The Relation between Revelations, Charismatic Authority and Believers

First, it is necessary to establish a theoretical framework to understand why the personal spiritual distress of Smith and Emerson led them away from established religious institutions and doctrines and towards a belief in an active and communicative God who would reveal himself to them. Weber believed that charismatic authority emerged in times of political or spiritual crisis as an absolute and extraordinary form of authority that could affect the religious as well as the secular realm. He defined charisma as

Charismatic authority is legitimized by its extraordinariness. In regard to religious authority, charisma finds its purest expression in the prophet who establishes authority based on his claim to immediate access to an ultimate, divine source, mostly through visions and revelations.Footnote ¹⁵ Weber argues that charisma, as a pure type, is disruptive as it usually entails a complete reorientation of the prevailing value system and the rejection of all forms of traditional authority. This exceptionality, however, is difficult to maintain for long. Therefore Weber believed charisma necessarily transformed itself into a more sustainable form of authority over time. Weber called this ‘a routinization of charisma’: the integration of charisma into everyday life to make it practicable.Footnote ¹⁶ Over time, charisma would transform into traditional authority, with established rituals that would help to legitimize the transfer of authority to another person or group, or even an office. The process of routinization, however, only becomes relevant once a coherent group is formed in which the leader wishes to maintain a leadership position.

Although various aspects have been criticized throughout the twentieth century, many sociologists made use of, and further developed, Weber's category, which was also transformed in the late twentieth century into a popularized form of mystical appeal on the part of influential public figures.Footnote ¹⁷ These figures were for Weber exclusively male: his failure to acknowledge and include female charismatic leaders has figured amongst the most prominent points of critique in recent years.Footnote ¹⁸ Among sociologists who looked into a broader conceptualization of charisma was Edward Shils, who critiqued ‘the “segregation” of charisma in the course of institutional establishment through its concentration into specific action, roles, or occasions, while it evaporated from the rest of the system’,Footnote ¹⁹ and argued for the possibility of charisma existing in a dispersed or more attenuated form in secular institutions where it would function as a disruptive force but could also maintain social order.Footnote ²⁰ Challenging Weber's leader-centredness, Charles Camic investigated the preconditions for charisma and their implications for different phenomena associated with it. Highlighting followers’ ‘differing extraordinary needs’ which need to be fulfilled by a prophet, Camic emphasized the agency of the disciples ‘who impute the specialness’ to the charismatic figure.Footnote ²¹ Sociologists in the 1990s then continued this trajectory of charisma as a dynamic and non-essential category which is ascribed to somebody, with Rodney Stark pointing out the reciprocal ascription processes between a charismatic figure and ‘holy families’, that is, a prophet's earliest and closest disciples,Footnote ²² in what sociologist Paul Joosse has most recently called ‘the charismatic aristocracy’.Footnote ²³ Scholars from other fields have also drawn attention to a set of character traits apparently shared among many charismatic leaders.Footnote ²⁴

Weber believed ‘charismatic inspiration’Footnote ²⁵ to be the foundation of authority but he was generally more interested in its legitimizing function than in the actual nature of the inspiration. Whether a prophet was truly inspired or a fraud did not matter to Weber as long as people recognized a prophet's inspiration as authentic and thus followed him (or his example). Thus, Weber's list of ‘classical’ examples of charismatic figures would not only include religious prophets with visions or Native American shamans, but also secular figures such as war heroes or demagogues. In a specific treatment of prophets in his Sociology of Religion (1920), however, Weber focused on the religious charismatic figure, thereby highlighting prophets who transmit revealed knowledge and distinguishing them from gurus with acquired knowledge or reformers who lack ‘that vital emotional preaching which is distinctive of prophecy, regardless of whether this is disseminated by the spoken word, the pamphlet, or any other type of literary composition’.Footnote ²⁶ What Weber described as the ‘vital emotional preaching’ is the key aspect when it comes to the dynamic relation between prophet and disciple. On the one hand, there is the prophet who feels called to communicate spiritual experience through preaching or writing; on the other hand, a receptive audience who believe in the prophet's ability to access ‘an unseen source of authority’Footnote ²⁷ is just as essential. Charisma is thus ascribed to a prophet and effectively co-created by both prophet and believers.Footnote ²⁸

While it could be argued that adopting a concept from the twentieth century and applying it to nineteenth-century figures may risk de-historicizing them, it should also be noted that there are inherent as well as historical connections between Weber's concept of charisma and these prophets that justify the application of the concept. In a footnote, Weber himself mentions Smith as a recent example of a charismatic prophet of the modern world.Footnote ²⁹ With this example in mind, it is not surprising that Smith as a prophet is in perfect accordance with Weber's subcategory of the ‘ethical prophet’. This kind of prophet serves as ‘an instrument for the proclamation of a god and his will, be this a concrete command or an abstract norm. Preaching as one who has received a commission from God, he demands obedience as an ethical duty’.Footnote ³⁰ Yet there are less obvious examples of charismatic prophets, including Emerson. Although Emerson rejected religious institutions and discouraged discipleship, he nevertheless enchanted his audience in lectures, addresses and essays with his poetically framed experiences of the divine, inviting them to follow his path to spiritual self-reliance. While this does not resemble the ‘ethical prophet’, Emerson often praised history's exceptionally gifted men and in his writings of the late 1830s he regularly assumed a pseudo-prophetic persona that strongly resembled the figure of the inspired genius. The same Romantic discourse that informed Emerson's idea of the ‘holy bard’, and thus his own performance, similarly informed Weber's category of charismatic authority, and more specifically his sub-category of the ‘exemplary man’, whose preaching ‘says nothing about a divine mission or an ethical duty of obedience, but rather directs itself to the self-interest of those who crave salvation, recommending to them the same path as he himself traversed’.Footnote ³¹ These two different types of charismatic prophets and their notions of inspiration and authority play a decisive role in determining the possibility of the community of followers taking institutional shape.

Receiving Revelations

Although he was a young, uneducated farmer, Joseph Smith assumed the powerful leadership position in one of the fastest growing new religious movements of the 1840s, based simply on his claims to be God's chosen mouthpiece. Like Emerson, Smith believed that the heavens had not been closed; God was still willing to reveal himself to his people. According to his personal account, Smith had been unable to settle with any congregation, as the revivalist spirit of most congregations had soon dissolved into sectarian strife and competition:

Frustrated by this corruption of pure religious enthusiasm, Smith reports how he randomly opened the Bible at James 1: 5: ‘If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him’, and took these words to heart. He circumvented ministerial guidance and turned to God instead to find out which church to join. In his 1838 account he remembered the vision of 1820 as follows:

Although this vision did not yet include a specific mission, it is still striking that, for Smith, communicating with God did not seem extraordinary. He was surprised by the intensity of the visitation by God and Jesus Christ, but he never doubted the reality of the vision. The content was special, not the communication itself. Smith's visions and the visionary encounters of people within the Book of Mormon were not ‘shadowy spiritual intimations’Footnote ³⁴ but what Terryl Givens calls ‘Dialogic Revelation’.Footnote ³⁵ Smith accepted revelation as a supernatural event and as the appropriate way in which God would communicate with people. Revelation had become an act of spiritual self-authorization, a practice that was available to all, regardless of their social position. By randomly opening his Bible at James 1: 5 and following God's word instead of a minister's advice, the farmer Smith had developed spiritual authority. In this initial moment of the movement, Smith democratized revelation.

By the time Emerson gave his rebellious ‘Divinity School Address’, he had already left the Unitarian ministry, had become a member of the notorious Transcendentalists, and had begun to establish his second career as a lecturer and writer.Footnote ³⁶ By leaving behind the ministerial office, he was able to overcome his spiritual crisis caused by a church which he diagnosed as marked by empty formalism and second-hand inspiration. It was obvious to him that tradition and institutionalization had slowly killed religious sentiment. He thus proposed to the young graduates, many of whom were about to enter the ministry, that they should become ‘newborn Bards of the Holy Spirit’,Footnote ³⁷ and reveal their own experience of divine truth to their future congregations.

Emerson did not wait until he had left the ministry to begin developing his concept of an eternally revealing divine spirit. Indeed, the first traces of his spiritualized idea of present-day prophecy, in the form of preaching and writing, could already be found in his sermons of the early 1830s.Footnote ³⁸ Even as a minister at Boston's Second Church, Emerson had occasionally warned against restricting divine inspiration: ‘do not confine it to one season or one gift. … [A]ll is spiritual influence, and its omnipresence excludes every superstitious distinction.’Footnote ³⁹ In the first sermon after ordination in 1829, he blamed Christianity's corruption on Christians being ‘much addicted to a few words’ and holding on ‘to phrases when the lapse of time has changed their meaning’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Restricting religious sentiment to one completed text was wrong when God would continue to reveal himself. Therefore, Emerson affirmed: ‘If to me were given that starlike vision which could see and make report how they all bear evidence to it, I cheerfully would. … It would be silly to shut myself voluntarily within a yet narrower circle, and only use a part of my pittance of truth.’Footnote ⁴¹ The egalitarian tendency of receiving divine knowledge is already visible in this passage, but what Hodder called the ‘democratization of the sacred’Footnote ⁴² becomes even more apparent when Emerson proclaimed explicitly two years later: ‘Probably all men have the same capacity of prophecy and miracle. What is prophecy but more knowledge? What is miracle but more dominion of the soul over matter than is now evinced?’Footnote ⁴³ This egalitarian tendency, however, needs to be regarded critically. Although Emerson did not explicitly exclude women or men with an ethnic minority background, his lists of ideal historical examples of inspired leaders were made up almost exclusively of white men.Footnote ⁴⁴

Like Smith, Emerson believed that humankind had separated itself from an ever-revealing God. People had stopped listening to their own soul, through which they could connect to the divine, and had turned towards worldly distractions, empty ritual and doctrines instead: ‘The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.’Footnote ⁴⁵ A distorted perception of nature had misled mankind to a distorted concept of religion. For Emerson, Jesus had been one of the few examples of exceptionally inspired prophet-poets. But most people had mistaken him for an ultimate authority and had become obsessed with the biographical Jesus, while what had been truly divine about Jesus – his immediate relation to God – had been forgotten.Footnote ⁴⁶

For Emerson, it was incomprehensible that people believed divine inspiration to have ended. He felt ‘that the need was never greater of new revelation than now [as] … [t]he Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct’.Footnote ⁴⁷ New inspiration was needed and therefore Emerson asked rebelliously: ‘Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?’Footnote ⁴⁸ Revelations were not commandments received by one person for others to obey, but transforming spiritual experiences that anyone could have. Prophets were exceptional because they had perfected their perception of the divine further than most ordinary people, but they were not essentially different. Therefore, Emerson asked

Rather than locating divine truth in something external that could be measured empirically or grasped rationally, people could use their imagination to access divine truth within the soul. Revelation, for Emerson, came to be an encounter with the sublime, a fusion of the Universal Mind with the individual mind.Footnote ⁵⁰ He believed these mystical experiences to be natural rather than supernatural. These experiences demanded an emptying out of the historical, personal self and a silencing of all the worldly noise that would constantly distract. His most cited revelation, the ‘transparent eye-ball’ passage, describes the dissolution of his body and the union of his mind with nature, when he becomes pure perception:

This passage was the climax of a highly individualized experience. If a person left tradition and external guidance behind, it was possible to reconnect to the divine. Rather than being the exceptional gift of only one prophet, revelation had been opened as an experience for all. Over time, Emerson developed his concept of revelation even further into a mode of perceiving the divine, which could and should be cultivated by everyone. In the end, the purpose of opening the soul for revelations was to help man to recover his divine potential. After all, ‘man is a god in ruins’.Footnote ⁵²

The Consequences of different Conceptions of Revelation for possible Institution Building

Both Smith and Emerson believed divine inspiration to be as real and intense as it had been at Pentecost. They even shared the idea that people (albeit ‘people’ generally implied white men) were gifted with charisma to different degrees. Despite these shared ideas, however, one crucial difference would ultimately separate them and determine the possibility of institution building within a coherent movement of believers. For Smith, the restitution of charismatic gifts, on which the (re-)establishment of the one saving church rested, entailed a sacred hierarchy. While some of Smith's closer associates, such as his wife Emma, Oliver Cowdery or David Whitmer, occasionally received authoritative revelations themselves (mostly in the company of Smith), Smith occupied an exceptional position from the very beginning of the movement.Footnote ⁵³ He was not one visionary coexisting among many. Instead, he was the divine vessel, chosen by God and not elected by fellow believers, to preside over the new church.

As a result, revelations articulated by Smith correlate with the divine commandments of Weber's ‘ethical prophet’. The doctrines Smith received were meant to lead believers into the one redeeming church. Unlike Emerson's individualized practice of spiritual seeking, Smith's concept of revelation included a God who was sending specific orders to reinstate God's only true church. Once that true church had been established, authoritative revelations were relocated within that sacred order. In the revelation given to Smith at the formation of the church, on 6 April 1830, God did not send a divine message of equality but first and foremost revealed Smith's divinely sanctioned superior position within the new institution. Smith was to be ‘a seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle of Jesus Christ, an elder of the church through the will of God the Father’.Footnote ⁵⁴ By divine commandment, Smith immediately occupied the highest position in order to lead humanity towards salvation although, at least theoretically, the same Spirit could speak through all members. God had sanctioned Smith's revelatory superiority and ordered all believers to ‘give heed unto all his words and commandments which he shall give unto you as he receiveth them, walking in all holiness before me; For his word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Revelation was reified as a hierarchy.

Smith established his position as the charismatic leader of a new church, but his ability to do so was not based simply on the visions he had received.Footnote ⁵⁶ The essential foundation for the new church was his new sacred writing, the Book of Mormon. For Smith, everything related to the production of this additional Bible – including recovering and hiding the gold plates and translation instruments, translating the text, enduring persecution and ridicule by neighbours, and suffering chastisement by God when he failed – served to establish his charismatic authority because it related the production to a specific mission. To recover this text and publish it was the first step towards an ecclesiastical institution for what previously had been a visionary movement. In the early years of the movement, the Book of Mormon thus acted as a ‘signifier’,Footnote ⁵⁷ as Givens has argued. It became the key identification marker for the early converts and separated believers from unbelievers. Thus Smith's prophetic persona was intricately linked to this new sacred writing.

Yet successful institutionalization did not only rest on additional revelation of scripture. Instead, what we find is a dynamic interplay between new revelations and the ordering of structures on the institutional level, which helped sustain charismatic gifts as a vital source in Mormonism without threatening the survival of the church. These ordering structures often developed from further revelations and they helped secure Smith's own authority as first prophet of the church. A case in point would be the revelation, now recorded as D&C 28, given through Smith to his close associate Cowdery in September 1830 in response to the confrontation with Hiram Page, who challenged Smith's exclusive revelatory authority when claiming to have received new revelations with the help of seer stones.Footnote ⁵⁸

Even before the formation of the church, Smith began to reinstate ancient priesthoods through baptismal rites that helped institutionalize the movement. Over the years, more sacred rites would be added, transforming the church into a complex system of various priesthoods and offices. But while on an organizational level Smith would distribute executive power into different offices, councils and conferences, additional divine instructions eventually transformed him into the ‘Prophet, Priest & King’ of a quasi-theocracy in Nauvoo on 11 April 1844.Footnote ⁵⁹ By then, only high-ranking church officials could reveal divine communications with authority binding on others. Several historians have therefore argued that from 1830 onwards, when the Book of Mormon was published and the church officially organized, we can no longer speak of Mormonism as an anti-clerical, democratized movement, because Smith had already begun to implement complex power structures.Footnote ⁶⁰ Michael MacKay's proposed term ‘hierarchical democracy’ most fittingly describes the tension between Smith's leadership as a ‘type of theological king’ and an ecclesiastical system in which power was diffused among chosen church leaders.Footnote ⁶¹

In Weberian terms, charisma had been routinized with the effect that it

True democratization of charisma was therefore only present in the initial moment of movement building in Mormonism when an uneducated farmer claimed to have received divine commands to restore an ancient sacred order. Once the process of church organization had begun, revelation with comprehensive authority over all believers could only come from within the ecclesiastical order, which, from the mid-1800s until 1978, was reserved for white men.Footnote ⁶³

In contrast, Emerson would have abhorred the idea of locating the gift of revelation within a new church. He asked: ‘What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a new Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me in vain.’Footnote ⁶⁴ For him, the mistake was to establish religion in any kind of institutional form, as all institutions would eventually restrain an individual's spiritual practice. To capture the religious sentiment within a church would always kill the divine element. To establish something as authoritative was to fix it, but the divine Spirit could not be fixed. However divinely inspired a prophet or text may be, they could never claim exclusive possession of all sacred knowledge, as divine truth would continue to be revealed and therefore could not be fully presented in one book by one church. New revelation would appear constantly, making the whole concept of authoritative sacred writing obsolete. Only the act of recording divine communication, or, in Emerson's poetic view, the act of ‘scripturalizing’ could be regarded as sacred. A new scripture could never be completed. Therefore Emerson neither advocated the fixing of new divine revelation in a new Bible nor encouraged the foundation of a new ‘Emersonian’ church.

Still, a prophetic element remains in Emerson's writings of the 1830s. He shared his experiences of the divine with a perceptive audience through his published writing. Although he presented his experiences only as examples of a way towards spiritual truth and not as a dictation of religious practice, he nevertheless assumed a pseudo-prophetic tone at times to lament the brokenness of the human soul and seemed to encourage others to follow his example of spiritual reversal. Recalling charisma's attributive nature, a group of disciples ascribed ‘post-life charisma’Footnote ⁶⁵ to their spiritual teacher Emerson. While some enthusiastic followers attempted to establish Emerson as a Western prophet at interreligious gatherings, the ‘Poughkeepsie Seer’ Andrew Jackson Davis actively tried to sacralize the wisdom of Emerson, ‘one of the inspired Scripturalists of this century’,Footnote ⁶⁶ in his ‘Gospel of St Ralph’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Emerson, however, never explicitly declared himself to be a prophet. Instead, he pointed towards history's more spiritually gifted people, who could act as inspiring teachers to show humanity how to reconnect with the divine, and he prophesied that many more would follow. These past and future prophet-poets acted as ‘liberating gods’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet the only way to divine revelation was through the cultivation of the individual soul through first-hand experiences of the divine rather than subjection to past genius.