Was Socrates a Monotheist?

It seems to be widely believed among members of the general public that Socrates was some sort of monotheist. If you go on the Stack Exchange Philosophy website, there’s a question: “Was Socrates a monotheist?” As of the time I am writing this, three of the answers say that he was definitely a monotheist and one of them says that it’s an open question. Only two answers correctly say that he wasn’t a monotheist, but neither answer gives a detailed explanation how we know this.

Historically speaking, Socrates almost certainly believed in the existence of many deities—just like most other people in classical Athens. Unfortunately, modern readers who are accustomed to thinking about religion in monotheistic terms have a tendency to misinterpret passages from the Platonic dialogues as suggesting monotheism.

This problem is only made worse by the fact that some of the most widely used translations of the Platonic dialogues were produced by monotheistic scholars who were desperate to see Socrates as a monotheist and therefore deliberately translated the texts to make it sound like he was one.

Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon

Before I go any further, I need to stress just how thoroughly separated most modern readers are from the historical Socrates himself. As I discuss in this article I originally published in March 2019, Socrates never wrote any of his ideas down, meaning everything we know about him comes from what other people wrote about him.

There are a ton of surviving ancient Greek sources mentioning Socrates that were written within his lifetime and shortly after his death by various people who either knew him personally or at least knew of him. The contemporary Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) wrote an entire play making fun of him and we have fragmentary references to him from two other contemporary Athenian comic playwrights, named Eupolis and Ameipsias.

The most important sources of information about what Socrates actually taught, however, are the works about him written by his students. We know from references in ancient sources that there were a bunch of students of Socrates who wrote about him, but the only ones whose works have survived to the present day complete are Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BCE).

Most of the people who think that Socrates was a monotheist have gotten this idea from misreading passages in the Socratic dialogues written by Plato, so, for this article, I will be focusing almost exclusively on Plato. Nonetheless, readers should be aware that there is also a very large surviving corpus of works about Socrates written by Xenophon. Furthermore, although Plato and Xenophon’s portrayals of Socrates do have a lot in common, they don’t agree on everything, meaning there’s an open question about how accurate Plato’s portrayal of Socrates even is to begin with.

ABOVE: Greek portrait heads of Xenophon (left) and Plato (right), our two most important sources of information about the historical Socrates

The language of Socrates and Plato

In addition to the fact that everything we know about Socrates comes from what other people wrote, there is another factor that separates most modern readers from the historical Socrates: translation. Quite simply, the historical Socrates did not speak English and Plato did not write in English. Instead, they both spoke Classical Attic Greek.

In his various surviving dialogues, Plato often portrays Socrates as using the phrase “ὁ θεός” (ho theós), which means “the deity,” and the phrase “ὁ δαίμων” (ho daímōn), which means “the divine being.” As an example, here are the famous final words of Plato’s Apologia of Socrates, from section 42a, in the original Greek:

“ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἤδη ὥρα ἀπιέναι, ἐμοὶ μὲν ἀποθανουμένῳ, ὑμῖν δὲ βιωσομένοις: ὁπότεροι δὲ ἡμῶν ἔρχονται ἐπὶ ἄμεινον πρᾶγμα, ἄδηλον παντὶ πλὴν ἢ τῷ θεῷ.”

Here is my translation:

“But this is the time to depart, for me to die, and for you all to live—but which of us goes to the better lot, it is unknown to all except the deity.”

Which “deity” is Socrates talking about here? He’s most likely talking about Apollon, the god of prophecy, whom he mentioned earlier in his speech. He’s certainly not talking about any kind of monotheistic God.

Socrates, Plato, and Christianity

Later history, however, has distorted Plato’s meaning and fueled the false impression that Socrates was a monotheist. In the late third or early second century BCE, various Jewish scholars translated the texts of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek, a dialect of the Greek language derived from the Classical Attic dialect spoken by Socrates and Plato. These translators chose to translate the Hebrew word אֱלֹהִים (Elohím), which refers to the God of Israel, using the Greek phrase “ὁ θεός.”

The authors of the Christian New Testament in the late first and early second centuries CE chose to follow the Septuagint translators’ lead. Thus, the writings of the New Testament use the phrase “ὁ θεός”—the exact same phrase used by Plato in his Socratic dialogues—to refer to the monotheistic Christian God.

As I discuss in this article from April 2020, early Christians read Plato’s Socratic dialogues and chose to interpret Socrates and Plato as unknowing Christians. The early Christian apologist Ioustinos Martys (lived c. 100 – c. 165 CE) argued that the “σπέρματα τοῦ λόγου” (spérmata toû lógou), or “seeds of the word,” were planted long before the coming of the gospel and that these seeds influenced the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

The slightly later Christian writer Klemes of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) went even further and argued that Greek philosophy was a revelation in its own right and that it had played a similar role in preparing the way for Christianity as the revelations contained within the Hebrew Bible.

ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of Klemes of Alexandria by the French engraver André Thévet in his work Les Vrais Portraits Et Vies Des Hommes Illustres. (No one knows what Klemes really looked like.)

This view of Socrates and Plato as “crypto-Christians” is not really accurate, but it allowed early Christians to freely adapt Platonic ideas for Christian audiences and appropriate Platonic philosophy to suit Christian needs and purposes. Moreover, the view has persisted well into modernity, especially among the more theological scholarly circles. Consequently, it has greatly affected how scholars have chosen to translate Plato’s dialogues into English.

A noteworthy example of this comes from Benjamin Jowett (lived 1817 – 1893), a prominent liberal theologian and professor at the University of Oxford who translated the complete works of Plato into English. Jowett chose to translate the Greek words θεός and δαίμων as “God” with a capital G whenever at all possible. His translations are still among the most widely read. Furthermore, Jowett’s translations are among the only translations available online, since most of the more recent translations are still under copyright protection.

Even in Jowett’s translations, however, the Greek deities abound everywhere; indeed, one can hardly go more than a few pages without at least one of them being mentioned in some form or another.

ABOVE: Portrait from 1893 of Benjamin Jowett, who translated the complete works of Plato into English, using “God” with a capital G as a translation for the Greek word θεός whenever possible

The daimon of Socrates

Plato portrays Socrates as claiming that there was a δαίμων, or “divine being,” that sometimes spoke to him and ordered him not to do what he was thinking of doing. In the Apologia of Socrates, sections 31c-31d, Plato portrays Socrates as giving the following description, as translated by Harold North Fowler:

“But the reason for this, as you have heard me say at many times and places, is that something divine and spiritual [i.e., a daimon] comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics.”

This passage has misled some people into thinking that Socrates must have believed in a single monotheistic God who was protecting him. This is not accurate, however. Daimones of the sort Socrates describes here were an established part of traditional Greek religion. The ancient Greeks believed that daimones were capricious supernatural beings who sometimes protected people and sometimes harmed people.

The ancient Athenians probably regarded Socrates’s claim that there was a benevolent daimon giving him personal guidance as a bit odd. Nevertheless, the claim on its own does not violate traditional Greek religious beliefs, nor does it in any way imply that Socrates was a monotheist.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure oinochoë dated to c. 320 BCE showing a woman with a mirror facing a winged daimon

Socrates’s arguments in The Republic, Book Two

In The Republic 2.377b-383c, Plato portrays Socrates as arguing that poets such as Homer, Hesiodos, and Aischylos have egregiously misrepresented the deities and falsely portrayed them as engaging in all sorts of immoral acts. He argues that true deities are capable only of good things, not evil things, and that they do not change shapes, but rather must maintain the same natures and appearances in all situations.

One of the answerers on the Stack Exchange Philosophy website quotes a portion of this argument from Benjamin Jowett’s translation and claims that it “certainly appears to imply monotheism, if followed through to its unspoken conclusion.” This is certainly not the case, however. At no point in his argument does Socrates ever dispute the assumption of multiple deities—either explicitly or implicitly. In fact, he explicitly refers to “deities” in the plural multiple times throughout the argument.

There is no evidence to suggest that Socrates or Plato would have seen this argument as implying monotheism. The only reason why some people today think that Socrates’s argument implies monotheism is because these people are already convinced that monotheism is true and logical and they therefore desperately want to believe that Socrates must have been a proponent of it.

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the House of Mars and Venus in Pompeii dating to around the first century CE depicting the affair between the goddess Aphrodite and the god Ares—one of the many instances in traditional Greek mythology in which deities are portrayed behaving immorally

The “demiourgos” in Plato’s Timaios

Other supporters of the idea that Socrates was a monotheist have pointed to the fact that, in Plato’s dialogue Timaios, the speaker Timaios describes in great detail how the whole universe was supposedly created by a single creator-deity, whom he refers to as the δημιουργός (dēmiourgós).

This concept of the demiourgos would later go on to be extremely influential on Gnostic and Neoplatonic thought. It continues to have influence even today, often through very unusual channels. Notably, as I discuss in this article from October 2019, the Greek word δημιουργός is, through an incredibly bizarre series of events, the ultimate source of the name of the monster called the “Demogorgon” in Stranger Things.

There are, however, two huge problems with interpreting Timaios’s description of the demiourgos as evidence that Socrates was a monotheist. The first problem is that Timaios is not Socrates, but rather an entirely separate individual. The second problem is that even Timaios does not describe the demiourgos as the only deity in existence; instead, he characterizes the demiourgos as merely the oldest and most powerful deity among many.

Timaios explicitly affirms the existence of the traditional Olympian deities, the Titans, and even demigods. Here is what he says in the Timaios 40d-41a (mostly from Jowett’s translation, but with a few emendations of my own):

“To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the gods—that is what they say—and they must surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of the gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs, still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them.”

“In this manner, then, according to them, the genealogy of these gods is to be received and set forth. Okeanos and Tethys were the children of Gaia and Ouranos, and from these sprang Phorkys and Kronos and Rhea, and all that generation; and from Kronos and Rhea sprang Zeus and Hera, and all those who are said to be their brethren, and others who were the children of these.”

Clearly, Timaios is describing a world full of polytheistic deities not very far off at all from the world described by traditional Greek poets like Homer and Hesiodos. He certainly is not describing anything close to the monotheistic God that Christians believe in today.

ABOVE: The Fall of the Titans, painted between 1596 and 1598 by the Dutch Mannerist painter Cornelis van Haarlem

The accusation of impiety against Socrates

In 399 BCE, Socrates was brought to trial under two charges. Some people have tried to use these charges as evidence that Socrates was a monotheist. If we actually pay attention, though, it is clear that Socrates was not a monotheist and that his accusers never even claimed that he was a monotheist.

Remarkably, the exact words of Socrates’s indictment have been preserved through quotation by the Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios (who lived in around the third century CE) in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.5.40. Diogenes Laërtios got the text of the indictment from a now-lost work written by the orator Favorinus (lived c. 80 – c. 160 CE), who had access to the original records. The indictment reads as follows:

“τάδε ἐγράψατο καὶ ἀντωμόσατο Μέλητος Μελήτου Πιτθεὺς Σωκράτει Σωφρονίσκου Ἀλωπεκῆθεν· ἀδικεῖ Σωκράτης, οὓς μὲν ἡ πόλις νομίζει θεοὺς οὐ νομίζων, ἕτερα δὲ καινὰ δαιμόνια εἰσηγούμενος· ἀδικεῖ δὲ καὶ τοὺς νέους διαφθείρων. τίμημα θάνατος.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Miletos, son of Miletos, the Pitthean, wrote and swore the following things against Sokrates, son of Sophroniskos, the Alopekian: Sokrates does wrong by not recognizing the deities that the polis recognizes and by introducing new divine beings; and he also does wrong by corrupting the youth. Penalty: death.”

Notice there is nothing in here about Socrates supposedly only believing in the existence of one God. The accusation is much more general; according to Socrates’s accusers, he didn’t recognize the deities recognized by the state and was instead introducing “new divine beings” (plural). There’s nothing about this to suggest that he was a monotheist of any sort.

Moreover, it is generally believed among classicists that Socrates was not really guilty of any of the crimes that he was publicly accused of and that these charges were instead politically motivated. In his Apologia of Socrates, Plato has Socrates say in the opening remarks of his speech to the jury that his accusers “… have scarcely spoken a word of truth at all.”

The rest of the Apologia and all Plato’s other dialogues seem to support this statement. Indeed, by the end of Socrates’s speech in the Apologia, Plato makes it very clear that Socrates is, in fact, a very pious man who honors the gods of the state, holds the god Apollon in high esteem, and who trusts the word of the Delphic oracle.

ABOVE: Modern imaginative illustration of Socrates speaking to the jury at his trial

It is generally recognized that the real reason why Socrates was brought to trial was not because he was genuinely impious, but rather because he was connected to some widely hated figures in Athenian politics.

Socrates had an extremely close relationship with the general Alkibiades. He is said to have rescued him from death in the Battle of Potidaia in 432 BCE. After that, Alkibiades is said to have become one of Socrates’s disciples. In the Symposion 217-219, Plato portrays Alkibiades as claiming that he actually tried to seduce Socrates into having sexual relations with him, but that Socrates rebuffed his attempts at seduction.

Therefore, it probably didn’t reflect well on Socrates’s reputation when Alkibiades defected from Athens in 415 BCE, shortly after the Athenian fleet arrived at Katane for the Athenian invasion of Sicily, and joined up with Sparta—Athens’ enemy. Perhaps partly as a result of Alkibiades’s defection, the Sicilian expedition ended up being an unmitigated catastrophe for the Athenians. Alkibiades bounced around changing loyalties throughout the remaining course of the Peloponnesian War, winding up on the Athenian side again before being banished. He was eventually assassinated in 404 BCE while living in the Achaemenid Empire.

ABOVE: Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, painted in 1776 by the French Neoclassical painter François-André Vincent

Meanwhile, after Athens surrendered to Sparta in 404 BCE, the Spartans took away Athenian democracy and imposed a brutal pro-Spartan oligarchic regime in which a group of thirty pro-Spartan Athenian aristocrats were given the highest authority. These thirty oligarchs later became known as οἱ τριάκοντα τύραννοι (hoi triákonta týrannoi), which means “the Thirty Tyrants.”

The Thirty Tyrants led a reign of terror lasting eight months, over the span of which they executed anyone whom they suspected of not being loyal to their regime. They also executed wealthy people simply to take their land. It is estimated that, within their brief reign, the Thirty Tyrants executed somewhere around 1,500 Athenians without trial—amounting to roughly one twentieth of the total Athenian population.

The ringleader of the Thirty Tyrants was a man named Kritias, who had been one of Socrates’s students. He was also a cousin of Plato’s mother Periktione. Another member of the regime was Charmides, who was Plato’s uncle and had also been a student of Socrates.

Eventually, early in 403 BCE, a group of democratic supporters led by the general Thrasyboulos overthrew the Spartan-imposed regime and restored democracy. After this restoration, however, many people who were connected to the Thirty Tyrants were viewed with distrust and suspicion.

Plato tells us that Socrates stood up against the Thirty Tyrants. In the Apologia of Socrates, sections 32c-32e, he portrays Socrates as saying the following words to the jury, as translated by Harold North Fowler:

“…and after the oligarchy was established, the Thirty sent for me with four others to come to the rotunda and ordered us to bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis to be put to death. They gave many such orders to others also, because they wished to implicate as many in their crimes as they could. Then I, however, showed again, by action, not in word only, that I did not care a whit for death if that be not too rude an expression, but that I did care with all my might not to do anything unjust or unholy.”

“For that government, with all its power, did not frighten me into doing anything unjust, but when we came out of the rotunda, the other four went to Salamis and arrested Leon, but I simply went home; and perhaps I should have been put to death for it, if the government had not quickly been put down. Of these facts you can have many witnesses.”

We will probably never know whether this account is truthful. It is possible that the historical Socrates may have been more complicit in the Thirty Tyrants’ reign of terror than Plato portrays him. In any case, regardless of whatever opposition to the regime Socrates might have shown, it is clear that the Athenian public still viewed him as one of the regime’s supporters and this is almost certainly the primary reason why they voted to put him to death.

In other words, the Athenians most likely put Socrates on trial and sentenced him to death primarily because many of them believed (rightly or wrongly) that he was training his students to become murderous oligarchs. It had nothing to do with him supposedly being any kind of monotheist.

ABOVE: The Death of Socrates, painted in 1787 by the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David