Sorry haven't had time to comment for a few days - I have little time for personal study and I used it for a couple of T&S posts and a few comments at the Mormon Dialog forum. Catching up. Let me know if I missed your comments you wanted answer. Earnestly not avoiding responses.
honorentheos wrote:Would you mind explicitly identifying the neoplatonic views of the Pratts you mention? I can't claim more than a very introductory understanding of neoplatonism so while I hate to ask that you fill in the gaps for me, I guess that's exactly what I'm hoping you'll do.
Neo-Platonism is the name scholars typically give the type of platonism existing from roughly 1st century AD to 400 AD. It's not a term people in that era themselves used. It's more to distinguish it from how scholars reconstruct either Socrates or Plato's own views. People like Iamblicus or Plotinus would have just seen themselves as platonists.
To flesh things out a bit its probably best to explain Plato's views. First he divided things into the world of the sense and the forms themselves. Forms are the ideas of things - so horseness as opposed to particular horses. Forms are also made up of other forms -- so horse is made out of mammal, four legs, and so forth. Basically all abstract ideas are these form. What Plato argues is that these abstract ideas are more real than the world of the senses.
By the time of the neoplatonists there had been quite a few other schools of thought. Plato's student Aristotle is the best example but other important groups were the Stoics, the Epicureans and so forth. Aristotle was a materialist and forms to him were just the structures in matter but not separable from matter. He talked of the essences of things but meant that more akin to how we'd talk of the essential characteristics of a category. What neoplatonism ends up being is a kind of platonism that had responded to the criticisms of these other schools. In particular the Stoics and Aristotleans. So neoplatonic cosmology was basically lifted from the Stoics which is the idea of a world-mind that organizes the universe in a kind of organic fashion. The main difference is that for the neoplatonists this is immaterial whereas for the Stoics it was a material substance that fills the universe.
The neoplatonists held there were three levels. Matter, Soul and Intellect. Past intellect you get to the One which was more or less God in a deist sense. Existence happens by emanations that start with the One and become less and less perfect until we reach matter.
The early Christians, especially Augustine, were highly influenced by the neoplatonists yet had some essential different doctrines. Primarily creation ex nihlo and the Trinity. To the neoplatonists proper everything is ultimately one and it just seems like multiple kinds of stuff because we don't see how it is related.
Getting to the Pratts, Parley in particular, they had a neoplatonic notion that creation happens literally out of the substance of god. Now one should also distinguish even the early Parley Pratt from some types of neoplatonism, especially that that considered matter evil. For Parley the resurection was essentially important even before the revelations on spirits as matter sometimes around 1842. It's that revelation that pushes them away from neoplatonism.
While most of the ties to neoplatonism come from this earlier view of Mormonism there are various parallels that historians have noted. Quinn ties the three degrees of glory to the degrees in Plotinus for instance. Unfortunately Quinn was largely doing a scattergun parallel target hunt pretty similar to what Nibley used to do. The more careful analysis looks not only at figures like Emerson but also at particular translations of neoplatonic works as well as the dialogs of plato available to pre-Nauvoo Mormonism. Often appeals to particular phrasing in those texts is used. (Which isn't necessarily to argue that Joseph read those books - more than there was a cultural influence there)
If there is one thing about Joseph Smith that seems to come through in the writings and revelations, it's that of a Newtonian, material world of cause-and-effect. I can't make the jump on my own to the place where I'm entertaining early Mormonism as sharing roots with the Transcendentalists.
As I said that's more 1842, around the height of Emerson's popularity (although there are hints before that of a materialist outlook). A good source if you're interesting are some of [url juvenileinstructor.org/?s=neoplatonism]Steve Flemming's posts at Juvenile Instructor[/url]. The big parallels are the idea of a pre-existence (alien to traditional Christian thought at the time of Joseph), the divine feminine, a certain perspective on unity, three heavens (somewhat -- I think Steve doesn't qualify this enough in terms of how neoplatonists understood this), deification, effect of ritual for knowledge of god etc.