As anyone who has read Plato’s Apology knows, at one point during his trial Socrates argues that it is irrational to fear death, because no-one really knows what happens to one after death.
This has never made sense to me. “But,” I’ve always mentally protested in response to Socrates’ point, “surely this ignorance is not a reason not to fear death. After all, if anything is worthy of fear, is not a prime candidate for such fear precisely the unknown?”
I still think that my objection is valid. However, I have had some leisure today to focus a bit more deeply on this issue, and it now seems to me that Socrates does have a good point.
What he is actually doing, one could argue, is clarifying the precise kind of fear it is rational to have in the face of death: not fear of “burning in hell” or whatever the ancient equivalent to that is (since we lack knowledge about this), but rather, precisely, fear of the unknown.
Fear of the unknown, that is, is quite different in character than fear of something like pain or eternal suffering. Likewise, it calls for different therapies or remedies. One such remedy was explored 2500 years after Socrates himself died: that of Heidegger.
At the end of Plato’s _Symposium_,
… the faithful Aristodemus … falls off into a drunken sleep, but awakens to find Agathon, Socrates, and Aristophanes having a discussion, with only Socrates fresh and in full possession of his powers (223B-D). Socrates is forcing the two poets to agree that it would be possible for a man to be both tragedian and comedian, which each resists because Agathon regards tears as highest and Aristophanes regards laughter as highest, and they are opposites. For them there is no mean between the two that is as high as the two extremes. Socrates says that philosophy is such a mean and that a mixture of laughter and tears is the way to define man. Practically, Socrates is telling them that their two arts must be combined in order to depict him. This is the formula for the Platonic dialogues and perhaps for Shakespeare’s plays. The other two nod away, and one is never sure whether Socrates could not persuade them. It is with this doubt that the dialogue ends. (Allan Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” in Plato, _Symposium_, ed. Seth Bernardete, 170.)
Socrates defines man in terms of “a mixture of laughter and tears.” Chesterton, who said that the wise man has comedy in his head and tragedy in his heart, would surely agree.
When it comes to classical Greek philosophy, my firm conviction is that the best way to view it is as a “propaeduetic of the Gospel,” as Clement of Alexandria held. When one reads the ancients’ texts for themselves, one is struck over and over by the ways in which the themes and teachings foreshadow themes in the New Testament.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear, however, than in the above quotation about tears and laughter, tragedy and comedy. Socrates says not only that they go together, but that they go together in the life of man. This is a suggestive pointer to, an intriguing foreshadowing of, the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ.
The Paschal Mystery is Good Friday (with all its pain and blackness) plus the Easter Feast (with all its luminosity and joy). It is the death of Christ, and his surprise resurrection on the third day after. It is tragedy plus comedy.
What’s more, in places like Rom 5:12-21 and I Cor 15:45-47 St. Paul argues that Christ is the “second _anthropos_ and the last _adam_.” He is the New Man, the Renewed Humanity. Socrates, then, is vindicated, for it is in the life of this most true human that we behold the Paschal Mystery. Death and life, sadness and joy, tragedy and comedy.
