Excerpts from "The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity" by Kathy L. Gaca

 

Excerpts from The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity by Kathy L. Gaca

From the Introduction, Loc 157 ... :

By the beginning of the second century c.e., patristic writers actively began to adapt ideas about regulating human sexual conduct from Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans as they developed their own teachings about permissible and impermissible sexual activity.[2] Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, and Epiphanes exemplify divergent early trajectories of this adaptation. Tatian was an ardent Christian advocate of complete sexual renunciation, also known as the “encratite”position, and Epiphanes was a Christian Platonist and a Gnostic supporter of more libertine sexual principles.

 

Tatian and Epiphanes drew on the Stoics for some of their teachings, and Epiphanes borrowed from Plato as well. Clement, also a Christian Platonist, censured both Tatian and Epiphanes for going to opposite extremes. He used Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans to develop putatively more moderate sexual guidelines. He is recognized today as a church father partly because he shaped a more workable set of Christian sexual regulations somewhere between the encratite and libertine positions. ...

 

Long before the emergence of Christianity, starting in the fourth century b.c.e., Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans produced sexually grounded political theories designed to create a more just and harmonious society. By their reasoning, human reproductive and other sexual mores are central to any endeavor to attain social order, justice, and well-being. ... For different reasons, Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans all found Greek society poorly constructed in its sexual foundations.[3] In response, they went to work like city-planning contractors and put in their utopian bids to construct sexual systems that would create new and improved societies.

 

... [Philosophers] had good reason to doubt, as Plato did near the end of his life, whether their ideal city plans would ever have any influence over human sexual behavior and society.[6] Aspects of the Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean plans eventually did become more influential through the nascent Christian church as it developed its own sexually grounded bid for a new social order. This development started in earnest by the second century, when the patristic writers began adapting various regulatory elements from the Greek philosophers, as well as from the Greek Bible (or Septuagint), the apostle Paul, and Philo of Alexandria. The proto-ecclesiastical bid eventually won imperial approval. Near the end of the fourth century, the Roman emperor Theodosius I in effect awarded the contract to the church when he made orthodox Christianity the sole permissible religion in the Roman Empire.[7] At this time the sexual and broader political reforms promoted by the church proceeded on a much more ambitious scale than they had hitherto. This especially holds true for the religious sphere of Christian sexual reform. ...

 

... A millennium later, [Gentile] Christian sexual morality set forth on an even more ambitious venture into the world, hand in hand with European colonialism.

 

Through this wide-ranging movement of Catholic and Protestant empire, the ecclesiastical sexual reforms that began to take shape by the second century c.e. [after 100 AD]  have informed the sexual basis of Western culture.

We can thus see that the original Hebrew Bible's view that was pro-body, with the "good nephesh" (the fleshy body) and was pro-sex: God even endorsed wives and concubines. This was changed by pagan converts to early Messianic Judaism (pre-70 AD Christianity), wherein, after 70 AD non-Hebrew converts outnumbered Hebrew Christians. These non-Hebew converts were influenced by Platonism and other Greek ideas. So, using the Greek translatiin of the Bible rather than the Hebrew Bible, after 70 AD we see Christianity losing it more Hebew pro-body aspects. Most of the original Jewish Christians died in 70 AD, so the Gentile Christians smuggled in pagan ideas into the Churches.

Excerpts staring from Loc 202: 

The inhabitants of Europe, the Americas, and various other regions live and make love in the domains of these religious sexual rules. This holds true even for the many persons, Christians and non-Christians alike, who resist [Empire-run] Christian sexual morality and its predominantly marital orientation. The Christian pattern of family values remains powerful in the United States and elsewhere, [6]. Plato in the Laws remains convinced that “no one will ever posit a more correct or better definition [of the ideal city] in its preeminence toward human virtue than one in which the private ownership of women, children, and all other goods is everywhere and by every means eliminated from human life,”739b8 –e[3]. Nonetheless, by this time Plato has come to believe that such reform is not workable given entrenched human possessiveness —my house, my family, my slaves. Only “gods or children of gods dwell happily in the fully communal city,” Laws 739d6 –e1.

 

... the sexual ethics of Plato and the Hellenistic philosophers, the Stoics in particular, provided early Christians with a prototype to adopt, with the result that Christian sexual morality followed rather fluidly from its philosophical predecessors. This view, if correct, would mean that the church fathers launched the philosophers’ sexual reforms on a scale that Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans never imagined —not a small town utopia here and there, but first the Roman Empire and later the New World as well. The differences separating the Hellenistic philosophers and church fathers would be relatively minor compared to their largely shared code of sexual morality. The former sing the Hymn to Zeus while the latter say the Lord’s Prayer, but the philosophers are honorary pre-Christian church fathers in their sexual restrictions and ascetic discipline.

 

... “Christianity has sometimes been considered . . . as playing the role of the oppressive mother superior...sexually liberated pagan culture of Greece and Rome. Most recent works on sexuality in the ancient world, however, have shown this to be an oversimplification, if not totally inaccurate.” [Foucault’s Care of the Self is first in Martin’s supporting citation, 289 n. 3.]. ...

COMPETING VIEWS: CLEMENT & AUGUSTINE'S VIEWS DOMINATED

... the relationship between Plato, early Stoicism, and so-called libertine Christianity, as exemplified by Epiphanes, is one of substantive and thoughtful continuity regarding sexual mores. Epiphanes regards the Platonic and early Stoic sexual principles as the right models for a Christian way of life. Clement, however, condemns Epiphanes for heresy because the ecclesiastical sexual mores that Clement champions cannot be reconciled with the Platonic and early Stoic sexual reforms. ....

PAUL IMPLEMENTED STOICISM & SO DID Epiphanes:

Stoic eros, in both its early communal form and its later marital guise, challenges the ingrained Greek conviction that eros is a divine force that capriciously subjugates mortals to its power. The Gnostic Christian Platonist Epiphanes adapts and promotes early Stoic eros in a communal Christian form.

SEX ONLY IN MARRIAGE CAME FROM CERTAIN GRECO FORMS OF PAGANISM:

... the dictate that people should make love strictly for reproduction and only within marriage...has a specifically Pythagorean provenance, and its central imperative is incompatible with Stoic sexual ethics, early and later alike. Given the prevalent but mistaken view that this sexual regulation was common currency in Hellenistic moral thought, its appearance in Philo and the church fathers seems a simple carryover of a widespread Greek philosophical view into the Christian sexual morality of the patristic period.

 

This impression is false. Like the infinitesimal triangles that shape the elements of Pythagorean reality,[21] the sexual dictate to marry and make love strictly for reproduction is a distinctive, even peculiar, artifact of Pythagorean thought, which transmutes and naturalizes into a biblically grounded church doctrine through the scriptural exegesis of Philo and Clement.

THE GREEK BIBLE:

To investigate the formation of Christian sexual morality without considering the Greek biblical norms [in the Septuagint] that inform it is like trying to understand Moby Dick while setting the whale aside. ...

Priesthood as the Power to Generate (Procreate) Endless Lives

In the 1800s, the LDS Church defended plural marriage by arguing that it gave men an outlet for their sexual desire; so that men would not be tempted to commit adultery or visit prostituties. Implicit in this was a nonjudgemental attitude of male virility and sexual desire in and of itself. D&C 132, the Book of Abraham 2:11, and the temple endowment on power in the loims and joy in one's posterity, all interpreted male sexual desire and seed-fertilizing power as holy, as man's "power in the presethood." Givens quotes Joseph Smith in his book Feeding the Flock, page 51, saying "the priesthood [...is] the power to generate 'endless lives' (a post-resurrection posterity), [WJS, 247]." In other words, Godhood, becoming one of the Gods in Abraham chapter 4 entailed procreative power with a body of celestialized flesh that bears the souls of men through wives and concubines (see D&C 76 and 130, 131, 132). 

All this changed in the 1900s, when the US government forced the Mormon Church to abandon plural marriage and what followed was a slow procress of endimg the theology behind the doctrine of procteatimg Gods as well. As Puritanicl Protestantism entered Mormon Thought and culture and the origional pro-body doctrine was replaced with a more Protestantsoumdimg dogma. Overtime Mormon men were then expected to control their sexual desire with Augustinian lines of thought. This was a complete reversal in mindset. The former Nauvoo era theology accepted male biology and desire as natural and embraced a spiritual outlet for man's sex drive, but the latter post-1900 view despised the body and attempted to muzzle the man's "power in the preiesthood"; and move him away from the former Nauvoo Enlightenment and back to the mindset of the Dark Middle Ages: of monkish asseticism, and celibacy before marriage, and only monogamous marriage.

Joseph Smith on “Feeling Nothing” and the Book of Mormon’s Pragmatic Epistemology on Faith as Uncertainty Growing to Experiencial Knowledge & the Criteria of the Ethically "Good" as Truth

 

From Joseph Smith, “Feeling Nothing”, and the Book of Mormon’s Pragmatic View of Faith by instrument_801:

Early accounts of Joseph Smith’s religious life suggest that both his experience and the Book of Mormon he produced frame faith not as emotional certainty, but as a pragmatic process of acting in hope and judging truth by its enduring fruits even if not felt.

 

Here are some musings I am working through. The story of Joseph Smith begins with a young man trying to find God. He was seeking redemption of his sins and trying to discern which church, if any, was true. In one of the Church’s First Vision videos, the narrative draws on an account I was less familiar with. In it, Joseph Smith states that he “wanted to feel and shout like the rest but could feel nothing.”

 

> Br Joseph tolt us the first call he had a Revival Meeting his Mother & Br & Sister got Religion, he wanted to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing…[See: Alexander Neibaur, Journal excerpt, 24 May 1844; in Alexander Neibaur, Journal, 5 Feb. 1841–16 Apr. 1862, pp. 23–24; handwriting of Alexander Neibaur; CHL.]

 

This experience aligns closely with how the Book of Mormon defines faith and knowing truth. Faith is explicitly not equated with perfect knowledge or emotional certainty. It is described as hope in things that are true but not yet fully known, followed by action in uncertainty (Alma 32:21, 27). Truth is tested through lived experience, and confirmation comes as the “seed” grows and produces a real impact on the soul and one’s understanding (Alma 32:28, 33–34).

 

Within this framework, feelings are not rejected, but they are not decisive on their own. What matters is what faith produces over time. The Book of Mormon provides a clear moral epistemology for judging truth: “all things which are good cometh of God” (Moroni 7:12). Individuals are given the capacity to judge by observing whether something invites them to do good, to believe in Christ, and to grow in light (Moroni 7:16–17). Is this how Joseph viewed his faith?

Scripture Focused: On Official Doctrine, The Standard Works & The Collective Witness Model: Knowing What is True, Authoritative and Binding on Mormons vs. Opinion, Conjecture, and a Yoking Burden

 

• The Case for "Scripture Focused Mormons" & What that Means?

• How the "Standard Works" (Mormon Canon) itself Teaches The Authority of Scripture over Fallible Leaders

• The Authority of LDS Scripture (Standard Works) versus the Tradition of the Elders?

• The True Law of Common Consent by Patrick (link to the site Uncorrelated Mormonism)

• Come in at the Gate of only Joseph Smith's Revelations (D&C 43: 2-7)

• 3 Bullets Point Summary On Scripture-focused Independent Mormonism that Is At Odds with Brethrenism

• Mormon Scripture through a Pro-Body Lens

• Comparing Jesus' Words in Mathew 15 & 23 in The Remedy to Brethrenism

• Mathew 23: Those Who Sit in Moses' Seat in The Joseph Smith Translation (JST)

• "Scripture Focused Mormon" Resources: Recommended Brighamite and Non-Brighamite Scriptures, Websites and other Restorationist Books, etc.

Mormonr article on Plural Marriage and LDS Population Growth in the 1800s

Excerpts from Polygamy and Population Growth by Mormonr.org:

Jacob 2 states, "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people." ...

 

Did polygamy actually increase the population in Utah more than it would have otherwise? 

Yes, probably. Studies have shown that societies where a man can have more than one wife tend to have many more children than other societies,[2] and Latter-day Saints had a lot of children relative to the rest of the U.S. at the time, particularly while polygamy was practiced.[3] ... Polygamy leads to fewer unmarried women,[7][8] which increases the number of children born in the polygamous society overall even if plural wives had fewer children than non-plural wives in that society.[9]  ...

OUR TAKE [at Mormonr.org]

 

... The scriptures tell us that polygamy was to "raise up seed"—did that actually work?

There is some data from census records and other studies on how polygamy affected the Utah population. That data indicates that polygamy increased the population more than comparable non-polygamous populations at the time. It seems that though polygamous wives had fewer children, polygamous populations disproportionally increased because more women were married and could have children.

 

Understanding polygamy, and the reasons for it, is more complicated than simply stating that it was meant to increase the population. There are many more legitimate questions about polygamy, and it's okay to acknowledge the messiness and complexities of the topic. Commandments from God can have temporal justifications, but Latter-day Saints rely on faith as they make sense of something like polygamy.

My take on this is that plural marriage was practiced in order to raise up the seed of Ephraim among the first LDS members in the 1800s. So their was a selective birthing process where those from the "northern countries" (mostly from Britain and Scandinavia), that were declared the pure blood of Ephraim, were raising up their seed in particular. So that plural marriage selected for more of the Ephraimite women by giving them more opportunities to give birth to the seed of Ephraimite men at the time. 

 

Expiation & Cohesion: How "Let's Talk about Polygamy" book adds support for my Thesis "The Expiation of Sectarian Dogma" & Supports the early formation of an "Ephraimite Peoplehood"

 

In the book Let's Talk about Polygamy by Britney Nash, in chapter eight, pages 95-103 we read:

In the [LDS] revelation on plural marriage, one reason given for plurality was to “multiply and replenish the earth” (D&C 132:63). In the Bible, Abraham was promised to have progeny as limitless as the sands of the seashore (Gen. 22:17). Latter-day Saints saw themselves as members of the restored house of Israel, called to help fulfill this Abrahamic covenant and, in so doing, becoming recipients of the same blessings (D&C 132:29–33). The Saints were not simply to produce children, however. God intended that they “raise up seed unto me,” implying that, through plural marriage, a righteous man with multiple wives could father more children and thus raise a large and faithful posterity unto the Lord (Jacob 2:30; italics added). 

 

Significantly, however, the Book of Mormon establishes monogamy as God’s preferred order of marriage except if the Lord commanded polygamy to be instituted (Jacob 2:24, 27, 30). These scriptures specify that monogamy is the rule, but polygamy could, for a time, be the exception. ... 

 

... Early converts were excited by the Church’s assertion that the “dispensation of the fulness of times” had commenced and would bring a final “restitution of all things,” including a restoration of the laws, authority, ordinances, and blessings of previous dispensations (D&C 128:18; 132:40; Acts 3:21; Eph. 1:10).[1] Among those laws was plural marriage, practiced by the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament, and many Saints accepted polygamy as being a component of the restoration ...

 

 As a young woman in England, Sarah Barnes joined the Church in 1842, believing that she had embraced “the same Gospel that the ancients had.” After learning that the Latter-day Saints practiced polygamy, she wrote, “I could plainly see that if plural marriage was a principle of the Gospel then, it must of necessity be so now.”[2] Sarah’s conviction of the necessity of a restoration of all things, including the reintroduction of plural marriage, was reinforced by her study of the Bible and served as the foundation of her acceptance of polygamy, and she later became a plural wife. ... 

 

Since the restored Church had direct roots in the Old Testament and Latter-day Saints viewed themselves as modern Israel (God’s people), they anticipated trials individually and collectively. Because Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage mentioned Abraham and the sacrifice of his son Isaac, many nineteenth-century Saints saw polygamy as an “Abrahamic test” intended to purify the Saints ... 

 

... More broadly, the Saints believed that because they were God’s people, He required their trial and purification as a group. ...

 

... Polygamy created a sense of cohesion among the Latter-day Saints. God’s people were always chastened in some way, the Saints believed, and polygamy was a shared trial that set them apart from other religious groups, reinforcing the idea that, through hardship, God was molding His chosen people. The practice also established an insular, protective sense of community. As the Saints gathered in the Mountain West, the sense of being a people set apart deepened. Church members not only created extensive family networks through plural marriage but also banded together to defend their religious beliefs from an outside world that persecuted, rejected, and mocked them. ... 

I believe that the best explanation for this purification process was the "expiation" of the sectarian Creeds, and their anti-body ideologies, from the psyche of early LDS members. For those Creeds were declared an abomination in Smith's First Vision.  When Nash says, "Polygamy created a sense of cohesion among the Latter-day Saints," this supports what I argue in my posts here and my documents here, where I argue that polygamy acted as a kind of funnel for producing a close knit quasi-ethnic tribe in the 1800s. Nash's book continues:

Victorian Sexuality and Polygamy

 

People in the nineteenth century were simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the sexual possibilities of polygamy. During the Victorian era, there was a dramatic rise in prostitution, and it was considered one of the great social problems of the day. Those not of the Latter-day Saint faith considered polygamous marriages illegitimate and scorned plural wives as being adulterers, prostitutes, and concubines. Latter-day Saints perceived a great hypocrisy between accusations that they were sexually immoral while the sexual indiscretions of Victorian men, such as employing prostitutes, were at that time figuratively swept under the rug. Apostle Orson Pratt suggested that plural marriage was an antidote to fornication and adultery. In the August 1853 issue of The Seer, he took the stance of a social reformer, arguing that polygamy could eradicate prostitution because men would not be tempted to have extramarital relations and women would each have the opportunity to marry able providers (124–25). Elder Pratt’s reasoning was not grounded in scripture or doctrine, but it became a popular defense of polygamy used by Latter-day Saints to publicly justify the practice.

 

... For a woman who desired to marry, plural marriage expanded her opportunities to find a husband. ...

 

This affirmation of biological desire by Pratt and others shows the pro-body nature of Mormonism. The book continues on, and we read in the Conclusion, pages 143-144:

“Plural marriage, as it was practiced, served its purpose.” —Elder Quentin L. Cook, 2020 

 

... The Gospel Topics Essays published on the official Church website suggest that the lasting effects of plural marriage were “the birth of large numbers of children within faithful Latter-day Saint homes,” the availability of marriage to “virtually all who desired it,” equalized wealth per capita, “ethnic intermarriages,” and aid in uniting “a diverse immigrant population.”[1] Polygamy provided a sense of group solidarity as Latter-day Saints saw themselves as separate from other religious sects, a “peculiar people” (1 Pet. 2:9). Indeed, in its purpose to “raise up seed unto [the Lord],” polygamy was remarkably effective (Jacob 2:30). Research suggests that 20 percent of living Church members descend from those who practiced polygamy.[2]

 

When plural marriage was discontinued, polygamists, too, reflected on its purpose and many believed it had been fulfilled. Said one plural wife, “Polygamy has served its day. We helped to populate Utah and to make it possible for every woman to become a mother. . . . We have served our purpose and polygamy has gone.”[3] ... Apostle Quentin L. Cook, reflecting on nineteenth-century polygamy, shared that “plural marriage, as it was practiced, served its purpose. We should honor those Saints, but that purpose has been accomplished.” ...

 

This is exactly what I had argued in my blog post here. So reading this book after I had written that post made me realize that the book substantiates my theory.

 

Why I'm "Mormon" (& Not Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist or Atheist)

 

• Bullet Point List of Why I'm a "Worldview-Mormon": Or Why I'm Not a Catholic, Protestant, or Secular-Atheist  & Want the LDS Church to Thrive (Even If/When I'm not a Chapel-Mormon)

• Why I'm a "Heritage Mormon” (Not Protestant, Catholic, Greek or Russian Orthodox, or Buddhist): The Case for Mormonism as an Ethnolinguistic Ancestral Religion like Ethnic Religions such as Jewish Judaism or Japanese Shintoism, etc.

• My Journey: Reconstructing a New Mormon Worldview