Joseph Priestley published Socrates and Jesus Compared in Philadelphia in 1803, late in a long life of chemical research and theological controversy. It is a short expository tract, not a narrative: Priestley sets the Athenian philosopher beside Jesus of Nazareth and argues, section by section, that the one is a heathen teacher of real but limited virtue and the other the Son of God. The book appeared together with a hostile answer by the young Philadelphia minister John Blair Linn, and the two exchanged further letters in print the same year. What survives is less a calm comparison than a live argument, conducted at speed, about how far reason can go without revelation.
Priestley’s method is forensic. He confines his evidence for Socrates almost entirely to Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology and to Plato, treating these two disciples as the only trustworthy witnesses, and he builds his case out of close quotation. The nine numbered sections of the pamphlet move from Socrates’ polytheism and idolatry, through his ideas of providence, his moral character, the imperfection of his piety, his belief in a future state, and the famous “daemon” or divine voice, to a direct comparison of the two teachers, the different audiences they addressed, and the inferences to be drawn from the whole. The appended letters turn the comparison into a dispute about the Trinity and the atonement, with Linn defending orthodox doctrine and Priestley answering him point by point.
How the Case Is Built
A Dedication and a Programme of Enquiry
Priestley opens by addressing his old friend Joshua Toulmin, offering the essay as a token of esteem. Leisure had let him return to the ancient texts—Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s portrait of Socrates—and drawing out the philosopher’s principles and conduct from those two original writers suggested the comparison with Jesus. Knowing Toulmin had published on the same subject, he deliberately avoided reading it until his own manuscript was ready for the press, so as not to be swayed; on finally reading it he was pleased, though he differs in some particulars. He thanks Toulmin for defending “rational Christianity,” names Belsham and Kentish among the champions to come, admits his own labours are nearly over, and acknowledges that Toulmin was the particular target of his recent tract on infant baptism. The dedication is dated Northumberland, January 1803. A short advertisement fixes the texts he quotes—Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology in Simpson’s Oxford edition, Plato in the Cambridge de Rebus divinis—and an index maps the nine sections, from Socrates’s polytheism through his daemon and the comparison of characters to the inferences drawn at the end.
Socrates Among the Heathen
The introduction presents Socrates as a singular phenomenon in the pagan world, resembling the ancient prophets and even the Saviour. No Greek philosopher before or after him came near him in conduct, though all were educated alike, and all fell short in moral purity. Xenophon and Plato, contemporaries and disciples, transmit his character; had their accounts been false, some trace of objection would survive among the many writers of the age, and none does. He abstained from vice, promoted virtue in others, drew to himself wealthy young men of the best Athenian families, and took no fee despite his poverty. As a citizen he was incorrupt and fearless, risking popularity and life; at his trial he behaved with magnanimity, accepted death calmly, refused to beg for a milder sentence or to escape, and drank the fatal cup with composure.
The Idolatry of a Wise Man
Section I presses the case that Socrates was an idolater who conformed to popular worship: he sacrificed publicly and at home, practised divination, and at his trial claimed to acknowledge only the received gods. Asked whether sun and moon are gods, he assented; he accepted demons; dying, he asked Crito to sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius. Once he spoke of one God who constructed the world, but never called him the only God. His assiduity in divination was immoderate—he sent friends to oracles, advised consulting the gods, and believed they signified their will to him particularly, sometimes as a “voice.” Against Rollin and others who make him a believer in divine unity, Priestley finds no sufficient evidence: he might have avowed it before his judges or at his death, and his language and conduct were the reverse. He doubts whether anyone so educated could reach a firm belief in one God by the light of nature alone.
Providence and the Unseen Gods
Despite his polytheism, Socrates held just sentiments of divine power, providence, and obedience—short of David and the prophets, but more rational than heathens generally or later philosophers. He ascribed the world’s formation and government to a god, where Hesiod held the world eternal and the gods subsequent. He pointed to providence in the senses, the eyelashes, the eyelids, the teeth. The gods, he held, know all that is said, done, thought, and intended, being present everywhere, so men should abstain from base acts in private. They know the future but conceal it, hence his prayer for good in general rather than specifics; lightning he took for an immediate divine intimation. The gods gave men rational souls, supplying water, fire, seasons, senses. Unwritten universal laws—worship of the gods, gratitude, the prohibition of parental incest, general morality—have the gods as authors. To the objection that the gods are unseen he answered with lightning, wind, and the human intellect: their powers must be reverenced though unseen. Nothing exceeded his respect for the divine will; if the gods signify it, we must not depart from it. At his trial he said he must obey god rather than man, and would philosophize wherever placed, dreading baseness more than death. To Aristodemus, who thought the gods too great to need his worship, he replied that the greater they are, the more to be honoured—and that a poor man’s offering is as acceptable as a rich man’s.
A Life Conformed to Doctrine
These sentiments were not merely speculative; his life answered to them. Xenophon’s summary has him so religious that he did nothing without the gods’ advice, so just that he injured no one, so temperate that he preferred the useful to the pleasant, so prudent that he never mistook worse for better. In conversation he excelled at defining right, reproving the vicious, exhorting to virtue. Though not affluent, he took no gratuity, preserving freedom and independence; at his trial he refused to supplicate the judges as custom allowed.
The Daemon and the Voice of God
The author then examines the “daemon,” the divine voice that warned Socrates against improper actions. It differed from divination and casual omens, accompanied him from youth, only forbade and never prompted, sometimes concerned others’ conduct, and never deceived him when he relayed the gods’ will to friends. He said his life of instruction was enjoined by “the gods, by oracles, by the god, by dreams, and every other mode” of divination. At his trial the deity twice forbade him to make a defence, and feeling no check during his speech he concluded it was best to await the sentence, even death, saying nothing happens amiss to a good man and it was better to die and be exempt from further labours. Such intimations are now generally thought an illusion, but Priestley doubts it: they attended Socrates from youth, were frequent, and concerned his friends. He also had dreams, including one bidding him apply to music, which prompted him in prison to compose a hymn to Apollo and versify Aesop. Priestley finds nothing unworthy of God in distinguishing Socrates thus, though these intimations were less decisive than the revelations to the Hebrew prophets. Such interpositions, he argues, prove a providence and a divine interference beyond natural law, against Epicurus’ unconcerned god, and imply future reward and punishment; the present mixture of vice and virtue exists because character needs time to form. He cites Abraham’s plea that the judge of the earth will do right, and compares the present state to infancy.
Two Characters Set Side by Side
Section VII compares the characters. Both controlled appetite and temper; Jesus, unmarried, showed continence where Socrates had no occasion for it. Both were affable and capable of strong attachments—Socrates to friends and pupils, Jesus to Lazarus’ family, the apostles, and John, with care for his mother on the cross. Jesus expressed stronger indignation against vice, especially in the great, while Socrates used irony and ridicule.
The Eulogy of Christ and the Limits of Comparison
The segment opens with a soaring eulogy of Jesus, insisting that his heavenly origin freed him from original contagion and every incentive to evil. The inseparable presence of divinity and the unrestrained effusion of the Holy Ghost, the author writes, preserved him from the defilements of infectious conversation; a divine light always shining in his soul directed him infallibly in truth and righteousness. No revolutions of passion, no tempests of adversity, no allurements of worldly pleasure or temptations of profit, no scoffs of deluding multitudes, no persecution of inveterate foes, no load of suffering, and no rigor of inflexible justice could diminish his love for his Father or his obedience to his will. The author exclaims against any future Plutarch attempting “the iniquity of parallel”; if a mortal must be contrasted with Christ, he should serve only “as the shade to his brightness.”
He then turns to his correspondent, approving the comparison between the deaths of Jesus and Socrates as accurate, just, and a specimen of fair and candid discussion. Had the whole pamphlet been of that nature, he says, he would never have entered a controversy to which he is unaccustomed.
The Demon of Socrates Magnified
In Section III the author sets out to show that his correspondent has magnified the demon of Socrates far beyond any consequence flowing from its real or supposed suggestions. He quotes the correspondent’s own pages, where it is argued that since Socrates persisted in his account of these admonitions to the last, in the most serious situation, and his veracity was never questioned, it may admit of a doubt whether they came from God—nothing unworthy of the divine Being in distinguishing this extraordinary man so, with the question to be settled by evidence of facts according to established rules of testimony. The author cannot join in that supposition, finding it opposed both by the character of Socrates and by the evidence of facts.
Socrates, in conversation with his pupils, spoke of a genius or demon attending him from infancy, by whose inspirations he was urged in all undertakings and frequently restrained when on the point of executing some intention. Xenophon declares that when Socrates spoke in the name of his genius he fully believed he felt its secret influence. The author grants we cannot declare what was in the man’s heart, but such uncommon pretensions would be expected to support themselves by uncommon evidences; had the correspondent discovered such evidences, he might more justly hope to carry conviction. The word demon, from the Greek, signifies something of a divine nature. The Platonists, deriving their opinions originally from Socrates, distinguish between gods, demons, and heroes: the gods are those Cicero calls Dii majorum gentium; the demons rank with our angels. Apuleius, defining demons in his De Deo Socratis, says they have a rational soul and an aerial body, are immortal and obnoxious to the same passions as men; that predictions, auguries, divinations, oracles, dreams, and magical delusions belong to them; that they convey men’s prayers to the gods and carry back the gods’ favors to men. Broughton’s Dictionary reports the opinions of Minucius Felix: the poets acknowledge demons’ existence, the philosophers make it matter of dispute, Socrates was convinced of it, having a demon always at hand by whose advice he governed himself in all actions, while the Magi not only know demons but perform all their magical operations by their help.
From these passages it appears that belief in demons was not peculiar to Socrates; many beside him pretended to have received their assistance and friendly admonition. If we grant that Socrates was attended by a friendly genius conveying the voice of heaven, is it not reasonable to suppose the same supernatural power attended all others making similar declarations and affording similar evidences? In that case these genii would become innumerable and the examination of such pretenders’ claims endless.
Plutarch quotes lines of Menander saying every man at his birth has a good genius given him, attending him through life as guide and director. Epictetus says: when you have shut your door and darkened your room, remember never to say you are alone, for God is within and your Genius is within, and what need have they of light to see what you are doing.
To the demon of Socrates the author can attach no greater importance than belongs to the dictates of a strong and inquisitive mind; the voice of the demon he believes to have been nothing more nor less than the impulse of his exercised reason. He has no doubt Socrates was pleased with the supposition that he derived his wisdom from heaven, since this would magnify his importance and teach a superstitious age to look up to him with greater reverence. He therefore strenuously asserted that he was continually attended by a demon from whom in every case he received advice. With an intellect of a higher order than most of his countrymen, he thought he could successfully manage the imposition and deceive the artless multitude. When by exercise of understanding and penetration he discovered the impropriety of any undertaking and saw it would probably prove unfortunate, in expressing his opinion and delivering his warning he declared he had received the inspiration of his faithful genius. The author knows of nothing he predicted but what a wise man might foretell even with ears closed against the whisper of a demon, and he quotes Johnson’s lines about heaven dispatching messengers of light, or waking the dead, to warn us of a falling fabric. Several celebrated personages beside Socrates have travelled the same road of demoniac greatness: Solon and Lycurgus advanced their credit by the authority of oracles, and Zeleucus pretended his laws were not his own invention but dictated to him by Minos.
Judging Socrates by Rules He Never Had
The reply continues through Sections III to VI and the Conclusion. On the moral character of Socrates, the author rejects the suspicion of adultery drawn from Xantippe’s scolding, noting that no evidence links the scolding to that charge and that the argument would implicate every man with a scolding wife. He turns the inference around: Xantippe’s affection at Socrates’ death may equally show she thought him a good husband. His chief objection is that the correspondent judges Socrates by rules he had no means of acquiring—like judging Hindoos by English law. Citing Romans ii. 12, he argues that Gentiles without the law are judged by what is written in their hearts; Socrates lived nearly four hundred years before Christ and will not be judged by Christian rules at the last day. To the challenge that Socrates did not reveal the same God, the same life and immortality, or a day of judgment, he answers that Socrates had no knowledge or means of acquiring these, yet taught according to his ability. He denies having claimed Socrates’ instructions were as perfect as Jesus’, calling Socrates an idolater with no knowledge of a future state. On bigamy, the same principle would condemn Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon; the story of Myrta is uncertain, Xenophon and Plato being silent, and if true arose from the Athenian magistrates’ encouragement of more citizens—though he censures Socrates for over-respecting positive law here.
Linn Presses the Comparison with Rollin
Linn opens his Philadelphia letter of September 16, 1803, by turning Priestley’s own chief authority against him. Rollin, on whom Priestley leaned most heavily, speaks more favourably of Socrates than any historian working from the Greek sources, yet even Rollin decides against him. Set beside Socrates’ boastful death are the deaths of bishops like Cyprian and Augustine—dying in humility, convinced of their unworthiness, fearing God’s judgments, and expecting salvation from his mercy alone. Philosophy, Linn argues, inspires no such sentiments; they proceed only from the grace of the Mediator, whom Socrates never deserved to know. And if Priestley appeals from Rollin to Socrates’ own contemporaries, he has no chance of confirming assertions so unfounded as that the instructions of Jesus and Socrates obviously resemble each other, that they were equally temperate, or that Socrates was free from vice.
The Demon of Socrates
On the demon, Linn says Priestley’s letter shows less ingenuity—his genius seems to have forsaken him. If Linn misconceived the demon, Priestley misconceived it more; it is extraordinary that a man of his age, industry, and attachment to Socrates should know so little of the genius from whose pretended suggestions Socrates drew his greatest importance. Greek inventive imagination gave life to almost every object—waters, woods, fields, villas, altars, the harvests of Ceres, the shades of Diana, the haunts of the Naiads, the gardens of Pomona—and, having imported Egypt’s idols, the Greeks peopled their country with a new generation. A genius was an imaginary being common among the heathen, divided into classes: one presiding over empires, as the genius of Carthage in Polybius; one over particular nations; one over individuals—the kind Socrates said watched over him and gave secret intimations. The term was applied also to qualities of mind, to fortune, and to the appendages of human nature: the fortune of Timotheus, the fortune of Julius Caesar, the wisdom of Socrates were each called their genius; the apparition before Brutus on the plains of Philippi was called his evil genius. Plato holds that every human being elected in a pre-existent state the attendant spirit who is now his guardian, and that these spirits share human imperfections and passions, cannot alter events, but sympathize with us, admonishing us of good and evil.
Linn can attach no greater importance to Socrates’ demon than to the dictates of a strong and inquisitive mind, with Socrates pleased by the supposition that he derived his wisdom from heaven—an opinion confirmed by Priestley’s own defence. Quoting Priestley (p. 34) that all Socrates ascribed to the demon were hints respecting his conduct and his friends’, only what they were not to do, with nothing predicted, Linn answers that both clauses are wrong: the genius told what was to be done as well as not done, and through it Socrates pretended to predict. Xenophon (Memor. Book i. Chap. i.), whose testimony Priestley cannot deny, records Socrates asserting concerning future things as he knew them from internal consciousness, declaring his genius the source and forewarning friends what to do and forbear; the parenthetical “as he said by his genius” implies Xenophon’s doubt. A footnote asks whether Priestley never heard that Socrates employed Chaerephon to bribe the Delphic priestess to pronounce him wisest of men, and that Socrates himself composed the verse Chaerephon brought back as the oracle’s answer. For prediction, Plutarch is cited: the genius warned Socrates that the expedition would prove fatal to Athens, and Socrates and Meton the astrologer both expected the wars against Syracuse would not advantage Athens—Socrates by prophetic notices from his attending genius, Meton by reasoning or astrology—and Meton feigned madness, taking a flaming torch and attempting to set his house on fire.
Uncommon Pretensions, Uncommon Evidence
Linn clarifies that by “wisdom” he meant not the subjects of Socrates’ teaching but the power by which he pretended to see the consequences of his own or his friends’ actions—the same sense as “dictates of a strong and inquisitive mind.” He does not judge what is proper for the Supreme Being but is determined by evidence, all of which is against Socrates being supernaturally illuminated; uncommon pretensions to inspiration require uncommon evidences, which Priestley failed to produce—he could not cast the shadow of a cloud on the sunshine detecting his assertion’s deformity. Priestley’s closing observations on plants and animals are irrelevant. Men higher than Socrates in intellect and excellence claimed no inspiration; Plato, Aristotle, Epaminondas, and Cicero were wiser than or equal to Socrates yet claimed none, therefore Socrates was not inspired. Linn’s previous letter listed men making the same pretensions, and Priestley has not replied; a footnote adds Amasis and Mneves, Zoroaster, Zamolxis, Zathraustes, Rhadamanthus and Minos, Lycaeon. God would never teach his creatures error; Socrates taught error, being an idolater chargeable with numberless errors, so could not derive them from God. The demon was often unsuccessful in accomplishing its warnings by the philosopher’s own account, so the admonitions were not from God. Nothing Socrates predicted but what a wise man might foretell.
The Divinity of Christ Defended
The treatise then turns to defending Christ’s divinity and the atonement. Except for the relation the first person of the Trinity bears to the second, no name, attribute, or work distinguishing God the Father in scripture is not also ascribed to Christ; a long footnote from Witherspoon’s proof cites Galatians, Philippians, John, Colossians, Revelation, and Matthew to show Christ’s eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence, and notes that worship is commanded and accepted by Christ but rejected by angels. In baptism “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” are connected, with the Son standing between two names of Deity—arguing the New Testament writers, seeking to convert heathens from idolatry, could not have used such language of a mere man without teaching idolatry; the argument from idolatry is called “conclusively against you.” Reading Mark 2, the author argues Christ neither admitted blasphemy nor denied that only God forgives sins, but claimed that power and wrought the miracle to prove it—so Christ is God. Against Priestley’s claim that Christ’s equality with the Father would have “shocked” Athanasius, the author quotes the Athanasian Creed and notes Waterland’s conjecture that Hilary of Arles composed it around 430, which still favours him as a zealous orthodox defender; he answers the hypothetical that Jews would have stoned him by noting the Jews stoned Christ for implying he was God. Priestley’s claim that the atonement was unknown before the Reformation, and that Austin held the price was paid to the Devil, is called “romance”; Jewish testimonies on Messiah’s suffering and sacrifices, and Mosheim on the Jewish doctors’ controversy over justification, are cited to conclude that Christ and his disciples unfold the atonement.
What the Comparison Is Really About
The surface subject is a philosopher and a saviour; the real subject is the sufficiency of human reason. Priestley’s Socrates is a man of extraordinary self-control who takes no fees, faces death calmly, and speaks of a single ordering mind behind the world—yet who sacrifices to the city’s gods, consults oracles, asks Crito on his deathbed to sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, and never once names one God as the only God. Priestley presses this hard against those, like Rollin, who wanted to make Socrates a monotheist by anticipation. He doubts whether anyone raised as Socrates was could reach a firm belief in divine unity by the light of nature alone. The comparison thus becomes an argument for revealed religion: Socrates is the best the heathen world produced, and the best is not enough.
Linn reads the same evidence to a different end. To him the pamphlet’s design is to lower Christ from his infinite station and raise a heathen to a rank he does not deserve. Where Priestley sees a noble but unaided moralist, Linn sees a sinful man among sinful men, an idolater whose opinions were erroneous and whose practice, judged by the gospel, was impious. The exchange sharpens into a dispute about the standard of judgment itself: Linn insists there is no infallible rule of right but the word of God, while Priestley answers that Socrates lived four hundred years before Christ and will not be tried at the last day by rules he had no means of acquiring—that the Gentiles are judged by what is written in their hearts.
The Daemon and the Limits of Evidence
The strangest and most revealing strand is Socrates’ daemon, the voice he said had attended him since youth, warning him away from actions and sometimes concerning his friends. Priestley treats it with genuine uncertainty. He will not call it an illusion, since it was frequent, lifelong, and never deceived him; he sees nothing unworthy of God in such intimations, though they were less decisive than the revelations given to the Hebrew prophets. Linn will have none of it. He attaches no more importance to the daemon than to the dictates of a strong and inquisitive mind, and he accuses Priestley of understating what Socrates claimed—citing Xenophon to show the genius told Socrates what to do as well as what to avoid, and Plutarch to show he pretended to predict. The argument is finally about evidence: uncommon pretensions to inspiration, Linn says, require uncommon proofs, and Priestley has produced none.
Two Deaths, Two Characters
Both men return repeatedly to the deaths. Priestley grants Jesus the higher dignity but admires Socrates’ composure at his trial, his refusal to beg or escape, his calm acceptance of the cup. Linn quotes Rousseau—that if the death of Socrates is the death of a sage, the death of Jesus is the death of a God—and complains that Priestley borrowed the comparison without granting the Saviour the glory Rousseau allowed him. The contrast widens into a contrast of teaching: Socrates’ question-and-answer method, which made hearers feel the conclusion was their own, against Jesus’ authoritative “Verily, verily,” his parables, his indifference to rank, his welcome of the poor. Priestley, for his part, insists he never claimed the two were equal; he wrote for unbelievers, to show that even on the most generous estimate of Socrates, Jesus stands immeasurably above him.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The pamphlet and its appended letters preserve a vanished style of argument—learned, combative, quotation-heavy, conducted in print between an old dissenting philosopher and a young Presbyterian minister who addresses him with respect and refuses to yield an inch. Priestley’s closing pages turn from Socrates altogether to a dying testimony against the Trinity and the atonement, which he calls an infringement of divine unity and a mock degradation of God. Linn’s appendix ends with a counter-testimony, sealed by the primitive martyrs, to the divinity of Christ and the sacrifice of the cross. Neither converts the other. What remains is the spectacle of two earnest men using the same ancient texts to reach opposite conclusions about how much a human being can know of God without help—and the sense, which Priestley states plainly, that his labours were nearly over and that younger champions would carry the argument on.
