Socratic Spiritual Tradition

Introduction to the Socratic Spiritual Tradition

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 to have a personal connection to the divine.  This tradition maintains that each person lives a better life if they concentrate on doing following their connection to the divine. (The divine can be conceived of in many ways, including as a Higher Power, the Higher Self, the gods, the Tao, or God.) 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. For this reason, Socratic spirituality appealed to some of antiquity’s most intellectually capable thinkers, including Plato, the Cynics, the Neoplatonists, and the Neopythagoreans.

But the most important proponents of this spiritual tradition were Stoics, including Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics emphasized that people should not get swept away by the way things appeared to them, but they should critically examine their psychological reactions to external events. 

Nowadays, all the proponents of the Socratic Spiritual Tradition would be described as “spiritual but not religious.”

In the fourth and fifth centuries, and with the aid of the Roman Emperors and the Roman army, the Catholic Church gained hegemonic power in the West. Catholics then persecuted the proponents of the Socratic spiritual tradition and closed their academies, or their schools. Many of the Platonists and Neoplatonists hid their beliefs or fled to Iran and the Middle East, where they eventually influenced the rise of an Islamic kind of deism, called “Mu’tazila’s.”  But in the seventeenth century, Herbert of Cherbury started Enlightenment 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, including Ben Franklin, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Maximilien Robespierre. 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 critical thinking and reason to help have a connection to the divine, fell out of fashion. 

Shortly after deism fell out of fashion, a new kind of spirituality arose, and it was very different from Socratic spirituality. This kind of spirituality was associated with the Romantic movement that began in Europe in the 1790s. Its leading proponents in Europe were William Wordsworth, William Blake, and W. F. Schleiermacher. Romanticism’s leading American proponents were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson most clearly articulated the ideas behind this kind of spirituality. He emphasized the importance of getting beyond the rational mind to a deeper connection to Nature, God, Being, or the Oneness of all things. Instead of emphasizing critical thinking and rationality like the proponents of the Socratic Spiritual Tradition, Romantics emphasized 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, Paulo Cuelho, and Deepak Chopra.

            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. However, unlike Buddhism, which started in India around the same time, Socratic spirituality was not created by meditating monks whose goal was to reach nirvana. Socrates lived in the world, enjoyed the pleasures of the world, but he was not attached to them. Instead of making the goal of spirituality being of an experience of Oneness, its proponents emphasize being connected to the divine and fulfilling one’s personal, family, and social responsibilities.

            The goal of the Socratic Spirituality Press is reviving the Socratic Spiritual Tradition.