Joseph Smith, Romanticist-like Poietes, part 2
Here, before going any further, I quote myself, from the introduction to Six Poems by Joseph Smith, to address a concern that may have arisen for some readers:
“Some readers might be troubled by my calling Joseph Smith the author of these works, for are they not the word of God, and is God not therefore the author? I submit that, for hermeneutical purposes, it is more helpful to understand some things about scripture by treating it as written not by God but by men in response to their experience with God. (This actually has been a principle of biblical hermeneutics since Friedrich Schleiermacher [1768 – 1834].) It is meaningless to speak of God’s literary style or method, for God will employ any style or method that will accomplish his purpose; but when he speaks to men, in order to be understood by them, he must necessarily speak according to their understanding; and therefore, at least indirectly, the human mind through which revelation comes to the rest of us necessarily has a part in shaping it, even when (as I am inclined to think happens only exceptionally, though my own experience with revelation is admittedly limited) the words are dictated one by one. The words of Isaiah are in a different Hebrew style from that of the words of Amos, and that is best explained by differences in the minds of Isaiah and Amos, and perhaps of their audiences; and in section 1, which is called ‘the Lord’s preface’ to the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord is presented as saying that the contents of the Doctrine and Covenants ‘were given unto [his] servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.’ I draw further support from this paragraph in The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, Manuscript Revelation Books, p. xxix:
“’Joseph Smith and his followers considered his revelations to be true in the sense that they communicated the mind and will of God, not infallible in an idealized sense of literary flawlessness. “The revelations were not God’s diction, dialect, or native language,” historian Richard Bushman has written. “They were couched in language suitable to Joseph’s time” (Rough Stone Rolling, p. 174). Smith and others appointed by revelation (including Oliver Cowdery, Sydney Rigdon, John Whitmer, and William W. Phelps) edited the revelations based on the same assumption that informed their original receipt: namely, that although Smith represented the voice of God, who was condescending to speak to him, he was limited by a “crooked broken scattered and imperfect language” (JS, Kirtland, Ohio, to William W. Phelps, [Independence, Missouri], 27 Nov. 1832, in JS Letterbook I, 4).’
“To appropriate and paraphrase from Ezra Pound (The Spirit of Romance, pp. 7 – 8), who was speaking of art, in particular literary art, the river of revelation is colored by the bed in which it runs, that bed being the human mind. That God has set his approval on a text as representing his mind and will (as through the process of canonization) is sufficient to call him ultimately the author of it; and a second reason is that he has given by revelation the ‘matter’ of the text; but differences in style and other aspects of composition, and perhaps even of content, are better explained by calling a human being the author. It was no less a prophet (and poet, and explicator of texts) than Nephi, after all, who wrote of the greatness of ‘the words of Isaiah,’ not the greatness of the words of God as dictated to Isaiah. God can compose in any manner he chooses, and it will always be adequate to his purpose, but the choice of one manner or another is to be explained in terms of the needs and capabilities of human minds, the mind of the human ‘author’ and the mind of the intended hearer or reader of the work. The words that follow ‘thus sayeth the Lord’ (implied or actual) are always the words as reported by a human being to human to human beings as a human being has received them, and the words are unavoidably conditioned by that human element. Moreover, this approach leaves more common ground on which to discuss these works with those of non-Latter-day-Saint or of no faith. Therefore, ‘six poems by Joseph Smith.’”
Or, in Eliseo Vivas’ terminology, Joseph, as poet, through a creative process, constituted the raw matter of his revelatory experiences. The poet Joseph Smith did not start from scratch, however. He had the Bible, which, as Northrop Frye has pointed out in The Great Code, supplies a comprehensive myth; but he revisioned the Bible to give us something new (“new and everlasting,” perhaps I should say), a more complete myth, expanded in what we have as the Book of Abraham, the Book of Moses, the Book of Mormon, and other works. Joseph did not put the myth all together in any one aesthetically unified text; but neither did any poet-prophet before him—the Bible with which he began is itself a heterogeneous collection of documents representing a multiplicity of voices, points of view, genres, and styles. I suppose that, actually, a truly complete and unified work is probably impossible, partly because it would, by definition, encompass all of reality from the inception of the Plan in the mind of God to the final consummation in the glorification of the earth and the consignment of all its former inhabitants to their eternal destinies, and no symbolic representation can do that, even if any mortal mind were capable of comprehending that reality, which none can (see Moses 1:4 – 5). Moreover, the drama that must be comprehended is constantly in progress, constantly being “made up,” as it were, as we go—it is a “never-ending story.”
All scripture, however, is unified by an underlying theme: “the great plan of happiness” (Alma 42:8) (which, for convenience, I will call simply “the Plan”); and, moreover, in every dispensation there has been on the scene priesthood authority with access to some level of revelation to ensure that the scriptures in use adhere sufficiently close to the central Plan to keep the Church on its course. This is not the place to present an exposition of “Mormon doctrine,” but an exposition of the Plan would treat of the eternal and premortal existence of intelligence, spirit, and matter in the original unity; man’s premortal birth as individual spirit offspring of God; man’s probationary mortal state; man’s fallen condition; the Atonement, on the basis of which men and women can be redeemed from their fallen state; the covenant pathway (including the covenants of obedience to God’s law, sacrifice to God, faith in the Redeemer, eternal marriage, and consecration), with its attendant ordinances and doctrines, by which individual men and women, on the basis of the Atonement, can re-attain, at a higher degree of complexity, their original unity with God; and the Holy Priesthood by which the doctrines, covenants, and ordinances are delivered and administered and the families and communities (ultimately Zion) that emerge among covenant-keepers are administered.
One thing that Joseph did leave was a relatively short dramatic composition, with related ritual, that distills the theme of the Plan, and that drama is the literary reference point around which all scripture is, and always has been, unified. It is the jar on the hill in Tennessee of scripture, and it is evident from scripture itself that that “jar” has been available in every dispensation of the gospel, though only portions of it may have been administered to individuals and groups, and has been the unifying element, the unifying mythic formulation, underlying scripture from Adam’s book of remembrance on. I would be very uncomfortable with open publication of the script of the sacred drama (which I know is available, but I haven’t looked, and anyone who does look has not really received it, anyway, for it can be truly received only in the prescribed way). That makes all scriptural texts elements of a kind of gnostic or hermetic system, the central literary element of which I personally will not disclose directly. Fortunately (providentially, actually), all the elements of the plan except those which the faithful are under covenant not to reveal are presented in openly published scripture, and all scriptural texts can be, and to be understood correctly must be, discussed in relation to it.
Differences in points of view and even of theology in different bodies of scripture (the Old Testament, the New Testament, different documents within the old and the new testaments, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and so forth) can be explained in terms of the concept of dispensations of the Plan to different peoples at different times. The Old Testament that we Restorationists have inherited through Nicene Christianity is the scripture of an Aaronic Priesthood Church, to the people of which, for the most part, only the covenants of obedience and sacrifice were administered, the covenant represented by baptism being administered only to the priestly family, and the ordinances (beginning with the bestowal of the Holy Ghost) and covenants of the Melchizedek Priesthood only to a very few. It was not necessary that doctrines pertaining to the higher covenants be included in that body of scripture (and we see in the Old Testament writings of people who struggled to make sense of their lives and experiences in the light of severely limited doctrinal knowledge). The New Testament that we have inherited through Nicene Christianity consists of remnants of the scriptures of a Melchizedek Priesthood church that, before it vanished in the Great Apostasy, possessed all the covenants and ordinances and the fullness of the priesthood by which they were administered. Those remnants contain an incomplete exposition of the doctrines, covenants, and ordinances that take an individual through the covenant of baptism to bestowal of the Holy Ghost, with only brief and cryptic references to the higher covenants. The Book of Mormon is the scripture of a Melchizedek Priesthood church that possesses the fullness of the doctrines, covenants, ordinances, and priesthood that get a person through the gate and onto the path of sanctification that finally ends in the promise of eternal life. (That was the church that first had to be established in the current dispensation in order to have a nucleus of members prepared to receive the higher covenants.) The Doctrine and Covenants and portions of the Pearl of Great Price are, in combination with the others, the scriptures of a Melchizedek Priesthood church that possesses, beyond the covenant of baptism and the priesthood that bestows the Holy Ghost, the higher covenants of marriage and consecration and is destined to establish Zion.
The foregoing is intended to be a defense of a kind of canonical criticism of the scriptures, a literary approach that treats the received scriptures as essentially unified regardless of whatever interesting insights source criticism might offer. It is all very “churchy,” and I don’t how that can be helped in a genuine Restorationist theory or criticism. We Restorationists do need to reach out, to seek points of overlap and as much as possible a common language with theorists, critics, and writers outside the Restoration, but first, it seems to me, we need to get things straight in our own terms, in our own Restorationist heads, and we have a good way to go toward accomplishing that.
In the next installment I intend to undertake an explication as a poem of D&C 93 (which must be in large degree a rerun of what I have done in Six Poems).
Thoughts?
I should have said in there that, as (per William Blake) the Bible is the great code of art, the temple script is the great code of the Bible. When one grasps that, a great many stars leap into constellation.
I like that way of describing the relationship between the two.
Implied by what you’ve written here (in my view) is the idea that while there is always a human element, the nature of the interaction between God and the writer will likely vary from case to case. Thus, there may be scripture composed by outright dictation — though even there (as you point out) there is always a human recipient, and the pressure of human understanding as the end goal.
A question I hope you will address in future installments is whether the literary production of prophets should or does have any particular literary authority. In other words: if God is the author of the content and prophets are the ones who give form to that content, is there special authority to that form? Or only to the content? If a prophet still a prophet when he is acting as a poet — and if so, what does that mean?
Tricky questions. I surmise that God approves Hebraic parallelism as _a_ prosodic method of revelatory texts, because, as C. S. Lewis observes in _Meditations on Psalms_, it lends itself well to translation. It also seems very suitable for composition that comes line upon line. I suspect that it is the first of all poetic rhythms, coming down to us from the songs sung in Adam and Enoch’s temple worship and recorded in Adam’s Book of Remembrance. For now, I would not want to go further than that. As to whether a prophet still acts as prophet when he acts as poet, my argument in the case of Joseph Smith (which I set forth in _Six Poems by Joseph Smith_, and which I will touch on in the next two installments) is that In Joseph the two functions cannot be separated, that to ignore the “literary” aspects of his revelations is to ignore a dimension of prophetic meaning. That is why I keep insisting that the techniques for reading scripture and those for reading “literature” are essentially identical; to know how to read one competently is to know how to read the other competently; and we ought not to place artificial barriers between them. Latter-day Saints don’t know how to read Shakespeare or Joyce (or your novels) because they don’t know how to read Genesis, Job, Esther, and John, and vice versa.
“we ought not to place artificial barriers between them”
Agreed!
And BYU has recently determined to take a step further in the wrong direction in its religion courses by teaching primarily doctrine, supported by scriptures–which in practice means proof-texting–rather than teaching the scriptures and how to read them. It seems to me that the beginning of the education of the Saints should be the scriptures and how to read them, in their full presentational, as well as discursive, nature. That means reading them as “literature,” and it would be an easier next step to the world’s other “best books.” Truman Madsen once said that the best-kept secret in the Church is the gospel of Jesus Christ; maybe that is because, for most members, including the “more active,” the scriptures are a pretty well kept secret.
That is discouraging. How can you learn new things from the scriptures if you don’t allow them to speak to you in their own voices instead of imposing on them the preexisting structure of your own understanding?