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The Secret History of Mormonism Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CGU Faculty Publications and Research CGU Faculty Scholarship 1-1-1996 The ecrS et History of Mormonism Richard Bushman Claremont Graduate University Recommended Citation Bushman, Richard L. “The eS cret History of Mormonism,” Sunstone 19.1 (March 1996), 66-70. This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the CGU Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in CGU Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SUNSTONE Book of Mormon spoke of an old Bible from THE SECRETHISTORY which Smith and Oliver Cowdery contrived their account. Alexander Campbell said the OF MORMONISM Book of Mormon tried to answer all the theo- logical controversies that had troubled New ~o;k for the past ten years. Nineteenth-cen- THE REFINER'S FIRE: THE MAKING OF tury editions of Roget's Thesaurus linked MORMON COSMOLOGY, 1644-1844 Joseph Smith's revelations with Mohammed by John L. Brooke and false prophets. In the twentieth century Cambridge University Press, 1994 anti-Masonry was brought into the picture. In more recent years, the influence of primi- xix+421 pages, $34.95 tivist restorationism, republicanism, and magic have all received book-length treat- THE JOURNALS OF WILLIAM E. MCLELLIN, 1831-1836 ments by serious historians, and Harold edited by Jan Shipps and John W Welch Bloom has offered a gnostic Joseph Smith who, by dint of pure genius, recovered cabal- BYU Studies and University of Illinois Press, 1994 istic religion for nineteenth-century xxi+520 pages, $29.95 Americans. Brigham Young University scholars have discovered an extensive, intri- cate, and detailed context in ancient Israelitish and Middle Eastern culture. Now, in an ambitious and erudite reading of Mormon culture from the beginning to the present, John Brooke throws still more ingre- dients into the mix: first, hermeticism (the Reviewed by Richard L Bushman agglomeration of alchemy, Platonism, Gnosticism, and Egyptian theology that flourished in the Renaissance), and, second, the Radical Reformation, with its millennial, restorationist, and other doctrines. Though with The admitting that his is not "a well-rounded ap- wefilly read proach," Brooke claims that the first of these, Refiner's Fire because they hermeticism, explains "the inner logic of Mormon theology" (xvii). The Radical Reformation tradition, which includes Anabaptists, Quakers, and many other sects on the fringes of the ~a~isterial Reformation, is the better known and, in Brooke's telling, the lesser of the two influ- ences. Though elaborately worked out and HE HUNDREDS OF thousands of effect. That fact makes us think differently ingeniously formulated by Brooke, radical new converts added each year to the about his place in history. Why did ideas are familiar in their general outlines. Tnine million Mormons who now Mormonism survive, while hundreds of Millenarianism, for one, has received full comprise The Church of Jesus Christ of movements withered away, and then go on to treatment by Grant Underwood. Moreover, Latter-day Saints are a phenomenon of the outgrow all the other survivors? Harold when ~rookenarrates Mormon history, he present that changes the understanding of Bloom, noted literary critic and recent com- downplays the Radical Reformation. He gives the past. Joseph Smith might easily be dis- mentator on American religion, has called considerable space to tracing radical groups missed as another religious eccentric in a Joseph Smith an authentic religious genius. like the Connecticut Rogerenes through time of chaotic religious creativity had the This extravagant assessment, which would eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mormons not persisted and flourished. But have drawn laughter and scorn in 1844, has New England, but when he gets to of all the visionaries and sectarian leaders to be taken seriously a century and a half Mormonism itself, radical influences recede. who formed new religions and communal after hi death, in light of the millions who In Brooke's view. radical doctrines con- orders in the 1830s and 1840s,Joseph Smith still regard him as a prophet. Joseph Smith tributed to ~ormonism,but did not shape its had the longest-lasting and most widespread now requires serious explanation. inner logic. Brooke thinks radical beliefs af- Beginning with the earliest revelations, in- fected the first few years, but after 1831 RJCHARD BUSHMAN is the author of Joseph terested observers have tried to "situate" added only details. His chief interest in the Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism and Mormonism culturally in an effort to explain radical sects is that they were open to the most recently The Refinement of America: the remarkable texts that nowed from Joseph hermeticism that he sees at Mormonism's Persons, Houses, Cities. He is Gouverneur Smith's mind. Where did the revelations center. Morris professor of history at Columbia come from, what background illuminates The Refiner's Fire can be read as an exten- University. their meaning? The first hostile readers of the sion of the scholarship on hermeticism that PAGE 66 MARCH 1996 SUNSTONE has appeared over the past thirty years, ever faithful would become gods. These parallels followers, and incidents of everyday life since Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the lead Brooke to argue that Mormonism moved Joseph to seek answers which then Hermetic Traditions (1964) reawakened in- should be understood as more of an hermetic grew in unforeseen directions, blossoming terest in the influence hermeticism had from restoration than a return to ~rimitive into emlications of doctrine that went far be- the Renaissance to the seventeenth century. Christianity yond the original stimulus. In a sense, Joseph The name "hermeticism" comes from Having heard presentations by Brooke be- Smith as revelator could be said to have had a Hermes Trismegistus, purportedly a divine fore reading The Refiner's Fire, and knowing green thumb: from the smallest seed he grew being whose revelations claimed to precede Lance Owens's scholarship on the Jewish ka- mustard trees. Moses but who is thought to be, in reality, a ballah, a related set of mystical teachings, I For the most part, however, we have creation of second- and third-century gnos- was prepared to look favorably on the rela- thought that the scriptural and doctrinal tics who fused Greek and Egyptian ideas. tionship of hermeticism and ~ormonism.' stimuli to inquire of God came from within The Florentine Cosimo Medici acquired a The idea of placing Mormonism against a the bounds of Protestantism. Mormonism collection of hermetic writings, the Corpus background different from standard has been understood as one variant of the Hermeticum, in Macedonia in 1460 and or- Protestant orthodoxy appealed to me. widespread Protestant impulse to restore dered his court scholar Marsilio Ficino to Although Mormons believe that Joseph primitive Christianity But what if, I specu- work on them. Recent scholarship has Smith received revelations directly from God, lated, orthodox Protestantism was too con- demonstrated the wide influence of hermeti- there is no denying that many of his ideas are fined to serve as a basis for the entire cism throughout Europe thereafter. Brooke not new. Other Christians taught faith and restoration? What if some of heaven's truths briefly recapitulates these studies and shows repentance, atonement through the sacrifice reached beyond the bounds of this single tra- how hermeticism's reach extends into eight- of Jesus Christ, resurrection, the promise of a dition, this one way of reading the Bible? eenth- and early nineteenth-century second coming, and so on. The revelations How refreshing it would be to discover an- America, right do& to the Smith family ln took ideas that were familiar to Christians other religious tradition, wherein other seeds America, the most complete expressions of and clarified them, or gave them new of religious truth could be found by a hermeticism occurred at the Ephrata meaning, as well as offering startlingly new prophet with a green thumb. Mormon Cloister, a German religious community of stories and doctrines. The gospel was both schblars who know kabbalah, hermeticism, mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, and new and everlasting. Robert Matthews has and the associated pursuits of alchemy have in Royal Arch Freemasonry, which had chap- suggested that retranslating the Bible felt sympathy for some of their doctrines. ters in many early nineteenth-century prompted Joseph Smith to seek elucidation, Why couldn't Joseph receive a spiritual stim- American towns. Drawing on hermeticism's which led to many new revelations growing ulus from this alternate source, thus ex- connections to alchemy, Brooke hints that out of biblical texts. The teachings of the reli- panding the boundaries of the Restoration? counterfeiters, miners, and virtually anyone gious world around him, questions from his So 1 began the perusal of The Refiner's Fire who mentioned the word "goldn could have transmitted hermetic secrets, although he eventually concludes that such shadowy fig- ures drew upon a "thin vein" (93). Brooke's primary reason for thinking her- meticism must have been transmitted to Mormonism is that he sees similarities to the mature teachings of Joseph Smith: (1) Hermetic philosophy taught that matter emerged from the divine spirit at creation, forming the great division of spirit and matter, along with other divisions such as light and dark, fire and water, and male and female. Mormonism taught that there is no such thing as immaterial matter; spirit is a re- fined form of matter. (2) Hermeticism sought the reunion of spirit and matter through the analogy of an alchemical mamage, the coni- unctio. Mormonism made celestial mamage a requirement for exaltation. (3) The goal of hermeticism was to recover divine power and perfection ("divinization" is Brooke's word). Mormonism promised that the MARCH 1996 PAGE 67 - - >.
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