I put up part one a while back (sorry, many life distractions in the meantime) and am finally getting up part 2. The bigger purpose of these posts is to share some thoughts on a bigger point about rethinking the grand narrative of biblical metahistory that we’ve constructed of Mormonism. Mormons tend to argue for Mormonism as some kind of playing out of biblical history, restoring biblical religion etc. I’ll be arguing in these posts (and have argued) that a lot of such notions are problematic since the Bible is problematic historically, but that there are other ways to think of placing Mormonism in a longer ancient history with Smith turning to Platonism within the context of what was known as “the ancient theology.”
I’ll talk about those themes over several posts, but I wanted to continue my last one: How I came across the significance of Plato for Mormonism.
As I plunged into my exam reading lists, I started notice a trend: throughout the history of Christianity, Christians who liked Plato were the ones who sounded Mormon.
[Note, I exclude Augustine from this group. Yes, he was influenced by Christian Platonists and would at times speak complimentary of Plato, but Augustine sought to distance Christianity from Platonism in his City of God. Augustine mostly opposed the Platonic Mormon tenets. See my dissertation “The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism,” 57-59.]
This observation applied in all the time periods I was reading: early Christianity, medieval, reformation, and eighteenth century. Some of the books that keyed me onto this theme were Gregory Show, Theurgy and the Soul, Barbara Newman God and the Goddesses, Steven Ozment, Age of Reform, among others. Theurgy was private rites certain Neoplatonists engaged in to gain power and become divine, and that divinity angle sounded rather Mormon to me and made me wonder about a way to view the “magic” that JS was involved in. But not only “magic,” Christian and Neoplatonists also had several Mormon doctrinal themes, especially deification and preexistence. Ozment and Newman indicated such themes persisted into early modern times.
So as I got toward the end of my reading lists, I went back to my late antiquity adviser, Beth, and noted the trend along with the fact I’d never read any Plato directly. I asked if she had anything to recommend on Plato’s influence in the era, and she recommended Dominic O’Meara’s Platonopolis. That was quite a game changer for me as O’Meara’s argument was that the political thought of the Neoplatonists was the attempt to implement what they saw as Plato political agenda: creating the ideal city where all goods were held in common for the purpose of helping its citizen become as much like God as possible.
That sounded really Mormon to me, and having learned of the influence of Platonic thought in the West, I figured something was up in terms of Joseph Smith having contact with such ideas. I finished my dissertation in 2014 attempting to make the argument, and have found a whole lot more since.
My point is that I came across Plato more through a historical lens than a philosophical one. Thus I link Mormonism to Christian Platonism as a living tradition that has some significant differences to how Plato gets taught in Western universities for the last 200 or so years. For that topic, see Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy. For Mormon similarities in Christian and Neoplatonism, I’d recommend reading Hanegraaff and O’Meara as good starting places.
The point that you came across Plato through history rather than philosophy is really helpful. In my case, with a degree in literature, I don’t see much problem with the Restoration as a playing out of Biblical history, since I’m approaching it as narrative. But it’s also interesting to see how it slots into particular currents of history and questions being asked within Christianity in the early 19th century.
No doubt lots of ways to interpret religious texts, but the historical approach is interesting too.
Stephen, thanks for posting this. I read and appreciated your thesis on Smith’s Theology and platonism. I feel that sometimes we give the Greeks too hard a time. In fact, I am a little unorthodox in the sense that I have quite an affinity for platonism/neoplatonism, I feel I have managed to include a lot of their philosophy in my personal theory of reality. So much so, that I posit a tweaked version of the Good as a separate higher entity from God. However, I agree with most of our few theologians in the church that a great deal has been lost when speaking about our God, and it seems to me many other denominations just choose to ignore the monolatric personal Hebraic theology present in the Bible. Perhaps I am full of nonsense. Either way, I will have to read Hanegraaff and O’Meara. What are your thoughts?
Hanegraaff and O’Meara are definitely worth reading Vic. In terms of the Good as separate from God, I haven’t thought about that in my own religious practice. I do argue in my updated draft I’m working on, that Smith drew on Plato’s Cave in his 1832 account and DC 88.