One cool bit of trivia Socrates and I share is that our mothers were both midwives. But it wasn't only his mother that was a midwife. Socrates claims in Plato's Theaetetus that he is a midwife as well; a midwife of the soul. For him, a midwife of the soul is responsible for helping a "pregnant mind" to give birth to ideas. So, while the medical midwife helps pregnant bodies to give birth to physical babies, the soul's midwife helps pregnant minds to give birth to ideas. To perform this task well, in any case, the spiritual midwife is firstly to make the pregnant soul realize that it has the potential, "dunamis," within itself to conceive and bear ideas. This realization is important for the individual soul to have because many people do not believe that there is a spark of truth existing within each and every one of us. They do not understand that God would not otherwise enjoin us to "let our light shine," (Matt 5:16) if we possessed no light sparks in us to fan into flames. Clearly then, the initial duty of the soul's midwife is to allay any doubt in the soul of its possession of the capacity for truth. In the Theaetetus, this is what Socrates first does with his young interlocutor.
In addition to their task of encouraging the individual soul to realize its potential, the characteristics and duties of the spiritual midwife are as follows: To begin with, the midwife claims to be barren of ideas. In Ancient Greece during the time of Socrates, the women who practiced midwifery were typically past child-bearing-age themselves. Similarly, Socrates as a spiritual midwife claims to be past being able to conceive of any ideas in his soul. This attitude of positive ignorance was typical of Socrates, such that even when the Oracle of Delphi called him the wisest person alive, Socrates replied that it was so only because his wisdom derived from his knowing that he did not know. And so, quite like the traditionally barren medical midwife, Socrates the ideal spiritual midwife was barren of ideas in his own soul. Another characteristic of the spiritual midwife was their ability to induce the birth of ideas in a pregnant soul, by means of the Socratic Method. The Socratic method proceeded by questioning and dialog. Socrates, typically feigning ignorance, would systematically question an interlocutor on a given subject. By repeatedly asking questions of such an interlocutor and evaluating their responses, Socrates tried to analyze philosophical concepts and critique the intellect of his interlocutor.
Still another attribute of the soul's midwife is to examine the ideas birthed by the soul to see if they are cogent ideas or erroneous thoughts. In the Theaetetus for example, we see Socrates thrash literally all of the young man's ideas. In response to the question "What is Knowledge?" the young mathematician Theaetetus, after whom the book is named, seemingly cannot give a valid answer. After examining all the answers Theaetetus gives, Socrates discards them as erroneous. Knowledge is not perception; it is not opinion (doxa), and it is not opinion with explanation (logos). At the end of the book, we do not end up knowing what knowledge is, but only that we know we do not know what it is. And all this because Socrates, astute spiritual midwife that he is, examines and discards all of Theaetetus' answers. After mulling over such answers and engaging in back-and-forth dialog, Socrates finds them unsound. And so, the chief attributes of a spiritual midwife, analogical with the medical midwife's, are: the ability to recognize the potential of ideas in a soul and encourage such a soul to realize it; the barrenness of ideas in the spiritual midwife themselves; the ability to induce the birth of ideas from a pregnant soul, and the ability to test whether the ideas so birthed are valid or erroneous. The foregoing serves as background to our discourse today about guru selection, and the nature of guru-disciple relationships.
For most of us, the way we find truth is by becoming disciples of gurus, or teachers, or pastors, or priests, or preachers - whatever we call them. We see these people as wise, as possessing divine wisdom; as knowledgeable of the word and will of God, and able to explain them to us. The situation of our need for preachers is captured beautifully in Romans 10: 13-15: "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how will they call on the one in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in the one whom they have not heard of? And how will they hear without a preacher? And how will the preacher preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news about good things!'" And so we need gurus. We need preachers to show us the truth; to bring us to the knowledge of "good things." This is why people still go to church and other places of worship. They go there to listen to the guru explain the truth about the will and mind of the divine.
But are our gurus showing us the truth? How can we know if what we get when we disciple ourselves to preachers is the truth? Indeed it were better that we did not know at all, than to know error and falsehood. Remember the case of Reverend Jim Jones and the Jonestown Guyana Kool-Aid Massacre of over a thousand people on November 18, 1978. There are many other cases, though not quite as horrendous as this. What I'm saying is that the demerits of listening for truth to the wrong persons cannot be overemphasized. In his book, The Teacher, St Augustine cautions in this regard: "After all, who is so foolishly curious as to send his child to school to learn what the teacher thinks? When the teachers have explained by means of words all the disciplines they profess to teach, even disciplines of virtue and wisdom, then those who are called 'students' consider within themselves whether truths have been stated." And so for Augustine, listening to the opinions of a so-called teacher will not lead to knowledge, but only observing whether the teacher's words correspond with the actualization of the potential for truth that already exists inside of us will. St John in this regard would not ask us to test each explanation (logos) given by every teacher, if he did not believe we have a yardstick within us (our own potential for truth) for conducting such test. He says in 1 John 4:1: "Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world."
Socratic epistemology in this regard helps us to understand the difference between persuasion and demonstration. Persuasion is when a person uses fine words and beautiful expressions to convince the audience of their opinion. The opinion need not be true. The focus is on the use of language. Just look at history and see how many very gifted speakers have used the power of public speaking - a skill I taught for a living, by the way - to sway large audiences to do the wrong thing. Does the Holocaust come to mind, for example? Effective public speaking that is unethical can do enormous harm. It was Quintilian, noted philosopher and rhetorician, who said in this regard, "Good speaking is a good person speaking well." In any case, in preference to persuasion is demonstration. With demonstration, the focus is not on the use of language or effective oratory. The focus rather is on truth. Philosophers have defined truth as that which is self-evident and clearly seen. And so, properly speaking, we do not tell truth, we show it. In other words, we demonstrate it.
Do you recall saying something to someone and the person goes, "aha!"? Aha moments are just so cool. In these moments, the truth strikes a person like a luminous vision. The person sees ever so clearly the brightness and glory of such truth. Like in R Kelly's The Storm is Over Now, the person may have been in a tunnel of error and falsehood, but with the power of truth, the darkness of falsity is removed and such a soul can witness the sunshine, or even the "heaven over me." That is the power of demonstration over and above mere persuasion. The science and philosophy of demonstration is explained thus: You see, there is something called the agent intellect. This intellect is universally shared. There is one agent intellect that everyone can access with their own potential intellect. The agent intellect is perfect and is never wrong. Objectively speaking, it is the mind of God. When the potential intellect in each one of us is activated say, by thinking or reading or listening to a guru - by any cogitative endeavor whatsoever - our activated intellect may align with the agent intellect; that is if what we get via the cogitative endeavor is the truth as contained in the agent intellect. And once such alignment takes place, of the agent intellect with an individual's activated intellect, a beatific vision of truth is acquired. Remember Archimedes from a previous post? He had been engaging in cogitative activity for a while, thinking about a difficult problem, until while at the public baths his activated intellect aligned perfectly with the agent intellect in a split second and he shouted, "I got it!" He then ran home happily.
We all can access the agent intellect. In other words, we all can access the mind of God. For Augustine, this mind of God resides inside of us. That's why in The Teacher he says, "those who are called 'students' consider within themselves whether truths have been stated." For Aquinas, like for Aristotle, this mind of God to which all things are adequated can illumine the mind of a virtuous person. For Socrates, the mind of God which contains all truth is dormant within us because we have forgotten all the truth we glimpsed of it before our spirits became enfleshed. This Socratic theory is called Recollection Theory, and is found chiefly in the classic book, Meno. In other words, for Socrates, before our spirits took flesh, they sojourned in a previous life and there became possessed of the knowledge of everything about everything. But upon taking flesh and thus becoming corrupted by materiality, our souls forget all the truth we previously possessed, but with the help of a guru we can begin to recollect. This guru, the one guiding the individual soul along its path to recollecting the knowledge it forgot by participation in the body, in any case must demonstrate the truth so we can again see it in much the same way as we saw it in a previous life. Only then can it ring true for us.
In short, we can know truth, but only if we engage in the proper cogitative activity. And when that cogitative activity is listening to a guru, we have to make sure that such a guru is demonstrating truth to us, and not merely persuading us of their opinions. The former is by far preferred to the latter, and is the only way we can perennially align our individual intellects with the agent one, God's own mind. We must seek out adequate teachers, teachers able to demonstrate and not simply persuade with good speaking skills. Avicenna, eminent scholar and scientist, recommended that there be a class of individuals within society, possessed with the highest form of wisdom, Sophia, set apart to teach people by means of demonstration. These individuals would occupy the highest echelon of society, similar to the position occupied by Plato's philosopher-kings; Ancient Egyptian priests, and Pythagoras' spectators at the Olympic Games. They alone would be entrusted with the sacred duty of popular education.
In our day, Catholic priests for me best perform this role. They are set apart through celibacy, simplicity and obedience to focus solely on the task of spiritual education of the many people that God entrusts them with. Disciplined as they are, and guided by Holy Mother Church, Catholic priests do not adulterate the word of God with their personal opinions. Rather they endeavor to demonstrate the truth as contained in the Gospels, so that we all can bear witness within ourselves to such truth and come to believe unto salvation. Our pregnant souls bear acts of faith, hope and love, assisted by the midwifery of these servants of God, preachers sent by the divine to induce the birth of faith within us, the actualization of the dunamis in our souls. But even when we are not Catholic, we should not despair. Even when we become disciples of other sorts of teachers, we should question and test the explanations (logos) they afford us, so as not to be deceived. We should always wait anxiously for the moment when it definitely "looks like we can see the light somewhere beyond the clouds," when the storms of our desperate seeking progressively give way to the brightness of a new day of knowledge and understanding.
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