple. To this end, Aristotle’s testimony is useful, which presents Socrates as the philosopher of the “concept,” leaving to Plato the entire philosophy of the “ideas.”
«I am eager to learn, and the fields and the trees do not wish to teach me anything, unlike men in the city.» Thus S. to Phaedrus in the dialogue of the same name (231 d). S., in fact, unlike the pre-Socratics, had no interest in naturalistic research: the object of his speculation is man and human society; hence, «humanism». This aligns him with the sophists (v.); yet the Socratic form of humanism is the radical critique of that sophistry. S., therefore, defines himself not «as a sophist» but «in comparison» with the sophists, precisely as Plato does. For the sophists, man is a subject of sensations; for S., he is a subject, as reason, of an objective, cognitive, and moral order. Knowledge, which for the sophists is opinion, is for S. concept; the practical activity which for the sophists is skill, is for S. virtue (ἀρετή); the society which for the sophists is individualism (the egoism of individuals and the right of the stronger), is for S. «dialogue», «communication», an organic structure of laws demanding obedience and respect. In short, for S., there is a rational principle by which man communicates with an absolute order of truth. To awaken inquiry according to this principle, to aid in finding the truth, to convince man that intelligence is not merely practical, to orient him toward living according to the laws of goodness, and to habituate him to thoroughgoing discussion—these are the aims of his educational mission. Man is not merely sense but also reason, and thus capable of immutable and universal concepts. To know is «to know by concepts»: to have a concept of a thing is to define its essence, by virtue of which all things of that kind truly and really are what they are. S. is the discoverer of the concept, whose essential features he fixed and defined.
His method comprises two moments: irony and maieutics. With the former, the philosopher, as if assuming the role of a disciple and declaring himself ignorant (for S. is wise who is conscious of his own ignorance), compels his interlocutors (sophists and youths educated by them) to confess their ignorance. Irony is the force of reasoning that pricks and deflates words full only of their emptiness, unravels rhetoric and confuses it, kills ignorance by making it conscious of itself, to clear the ground for the other subtle and fruitful procedure of maieutics. The art of his mother: mastery in the theater, inability to give birth (Theaet., 1:50 c d), the obstetric power of questioning that, from the depths, evokes into the life of consciousness the dormant yet fecund truth. Maieutics also signifies that truth is not learned from without but is won from within: a laborious generation whose products must be sifted by reason.
From particulars, abstracting what is contingent, through the method of induction (v.), one grasps the essence (v.), that by which a thing is what it is. Thus S., against the sophists, vindicates the objectivity of knowing, which also serves as the norm of conduct. To know means to define: and thus to know the good means to possess the concept. Undoubtedly, according to S., no one feels morally obligated unless he has an «interest» in doing so, but this does not mean, as the sophists taught, that the good resides in utility or in the particular interest of each. For S., the good consists in the utility of all. When man acts for the common interest, he also gains his own happiness, which lies in the consciousness of acting justly, with full mastery of himself through reason. The wise man is thus just, strong, and temperate. For S., the virtuous man is the wise man: he practices the good who knows it; virtue is knowledge. On the other hand, he who knows the good cannot fail to do it, since only the virtuous man is happy, and all men aspire to happiness. No one, therefore, is wicked voluntarily, and he who does evil does so through ignorance. To render men virtuous, it suffices to teach them what the good is; hence, the improvement of society is a matter of education. S.’s morality is eudaimonistic, in that it places the good or the good of man in happiness, which, however, is the acquisition of virtue, which is knowledge of the good. For him, the concept is «the law of the mind», virtue is «the law of life» of the individual and social being; and the being of the concept coincides with the «ought» of moral action.
His philosophy was also his religious faith. S. always showed respect for traditional religion, whose observance he counted among the duties of the citizen; yet his religion was not the cult of the gods but of the «Divine», that of which, through his daemon, he felt the inspiriting sign within himself; and it seems that he identified this divinity with the very principle of moral order. Before his judges he declares that he «obeys God rather than men» (Apol., 29 d), that is, the God who spoke within him and to whom he wished to assimilate himself; and «one assimilates oneself to God by becoming just and holy in the clarity of the spirit» (Theaet., 176 b). Even on the immortality of the soul S. had no very precise ideas, though he did not exclude its possibility. Fundamentally, his tendency was rationalistic.
SOCRATES — Bust of S. Roman copy from an archetype of the early 4th century B.C. — Rome, Capitoline Museum.