The Religion-Making Imagination of Joseph Smith

Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love.

The powerful sexual reductiveness of this definition necessarily produces distortions when applied to the personality of any prophet whosoever. Yet no one can study the portraits of Joseph Smith, or read descriptions of him by his contemporaries, and avoid the sense of his mysterious charm. Whatever account of charisma is accepted, the Mormon prophet possessed that quality to a degree unsurpassed in American history. In spite of his lack of formal education, this fierce autodidact might have achieved a considerable political career, and be remembered now as we remember his contemporary Stephen Douglas, had his genius not discovered itself in the problematical realm of religion-making. Other Americans have been religion-makers, down to Elijah Muhammad in the time just past. Smith’s difference was not a question of success as such; we are, after all, surrounded still by Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and Christian Scientists, as well as by Black Muslims, New Age enthusiasts, and such curiosities as Theosophists, Scientologists, and Moonies. One studies these beliefs, and seeks to comprehend their appeal to those to whom they appeal. But none of them has the imaginative vitality of Joseph Smith’s revelation, a judgment one makes on the authority of a lifetime spent in apprehending the visions of great poets and original speculators.

Researchers have not yet established, to my satisfaction, precisely how much the prophet Joseph knew about Jewish esoteric tradition or Kabbalah, or about the Christian Gnostic heresies. One wants to know also just what Brigham Young had absorbed from these sources, since some of Young’s speculations about God and Adam, and on the ascent of the soul after death, are strikingly akin to ancient suggestions. What is clear is that Smith and his apostles restated what Moshe Idel, our great living scholar of Kabbalah, persuades me was the archaic or original Jewish religion, a Judaism that preceded even the Yahwist, the author of the earliest stories in what we now call the Five Books of Moses. To make such an assertion is to express no judgment, one way or the other, upon the authenticity of the Book of Mormon or of the Pearl of Great Price. But my observation certainly does find enormous validity in Smith’s imaginative recapture of crucial elements in the archaic Jewish religion, elements evaded by normative Judaism, and by the Church after it. The God of Joseph Smith is a daring revival of the God of some of the Kabbalists and Gnostics, prophetic sages who, like Smith himself, asserted that they had returned to the true religion of Yahweh or Jehovah. If Smith was mistaken, then so were they, but I hardly know just what it could mean to say that the Kabbalists or Joseph Smith were mistaken. The God of normative Judaism and of the mainline churches, at this time, is rather more remote from the God of the earliest or Yahwist portions of the Bible than is the initially surprising God of Joseph Smith.

Theology plays no part in the Hebrew Bible, but was invented by Philo and other Alexandrian Jews to explain away the supposed anthropomorphism of God’s depiction in the early Yahwist vision. Anthropomorphism or the idea that God could be human-all-too-human is a poor notion anyway, as Joseph Smith implicitly understood. We are men and women, and not trees; presumably the god of trees is dendromorphic. What theologians deprecate as an anthropomorphic Yahweh is the necessary correlative of the Hebrew Bible’s vision of theomorphic men and women: Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Tamar, David. The religion-making genius of Joseph Smith, profoundly American, uniquely restored the Bible’s sense of the theomorphic, a restoration that inevitably led the prophet into his most audacious restoration, patriarchal plural marriage.

That audacity I defer for now, since its complex realization was deferred in Smith’s career until its religious basis was thoroughly established, and we are only starting to recover Smith’s full vision of God. Smith was haunted by the figure of Enoch, who in ancient Jewish texts was transmogrified into the angel Metatron, sometimes called the lesser Yahweh. Agiant in size, radiant with light, this patriarch-angel was renowned for his total knowledge of the secrets of God. If the distinction between God and man wavers anywhere in Kabbalah, that wavering is most incessant in the fused figure of Enoch-Metatron. Enoch, who walked with God, is taken up by God and does not die. The Kabbalists interpreted Enoch’s ascent as the restoration of the state of Adam, not Adam in the Garden but a preexistent cosmic anthropos, at once God, angel, and man.

It is a crucial commonplace of Mormonism that Joseph Smith nullified the distinction between Old and New Testament, and castout al of Church history that intervened between the biblical texts and himself. To apply a strictly rhetorical and literary term to the prophet’s religion-making career, we can say that Smith accomplished a transumption, by joining his Latter-day Saints to the ever-earliness of the great patriarchs, and to Enoch in particular. In a transumption, earliness and lateness change places, while everything that comes in between is voided. Whether Smith had read aversion of the apocalyptic Book of Enoch is uncertain, but I hardly think that written sources were necessary for many of Smith’s imaginings. Enoch chose Joseph Smith because esoteric traditions always had exalted Enoch as the archetype of man-become-angel, and even man-become-God.

The revelation of Enoch was made to the prophet Joseph precisely as it was made to the Kabbalists, to grant unto us a more human God and a more divine man. But the Enoch of Kabbalah was a solitary figure who went up into heaven to become Metatron, a version of the archangel Michael. It is characteristic of Joseph Smith that his Enoch founded a city, Zion, and gathered a people together there, and then took city and people up to heaven with him. In the fullness of time, Joseph prophesied, Enoch and his city would descend, to be fused into Joseph Smith’s Zion, the Mormon New Jerusalem that shall gather in all the Latter-day Saints throughout the globe. The fulfillment of this prophecy would clarify the precise relation, perhaps the virtual identity, of Enoch and of Joseph. Because Joseph’s religion is sacred history, in which word, event, and thing again are one, as they were for the ancient Hebrews, then the actual life of Joseph Smith must assume the pattern of Enoch’s. Secular American history remembers Smith, as it remembers Brigham Young, as a founder of cities. But Latter-day Saints differ pragmatically from Gentiles primarily because their history is sacred, and that returns us again to Enoch’s choice of the prophet Joseph.

Smith’s religious genius always manifested itself through what might be termed his charismatic accuracy, his sure sense of relevance that governed biblical and Mormon parallels. I can only attribute to his genius or daemon his uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to normative Judaism or to Christianity and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly. Theurgy consists of operations designed to influence God, whether in his own dynamic nature or in relation to humans. Joseph Smith’s God, as the Mormon theologians rightly tell us, is finite, being subject both to space and to time, as is necessary for a material being, indeed for a passionate and dynamic being. As such a person, Smith’s God is hedged in by limitations, and badly needs intelligences besides his own. Smith never described the theurgical labors performed for God by the other gods or by the angels or by Mormon believers, but his vision of God suggests the outlines of such a theurgy. Smith’s God, after all, began as a man and struggled heroically in and with time and space, rather after the pattern of colonial and revolutionary Americans. Exalted now into the heavens, God necessarily is still subject to the contingencies of time and space. I think transumptively of the prophet Joseph’s God when I read the text of the Yahwist, or J writer, author of the earliest tales of the Pentateuch. The Yahweh who closes Noah’s ark with his own hands, descends to make on-the-ground inspections of Babel and Sodom, and picnics with two angels under Abram’s terebinth trees at Mamre is very close, in personality and dynamic passion, to the God of Joseph Smith, far closer than to the Platonic-Aristotelian divinity of Augustine and of Moses Maimonides.

Smith’s God would not maintain that he will be present wherever and whenever he chooses to be present, even though he is hardly the absent numinosity of the negative theologians. The God of the American prophet simply cannot be everywhere at once, even though his own powers, like ours, are progressive. Nowhere is Joseph’s genius so American as when he declares that God organized us and our world but did not create either, since we are as early and original as he is. Emerson shrewdly anticipated David Brion Davis in finding Mormonism to be the last expression of Puritanism, the final extension of the line of Abraham. Smith’s difference from his Puritan and Judaic ancestors centered precisely where a younger Emerson ought to have felt imaginative sympathy—that is, on envisioning a God within us whose best efforts were needed to reinforce the exalted Man in the heavens. What Whitman sang, Joseph Smith embodied: to be Adam early in the morning, confronting a God who had not created him and who needed him to become a god himself.

We approach the mystery of Smith’s religious genius when we seek to intuit how he came to discover the foreboding of his own charisma in Enoch. In his remarkable Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1987), D. Michael Quinn relates Joseph Smith’s priesthood revelation of 1832 to esoteric rather than to traditional Christian traditions, and then goes on to the crucial instructions that Smith gave from 1842 through 1844, establishing the temple endowment. Whether Smith relied on William Warburton and George S. Faberor, more likely, reimagined ancient mysteries for himself, he evidently was highly conscious of restoring ancient mysteries associated with Enoch. Somehow, in an insight of genius, the prophet Joseph recovered what Moshe Idel describes as a central mystery of Kabbalah, generally described in the cryptic formula “Enoch is Metatron,” an identification that makes the ascent of Enoch also a return to the original Adam, hardly to be distinguished from Yahweh himself. Only Mormons are in a position to define the essence of their religion, but to this outsider nothing in Smith’s revelations was more central than the prophet’s identification with the Kabbalistic Enoch. The union of patriarch and angel in Enoch is one of the prime tropes in Kabbalah for the ecstasy of union with the divine principle, for the fusion of God and man. I think that Joseph Smith would have understood immediately the grand statement of the early Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac of Acre, which was that “Enoch is Metatron” could be translated also as “a fire devouring fire.” Metatron, sometimes called by Kabbalists the prince of this world, was once a man who walked this earth, Enoch, and Enoch in effect was taken by Joseph Smith as a paradigm for his finite God, who had progressed from Adam to Jehovah, from humanity to exaltation.

What I call the American Religion is a far larger and more diffuse phenomenon than is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and as such it seems to me to have three fundamental principles. The first is that what is best and oldest in us goes back well before Creation, and so is no part of the Creation. The second is that what makes us free is knowledge, a history of facts and events, rather than a belief founded on mere assent. The third is that this freedom has a solitary element in it, an element imbued by the loneliness of belated American time and the American experience of the abyss of space. What holds these principles together is the American persuasion, however muted or obscured, that we are mortal gods, destined to find ourselves again in worlds as yet undiscovered. None of the three principles is quite or altogether Mormon, nor is that dangerous and beautiful persuasion, and yet principles and persuasion alike have much to do with the charismatic personality of the prophet Joseph Smith.

David Brion Davis, the American historian who greatly illuminates Mormonism for me, remarked that the most important fact in our early religious history was the American tendency away from the concept of a national church. In the Burned-over District of upstate New York the swarm of revivalists left transplanted New Englanders, like the Smiths, restless and tormented, confronting a mad mix of doctrines and preachers, while longing for a church in legitimate descent from ancient authority. A personal God, a history of providences, a theocracy of saints: these were Puritan inheritances. As a kind of Puritan anachronism, two centuries later, the Mormons became furious monists and perhaps the most work-addicted culture in religious history. As Davis remarks, their gospel of work was communal rather than individual, and they took out to the frontier with them an organization and an outlook that was guaranteed to alienate the selfish and violent individualists who were to surround them. If you followed a new Enoch west in order to build a new Zion, then you were engaged in nation-building of a kind very different from your neighbors’ mode of enlarging the republic. Granted Mormon group loyalty and self-discipline, then your economic and political potential became something substantial enough to alarm others. But if your new Enoch, as prophet, seer, and revelator, also restored patriarchal marriage customs, then indeed your capacity for disturbing the conventional became extraordinary.

Joseph Smith’s most remarkable innovation or restoration, plural marriage, had to be abandoned by the Latter-day Saints a century ago, as Utah’s price of admission into the federal union. Sometimes it is said that the Mormons themselves in time would have abolished polygamy on their own, but no one who has read accounts of the underground heroism of President John Taylor and other Saints, martyred by the federal law for keeping faith with Joseph Smith, will easily believe such assertions. Smith’s genius for restoration exceeded that of Mohammed, and the religious necessity and sincerity of Smith’s vision are beyond doubt. We can find the central formulations of Smith’s religion-making imagination in the extraordinary sequence of the Doctrine and Covenants that begins with baptism for the dead in Sections 127 and 128, proceeding then to the resurrection of the body in 129 and to the tangibility of the bodies of the Father and the Son in 130. Directly after this, in Section 131, the new and everlasting covenant of marriage is stated, to be followed by the most remarkable of all the prophet’s revelations, Section 132, where the essentials for the attainment of godhood lead on directly to a plurality of wives. Historians, both Mormon and Gentile, have traced the long and subtle evolution of the prophet’s concept of plural marriage from 1831 through the dictation of Section 132 on July 12, 1843. This evolution contains within it Joseph Smith’s most original speculations, which even he dared not formulate overtly. If Smith’s God was an exalted man of flesh and blood, and the literal father of Jesus, and the begetter of intelligences in many spheres, then was this God not also a polygamist? The problem is not so much one of distinguishing the Mormon God from Adam (a distinction not quite made by Brigham Young) but rather that of distinguishing God from what a theomorphic leader like Young might yet progress to be. It is the audacity of Smith’s genius that he would never quite make that distinction. There is a peculiar intensity, indeed a mystical ecstasy, conveyed throughout Section 132 by the fire of Smith’s rhetoric, as in Section 37: “Abraham received concubines and they bore him children; and it was accounted unto him for righteousness, because they were given unto him, and he abode in my law; as Isaac also and Jacob did none other things than that which they were commanded, they have entered into their exaltation, according to the promises, and sit upon thrones, and are not angels but are gods.”

Joseph’s implication is quite plain: the function of receiving concubines is to transcend the angelic state and become a god. If the entire quest of Joseph’s life was to restore archaic religion, in which spirit and matter, God and man, were to differ only in degree, not in kind, then the culmination of that quest had to be plural marriage. One can go further: Joseph’s design was as radical as the history of religion affords. His prophetic aim was nothing less than to change the whole nature of the human, or to bring about in the spiritual realm what the American Revolution had inaugurated in the sociopolitical world. Kings and nobles had lost their relevance to Americans; that hierarchy had been abolished. Joseph Smith, in his final phase, pragmatically abolished the more fearsome hierarchy of official Christianity. Plural marriage was to be the secret key that unlocked the gate between the divine and the human.

I emphasize again the profound affinity between Smith and the Kabbalah, since in each the function of sanctified human sexual intercourse essentially is theurgical. Either there was a more direct Kabbalistic influence on Smith than we know, or far more likely his genius reinvented Kabbalah in the effort necessary to restore archaic Judaism. Consider the following passage, taken from Moshe Idel, in which I have substituted “Mormonism” or “Mormon” for “Kabbalistic” or “Kabbalist” but otherwise have altered nothing:

The focus of the Mormon theurge is God, not man; the latter is given unimaginable powers, to be used in order to repair the divine glory or the divine image; only his initiative can improve Divinity. . . . The theurgical Mormonism articulates a basic feature of Jewish religion in general: because he concentrates more upon action than upon thought, the Jew is responsible for everything, including God, since his activity is crucial for the welfare of the cosmos in general.

Joseph Smith’s emphasis on human power necessarily achieved an apotheosis in his exaltation of plural marriage, which became for him the new and everlasting covenant between God and the Latter-day Saints. Historians both Mormon and Gentile have made clear that Smith went so far as to practice a kind of polyandry with the wives of several highly placed Mormons. Again there are archaic precedents, including the complex career of Sabbatai Zvi, the Kabbalistic Messiah. Joseph Smith, far more than any other religious innovator in his century, authentically brought about a fresh breaking of the vessels. We underestimate his genius when we fail to see that he desired an ontological change in his followers, a new mode of being, however high the cost. The Mormonism of the past hundred years, and of today, is not my subject here, but plainly it is only a compromise with Gentile America, rather than the authentic vision of Joseph Smith. The sacredness of human sexuality, for Smith, was inseparable from the sacred mystery of embodiment, without which godhood would not be possible. God and Jesus are men of flesh and bone, and those who would progress to join them must be in the body also. Smith’s theurgy, like that of the Kabbalists, is essentially sexual, and demanded a full realization of the prophet’s desires.

One scholar, Mark Leone, has remarked on “the virtually unfathomable complexity of Joseph Smith’s early ideas and trials at plural marriage.” Certainly the complexity is immensely intricate, as much so as the sinuous windings in the doctrines and conduct of Sabbatai Zvi, as described by Gershom Scholem. But the Kabbalistic Messiah espoused the Gnostic way of the antithetical; his prophet, the brilliant Nathan of Gaza, argued that Sabbatai had to descend into the broken shells to liberate the sparks, a pattern that Scholem called “redemption through sin.” Smith’s ascent into plural marriage was not antithetical but life-affirming, and indeed God-affirming. In simplest terms, I can accept the notion that the prophet Joseph sought to follow the Jewish pattern, in which a religion becomes a people. Marked by the glory and stigma of plural marriage, the Mormons of 1850 through 1890 indeed became a peculiar people, a nation apart. But this formulation is reductive and inadequate; Joseph Smith did not wish merely to set his Saints apart. He wished them to become gods, and he decided that polygamy was necessary for that apotheosis. The truest mystery of what I would want to call Smith’s Kabbalah or secret tradition is why and how he linked divinity and plural marriage. What was the imaginative form of that linkage?

Anthropologists have no more regard for Freud’s Totem and Taboo than they have for the Book of Mormon, and neither Freudians nor Mormons would wish to see the two works juxtaposed. But Totem and Taboo is as much an effort of the religion-unmaking imagination as the Book of Mormon is of the religion-making kind. Smith’s early scripture rejects polygamy, while hinting that a subsequent revelation might yet impose it. Freud’s identification of God with the slain and cannibalized leader of a tribal horde, murdered by his sons for having monopolized all the women, can be read as Smith’s later polygamous revelation reflected in a dark mirror. What the Church Fathers made into the close of their Old Testament, the latecomer prophet Malachi’s final admonition turning the hearts of the fathers and the sons toward one another, is one of the biblical texts that most haunted Joseph Smith. Smith’s vision of plural marriage is many mythmakings at once. Those Latter-day Saints who have the authority to sustain polygamy will become gods, and the sons of those gods will be reconciled with their fathers and then become gods themselves. It was, I think, the early Mormon leader Orson Hyde who once speculated that Jesus had married Mary, Martha, and the other Mary, which is a step short only of speculating about the plural marriages of God.

One suspects that Joseph Smith had thought about patriarchal polygamy long before 1831, because his imagination was of the unfolding rather than the developing kind. National circumstances and human nature alike combined to dim the full audacity of Smith’s vision, when his church retreated from him during the century of 1890 through 1990. Mormonism, born of Puritanism, has returned to Puritanism, and has had to forget that Smith intended a religious reform as total as the birth of Islam. Smith’s most original doctrines have the same relation to Protestantism that the Kabbalah has to the Talmud. Yet what is the status of those doctrines in Mormonism today? Before he was martyred in 1844, Joseph Smith evidently had himself crowned as king of the Kingdom of God. The LDS Church evades that crucial moment in its history, even as it evades the tradition that Brigham Young emulated Smith by an ultimate repetition of this sublime audacity. Yet to evade such sublimities is to cancel out, at least for a time, the powerful imaginative assertion that Mormonism could make, to the effect that it indeed is the American Religion, the spiritual embodiment of the American Sublime.

“Did the Prophet Joseph want every man’s wife he asked for?” was a rhetorical question asked in a sermon by Jedediah Grant in 1854. Grant replied in the negative, asserting that Smith was testing his people, but no one ought to consider it other than an open question now. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young shared a vision of authority very different from any now tolerable among their descendants. Scholars, whether Mormon or Gentile, only can offer their misinterpretations, strong misreadings or weak misreadings, of Smith’s vision. The strongest misreading, and so the best interpretation, necessarily was provided by Brigham Young, who founded his kingdom on the prophet Joseph’s aspirations for plural marriage. For thirty years Young led in very nearly the full meaning of leading. Though his complete legacy was voided thirteen years after his death, Young lived to see part of what Smith dreamed. Celestial Marriage and baptism for the dead are now Mormon abstractions, as they are not differences that make a difference without a system of plural marriage. Visionary and pragmatist at once, the prophet Joseph had the American concern with the earthly paradise, and so he taught Young, at least by example, that the mysteries of the Kingdom had to be enacted in the here and now, privately if possible when hemmed in by Gentiles, and publicly though by no means universally when a stable Zion at last could be founded.

Whether Brigham Young had twenty-seven or fifty-five wives is one of those questions akin to scholarly speculation as to whether Joseph Smith had managed eighty-four marriages within the three years before his murder. Good clean or unclean fun, this erudite arithmetic at least establishes the high seriousness of the quest shared in by both men. Each understood that Celestial Marriage and consequent progression toward godhood were the true essence of becoming a Latter-day Saint, the heart of Mormon religion-making. Without plural marriage as the instrumental modality for Celestial Marriage, their quest would have seemed to both seers to have become the tragedy of Hamlet without the prince. The true epiphany of Mormonism did not take place in Smith’s Lifetime but must be identified with the public proclamation in August 1852 of plural marriage by the church, certainly the most courageous act of spiritual defiance in all of American history. Orson Pratt’s grand discourse on Celestial Marriage is of course not part of Mormon scripture, but perhaps someday it yet will be, for the spirit of Joseph Smith breathes through it.

Orson Pratt’s truthful and realistic assumption is that the difference between a vigorous Gentile male of talent, intellect, and power and his Latter-day Saint counterpart is that the Gentile is a hypocrite and an adulterer, while the Saint need not be and is not either. Male nature being polygamous, the restoration of all things demanded a sanctification of that polygamy, rather than an abolishment of a nature that could not be corrected. Joseph Smith had found in himself a polygamous nature and evidently had come to understand that his prophetic gift would perish if nature were balked or voided. When some Mormons say now that Smith instituted plural marriage against his own will, threatened by a divinely commissioned angel with a drawn sword, lest prophecy cease, they perhaps fail to see precisely what the metaphor intimates. Orson Pratt saw and said what was intimated. Either our bodies, like the body of the prophet Joseph, were to be tabernacles toward the building of the Celestial Kingdom, or they were to be sepulchers for adultery. Gentile America refused to accept this as religion, and so as protected by the Constitution, but Gentile America, then as now, had become a country in which prophecy had ceased. When William Blake declared that one law for the ox and the lion was oppression, he prophesied the embattled stance of Brigham Young and the underground exile of John Taylor.

There have been many other religion-making imaginations in America before, contemporary with, and since Joseph Smith’s, but not one of them approached his in courage, vitality, or comprehensiveness or in so honest a realization of the consequences of a charismatic endowment. In retrospect, it is clear enough why Smith and Parley Pratt and so many other Mormons were murdered, and why the Saints were driven west from state to state, territory to territory, by a furious rabblement of endlessly violent persecutors. If Joseph Smith was a true prophet and spoke with authority, then America was nothing but a vast Sodom, rushing onward to inevitable destruction, in exile from God and from Christ’s own visit to the American continent. Mormonism today is one of the centers of the American establishment, one more exaltation of the way things are in this best of all possible societies. But Joseph Smith, for all his genial and loving nature, prophesied against the way things were in a fallen and unjust society. Biblical prophets practice a most dangerous profession and live in expectation of potential martyrdom. Joseph Smith, the most gifted and authentic of all American prophets, was too robust an American humorist not to be able to see the irony of his mixed legacy, if he returned now.

Prophecy is a difficult mode; religion-making is so impossibly difficult an adventure that no one could hope to set standards for it. On the giant scale of Mohammed’s imagination, Smith’s might be dwarfed. After all, an angel’s voice speaks the Book of Mormon, while the only voice we hear in the Koran is that of Allah himself. Smith’s Saints have survived and prospered, but they constitute perhaps 2 percent of their own nation, and a fraction of a percent of the world. I speak out of a stance separate from Christian or Islamic when I observe that Islam indubitably is closer to Mohammed’s teaching than Mormonism now is to the complete vision of Joseph Smith. History, in our country, stands neither at an origin nor at an end. The material continuity of Smith’s imaginings is assured and will endure at least as long as our nation endures. But the prophet Joseph centered on the law of consecration: the spirit and temporality were to dwell together. Mormonism is as much a separate revelation as ever Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were, and a total revelation is a kind of giant form, with dimensions somewhat beyond our faculties of discernment. Like the prior revelations, the religion of the Latter-day Saints moves on in ways both seen and unseen, and is certain only to confound our expectations.

Except for such visionaries as the Christian mystics, Jewish Kabbalists, and Islamic Sufis, there is little enough precedent in Western religion for Joseph Smith’s heroic enterprise in lessening the difference between God and man. But Smith wisely declined to live a life of continuous ecstasy. The March 1836 dedication of the Kirtland temple was unique in Joseph’s and the Saints’ history, and the prophet never sought to revive such raptures and visitations. It is as though he wished to rely more on his own authority as revelator than on peak experiences, whether communal or personal. Because Smith denied the dogma of original sin, he could regard himself as untainted by history and fully capable of reigning over the kingdom of God upon this earth.

I suspect that Joseph Smith was the source of Brigham Young’s near-identification of God, Adam, and Michael, which I earlier traced back to the same archaic Jewish traditions that gave Kabbalah the formula that Enoch was Metatron or Michael. In the imagination of Joseph Smith, five figures may have become a composite, comprising God or the Ancient of Days, Adam, Michael, Enoch, and Smith himself. Though many Mormons are now uncomfortable with their very human God, their prophet was emphatic in his insistence that God had begun as a man upon our common earth and had earned godhood through his own efforts. A God who progresses through crises has much to do with the archaic Yahweh of the Yahwist or J writer, but very little to do with the infinite and transcendent power of orthodoxy, whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. Monotheism in Israel certainly evolved from a cult in which Yahweh, though chief of gods, was surrounded by many gods, to a cult of Yahweh alone. Smith, studying the Bible, shrewdly surmised this development, and desired to restore the archaic polytheism, but only so that we, too, as Americans, might also become gods.

Latter-day Saints, however much their church may have had to stray from his paths, have been almost alone in apprehending the greatness of Joseph Smith. An entire century after the Mormon repudiation of plural marriage, their prophet remains without honor among most of his compatriots. But insofar as there is an American religion that is almost universal among us, whatever our professed beliefs, then Smith may be considered to be in many respects its unacknowledged forerunner. His imagination created a particular religion, but the contours of his imagination may mark the limits of every post-Christian spirituality in our America.

What is a valid estimate of Smith? The largest obstacle is that of the clash of two perspectives, the rest of us and the Mormons. Smith demanded to be accepted as the true, the only prophet of this latter dispensation. To the Mormons, he was, is, always will be that. By his own doctrine, he was more even than a prophet, or rather he is now doubtless a God, having progressed in the almost one hundred and fifty years since his death. Some later nineteenth-century Mormons even speculated that the pre-existent Joseph Smith had been among the beings who had helped God in the initial organization of this world. The Mormon perspective is available only to Mormons, or to those few who can imagine themselves into that people.

If one decides that Joseph Smith was no prophet, let alone king of the Kingdom of God, then one’s dominant emotion toward him must be wonder. There is no other figure remotely like him in our entire national history, and it is unlikely that anyone like him ever can come again. Most Americans have never heard of him, and most of those who have remember him as a fascinating scamp or charlatan who invented the story of the Angel Moroni and the gold plates and then forged the Book of Mormon as a follow-up. Since the Book of Mormon, more even than the King James Bible, exists in more unread copies than any other work, that is poor fame indeed for a charismatic unmatched in our history. I can think of not another American, except for Emerson and Whitman, who so moves and alters my imagination. For someone who is not a Mormon, what matters most about Joseph Smith is how American both the man and his religion have proved to be. So self-created was he that he transcends Emerson and Whitman, in my imaginative response, and takes his place with the great figures of our fiction, since at moments he appears far larger than life, in the mode of a Shakespearean character. So rich and varied a personality, so vital a spark of divinity, is almost beyond the limits of the human, as normally we construe those limits. To one who does not believe in him but who has studied him intensely, Smith becomes almost a mythology in himself. In the midst of writing this, I paused to reread Morton Smith’s remarkable Jesus the Magician (1978) and found myself rewriting the book as I went along, substituting Joseph Smith for Jesus, and Joseph Smith’s circumstances and associates for those of Jesus. No Mormon (presumably) would sanction such impiety, but it is strikingly instructive. Joseph Smith the Magician is no more or less arbitrary a figure than Morton Smith’s persuasive mythmaker.

We do not know Joseph Smith, as he prophesied that even his own could never hope to know him. He requires strong poets, major novelists, accomplished dramatists, to tell his history, and they have not yet come to him. He is as enigmatic as Abraham Lincoln, his contemporary, but even if we do not know Lincoln, we at least keep learning what it is that we cannot quite understand. But with Joseph Smith, we cannot be certain precisely what baffles us most. As an unbeliever, I marvel at his intuitive understanding of the permanent religious dilemmas of our country. Traditional Christianity suits the United States about as well as European culture does, which means scarcely at all. Our deep need for originality gave us Joseph Smith even as it gave us Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Whitman and Melville, Henry and William James, even as it gave us Lincoln, who founded our all-but-all-powerful presidency. There is something of Joseph Smith’s spirit in every manifestation of the American religion. Joseph knew that he was no part of the creation, knew that what was best and oldest in him already was God. And he knew also, more humanly, that despite his prophetic vocation and communal vision, he was essentially alone, and could experience his own spiritual freedom only in prophetic solitude.

The Yale Review is committed to publishing pieces from its archive as they originally appeared, without alterations to spelling, content, or style. Occasionally, errors creep in due to the digitization process; we work to correct these errors as we find them. You can email [email protected] with any you find.