Grotius and the Book of Mormon

 Over at Mormon Dialog and Discussion Board there is a detailed discussion about methodology and if the 17th century philosopher, Hugo Grotius, wrote the Book of Mormon. As someone with a book on the subject and significant knowledge of Grotius I got tagged and felt obligated to respond. I also rarely get a chance to discuss the 17th century thinker Grotius and topics like preemptive war and my book so this was a good opportunity. This is copy and pasted from the board so I apologize for any weird formatting. 

        I appreciate being tagged on this. My newest book on just war in the Book of Mormon discusses Grotius a great deal. Its been well reviewed thus far and you can read those reviews and find a link to the book here: https://mormonwar.blogspot.com/2024/12/reviews-of-my-new-book.html

        I've been working a great deal so I can't go into extensive detail but I've got a few points worth mentioning about the topic.

        The major thrust of my book doesn't simply show congruency. As Ben has explained (many, many times) I think people tend to see what they want to see so the comparisons aren't very useful. What I did was use the keen insights of Grotius to better explain under studied elements in the Book of Mormon, and then in turn use those extra insights from the Book of Mormon to comment on matters of just war. Its a conversation among great thinkers more than finding comparisons. 

        To cite one specific topic with two examples we might look at the concept of preemptive war. I know most people think the Book of Mormon dismisses the concept out of hand. But the most frequently cited verse in Mormon 4, actually condemns the heart that makes the strategy not the strategy. The Nephites lost a great deal on the defensive too. I found 9 other verses that discuss the concept and show its use. I don't want to get too off in the weeds but if you want you can read more about it here: https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleDeaneKishkumenDagger.html

        Probably the most important scriptures for this discussion are Alma 46:30 when Moroni justifies his capture attempted capture of Amalickiah, and Helaman's servant in Helaman 2 that preemptively kills the assassin before he kills Helaman. 

        These are important for how they interact with Grotius. Most justifications for preemptive war, outside of some more extreme views like Vattel, Gentili, or the Chinese Shizi, focus on the present. According to these theorists, if a nation focused on the past to justify preemptive war leaders would claim that they are reacting to the nefarious nature of the opposing regimes that are warlike and bloodthirsty and thus must be attacked first before they attack again (see Epaminondas for example). A focus on the future would be similar to the Thucydides trap, where Athens, WW1 Britain, WW2 Germany are respectively worried about a rising Sparta, Germany, and Russia. They have to attack now to prevent some greater calamity in the future. But the present is the more accepted position. You can read this from Walzer or in the Caroline Standard, but Grotius' criteria is still the most useful when he said that an enemy must have intent, means  and the defending nation must face an imminent attack. Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace, Stephen Neff trans., (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 83-84.

        This is where both examples from the Book of Mormon matter. If you read Alma 46:30, you see that all of Moroni's concern's are in the future. Amalickiah has been defeated and is running away, there is no imminent attack, only future problems:

        Now Moroni thought it was not expedient that the Lamanites should have any more strength; therefore he thought to cut off the people of Amalickiah, or to take them and bring them back, and put Amalickiah to death; yea, for he knew that he would stir up the Lamanites to anger against them, and cause them to come to battle against them; and this he knew that Amalickiah would do that he might obtain his purposes.

        This might seem like really obscure theory, but if Grotius wrote the Book of Mormon he wouldn't include details and narratives that contradicted his ideas of imminency. In fact,  many people dissented from the Lamanite king and then seized the "place of arms" (Alma 47:2; 5). So you could argue Amalickiah didn't have means either and many Lamanites didn't have the intent. So Grotius wrote a narrative that contradicts his theory of preemption, and then provided narrative details where Amalickiah fulfilled every worry that Moroni had, thus undermining his own theories even more.      

        The second verse regards Helaman's servant who preemptively killed Kishkumen during his assassination attempt on Helaman. This one is even more clear because Grotius wrote about robbers as a reason for law enforcement and not deadly preemption: if the conspirators “formed a plot, prepar[ed] an ambuscade, poisoning, or readied a false accusation [the planner] cannot lawfully be killed either if the danger can in any other way be avoided, or if [the ruler] thought delays could afford remedies.” (Ibid.) In other words, if the plot can be neutralized by the defenders using other remedies, then they likely haven't gathered the means, shown intent, and attack it isn't imminent enough to warrant deadly force. 

        Yet the servant of Helaman didn't take any other remedies. He was "out by night" and seemingly had plenty of advanced notice (Helaman 2:6). Kishkumen let his guard down and there was time as they "were going forth" to the judgement seat (2:9). A chapter before Nephite leaders seized incipient rebels like Paanchi  and killed them (Helaman 1:8; notice the preemption of the Nephites leaders as they seized him when he was "about" to flatter). Yet the narrative says Helaman's servant killed Kishkumen. We don't exactly know why he didn't call for the guards instead of killing them. But if Grotius wrote the narrative, we would assume that he would clearly articulate his previously stated beliefs that there was enough time to "use other remedies." Some might argue that the narrative doesn't clearly endorse this story as righteous so why bother. But a recent Interpreter article suggests that Moroni's dramatic use of omission about Helaman's servant, while simultaneously detailing the nefarious Gadianton plot, highlights the righteousness of Helaman's servant: https://interpreterfoundation.org/nameless-mormons-dramatic-use-of-omission-in-helaman-2/ 

        Here are a couple examples where extremely specific details from Grotius are entirely contradicted by the Book of Mormon text. I don't like simply showing congruency, or authorship based on poorly thought out similarities. As you can see just from two small examples, a careful study of scriptures, and using those scriptures to have a conversation with the best philosophers, brings new insights and deepens faith. I know I'm biased, but given the positive reactions to my book, and how I've independently published or presented 7 different times based on material from the book, I think its incredibly fruitful. 

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The Most Overrated Mormon Scholars

        In the middle of eating lunch at the LDS National Security Conference the person sitting next to me was so sad they missed hearing Patrick Mason speak and without thinking I groaned. The conversation stopped and the table looked at me. I then awkwardly explained that I was rather unimpressed with his scholarship in a number of ways.

        Incidents like this happen on a regular basis as I receive quizzical and sometimes angry looks and questioning when I don’t share someone’s enthusiasm for a given scholar. In many cases that’s because the scholar in question is part of my overrated club. What follows is a list that doesn’t discount the meaningful scholarship of these individuals. The list is more about inflated or misplaced praise and uncritical hype. Yet those behaviors are so pervasive and shape our evaluation of ideas that I need to identify the most frequent recipients of hype.

Michael Quinn

        I attended the same conference as him (War and Peace in Our Times) towards the end of his life and the beginning of my career. The fawning praise he received was closer to worship. Even though he was discussing an issue for which he had no appreciable training or knowledge (military history and ethics), and wasn’t providing anything particularly noteworthy, a reverent hush came over the room when he provided an answer.

        Then the paper he presented had numerous glaring and unexamined implications as I detailed here. I describe how Quin uncritically accepted J. Reuben’s Clark isolationism to such a degree that Quinn failed to notice his subject’s hypocrisy, pro-Nazi stance, and how his views were overruled by other church leaders at the time. The last point is especially egregious since one of Quinn’s book invented disputes among church leadership when it suited his arguments, but seemed to ignore meaningful disputes in this case because of biased favoritism towards the isolationism of J. Reuben Clark.   

        Those are just the problems I found in my personal interaction with him. As summarized by Sarah Allen, he was also known for his tendency to personally attack those he disagreed with, and to play fast and loose with the connections he made between the factual record and its supposed meaning. So I imagine his article about J Reuben Clark probably had even more problems than my cursory review. (As far as I know, no one has interacted with his presentation more than I have.) 

        His popularity seems to result from the good fortune of being from a favored minority group, homosexuals, his writing about the same topic, and his work was thoroughly, and rightfully I believe, dismissed by the ~evil~ “FARMS” crowd. Because Mormon historians are the most biased of any group I’ve ever seen (while ironically calling their opponents biased), he was criticized by the "right" group of people, as a result, those criticisms never carried the weight they should.

Hugh Nibley

        I love Hugh Nibley and his work. His works helped spark my academic journey and often helped me on my mission. But Hugh Nibley was often too sloppy with his footnotes and saw too many vague connections to the point that he embodied the concept of “parallel mania.” Its a real criticism, but I should note that parallel mania is often used by his critics as a pat buzzword to ignore the real connections that he made. Nibley’s work is extremely outdated and there have been often decades worth of additional scholarship that contradicts his work. This is common in academia and not a problem if scholars properly engage and build upon previous scholarship.

        But his fans are often dilletantes instead of scholars. Like a right-wing inverse of the left-wing love for Quinn, too many people uncritically read a Hugh Nibley book and suddenly think they are experts. He is quoted chapter and verse, but there isn’t much thinking beyond seeing a parallel to Nibley’s words, and a quote.

        Chinese theorists had the same annoyance with people quoting Sunzi. They ended up writing about it, and if you change the subjects to Hugh Nibley, it is surprisingly accurate:

Even though the mouth recites the words of [Hugh Nibley], the mind has not thought about the mysterious subtleties of the discussion...[they] merely recite the empty words and are misled by the enemy...

The study of [any subject] must be from the lowest to the middle and then from the middle to the highest, so that [the learners] will gradually penetrate the depths of the teaching. If not, they will only be relying upon empty words. Merely remembering and reciting them is not enough to succeed.[1]

Patrick Mason

        Given my specialty in ethics and just war I encounter Mason a great deal. I’m sorry to say, I’m just not impressed. He has all the credentials, praise, institutional power, and seems to publish or present in every conference imaginable. But I find his scholarship lacking. His book, Proclaim Peace, ignored or minimized many important scholarly points regarding just war. He tries to have his cake and eat it too by claiming the non violent ethic of Jesus from the New Testament is "absolute", while also acknowledging verses that clearly support just war. But the latter is clearly lip service forced on him because he spends so much time supporting the former. 

        In a Maxwell Institute funded piece he ignored King Benjamin’s speech, distorted his preaching and policies, and invented an offensive war to imply the Nephites were colonialist. After reading about Michael Quinn’s lapses in scholarship, I might even say the invention of an offensive war whole cloth from the scriptures sounds like what critics called Quinnspeak. At best, he just didn’t read the text carefully.

        After noticing his failure to read texts carefully, I started to wonder if he read some texts at all. I carefully started looking over some of his work, and I see a pattern where he relies on secondary sources when quoting church fathers.[2] For example, every footnote in “Zionic Non Violence” referencing Christian fathers refers to a secondary source. Based on his footnotes, he doesn’t read the works of major just war theorists, he stumbles across an occasional quote in various pacifist books. Yet he feels imminently qualified to call them “insufficient” and he is celebrated as some kind of guru on peace making.  

        Privately many people tell me that he gives vibes that he thinks he is the smartest man in the room. He asked a smarmy gotcha question to me during a conference I attended that was poor form. The peace studies program at BYU-Hawaii held a peace conference about his book, which I’m sure didn’t help his self-admitted arrogant smugness, and he and his peace studies friends in the audience actually snickered when discussing arguments from people like me. 

        I found that behavior rather unseemly, especially for someone who claims his attitude will bring a Zion like peace. It’s especially hypocritical considering the attacks levelled against FARMS for the same behavior. Anti Mormons included an incident at a conference as one of the “top” events of 2011. #3 on that list described how the ~evil~ Maxwell Institute “scholars” (the scare quotes added by the author) were seen “sniggering” before they lobbed a series of “aggressive and mean spirited” questions in their “verbal assault” on Mike Reed. But when I’m “verbally assaulted” by Mason’s smarmy gotcha questions and heckled by a hostile audience, they remain celebrated peacemakers.

        I liked his book about 19^th century lynchings and his advice designed to help struggling members. But his academic work on peace has numerous methodological gaps and is celebrated far beyond its actual merit. Even more importantly, his unseemly behavior ranging from his poor research into Church fathers, to gotcha questions and sniggering run contrary to the unearned praise he gets for supposedly building bridges and a peaceful Zion.

Conclusion 

        Many of these scholars are household names. But a close look at their scholarship suggests perhaps they shouldn’t be. The biggest flaw is that we often uncritically accept the arguments of a celebrity scholar, when we should be thoughtful and critical readers of any argument and engage their thoughts and arguments. In short, we substitute their reputation for our thought. The result is that we spend more time praising than thinking. I hope this post will help check that tendency. And maybe if you hear something from me during lunch at a conference, you'll understand. Thanks.

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[1] Questions and Replies Between Tang Taizong and Li Weikong in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Ralph Sawyer trans., (Westview Press, 1993), 338, 360. 

[2] Rethinking Righteousness in the Shadow of War, fn1 reads: Idolatry 19, p. 73, quoted in Lisa Sowle Cahill, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 77. See also: fns. 6-10 in Patrick Mason, "Zionic Non Violence as Christian Worship and Practice," in How and What you Worship: Christology and Praxis in the Revelations of Joseph Smith, Rachel Cope, Carter Charles, Jordan T. Watkins eds., (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book), 2020.