Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite, Par

D&C 93 as a Poem — 1

   First, here is D&C 93 formatted as a poem. (I have included verse numbers in subscript to facilitate navigation. I am not pleased with the effect on the typography and will be seeking a better solution.) The first part of a commentary follows.

Doctrine and Covenants 93

i

NARRATOR:

₁Verily, thus saith the Lord:

THE LORD:

It shall come to pass that every soul
**who forsaketh his sins,
**and cometh unto me,
**and calleth on my name,
**and obeyeth my voice,
**and keepeth my commandments
shall see my face
**and know that I am,
₂and that I am the true light
**that lighteth every man
**that cometh into the world,
₃and that I am in the Father,
**and the Father in me,
and the Father and I are one—
**₄the Father because he gave me of his fulness
**and the Son because I was in the world
**and made flesh my tabernacle
**and dwelt among the sons of men.
₅I was in the world and received of my Father,
**and the works of him were plainly manifest.
₆And John saw and bore record of the fulness of my glory,
**and the fulness of John’s record is hereafter to be revealed;

₇and he bore record, saying:

JOHN:

I saw his glory,
**that he was in the beginning,
**before the world was.
₈Therefore, in the beginning the Word was,
**for he was the Word,
**even the messenger of salvation,
₉the light and the Redeemer of the world,
**the Spirit of truth,
**who came into the world,
because the world was made by him,
**and in him was the life of men
and the light of men.
₁₀The worlds were made by him;
**men were made by him;
all things were made by him,
**and through him,
**and of him.

₁₁And I, John, bear record

that I beheld his glory
**as the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father,
**full of grace and truth,
even the Spirit of truth,
**which came and dwelt in the flesh
**dwelt among us.
₁₂And I, John, saw that he received not of the fulness at the first
**but received grace for grace;
₁₃and he received not of the fulness at first
**but continued from grace to grace
**until he received a fulness;
₁₄and thus he was called the Son of God,
**because he received not of the fulness at the first.

₁₅And I, John, bear record,

and lo, the heavens were opened,
**and the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove
**and sat upon him,
and there came a voice out of heaven saying,
**“This is my beloved Son.”

₁₆And I, John, bear record

that he received a fulness of the glory of the Father;
**₁₇and he received all power,
**both in heaven and on earth,
and the glory of the Father was with him,
**for he dwelt in him.

THE LORD:

₁₈And it shall come to pass that,
**if you are faithful,
**you shall receive the fulness of the record of John.
₁₉I give unto you these sayings
**that you may understand
**and know how to worship
**and know what you worship,
that you may come unto the Father in my name
**and in due time receive of his fulness;
₂₀for, if you keep my commandments,
**you shall receive of his fulness
**and be glorified in me as I am in the Father.
Therefore, I say unto you,
**you shall receive grace for grace.

ii

THE LORD:

₂₁And now, verily I say unto you:

I was—in the beginning—with the Father,
**and am the Firstborn,
₂₂and all those who are begotten through me
**are partakers of the glory of the same
**and are the church of the Firstborn.
₂₃Ye were also—
**in the beginning,
**with the Father—
that which is Spirit,
**even the Spirit of truth;
₂₄and truth is knowledge of things as they are,
**and as they were,
**and as they are to come;
₂₅and whatsoever is more or less than this
**is the spirit of that wicked one
**who was a liar from the beginning.
₂₆The Spirit of truth is of God;
**I am the Spirit of truth;

and John bore record of me, saying:

JOHN:

He received a fulness of truth,
**yea, even of all truth;
₂₇and no man receiveth a fulness
**unless he keepeth his commandments.
₂₈He that keepeth his commandments receiveth truth and light
**until he is glorified in truth and knoweth all things.

THE LORD:

₂₉Man was also—
**in the beginning—
**with God;
intelligence,
**or the light of truth,
was not created or made,
**neither indeed can be.
₃₀All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it,
**to act for itself,
as all intelligence also;
**otherwise there is no existence.
₃₁Behold, here is the agency of man,
**and here is the condemnation of man,
because that which was from the beginning
**is plainly manifest unto them,
**and they receive not the light,
₃₂and every man whose spirit receiveth not the light
**is under condemnation;
₃₃for man is spirit;
**the elements are eternal;
and spirit and element,
**inseparably connected,
**receive a fulness of joy;
₃₄and, when separated,
**man cannot receive a fulness of joy.
₃₅The elements are the tabernacle of God;
**yea, man is the tabernacle of God,
**even temples;
and whatsoever temple is defiled,
**God shall destroy that temple.
₃₆The glory of God is intelligence,
**or, in other words, light and truth;
**₃₇light and truth forsake that evil one.
₃₈Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning,
**and, God having redeemed man from the fall,
**men became again, in their infant state, innocent before God;
₃₉and that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth,
**through disobedience,
**from the children of men,
**and because of the tradition of their fathers.

iii

THE LORD:

₄₀But I have commanded you
**to bring up your children in light and truth.

₄₁But, verily, I say unto you, my servant Frederick G. Williams:

You have continued under this condemnation:
**₄₂you have not taught your children light and truth,
**according to the commandments;
and that wicked one hath power, as yet, over you,
**and this is the cause of your affliction.

₄₃And now a commandment I give unto you:

If you will be delivered you shall set in order your own house,
**for there are many things that are not right in your house.

₄₄Verily, I say unto my servant Sidney Rigdon
that in some things he hath not kept the commandments
concerning his children;
therefore, first set in order thy house.

₄₅Verily, I say unto my servant Joseph Smith Jun.

(or, in other words, I will call you friends,
**for you are my friends,
**and ye shall have an inheritance with me;
₄₆I called you servants for the world’s sake,
**and ye are their servants for my sake)—

₄₇and now, verily, I say unto Joseph Smith Jun.:

You have not kept the commandments
**and must needs stand rebuked before the Lord.
₄₈Your family must needs repent and forsake some things
**and give more earnest heed unto your sayings
**or be removed out of their place.

₄₉(What I say unto one I say unto all:

Pray always, lest that wicked one have power in you
**and remove you out of your place.)

₅₀My servant Newel K. Whitney, also,
**a bishop of my church,
hath need to be chastened
**and set in order his family
and see that they are more diligent and concerned at home
**and pray always,
**or they shall be removed out of their place.

₅₁Now, I say unto you, my friends:

Let my servant Sidney Rigdon go on his journey and make haste,
**and also proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord
**and the gospel of salvation
**as I shall give him utterance;
and, by your prayer of faith, with one consent,
**I will uphold him.

₅₂And let my servants Joseph Smith Jun. and Frederick G. Williams
**make haste also,
**and it shall be given them,
**even according to the prayer of faith;
and inasmuch as you keep my sayings
**you shall not be confounded in this world,
**nor in the world to come.

₅₃And, verily, I say unto you

that it is my will
**that you should hasten to translate my scriptures
**and to obtain a knowledge of history
**and of countries
**and of kingdoms,
**of laws of God and man,

and all this for the salvation of Zion.

Amen.

Although most of the revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants respond to particular questions, it is not known what question section 93 was intended to answer, but it is in effect a commentary on John 1:1–14, and therefore I surmise that the question was something like, “What does it mean that Christ was in the beginning with the Father?” The Lord, who quotes John, is the main speaker in this piece, though he is introduced in the first line by a speaker that I have designated “Narrator.” I have indicated by headings what I judge to be the identity of the speaker of each speech—the Narrator, the Lord, or John (the Apostle John or John the Baptist; commentators differ on that point, but it is irrelevant to the present purpose) as quoted by the Lord. The identity of the speaker of verses 29–38 is ambiguous. John clearly is the speaker of verse 28, but when does John stop and the Lord begin again? The Lord clearly is speaking in verse 39, and my reading is that the “but I” that begins that verse connects it with the preceding verses 29–38, those verses being the Lord’s expansion on the words of John given in verse 28.

The central theme of the Lord’s statement as a whole (including his quotations of John) is unity with God, with three subthemes: the unity of the Father and the Son (addressed in part i); the primal unity of man with God and the possibility of following a course similar to the Son’s, with the redeeming help of the Son, to achieve a new and more complex unity with God (addressed in part ii); and more immediate concerns with certain individuals and the failings that hinder them from achieving the proffered unity with God (addressed in part iii).

Part i begins (verses 1–2) with a promise that the faithful shall “see my face and know that I am,” the fulfillment of which is not necessarily reserved for the next world. Section 93 is thus thematically in company with sections 76, 88, and 84, which emphasize the essential importance of the Holy Priesthood and its ordinances to the fulfillment of that promise. The final line of part i is a key to the paraphrasable intent of the whole text, as identifying the means by which men may obtain the promised blessing: following and being filled with the light that figuratively is Christ. From that identification of Christ with the divine light the text moves abruptly in verse 3 to the unity of Christ with the Father. That abruptness is not an incoherence, for, as has been noted, the unity that is the central theme of this section is achieved by the instrumentality of that light.

Verses 3–5 have a theological significance that is made more explicit by filling in the ellipses that follow “And the Father and I are one” as follows in an implied syntactic parallelism:

and that I am in the Father,
and the Father in me,
and the Father and I are one—
[the Father and I are] the Father because he gave me of his fulness
And [the Father and I are] the Son because I was in the world
and made flesh my tabernacle among the sons of men.
I was in the world and received of my Father,
and the works of him were plainly manifest.

Thus, the Son fully possesses the consciousness of the Father, and the Father fully possesses the consciousness of the Son. The words of Abinadi in Mosiah 15:1–4 are thus rescued from Nicene trinitarianism, for this is a unity in multiplicity—the individuality of Christ and the Father are preserved, but each is enlarged in the other; it is a case not of either–or (either one or separate) but of both-and:

God himself shall come down among the children of men,
and shall redeem his people.
And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God,
and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father,
being the Father and the Son—
The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God;
and the Son, because of the flesh;
thus becoming the Father and the Son—
And they are one God,
yea, the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth.

The Savior then invokes the words of John (verses 6–17) to the effect that the Son was with the Father “before the world was,” and he describes the process by which the Son in this world was restored to unity with the Father: “from grace to grace, / until he received a fulness.” He then returns (verses 18–20) to the theme of the opening verses, explaining that, by a process similar to that through which the Savior went, men may obtain the same fulness.

The Savior begins part ii (in verses 21–22) by linking back to themes of part i: his presence with the Father at the beginning, and the possibility of man’s partaking of the Father’s glory; and then adding a definition of “the church of the Firstborn” as those who partake of that glory. There is an ambiguity in “church of the Firstborn”: Christ is the Firstborn, and it is his church, that society of those who have obtained the promise of exaltation; but it is also the church comprised of the latter, who come to be treated by the Father as if they were the Son, becoming coinheritors with him of all things, being in him as he is in in the Father (see John 17:21)—they also are, by adoption, the Firstborn, having taken upon them the name of Christ. Again, there is a case of both-and, of unity in multiplicity. Then the Savior goes on to reveal (in verses 23–39) another parallel between men and himself: not only can they come to enjoy the glory that he enjoys, but they were with the Father in the beginning as he was. What is meant by that is profoundly important and is one reason why section 93 is given primacy of place in this essay—it is a key text for arriving at the larger metaphysical frame in which a Latter-day Saint philosophy of art and a practical criticism and explication must ultimately find their place; and here I have in mind the example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who worked out a system from a general metaphysic through a theory of art to practical criticism; indeed, I envision a Restorationist system of thought that Coleridge’s closely parallels.

Joseph searched out not only the plan of salvation but also the essential nature of all reality; indeed, the two, in his thinking, could not be separated. He sought, in words of Elder John A. Widtsoe, “from out the universal mystery . . . the general, controlling laws, that proclaim order in the apparent chaos” (A Rational Theology, p. 1). He undertook what Sterling McMurrin describes as the task of metaphysics: “Metaphysics is an attempt to answer the most basic questions which can be asked concerning the nature of reality. It has to do not with what in particular it is that in fact exists, but rather with the nature of existence as such, or with the general properties of whatever exists. It is concerned especially with ontological problems on the nature of being and cosmological problems on the structure of reality” (The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion/The Philosophical Foundations of the Mormon Religion, p. 1).

Some of Joseph’s key metaphysical insights are contained in verses 23–36 of section 93; and if there is a single key metaphysical passage in section 93, it might well be this one (verses 29–31, directly quoting the official edition):

“Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

“All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

“Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man; because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light.”

Closely related to that passage are these, in the same section:

“Ye were also in the beginning with the Father; that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth;

“And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come;

And whatsoever is more or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning.

“The Spirit of truth is of God. I am the Spirit of truth. . . .” (verses 23–26).

 

“For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy;

“And when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy.

“The elements are the tabernacle of God; yea, man is the tabernacle of God, even temples; and whatsoever temple is defiled, God shall destroy that temple.

“The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (verses 33–36).

 

The labor of Latter-day Saint writers to formulate a coherent metaphysic has largely consisted of attempts to interpret those passages. Section 93 (like all the rest of scripture) does not, in fact, present a systematic philosophy or cosmology. Rather, it presents loosely connected aphorisms, stated dogmatically, without reasoned defense or explanation, leaving the reader to discern relationships. This ambiguity is not a fault in the text, or in the thinking of Joseph Smith; rather, it reflects the nature of the problem of getting at ultimate realities by means of language. Indeed, it may not be possible to get closer, or much closer, to that toward which section 93 points aphoristically and suggestively, for language has its limits, and certainly analytical discourse would not have gotten any further. It also reflects the fact that Joseph was not a systematic philosopher or theologian but rather something more fundamental—a prophet and a poet. Joseph certainly was aware of the limitations of the language he was using. He complained in a letter to William W. Phelps, dated November 27, 1832, of being limited by a “crooked broken scattered and imperfect language” (Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 287). He might have sympathized with the sentiment expressed in lines of T. S. Eliot, in “Burnt Norton”: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.” Thinking the problem further through, he might have recognized that no language could be adequate to the task, as any attempt to go to the end (or the beginning) of things linguistically is, in the words of Zen masters, like unto the attempt of a hand to grasp itself, an eye to see itself. The first link of any chain of reasoning or attempt at coherent exposition must necessarily be anchored in something that cannot be verbalized in any merely discursive way, and attempts so to verbalize it must necessarily end in paradox (as per Russell’s Paradox and Göedel’s incompleteness theorems). The use of this aphoristic, suggestive language with the approval of the Lord may be a caution against expecting too much from analytic, discursive, propositional language, and perhaps even a caution against becoming unduly entangled in metaphysical speculation.

I think that Joseph’s meaning is made clearer by the repunctuation of D&C 93:23–26 as I have proposed:

Ye were also—
in the beginning,
with the Father—
that which is Spirit,
even the Spirit of truth;

In other words, in the beginning, you were that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth—as was the Father and as was Christ with him.

I will step far enough into the philosophical tanglewood to submit that what Joseph arrived at in those verses, not by analytical reason but by intuition and divine illumination, is a kind of nondualism that would have been recognized by certain philosophers of his time and by the Vedantic writers who influenced them. I am suggesting that Dr. Candadai Seshachari, a Hindu and a professor of English and Director of General Education at Weber State College, has correctly pointed the direction in which we should seek a path toward the metaphysic of section 93: “Mormons will be misunderstood and misrepresented as long as critics try to force traditional Christian meanings into the Mormon tenets and doctrines. It is far easier to approach the Mormon gospel through Hinduism than through Roman Catholicism, through the works of Sankara than those of St. Thomas Aquinas” (“Revelation: The Cohesive Element in International Mormonism,” p. 45). What I think Dr. Seshachari is getting at—and I think he is right—becomes clearer if a bit of Joseph’s language in section 93 is translated into the language of the world’s philosophers, if we read verse 30 as follows: “All object is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all subject also; otherwise there is no existence”; or, perhaps, at a somewhat lower level of abstraction, “All known is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all knower also; otherwise there is no existence.” Joseph intuited a self-existing ground of existence, an Absolute, as some philosophers have called it, that he called “that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth,” of which all the intelligences, including God himself, are expressions or manifestations. He did not ask the meaningless question “Why is there something and not nothing at all?” (or, if he asked it, he got quickly past it); he accepted existence itself as a given, as it must be accepted (and he found in his intuition neither the angst of his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard nor the nausée of the later Jean-Paul Sartre; indeed, as he dictated the words in another place [italics added], “Men are that they might have joy” [2 Nephi 2:23]). He intuited that if there is no consciousness and nothing of which to be conscious there is no existence, and that consciousness and that-of-which-to-be-conscious—knower and known, subject and object—necessarily exist together as something like poles within the Absolute; that there is no consciousness—and therefore no existence—except of opposition, of that and not that; that there can be no consciousness without the opposition of permanence and change; that being is therefore an eternal process of becoming; that the Absolute is absolutely free to become in whatever forms of opposition it chooses (because what else is there to limit it or determine it?); that the personal God is the personification of the Absolute in relation to the inferior intelligences; that the inferior intelligences come into self-conscious being in something like an act of self-alienation by the Absolute as they are born as spirit children of the personal God; that the children of God possess agency because even in their alienated state they are of the same free “stuff” of the Absolute—and “here is the agency of man”; that the Absolute, in the person of God in relation to his children, seeks reintegration of its alienated self at a higher level of complexity, of fulness of being—of joy; that God’s fundamental attitude toward his alienated parts is therefore love; and God’s work and glory, therefore, is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man (Abraham 1:39).

Yes, I am aware of the huge leaps of logic in the foregoing; that is why I submit that Joseph intuited all that, or something like that, rather than reasoned his way to it—for he was a prophet and a poet, not a German metaphysician. I am further aware that I have used language that Joseph did not use—that is but my clumsy attempt to say outright what Joseph was wise enough only to hint.

I have suggested that Joseph and the nondualist philosophers of the nineteenth century would have understood each other had they talked. I present here a few quotations from three of those philosophers to support that proposition. There is this from the Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an approximate contemporary of Joseph Smith, in chapter 10: “God, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker and judge by his wisdom and holy will.”

There is further parallel between Coleridge’s thought and Joseph’s in such statements as this, from chapter 8: “Body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum.” Compare D&C 131:7: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure.” “Matter” in that verse might be taken as equivalent to Coleridge’s substratum of body and spirit.

From Coleridge, chapter 9: “Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio [from the beginning], identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other’s substrate”; and from chapter 12: “An object is inconceivable without a subject as its antithesis.” Compare D&C 93:30: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence”; and D&C 93:33: “The elements are eternal.”

From chapter 12: “Intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it.” Compare D&C 93:30–31: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence. Behold, here is the agency of man.”

From chapter 12: “We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD” (1:186). Compare D&C 93:23 (as I have emended the punctuation): “Ye also were—in the beginning, with God—that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, another contemporary of Joseph, wrote in The World as Will and Representation:

“No truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. . . . Therefore the world as representation . . . has two essential, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object. . . . the other half, the subject. . . . Therefore these halves are inseparable even in thought, for each of the two has meaning and existence only through and for the other; each exists with the other and vanishes with it” (p. 3).

Again, compare that to D&C 93: 30–31: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence. Behold, here is the agency of man.”

Schopenhauer found parallel with his own thinking in that of “the sages of India”: “The fundamental tenet of the Vedânta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms” (3–4).

Then there is this:

“From all these considerations the reader has now gained in the abstract, and hence in clear and certain terms, a knowledge which everyone possesses directly in the concrete, namely as feeling. This is the knowledge that the inner nature of his own phenomenon, which manifests itself to him as representation both through his actions and through the permanent substratum of these in his body, is his will. . . . He will recognize that same will not only in those phenomena that are quite similar to his own, in men and animals, as their innermost nature, but continued reflection will lead him to recognize the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant, indeed the force by which the crystal is formed, the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole, the force whose shock he encounters from the contact of metals of different kinds, the force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally even gravitation, which acts so powerfully in all matter, pulling the stone to earth and the earth to the sun; all these he will recognize as different only in the phenomenon, but the same according to their inner nature. He will recognize them all as that which is immediately known to him so intimately and better than everything else, and where it appears most distinctly is called will (pp. 109–10).

Once more, “here is the agency of man” (and of everything else; but that is beyond the scope of this essay).

The thinking of the likes of the Vedantists, Schopenhauer, and Coleridge entered into the stream of American thought by way of the Transcendentalists, outstandingly Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whose essay “The Over-Soul” I extract but a few lines to make the point: “. . . that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other. . . . We live in succession, in division, in parts, in wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. . . . We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul” (pp. 155–56).

There is, of course, no evidence of influence or borrowing between Vedantists, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, or Emerson, on the one hand, and Joseph Smith on the other. He arrived at his insights independently of them, and they of him. My purpose here for presenting the excerpts from the philosophers quoted above, with whom Joseph in section 93 seems to have an affinity, is, rather, to illuminate some implications and ramifications of section 93—if intelligence and truth and that which is Spirit are correctly “translated” as I have proposed.

But there is more to section 93 than theme; there is the “how” it says “what” it says about its theme; for it is a poem, and in the next installment I will address the “how” by which the metaphysic becomes an aspect of a poem.

Thoughts?