Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 89
GREEK PHILOSOPHY commands in other forms, is so powerful and so completely at one with the universal experience of Divine prophets that it leaves no room for doubt that he means exactly what he says. A large number of Quranic verses fully support. Socrates when they speak of all the prophets before the. Holy Founder of Islamsa having shared with him all the different modes of Divine revelation. . Vlastos further builds his contradiction theory by raising the question: 'Should this incline us to believe that Socrates is counting on two disparate avenues of knowledge about the gods, rational and extra-rational respectively, yielding two distinct systems of justified belief, one of them reached by elenctic argument, the other by divine revelation through oracles, prophetic dreams and the like?""1. O. NE IS AMAZED to note how imaginary contradictions can be built between what Socrates believed and what he actually experienced. He is known, of course, to have criticized the so-called Greek gods and disparaged the reliability of their revelation through oracles, but whenever he spoke of his personal experience he never ridiculed, even once, his own Divine revelation or dreams. The author has done no justice to him by adding 'through oracles' after 'divine revelation'. The personal. Divine revelation of which Socrates has spoken, as quoted above, has no mention whatsoever of any ‘oracles'. . Invariably when he speaks of his personal experience he speaks of 'God' in singular, with capital G, and not of 'gods'. When he mentions the poets' visions, as though they were god-given, he only uses such expressions as a figure of speech, not meaning them to be actually 'Godgiven': 89