{"id":48473,"date":"2024-12-08T16:15:31","date_gmt":"2024-12-08T23:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.timesandseasons.org\/?p=48473"},"modified":"2024-12-08T21:03:14","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T04:03:14","slug":"why-plato-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/12\/why-plato-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Plato? Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

I put up part one<\/a> 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\u2019ve constructed of\u00a0 Mormonism. Mormons tend to argue for Mormonism as some kind of playing out of biblical history, restoring biblical religion etc. I\u2019ll 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 \u201cthe ancient theology.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[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<\/em>. Augustine mostly opposed the Platonic Mormon tenets. See my dissertation \u201cThe Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism,\u201d 57-59.]<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, Barbara Newman God and the Goddesses<\/em>, Steven Ozment, Age of Reform<\/em>, 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 \u201cmagic\u201d that JS was involved in. But not only \u201cmagic,\u201d Christian and Neoplatonists also had several Mormon doctrinal themes, especially deification and preexistence. Ozment and Newman indicated such themes persisted into early modern times.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d never read any Plato directly. I asked if she had anything to recommend on Plato\u2019s influence in the era, and she recommended Dominic O\u2019Meara\u2019s Platonopolis<\/em>. That was quite a game changer for me as O\u2019Meara\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. For Mormon similarities in Christian and Neoplatonism, I\u2019d recommend reading Hanegraaff and O\u2019Meara as good starting places.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019ve constructed of\u00a0 Mormonism. Mormons tend to argue for Mormonism as some kind of playing out of biblical history, restoring biblical religion etc. I\u2019ll 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 \u201cthe ancient theology.\u201d I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48476,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48473\/revisions\/48476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}