So I’ve posted related to this topic, but I was thinking of putting up a few posts on this larger theme of Greek philosophy corrupting early Christianity. Like I said in this video, that was a common Protestant idea going back to the 1600s, very prominent in Smith’s day, and was even in a book he owned.
Such an idea seemed to have gotten picked up by Mormon intellectuals around the turn of the 19th century and seems to still be fairly popular among a lot of Mormons.
I’ve argued that it appears that Joseph Smith knew of such Protestant claims and rejected them. Instead of Christianity being corrupted by Greek philosophy, it was the loss of the larger truth of the ancient theology (including Greek philosophy) that was the problem.
So I’d like to do a few more posts on why I think it was a mistake for later Mormon thinkers to adopt this claim of philosophical corruption.
First, let me quote a few lines from Wouter Hannegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy for historical context. It’s pages 33-34 of my dissertation:
Protestant scholars seeking to purify Christianity from what they believed were Catholic corruptions began to target what they believed to be Platonic corruption in Christianity and those who, like Marsillio Ficino, believed that Christianity and Platonism overlapped. “But critics who investigated the Florentine agenda more closely were bound to discover a disconcerting truth: to a surprising extent, those paganizing heretics seemed to have the Fathers of the Church on their side!” Since many of the early fathers had been heavily Platonic, the answer for these Protestant scholars was to argue that these fathers had themselves been corrupted by Plato. “It is not hard to see that [this claim] carried an enormous polemical potential from Protestant perspectives, since it strongly suggested that Roman Catholicism and its dogmatic tradition as a whole might be exposed as a pagan perversion.” Such Protestant scholars even developed a hermeneutic for determining who the corrupt Platonists were among contemporaries and determined that the tenets of a Platonist were the belief that the soul was uncreated and the denial of creation ex nihilo.[1]
[1] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 94-95, 105-7.
Comments
5 responses to “The Apostasy and Greek Philosophy: Introduction”
Ah yes, Ficino. If I was any good at intellectual history I would have spent a lot of time with him, instead of with the detritus of his influence in products of popular culture. But thanks for the reference to Hanegraaf – it looks like something I urgently need to look at.
Your thesis of “Instead of Christianity being corrupted by Greek philosophy, it was the loss of the larger truth of the ancient theology (including Greek philosophy) that was the problem” contradicts the broader use of corruption in JSH 1:19.
I think we understand the argument of you dissertation after all these posts but your speculation, while interesting, uses a lot of conjecture and revision.
Was it loss or corruption sets this up a reductive choice that likely gets in the way or what you rhetorically want to argue.
Yes, highly recommended, Jonathan.
As I mentioned on a previous post, RL, I take JSH 1:19 as a dig at Protestantism and their apostasy claims that JS rejected. As JS said in his very last speech, “the old Catholic church is worth more than all” the Protestant ones.
It seems to me like the biggest proponents of anti-Platonism in the Church have been the descendants of Hyrum. Which leads me to wonder, was there daylight between Joseph and Hyrum on this issue when they were alive? Or is it just an artifact of Hyrum’s descendants having the playing field pretty much to themselves in the 20th century?
I’m not aware of a difference on these points between JS and Hyrum. I’ll give some more context of this idea developing into the 20th century in my next post.
But some LDS thinkers did take shots at Greek philosophy while JS was alive and JS never overtly rebuked such critiques. My sense is that JS kept a lot to himself, especially extra-biblical influence. Which is pretty common for visionaries.