When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke to his fellow bishops on the subject of conscience and law in 1991, he referred to Socrates, the pagan, as being, in a certain respect, “the prophet of Jesus Christ”. So perhaps we should think about the part Socrates played in the history of human thought. He is not easy to pin down, for tradition tells us that he wrote nothing. We only know him through writers such as Xenophon and Plato; and Plato, his student, undoubtedly extended his master’s teaching to fortify his own philosophy.