Abraham 3

As I worked through the third chapter of Abraham the past few days I began to wonder what knuckle-head put together our reading schedule and put me in charge of talking about Kolob. And then I realized that I put myself in charge of talking about Kolob. And then my wife laughed at me :)

Nonetheless, this is, I think, an extremely interesting, singular, and complex passage of Mormon scripture (+ a facsimile!). I’ll do my best to toss out some observations and questions and see what kind of thoughts and responses you might have.

vs. 1, “And I, Abraham, had the Urim and Thummim . . .”

Could we read the Urim and Thummim as a kind a typological de-coder/re-coder that runs the mundane situation through an algorithm of immemoriality in order to reveal the world’s alternate meanings? Here, taking the stars as a “type” for intelligences and reading out of them truths about the nature of our relation to God, the gods, space, and time? That may be a little bit of a stretch – or not.

vs. 2, “And I saw the stars . . .”

An initial problem we face in reading the chapter (especially if we don’t read the discussion of the heavens as exclusively typological) is deciding what kind of cosmological context we ought to use as a background frame. Should we assume a pre-Copernican cosmology as a backdrop? A Joseph Smith era cosmology? A contemporary, “accurate” cosmology? I really don’t have the faintest. Any suggestions?

vs. 4, “And the Lord said unto me, by the Urim and Thummim, that Kolob was after the manner of the Lord, according to its times and seasons in revolutions thereof; that one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest.”

Does the difference in the length of days apply experientially or just planetarily? That is, does the Lord experience a day on Kolob (1,000 years) in the same way we experience 24 hours here (so that he experiences a day for us as just 1.4 minutes)? Or does he experience time at the same speed as us but just on a much longer scale? (Of course, if you know the answer to this question, I have a couple of other things I’d like to speak to you about by private email.)

Either way, what strikes me as particularly interesting is the way that God experiences time – period. That God is, according to this account, is in time. I’ve always been much more amenable to this view than the classical position that locates God extra-temporally. If an eternal life is not in some sense temporal, then, whatever it is, it won’t allow for anything even remotely like the lives, relationships, loves, etc. that we experience here. Time is, for us, the very stuff of life and the very meaning of a relationship.

What seems to be at stake, then, is question of one’s relationship to time, the way in which time is taken up in one’s passing through it and extension in it. This notion connects nicely with all our previous discussions of the immemorial as being a certain kind of relation to time rather than something non-temporal. It also intersects with our discussion of types as “folding” time or reconstructing and re-orienting time.

We could describe sin, I think, in purely temporal terms as a mis-relation to time (e.g., my present is held captive both to the weight of my past and my fears for the future) and the atonement as a re-opening of the gift of time (i.e., life) when time seems to have come to a stop (I’m “stuck” in sin!) or we appear to have run out of time (I’m dead!).

This not exactly how things play out in these verses but, minimally, we should come away with the notion that our (sinful? profane?) conception of time is not the only possible conception of or relation to time. Another order of time, magnitudes more powerful, is possible and this “other” time is what God is offering Abraham (and us) access to.

vs. 6, “And the Lord said unto me: Now, Abraham, these two facts exist, behold thine eyes see it: it is given unto thee to know the times of reckoning, and the set time . . .”

I’m interested here in the language of “facts” and they way that the chapter keeps circling back to this locution (“there are two facts,” “these two facts exist,” etc.). What do you make of this? Is the “fact” in question the “reckoning of times” or is the “reckoning of times” something that Abraham is given privileged access to here in addition to the bare facts about greater and lesser lights? Is time a “fact” or some “fact +1”?

vs. 14, “And it was in the night time when the Lord spake these words unto me: I will multiply thee, and thy seed after thee, like unto these; and if thou canst count the number of sands, so shall be the number of they seeds.”

The cosmological narrative breaks in verse 14, interrupted by the repetition of God’s promises to Abraham about his numberless posterity. Should we retroactively read all of the preceding discussion of the heavens, etc. as really a discussion of children and posterity? The stars being a type for Abraham’s seed? Not Abraham’s children being like the stars (though this is the phrasing used), but the stars being like Abraham’s children? This may find support in the way that the reiterated promise explicitly incorporates a reference to “sand” as countless rather than limiting itself to the obvious stellar parallel – as if to say that the stars, like the sand, are a just a metaphor for something else.

vs. 16, “If two things exist, and there be one above the other, there shall be greater things above them . . .”

This is a fascinating formulation of infinity. For any two terms placed in relation, there will be a third. And a third for this third. And so on. Here, it is the ordering of magnitudes (“if one is greater than another, then there will be a third”) that allows for the infinity of relations and differences to unfurl.

vs. 18, “. . . as, also, if there be two spirits, and one shall be more intelligent than the other, yet these two spirits, notwithstanding one is more intelligent than the other, have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal.”

The pay-off comes explicitly in vs. 18 with the transition from the discussion of cosmology to a discussion of spirits or intelligences. The relationship between the two discussions is explicitly described as analogical: “as, also, . . .”

What interests me about this verse is the way that it backs off of or punctures the hierarchical ordering: “notwithstanding” the differences in intelligences, all the spirits are co-eternal. None is absolutely reducible to its hierarchical position. There is a kind of primeval and anarchic atomism that asserts the shared, generic eternality of each spirit, a co-eternality that no ordering can overcome or erase.

I’m also struck by the way that there is no “softening” of the blunt differences in intelligence, no attempt to apologize for the political incorrectness of such an assertion. It is simply a “fact”: some spirits are more intelligent than others. It’s just the brute facticity of the way things are. Nobody made these things, nobody asked for them to be this way. We can organize and order them in different, loving ways, but, in the end, we just have to work, each of us, with what we’ve got. And if you think you’re so great, be careful - there is always a third greater than you.

It’s as if salvation and creation are a kind of unavoidable bricolage, a process of working things through from the material necessity of where we are and doing what may be done with what there is, giving what gifts can be given and receiving what gifts may have been sent our way. Whether you’ve got one talent or fifty, that’s just the way things are. The issue is what you do with it.

Is there a touch of Stoic fatalism (not necessarily in a negative sense, but possibly in a very positive sense) in the way that the “facts” of the cosmological order are laid out here?

vs. 23, “He stood among these spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born.”

This is a nice description of the way that our lives are structured in advance of us, given to us even before we are there to receive them.

(The possibility of being given something before we exist to receive it is, I think, the primary sense of the “immemorial” as Jim introduced it: that which precedes time itself making time possible, a non-recoverable pre-history).

Though, here, the picture is nicely complicated by the way that we “have always already been.” I’m tempted to say, however, that this does not refute the point that we were given something before we existed but that it confirms it. It confirms it with an argument that we have “always already been thrown” into ourselves, that we never were not always already given in advance of ourselves.

Everything depends, then, on how we choose to relate to this always already given gift or grace. Everything depends on how we relate to this immemorial dimension of our own histories that is the gift of life given in advance of itself, unearned and unmerited (who could “merit” the grace of a life always already given?). Do we resent not being self-created, master of our own destinies, as intelligent as we’d prefer, or do we accept the grace by extending grace to others with what grace we have?

The drama of our familial relationships then plays out this same drama again on an earthly scale: I’m born to parents who have named and called me in advance of my having even existed in the world and everything will depend on the way that I (and they) relate to this immemorial dimension that defines what a family is.

vs. 25, “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.”

This verse is an interesting extension and generalization of the “testing/proving” that originally anchors the climax of Abraham’s story in Genesis 22.1. It is also an interesting way of talking about how the gods are involved in the process of creating and extending truths: the anarchic/generic co-eternality of the spirits must be tested and ordered and structured for a genuine infinity to unfurl. The unending must be qualitatively transformed into the “eternal,” profane temporality into faithful temporality. An infinite chaos is not sufficient. Orders of infinity must be constructed and elaborated, one above another.

vs. 28, “And the second was angry, and kept not his first estate; and at that day, many followed after him.”

The primal drama of choosing a Savior almost too neatly fits my above description of what is at stake: one’s relation to one’s always already given estate. Will the gift/estate be accepted or will it be rejected out of anger and shame at not having been autonomous, “perfect” and self-created? Satan can’t bear the shame of his life having started without him, without asking him for permission, without his consent and control. Can I? How deep does my shame burn at my inadequacy? How thoroughly does it prompt me to deliberately hide myself (like Adam and Eve) from those intelligences greater than I (God above all)?

My general discussion question, then, for this week is the following (take it up as you prefer or prefer not to – I’m game for whatever you’ve got):

Q. What can we learn from Abraham 3 about the ways in which cosmology/the stars, endless posterity/the family, and immemorially co-eternal spirits are all theologically knotted together for Mormonism?