225. Why Socrates was the greatest philosopher
225. WHY SOCRATES WAS THE GREATEST PHILOSOPHER
Whom did St. Thomas admire as the greatest philosopher who ever lived?
It was fitting that Christ should not commit His doctrine to writing . . . for the more excellent the teacher, the more excellent should be his manner of teaching. Consequently it was fitting that Christ, as the most excellent of teachers, should adopt that manner of teaching whereby His doctrine is imprinted on the hearts of His hearers; wherefore it is written (Mt 7:29) that He was teaching them as one having authority. And so it was that among the Gentiles, Pythagoras and Socrates, who were teachers of great excellence, were unwilling to write anything (III,42,4).
St. Thomas, like many of his medieval contemporaries, called Aristotle simply “The Philosopher”, and he used the fundamental commonsense concepts of Aristotle’s logic, physics, metaphysics, anthropology, epistemology, and ethics more than anyone else’s (though with important corrections and additions). But there was someone he ranked even higher than Aristotle, at least personally.
St. Thomas quoted and approved the words of St. Augustine more than those of any other writer outside Scripture (although he corrected a few key Augustinian ideas, especially in epistemology, as Aristotle corrected Plato). But there was someone he ranked even higher than St. Augustine—not in theology, or in technical philosophy, or in personal sanctity, but in “philosophical sanctity”, so to speak.
Erasmus, writing three centuries later, voiced this evaluation when he called this philosopher “Saint Socrates”.
St. Thomas’ ultimate standard for ranking philosophers was the same as his ultimate standard for ranking anything: Jesus Christ. Socrates is ranked highest among the philosophers because of his resemblance to Christ.
The clue that led St. Thomas to this conclusion was not primarily anything in the content of his teaching (which he sometimes explicitly disagreed with, especially the notion that “all evil is due to ignorance”) but his method of teaching. Among philosophers Socrates most resembled Christ because alone among philosophical “teachers of great excellence”, Socrates wrote nothing. (St. Thomas had to mention Pythagoras too in this regard, but I suspect that was merely an after-thought or a concession.)
St. Thomas says that Christ’s manner of teaching without writing anything is more, not less, excellent than the method of other philosophers.
Lao Tzu says the same thing: he wrote his severely laconic masterpiece the Tao Te Ching only under duress, when the gatekeeper at the Great Wall would not allow him to pass and exit from the civilized and (he thought) corrupt civilization of China and enter the Mongolian wilderness until he had given his wisdom to the world in writing; so he quickly wrote down 81 amazingly wise, laconic little poems. It begins with “The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way.” And later, “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.” This is close to Socrates’ conviction that what is most worth teaching is not teachable (in words).
More important, it is also close to God’s conviction that made Him express Himself most definitively not in words, not even in the infallible words of His inspired prophets and saints, but in The Word, Who is a Person—both eternally, in the Trinity, and temporally, in the Incarnation.
St. Thomas is careful, however, to sharply distinguish Socrates from Christ in pointing to the heart of the uniqueness and absolute superiority of Christ’s teaching method, which was the direct implanting of eternal Truth in the hearts of His disciples. No man could do that, not even Socrates. For what was implanted by Christ was (and is) not just truth in concepts but truth in Person. The eternal Truth that Christ implants in human hearts is not truths about God but God Himself.