Mormonism and Christianity, Inferior Philosophies?

[_Johannes]

Then the Early Church Fathers borrowed from the best of Greek and Roman systems. The CCC then quotes from them and later theologians to reintegrate all in the context of modern life. Tradition plus Scripture. The Protestant (in large part) rejection of Tradition is one reason for many of the dysfunctions.

I would agree that the Catholic Catechism is the appropriate comparator here if one is looking for something systematic and consistent. Of course, there is a Protestant tradition of systematic theology too which has produced similar works. Where I think Kish is right is in saying that Mormonism doesn't really have any similar body of work. What is the Lds equivalent of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae or Calvin's Institutes, for example? Bruce McConkie? To ask the question is pretty much to get the answer.

[_Johannes]

But it is that therapeutic aspect—how should I deal with my irritation at loud noise? how should I deal with the death of a loved one? where is my place in the cosmos? etc.—that these philosophical systems have most in common with ancient Christianity, probably in part because, as Johannes points out, Greek philosophy was poured into the Christian vessel. But why did this happen in the first place? Why, for example, were philosophers like Justin Martyr attracted to Christianity? It wasn't because of the Bible (the Christian canon wasn't even formed in the West till the fourth century and some Christians rejected large portions of it!) but because Christianity seemed to them better to address the ethical and personal concerns they faced as philosophers in the therapeutic mode of ancient philosophy.

Yes, that's a fair point. I concede that I'm pushing my own false dichotomy by contrasting élite classical philosophy with the (implicitly more authentic) experience of the early Christians who wrote and canonised the New Testament. But, as you say, there's a major common factor that joins the classical philosophers with the early church, on both the élite and demotic levels, and that's where philosophical and theological thought intersects with therapeutics. St Paul's splendid advice about being passive-aggressive to one's enemies in Romans 12.20 might have come straight out of Epictetus.

Just from a believer's experience, what is there for a Mormon to draw on in terms of personal devotion? Every other Christian tradition can go to a St. Augustine or Gregory the Great or the Cappadocian fathers or the desert ascetics or whomever. Sure, people who aren't intellectually curious might not go there, but their pastors usually will (because they're professional), and at the very least they won't object. Meanwhile, we got an old kook named Ezra Taft Benson who thought justice was a communist plot to raise taxes, or a socially awkward bird portraitist named Boyd who thinks funerals shouldn't be about the person who died, or, if we really want to go back, we have Joseph Smith promising that your dead baby will get to reign over a planet as a gnome-sized god.

That is immeasurably sad, on a human level as much as a religious one. To be a Mormon is never to read St John of the Cross.

Utah Mormonism doesn't answer many questions because the businessmen who run it never asked any questions in the first place and consequently they do not have a tragic sense of life, which is what Christianity responds to. The only thing they read the Book of Job for is a one liner they lean on to prove that the idea of "preexistence" has some biblical support. The whole ____ point of the thing flies gloriously over their number-crunching heads. They seem not to understand that the appeal of classical Christianity was that the god who made this ____ of a world at least had the decency to try it on for size. One can buy that or not (I don't), but at least it's something.

Indeed. In polite ecumenical circles, it's considered good form to have a "holy envy" for elements of other faith traditions. SO, for example, I can say that I find depth and pathos in John Paul II's writings on the problem of pain (even as I reject his conservative Polish Catholicism). I genuinely struggle to find something similar in Mormonism, and I've made some effort to look. Maybe if I'd been to the temple I'd feel different (I've not watched the bootleg videos or read the whole of the trascripts).

[_Stem]

I'm not going to pretend to be a great contributor to this thread. I"ve read History of Western Philosophy, Kierkegaard (a handful of his books), Seneca, Epitictus, some Kant, Hegel, and others- mostly missing the meaning behind all that is said in each of those.

I will say, though, that if Mormonism ever became what it seemed Joseph started to invision (outside of polygamy) when he said:

One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from where it may

Sermon of Joseph Smith, 9 July 1843 (Sunday Morning), in Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980), 229.
and

“Friendship is the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism

Sermon of Joseph Smith, 23 July 1843 (Sunday Afternoon), in Ehat and Cook, Words of Joseph Smith, 234

It might sure be a nice religion by now.

Instead of course, and trying to tie in with the OP in another way, the Church embraced anti-intellectual development, fear, and authority.

Thanks for the thread. I'll go back to just reading the fine thoughts of the intellects here.

[_Uncle Ed]

Is it fair to compare the body of religious texts and their authors with Mormonism? Could early/primitive Christianity compare its early body of writings to the pagan philosophers'? The reason why the earliest Christian writers inculcate extant philosophers into the religion is because of this "religious envy". All subsequent religions borrow/steal from existing ones. It's why it's called Judeo-Christianity (inclusive of Islam).

Mormonism is like early/primitive Christianity, growing up in the pagan world. Judeo-Christianity today is the dominant religious persuasion. Out of it came Mormonism, which at this point is analogous to early/primitive Christianity in the second century AD; marginalized, persecuted, mocked/satirized, compared, etc.

Every religion has its needy ones. And every religion has it detractors and departing members. If the religion doesn't have a unique set of answers to social needs, then the religion falters and dies away, or is usually stillborn. Mormonism is as large as Judaism and is still growing. Fulminating against its existence may be fun but is surely feckless. Positing on Mormonism's ultimate "fate" may be entertaining but accomplishes nothing.

We have a limited, large number of recognized religions so-organized. And what we really have is as many religions as sapient minds on the planet. The organized part of it is so that socializing can take place. But there is literally no meeting of the minds where personal religion is concerned. Philosophy is ditto that. "Organized philosophy" is not any different from organized religion. It is so that socializing can take place, which depends on intelligible conversations. Those who do not need regular doses of socializing intelligibly tend to avoid both.

[_Chap]

Funny, isn't it? It is almost as if those early Christian thinkers realised that, on its own, their religion was not a very satisfactory world view for an intelligent person ...

You're being playful, of course, but this raises a serious point. Why would we expect a religious commitment to generate a systematic world-view? And, as I intimated above, there is the further question of whether systematic coherence is a good thing. I surmise that you and Kish are taking these points to be self-evident, but they aren't. ...

During the years I believed one of the versions of the main historical tradition of Western Christianity to be true, I thought that it was indeed possible to see the world as a whole on that basis. I did, by the way think that that way of seeing the world was capable of being completely consistent with the science in which I had been trained to a non-trivial level.

Because I thought that the religion in which I believed was the last, best word to humanity by the creator of the cosmos, I confess that I did expect that it would open the way to a view of the world that was, on the whole, coherent and all-embracing, though I assumed that it would have to leave space for an lifetime (and beyond that perhaps an eternity) of learning and exploration. Of course I did not think that my deity demanded that everybody should aspire to such a view of the world - but I felt that all that a human being could need was available through him (since he made us), and so I felt that I could find what I wanted from him.

I gave up belief in that religion partly because I ceased to believe its historical basis to be true, and partly because I ceased to think that it was possible to find coherence in the concepts that were essential in order to articulate it.

I hope that makes my position clearer.

[_Johannes]

This is getting a bit autobiographical.... Chap, I think the real reason you left is that you wanted to sin.

[_Chap]

This is getting a bit autobiographical.... Chap, I think the real reason you left is that you wanted to sin.

Damn! Rumbled again. Let me make another cup of coffee, heh heh heh!! Then where is my rather dogeared copy of Playboy for June 1972?

Seriously, though ...

Some autobiography when talking about the function of religion in the formation of a worldview, is surely necessary unless the discussion is to stay at a level of bland generalisation devoid of any solid content? After all, this board exists purely because there are people who share the experience of having been Mormons, and need to express their experience in a free environment, or who are interested in their experiences. It's a perfectly appropriate place for religious autobiography, I would have thought.

Where do you come from in religious terms, by the way?

[Guest]

I agree. Personally, I prefer the scriptural hodgepodge - the former British chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, once described the Bible as a bunch of Jews arguing with each other, and some of us rather like that sort of thing. Evidently you're more of a systems man. The point, for me, is that the two things are not really susceptible of comparison. Whatever you think about the scriptures, they were written and compiled under wholly different circumstances and for different reasons from, say, the writings of Seneca (to use the Stoic example). A more appropriate comparison would be Seneca and St Augustine.

I can't take issue with any of this. But what I am specifically addressing is the problem of finding a method for arriving at an ethical lifestyle. Although I am sure my appreciation of scripture is not as profound as yours, I too love the Bible and I appreciate that it was compiled under much different circumstances.

But let's look at the standard, uninformed Christian approach to the Bible as the Word of God. For the majority of Christians, including, up to my adulthood, me, there was no appreciation that this was "a bunch of Jews arguing with each other." No, the Bible is, much to one's amazement, presented as God's message to humankind. St. Augustine seems to have approached the book much as the great grammarians would have approached Vergil. There can be no greater testament to this misapprehension of the Bible than the Book of Mormon, which, like the Historia Augusta, was written as a pseudo-collection by one author who sought to make an overarching point.

That speaks volumes regarding the popular understanding of the Bible in Joseph Smith's day. Where are the arguing Jews in all of this? For Joseph Smith, there are no arguing Jews, there are corrupt and deceiving priests who cloud the clear message of the Bible. Now, I use a Mormon example, because it is what is closest to hand for a person like myself, but I don't think this is an accident. Even today, fundamentalists view the Bible as one coherent whole with a clear message. You, as a trained theologian-seminarian, are the outlier.

Additionally, the Bible is taken to be "God's handbook for living." So, if you want to know how you should live, go to the Bible, so many Christians popularly say. Well, good luck. As I said before, you will find lots of interesting stories to ponder, and direct commandments to follow, but you are given absolutely no training to grapple with the problems presented by this collection of texts in a coherent way. Churches by and large do not teach this. I know the LDS Church is next to hopeless on this account, since it essentially mines the scriptures for prooftexts that are taken as support for whatever some GA mumbled out in General Conference. The result is incoherent garbage.

But you approach this much differently from the vast majority of Christians. You see the Bible more for what it is. You know something about the Jewish tradition and the arguments of rabbis. Most Christians do not have the foggiest idea about any of that. So they do not see the Bible as a series of texts by different human authors that work through a myriad of issues and solutions in a centuries-spanning discussion about the nature of God and his relationship with Israel, etc. There is so much beauty in there and so much to ponder, and most people do not have even the most rudimentary tools for understanding that, let alone working with it productively.

And what kind of way of living does that provide us? Not much of one. And yet so often churches present their "systems" as a way of life. Even scholars of religion will emphasize this. I might be channeling a little bit of Huston Smith's idiosyncratic take on Christianity here. Most definitely Mormons sing and tell each other, there is a right way to be happy. And that is the Gospel. It is not just a Gospel of human salvation, but a method for living the right way that will bring happiness and perfection. And yet it most clearly falls down most of the time, failing its people and leaving them bereft of tools for making their lives better. So they fill that void with "The Secret" or whatever other nonsense plugs the gaps of their failed religious ideology of choice.

I don't know that my comments are inspired by my personal preference for systems so much as they are driven by the failure of the Mormon Gospel to provide what it is advertised as being.

I will never forget that, in the months leading up to my first cessation of LDS Church attendance, I was speaking with the Young Men's President (I was one of his counselors) about the books I was reading to help me understand the challenge of raising my daughter as a new father. He looked at me like I was completely nuts and said, "Why would you bother with that when you have the Gospel?" Inside I thought to myself, "What a stupid and absurd question!"

What does the Gospel have to teach me about the sleeping patterns of infants? What does the Gospel give to me to address issues of attachment with adopted children?

The man who said this was a trained, practicing MD. I was absolutely stunned by his profound ignorance.

Is he alone to blamed for this ignorance? I think not. He had been told what his priorities should be by the LDS Church, and he was applying that message as it was communicated to him. And the results are a disaster.

There are really two responses to this. The first, rather banal response is that classical philosophy was always more or less an élite pursuit. You only have to read Aristophanes' Clouds to see how it was perceived by mass opinion. If there is evidence that the Stoics - or the Epicureans, or the Peripatetics, or the Platonists - ever amounted to a mass movement, I am unaware of it. All I can think of off hand is a rhetorical reference in a biography of Plotinus to the effect that even the common people adopted his doctrines, but I don't think that counts for much. If anything, one gets the impression that philosophical schools were self-consciously élitist, both intellectually and socially (and sometimes politically). I love Plato, for example, but he and followers of his like Plotinus were amongst the worst offenders.

The second, and much more interesting, response is that classical philosophy merged seamlessly into Christian theology. This is a matter of historical record. In patristic writings, you find a recurring desire to plug the faith of Christ into the pagan philosophical tradition, and this bore fruit with the likes of Justin Martyr, Origen and indeed St Augustine. Certainly, the Stoics were profoundly influential on early Christian thought, arguably going back to St Paul. One could multiply examples. Clement of Alexandria would be unimaginable without the influence of pagan philosophy. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is profoundly indebted to Platonism. The last great anti-Christian philosophical movement of antiquity was Neoplatonism, and yet who was the culmination of that movement? Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Christian.

Again, I have no real problem with any of this. I am aware of it, and I know that my position seems somewhat extreme. Yes, one cannot give the false impression that philosophy, which was by and large an elite activity, somehow permeated the culture such that the lowliest slave working the mines in Spain was talking to his fellow laborers about Epictetus. Obviously no. And yet I think it would be too extreme on the other end to restrict all such learning to the salons of the wealthy in the largest cities of the empire. Philosophy, and its organization of knowledge, did penetrate further into society and education than I think people realize. Christianity does deserve credit as the triumphant ideology at the end of the Roman Empire for incorporating Greek and Roman learning into its system pretty thoroughly and then transmitting that knowledge.

And, at the same time, I can't help but regret the profound failure it represents in terms of lost opportunities. Having started its history as an ideology of the marginalized and oppressed, Christianity lost a great deal of its value to those oppressed as it worked its way up the social and intellectual food chain. On the one hand, that was inevitable, but, on the other hand, it is still regrettable. The Church as a profoundly hierarchical and elitist organization treated the majority of people as completely incapable of learning or grappling with the intellectual heritage that it inherited and developed, leaving most of them ignorant. OK, OK, so it's easy and unfair to say this from the distance at which I am writing, and I know I am asking for the impossible given the historical situation.

But I am not really interested in blame so much as causes. My point seems polemical but I don't think it actually is. The questions I am asking are driven by my astonishment at the continuing pervasiveness of ignorance in a sea of of information and relatively high rates of literacy. It is a hugely complex issue with many causes. One of those causes, however, is surely the ideologies--to use the term roughly--that organize our collective approach to knowledge. We need not blame Christianity and, in our LDS experience, Mormonism or fail to give the former its due for great intellectual strides forward in human civilization, to recognize that there are clearly aspects of their expression on a popular level that perpetuate and propagate profound ignorance of certain kinds.

But I must acknowledge, Johannes, that when it comes to Christianity I must be watched like a hawk. For though I have read and fallen in love with St. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, though I have a smattering of knowledge of Constantine, Theodosius, and subsequent history, I was not raised Christian, I am not a true historian of these matters, nor am I a seminarian and theologian, and I need pushback. I write as a lightly educated LDS person who came to learning late, and then really in one specific subject area. I feel the deep pains of my staggering ignorance, and that awareness sometimes moves me to reflect roughly along the lines of Paul Veyne.

[_Johannes]

Some autobiography when talking about the function of religion in the formation of a worldview, is surely necessary unless the discussion is to stay at a level of bland generalisation devoid of any solid content? After all, this board exists purely because there are people who share the experience of having been Mormons, and need to express their experience in a free environment, or who are interested in their experiences. It's a perfectly appropriate place for religious autobiography, I would have thought.

Indeed, there's nothing inappropriate about it. It's been said that all theology is autobiography, although I don't think we need go that far.

Where do you come from in religious terms, by the way?

I'm an Anglican cleric, the stereotype of the annoyingly vacuous liberal vicar. Forgive me if I'm light on the autobiography, as certain prominent LDS bloggers have served as an awful warning of what happens when a priesthood-holder puts too much of himself online.

[_Johannes]

That speaks volumes regarding the popular understanding of the Bible in Joseph Smith's day. Where are the arguing Jews in all of this? For Joseph Smith, there are no arguing Jews, there are corrupt and deceiving priests who cloud the clear message of the Bible.

Just to be contrarian, I'd question this. I've read a couple of biographies of Smith (Bushman and Vogel), and I gather that questioning the status of the Bible as a fax from God was quite common in 19th century America, even among less educated people. Didn't Smith's grandfather reprimand him for being too conservative and demand that he read Tom Paine, a radical critic of scripture?

But you approach this much differently from the vast majority of Christians. You see the Bible more for what it is. You know something about the Jewish tradition and the arguments of rabbis. Most Christians do not have the foggiest idea about any of that.

I think I could make a case for challenging this, and not just in the liberal modern era. To take just one example, it was always at least implicit, if not explicit, in the Reformation project that people had the right to read and interpret the scriptural text for themselves, as members of the "priesthood of all believers". They could, in effect, become the latest generation of "arguing Jews". Of course, state authorities in various parts of Europe managed to make sure that it didn't necessarily turn out like that, but the potential was always there.

We must do another thread on this sometime.

I don't know that my comments are inspired by my personal preference for systems so much as they are driven by the failure of the Mormon Gospel to provide what it is advertised as being.

Fair enough. I shouldn't have ascribed that to you.

Yes, one cannot give the false impression that philosophy, which was by and large an elite activity, somehow permeated the culture such that the lowliest slave working the mines in Spain was talking to his fellow laborers about Epictetus. Obviously no. And yet I think it would be too extreme on the other end to restrict all such learning to the salons of the wealthy in the largest cities of the empire. Philosophy, and its organization of knowledge, did penetrate further into society and education than I think people realize.

Hmm. This interests me. I'm not au fait with the scholarship in this area, so I can't really push back against you here. I'd like to ask, though, what sort of evidence you have in mind. What is there that tells us that "middle-class" people would have been conversant with, say, Stoic ideas?

Having started its history as an ideology of the marginalized and oppressed, Christianity lost a great deal of its value to those oppressed as it worked its way up the social and intellectual food chain. On the one hand, that was inevitable, but, on the other hand, it is still regrettable. The Church as a profoundly hierarchical and elitist organization treated the majority of people as completely incapable of learning or grappling with the intellectual heritage that it inherited and developed, leaving most of them ignorant.

I certainly agree that the church became hierarchical and élitist, but there have always been contrary currents which have sought to emancipate, or indeed been led by, ordinary people. In LDS terms, tou sound like you're talking about the "great and abominable church". I return to my example of the Reformation, even if its full dangerous potential was not fully realised at the time. There were popular lay movements in mediaeval times, too. Ordinary people have always looked for ways to reappropriate the Christian heritage as their own, even at the cost sometimes of coming into conflict with the church hierarchy.

But I must acknowledge, Johannes, that when it comes to Christianity I must be watched like a hawk. For though I have read and fallen in love with St. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, though I have a smattering of knowledge of Constantine, Theodosius, and subsequent history, I was not raised Christian, I am not a true historian of these matters, nor am I a seminarian and theologian, and I need pushback. I write as a lightly educated LDS person who came to learning late, and then really in one specific subject area.

Your modesty would do St Francis credit, and you are among friends as I had a classical education too. It's interesting - for obvious reasons - that you define your upbringing as LDS rather than Christian. Is that how you would have seen it at the time?