First Vision

Steven C. Harper's bookFirst Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins is, if nothing else, perfectly titled. The book is like none other of the dozens written over the years about what Latter-day Saints call “the first vision.” To this point, authors interested enough to take up the subject have done so out of a variety of motives, which in turn have predictably produced an equally various collection of writings. The most common motives, of course, were, and remain, the apologetic and critical (what used to be known as the “anti-Mormon”). Harper demonstrates, with admirable lightness of touch, the fundamental, categorical mistake shared by both of these approaches: their entire conceits are tied to old ideas of logical positivism. Stated plainly, logical positivism is the idea that a reconstructable past exists, and if historians search long enough, with sufficient diligence, they will be able to put the past back together. Such an idea has persisted longer in the history of religions than in other fields, largely due to the nature of religious truth claims. The natural next move away from logical positivism, that is from trying to reconstruct an objective “past,” is to start looking at the construction of “history.”Thus defined, history is the production of a narrative symbol that represents the past, constrained by the availability of textual evidence and shaped by the subjectivities of both the creators of the archival traces and the historians constructing the narrative. Harper's book draws on yet another set of theoretical steps that historians have taken: those dealing with the role of memory in the creation of history. Harper's book therefore deals with memory at all levels of generalization, from the memory of the individual to the shared memory of cultures. He tells the story of how a single event produced a web of memories and, most interesting, the story of which of these competing memories came to prevail in the minds of Latter-day Saints collectively.Harper takes the basic concepts of memory studies and applies them to the creation of the historical narrative of what is now known as “the first vision,” which is a theophany described by Joseph Smith in which he saw and spoke with divine beings. The identity and number of these beings, as well as other details, vary with the different recitations of the event given by Joseph Smith and others.Although incisive and useful, the fundamentals of memory studies are not complicated for readers to understand, and Harper does a nice job of avoiding the swamp of theoretical jargon. The basic idea is that an event occurs, during which time it exists as itself per se. Once the event is over, however, it no longer exists outside of the memory of human beings. Human memory, scientists have discovered, is not a recording device. Rather, it essentially recreates a memory each time that particular memory is evoked. This reconstruction inevitably integrates into the memory elements that were not there when the memory was first formed. To illustrate this, simply consider the common phenomenon of not being able to separate a memory of an event from a photo or video depiction of that event. Do you really remember wearing your pink hat when you rode the pony on your fifth birthday? Or do you remember it because of the picture that hangs on the wall in your parents’ home? The upshot of these lessons is that memory is dynamic.Throughout the book, Harper uses a minimum of technical language to frame his discussion of memory studies, but he is obliged to include some. These include terms like “formation,” “re-formation,” “memory consolidation,” “memory recursion,” “memory cues,” “memory buffers,” “contingent variables,” and “selector/relator” figures. One of the few critiques I have of the book is that these and other technical terms are not placed in a handy glossary to which the reader can return when the terms are used. But it is to Harper's credit that he restrains the powerful urge to include more jargon as a way to gain credibility.So, what does any of this have to do with the first vision? Quite a bit, it turns out. Book reviews never do justice to their subjects, and this book is unusually complex, compounding the problem of summarizing. But let's look at a few key points that Harper hits on repeatedly. First, he argues that the received version of the first vision—the one memorized by missionaries and known by most Latter-day Saints and canonized in Joseph Smith's History, the one that Joseph Smith recited and included in his 1838–39 history—is not “inevitable.” That is, there are a plethora of historical contingencies, most of them randomly determined, that resulted in that particular memory of the first vision becoming the most dominant among all the many collective memories of the event. There were two chief reasons, according to Harper, that this particular version took pride of place. First, it was the version Apostle Orson Pratt favored. Pratt was, arguably, the most influential Mormon thinker and theologian of the second half of the nineteenth century. He not only coined the term “first vision” in 1849, but he spent nearly four decades “tag[ging] the [1838–39] vision story in the saints’ [sic] memory in a way that made it the specific referent in the otherwise general narrative of apostasy and restoration” (75–76). Pratt found in this particular version of the memory a way to legitimize the foundation of his own theological speculation: the materiality of God. His incessant campaign not only convinced Pratt's theological ally John Taylor and his intellectual protégé Joseph F. Smith of the central importance of the 1838–39 version but also persuaded even his frequent theological jousting opponent Brigham Young to accept it as the standard narrative. All of this culminated in the 1880 canonization of this version in the Pearl of Great Price.But there was another, somewhat coincidental, reason that made this version especially potent in the 1870s and 1880s. This brings us to another of Harper's key insights: the process of initial recitation, or relation, is heavily influenced by the context in which that relation occurs. The 1838–39 version was delivered at the height of Mormon conflict in Missouri. This version of the first vision was the result of Smith's “mind [being] cued to search the past for the origins of persecution” (17). Harper concludes, “this combination of Smith's past and present consolidated a defensive, resolute memory in which reporting his first vision catalyzed his lifetime of persecution” (18). Naturally, this posture was appealing to Latter-day Saint faithful who were facing increasingly effective persecution via prosecution for their practice of plural marriage. The canonized version of the vision thus became more than a memory: it was a touchstone, an anchor, a collective boundary marker that “consolidated their collective memory in the context of their quest to maintain their identity against intense pressure” (95).One of the great strengths of this book is that it does not flinch when it comes to the current controversy surrounding accusations that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has actively attempted to suppress non-canonical versions of the first vision, and that this has led to the disaffection of younger generations of Latter-day Saints. By very early in the twentieth century, thanks to factors as diverse as the artwork featured in the Salt Lake Temple and the championing of the canonized vision by then-Church President Joseph Smith, many who knew the story of Joseph Smith's 1838–39 version “were unlikely to know the origins or circumstances” of its composition and the history of its ascendancy to become the version (119). By the 1950s, Latter-day Saints at all levels of prominence were therefore jarred by discovery of other versions. Harper bluntly, and correctly, states that Joseph Fielding Smith figuratively, and sometimes literally, slammed the door in the faces of anyone who wanted to know about anything other than the official version. This placed the LDS Church in the difficult position of having to defend itself against those who would use the existence of multiple versions of the first vision account to try to prove that Joseph Smith was a fraud and his was church a sham. In fact, it was a critic of the church, the Reverend Wesley Walters, that provoked a re-evaluation of the first vision in its historical context. But despite work by such eminent scholars as Richard Bushman and Truman Madsen, very little changed in the church's posture toward how it taught the first vision.It was not until the age of the Internet, when “the LDS Church could no longer quarantine information about the vision,” that real changes began to take place (240). Faithful, mostly young, devoted members of the church faced real faith crises not only over the existence of various versions of the vision, but also over the sense that they had been somehow deceived by the church they loved, served, and trusted. Among the most famous of these dealt with in the book is Jeremy Runnells and his now-ubiquitous “Letter to a CES Director,” but he was far from the only example.1This brings us back to the beginning of this review. What is memory? The church's official media, whether film, text, or any other medium, is beginning to admit that many versions of the first vision exist, and incorporate details from the versions in a sort of harmonization (a problematic practice that deserves more space than we have). It is also moving away from the logical-positivist stance that one, and only one, version could be “true.” In a beautiful and stark way, Harper ends his book by noting that “the most surprising lesson of [the history of the memories of the first vision] is not how Latter-day Saints . . . have remembered . . . but how quickly a group can forget” (261).I earlier mentioned one small critique of Harper's book, and here I will offer another. While he approaches Joseph Smith's memories of his first supernatural encounter armed with all of the weapons of current memory study, Harper does not do the same with another important event: Smith's alleged confession of his experience to a local minister, who reacted negatively and immediately dismissed the event as impossible at best, and diabolical at worst. Harper treats this memory as solidly anchored, somehow immune to all of the other vicissitudes that plague and shape historical memory more generally. I do not fault Harper for this. As someone who has been working and publishing on Mormonism and collective memory for nearly twenty years, it is my considered opinion that this is the weakness of almost all work on collective historical memory. Followed to its logical conclusion, without some anchoring event treated uncritically, the possibility of historical narrative dissolves. This problem has yet to be solved, but work like Harper's certainly makes it less relevant

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