Harold Bloom on Joseph Smith

LDS Affirming University of Utah speech Nov 15 1990

Joseph Smith having a sit down discussion with Harold Bloom courtesy of Chat-GTP

The following is a transcript of a speech given by Harold Bloom, Famous literary critic and Stirling Professor¹ of Humanities at Yale (Their highest office/title.) One might say that this speech is a somewhat obscure document, but one that I think LDS readers will appreciate as faith affirming. (I spend so much time criticizing that I think it’s only fair that I put out some information that is on the nicer-side - particularly if I want to stay married!)

Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale University.^[1] In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world".^[2] After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books,^[3] including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm.^[4][5] Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.^[6]

Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "School of Resentment" (which included multiculturalism, feminism, Marxism, and other ideologies).^[7][8] He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

This one is for the LDS readers. Underlining and Exclamation marks were added by the person (Donna Neilson²) who published the transcription. I (LEE) have not edited it in any way.

Transcript

PROF. HAROLD BLOOM, Yale University, The Annual David P. Gardner Lecture Kingsbury Hall, University of Utah, Nov. 15, 1990, (typescript from tape by Paul Cracroft)

It has become something of a commonplace to observe that modern Mormonism tends to reduce itself to another Protestant sect, another Christian heresy, while the religion of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Parley and Orson Pratt and other leading early Mormons was a far more radical swerve away from Protestant tradition.

Nineteenth Century Mormonism in its deepest implications had the same relation to Christianity that early Christianity had to Judaism³. Such an assertion, made by many scholars of Mormonism, is unassailable, but I do not desire to explore its complexities here. Instead, I want to return to the imaginative origins of the Mormon religion, to the visions and conceptions of God experienced and thought by Joseph Smith.

As a Jewish Gnostic, I am in no position to judge Joseph Smith as a Revelator, but as a student of the American imagination, I observe that his achievement as national prophet and seer is clearly unique in our history. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were great writers, Jonathan Edwards and Horace Bushnell major theologians, William James a superb psychologist and all these are crucial figures in the spiritual history of our country.

Joseph Smith did not excel as a writer or as a theologian, let alone as psychologist and philosopher, but he was an authentic religious genius and surpassed all Americans, before or since, in the possession and expression of what could be called "the religion-making imagination."

Even the force of Brigham Young's genius for leadership and the heroic intensity of the early Mormon people could not have assured the survival of the new religion. There had to be an immense power of the myth-making imagination at work to sustain so astonishing an innovation. That power, when it appears, invariably manifests itself in the phenomenon that the sociologist, Max Weber, taught us to call "charisma."

To ponder Joseph Smith's imagination we need to begin by considering the charismatic element in his personality, the singular aura that attended him. We have debased the word "glamour," as we have the word "charm," and so we fell back upon the word "charisma"... in English a rather odd blend of theology and sociology ... when we need a term for the element that marks a prophet and seer ... the element in which the marvelously gifted Joseph Smith lived and moved and had his being, until, at last and inevitably, he was martyred, not so much for having offended American democracy or our national sexual morality but for having been rather too dangerously charismatic.

In that one respect Smith resembled Aaron Burr, a purely political charismatic whose vision of a western empire in America paralleled the dream of power that Brigham Young only barely failed to make actual. But Burr is now part of the American picturesque, a kind of novelistic shadow hovering in our remote past. Joseph Smith is a vital part of the American sublime, very much here in the Mormon presence, even if his believers, for now, have chosen their own kind of patient version of what we might call "the Japanese option," deferring the imperial dream in favor of economic triumph. [Laughter]

If there is already in place any authentic version of the American religion, then, as Tolstoy himself surmised, it must be Mormonism, whose future as yet may prove decisive for the nation and perhaps for more than this nation alone. But that again returns us to the charismatic personality of Joseph Smith and to the religion-making genius that was his imagination and that gave his followers the design for their quest

Max Weber defined charisma as a supernatural or divine power that a prophet manifested in miracles, basing the word upon its' early Christian meaning of a gift or grace that healed or else spoke in tongues. Camille Paglia in her recent masterwork, Sexual Personae, questions Weber's reliance upon external deeds and sees charisma as a pre-Christian glamour, citing Kenneth Burke's point that "glamour" originally was a Scottish word meaning "a magical haze in the air around a favored person."

The powerful sexual reductiveness of this definition necessarily produces distortions when applied to the personality of any prophet whatsoever. Yet no one can study the portraits of Joseph Smith or read descriptions of him by his contemporaries, even his enemies, 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. Despite 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 Muhammed 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 for 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 extraordinary 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 or "J" Writer, 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 re-capture of crucial elements in the archaic Jewish religion, elements evaded by normative Judaism and by the Christian. church after it.