My man Plutarch is pretty awesome.  He is interested in all kinds of things, everything from discussing how young men ought to be taught how to properly and beneficially read poetry (lest they be sullied by the fake hocus-pocus crap and salacious stuff) to the parallel lives of Demosthenes and Cicero.  He is also an astute commentator on religious things.  He is a philosopher, in the sense that he lives a philosophy (an eclectic [Middle] Platonism), and he is a priest of Apollo at Delphi, a job he takes seriously.

One work that displays Plutarch’s interest in practiced religion is his de superstitione (peri deisidaimonias).  Superstitio, the Latin rendering of the Greek deisidaimonia, doesn’t quite do justice to deisidaimonia.  The two lexemes in the compound are deid, fear, and daimon, deity; so a periphrastic rendering would be something like terror of gods meaning terror for gods.  Anyhow, in this work Plutarch lays out his basic question: On the spectrum of religion, with atheism on the one terminus and superstition on the other, where does true religion lie?

Plutarch immediately demonstrates his detestation for superstition.  He points out that it is irrational, destructive, and a far worse condition that atheism.  One example of this odium for superstition that is of interest for students of Judaism and Christianity is Plutarch’s disgust for the account of the Jews refusing to defend Jerusalem’s walls on the Sabbath.  Instead of taking up weapons to defend themselves, their wives, and their children, the Jews, overawed by irrational fear of their god and his rites, sat idly and were slaughtered along with their non-combatants.  How awful the effects of superstition!

Atheism Plutarch sees as something like an unfortunate mindset that usually only hurts the atheist.  It is like a malady that can be cured while the disease of superstition has no remedy since the sufferer fears both the disease and the doctor.  The atheistically minded are often driven to a more hardened atheism due to the ridiculous and shameful actions of the superstitious, laments Plutarch.  This really chaps Plutarch’s hide.  The generally decent but misled atheists are being soured to true religion by those ignorant superstitious rubes!  I could go on for pages summarizing the spleen venting in which Plutarch indulges in his attack on superstition. Really, you should read the entire treatise, it will only take 30 minutes (here is a link at a rad website that devotes some loving attention to Mormons).

One might be disappointed to come to the end of his essay and discover that Plutarch does not spell out just where he places true religion on his spectrum.  But Plutarch does give us this: True religion lies closer to atheism than it does to superstition.

This feels right to me.  I do not agree with Plutarch’s vitriolic rhetoric and his dismissal of all superstitious folks as hopeless causes but I do think that true religion must lie closer to atheism.  I need a god who exists in a removed sense, cares for, provides for, and occasionally intervenes on behalf of humanity and individuals, not a god who is immanent, persnickety, officious, quick to anger, needy for appeasement, and the source of all good and/or evil.  Also I need religion that has a healthy regard for outrageous fortune.

But I also love and respect many people close to me who need and believe in religion much closer to the superstition terminus.  And these people are my co-religionists.  What about you all?  Where do you fall on Plutarch’s spectrum of religion?  Are you more a god fearer or an atheist?  Does or can Mormonism provide an umbrella spanning one end of the spectrum to the other?

These days I am reading for my comprehensive examinations and almost daily I come across something that makes me silently chant the refrain:  There is nothing new under the sun.  Well yesterday’s discovery was a real head scratcher and one that might cause some blushing for those with tender ears and modest tongues.  So for those whose eyes cannot bear the sight of things unsightly I forewarn you: stop reading.

For the titillated: read on.

Sometimes you hear slang and you can sense that it is neological or you have a vague memory of a time when you are pretty sure that you did not hear it.  Like, da bomb, boo-yeah, or fo’ shizzle.  Well there is a certain slang phrase that has sounded new to me the few (rather unpleasant) times that I have heard it said and a quick check of the OED and Urban Dictionary confirmed its recent coinage and heyday (20th century, especially the last few decades).  Well you can imagine my surprise when I read this very slang in a text composed sometime in the late 1st or very early 2nd century CE.  IN GREEK!  Yeah, that’s right, the exact slang in highfalutin Attic Greek (Plutarch, Stoic Self-Contradictions).  For you Greek nerds, the uppity LSJ doesn’t even deign to offer a definition for the phrase although one hardly needs to be given.  I read the sentence and then I read it again to make sure I wasn’t Freuding the thing up and it was right there to behold.

The word?   ἀποτρίβεσθαι in its masculine singular accusative present middle participial form ἀποτριβόμενον.  And it is taking this as its direct object: τὸ αἰδοῖον.  Yeah, you read that correctly.  Hard to believe isn’t it?  I am still dumbfounded.  I wonder how many school-boys tittered or turned red over this passage as they read it at boarding schools and prep academies during that briefest window of time when rich kids still learned Greek and the English version of the slang had gained sufficient currency to be commonly used by teenagers.  I can only imagine the reaction to this line of lines: τὸν Διογένη τὸ αἰδοῖον ἀποτριβόμενον ἐν φανερῷ.  Holy smokes.

Διογένη=Diogenes (the famous Cynic philosopher)

τὸ αἰδοῖον=his package

ἀπο=off/out

τριβόμενον=rubbing

ἐν φανερῷ=in the open

Diogenes was rubbing [one] off.  Publicly.

You can’t make this stuff up.

For various reasons that I won’t go into here, I find the Nephi-killing-Laban episode to be the most striking story from the Book of Mormon.  If it is read as a retrospective account, it seems that Nephi or some later hand has crafted the story to certify that the killing wasn’t cold-blooded murder but an inspired killing that is beneficial both to Nephi and countless others.  In Nephi’s internal dialogue about whether or not to kill Laban, it is the divine permission/command that tips the balance in favor of killing even though Nephi offers some well considered reasons to the contrary.  Scary stuff.

Lately I have been immersing myself in the issue of Stoic suicide and I have been blazing through various Stoic thinkers who treat of suicide.  Two of the big names in this area are Epictetus (who now has a canonized dictum in the Mormon scriptural corpus thanks to a shout out by President Monson at the last General Conference) and Seneca.  Epictetus was a freed slave who became a famed Stoic teacher some of whose words survive through the efforts of a devoted student (Epictetus was born mid first century, died probably in the 130s).  Seneca was the personal tutor and confidant of Nero many of whose moral writings survive as well as some of his Latin versions of Greek tragedies (Seneca was forced to commit suicide by Nero in 65, a common fate for many elite Roman men in that year).

Seneca is famous for his obsession with suicide.  In his moral essays and epistles he lauds and romanticizes suicide not just as an option for the Stoic philosopher (for Stoicism did allow for suicide as a virtuous exit from life) but he more than once suggests that it is the mark of a true Stoic.  His hero, of course, was the Stoic Cato (the Younger) who disemboweled himself at Utica rather than surrender to Caesar.  But Seneca was not advertising suicide for the masses.  No, he revered the act too much for such vulgarity.  Only those with sound reasoning were justified in killing themselves.  For Seneca reason (ratio) was the deciding factor in the calculus of autothanasia.

Epictetus also preached suicide as a viable retreat from life and he frequently asserted that suicide is “a door that stands open.”  But Epictetus did not romanticize suicide like Seneca (partially because he did not live in the bizarro world of top echelon Neronian Rome).  For Epictetus suicide could rightly be committed upon certain conditions.  One set of circumstances would be if conditions made it impossible for the Stoic to live virtuously (although Epictetus does not make clear what conditions like these would look like).  The other circumstance would be if God/Fate/Providence/Nature/Zeus (varying Stoic names for the all pervading, immanent, pantheistic Stoic deity) permitted suicide, if God gave a sign.  Epictetus’ hero was Socrates and it is to Socrates that he looks for his position on suicide.  Plato offers a  Socrates that espouses the position that suicide is not to be engaged in unless deity gives a sign to do so.   Of course, such a sign did come to Socrates and his suicide needs no retelling.

So in my vastly over simplified discussion there is well-reasoned Stoic suicide proffered by Seneca and there is divinely appointed Stoic suicide taught by Epictetus.  Reason.  Divine inspiration.  Killing.  Based upon the Nephi-killing-Laban narrative as we have it, if Nephi were to consider suicide it seems that he would probably be an Epictetus man and err on the side of divine inspiration after a bit of reasoning.   If conditions were to come down to it, which suits you?  As much as I really like the idea of a divinely inspired, self inflicted exit from life (so much comfort and assurance!), I have to think that I would be a Seneca man and let reason carry the day.

You may also want to ask yourself WDJD (What Did Joseph Do)?