A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From

Why was Socrates sentenced to death? Ask any reasonably educated person why Socrates drank the hemlock, and they might respond: “corrupting the youth.” In reality, corrupting the youth was one of a pair of charges and stemmed from the more seditious charge of impiety. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defended himself against the allegation of godlessness by calling his work an “obligation” or a “duty” that had been “enjoined” or “imposed” on him by “god, by means of oracles and dreams, and in every other way that a divine manifestation has ever ordered a man to do anything.”1 It was this very admission of divine guidance that upset the Athenian authorities in the first place, a notion that “caused him to be accused of introducing ‘new spiritual beings’ or divinities and of disbelieving in the gods of the state.”2 Socrates said he was commanded by god to pursue philosophy, which suggests he felt a divine, mystical, or supernatural inspiration to pursue his life’s work. “God gave me a…