On Euthyphro

"One should only watch whether the killer acted justly or not."
"What kind of thing do you say that godliness and ungodliness are, both as regards murder and other things?"

In any discussion of essence, of defining qualities, it is necessary to clarify the shifting of territory, the line upon which all new laws come into being, where we must grapple with the character of an unknown sovereignty. Here, as an entire landscape opens before us, we recognise that values, such as Piety and the Good, are not equitable, each attracts its own rays of light and passages of migrant species. The world of essence and values is not an impenetrable grey territory, a problem presented in the Euthyphro which is often evaded by its readers and interpreters. They would prefer to keep to the stone arteries of mechanised streets.

Understanding the living and breathing territory upon which we walk, even if only in our minds, changes the entire discussion, for if natural law loses the force of nature it becomes something else entirely. Plato's dialogue concerns piety and man's legal service beneath the justice of heaven, the cultivation of a territory worthy of the vision of gods. It is not a Christian or secular interpretation of Good, and one must attempt to set aside such preconceptions to understand what Socrates is attempting to grasp. This is not a certain territory, there are no topographic maps available, we are instead entering a clearing just beyond a young and thick forest growth—to which we will be asked incisive, even confounding, questions. This is our judgement before powerful beings, and confused silence seems a natural response.

The question of polytheism is important in this, as the problem Socrates and Euthyphro are discussing echoes that of an apparent contradiction in justice: should one follow the laws of the family or the potentially greater laws surrounding murder? Or perhaps there is an even greater form of justice that is revealed in the conflict of the laws themselves. One may even rephrase the question, is the law in keeping with justice because it appeases the gods? Or is the law in keeping with the gods because it appeases justice? The dilemma is not itself a law, but a fulcrum upon which law rests. There is not one law just as there is not one god.

Here it becomes necessary to consider the Athenian and Greek relation to justice and law. As is clarified in the dialogue, even murder is not necessarily unjust—or at least the relation of the city to justice is not to be decided by common men or relatives of the involved parties. Laws must always be recognised as a force, a coming into being to which dominion must reconcile, live up to as its own sustaining strength. Socrates implies this when he says that there is a godliness and ungodliness in relation to murder. There are no fixed laws, no hardened reactions of technicity to contain human actions—even murder can be justified within a given territory. Justice is a matter of balancing all things within the essence of the city, and, in the particular case of Athens, this meant the law of divine wisdom. In the end, a blood offering must be made to return the sovereign land to its essence, to cleanse that which pollutes its beauty; the law performs this rite, and so reveals itself in opposition to other laws.

What Euthyphro may have witnessed was a betrayal of blood offering, that rather than simply a murder of a murderer his father had prevented vindication, both for the people involved and the city itself. Rather than a cleansing of the earth, and appeasement to the laws of gods, there was twice as much blood spilled—the earth had been doubly polluted, and so the city would remain even further removed from justice if the father was not prosecuted. Within this fate it was the duty of Euthyphro's father to care for the accused man while the law was balanced against the needs of justice. A polluted territory had been laid out before him, and it was necessary to retain humility before it if justice was to receive its due. This event changed his being, in its rising he was no longer a simple employer, but a guardian caring for a man awaiting judgement. And in this one should not assume a dead territory, but a living one to which senses and values are sacrificed. Nature must be maintained in its living essence, the laws seen as elements of its territory. And in betraying this Euthyphro's father potentially conjured up something worse than murder.

It is in a similar vein that we must consider the acts of gods within their essence—their seemingly violent and wretched acts may serve some greater sense of purpose, some laws of justice unseen to the human. In falling away from love or receiving piety they may be carrying out a deep cosmological necessity, awaiting a return to peace. Thus the care taken by Euthyphro and Socrates in relating any stories of the gods as anything but Good. One might even say that the descriptions of extreme violence within the heavens are merely an attempt to describe laws beyond our understanding, and the gods do not love these evil things.

This is why we must say that the gods are beyond the dilemma of piety and love. Love is something simple to them, it is a natural law of their dominion, and instead the pious is related to what is exceptional to the gods, what they carry on even when love is abandoned. It is what lives on within justice, when everything else must be abandoned, the most essential quality that creates dominion and to which love itself is subordinate, just as each god may be subordinate to justice. There is a seeming paradox in this, a mirror of that of the trial, in that one must show piety to the gods as a whole, the heavenly kingdom as well as each individual god. Their territory may even, for a time, intrude upon the dominion of others.

Such laws may appear as a contradiction, but what we see in the myths and mysteries is a singularity of essence, the pure form of the gods, clearly a part of a hierarchy, and yet undiminished—complete of their own world. Even in lesser myths we tend to sense this irreducible quality, as if the whole cosmology exists within a single god as a force, in opposition to laws of reductionism. Such power is what is referred to as Dominion, the absolutely sovereign quality of the gods which is retained even in exile or destruction—so prominent in the figure of Dionysus.

One might say that we humans are a reflection of this, our piety and sacrifice is also subordinate to something beyond us. And it is in this sense that the sacrifice acts as an offering, not to any one god, but their entire realm. Our offering must include reconciliation of one divine law to the dominion as a whole. Perhaps the most clear example of this is the false offerings to Zeus - the bones covered in fat first offered by Prometheus as a trick - a subtle recognition that there is something even more powerful than the King of Olympus. It is a tentative agreement between god and man, for even a sacrifice is never enough to maintain the boundaries between heaven and earth. There must be something more.

It is here that we sense the horrifying vision of the divine, the landscape which religions attempt to grasp: the end as a temporary retreat into nihilism, what the cults often referred to as mysteries. But it is this inability to escape beyond our realm, the inevitable retreat back into a simple form of living, the restraints of our eternally regenerating body and the conflict of nihilism before the final answer, which retains our dominion. It appears as a wall of time, before which our mortality stands in judgement in the face of its end. And yet this is also the place, kneeling before form, to which our eternal being appears to us with its undiminished qualities.

This is also where human justice collides with the divine. Of any human experience it is the conflict of law and the elusive return to peace which compels a sense of divine intervention, of some force which is forever beyond us. And so it is within this realm that we must proceed with the utmost care, for both hubris and betrayal may form of a single act. And what is worse than hubris, as if the strange compulsion towards indecision were not enough, is if the wall were to collapse upon us. The eternal battle of human justice forever faces the possibility of opening up another front.

Perhaps Socrates' answer resides just beyond this border wall, in a place where the justice of both gods and men allows everything else to fall away; where men are able to set aside what is carried, to endure the collapsing of walls; where a sacrifice to the gods surpasses both love and piety. It is an impossible question, one which demands the subordination of laws of time and space, yet it is a question which must be resolved if the integrity of gods and men is to be maintained.

Socrates seems to fear that justice will become subordinate to law. He seeks the form of Justice even as he is to become a victim of its machinations. And so we are left with indecision, a sense that justice must reside beyond the trial or even the human understanding of it. Justice weights the unseen, the oath and necessity of human dominion beneath the kingdom of gods, the hidden future opposed to the past, the impossible scaling of opposing dominions. If law is turned against this the result is an intrusion upon dominion, a pollution amidst hidden forces. The clearing we have stumbled into, exhausted, may destroy us, and all other beings present.

Plato asks us to consider what Socrates felt within this great shadow.