Socrates & Asclepius, Donald the Healer & Light-Bringer

Reflections on the president availing himself of Christ the Healer's vestment.

I laughed pretty hard when I saw the following image that Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social account this morning.

Here we see Donald the Healer and Light-Bringer, surrounded by jingoistic images. I wonder about the significance of the light emanating from his left hand. The conspiratorially minded might be tempted to see in this an allusion to depictions of Lucifer holding the "Secret Fire" or a light in his left hand.

And what are we to make of the figures looming behind and above him, the temple edifice to his left, and the jet aircraft to his right that don’t resemble any American aircraft?

Upon viewing this image, I was reminded (among other things) of Lord Salisbury’s remark that the jingoistic reporting of the Daily Mail in his day was “written by office boys for office boys.”

“Trump the Healer and Light-Bringer” made me think of Socrates’s interest in Asclepius—the god of healing, incubation rites (sleeping in sacred places to receive divine wisdom in dreams) and resurrection—as a symbol of true wisdom and compassion.

Socrates’s interest in Asclepius marked a philosophical shift away from the warlike deities of the archaic Olympian pantheon toward a more humane, therapeutic ideal suited to the examined life of the philosopher.

In the Phaedo, as the hemlock poison numbs Socrates’ body and death approaches, his final words are: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and do not neglect it.” A rooster was the standard thank-offering to Asclepius for a cure, often linked to the dawn’s renewal.

Socrates’s friends urged him to escape into exile, and they made arrangements for his escape—with the apparent tacit agreement of the Athenian authorities to turn a blind eye—but he insisted on undergoing the death penalty instead of running from it.

In dialogues like the Gorgias, Socrates likens his questioning method to a physician’s treatment, purging ignorance, vice, and misology (despair of reasoned argument).

Asclepius embodied these ideals. Unlike the Homeric gods—envious, meddlesome, and riven by petty conflicts—Asclepius was celebrated as a “blameless” healer who compassionately served humanity, even at the cost of his own life (Zeus struck him down for reviving the dead).

Thus, at the end of his life, Socrates signaled his belief that Asclepius was the proper successor to the archaic Olympians. The old gods of Olympus—Zeus with his thunderbolts and infidelities, Ares with his bloodlust, Hera with her jealous rages—represented the destructive forces human passion that dominated archaic myth and Athenian civic religion.

Their worship was intertwined with imperial power, warfare, and ritual appeasement rather than ethical self-improvement. Socrates was charged with impiety for questioning such traditions and “introducing new gods.”

He advocated an alternative piety, centered on care of the soul (psychēs therapeia), intellectual humility, and altruistic service. He asked us to see true piety not in archaic sacrifices to temperamental gods, but in the compassionate pursuit of wisdom that cures our perennial human afflictions.

As a young philosophy student, I found the Greeks more fascinating than the Christians. The older I get, the more I have come to appreciate that Jesus was, among other things, a Hellenistic philosopher. Increasingly, his story reminds me of that of Socrates.

Towards the end of his life, the Athens in which Socrates lived was put under great stress due to the Peloponnesian War against Sparta going badly wrong. In 406 BC, as a member of the Athenian Council, he was the only member who refused to vote for the illegal mass execution of six generals who were accused of failing to rescue sailors after the Battle of Arginusae. Socrates recognized that there was nothing the generals could have done to save the sailors, who were shipwrecked in a violent gale in which everyone had to cling to the wreckage for dear life. Accusing the generals of bearing responsibility for their deaths was therefore completely irrational. Socrates’s refusal was his valiant effort to maintain constitutional order during a time of panic and political chaos caused by the war.

Likewise, at the end of his life, Jesus entered a Jerusalem that was stressed by the Roman occupation, which Jesus believed was causing the religious establishment to pursue a path that would eventually lead to its destruction. Many scholars have interpreted his weeping for the city as evidence that he foresaw it would be destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, about forty years after his death.

The icon of Donald the Healer and Light-Bringer is fascinating in its Warholian irreverence for history, culture, reason, philosophy, art, literature, and religion. It is a sublime Magnum opus insaniae (Masterpiece of Insanity).

It is a testament to great healing power of laughter that viewing it, in some ineffable way, softened my heart for him. There is something undeniably splendid about being the greatest weirdo in history.