Historical Periodization in the LDS Great Apostasy Narrative (2024)

Eric R. Dursteler

The idea of a universal apostasy is one of the linchpins of the Mormon faith: without an apostasy, there would have been no need for Joseph Smith or for the Restoration. “The apostasy is, ” according to the great doctrinal commentator and apostle Bruce R. McConkie, “the first great sign of the times.”1 Among the Mormon faithful, both the explanation and the justification for this pivotal moment are historically based; indeed, as one astute observer has commented, “For Mormonism more than other religions, history evolves as part of the church’s canon.”2

The concept of a historical apostasy was most fully developed in the works of three influential LDS doctrinal commentators and general authorities—B. H. Roberts of the First Council of Seventy, apostle James E. Talmage, and apostle and future church president Joseph Fielding Smith—all of whom wrote around the turn of the twentieth century. For each of these scholarly leaders, the key moments of the apostasy were the first Christian centuries when innumerable “plain and precious truths” were lost, which were reinstated when the heavens opened again in 1820 in upstate New York. As they sought to explain the relationship between the apostasy and restoration, they adopted prevailing nineteenth-century historical periodization. Drawing on Enlightenment-era historical works, nineteenth-century historians conceived of the premodern period as consisting of three eras: the Classical Age of political and artistic achievement, the Dark Age of medieval illiteracy and serfdom, and the Renaissance Age, a rebirth of classical learning and ideals. This pattern of loss and renewal resonated with the Mormon leaders, and in their divine chronologies, the Middle Ages and Renaissance play a pivotal role in the historical evolution that led ineluctably to the Restoration.

All three writers point to the darkness of medieval times as the fullest expression of the effects of apostasy in contrast to the light that the Renaissance revival of learning reflected into the world. The Renaissance set the stage for the Reformation, which, in turn, acted as a prelude to the Restoration. While this binary vision of medieval and Renaissance was common in the intellectual world of the late nineteenth century, over the intervening years this paradigm has been decisively rejected as inadequate and outdated. Scholars now acknowledge the value of “marking off points of temporal difference” in order to illustrate historical change, while also acknowledging the limitations and simplifications of such categories.3 Indeed, division determines relevance; that which follows the divide is relevant to the present, and what precedes is deemed irrelevant. The divide thus functions “less as a historical marker than a massive value judgment, determining what matters and what does not.”4 This essay explores the contexts and limitations of the historical periodization of these influential LDS commentators in the Great Apostasy narrative, focusing particularly on the roles of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in their broader histories. It also will examine the enduring appeal of this historical paradigm within the LDS community.

The Apostasy in Mormon Thought

Given the importance of the “Great Apostasy” in Mormonism, the somewhat sparse attention it has received at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first from the pulpit and in official publications is striking.5 During Mormonism’s first century, discussions of apostasy were a much greater part of the faith’s dialogue. Apostasy, of course, figured centrally in the mission and teachings of Joseph Smith, particularly in his accounts of the First Vision, in which he was told that Christ’s church had been lost from the earth and that the existing sects “were all wrong;…[and] all their creeds were an abomination” (JS-History 1:19).6 These early narratives present the new faith as a light bursting through the spiritual darkness that had reigned for almost two thousand years, a metaphor to which subsequent LDS writers repeatedly returned.7 This theme resonated strongly among the first generation of converts and gradually evolved in the writings and discourses of many leaders. Brigham Young, for example, reflected on apostasy, as did Parley and Orson Pratt in several important treatises.8 The most extensive early treatment was Benjamin Winchester’s A History of the Priesthood from the Beginning of the World to the Present Time (1843), Mormonism’s first attempt at a systematic historical theology.9

Building upon these earlier works, the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth saw the publication of a number of more systematic treatments of the apostasy.10 The most consequential were those of Roberts, Talmage, and Joseph Fielding Smith, three of Mormonism’s most influential doctrinal and theological thinkers. These writers all attempted to historicize the nature and progress of the “Great Apostasy” in specific detail. In turn, they influenced a flurry of works in the mid–twentieth century on the historical apostasy, which were developed for use as manuals in church instruction. In 1944, the apostasy was the subject of an Institute of Religion manual used for instructing college-age youth, in 1950 a Sunday School manual used for teaching weekly adult scripture classes focused on the topic, and in 1952–55 and 1960 Melchizedek priesthood manuals used for the instruction of adult men revisited it yet again.11 The 1950s thus saw the institutional validation and recognition of a historical view in which the apostasy directed the whole of Western history toward the culminating event of Joseph Smith’s 1830 restoration of Christ’s original church.

The quantity and scope of the works produced from 1900 to 1960, however, were followed by a decline in attention to the apostasy among Mormon thinkers. The causes are not entirely clear, but they may have been linked in part to the expanding LDS missionary effort and ongoing efforts to fit more squarely within mainstream American culture and society, which led to attempts to find common ground with former religious antagonists.12 As part of this trend, the missionary lessons, which were recast in the early 1970s, shifted the apostasy from its privileged position immediately following the recounting of the Joseph Smith story to a less conspicuous place in one of the later lessons. The general trend toward emphasizing the teaching of commandments over doctrinal exegesis certainly played a role in this declining focus as well.13 As part of this process, the strident anti-Catholic undercurrent that informed many early Mormon views on apostasy was tempered and even disavowed.14 This shift is most evident in the controversy over the identification of “the church of the devil” and “the great and abominable church” of 1 Nephi 13–14 with Roman Catholicism in the first edition (1958) of Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, which was subsequently expurgated from the second edition (1966).15 Exceptions to this general pattern of ignoring the apostasy occasionally appeared, such as Milton V. Backman’s American Religions and the Rise of Mormonism and McConkie’s A New Witness for the Articles of Faith.16

While it is often rich and suggestive, a perusal of the Mormon literature of apostasy reveals a marked hom*ogeneity, despite spanning almost 150 years. A comparison of the reflections of Orson Pratt in 1857, of James Talmage in 1909, and of Bruce R. McConkie in 1985, for example, shows striking similarities among these generations of LDS thinkers. Some of these resemblances stem from their dependence on the same sources and their tendency to self-reference. These characteristics are especially true of the foundational doctrinal works of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, in which LDS theories of apostasy were codified in the first decades of the twentieth century as part of an extremely fertile theological era of definition and reconciliation with secular learning, described by Leonard Arrington as “the stage of creative adaptation.”17

These three scholarly leaders of the second generation of Mormonism were most responsible for systematizing LDS theology. All wrote widely and perceptively on many of the doctrinal issues of the day.18 While Smith and Roberts disagreed fiercely about evolution and other issues, Talmage often staked out a middle ground between them. In marked contrast, their historical theologies were virtually identical, particularly in how each understood the place of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the apostasy and their relationship to the LDS Restoration.19 Church leadership and membership alike generally embraced the “priestly narratives” of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith as authoritative in their day,20 and they have provided the foundation for all subsequent discussions of the apostasy. In many ways, their views continue to inform Mormon thinking on the apostasy even to this day.

Medieval and Renaissance in Mormon Writings on Apostasy

The first comprehensive treatment of the apostasy was that of B. H. Roberts, whom Sterling McMurrin called “the intellectual leader of the Mormon people in the era of Mormonism’s finest intellectual attainment.”21 In his Outlines of Ecclesiastical History, first published in 1893 as a Seventies quorum manual, with five subsequent editions over the next thirty years, Roberts developed a wide-ranging and all-encompassing view of the apostasy. He restated and amplified these views—without substantially altering them—in a 1929 series of radio lectures published as The Falling Away.22 At its core, Roberts’s position centered on the view of the apostasy, common since Joseph Smith’s time, as primarily the loss of priesthood authority—that is, the loss of divine sanction to act in the name of God in conducting such saving ordinances as the sacrament, baptism, and temple sealing—and the end of continuing revelation. In these foundational works, however, Roberts also attempted to historicize the process of apostasy. He focused particularly on historical and doctrinal developments in late antiquity, changes in ordinances, the infiltration of pagan philosophies, the rise of the Mass, and variations from the original organization of Christ’s church. For Roberts, the first three Christian centuries were the key period in the “Great Apostasy.” By the time of Constantine, the church that Christ had organized had ceased to exist. More than any other Mormon scholar’s, Roberts’s ideas and approach effectively set the parameters and pattern for all subsequent discussions of apostasy; indeed his oeuvre provided the basic outlines of “a Mormon theology of history, nearly Augustinian in its vision.”23

While Roberts’s chief emphasis was on the first Christian centuries, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were important transitional moments in the lockstep evolution from apostasy to Reformation to Restoration. He concentrates on what he considered evidence of both the omnipotence and the depravity of the papacy and the “state of morals” within the church.24 Roberts also identifies a number of medieval events that he sees as preparing the ground for the all-important Reformation. He traces “the progress of popular liberty” to the rise of a “commercial class” around 1200, which financed the crusading movement in return for grants of “political privileges” from cash-strapped monarchs. This development, according to Roberts, led to the breakdown of the “Feudal Land Tenure System” and the ultimate weakening of the ecclesiastical stranglehold on European society. Despite these seemingly positive developments, however, Roberts’s Middle Ages are painted overwhelmingly in monochromatic tones. These are the Dark Ages, a backward bookmark between New Testament Christianity and the beginnings of its revival with Martin Luther. This was, in his words, an “Age of Darkness, ” the “midnight period of our world.” He exclaims: “A period of fifteen hundred years! In which a famine for the word of God existed; a period when men wandered from sea to sea, and ran to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and found it not. How pitiful the picture of it!”25

In Roberts’s theological chronology, this fifteen-hundred-year “Age of Darkness” was not only spiritual but also intellectual, blighting all aspects of European life: “The intellectual stupor of Europe had been as profound as spiritual darkness had been dense.” Into this spiritual and intellectual obscurity, however, a ray of light began to break through with the “Revival of Learning” in the latter part of the fifteenth century, which set the stage for Luther’s theses and eventually Joseph Smith’s vision. Roberts points to significant innovations in this awakening: the invention of gunpowder, the compass, paper, and printing; the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope route to India; Columbus’s discovery of the Americas; innovations in art; and “a greater knowledge of antiquity” spread by Greek refugees fleeing the fall of Constantinople after 1453.26 These are the key elements in Roberts’s binary view of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Although Roberts effectively set the parameters of what came to be the standard view of apostasy within the Mormon community, the most noted work on the topic is James Talmage’s slender volume, The Great Apostasy, written in 1909 before his call as an apostle, for use in LDS youth Mutual Improvement Associations.27 Though in many ways quite derivative of Roberts, Talmage’s is the book still in circulation and still regularly referenced today. Indeed, it often still appears on approved reading lists for Mormon missionaries.28 Like Roberts, Talmage emphasizes the nexus of apostasy and loss of priesthood authority; he devotes the bulk of his historical exegesis to the initial stages of apostasy in the early Christian church, emphasizing both external and internal causes. In his final chapter, “Results of the Apostasy.—Its Sequel, ” however, he briefly surveys medieval resistance to the church in Rome as a bridge to a discussion of the Reformation. When Talmage describes revolts against the “tyranny…[of] the thoroughly apostate and utterly corrupt…Church of Rome, ” he uses language reminiscent of Roberts’s in describing the Middle Ages: “The awakening of intellectual activity…began in the latter part of the fourteenth century. The period from the tenth century onward to the time of the awakening has come to be known as the dark ages—characterized by stagnation in the progress of the useful arts and sciences as well as of fine arts and letters, and by a general condition of illiteracy and ignorance among the masses.” This era of darkness was enlightened by “the revival of learning, ” which opened “the struggle for freedom from church tyranny.”29

In his widely respected Jesus the Christ (1915), Talmage makes even more explicit the relationship of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:

The lockstep linkage of the three R’s—Renaissance, Reformation, and Restoration—at the center of Roberts’s depiction of the “Great Apostasy” is abundantly evident in Talmage’s writings.

The influential writings of Roberts and Talmage culminated in the work of Joseph Fielding Smith, the third prominent Mormon theologian of the apostasy in the early twentieth century. Son of President Joseph F. Smith, grandson of Hyrum Smith, he was called by his father as an apostle in 1910 at age thirty-three and in 1970 was ordained the tenth president of the LDS church. Called a “soldier of truth” by his biographer-grandson, Smith was also one of the most important doctrinal thinkers and probably the most influential conservative force of Mormonism’s second century. He published more books and articles than any other Mormon president, and President Heber J. Grant considered him “the best posted man on the scriptures of the general authorities.”31 In addition, Smith significantly shaped the historical consciousness of the church through his work at the church historian’s office. He was hired in 1901 when he returned from his mission and called as assistant church historian in 1906 and then church historian in 1921, a position he held until 1970, when he became the president of the church.

Smith’s views on the apostasy first appeared in his 1922 Essentials in Church History. His introduction includes a general overview of the “Falling Away, ” which serves simply to set the stage for the real focus of his treatise, the restoration of all things by Joseph Smith and the subsequent history of the church he founded.32 A decade later, Smith returned to the apostasy and published a much more extensive study, The Progress of Man (1936). This rich work was commissioned by the board of the Genealogical Society of Utah, which because of the “grave conditions” of the day “thought it would be timely to have a course of study giving a brief outline of man’s history on the earth.” Smith’s text was no ordinary universal history, however; it was “an outline history of man interpreted in the light of revelation. It tells of…[the] everlasting conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, freedom and oppression, [and]…the final and destined triumph of truth.”33 Smith’s striking litany of binary oppositions foreshadows his treatment of the medieval apostasy.

Smith devotes more attention than Roberts or Talmage to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as they relate to the Mormon understanding of the apostasy. He links the Renaissance’s revival of learning to Europe’s increasing encounters with Islam and the rest of the world through the Crusades, Mediterranean trade, and the travels of Marco Polo. Despite Smith’s greater detail, however, he does not depart significantly from the path outlined by Roberts and Talmage. Like both of them, he finds divine technological intervention in the invention of the compass, paper, gunpowder, and printing, though he develops each example in greater detail. The Middle Ages for Smith, as for Roberts and Talmage, are the “Dark Ages[, which]…commenced with the fall of Rome and continued during the greater part of the next thousand years.” It was an era characterized by a “condition of mental and spiritual stupor and stupidity.”34

As with his precursors, Smith also sees the “Springtime of the Renaissance” beginning to warm the dark medieval winter. The thaw began in the twelfth century, when “the world was like a great giant who gradually began to stir from a long drunken stupor.” The real awakening, however, occurred during the Renaissance of the fourteenth century—the age of Petrarch, Giotto, and Boccaccio. Smith even appropriates Roberts’s language in describing this era as “The Revival of Learning.” He departs from his predecessors in generally avoiding their often virulent anti-Catholic stance (especially characteristic of Roberts), and he also suggests that, despite what he perceived as the terrible darkness of the medieval era, “the Spirit of the Lord was working among the people, ” preparing the way for “the day in which the fulness of freedom and religious liberty was to be ushered in.” This time of preparation, for Smith, was the Renaissance.35

From the writings of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, several key features of the Mormon view of the historical apostasy emerge. All three emphasize that, at its core, the apostasy consisted of a loss of priesthood authority on the earth. All three devote most of their discussion to the early Christian centuries, which they see as the pivotal age of apostasy. In their often brief treatments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, all three resort quite strikingly to the metaphor of light and dark. While the exact dates may vary slightly, in general the period from approximately 500 to 1500 is characterized without differentiation as the Dark Ages.36 The Middle Ages, for these LDS observers, were a time of abject backwardness, of obscurity and apostasy. For Roberts, this was the “Age of Darkness, ” the “midnight period of our world.” For Talmage it was a “period of retrogression.”37 The influence of these authorities’ views is evident in other contemporary Mormon authors, such as Hugh B. Brown, whose 1941 discourse “The Night of Darkness” familiarly describes the medieval period as “the Dark Ages, a time which has been designated as the midnight of time, …in which not only the artificial lamps of men burned low, but also the celestial lights of God’s inspiration were extinguished.”38

The darkness of the era is twofold in Mormon apostasy literature. On the one hand, there is the spiritual darkness of apostasy created by the absence of direct revelation and priesthood authority. The roots of this view can be traced back to Joseph Smith’s accounts of his First Vision, in which he attributes the spiritual darkness of his day to the absence of priesthood authority. This is penetrated, however, by the light of God and Christ breaking through to him in his moment of despair (JS-History 1:16–17).39 The innovation of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith was to expand this metaphor of darkness beyond the purely spiritual realm. In their depictions, not only are the Dark Ages spiritually benighted, but the backwardness and degeneration of the spirit are accompanied by a decline in civilization. For Talmage, “the dark ages [are] characterized by stagnation in the progress of the useful arts and sciences as well as of fine arts and letters, and by a general condition of illiteracy and ignorance among the masses.” In “this period of retrogression” in Europe “civilization was retarded and for centuries was practically halted in its course.”40

In contrast to the dark of the Middle Ages, these Mormon writers emphasize the light of the Renaissance, which is privileged as a precursor to the Reformation in this holy history. For Talmage, the intellectual revival of the late fourteenth century is part of a general trend of rebellion against tyrannical ecclesiastical power. This “rapid awakening among men, and [the] determined effort to shake off the stupor of indolence and ignorance” were predetermined by God “to illumine the benighted minds of men in preparation for the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” For Roberts, “the intellectual stupor of Europe had been as profound as spiritual darkness had been dense. But with the close of the fifteenth century, literature, science and art seemed to spring into active life.” Similarly, Smith writes of the Renaissance that “the Lord never intended that man should be kept in ignorance [as existed in the Middle Ages]. The time had to come when the minds of men were to be freed from the chains that enslaved them.”41

In sum, then, the historical narrative of the “Great Apostasy” generated by these Mormon thinkers during the fertile doctrinal and intellectual atmosphere of the early twentieth century emphasized a generalized view of the period from 500 to 1500 as a time of spiritual and intellectual darkness in which all revelation and, indeed, progress of any sort disappeared. About 1500, the revolutionary changes associated with the Renaissance opened heaven’s door a crack and allowed a beam of light to penetrate the gloom, thus setting the stage for the Reformation, which in turn prepared the way for the Restoration. What I will show in the remainder of this chapter is that the black-and-white picture in LDS historical surveys of the medieval bridge between the “Great Apostasy” and the “Restoration” is rooted in historical assumptions of the nineteenth century. These ideas, while broadly embraced in their day, have been largely superseded by scholarship in the intervening century and a half.

The Sources of Mormon Apostasy Literature

While all three authors often did not cite their sources, as was common in their day, we can still get a sense of the roots of their ideas.42 In crafting their depictions of the apostasy, all relied chiefly on two types of sources: the highly polemical, popular, confessional, historical literature of the nineteenth century and the anticlerical literature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Roberts seems to have roamed most widely with his research, relying on a range of Protestant, Catholic, and Enlightenment authors.43 His chief historical source was the Protestant theologian and historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, especially his 1755 work, Institutionum historiae ecclesiasticae antiquae et recentioris, which Roberts read in a 1764 English translation, entitled Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern.44 He supplemented Mosheim with other Protestant histories, including the evangelical Joseph Milner’s The History of the Church of Christ (1794–97) and the Swiss theologian Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné’s Histoire de la Réformation en Europe au Temps de Calvin (1862–78). He also referenced several Catholic sources, though only to support his ultimately anti-Catholic position. These include the English Roman Catholic vicar John Milner’s The End of Religious Controversy (1818) and John Andrew Cramer’s eighteenth-century translation and additions to Jacques Bénigne Bossuet’s influential 1681 work, Discours sur l’histoire universelle.45

Roberts’s chief sources, however, were Protestant histories, which were often infused with post-Reformation polemics. As Richard Bushman has observed, Talmage’s and Roberts’s ideas were conceived “with the liberal assistance of Protestant scholars who were equally committed to belief in the apostasy of the Roman Church.” Indeed, it is not clear whether they “added anything to the findings of Protestant scholars.”46 Mormon apostasy literature also owed a great debt to the anti-Catholic polemics that dominated turn-of-the-century historical writing in Protestant America.47

Beyond these Protestant works, Roberts, like Talmage and Smith, was influenced by Enlightenment and Romantic historiography. Mormon theologians, like many Romantic writers, tended to view history as drama, “the unfolding of a vast Providential plan, ” and generally shared the Romantic belief that a historian’s task was “to arrange apparently disconnected events in their proper order.”48 Influential in a different way were the great Enlightenment histories of Edward Gibbon and David Hume, which were tempered, however, with the English theologian and utilitarian philosopher William Paley’s compendium of orthodox arguments in refutation of deist philosophies, View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794). It was common in the universal histories of the philosopher-historians of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Henry Bolingbroke, and Hume, to see “nothing but barbarism, ignorance, superstition, violence, irrationality, and priestly tyranny” from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, which they viewed as the birth of the rational, secular, modern era—that is, their own day. The Middle Ages provided the perfect irrational foil for their own, enlightened age. This philosophe history of progress posited the “dark centuries” of the Middle Ages as the gloomy backdrop against which the first stirring of modern progress, the light of Renaissance Italy, burst forth.49 Or as Voltaire, in his An Essay on Universal History, famously described it, the Italians “began to shake off the barbarous rust, with which Europe had been covered since the decline of the Roman Empire.”50

While the sources they cited tended toward outdated, polemical religious and philosophical works, our three Mormon scholarly leaders also relied to a degree on more recent general historical works, to flesh out their understanding of apostasy. Roberts discusses briefly a number of significant technological innovations associated with the Renaissance “Revival of Learning, ” including the invention of printing, the compass, and gunpowder. Smith reprises the same list—indeed both erroneously attribute the invention of gunpowder to a certain Schwartz.51 Roberts’s discussion of Renaissance innovations is drawn almost word for word from a passage in François Guizot’s popular History of Civilization in Europe (1828); Smith effectively accepts Roberts’s findings, though he buttresses them with more recent general histories.52 While neither man cites a source for his discussion of the invention of gunpowder, it likely came from John J. Anderson’s A Manual of General History: Being an Outline History of the World from the Creation to the Present Time. This work was part of a wide-ranging series of general histories that Anderson wrote on a variety of topics intended for use in “Colleges, High-Schools, Academies, Etc.”53 Anderson uses the light/dark metaphor in describing the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, which is so characteristic of Mormon apostasy literature: “The epoch at which Modern History commences is the dawn of intelligence that broke upon Europe in the latter part of the 15th [sic] century….[T]he West, emerging from the night of medieval ignorance, began to glow with the first beams of an intellectual and social illumination.”54

This notion of medieval darkness and Renaissance light in Anderson, and through him in Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, seems clearly influenced by the great nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt and the influential, but less innovative, English scholar John Addington Symonds. This link may seem at first glance rather tenuous, since none of the authors makes direct reference to Burckhardt and only Smith explicitly cites Symonds.55 All three Mormon leaders, however, appropriate both the concept and the wording of the title of the second volume of Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, Revival of Learning, in their books. And Burckhardt’s germinal vision of the Renaissance is evident in their sources and even more in their conceptualization of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in relationship to the “Great Apostasy.”56

Roberts, Talmage, and Smith were apparently quite unaware of the burgeoning professional historical literature of their age; and indeed it would be unfair to expect them as nonprofessionals to have been up to date on current historiography. All three relied entirely on popular, general history textbooks of their day instead of the work of scholars: Roberts favored Anderson, and though neither Talmage nor Smith explicitly cites him, Anderson’s ideas are apparent in their works as well, probably transmitted through Roberts’s influential Outlines. Further, all three extensively cite another popular turn-of-the-century historian, P. V. N. Myers. Myers’s principal publications were a number of widely used general history texts for high school and college students, including Mediaeval and Modern History and General History for Colleges and High Schools. In these synthetic works, Myers’s discussion of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is significantly more nuanced than that of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, and it is clearly informed by contemporary scholarship. Indeed, his list of recommended readings on the Renaissance includes “Symonds…the best extended history in English, ” as well as “Burckhardt…the most philosophical and suggestive work on the subject.”57 It seems clear that, through Myers’s work, Roberts, Talmage, and Smith obtained their dose of the Burckhardtian and Symondsian vision of the Renaissance.

Burckhardt, Symonds, and the Idea of the Renaissance

An examination of the ideas of Burckhardt and Symonds clearly reveals Mormon apostasy literature’s debt. Jacob Burckhardt was born in Basel in 1818, where he taught until his death in 1897; he studied in Berlin from 1839 to 1843 under Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. A cultural historian, Burckhardt was in many ways unique among the military and political historians who dominated nineteenth-century historiography. After an initial work on Constantine, Burckhardt turned his attention to an entirely different era: the result was his masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860.58

With this work Burckhardt made his name and created a widely influential paradigm that continues to influence Renaissance studies to this day. As Karl Brandi wrote, “Our conception of the Renaissance is Jacob Burckhardt’s creation.”59 Before Burckhardt “the Renaissance was uncharted territory”; he created “a new field of study” in which he “elaborated in animated and persuasive detail…an autonomous historical epoch with its own physiognomy, its rich articulation and inner coherence, its unmistakable mental style.”60 This is not to say that Burckhardt’s ideas were created ex nihilo. He brought together many preexisting strands in a concise, convincing paradigmatic statement, a “coherent masterpiece, ” which crystallized all subsequent discussions of the era.61

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is a varied and rich work, which has often suffered from overly reductive treatments, so a summary of its ideas is challenging. At its core, however, is a simple question: Whence modernity? This query resulted from the monumental political, economic, and social changes of the nineteenth century, which caused intellectuals to question the relationship of the past to their present. Burckhardt said: “The [French] revolution has created a connected unity that distinguishes our time from earlier times.”62 In his greatest work, he traced the roots of this disturbing modern reality back to “the Italian Renaissance[which] must be called the leader of modern ages.”63

Burckhardt identified a number of Renaissance developments that signaled a departure from the medieval and the birth of the modern. The Renaissance saw the rise of the modern state (which or that Burckhardt termed famously as “a work of art”)64 characterized by institutional complexity, bureaucracies, foreign policy, and military organization. The Renaissance represented the rediscovery of antiquity, the last great era in Western history, which had almost been lost in the gulf of the Middle Ages. However, the defining element of the Renaissance for him, and the most significant component of his thesis, was the discovery of the individual: “Awareness of individuality…is the novel and distinguishing feature of the Renaissance, and of modernity.”65 As Burckhardt put it, in the Middle Ages, “man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air;…man became a spiritual individual.”66

Important changes derived from the discovery of the individual, including a sense of human capabilities and “a shift from absorption in the world above to concern with the world below.” In the Renaissance, Burckhardt argued, social classes became increasingly equalized, and aristocratic birth had less influence on destiny. Another key element of modernity was a general disintegration of belief and the attendant secularization of society. The Renaissance man was rational and disinclined toward medieval superstition and obscurantism, and this resulted in a more secular society. Burckhardt was no Whig historian, however, and unlike his philosophe predecessors, his history was no tale of inexorable progress. Thus the Italian Renaissance with its discovery of the individual represented paradoxically a cultural high point in European history but also the beginnings of the creation of “a culture that became cheap, corrupt and amoral”—all characteristics, according to Burckhardt, of modernity.67

To make his case for a dramatically changed Renaissance world, Burckhardt had to contrast it clearly to the Middle Ages. Thus he resorted to a language and metaphor that should ring familiar to readers of Mormon apostasy literature: “In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness…lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession.” This was true for all of Europe, except in Italy, where “this veil first melted into air.” Italian Renaissance culture freed itself “from the fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages” and saw a perfecting of the individual.68 The era was characterized by a spirit of self-discovery, a recognition of human worth, and especially a dynamic outpouring of activity by individualist geniuses. In short, for Burckhardt, the Renaissance marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world.

Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy made such a powerful, paradigmatic statement that initially few posited competing interpretations. Instead, most scholars devoted themselves to supplementing and fleshing out elements of his vision.69 For English-speaking readers, the most important work was that of the English gentleman scholar and poet John Addington Symonds, whose multivolume Renaissance in Italy (1875–86) developed a similarly broad and engaging portrait of the age. Symonds’s vision of the Renaissance was not as conceptually sophisticated as Burckhardt’s; indeed, he openly acknowledged his debt to the Swiss historian. However, while Burckhardt’s reputation grew only slowly in the English-speaking world, Symonds’s “embarrassingly exuberant” if accessible prose was much more widely read.70 It was ultimately through him “that the Burckhardtian Renaissance came to life in the minds of generations of students.”71 And it was Symonds’s exaggerated emphasis on the light/dark metaphor in characterizing the medieval/Renaissance dichotomy that came to permeate late nineteenth-century views in the English-speaking world.

While Symonds was certainly a fine literary stylist, as a historian he was often derivative and tended toward exaggeration, hyperbole, and high drama.72 In contrast to Burckhardt’s more subdued and careful tone, Symonds characterized the Renaissance as “the most marvellous period that the world has ever known.”73 With similar hyperbole, he declaimed:

This passage suggests the similarity of Symonds’s interpretation to Burckhardt’s, as well as his exaggeration of it. In contrast to Burckhardt’s ultimately negative view of modernity,75 Symonds sketched a historical trajectory that celebrated the triumphant march of progress, connecting the Renaissance to the Reformation and eventually to the English Revolution—all three acts in the “drama of liberty” so dear to the nineteenth-century, liberal, Protestant historiographical tradition.76 In this drama, the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual backwardness, of darkness, a world in which the individual was limited by the corporate tethers of community, guild, family, and especially church. The Renaissance that began in Italy shone a bright light onto this dark, medieval world, waking (and creating) the independent, freethinking, modern individual self.

The Apostasy in Recent LDS Literature

This nineteenth-century view expressed most influentially by Burckhardt and Symonds but shared and expanded upon by many others should seem very familiar. The treatment of this transitional era in the Mormon literature of apostasy is clearly shaped by these views, which were generally widely accepted in nineteenth-century historiography. As Anthony Molho has persuasively demonstrated, American historians and the public in general from the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth century were fascinated by the Italian Renaissance. Americans saw their new land as the culmination of the historical process, the epitome of modernity. Thus, they enthusiastically embraced Burckhardt’s genealogy tracing the roots of the modern world—their roots—to the city states of Renaissance Italy. Burckhardt’s depiction of the Renaissance as the birth of the modern individual also resonated deeply within American culture, which celebrated individualism as an essential element of the national character.77 America embraced the Renaissance because it ensured the young nation a pivotal role in the great drama of Western civilization, “that curious American curricular artifact, ” which was created by the American historical community in the years before and after World War I to provide the public with a “usable past.” In this vision of the European past, the Renaissance was “Scene One of the turbulent Act Three, ‘The Modern World.’”78 That Mormon authorities such as Roberts, Talmage, and Smith should embrace this vision, then, is not at all surprising; their vision of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was in many ways entirely harmonious with the prevailing view of the contemporary historical community.

What is revealing is that, while scholarship in the intervening century and a half has moved decisively away from this Burckhardtian paradigm, Mormon treatments of the apostasy since the time of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith have generally retained much of this dated, binary notion of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The persistence of this view is most evident in the writings of Bruce R. McConkie, perhaps the best-known and most influential LDS doctrinal commentator of the last half of the twentieth century.79 McConkie’s rich and varied ideas span a wide body of work. He initially developed his views on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in relation to the apostasy in the first edition (1958) of his ambitious and authoritative Mormon Doctrine, but his most detailed exposition on apostasy appears in his final work, A New Witness for the Articles of Faith (1985).80 In the context of a discussion of the eleventh Mormon Article of Faith, McConkie addresses the rise of religious freedom, the apostasy, and the Middle Ages as a critical prelude to the Reformation and the Restoration in familiar terms. For him, the period from Constantine until 1500 was “The Black Millennium, ” in which “the world lay in darkness”:

In contrast to this gloomy medieval world is the Renaissance, “A Day of Awakening”:

With McConkie, the vision not only of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith but also of nineteenth-century scholars has survived intact. The Middle Ages are still the Dark Ages, their inflated span lasting from 500 to 1500. The spiritual retardation of this age is still accompanied by material and intellectual backwardness. And the Renaissance is still privileged as the turning point in this history, the staging ground for the Reformation and Restoration. McConkie is not unique among Mormon writers and authorities in his continued embrace of this dichotomous view; indeed, even today many within the broader Mormon community probably still accept the image that Roberts, Talmage, and Smith created a century ago.83

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Twentieth-Century Historiography

Although the nineteenth-century view seems to have been remarkably durable in the LDS historical vision of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the broader historical community has now largely rejected the paradigm. The suggestive formulas of Burckhardt and his followers set the parameters for a fruitful and energetic debate that emerged after 1900 over what many saw as his teleological, oversimplified, and binary depiction of history. Trying to summarize the very rich historical literatures of medieval and Renaissance Europe that have evolved in the past century would be impractical. Still, a suggestion of several dominant trends may illuminate the chasm that has arisen between Mormon scholars of the apostasy and the work of the larger historical community.84

Medieval scholars were among the earliest to challenge Burckhardt’s Renaissance paradigm, which depicted their age as “one long, dreary epoch of stagnation, of insecurity, of lawless violence.”85 This “revolt of the medievalists” became increasingly vocal after 1900, when medieval studies underwent a dramatic expansion that produced a significantly altered understanding of the period, leading one eminent medievalist to observe that “no book written about the European Middle Ages before 1895 or so is still worth reading except for curiosity’s sake.”86 While a bit hyperbolic, this statement is revealing for what it suggests about Mormon reliance on views that the broader historical community now considers obsolete. Where Mormon authors often emphasize the backwardness and darkness of this age, medievalists since 1900 “have sought to reveal and celebrate the ideas and institutions of the high Middle Ages.”87

Not only have medieval scholars emphasized the complexity and diversity of medieval civilization, but they have also insisted on its direct relationship to the developments that Burckhardt situated in the Renaissance. At its core, the medievalist response has argued for continuity rather than radical change. Johan Huizinga elegantly stated this position in his 1919 Dutch classic, The Waning of the Middle Ages, which argued that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries “are much more suited to give us a sense of the end of the Middle Ages…than they are to demonstrate to us the awakening Renaissance.”88 Huizinga’s emphasis on the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary relationship of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was also at the heart of Charles Homer Haskins’s influential 1927 work, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, which argued that many of the characteristics of the Renaissance—the revival of classical Latin literature, Greek science, and Greek philosophy—had medieval roots. Haskins attacked the Burckhardtian paradigm head-on: “Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom stand in the sharpest contrast to the light and progress and freedom of the Italian Renaissance?” His response: “The continuity of history rejects such sharp and violent contrasts between successive periods….Modern research shows us the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed. The Middle Ages exhibit life and color and change, much eager search after knowledge and beauty, much creative accomplishment in art, in literature, in institutions.”89

Huizinga and Haskins led the frontal assault on the Renaissance, but others joined them, defending the Middle Ages by drawing explicit links to modern institutions. Frederic William Maitland, for example, traced English common law and the jury system of trials—institutions still in use in the United States and United Kingdom—to the thirteenth century. Joseph Strayer emphasized the construction of rational, centralized governmental institutions and the rise of national identities during the medieval period. More recently, scholars influenced by R. W. Southern, perhaps the greatest medievalist of the twentieth century, have traced “a continuous rising stream of rationality from the military advances of feudal technology and the organization of urban commerce in the tenth century, through the classical recovery and dialectical capacity of the twelfth century, to the culminating anticipations of the scientific revolution in the fourteenth century.” They have argued, certainly with some exaggeration, that “the Middle Ages were the most dynamically progressive moment in the history of this planet.”90

The work of the medievalists in the first half of the twentieth century was primarily devoted to demonstrating the continuity and relationship between medieval and modern times. Since the sixties, this “highly overdetermined…discourse of continuity and progress” has been replaced by a richer and more particularized view of the medieval era that does not lend itself to easy categorization. Recent scholarship, influenced by postmodernist, anthropological, and feminist theories, has “demodernized” and “defamiliarized” the Middle Ages, emphasizing the period’s fundamental alterity. To be sure, these new interpretations have not gone unchallenged; but as Norman Cantor has observed, “The one conclusion that everyone can agree to is the great complexity of high medieval culture, society, government, law, economy and religion.”91

This refashioning of the Middle Ages as other has been mirrored in the community of Renaissance scholars who have challenged the position posited by their intellectual forefather, Jacob Burckhardt. While his views still inform debates within the field, it is probably safe to say that during the past century or so scholars have effectively revised the majority of his most evocative hypotheses.92 Burckhardt is generally no longer read to understand the history of the Renaissance but, rather, for his historiographic significance. For example, in contrast to Burckhardt’s vision of the progressive secularization of Italian society—and indeed its growing irreligiousness—more recent scholars have emphasized the complex and profound religiosity of the Renaissance. With the medievalists, they have convincingly shown that Burckhardt’s revival of antiquity, evidenced in humanist thought, had deep medieval roots and that so-called medieval philosophies persevered in popularity throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and beyond.93 The Renaissance state, characterized by Burckhardt famously as a work of art, has been shown to have been a far cry from modern, centralized, rationalized, bureaucratic nation-states.94 And finally, in the area of Burckhardt’s most suggestive hypothesis—the rise of the individual—scholars have convincingly shown the importance of networks of relationships, patronage, and kin groups in the definition of self and in the construction of late medieval and early modern identities.95

Where Burckhardt and subsequent generations of scholars sought to trace and link the Renaissance to the modern world, the most recent generation of Renaissance scholars, paralleling similar trends among medievalists, has generally abandoned the search for modernity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. Inspired by the work of anthropologists, they have sought to “defamiliarize the Renaissance” by emphasizing the alterity rather than the modernity of Renaissance Italy.96 They describe the age as a “distant and alien reality, ” which must be studied and understood in much the same way that Western anthropologists approach equally exotic Balinese or Berber cultures.97 The elaborate ritual life of the Renaissance, its criminality and its violence, and its witchcraft and its superstitions are but a few of the areas of “alienness” or “premodernity” to which anthropologically inclined historians have turned their attention.98 So complete, indeed, has been the refashioning of the Renaissance that the label itself has been largely usurped by the less ideologically charged “early modern.”99

The century and a half since Burckhardt penned The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has seen a considerable change in the way in which the Renaissance is understood and how its relationship to the Middle Ages is perceived. The Renaissance is no longer seen as the cradle of modernity, separated by a chasm from the medieval world. Warren Hollister’s assessment seems a fitting epitaph:

Conclusions

What implications have these historiographical developments had for Mormon notions of the “Great Apostasy, ” the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance? It seems clear that Roberts’s views of medieval darkness and Renaissance brilliance were formed in the bosom of nineteenth-century scholarship and religious polemics and that Talmage and Smith inherited his vision in large measure. As Davis Bitton has written, their “conception of history” is very clearly a product “of the past century.”101 Though a range of opinions certainly persist among contemporary scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, one would nonetheless be hard pressed to find any historian today who would argue that the Middle Ages were a period of political, technological, social, or cultural backwardness or that the Renaissance was the moment that brought light back into a dark world. Yet, curiously, this view has continued to persist in many LDS narratives of the “Great Apostasy” and more broadly in the collective views of many in the Mormon community.102 Ideas clearly have remarkably long half-lives.

Despite the persistence of the turn-of-the-century paradigm of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, recent years have seen the stirring of a somewhat more expansive and balanced view of the apostasy among some Mormon authorities and scholars. Though the familiar light/dark metaphor has not disappeared entirely, there have been some efforts to emphasize the spiritual nature of the apostasy without embedding it in an ahistorical picture of intellectual and moral decline. Mormon apostle M. Russell Ballard, for example, has written that the darkness of the Middle Ages refers to “the light of the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, including the authority of His holy priesthood, ” and has emphasized that good Christians also lived during this time. Apostle Dallin H. Oaks likewise affirmed that during the apostasy “men and women…kept the light of faith and learning alive” and that “we honor them as servants of God.”103 Indeed, despite his affinity with the work of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, McConkie too acknowledged that “many good and noble souls lived during the dark ages, …and they received guidance from th[e] Spirit.”104

While none of these recent entries can fairly be compared with the all-encompassing, early historical narratives of apostasy, still they suggest perhaps the first stirrings of a change that may bridge the disjuncture between traditional Mormon and contemporary scholarly views of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These and other recent works are moving away from justifying the need for the Restoration by depicting the apostasy as an age of complete degradation, of moral stupor, and of intellectual stagnancy.105 Instead, the apostasy is depicted simply as an age in which priesthood authority did not exist, a view that may be closer in some ways to notions of the apostasy in Mormonism’s first days. By emphasizing the spiritual nature of the apostasy, Mormons may be able to let go of the problematic nineteenth-century historical periodization and acknowledge the complexity and richness of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance without challenging the need for Joseph Smith to restore priesthood authority. In this new picture there is no disjuncture between the accepted historical understanding of the age and Mormon ideas on apostasy. If justification for such a reevaluation is necessary, historical precedent and inspiration for further research into other vintage views of apostasy can perhaps be found in an 1873 statement by then-apostle, soon-to-be prophet, John Taylor:

Notes

This chapter first appeared in a slightly different form as “Inheriting the ‘Great Apostasy’: Medieval and Renaissance in Mormon Thought, ” Journal of Mormon History 28 (Fall 2002): 23–59.

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