Debating the Mormon Theology of Spirits

Posted on November 3, 2009
Filed Under Religion | 5 Comments

35AB14A7-AD04-425F-8D52-86BA5D771118.jpgOver at NCT Geoff has up a pretty good discussion of the theology of spirits in Joseph Smith’s thought. I think the comments went pretty well, although as is common there the volume gets a bit high. (Comment 77 and counting at the moment)

The basic debate is over the meaning of spirits in Joseph’s thought. What most Mormons tend to think of as the nature of humans actually arises fairly late with B. H. Roberts. Roberts was trying to synthesize a lot of writings from the 19th century, the scriptures, and then his own philosophical writings. Many of the people Roberts read held to a Cartesian or quasi-Cartesian mind. (This is fairly explicit in the books he wrote) So for Roberts you have a roughly Cartesian mind called an intelligence which is uncreated and co-eternal with God. You then have a spirit body into which the intelligence is born. This spirit is material, but unlike the material we have now. Then you have our regular body now.

However if you go back to what Joseph wrote about spirits he tends to use intelligence, soul, and spirit roughly as synonymous. So many, such as Blake Ostler, argue they are the same. The question is what this spirit is like.

There end up being two key issues (which I think are ultimately unresolvable).

One does a spirit have parts? If it does you end up with a tripartite model, albeit unlike B. H. Roberts. (Probably something closer to Orson Pratt’s who had spirits as organized out of spiritual atoms which are traditional 19th century atoms but with property dualism such that they are intelligent of a sort – sort of a materialistic form of Leibniz’ monads)

Two is a spirit a mind or does it have a mind? This is arguably the key issue. Just because Joseph used the terms roughly synonymously I don’t think it follows he treated them as fully equivalent.

There is one more issue regarding the nature of a spirit. Now for Joseph (and most Mormons) spirits always appear anthropomorphically. Some argue that these spirits are elastic and can come in multiple shapes. There are two ways to interpret this. One that they are like a “more pure and refined” T-1000 from the old Terminator 2 movie. The other is that they are more akin to a Thomist soul which can simply animate any matter it comes in contact with. I think though that the Thomist view is highly problematic given Joseph’s many comments on identifying spirits. (Such as the March 21, 1841 sermon) Such a view also makes it hard to understand the central position of obtaining a physical body holds in Mormon theology.

One thing to keep in mind is that it might just be that Joseph didn’t understand the issue well. I don’t think one should draw too much out of ambiguous and perhaps confused non-canonical comments by Joseph.

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5 Responses to “Debating the Mormon Theology of Spirits”

Thanks for the summary Clark.

With my interest in spirit birth, I vaguely think that a spirit is the reproductive offspring of resurrected beings. Does this provide some possible explanation for the anthropomorphic form of spirit bodies? I kinda think it does, but I am no good at expressing such things. I would be interested in your thoughts.

By “Does a Spirit have parts?” I assume you mean is a spirit divisible into parts. I would say that spirits being eternal would entail that no, spirits are not divisible into parts.

As for your second question, maybe I can do a quick search of Joseph’s usage of the terms and see what I can find, as it’s an interesting question.

I think your point in this post is a good one, that we have to accept that maybe Joseph did not have a fully fleshed out theological concept of our spiritual pre-mortality. At the time it was incredible enough that we knew we existed before we got here. To add to the fact that Joseph may not have figured all this out, we can also state that judging by the many variations in the sermons we have from Joseph (KFD for example), it is difficult to determine what Joseph actually did say on the subject, to a certain extent.

Eric, Geoff at NCT discussed that a fair bit. The spirit birth theology primarily comes in the Utah period with Brigham Young and Orson Pratt. However while it is a very common belief there’s actually not a lot of source evidence for it. Many see it as pushing “the same sociality there” view of heaven too far. (i.e. making resurrected beings just too much like our life here) Thus you find a lot of people who consider everything Pratt and Young taught as primarily speculative throwing it out.

My perspective is that regardless of what a spirit birth means, a tripartite model is very defensible and if you have a tripartite model you need some sort of organization. Maybe the analogy to biology is indefensible, despite its popularity, but something was going on. That’s why the two points I mention above are important.

Matt, I don’t think spirits being eternal entails they have no parts. That seems to privilege substance too much. However to just throw out an other example, consider a pattern in matter that is so strong in its pattern that it is permanent. The parts constituting the pattern may change but the pattern itself is permanent. Logically there’s nothing wrong with such an idea which then means your logic isn’t valid.

I do agree that folks get too caught up on the minutiae of words. Not only do the source records not provide that level of detail but I think we err if we parse Joseph’s words that carefully. He wasn’t writing as a philosopher after all. He’s speaking in a more loose vernacular. As a wise man once said, there’s usually much less to a person’s words than meets the eye.

It’s interesting no one noted how silly all this discussion seems. I think the big problem is that these questions just lead to silly sounding ideas. My personal opinion is that most early 19th century views of spirits weren’t particularly unique to Mormons but were the standard folk way people viewed spirits (as opposed to the educated theologians of Europe). Spirits (including angels and ghosts) were largely anthropomorphic and their “immateriality” wasn’t an ontological one but more akin to the difference between a gas and a solid. Some philosophers like Telesio in the Renaissance started taking such ideas seriously (during era of blowback against Scholastic philosophy) but by and large there was always a big divide between folk traditions (often tied to purported first person encounters) and theology.

Given the history of Mormonism’s origins in first person religious experience and folk traditions I don’t think the evolution of our spirit theology is particularly surprising. Nor particularly novel.

By “Does a Spirit have parts?” I assume you mean is a spirit divisible into parts. I would say that spirits being eternal would entail that no, spirits are not divisible into parts.

If a spirit has two eyes and ten fingers, it most definitely has parts. Those are parts. If those parts are separable, then one tends to need a tri-partite model to have the core part of a spirit be intrinsically individual and eternal, unless one is willing to consider a relatively high level of intelligence to one or more of the component particles / atoms / etc, the way Orson Pratt did.

I wonder whether 21st Century cosmology doesn’t open up some possibilities for the relationship of the spirit to the physical body that could never have occurred to Joseph Smith. Specifically, many cosmological models (including the “standard” or “consensus” model) predict an infinite spacetime in which any region can be organized in only a finite number of ways — implying that each of our physical bodies has infinitely many copies and close variants.

Presumably, each of those bodies is as entitled to call itself the “original” as we are. So that immediately raises the question of what is the relationship between my spirit and my copy’s spirit.

In fact, why should we any longer assume that there is one spirit per body? Maybe the better analogy is “spirit is to person as mind is to neuron”. Maybe the spirit is a collective property of ALL of the copies and variants the way the mind is a collective property associated with the entire brain.

I’ve written more about this at “http://thefirestillburning.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/youve-read-this-post-before/”. I think it leads to certain concepts of Mormon theology, like pre-existence, in a way that more naturally bridges the physical and spiritual divide in our thinking.

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