Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 80
GREEK PHILOSOPHY. He was charged with the mission of delivering a. Divine message to the people of Greece. To him this life was only a preparatory stage for the life to come. It was the human soul which mattered to him. It was this soul which was decreed to be delivered and transferred to the hereafter. . This was his philosophy, call it Divine wisdom if you will, but certainly not a secular philosophy as portrayed by modern intellectuals. . Repeated attempts have been made to pluck him away from the comity of prophets to that of mere philosophers. . Many modern writers, great as they may be in their learning, are miserably confused about his true identity. . They have wasted bookfuls of material on him to try to place him where he does not belong. . Some renowned scholars have seriously attempted to remove an imaginary contradiction in him which actually did not exist. For them the contradiction was between his belief in Divine revelation and his profession of rationality. . If rationality and Divine revelation ever posed a paradox, it was always posed by all the prophets of God, Socrates being no exception. Every true prophet and all the founders of great religions simultaneously believed in Divine revelation and rationality, holding fast to both with absolute tenacity. They saw no contradiction between the two. Had they seen any, true as they were, they must have rejected either the idea of God or the idea of rationality, or both perhaps. To them, the idea of rationality and God could not belong to opposite camps. Hence those who see a parallax in Socrates' beliefs and his rationality must be suffering from diplopia themselves. Let them read Socrates once again and all that is written of him by authentic sources. . They are bound to discover a new person in him who can never simultaneously be separated from his adherence to. God and his rational philosophy. They must notice the fact 80