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.Once the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553condemned the “fabulous” doctrine of the preexistence of souls, Origenism forever acquired the taint of heresy.134 Mormonism suffered under a similar stigma, which paradoxically only strengthened its adherents’ conviction that they were a peculiar people, chosen for a special mission by God.Mormons may have shattered all predestinarian constraints on free will, but they were good Puritans in at least this respect.When Brigham Young marked the location for the Salt Lake Temple in 1847, he was confi dent that this was the foreordained Zion, where the Saints could realize their divine destiny.From Methodists to Mormons129THE “AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT OF ANGLO-SAXONMINDS”?Mormonism met with unmitigated hostility from the beginning, even from other Christians committed to what Alexander Campbell called the“restoration of the ancient order of things.”135 Critiquing the Book of Mor-mon in 1831, Campbell wrote that Joseph Smith was “as ignorant and asimpudent a knave as ever wrote a book.”136 Later, Mark Twain unleashed his incomparable wit, dismissing the book as “chloroform in print” and mocking Smith’s frequent use of certain phrases from the King James Bible.“ ‘And it came to pass’ was his pet,” Twain observed.“If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” 137 Other critics were more vicious.Methodist minister C.P.Lyford, who served four years as a missionary in Utah, cited the doctrines of preexistence and the plurality of gods as evidence of Mormons’ perverse acceptance of “whatever trash a lecher-ous priesthood may be pleased to pronounce divinely inspired.”138Yet in fl irting with ancient heresies, especially Pelagius’s denial of original sin and Origen’s doctrine of preexistence, Mormonism was in some ways simply the culmination of a much wider cultural rebellion against Augustinianism.Joseph Smith was far from a systematic theologian—he describedhimself as a “rough stone”139—but his elimination of original sin was nev-ertheless a shrewd tactical maneuver because it deprived predestination of its foundation.Without an inherently damnable humanity, God’s sovereign election of some and reprobation of others could hardly appear to be anything else but arbitrary.Preexistence, meanwhile, not only extends human agency into the indefi nite past but also throws open the plan of salvation, suggesting that this short life is but a fraction of the time in which humans can realize their divine aspirations.Though it is likely that the rough-hewn Smith was unaware of theanti-Augustinian implications of his theology, other more polished thinkers of Smith’s day actually named the bishop of Hippo as the culprit in the corruption of simple, biblical Christianity.The most notable attacks came from the educational reformer Catharine Beecher (1800–1878), eldest child of the prominent New England minister Lyman Beecher and his wife, Roxana Foote.140 Reared on the Westminster Confession and Edwardsean-ism, she gradually turned against predestinarian orthodoxy, especially after her fi ancé, Yale mathematician Alexander Metcalf Fisher, was killed in a shipwreck.Like Catharine, Fisher was unregenerate, despite the strenuous efforts of his pastor, Nathanael Emmons.The tragedy plunged Catharine into a prolonged period of anxiety over Fisher’s, and her own, eternal destinies.Lyman, in an attempt to comfort his daughter, poured salt on 130Predestinationher wound when he wrote to her that many people “did and will indulge the hope” that Fisher had experienced a last-minute conversion.Catharine was so tortured by this uncertainty that on an extended visit with Fisher’s family, she combed through his remaining papers, searching for evidence of regeneration, only to conclude that Fisher had tried mightily “to yield that homage of the heart to his Maker which was required; but he could not.” 141Amid her grief, Catharine slowly abandoned the Augustinian system in which innately sinful humans were left utterly dependent on an uncertain hope of election.Catharine would not air her most contentious theological views for many years, not until, as Stephen Snyder points out, Lyman had become safelysenile.142 Then, in 1857, she published the fi rst of two companion theological works, Common Sense Applied to Religion; or, The Bible and the People.In addition to articulating 11 “intuitive truths” about human free agency, Alexander Metcalf Fisher by Samuel Finley BreeseMorse (1822).Yale University Art Gallery.From Methodists to Mormons131the reliability of the senses, and the like, Common Sense threw down the gauntlet against Augustine, condemning his doctrines of original sin and the enslaved will as the chief impediments to the reform of American society.The Augustinian system, Catharine believed, left the laypeople largely incapable of independent thought or right action and instead elevated the authority of fallible clerics and church institutions to promulgate doctrine and regulate behavior by coercion.If only Pelagius, whose theology she unabashedly claimed as her own, had possessed “the power and adroitness of Augustine,” the churches throughout the ages would have been focused on the proper training of the human mind in obedience to God’s laws rather than on the curing of hopelessly diseased and miseducated minds.143Catharine continued her attack in An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible (1860), in which she charged that the Augustinian theory of the depravity of human nature was based on “a few misinterpreted passages of the Bible,” especially Romans 5:12–19.Augustine, she insisted, had mistakenly taken this passage as proof of the spiritual death of all humans in Adam, whereas it referred only to natural death.144 Yet she buried her most provocative rhetorical fl ourish, as one might conceal a dagger, in the last endnote on the last page of the second volume.Seizing upon the African context of Augustine’s career as a metaphor for his deleterious infl uence on Christian theology, she concluded that reasonable people have a duty to resist the “African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds” no less than to combat the “Anglo-Saxon enslavement of African bodies.” 145Ironically, while Catharine found no salvation in the African Augustine, two of her seven clergyman brothers, Edward and Charles, relieved their own Augustinian anxieties by rehabilitating an earlier African father of the church, the Alexandrian-born Origen.Like their sister Catharine, and Joseph Smith before her, Edward and Charles recoiled at a God who would impute Adam’s sin to all humanity.Origen’s doctrine of preexistence allowed them to explain human sin (and vindicate God) by claiming that individuals implicated themselves in an existence prior to birth.The present life was a remedial stage in which a just and loving God intervened to save his creatures.146 Edward’s and Charles’s books detailing their proposal won quick and nearly universal disapproval [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]