The Hyperreal Temple at Nauvoo

As architect, William Weeks materialized a definitive moment in Mormonism’s evolving cultural identity by reshaping ritual space, establishing Mormon material identity and introducing mystery and complexity in the ephemeral Nauvoo temple (1841-1846). The Nauvoo temple became the iconic symbol of Mormonism’s revolutionary doctrinal teachings during the Nauvoo period and its bombastic broadcast atop a prominent bluff overlooking the Mississippi River amplified the already harsh antipathy of the opposition.

On February 9, 1846, “The Twelve [Apostles] met in the attic and Brigham Young dedicated the temple thus far completed, leaving the building in the hands of the Lord,” (1) and the Mormons subsequently abandoned their shining City of Zion. The Nauvoo temple, the principle remaining artifact of Joseph Smith’s utopian vision, remained a powerful symbol of Mormonism’s presence and on May 13, 1846, The Daily Missouri Republican reported on the decision to sell the temple indicating that it would “cut off the last and only motive which could exist to induce them [the Mormons] to stay in Nauvoo, or to return to it at any future time.” (2) Finally, on March 11, 1848, the temple was sold to David T. LeBaron, the brother-in-law of temple Trustee Almon Babbitt for a mere $5,000. (3)  However, the sale of the temple did little to placate the hate riddled sentiments held by the enemies of Mormonism and on October 9, 1848, shrouded in quiet darkness, the great Mormon temple erupted into a chaos of intense heat and light in the early morning hours as fire seethed within its limestone walls and exploded violently through the delicate wood windows, ultimately breaching the conflicting chill of the autumn air. The calm ripples of the legendary Mississippi distorted the glowing spectacle on the bluff into an absurd dance, amplifying its agonizing and violent death across the gently undulating landscape of western Illinois. (4 & 5)

Although the morning was tolerably dark, still, when the flames shot upwards, the spire, the streets and houses for nearly a mile distant were lighted up, so as to render even the smallest objects discernible. The glare of the vast torch, pointing skyward, indescribably contrasted with the universal gloom and darkness around it; and men looked on with faces sad as if the crumbling ruins below were consuming all their hopes. (6)

The ultimate desecration of the Nauvoo temple resulted from the collective effort of the enemies of the Mormon Church intent on eradicating the infant faith and evicting its lingering members remaining in the moribund city following the mass exodus of the Mormon Saints in 1846. Following the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s murder in 1844, the Nauvoo temple’s own inevitable death became the culminating event marking what was to be the decisive defeat of Mormonism in Illinois. The Warsaw Signal, a press unequivocally antagonistic to Mormonism, reported: “The four blackened walls of stone will stand a monument of the rise, progress and downfall of one of the boldest and most nefarious systems of imposture of modern times.” (7)  The brief physical existence and death of the Nauvoo temple epitomized the transient nature of the new Mormon faith and its certain and convincing demise in the eyes of its detractors.

Less than a decade earlier in 1839, following ultimately fatal religious persecution in Missouri – a land proclaimed by Mormons as their Zion, the Saints revealed their zealous optimism and resilient vision upon arriving in the muddy environs of their future Nauvoo. There, situated on a horseshoe bend of the Mississippi River the Saints began building their Zion anew and on April 6, 1841, the cornerstones of that enigmatic sanctuary, the Nauvoo temple, were placed amid ostentatious ceremony. (8)

Just four years following the Nauvoo temple’s completion the four blackened walls which remained after the fire of 1848 succumbed to the forces of a freak tornado and collapsed into a heap of rubble, leaving only the principal façade weakly intact. (9) Parley P. Pratt, a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles recalled in 1857:

On the way we saw Nauvoo and the ruins of the temple in the distance. This called up reflections which I will not attempt to describe. I thought of the Temple and city in their glory; of the twenty thousand Saints once busy there; of the vast congregations once assembled there in prayer and praise; of the martyred Prophet and Saints; of the wholesale murder and plunder perpetrated by ruthless mobs. I thought of my once happy but now fallen country. I greatly desired relief by tears, but tears would not come to my relief. I felt too deeply; but I felt some relief in assuming myself that at last justice could triumph and righteousness reign. (10)

News of the temple’s destruction elicited bittersweet reaction on the part of the Mormon refugees in the deserts of the west. Brigham Young, Smith’s theocratic successor, later recalled, “I hoped to see it burned before I left, but I did not. I was glad when I heard of its being destroyed by fire, and of the walls having fallen in, and said, ‘Hell, you cannot now occupy it.’ ”  (11)  In 1865 the Carthage Republican reported: “The last remaining vestage [sic] of what the famous Mormon temple was in its former glory has disappeared, and nothing now remains to mark its site but heaps of broken stone and rubbish.” (12)

The prosperous city of Nauvoo and its iconic architectural monument were abandoned following intense mobocratic and political pressure in 1846, eventually becoming an atrophied paradox of the untouchable millennial fortress it once represented. The majority of Nauvoo’s Mormon population followed Brigham Young and embarked on an arduous and unrelenting trek across the Midwestern plains and eventually through the heart of the rugged and perilous Rocky Mountains to their new Zion. The Saints’ emotional struggle in leaving their beloved city can be gleaned from an excerpt from the journal of Dr. Priddy Meeks, a devout Mormon adherent and later an important colonizer in Southern Utah, most noted for his establishment of Orderville, Utah. Dr. Meeks later recalled in 1879, “while crossing over a ridge seven miles from Nauvoo, we looked back and took a last sight of the temple we ever expected to see. We were sad and sorrowful. The emotions of our mind at that time I cannot describe.” (13)  The Mormon émigrés eventually arrived in the hostile and arid desolation of the Great Salt Lake Valley in the summer of 1847. This early group was armed with an undying optimism epitomized by the historical account describing the wagon trains descent into Emigration Canyon when Young, ill with fever, sat up and viewing the Salt Lake Valley for the first time uttered, “This is the right place. Drive on.” (14)  Content with their new Zion in the west, for over one hundred fifty years the Mormon presence in Nauvoo was just a whisper of its majestic past, while the Nauvoo temple defiantly eroded into its grave, groaning to communicate its troubled life like a last dying breath. Its physical absence perpetuated the paradigmatic and contentious moment so formative in Mormon theology during the Nauvoo period. The ghost of the ephemeral and mysterious temple lurked in the shadows and awaited its triumphal return.

Then, on April 4, 1999, during the closing remarks of the 169th Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the late Prophet of the Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, spontaneously announced the reconstruction of the Nauvoo Temple stating that “the new building will stand as a memorial to those who built the first such structure there on the banks of the Mississippi.”  (15) The moment of triumph in Nauvoo finally arrived when the temple was painstakingly coaxed out of its grave and reconstructed in detail by the Mormon Church in 2002, catalyzing the forceful return of Mormonism to Nauvoo.

The replica temple incarnated the ghost of the original temple which had inhabited and characterized the sacred place since its destruction in 1850. On its exterior the replica temple is nearly identical to the original with a few minor exceptions such as the modern trumpeting angel atop the spire. On its interior, although the new temple hints at the original floor plans, it is unfortunately entirely consistent with modern Mormon temple design and rejects historical accuracy to the original Nauvoo temple.  The architecture of the replica temple fomented new dialogue on the original temple by overshadowing the original discourse with the sanitized reinvention. While the flurry of chatter revolving around the replica reconstruction has substantially subsided a close examination of the original temple, and by association its architect William Weeks, was timely. The groundbreaking ceremony of the replica temple in Nauvoo occurred on October 24, 1999 with unprecedented speed following an accelerated construction period, described by the architect, Roger Jackson, as “a wild ride.” (16)  The temple was completed and dedicated in a widely attended ceremony on June 27, 2002, purposefully the one-hundred fifty-eighth anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death. Hinckley offered:

This is Joseph's temple...There will be with us today an unseen audience, with Joseph and Hyrum among them, as well as many who gave their time and even their lives for this temple.  (17)

The deliberate timing of the replica temple’s dedication revealed the Church’s conscious effort to establish a direct conduit to its controversial past, unapologetically claiming direct lineage to the early Church and its contentious teachings as presented by Joseph Smith while at the same moment displaying the Church’s conceit by reportraying the historical events of the Nauvoo period through the lens of a misleading architectural narrative. The newly completed temple, at first blush, is a stirring and inspiring monument and does in fact evoke the temporal and spiritual sacrifice and commitment of the early Saints to the Church, as Hinckley so ably foretold. However, at the same moment, the replica temple re-presents the original Nauvoo temple within a novel and distinctly foreign context. The replica temple embodies the vitality, wealth, power and global influence of the modern Mormon Church, conditions all of which were crucial and requisite in the Church’s triumphant return to Nauvoo. Hinckley affirmed at the dedication ceremony that the replica temple showed the resilience of the Church which was forced out of Nauvoo. (18)  Resilience may be too gentle a term. Rather, the replica temple is symbolic of the absolute and final victory of the Mormon Church in Nauvoo, whereas the nagging presence of the scant physical remains of the original temple served as a bleak reminder to modern Mormons of the humiliating defeat and death of the early Church in Nauvoo, a demeaning detail which stubbornly persisted into the twenty-first century. The replica temple is an ersatz referent of the original Nauvoo temple. It symbolizes the permanence of the modern Church and ubiquity of the modern temple by continuing the imperialistic progression of rapid global temple development and displaces the fragile ephemerality the original Nauvoo temple embodied during its life. Nevertheless, the replica temple, at least in part, fulfills Parley P. Pratt’s stubbornly optimistic prediction when he wrote, “…I felt some relief in assuming myself that at last justice could triumph and righteousness reign.” (19)

The ornamentation of the original temple served as a material sermon of the paradoxical concepts of the divinity of man and the mortality of god, both key doctrinal developments during the Nauvoo period. The didactic symbolism is recreated on the replica temple, yet it is entirely subservient to the larger symbol of the modern temple and demoted to quaint decoration, misunderstood and overlooked by the modern adherent. The replica temple, both in its material approximation and its modern and invented interpretation, ousts the original temple and all its strange mystical theological trappings inherent in the practice of early Mormonism. The original temple was the materialization of millennial preoccupation and was the central element to Mormonism’s utopian concept of Zion. In short, the original temple was a unique cultural expression of a people, place and time, all of which has passed into history.

The replica temple is hyperreal, supplanting both the physical being and symbolic meaning of the original temple with an invented symbolism reflecting the cultural expression of the modern Church. Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and philosopher, explained the post-modern neologism in this way:

The ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake.’ Absolute unreality is offered as real presence. The aim ...is to supply a ‘sign’ that will then be forgotten as such: the sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement. Not the image of the thing, but its plaster cast. Its double, in other words. (20)

The replica temple is superficially understood as a modern reconstruction of the original, however. As Eco went on to explain, “the American imagination demands the real thing, and to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.” (21)  The replica temple realized its own monumentality and significance as the boundary between the hyperreal and the real became ambiguous and contested. The dedication plaque (a replica of the original as well) creates added confusion by implying that the construction of the hyperreal temple was initiated on April 6, 1841.

The House of the Lord

Built by

The Church of Jesus Christ

Of Latter-day Saints

Commenced April 6, 1841

Holiness to the Lord

The capstone, found at the southeast corner, bears the only textual reference of the reconstruction and dispels some of the confusion through a muted and somewhat misleading homage to the original temple. It reads:

Originally Built 1846

Rebuilt 2002

With respect to the hyperreal temple Richard Oman, pointed out:

As a significant and spiritual and historical reference for temple building the impact of the Nauvoo temple can scarcely be overemphasized. The rebuilding of this sacred edifice seems to be a perfect embodiment of the Lords directive in Doctrine and Covenants 124. The building of temples in Palmyra, Nauvoo, and Winter Quarters, helps to link the Saints with the spiritual foundations that called the early history of the Church into being. (22)

Ultimately, the Nauvoo temple became a permanent fixture of Mormonism, in its brief life, protracted death and reconstructed hyperreal self.

© 2010 Steven D. Cornell



Notes:
1.  Smith, Joseph. History of the Church. 7:580.
2.  Daily Missouri Republican. 13 May 1846.
3.  Hancock County Deeds, Book V. 93. The deed however was not recorded until November 12, 1848.
4.  Keokuk Register, October 12, 1848.
5.  Arrington, Joseph Earl. “Destruction of the Mormon Temple at Nauvoo.” 8. Arrington reports that the suspected arsonist was likely Joseph B. Agnew.
6.  Nauvoo Patriot, October 9, 1848.
7.  Warsaw Signal, October 12, 1848. The press was located in nearby Warsaw, Illinois. Journal of Illinois State Historical Society. December, 1947. 7. The Warsaw Signal was well known for its bias against the Mormons.
8.  Flanders, Robert Bruce. Nauvoo Kingdom on the Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965. 56.
9.  St. Joseph Adventure, 28 June 1850.
10.  Proctor, Scot Facer and Proctor Maureen Jensen, ed. Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Revised and Enhanced Edition. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company. 2000. 546. Entry dated October 17, 1857.
11.  Journal of Discourses. 8:202-03. October 8, 1860.
12.  Carthage Republican, February 2, 1865.
13.  Priddy Meeks Journal, 22 October 1879 LDS Church Archives.
14.  Gibbons, Francis M. Dynamic Disciples, Prophets of God. Salt Lake City, Utah. Deseret Book Company. 1996. 44.
15.  Hinckley, Gordon B. The Ensign. May 1999.
16.  Jackson, Roger P. “Designing and Construction the “New” Nauvoo Temple: A Personal Reflection.” Mormon Historical Studies. 221.
17.  Stack, Peggy Fletcher. The Salt Lake Tribune. June 28, 2002. “Hinckley Dedicates New Nauvoo Temple.”
18.  Washington Post. June 29, 2002. “Mormons Begin Dedicating Temple.”
19.  Proctor, 546.
20.  Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1986. 7.
21.  Ibid, 7.
22.  Oman, Richard. “The Nauvoo Temple: Some Architectural Forms and Their Possible Interpretations.” March 20, 2001. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Archives. CR 100 221. 24.  1.