Agency: A Power Grounded in Relationality
Adapted from Agency, by Terryl Givens, in the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series.
Agency existed in those premortal worlds from which we come. And yet, we know that in some essential way agency became operative with new stakes and new conditions in the Garden of Eden. The Genesis narrative makes clear that human creation is not finished—we do not exist in any complete or perfect way—until the first human creation has been differentiated, organized, into two human entities. God’s statement after Adam’s creation, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” is more than an observation about loneliness. It is rather a recognition of Creation’s incompleteness at that stage; only after the woman and man are present together, positioned as help “meet” for each other, is creation pronounced not “good” as in the prior phases of creation, but “very good” (2:18; 1:27, 31). We learn here that meaningful existence cannot pertain to solitude, but unfolds in plurality. Only then is the stage set for the meaningful interactions and subsequent choices that are to follow. As Virginia Held writes, we must challenge the old belief that “we are distinct individuals first and then we form relationships.”[i] Adam and Eve, like any newborn child, appear as fully formed persons already related to other persons. That is a fact of our existence worth pondering. They come from heavenly parents, and transition into a human couple. Anterior to their incarnation, and as part of the drama of Creation, their identity is inseparable from relationship.
The capacity of a being to “act for itself” is prerequisite to meaningful “existence” (93:30). Existence—in the human sense of existing—requires agency. And the prelude to the drama of human agency as it unfolds in mortality is the establishment of a mini-community of persons. This is because the very fact of agency is, at the most fundamental level, a power that is grounded in relationality. The father of Western philosophy made this point: in trying to define the nature of Being itself, Plato held that “anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; And I hold that the definition of being is simply power.”[ii] In other words, to be an agent is to have the capacity to influence another—or be influenced by another. We all come into the world as individuals within a relational field. The very concept of the individual entails an “other,” or multiple “others,” in relation to which our own identity is constituted.
Agency is not even meaningful, it has no value or discernible reality, except insofar as it registers in a network—or community—of other agents. The entire mortal program of agency focuses on choice, experiencing and discerning and choosing the sweet and good over the bitter and evil. But we do not choose those categories in the abstract, and we do not choose in an impersonal vacuum. We choose in response to words, enticements, counsels, actions of others. A modern physicist even argues that this criterion is what constitutes the essence of life itself: “for something to exist from the point of view of the world, extrinsically, it must be able to influence things and things must be able to influence it. That is what it means to have causal power. When something can't make a difference to anything in the world or be influenced by anything in the world, it is causally impotent. Whether or not it exists makes no difference to anything.”[iii] Marilynne Robinson’s character makes the point more simply: “a thing that does not exist in relation to anything else cannot itself be said to exist.”[iv] (“One can only be a person in relation to other persons,” notes one theologian).[v]
Humans are exceptional in their ability to choose which models we will be influenced by; what values will we choose to embrace? What futures will we choose to steer towards? What influences, words, actions of others will we decide to emulate, and which will we reject as unworthy of imitation? Ironically, in sum, imitation is one of those capacities that make us human. To imagine a capacity to act in an entirely spontaneous, self-directed way, untainted by external ideals or models, is a pipe dream. What would such an imagined life even look like? The wolf-child of legend, who grew up deprived of any human contact whatsoever? Such “authenticity” is not only an illusion; the sacrifice of our capacity for imitation would represent the loss of one of the most conspicuous markers of our humanity.
We might say that at a deeper level of identity, scripture affirms our nature as eternal beings, progeny of the gods. That is true, and that is crucial in tracing our identity beyond the biological. My point is that the shape that identity takes in mortality is the capacity to choose the path by which a divine potential blossoms into the divine.
How, and what, will be imitated? Hopefully, we can now read section 1 in new light: “every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol” (1:16). “After the image…” Pelagius, the fourth-century critic of Augustine, was on to this same point. We are not sinful by nature, he insisted. The fact is we are “essentially social: we become whoever we are largely through imitation.”[vi]
One word that Christianity often employs as code for “the imitation of Christ” is “obedience.” Obedience, like imitation, rubs against the grain of contemporary culture. It has all those connotations of authoritarianism, inauthenticity, robot-like conformity. I have found, in this regard, the words of Timothy Radcliffe to be a powerful corrective to the cultural baggage of obedience. “The obedience of faith,” he writes, “is more like listening expectantly to a Beethoven string quartet than to obeying a police officer. It’s a response to the authority of its meaning.”[vii] No one compels us to love the music of Beethoven or a sonnet by Shakespeare. If we are attentive and open, susceptible to its beauty and power, then we respond to its sway over us. It washes over us, draws us toward a recognition of the rightness of this experience so far beyond the cacophony of traffic or the tedium of our own voices. The parallel is not perfect but it is close. We are drawn to Christ to love and imitate and yes, obey, because his love is non-coercive, his tenderness matchless, his every interaction with his friends and strangers the ideal of how any one of us can be most fully alive and responsive in this world of human relationship.
There is a kind of independence we ought to be seeking, the kind Brigham Young spoke of recurrently. We are “organized to be as independent as any being in eternity,” he preached; we are intended “to act… as independently in [our] sphere as [God does] in the government of heaven.”[viii] How can we be both relational beings, and independent beings? By achieving that kind of imitation that is response rather than reaction, actively receiving godly influences rather than mirroring culturally fashionable values. It may in fact not be off the mark to say that a principal objective of our mortal education is to enlarge the sphere of meaningful agency by turning automatic reaction into deliberative response—mindless mirroring into measured imitation, in an educative process the Lord mentors.
[i] Held is here quoting Michael Sandel’s critique of the view that we begin our existence as autonomous agents. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13.
[ii] Plato, The Sophist.
[iii] Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 149.
[iv] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Picador, 2006), 47.
[v] Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72.
[vi] Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (New York: Norton, 2017), 105.
[vii] Radcliffe, Alive in God, 30.
[viii] Brigham Young, “Perfection and Salvation, etc.” Journal of Discourses 2:135; “Spiritual Gifts, Etc.” Journal of Discourses 2:139.