Why Plato? Part One

So in continuing this series on my thoughts on belief and history (I may pick that as a title), I wanted to give some background on why I ended up linking Mormonism and Plato. I did an interview with Gabriel Proulx a few months ago, and he assumed I’d been interested in philosophy for a long time. Not so. I had NO interest in philosophy as an academic discipline as an undergrad and focused on history then and throughout my academic training. I came across my interest in Plato from that angle.

The only philosophy class I ever took was part of a four-course overview UC Santa Barbara had all the religious studies PhDs take, the second one on religion and philosophy. That particular course was generally considered the most difficult course of the entire program as the professor had us start with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which is really hard especially if you have no philosophy background. Perhaps the most discouraging moment of the whole process was when I showed up to discuss Hegel having no ideas what I’d read, and another student saying, “This is nothing compared to Heidegger.” Being and Time was later in the course and was indeed much harder than Hegel. Rough course (though Hegel was a good crash course in Christian Platonism after the professor explained what he was talking about).

I came to Plato (as I’ll discuss in my next post) through my interest in history and the question “where did Mormonism come from?” or “by what means did God bring out the cultural conditions for the restoration?” I wrote up some articles on religions I found important to the question, and I worked on that issue for some time prior to starting my doctoral program.

As I posted over at the JI a few times, John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire had a huge influence on me, and I spent several years stewing over the question “what is hermeticism?” I delved further back in time chronologically as a result, dipping into issues of medieval Catholicism and resistance to the Protestant Reformation (including this this article). So I studied lots of that sort of thing by the time I was ready to start putting together my book lists for my reading exams.

For reading exams at UCSB religious studies, we were able to pick our own topics and were given the guidance of “don’t make the topic too big or too small” (makes sense). We’d work with our advisers to pick the topics and construct the books lists and after reading all the books, you take a big test. The exams I eventually chose were early Christianity with Beth DePalma Digeser, medieval Christianity with Sharon Farmer, English Reformation with Stefania Tutino, and religious themes in the eighteenth century with Ann Taves (my main adviser).

The early one was the most peculiar as it was the one I knew least about prior to starting the readings. I told Ann I was interested in learning more about early Christianity, but worried I’d look not focused enough. Ann said it would make me look well-rounded (who knows? No academic job).

Anyway, it was unusual to do a reading exam on a topic I knew very little about, and that made things a little hard for that one. But Beth was interested in my topic having grown up near Palmyra, so connecting Mormonism back to late antiquity (Brooke’s hermetic angle) really interested her.

I had previously audited Beth’s class on early Christianity, and found myself kind of losing interest until she got to Plotinus, considered “the founder” of Neoplatonism (“founder” probably isn’t the best term for Plotinus, later Platonic thinking had been around, but he was an important thinker). Unfortunately, I can’t remember what she said about Plotinus at that time (I’ve since studied a lot about Neoplatonism, so that kind of obscures my memory of that event) but I remember thinking, “Wow! That sounds really Mormon!” Again, I can’t remember what she said, but do know that there are a lot of Mormon similarities with Neoplatonism, or the thought of the Platonic philosophers that came after Plotinus.

So what I said to her when I told her I wanted to do a reading exam with her, was that in addition to getting a good overview of early Christianity, I wanted to figure out what Brooke was talking about (I’d been working on that for a while). “In addition to early Christianity in general,” I told her, “I really like to get a clearer picture of what Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Neoplatonism are.” “I can help you with that,” Beth said enthusiastically.

This is getting a little long, so I’ll break this part in two. I’ll describe it more in the next post, but it was during my readings for all four of those exams that I saw a trend: Christians who liked Plato were the ones who sounded Mormon. More on that in my next post.