Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite : No. 4

Joseph Smith, Romanticist-like Poietes

   As I noted in my first post, seventeenth century Europe inherited from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the grand unifying idea of the Great Chain of Being, which served, among other purposes, to justify the existence of a highly authoritarian and stratified society. In that worldview, the universe was orderly, that order having been established at the Creation by the Nicene Christian God who resided at the apex of the Great Chain, and that order was complete and unchanging. What was revealed to Joseph Smith (not, I am careful to say, the Restoration itself, but the reality that was revealed in the Restoration) was a wrecking ball to the edifice of the Age of Reason, in all its social, economic, political, religious, intellectual, and artistic aspects. Pieces of the rubble would be useful to us Restorationists, but the structure as a whole had to come down to make room for the Restoration and the establishment of Zion (both of which are still works in progress). The project of demolition began in earnest with the advent of what we have come to call the Romantic Revolution. Here I am going to allow Russell Noyes, the editor of my yellowed and duct-tape-bound college anthology of English Romanticism (English Romantic Poetry and Prose, Oxford University Press, 1956), to make my sweeping generalizations for me and take responsibility for them.

“The years spanned by the lives of Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley witnessed a succession of earth-shaking revolutions—social, intellectual, economic, and political—such as the western world had not known since the dawn of the Christian Era. During the period roughly from 1760 to 1840, the combined shock and challenge of intellectual advances in science and political economy, of far-reaching geographic voyage and discovery, of the no less than revolutionary social and political reforms in England, of the Industrial Revolution, of the American Revolution, and of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—all these released new forces which immeasurably enlarged and enriched the content of English [and of German, French, and American] romantic literature” (p. xxvii).

“During these years there occurred a vast upheaval in the philosophical, social, economic, and political systems of Europe. Traditional beliefs and institutions were abolished and empires overthrown; and upon the ruins of the old order, new creeds and institutions and new frames of government were built” (p. xix).

As the old order crumbled, there arose a generation that aspired to more, in every conceivable way, than eighteenth century life and thought offered, and the crumbling of the older order opened ways for them to pursue, or at least to dream of pursuing, their aspirations. In his essay “Stuck in Romanticism,” William Morris apologizes for his “reductionism.” I am going to reduce more shamelessly: Neoclassicism was about accepting limits; Romanticism was about aspiration to transcendence. The Neoclassicist said, “Life is what it is; get used to it.” The Romanticist said, “There has to be more to life than this, and I want it!” Indeed, the Romanticist aspired to the Infinite—to experience it, to be taught by it, to be transformed by it, even to be it. It seems to me that all the diverse and even contradictory movements and philosophical and artistic works that are lumped together under the label of “Romanticism” can be unified by that reductive formulation.

I heard the British author Colin Wilson address Romanticism in 1967 in a guest lecture at the University of Washington, in which he observed that life in the eighteenth century was pretty dull, and there came a generation that glimpsed the possibility of a richer, more intense, altogether more satisfying experience, and they did, in fact, experience life and their emotions more intensely (as I remember, Wilson speculated that evolution had something to do with that change in sensibility). Briefly, they “flew high,” but reality always brought them down again. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were littered with the corpses of young men who flew high, burned out, and crashed. Wilson explained it in terms of fish juice. He related the anecdote of a man who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat, sustaining himself by catching fish and drinking the juice that he squeezed out of them. He did well until a cruise ship pulled up alongside him and the captain invited him to come aboard to enjoy a shower, a meal, and a stateroom, and then return to his rowboat in the morning, which he did—and it was days before he could face his fish juice again without retching. The Romanticists tasted something better, Wilson said, and then were forced to face again the fish juice of life in the eighteenth century world. I quote Anna Balakian: “The Romanticist’s ideal of life, whether it be terrestrial or otherwise, is happiness. Most of his writing is a protest against the imperfection and frustration of happiness here on earth” (The Literary Origins of Surrealism, p. 23). The Romanticists’ quest for happiness can be understood as an attempt to escape from the known of their existence to an unknown that they hoped and sensed existed somewhere. They sought it “through physical action, through concrete phenomena, such as a beautiful landscape, a beautiful unknown face, a newly discovered country” (Balakian, p. 21). Above all, they sought it in a quest for communion with and even identification with the “Infinite,” for they knew, and keenly felt, as Jean-Paul Sartre would put it generations later, that “no finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.”

What is to be said of Joseph Smith in relation to all that? That “finite point” that was the adolescent Joseph Smith sought a satisfying relationship (which he understood at first in orthodox Christian terms as the salvation of his soul) with the Infinite (which he understood at first as the God of Christian orthodoxy). No existing authority gave him the knowledge he wanted about “the Infinite” or about how to be reconciled to it; he wanted personal knowledge. “Reason” (in this case reasoning upon the Bible) did not lead him to that knowledge; it led only to contradiction and confusion. Nor did the “feeling” that he may have experienced, or at least sought to experience, at Methodist-style revival meetings satisfy him. He finally sought it in direct, personal address to “the Infinite,” and he went, not to a cathedral or a chapel to make that address, but to the woods. By his own account, what he experienced there set him on the way toward a personal transformation that would ultimately make of the finite mortal (not only Joseph but any who would receive it) a being that in mortality could enjoy the company of God and visions of eternity, and in immortality a unity of mind with God and the powers of a god. He found a God who did not enchain Man eternally to a place inferior to His own in a Great Chain of Being but rather invited Man to join Him at the pinnacle of that Chain (the concept, though not the language, appears in Abraham 3:16 – 26). He arrived at a nondualistic “metaphysic” that contemplated a primal identity of God and man (in “that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth”); a unity of subject and object (“intelligence” and “truth”); “intelligence” and “agency” in every part of existence, there being no “inanimate” matter; a universe in an eternal process of creation, never finished, with Man joining God in the creative process; a universe to which something like eros was fundamental, the process of creation issuing from the union of something like the “Eternal Feminine” (Goethe’s phrase, at the end of Faust, Part 2) with the “Eternal Masculine” (a phrase used nowhere in literature, so far as I know, but only here) in the persons of the individuals who join God in his exalted state. He envisioned and set in motion the processes to create a new society that was an earthly social, economic, and political embodiment of the eternal unity-in-multiplicity and that afforded liberty and opportunity for every individual to achieve his or her full personal potential and the fullest enjoyment of mortal life. He challenged the marital rules of his time, as he endeavored to establish on earth an order that he saw in heaven (see D&C 132:41 – 42). As a personality, he was a meteor that blazed its way through his time and place and came to mortal destruction (though not by suicide, like so many of his Romanticist contemporaries, unless one wants to call it suicide by mob), dying disappointed that his people had not risen to his vision—finally had to drink the fish juice. And he was a poet, a poet-prophet, who found the literary forms of his tradition (the biblical) to be not fully adequate to his purposes and transcended them.

There is in the foregoing sufficient reason to call Joseph Smith a Romanticist, if one chooses to look at him from that standpoint; but I propose a Copernican revolution in that regard. Joseph is not a lesser orb revolving about the suns of Wordsworth, Byron, Hugo, Emerson, and their like; rather he is the sun in relationship to which they are to be placed. As I have written in Six Poems by Joseph Smith, they are the also-rans; Emerson, and all the others with him, are Joseph Smith Lite. Joseph is the first and so far the greatest Restorationist poet, and the Romanticists are proto-Restorationists, or anti-Restorationists. Joseph Smith is not to be explained in terms of their lives and work, rather the reverse. Much of what they accomplished is valuable from a Restorationist standpoint, and they merit study from their own standpoints, but when I get to them here I will approach their works in relation to the poet Joseph Smith—who was first of all, mythopoietes.

A human being who feels in no imminent peril of being eaten by a bear, speared by a member of a neighboring tribe, or swept off by a tornado; is adequately clothed and sheltered to avoid death by exposure; is getting enough to eat to stave off constant hunger; feels accepted as a member in good standing of some community; and is reasonably confident that those conditions will continue; is likely at some moment to find himself (by which I also mean herself; I have never gotten comfortable with wrenching English grammar for reasons of sexual politics) — to find himself asking, “What is life all about, anyway?” When we ask that question, we are asking, “In what story am I a character, and what is my role in the story?” The primary stories that give shape and meaning to our lives are sometimes called myths; and by myth I do not mean a story that is not true, but rather a story that unfolds a worldview; there is such a thing as an objectively true myth. (I overemphasize a story that unfolds a worldview because it is so important in this discussion to get past the popular use of the word myth. I am using the word in a technical, literary sense, and I do not want that to be misunderstood.) All other things being equal, a person finds life more satisfying and experiences more inner peace when he understands himself as being part of a story, a myth, about which he can say, “I believe in this; I can say, ‘this is true’.” Myth is the beginning of all art, the primary product of the aesthetic function—the symbolizing function of the mind that gives primary shape to the chaos of experience—and the products of the aesthetic function are prior to all analytic functions. When we do analysis—philosophy, theology, science—we are walking around and pointing at and talking about—discoursing about—something that the aesthetic function has given us, something that is, in a fundamental sense, a work of art, and that ultimately we agree is simply, in all its presentational nature, there to be contemplated and to give shape to existence. (I didn’t come to all that on my own, of course; I got help from Immanuel Kant, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer, Eliseo Vivas, Joseph Campbell, and Abraham Maslow.)

Most of us do not arrive on our own at the myths by which we live; rather, they are handed down to us by culture; but a myth comes into being in the mind, the imagination, of a particular human being (or of particular human beings; it can be a collective process). The making of myth is called in Greek mythopoiesis, and the greatest poets are mythopoietes, maker of myth. Now, here I must make another theoretical point: as the aesthetic is always prior to the analytic, story, whether presented in narrative or in drama, is always prior to lyric. I think this is so. A lyric, which I include, rather idiosyncratically, I admit, with essays under the category meditations (a friend suggested that taxonomy to me many years ago), presents a moment that derives its significance from its place in a story, in an ongoing process that, explicitly or implicitly, is cast as a narrative or a drama. Myth is narrative or drama that underlies all other art. Now, that said, Joseph Smith was, as a poet-prophet, first of all mythopoietes. (I emphasize again that I do not mean that he merely “made up” the restored gospel. I accept the restored gospel as objectively true.)

In the next installment, I propose to say some things about the “myth” that Joseph left us and its relationship to Restorationist literature and criticism.

Thoughts?