Ask, Seek, Knock

Cicero said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven into the cities and homes of men.  Socrates’ followers did just the opposite. Socrates’ student and disciple, Plato,  founded a school (the Academy), a place where men could go to develop to the full whatever capacity they had of seeking and finding the truth.  The aim of the school was to give the city of Athens a new life, providing the city with wise and good political leaders.  The eager young Academicians who attended the school, pursuing the higher truth, strictly avoided getting tainted by the tears, pains, sufferings, joys and loves of the ordinary Athenian people.  Theirs was a higher goal. They were seeking truth and in that seeking they avoided the truth and knowledge of how ordinary people lived! The students sought a political education but were withdrawn from practical politics.  They lived a retired life absorbed in studies which had no remote connection with anything political.  Seeking knowledge, hungering for the truth, aiming for the highest, these students of the Academy, according to Plato himself, did not even know their way around the city, where the market-place was, or what new law had recently passed in the Assembly, and they had not the slightest idea what people were talking about.  

The Academy (the followers of Socrates) stopped following Socrates. Socrates sought “knowledge of the highest,” but the place where he looked for it was in the gymnasium where he would sit down and talk to a couple of fellows resting from their exercise, or on a street corner where someone stopped to pass the time of day with him, or at a dinner party where men drank good wine and talked freely.  

Socrates, like Jesus,  never considered establishing an institution (an Academy, a university, a church,  or a theological seminary) to spread the truth they had discovered.  Both men knew that the truth they knew could not be expressed in statements and taught to others.  The truth they knew could only be found by a person seeking it himself (herself).  Perhaps this is why Socrates never wrote down a word and Jesus wrote only once, with his finger in the dust.  

There is in every person, Socrates believed,  a spark of good, of the divine (which John’s Gospel centuries later called “The true light which lighteth every man”) which could be kindled into a flame.  It was the object of Socrates’ work to kindle the spark.  This was Plato’s aim, too.  It was the object of Jesus’ work to kindle the spark.  This was Paul’s aim, too.  Did the Academy, the university, the church, the theological seminary smother the spark?  Of course not, but such institutions have often forgotten that Socrates’ and Jesus’ truth is not something expressed in statements (creeds, dogmas, etc.) and taught. Socrates’ truth is something one must seek in order to find—such knowledge cannot be given by Academy, university or book.  Jesus’ truth is something one must seek for him/herself in order to find—such knowledge cannot be given by Church, university, seminary or book.

The LIbrary of Ephesus