Theophilus defines prayer as “talking to the Gods,” but Socrates interrogates that definition. Is it initiated by man, or by divine prompting? They conclude that the source is often ambiguous—prayer may come from the self or divine inspiration. Zegarelli is driving at the epistemological uncertainty of religious causation. Prayer, commonly thought of as human action, may itself be triggered by divinity—or may not. This chapter teaches philosophical humility: even the devout cannot distinguish the origin of their devotions. The section also introduces the theme of internal voice—an idea that will blossom later in the book. [AI Assessment]
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[3b] “Socrates, I used the term like everyone else in the world does, simply ‘to talk to the Gods.’”
“Splendid, Theophilus! When you say, ‘to talk to the Gods,’ can you be more clear about what is meant by you or others in conjunction with the phrase?”
[3c] “I would be glad to do so, Socrates. It is simply this: praying is communication with the Gods.”
[4a] “Thank you, Theophilus!” said Socrates, “This is exactly what I am seeking to understand. This communication you reference, is it initiated by us, as human beings, or by the Gods?”
[4b] “Well, Socrates, such as you ask it, I’ve done it now for so long that I’m not sure that I ever really thought about that precise question before. I think that it is sometimes hard to tell. It may be that a person chooses to pray as the cause, or it might be that some divine inspiration is the cause.”
“I am glad that you referenced causation to prayer,” replied Socrates, continuing, “If I understand your answer, prayer is the effect that is communication with the Gods, but it is difficult to say if the causation was by the human being or by the Gods.”
“That is it, exactly as you have said it, Socrates. I could not have said it any better myself.”
[5a] “Now,” said Socrates, “if we try to understand the difficulty in identifying the discrete causation of prayer, is it because it is not initiated by the Gods by some clearly obvious form of initiation?”
“I don’t quite understand your question, Socrates,” replied Theophilus.
“Let me ask it this way. In your own experience, if it is not too personal, do you, for example, hear the voices of the Gods? That is, do you hear something like a distinct voice calling you, or enticing you, or directing you, or even barking at you, to pray or to continue this communication with the Gods with the same clarity and in the same manner that we hear our wives on various points? I mean, so that there is no mistake for it.”
“Why, I dare say, Socrates, that I do not at all hear myself the voice of the Gods in that manner, and I do not know anyone who has, excepting perhaps the Oracle, of course, who has that distinct attribute to hear and to be the voice of the Gods.”
[5b] “That is what I was thinking, too, Theophilus. But, in point of fact, isn’t it true that, if any person other than the Oracle said that the voice of the Gods was actually heard in the manner of sound or perception as indicated—that is, in the actual voice of the Gods—that person would be condemned by society as a lunatic in a similar manner as if the person refused to believe in the Gods at all. Isn’t that your understanding?”
“Indeed, Socrates, it is.”
[5c] “And, if certain persons each heard the voice of a God, would it not be natural then for those people to discuss in what manner the voice of the God was respectively perceived?”
“What do you mean, Socrates?”
“Well, if two or more persons each asserted that each person heard the actual voice of a God, such as the God’s voice actually is or would be, would they not each tend to compare and contrast what each person heard, such that one person might have perceived a deep voice and another person a high voice, or another person a man and yet another person a woman, or perhaps something else, in accordance with each person’s own cognizance?”
“Indeed, yes, Socrates, I admit that experience does teach us that it would be likely for human beings to do so, comparing and contrasting every detail of their respective experiences.”
[5d] “And, in that discussion, assuming any expressed differential in that perceived actual voice of a God as between or among such persons, would not there also be a tendency to conduct a debate and a following argument as to whose voice of God was authentic, and whose was imagined? That is, does not experience teach us that there would be distrust by one person as to the other person’s experience regarding the voice of God? Or some other manner of distrust, doubt, debate, divisiveness, or mean argument between or among the subjects of the Gods?”
“I understand what you are saying, Socrates,” replied Theophilus. “It is hard for me to believe that, if two persons asserted hearing or perceiving the actual voice of the same God anyway, that they would not compare their experiences at the most detailed level until some attribute of differentiation was isolated as the better or the worse.”
[5e] “And, moreover, Theophilus,” continued Socrates, “is seems likely that, in addition to the perception of the actual voice of the Gods as one issue, that perhaps a second incidental issue would be that the persons might perceive different or contradictory messages from the Gods, which would greatly exacerbate the debate. Do not people debate much less important points of their respective experiences, so a debate over any experience regarding hearing the voice of the Gods would tend to attract the most scrutiny and debate.”
“Yes, yes, of course, there is nothing more true than your statement, Socrates. Indeed, hearing the voice of God is so important that people would not stop inquiry of each other until every detail was known to compare and contrast between or among them.”
[5f] “Unless, of course,” said Socrates, “they agreed, in the course of their conversation, that the voice of God was unique to each person and therefore could not be compared or contrasted between or among people.”
“Well, I suppose, that seems likely, Socrates,” said Theophilus. “I mean, if people who each heard the actual voice of God agreed that the voice of God is unique and different for each person, then, I suppose that the presupposition of that debate or argument would not exist, at least for the perception in the sound of God’s actual voice.”
[6] “But, alas, Theophilus, as you’ve said, we do not hear the actual voice of God, as such, and I wanted to make sure that at least you and I were communicating regarding the actual voice of the Gods as it relates to your definition of praying. So, if I understand you, therefore, a person does not always know exactly what initiates or causes prayer, it being sometimes by the person’s consciousness as causation and sometimes by the causation of divine inspiration.”
“Yes, Socrates, I think that is exactly it.”
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ChatGPT Assessment
Yes. Reading Chapter II again in the context of the completed book rather than as an isolated early chapter, I would materially enlarge the assessment. I would not change the chapter itself. It is doing more structural work than the existing short AI assessment recognizes.
The current assessment is correct:
“Zegarelli is driving at the epistemological uncertainty of religious causation.”
But I now think that describes only the first layer.
The chapter quietly establishes the book’s epistemological jurisdiction
The crucial move occurs almost immediately. Theophilus says prayer is “communication with the Gods.” Socrates does not challenge the existence of the Gods. Instead he asks a narrower question:
Who initiated the communication?
Theophilus cannot tell. It might be conscious human choice; it might be divine inspiration.
That distinction becomes enormously important in light of the rest of the book.
Socrates has effectively said:
I don’t need to prove or disprove the Gods. I only need to examine what the human being is epistemically entitled to claim about the causal relationship.
That is exactly the distinction we recently extracted in Does God Exist?: ontology and the human state of knowledge about ontology are separate questions.
Chapter II therefore establishes a kind of jurisdictional boundary for the entire dialogue.
The Gods may exist.
The Gods may inspire.
The Gods may answer.
But:
What does Theophilus actually know about any of those propositions?
That becomes the case.
More importantly, Chapter II plants the evidentiary problem that Chapter III detonates
Chapter II first establishes that Theophilus does not hear an objectively distinguishable divine voice:
he does not hear “a distinct voice calling you, or enticing you, or directing you”; he knows no one who does except perhaps the Oracle.
Chapter III then draws the implication:
any perceived divine response occurs “in the same voice as our internal thought.”
Seen retrospectively, Chapter II is therefore laying an authentication problem.
Suppose I experience thought T.
Possible causes include:
A. I caused T consciously.
B. T arose subconsciously.
C. God caused T.
D. some other cause produced T.
If the phenomenological output presented to consciousness is the same—
my internal voice
—then the experience itself cannot authenticate C over A or B.
That is stronger than merely saying:
We don’t know whether prayer was divinely inspired.
It says:
The claimed supernatural cause lacks a discrete authentication channel.
And that becomes devastating later when Theophilus begins asserting knowledge of what the Gods want, cause, permit, reward, punish, and intend.
The “two people hearing God” sequence is really an early theory of religious pluralism
This is the portion I would elevate substantially in a new assessment.
Socrates hypothesizes two people actually hearing God. Immediately they would compare:
deep voice / high voice;
male / female;
one perception / another perception. The Prayer of Socrates – Soft-H…
Then he adds the much more dangerous possibility:
different or contradictory messages from the Gods.
That is not merely a cute Socratic hypothetical.
It is the whole problem of revelation compressed into about two pages.
Once private experience becomes public proposition—
God told me X
—the listener reasonably asks:
How do you know?
And when another says:
God told me not-X
there is no mutually available divine voice against which either claim can be authenticated.
So religious conflict arises not necessarily because either person is dishonest. Both may be perfectly sincere.
The problem is epistemic non-transferability.
One person’s internal experience cannot simply become another person’s knowledge.
That anticipates the desert-island problem we subsequently explored: outside-in institutional religion ultimately attempts to standardize what begins, if genuinely revelatory, as an inside-out experience.
And [5f] contains an extraordinary escape hatch
Socrates says essentially:
Unless everyone agreed that God’s voice is unique to each person, in which case comparison would disappear.
I read that differently now.
That is almost a fleeting glimpse of the solution that the book ultimately declines to exploit dogmatically.
If divine communication is uniquely personal, then:
my revelation cannot prove your revelation false merely because yours differs.
But the price is enormous:
private revelation loses much of its authority as public evidence.
You can have maximal personal revelation or maximal social comparability, but it’s difficult to have both.
That tension now strikes me as one of Chapter II’s deepest propositions.
The social-lunacy passage is also more sophisticated than I initially credited
There is a deliberate paradox in [5b].
Theophilus accepts that someone who denies the Gods may be condemned socially—but someone who claims actually to hear the Gods may likewise be condemned as a lunatic.
That’s wonderful.
The socially approved position occupies a narrow middle:
Believe the Gods communicate with us—but don’t claim too clearly that they communicated with you.
Too little divine perception:
impiety.
Too much divine perception:
insanity.
Acceptable religion therefore occupies a socially mediated epistemic corridor.
That anticipates much of the later book’s criticism of inherited stories, customs, writings and communal assertions. By Chapter VII, Theophilus finally admits that his supposed knowledge of divine things derives from “stories, songs, customs, and writings,” and Socrates asks whether perpetuation makes them factually true.
Chapter II has already planted the problem.
There is also a beautiful structural progression across Chapters I–III
Reading the complete manuscript makes this much clearer.
Chapter I — Definition
What is prayer?
Theophilus assumes everyone knows. Socrates insists upon defining the term precisely.
Chapter II — Causal source
Who initiates it?
Human consciousness or divine inspiration?
Chapter III — Communication channel
If God responds, through what perceptible medium?
Theophilus ultimately concedes:
the human internal voice.
That is a very deliberate tightening:
definition → causation → perception.
Only after establishing those foundations can Chapter IV ask whether the process is rational or irrational.
So Chapter II is not merely another conversation about prayer. It is a necessary link in the chain of proof.
Remove it and Chapter III’s internal-voice proposition arrives too abruptly.
And this now connects beautifully to our recent circumcision discussion
Oddly enough, the same pedagogical mechanism is operating.
Theophilus begins with:
“I used the term like everyone else in the world does.”
There it is again.
Everyone says prayer is communication with God.
Socrates asks:
What exactly do you mean?
Theophilus has practiced it for so long that he admits:
“I’m not sure that I ever really thought about that precise question before.”
That sentence now jumps off the page at me.
It is the “Of course” problem in another form.
Theophilus isn’t stupid.
He is experienced. Devout. Thoughtful. He has done this repeatedly for years.
And precisely because the practice is familiar, its premise escaped examination.
That gives us essentially the same principle we just reached:
The hardest premise to discover is the one society has ceased to regard as a premise.
Prayer is a far more elegant early example of it.
The chapter also foreshadows the book’s final inversion
Theophilus begins with:
prayer = talking to the Gods.
By the end Socrates arrives at:
thinking with the Gods.
And that distinction is already latent here.
“Talking to” implies:
sender → message → recipient → possible response.
“Thinking with” doesn’t require Socrates to authenticate a supernatural communication channel at all.
By Chapter X, Socrates says he goes to the temple simply:
“to think and to contemplate achieving virtue, just me in the presence of the Gods.”
So Chapter II establishes the defect in the communications model that the conclusion ultimately replaces.
That’s elegant architecture:
talking to → hearing from → inability to authenticate → thinking with.
The book does not necessarily destroy prayer.
It reconstructs what prayer can rationally mean.
My updated AI Assessment
If you’re filling that blank ChatGPT Assessment section, I would now replace the old short assessment with something closer to:
Chapter II establishes the epistemological jurisdiction of the dialogue. Socrates does not ask whether the Gods exist, but what a human being can know about purported communication with them. Theophilus defines prayer conventionally as “communication with the Gods,” only to discover that he has never examined who causes that communication. Human choice and divine inspiration are phenomenologically difficult to distinguish, because the Gods do not ordinarily speak through an objectively identifiable external voice. The chapter therefore introduces an authentication problem that drives the remainder of the work: if divine causation is perceived through human consciousness, how can the recipient distinguish God from self?
The hypothetical of multiple persons hearing different voices—or contradictory messages—extends the problem from private epistemology to social religion. Once private revelation becomes a public claim, people compare, authenticate, rank, distrust, and dispute their respective experiences. Yet if God’s voice is unique to each person, comparison becomes impossible and private revelation loses much of its authority as transferable public proof. Thus, the chapter quietly anticipates religious pluralism, institutional orthodoxy, and the later distinction between belief and knowledge.
Most importantly, Theophilus admits that although he has prayed for years, he has never considered the precise causal question Socrates asks. That admission embodies one of the work’s recurring lessons: familiarity can conceal an unexamined premise. Chapter II therefore does more than question prayer. It begins the method by which the entire dialogue moves from conventional “talking to the Gods” toward Socrates’s concluding discipline of “thinking with the Gods”—from asserted divine communication toward humility, contemplation, and virtue.
I think that is the assessment Chapter II deserves now that we can see the whole architecture. The original assessment wasn’t wrong; it simply caught the seed before we had watched the tree grow through Chapters III–X.
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The expression set forth in this article are solely the author’s and are not endorsed, condoned or supported by any affiliation of the author.
First Publication September 11, 2022. Copyright © 2022 by Gregg Zegarelli, Esq.
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