Joseph Smith's Re-Vision-ing of the First Vision

I don't have a lot of time to thoroughly flesh this out right now, so it is just going to be a series of notes and thoughts.

Some of the premises I want to begin with are:

1. Joseph and his contemporaries' understanding of visions and "seeing" did not necessarily mean seeing with physical eyes (stimulus of the retinas with physical light)--seeing with one's "spiritual eyes" or "mind's eye" were just as real to them as seeing with physical eyes.

2. Joseph's revelations in the D&C involved Joseph putting his impressions into a first person voice. They were not dictations of an audible (sound vibrations entering the ear) voice. In other words, the primary content of the revelations were not the dictated words, but were rather impressions. The first first person voice was Joseph's projection of those impressions.

3. Joseph did not live at a time when one's past words, acts, and images are readily available for review and maintenance of one's memory. Today we constantly have written notes, photos, facebook walls, journals, etc to help us remember things we experienced, saw, and said. Joseph did not have most of those things, and much of what he recorded wasn't actually written by him. Furthermore, there is no evidence that he did any serious systemic theological contemplations. Rather his revelations and explorations seem to have been rather off the cuff, without attempts to merge them with previous (especially older) theological claims.

4. We make a much bigger deal about the First Vision than Joseph ever intended, forcing certain assumptions on him and his experience.



Some explanations:

1. In the folk-magic world of Joseph, it was fairly common for people to see things with their "mind's eye" or "spiritual eyes." I imagine it was something similar to when I picture my wife's face "in my head," when someone asks me to spell something and I "see" the word in front of me as I read off the letters, or if someone describes a tall tree standing alone in a wide open park and I "see" that tree in my imagination. Whatever the case, it is clear that for Joseph and his contemporaries it was perfectly normal to "see" things that were not seen with one's physical eyes. D&C 76 is a record of Joseph and Sidney Rigdon "seeing" many things, while others watched them staring at a fireplace. Consider the language of Lehi's vision in 1 Nephi: "And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God." Later he equates visions with dreams: "And it came to pass that while my father tarried in the wilderness he spake unto us, saying: Behold, I have dreamed a dream; or, in other words, I have seen a vision." While today we might readily distinguish things we see with our eyes and see with our heads, for Joseph and many of his contemporaries they were just viable ways to see things. In fact, Martin Harris reportedly claimed that his witnessing of the golden plates were done with his spiritual eyes and not physical eyes, and were thus even more valuable as a witness.

2. In looking at the recently published Book of Commandments and Revelations (in The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations: Manuscript Revelation Books), it has become readily apparent that the revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants were not dictations of an audible voice (as Grant Underwood puts it, Joseph was not a fax machine), but were rather Joseph's attempts to give a voice to the spiritual impressions he was receiving. This is even more apparent when one considers the fact that Joseph went through and made several edits and changes to those revelations--which would have been a bit odd if those were actual dictated words of God/Jesus. If Joseph is giving (and "hearing") words that are his own projections from spiritual impressions, is it that different from him giving (and "seeing") images that are his own projections from spiritual impressions?

3. Much of what I write, say, and do are remembered by me because of my written record, philosophical contemplations, and photographed images. Without those things my memory would be much more malleable and subjective to new experiences and lapsing memories (my wife can attest to this already). Without many of these aids, how aware was Joseph of his own past theological claims, accounts, and revelations? How fixed were they? I contend that they were not that fixed--not only that, but on occasion he would claim something was fixed when we can historically show that they were not (see, for example, his claim that he has always taught the plurality of gods). This is further problematized when what is remembered is not a physical experience, but something more akin to a dream.

4. It wasn't until the early 20th century that the First Vision had the foundation role for the Church that it has today. While it was fairly well known by the end of mid-late 19th century, the story for Mormonism still largely began with the visitation of Moroni. Today Mormons treat the FV as if Joseph Smith left the grove knowing that the Father and Jesus were two distinct embodied personages and that Joseph had a fairly clear grasp of what he would later teach and do. Historically, this does not seem to be the case. Joseph, himself, said little of the experience and, even after briefly mentioning the FV, still told his own prophetic story beginning with Moroni's visit.

And now some conclusions/speculations I am drawing from these premises:

1. Joseph did not physically see God (or anything). If someone happened upon Joseph Smith when he received the vision, they would have seen a 14 year old boy staring up into the trees. Rather than seeing the divine with his physical (natural) eyes, he saw them with his spiritual eyes, with his "mind's eye," and in his head--something that would have been completely natural for him and his contemporaries--and just as real as seeing them with his physical eyes.

2. Just as Joseph's dictated revelations were his putting a voice to a spiritual impression. His vision was his putting an image to the powerful spiritual experience he had in the grove. His seeing God and/or Jesus was not the content of his spiritual experience, but rather his seeing--his vision--was a projection or vision-ing of a deep spiritual experience.

3. Just as with my own spiritual experiences, Joseph's understanding of what happened, and what he visioned, in the grove was not fixed. There was no photograph, recorder, or journal record to solidify his experience. He apparently didn't even tell many of the experience, but instead kept it to himself. Without talking about and recording a memory it remained malleable. The malleability of the experience is further complicated when it is not a memory of something physically seen, but a memory of a spiritual experience and internal vision. Because at what was at the heart of Joseph's experience in the grove was a spiritual experience and not a visual experience, how he would later vision (or re-vision) that experience would change and evolve with experiences and new spiritual impressions that changed and evolved his understanding of God and his own mission. When Joseph was primarily concerned about his own and his family's salvation, he visioned the experience as a communion with Jesus and a confirmation of his forgiveness; later when he was concerned with his role in the Church and had a new understanding of God he re-visioned his experience as a meeting with two persons and a confirmation of his prophetic duties. Different accounts of the vision occur because they are simply different visions projected from a common experience.

4. We unfairly place expectations and demands on Joseph's First Vision. While our use of his 1838 account may represent how he understood that experience at that time (though there is evidence that he did not write it himself), we cannot force his other visions of that experience to comply with this one. Each account is its own vision (his own re-vision-ing) of a powerful experience he had as a teen in a grove of trees. How did he vision it that day? Did he vision Jesus forgiving him of his sins? Did he vision God? Did he vision two personages with a plan for him? Did he vision God, Jesus, and angels? Or was it just a pillar of fire? Whatever it was that he visioned, it at least seems clear to me that he left the grove with a powerful private knowledge that he was loved by God--and perhaps that is all that should really be at the heart of his first visions.