No Man Knows My History

Fawn M. Brodie's NO MAN KNOWS MY HISTORY: THE LIFE OF JOSEPH SMITH -- THE MORMON PROPHET is justly celebrated. It comes early in an evolving 20th century historical tradition recently exemplified by Yale Professor Frank M. Turner's hotly debated studies of Cardinal John Henry Newman. In what some call "new history," an historical figure like Joseph Smith or John Henry Newman produces an autobiography. Hagiographers from the figure's own church (Mormon, Roman Catholic) may then tend to take their hero's own description of himself as definitive, "Gospel." Any criticism of a favorite Saint by carping sinners is then discounted. Not so with New Historians. For them a Newman, a Smith, a Churchill, a Nixon speaks but one voice among many contemporaries looking at the subjects' lives, works and reputations. Like Turner's Newman, Brodie's Smith is and must be evaluated from many points of views, not all flattering ***

Smith (1805 - 1844) is seen as a product of his growing up years in America, especially in New York. It was a time of religious dissolution in which prophets flourished and the second coming of Jesus was widely expected in the 1830s and 1840s. But before he was the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith was a man of limited formal education, possessed of perhaps the most fertile imagination before Franz Kafka and latterly a voracious, eclectic, increasingly well-informed reader and a prodigious yarn-spinner. For years Smith also dabbled in searching for buried treasure (Spanish, Indian) through necromancy. He read signs and mysterious texts through a powerful stone. His transition from magic to religion was not abrupt. ***

Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon borrowed lavishly from ideas in the air about the coming of ancestors of red Indians to North America. He also drew upon Scriptural language and recurring phases like "and it came to pass" from the King James's translation. What is original in his various religious writings contains nothing so exalted as the greatest passages of Isaiah or the Gospels. Joseph Smith did not formulate as new and exalted a religious vision as Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. What he did do, in Brodie's judgment, was create a well-conceived and organized church with a defined, active, contributing role for every member. Before God was God, He had been a man, in constant motion towards getting better and better in every way. Joseph Smith assured his followers that they too were meant to follow in God's footsteps. His was a religion of joy, optimism and blessing of earthly pleasures. ***

Mrs Brodie's prose is memorable. Her research, though in many ways long since overtaken, was impressive for its time and in the teeth of a church tradition among some of limiting access to their prophet's human shortcomings. A most impressive piece of historical writing. -OOO-