“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked the second century Christian thinker Tertullian.  He was referring to one of the enduring intellectual issues of Western civilization: the relationship between revelation and human reason.  Thinkers such as Augustine, Maimonides, and Al-Ghalzali have looked at this problem with in the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, while in more modern times Leo Strauss and others have written on this theme.  Within Mormon scholarship Louis Midgley and Hugh Nibley, among others, have confronted this issue.  Nibley has sought to understand the relationship by reference to two, often competing approaches to knowledge: the sophic, which puts its faith in the power of unaided human reason, and the mantic, which turns instead to prophecy and divine revelation.
 
    Comparing sophic and mantic reactions to similar situations provide us with useful opportunities to understand and illustrate the differences between these two approaches.  A comparison of the trials of Socrates and Abinadi offers such an opportunity.  Both men lived in societies beset by political and military instability and mired in moral and social decline.  Both men traced the corruption of their societies to moral failures.  Both men sought to address these problems in ways dictated to them by their position within either a sophic (Socrates) or mantic (Abinadi) perspective.  Both men were put on trial for their lives, used their trials to explain and vindicate their approach, and were ultimately executed.  An analysis of their trials and defenses, however, reveals important differences in how they understood the basic failings of their societies, and the prescriptions they offered to address those failings.
 
    Socrates accused the Athenians of being too caught up in the worldly pursuit of power and profit to attend to the proper care of their souls.  They did not attended to a proper understanding of virtue, justice, and other transcendent things, content instead for the appearance of wisdom.  Socrates claimed that this inattention resulted in a perversion of the soul.  This perversion, the Apology implicitly claims, is what is responsible for the injustice of Socrates’ trial and ultimate execution.  The solution to this problem, argues Socrates, is a particular kind of discussion, the Socratic elenchus.  The elenchus is a careful examination between two people into their supposed understanding of some important concept (justice, piety, etc.).  The purpose of the elenchus is to bring the interlocutor into a state wherein they acknowledge their own ignorance (“The wisest man is the man who knows that he knows nothing”).  This state, called aporia, is, according to Socrates, the condition of the wise soul and is the solution to the injustice of the Athenians.
 
    Abinadi offers a different story.  The wickedness of the Nephites, he claims, results from the failure of their king and priests to properly understand the nature of God’s commandments.  In his confrontation with the priests of Noah, Abinadi accuses them of not only disobeying the Law of Moses, but of fundamentally misunderstanding it.  According to the priests, salvation comes by obedience to the commandments themselves.  Abinadi responds by showing how the law is actually an embodiment of the plan of salvation, everything in it is a “type of things to come” (Mosiah 13:31).  The purpose of the law is to keep one in “remembrance of God” (Mosiah 13:30).  The wickedness of the Nephites is thus revealed as stemming not simply from their disobedience to divine command, but from the forgetfulness of God’s plan embodied in that disobedience.  The solution is repentance, which consists in remembering the atonement of Christ through obedience to God’s commandments.
 
    The sophic and the mantic thus offer two differing solutions to the problem of sin.  The sophic response can be summed up in the word logos.  Logos, the Greek word for speech or reason, is an intellectual discussion that leads the soul to condition of aporia where it will be safe from the injustices visited in the name of mistaken conviction.  The mantic response could be summed up in the work sakor.  Sakor, the Hebrew word for remembrance, implies more than orthodoxy (the correct thinking) about God or orthopraxis (correct action) in response to his commands.  Rather it is the process of incarnating in one’s life the pattern of God’s plan.
 
    The trials of Socrates and Abinadi illustrate several things about sophic and mantic approaches to injustice.  Both are critical of the moral failings of individuals and society.  Both trace that failing back to a misunderstanding that has strong moral overtones.  Both are politically threatening and subject to persecution by established powers.  However, the mantic response embodied by Abinadi is more fundamentally ambitious than the sophic response proffered by Socrates.  Sakor reorients and reinterprets life as a model of God’s eternal and cosmic plan.  Logos, on the other hand, merely gives one a peculiar kind of skepticism that protects one from committing great injustice, but offers no real answers to the questions it poses.

Main Sources:
The Book of Mormon, Mosiah 11-17

Plato, The Apology trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981)

Secondary Sources:
Boman, Thorlief, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960)

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1987)

Faulconer, James, “Scripture as Incarnation” in The Historicity of Scripture (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, forthcoming)

Midgley, Louis, “Review of Hugh Nibley’s The Ancient State” in FARMS Review of Books 11:1 (1999)

-------, “The Ways of Remembrance” in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon (Provo: FARMS and Deseret Book, 1991)

Nibley, Hugh, The Ancient State (Provo: FARMS and Deseret Book, 1991)

Parker, Todd, Abinadi: The Man and the Message (Part I) and The Message and the Martyr (Part II) (Provo: FARMS, 1996)

Strauss, Leo, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)

Taylor, C.C.W., Socrates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Welch, Jack, Judicial Process in the Trial of Abinadi (Provo: FARMS, 1984)