Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine and Christianity, pt. 4: Evidence of a Marital “Sealing” Rite in the Greek Mysteries?

As an addendum to my secret tradition posts, I recently came across something interesting related to Plato and the Greek mysteries.  In my post on Plato, I noted the Anne Mary Farrell’s dissertation arguing that Plato often made allusion to the Eleusinian mysteries and that the that Diotima’s ladder of love in Plato’s Symposium may have been related to ritual stair case in the Eleusinian telestron (or the temple where they performed the rite). The Symposium also contained Aristophanes’ myth of spilt male and female pairs that can be “welded” back together so that they’ll be “one and not two in Hades?” (ie the afterlife). So I wondered if since Diotima referred to a ritual, Aristophanes might have as well.

Joseph Campbell’s description of the Orphic Sacramental Bowl suggests that Aristophanes was referring to a rite. Unearthed in 1837, the object was later melted down by the Russians during World War I, but not before casts were made in England in 1867.[1]

To explain why I found this Campbell’s description of the bowl significant, I first need to describe what Plato says about souls falling from and returning to the Gods in his Phaedrus. At 246 d, Socrates launches into his description of the chorus of the Gods by declaring, “Let us turn to what causes the shedding of wings, what makes them fall away from the soul,” based on his belief that we had preexisted with the Gods and our wings had allowed us to be up in the heavens with them.  Socrates then describes the chorus of the Gods, how the Gods travel around the cosmos to behold “the place beyond heaven” or true reality, a process that Farrell says had the most over references to the Eleusinian mysteries.  Premortal humans follow the Gods to behold this reality, but if “by some accident [the premortal soul] takes on a burden of forgetfulness and wrong doing, then it is weighed down, sheds it wings and falls to the earth,” ie becomes mortal (246d-248d).

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2016 in Retrospect: An Overview of Noteworthy Books and Articles in Mormon History

Just some of the significant volumes from 2016. Also, my awesome bookends inherited from my grandparents.

Once again, this is my attempt to recap the historiography of Mormonism from the past twelve months. This is the eighth such post, and previous installments are found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I do not list every single book and article from 2016, but I do highlight those I found most interesting and relevent. Therefore, a strong bias is obviously involved, so I hope you?ll add more in the comments.

I think it’s safe to say it was another solid year for the field.

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Prehistoric Mammals in the Manti Temple

Three years ago I wrote about prehistoric reptiles in a mural in the Manti Temple: ?Things I Did Not Know: Dinosaurs in the Manti Temple?. This past summer I went back and, this time, noticed some prehistoric mammals.

I was not able to find images of the particular murals [1], so… with the usual caveats about memory and eye-witnesses of a mural I saw in from across the room in July while doing something else, the animals I saw were:

• Deinotherium (looks like an elephant with downward curving tusks),
• Megacerops (looks like a rhinoceros with forked horn),
• Xiphodon (looks like a camel)

There was also a goat in the same panel, but I didn?t notice anything to distinguish it from a present-day male Alpine ibex (Capra ibex).

The murals in question were painted by Carl Christian Anton Christensen (1831-1912; usually CCA Christensen) in 1886-1887 and depict facets of creation up to, but not including, humans. Below I have included images from  Louis Figuier?s La Terre avant le déluge (1863, French; 1872, English), which seems, upon casual inspection, to be a candidate for one of Christensen?s sources. [2]. (Hat-tip again to Mina for pointing out Figuier when I posted about Mesozoic Reptiles.)

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Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine and Christianity, pt. 3: The Secret Tradition

Since I’m going to be referencing the Christian secret tradition a lot in these posts, I wanted to list out the post I did on this topic a couple of summer’s ago.  I’d wanted to put these together anyway.

Clement of Alexandria declared, “The Lord after his resurrection imparted knowledge to James the Just and to John and Peter, and they imparted it to the rest of the apostles, and the rest of the apostles to the seventy, of whom Barnabas was one.”

Introduction

Clement’s letter to Theodore

The debate over the the letter to Theodore

Evidence of a ritual

Judeo-Christian Apocalypses

The Greek Mysteries

Plato

The Disciplina Arcani

Theurgy

Joseph Smith

Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine and Christianity, pt. 2: Debates

Friedrich Schleiermacher, who played a major role in the modern study of Plato, rejected the notion of a Platonic oral tradition, arguing that Plato?s central purposes were expressed in his dialogues. Though Friedrich Nietzsche was heavily critical of Schleiermacher’s interpretation, Schleiermacher’s became the dominant view especially in the Anglo-American academy.[1]  American Harold Cherniss went so far as to say that Aristotle was simply mistaken when he referenced Plato’s “so-called unwritten doctrine.”[2]

The Tübingen school, or a group of scholars at Tübingen University who study the issue, pushed back against Schleiermacher, by not only pointing out Plato?s over references in the Phaedrus and in letter 7 but also noting the numerous times that Socrates refers to things he cannot talk about throughout Plato’s dialogues.[3] As Dmitri Nikulin puts it, “The Tübingen interpretation to a large extent suspends the fundamental principle of modern hermeneutical interpretation: the sola scriptura. This hermeneutical principle stresses the importance of going back to the ‘original’ text as the only source of dependable interpretation, and hence implies the rejection of any oral tradition of transmission that is construed as only secondary and therefore untrustworthy.”[4]

The Tübingen scholars have set about trying to recover what the unwritten doctrine might have been by looking at clues in Plato’s dialogues and statements by his pupils, to argue that the unwritten doctrines seem to relate to mathematical relations of ultimate reality, and dualism and monism.[5]  Many argue that the Neoplatonist’s ‘One’ may have been what Plato had in mind, and that Plotinus had it right.

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Reminder: DEADLINE TOMORROW: CFP – 2017 Faith & Knowledge Conference

We’re pleased to post the following Call for Papers from the Faith and Knowledge Conference, which will meet February 24-25, 2017 in Cambridge, MA. If you are a Mormon graduate student or early career scholar in religious studies or a related discipline, I can’t urge you strongly enough to propose a paper and attend the conference. The three F&K Conferences I’ve attended were among the highlights of my graduate student career, and I don’t know a comparable venue that succeeds in accomplishing what F&K sets out to do. -Christopher

SIXTH BIENNIAL FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE CONFERENCE
HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL
CAMBRIDGE, MA
FEBRUARY 24-25, 2017

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