The Death of Socrates

Have you ever read the account of the death of Socrates? I did so this week in my book "The Story of Philosophy." It was arresting. He was given the option of exile but chose rather to die, presumably to avoid the shame of exile. He turned down the opportunity to escape, and when the day was come, didn't delay until evening as his emotional friends were hoping. He saw it as inevitable, and rather than resist death he accepted it with calm composure. Perhaps he knew that facing death fearlessly would do more for his memory than anything else he could accomplish in his few remaining natural years (he was seventy).

Reading the account made me feel as uncomfortable as his friends felt. That it did so was curious, because reading of the calm death of martyrs isn't disturbing at all. I knew he wasn't a Christian and that he was suppressing the knowledge of his meeting with God after death just as he had suppressed the knowledge of his responsibility to God before death. Perhaps it was the tension between his present confidence and the shock and horror he would soon experience that jarred me.

Why did he choose death and face it with such casual boldness? He was trying to be the ideal self-reliant man, and in his death he pushed that vision to the limits of human capacity. All who do so fall, and they fall hard. Some before death, and some after. God receives glory all the same, for time and eternity are both bare before him. We are blind to eternity and rarely think about it. Unless, by his grace, he opens in us the eyes of faith just a little and allows us to perceive the judgments and rewards that await all men. May we, unlike Socrates, live and die in the light of that knowledge.