The Meaning of the Temple, by Hugh W. Nibley

Salt Lake City Temple

There is matter. That is the first law: matter was always there. There is unorganized matter. Or as Lyall Watson says, "The normal state of matter is chaos." It always is and it always will be. The normal state of matter is to be unorganized. There is unorganized matter; let us go down and organize it into a world. That mysterious somebody is at work, bringing order from chaos. It would be easy to say we were making up a story, if we didn't have a world to prove it. Somebody went down and organized it. Matter was always there, always in its normal state of chaos; and long ago the protons should have all broken down, yet here is the world. Matter is unorganized. The temple represents that organizing principle in the universe which brings all things together. It is the school where we learn about these things.

In the temple we are taught by symbols and examples; but that is not the fullness of the gospel. One very popular argument today says, "Look, you say the Book of Mormon contains the fullness of the gospel, but it doesn't contain any of the temple ordinances in it, does it?" Ordinances are not the fullness of the gospel. Going to the temple is like entering into a laboratory to confirm what you have already learned in the classroom and from the text. The fullness of the gospel is the understanding of what the plan is all about—the knowledge necessary to salvation. You know the whys and wherefores; for the fullness of the gospel you go to Nephi, to Alma, to Moroni. Then you will enter into the lab, but not in total ignorance. The ordinances are mere forms. They do not exalt us; they merely prepare us to be ready in case we ever become eligible.

There is an interesting sidelight to the word telestial, a word long considered as one of Joseph Smith's more glaring indiscretions. We know now that there are three worlds: the telestial, in which we live; the celestial, to which we aspire; and in between them another world, called the terrestrial. It is of neither the celestial nor the telestial. According to the ancients, this world is represented by the temple, the in-between world where the rites of passage take place. Indeed the root telos is a very rich word in this regard and has been treated a lot recently. It deals with the mysteries. Telos means initiation. Teleiomai means to be introduced into the mysteries. Professor Werner Jaeger of Harvard, a close friend of mine who wrote Paideia, was much exercised with that word teleiotes when he was editing Gregory of Nyssa. He claimed that Gregory was talking about the mysteries. A teleiotes is a person who has been initiated into some degree or other of the mysteries, and the completion of the degree qualifies him as complete or "perfect."

This word root first appears as indicating various steps from beginning to end of the initiation ordinances of the mysteries. In a recent book, just out this year (1973), Morton Smith has shown at great length that the word "mystery," as used by the early Jews and Christians (taught in secret to the apostles), was nothing else than a series of initiatory ordinances for achieving the highest salvation which today are lost and unknown to the Christian world. He says we don't know what they are; but that is what Christ meant by the mysteries of the kingdom. He meant ordinances, which were necessary; and these he revealed to the apostles during his very confidential teachings of the forty days after the resurrection. The purpose of such ordinances is to bridge the space between the world in which we now live, the telestial world, and that to which we aspire, the celestial world. Therefore, the events of the temple were thought to take place in the terrestrial sphere. Recall that you leave the creation, and you end up at the celestial; but nothing happens in the celestial. Everything happens in the telestial and terrestrial, but not until after you leave the garden. Then the fun begins, until you arrive at your celestial rest. The whole temple represents teleiotes. It is also in the "telestial" world below, a word that nobody used but Joseph Smith. And it means that very thing—the lowest world, the world in which we are placed below the other two. Because the ordinances bridge the two worlds—the telestial and the celestial—the events of the temple were thought to take place in both terrestrial and telestial spheres, the world of the mysteries or ordinances. But the Coptic Text called the in-between world the world of transition. This is a beautiful score for Joseph Smith.

Someone once asked me concerning the Egyptian ordinances contained in the Joseph Smith manuscripts, Is this stuff relevant to the modem world? My answer is no. It is relevant to the eternities. The modern world is as unstable as a decaying isotope, but the temple has always been the same. The ordinances are those taught by an angel to Adam

We testify to the truth of the existence of these things. We ask, What did Joseph Smith know about the temple? He knew everything about it. He gave us the complete thing. So we know that the gospel has been restored, and that the temple is the center of things. So we must repair there often. I have gotten so I am almost an addict. I cannot keep away from the temple. I revel in it, the building I call an endowment house, lacking as it does in so many aspects—but that doesn't make any difference. We can see the ordinances and the endowments. It was built for practical purposes.