Last time, we noticed an interesting feature of Alma’s highly-crafted advice to his sons. His advice to Corianton the fornicator refers to murder at the beginning and then returns to talking about death as a blessing from the Father towards the end. In other words, we have good death and bad death.
I don’t usually think of death as a good thing (and still don’t really) but Alma seems to be saying that receiving a mortal body and a mortal death are both necessary preconditions to the resurrection. I don’t know why he thinks that, more study needed.
Regardless, a sermon contrasting bad death and good death puts me irresistibly in mind of a virtue chart.
Corianton went off fornicating on his mission and Alma calls him on it. But even the rebuke portion of his sermon is pretty doctrinal. Alma starts by situating fornication on the scale of serious sins. First denying the Holy Ghost, he says. Second, murder. But next to those two, its fornication. Rhetorically effective, but also interesting in itself for us and it sets up the later parts of Alma’s discourse to Corianton in ways that aren’t obvious to a casual reader.
Interesting in itself– notice how each part of that trifecta of serious sins corresponds to a part of the complete human, body and spirit.
Denying the Holy Ghost —————> Spirit
Murder ————————————-> Sins against the end of the body
Fornication ——————————-> Sins against the beginning of the body
If you wanted to stretch even further, you might analogize each of these three to a member of the Godhead. Denying the Holy Ghost obviously corresponds to the Holy Ghost, Resurrection is an obvious role for the Son which corresponds with life creation/the (re)beginning of the body), but is God associated with death in some way? It seems fanciful. On the other hand, we are reading something fancy here. Look at the elaborate beautiful chiasmus in Alma 36. The idea that Alma’s discourses to his son are highly structured literary works is not something we should reject. More to the point, the rest of Alma’s sermon talks repeatedly about Christ as the Resurrector and mentions several times that men are “appointed to die” and then in Chapter 42 says that it was “God” who appointed death. That is very suggestive.
One of the blog’s greatest hits is MC’s essay the Military Mental Model of Mormonism. It continues to get attention and I recently discovered that the doofus who runs the blog has inadvertently marked it as private. That’s now fixed.
Once again, observations about the last two weeks of Book of Mormon reading when no one only the intellectual elite are interested in them anymore.
By Antiquary – This file was derived from: St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, stained glass 6.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77509103
We are hitting on everything from the flaming sword that blocked the tree of life to Alma’s take on how the Law is the schoolmaster (somewhat different from Paul’s).
WJT has a pretty hilarious method for exposing AI companies’ crude efforts to manipulate their product results.
Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies.
This is a game theory strategy. In fact, it is the winning game theory strategy for a repeat prisoners’ dilemma.
The prisoners’ dilemma goes like this. Two guys get nabbed. The cops separate them and try to get them to confess. If neither talks, they both get light sentences. If only one talks, the other gets a heavy sentence and the crook who turned gets off scot free. If both talk, they both get heavy sentences.
because there were no more Calvin and Hobbes
The Books of Mosiah and Alma are this time of great cultural ferment that I’m calling Nephite Modernity.
Something odd I’ve just noticed. The phrase “wives and children,” “our wives and our children,” “their wives and their children,” shows up 20 times in the Book of Mormon. 16 of those times are in Mosiah and Alma. 1 is in Mormon, 1 in is 3 Nephi, and 2 are in Ether.
You: What does it mean, G?
G: I don’t know what it means, you.
It does reinforce the idea that the Mosiah-Alma era is a distinct era. It also makes me wonder if the translation of the Book of Ether is responsible for this phrase taking off with the Nephites.
Alma’s approach with his wayward son is interesting. He doesn’t just teach doctrine alone. He doesn’t just rebuke alone.
He starts specific: identifies the sin, rebukes it, and discusses the consequences. He also discusses the specific doctrine. Fornication and harlotry is a great sin and will lead to damnation is not repented of. He then spirals out to more general doctrine about the resurrection, choice, and agency.
I liked it.
As you know, I am reading the Book of Mormon this year in light of Lehi’s Dream. My main insight from Lehi’s dream is that it describes an iterative process where people take of the fruit repeatedly, and where many of the images in the dream are actually repetitions of the same process of coming to Christ over and over again in an upward spiral.
So it was interesting to have a belated insight about Alma’s seed in Alma 32–a chapter with obvious connections to Lehi’s dream since Alma describes the ‘fruit’ of the successful seed with references to the fruit in Lehi’s Dream.
Here is the belated insight–Alma is also talking about an iterative repeated process. That’s evident for two reasons. First, he says that when you cease to have faith that the seed is good because you know it is, you still need to nourish the ‘tree.’ Second, in Alma 32:34, when someone reaches a stage of knowledge he doesn’t say that their faith goes away. He says it becomes dormant, i.e., waiting for the next time you need it. Dormant and dead and done are not the same thing.
Actually, the reign of the judges did, title deliberately eyecatching.
I continue to reel from my realization this time through the Book of Mormon that switching from the kingship to the judgeship was a disaster that resulted in stacks of corpses year after year after year. (Which is not the same as saying it was wrong, Mosiah was in a genuinely tough spot and perhaps there was a window for a better response that key people chose not to take.) But setting aside any moral judgment it was just a disaster in fact and a case could be made that the entire destruction of the Nephite people hundreds of years later was just the result of the judgeship (it’s not a slam dunk case because of the supervening Savior, but the argument would be something like Judges–>Gadiantons–>rot of Nephite culture that revived after the Savior’s influence wore off. I’ll sit down to think about it more seriously at some point.)
Anyhow, these were my thoughts in the dark. It’s 3 AM and I’m lying in the dark trying to solve the problems of a foreign culture 20 centuries in the past. What my brain is telling me is that what the reign of the judges really needed was a king. It was an experimental system and it really needed someone running the experiment. The judge couldn’t be that person because the judge was a product of the system. It needed Eternal Mosiah.
I am impressed with how much truth Alma 32:32 packs into a simple sentence.
Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away.
There’s nothing in there about whether the seed is unblemished or whether it might need some pruning when it grows, or suffer some partial dieback at one point. Nothing at all. If it grows, its good.
Perfection is the destination, not the journey. Enjoy the journey.
The sun hasn’t quite set on America’s vacation from history but for Alma, as for many souls throughout the history of mankind, mass death was a reality.
And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.
And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth
I do not recommend.
It starts out winsome. Extremely winsome. A cozy alternate history where England is still half-medieval, half-Victorian. Ornate trains whisk sturdy yeomen over Channel-spanning bridges on pilgrimages to Rome. Diplomats gather to pay their respects to England’s fallen king as the sung notes of the funeral mass soar in a time-hallowed cathedral. (The protagonist is one of the choir boys singing said funeral mass)
It’s fun.
But the one thing you can’t have in a mid-century novel is fun.
