Plato's Nature Of Piety

Religious people, to varying degrees, try to interpret religious texts to comprehend how to live their lives. But by its very nature, interpreting the totality of a deity’s creed arguably exceeds a mortal’s comprehension. As such, actions based on claims of according with higher-power principles are often met with skepticism and a desire to understand how the promoter arrived at such a conclusion. In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, two men dialectically discuss the nature of piety to reach agreement on the term in an attempt to understand one’s foundation for claiming his actions as pious. By using Socrates as a literary tool to repeatedly question and refute Euthyphro’s assumptions on the nature of piety, Plato reveals the difficulty and presumptuousness of understanding the desires of higher beings, ultimately concluding the piece without a satisfactory understanding of the nature of piety. Socrates and Euthyphro begin their discussion on the nature of piety when they meet at a courthouse in

Euthyphro responded by saying that “doing what he is doing,” prosecuting someone for murder, constitutes pious behavior (Plato 20). He explains how his kindred relationship to his father is irrelevant because the nature of piety does not change with one’s relationship to another. Furthermore, he believes prosecuting someone for murder reflects the pious behavior of the gods. Under this rationale, not pursuing his father would be impiety, as he illustrates by comparing his actions towards his father with those of Zeus’s treatment of his father, Cronos. Understandably, Socrates rejects this as a definition because Euthyphro’s use of his actions as a definition provides an example of piety, rather than a definition when he states, “I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious”