Words Sunk Deep: Indwelling, Necessity, and Reconciliation in Enos 1

With his sins forgiven and his guilt swept away, Enos asks a crucial question in Enos 1:7: “Lord, how is it done?”Enos has observed the effect—he knows he has been forgiven—but he doesn't yet know the cause. How was he forgiven? And why?In this way, Enos is like all of us. At birth, he passed through the veil that divides “now” from “before” and, thus, he passed through the veil that separates this world's branching effects from their root causes. Having passed through the veil, Enos suffers from the fact that, as Baruch Spinoza puts it in the appendix to Part 1 of his Ethics, “all men are born ignorant of the causes of things.”1The problem that results is threefold.Ignorant of causes, Enos is ignorant of God, his first cause.Ignorant of causes, Enos is ignorant of his father, one of his nearest causes.And crucially, ignorant of causes, Enos suffers from the fact that he is ignorant of how to consciously be a cause, of how to act and not just be acted upon.Framed by these three problems, my thesis with respect to reading Enos 1 is the following: that the pivot point in Enos's story of redemption comes after he has been forgiven, when he first poses this decisive question: “Lord, how is it done?”The turning point comes when Enos asks: “Lord, what is the cause?”For Enos, his story about God—and his discovery of causes—begins with his father.To start, it is helpful to note that, unlike other books in the small plates, the Book of Enos floats free of its causal genealogy. Though Enos begins with his father (Enos 1:1), he never says who his father is. He never names Jacob. And unlike Jacob who precedes him or Jarom who follows him, Enos also never names his spiritual successor (cf. Jacob 7:27; Jarom 1:15). These genealogical dots aren't hard to infer, but Enos doesn't connect them. He doesn't link himself into the larger family tree.Add to this lack of linkage the weird chronology spanning the lives of Jacob and Enos—there appears to be something like 124 years between them—and it is likely that Enos was a small child when Jacob died.2 If Enos hardly knew his father, this makes a common problem all the more acute: the problem that it is hard for children, even in the best of circumstances, to understand their fathers.Of course, this ignorance doesn't mean that fathers don't leave a deep causal mark. Being ignorant of a cause doesn't stop it from functioning as a cause. It doesn't stop that cause from working on us and through us, from shaping us and persisting in us.In a very real sense, every effect is “indwelt” by the causes that preceded it, just as every son is indwelt by the causal stamp of his father.And this, as we're told, is exactly where Enos finds himself: though his father is long dead, Enos can't get his father's voice out of his head. That voice is still inside him. It is still working on him, still pushing, still creating new effects. As an active cause, that voice still has a kind of life and agency all its own. “I went to hunt beasts in the forests,” Enos says, and instead, “the words which I had often heard my father speak concerning eternal life, and the joy of the saints, sunk deep into my heart” (Enos 1:3).This characteristic of his father's sunk-words—that his father's voice has a life of its own in Enos's head—is, for Enos, a hint, a clue. This autonomous voice in his head is a symptom of the fact that Enos's head isn't simply his own. It is a symptom of the fact that Enos—regardless of his ignorance—is caused.Enos describes what comes next as a wrestle. “I will tell you about the wrestle which I had before God, before I received a remission of my sins” (Enos 1:2).The irony of this wrestle is that it happens only once Enos is alone. It happens in the presence of God, “before” God—but it is not exactly with God, at least not at first, at least not directly. As with the biblical Jacob's famous wrestle with an “angel”—a description that already presumes too much given the opacity of the text—the nature of Enos's opponent is ambiguous: like Jacob in Genesis 32, it was only once Enos was “left alone” in the wild that “there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day” (Genesis 32:24).But how does one wrestle alone? With whom is Enos wrestling?Enos is wrestling with himself—after a fashion. Or he is wrestling with some part of himself, with some part of himself that isn't simply the same as himself. He is wrestling, I would suggest, with some force or cause that indwells him.Again, as pivotal as this is for Enos, it is not unusual. If you want to discover what causes indwell you—and, thus, wrestle with yourself—few catalysts are as potent as solitude and silence. So, for Enos, it is no surprise that his father's voice becomes impossible to ignore only once he is alone in the forest. It is no surprise that he must first be alone to discover he is not actually alone, that his mind and body are effectively indwelt by the voices and lives that caused him.This, I would argue, is the precondition for his forthcoming struggle: Enos can wrestle with himself before God because he has discovered he is not just himself. He has discovered that every effect is irreparably intertwined with its cause.The structure of this wrestle is obliquely mirrored in the grammar of the book's opening verses.In verse 1, Enos's first move is to name himself—twice. His first move is to duplicate himself, simultaneously positioning himself as both a first-person cause and a third-person effect: “Behold, it came to pass that I, Enos, knowing my father . . . ” (Enos 1:1).On the one hand, Enos is the “I,” the subject of the sentence. And on the other hand, he is also “Enos,” the object of someone else's attention and address. He is both at once, doubled and divided. “It came to pass that I, Enos . . . ”What induces this grammatical doubling of Enos into both cause and effect? In this sentence, the proximate reason is the introduction of Enos's father. “I, Enos, knowing my father that he was a just man—for he taught me in his language, and also in the nurture and admonition of the Lord . . . ” (Enos 1:1). Structurally, Enos's father sits at this fork that makes it possible for Enos to wrestle with himself.Moreover, Enos's description of his father also mirrors this same doubling: “I, Enos, knowing my father that he was a just man . . . ” (Enos 1:1). On one hand, Enos knows his father—my father, he says—as a person, in the first person. On the other hand, he interrupts this personal connection with the insertion of an awkward, third-person qualification: “that he was a just man.”And, perhaps most telling, the end result of this forked grammar is that the sentence introduced by I/Enos breaks off without ever introducing an active verb. The sentence that begins in verse 1 is grammatically incomplete. It is an incomplete sentence. And verse 2, instead of addressing the problem, opts to just start from scratch. “I, Enos, knowing my father that he was a just man. . . . And I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before God” (Enos 1:1, 2).Hamstrung in this way between his status as a subject and his status as an object, Enos doesn't yet know how to be active. He doesn't know how it is done. He doesn't know how to be a cause.Suffering his ignorance, indwelt by his father's voice, divided, and hamstrung, Enos begins to wrestle with himself. His soul begins to hunger. “And my soul hungered,” he tells us, “and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul” (Enos 1:4).Enos's soul is hungry. For what would a soul hunger? What would satisfy a soul? There may be a clue in the roughly poetic structure of verse 4, rendered as follows: (A) And my soul hungered(B) And I kneeled down before my Maker(B) And I cried unto him(A) In mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul(C) And all the day long did I cry unto him(C) And when the night came I did still raise my voiceEnos's soul hungers, and so he kneels down, and he cries unto his Maker for . . . his own soul? Enos's soul is, apparently, hungry for itself. Enos's soul, in some way, lacks enough of itself. Enos's soul is apparently hungry for more soul.Is “mighty prayer” simply the sound of a soul rumbling with hunger for more of itself? Is Enos's soul hungry for a “whole” soul (cf. Enos 1:8), rather than a partial or inadequate or incomplete soul? What would this mean? What would it mean for a soul to be whole rather than incomplete?My thesis is that Enos's soul—knowing itself only as an effect—is hungry for knowledge of its causes. Enos puts it this way himself: his soul, he says, cried out for its first cause, for its “Maker” (Enos 1:4).This kind of soul, a soul that is cut off from its causes—a soul that is ignorant of its God and Maker, that knows itself only as an effect, a soul that isn't whole—is a soul caught in the grip of sin. Hamstrung by ignorance, sinners experience themselves (1) as cut off from their Maker, (2) as inadequate or incomplete, (3) as random and haphazard, (4) as a passive effect, and (5) as powerless to act.In terms of emotions or affects, the soul's incomplete sense of itself—as rootless, inadequate, aimless, passive, and powerless—expresses itself acutely in the felt form of guilt. Guilt is what it feels like to be ignorant of one's causes. Guilt is what it feels like to be inadequate and incomplete. Guilt it what it feels like to not be whole. Guilt is what it feels like to need more soul.In itself, this guilt—like all pain, like all passive suffering—is pointless. But, as a clue, this guilt may be helpful. As a clue, guilt may be a powerful symptom orienting Enos to his missing causes. Prompted by the persistence of his father's words, Enos takes his guilt as a sign and, as a sign, his guilt is transfigured into hunger: “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul” (Enos 1:4).In response to his hungry heart-cry, Enos reports that “a voice came unto me, saying: Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou shalt be blessed” (Enos 1:5).This is, of course, a vital moment—though, for my part, I think the more important moment comes next. What results for Enos from this conjunction of forgiveness and blessing?What results is that he acquires a new idea and, specifically, he acquires a new idea about something necessary and essential. What results is that he learns something about how God—as cause—acts. “And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie; wherefore my guilt was swept away” (Enos 1:6).This moment might be read in a number of ways. However, for my purposes, I don't want to read this as an idea about God that Enos already had in hand before he cried out. Rather, I want to read this as a new idea that Enos acquired as a result of what the voice told him. I want to read this as a privileged example of exactly the kind of adequate idea Enos's soul originally hungered for when he asked for more soul.Why might this specific idea about God be an example of what Enos was praying for? What makes an adequate idea different from an inadequate idea?Inadequate ideas are partial or incomplete because they are ignorant of causes. Adequate ideas, on the other hand, are whole or complete because they link effects back to their causes.In addition, as I've already noted, inadequate ideas, because they're ignorant of causes, also feel a certain way. In the register of emotions or affects, inadequate ideas feel rootless, aimless, passive, and powerless. They feel contingent and haphazard and accidental. They feel like the shell of an idea, empty and meaningless. And this, of course, is exactly the constellation of emotions that converge in an experience of guilt.How, though, do adequate ideas feel? In the register of emotions or affects, adequate ideas feel rooted, directed, active, and powerful. With the cause of an effect clearly in view, with the two halves of the puzzle reunited, adequate ideas, as adequate, feel necessary. In short, an adequate idea will present itself as a necessity.What, then, does the presence of God—as cause, as Maker—feel like?God's presence feel likes necessity. God's presence feels like the following conviction: that things are necessarily what they are and that now we must do what must be done. God's presence feels both like the full and unavoidable truth and a moral imperative to act in light of that truth.And this is exactly the kind of idea given to Enos's mind, hungry as it is for necessity. What does Enos learn? “And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie” (Enos 1:6). Enos doesn't learn that God “didn't” or “wouldn't” lie. Enos learns that God couldn't lie. Enos learns something about God, and this idea about God presents itself as a necessity.Then, anchored in this divine necessity, Enos finds his guilt swept away. Aligned with his Maker, he no longer feels inadequate. Grounded in God as his cause, he no longer feels incomplete, rootless, aimless, passive, or powerless. The connection between cause and effect has been made, and the lights have come on.We are positioned now at the fulcrum of Enos's conversion.Having connected with God as cause, having felt that cause as a necessity, and having had his feeling of guilt thus swept away, Enos asks: “Lord, how is it done?”Again, I think this question is open to multiple readings. In light of my thesis, though, I would suggest that Enos is not asking God for an explanation of what just happened. Rather, I think he is asking for instructions about how to do it again, himself.Lord, how is it done? Meaning, “How does one do this?”Enos has experienced God as necessary cause—this is critical—but now he still needs to address that third fundamental problem: How does he stop living as an effect and start acting as a cause? How does he become an active agent in his own right?The answer, as God explains it, is to have faith in Christ. “And I said: Lord, how is it done? And he said unto me: Because of thy faith in Christ” (Enos 1:8).What, though, is faith?Here, on my reading, Spinoza makes another helpful distinction when he outlines two different ways of achieving adequate knowledge of causes. As he argues in Part 2 of his Ethics, adequate knowledge of causes can be achieved: (1) via reason, or (2) via intuition.3Achieving an adequate knowledge of causes via reason is hard work. It is adequation by works rather than faith. You must painstakingly work step-by-step through the causal chain, identifying all the links, until the necessity of those connections comes clearly into view. Once their causal necessity comes into view, then you have knowledge. You're no longer ignorant of those causes.The trouble with reason, however, is that while all causal chains ultimately link back to God, these causal chains are also infinite, and so you can never reach God this way. You can get a sense for local necessities, but you'll never secure a grasp of a global cause or necessity.But adequate knowledge of causes via intuition has a different shape. Rather than painstakingly working your way back through the local causal chain by way of observations and inferences, you instead have an immediate intuition of God as a global cause or necessity. In one revelatory leap, you essentially skip the intermediate chain to intuit—especially in the form of an affective grasp of necessity—God as global cause. This intuitive grasp of necessity is, I think, something like adequation by faith rather than works.In this latter case, you still get all the redemptive effects of adequate knowledge—for example, the dissolution of guilt and your empowerment as an agent—but without actually knowing the details of all the intermediate steps that compose the causal network.Here, faith isn't a lack of knowledge or a blind hope. Rather, faith is a real, operational knowledge of God as cause—it is just that faith, unlike reason, doesn't claim to have adequate knowledge of all the other local causes besides God. To paraphrase Nephi, we might say: Faith is a real intuition of causal necessity; nevertheless, faith doesn't know the meaning of everything that is necessary (cf. 1 Nephi 11:17).Faith, in this sense, is a principle of power. It empowers us to act and not just be acted upon. While we can't understand or control all the causes that affect us—we will always be indwelt and affected by all manner of voices and causes we can't control—we can grasp their necessity when we see them from God's perspective.And this truth—perhaps counterintuitively—is redemptive.First, it is liberating and empowering to stop wishing that things were otherwise, and instead affirm them as necessarily being what they are. I am what I am. Things are what they are. It is liberating to see and affirm that this world truly is what it is. Truth, in itself, is liberating.And, too, it is consequently liberating and empowering to then also feel in my bones, in light of these necessities, what must now be done. It is liberating and empowering to be convicted about what I must now do as I submit to divine imperatives.But as mortals, the only way to do this—the only way to stop living as effects and start acting as causes—is to align ourselves, by way of faith, with the Cause. The only way to be active rather than passive is to act in God's name, as his agent, on behalf of what's necessary, placing our faith in Christ rather than in our own ideas and desires.In Enos's account, this is exactly what follows: Enos, having faith in Christ, begins to act as an agent of his Maker, as an active cause now aligned with his ultimate Cause. And, tellingly, he does so by seeking the welfare of others. He does so by actively seeking the welfare of the voices and lives and causes that surround him and indwell him.The difficulty of this work is that Enos, as God's agent, will have to commit himself to struggling in faith with necessities he cannot control.What does this work—the work of faith—look like?Enos starts by struggling as an agent of God on behalf of those voices and causes closest to him. “Now, it came to pass,” Enos says, “that when I had heard these words I began to feel a desire for the welfare of my brethren, the Nephites, wherefore, I did pour out my whole soul unto God for them” (Enos 1:9). God, in response, makes Enos a promise: “I will visit thy brethren according to their diligence in keeping my commandments” (Enos 1:10).This, though, is not enough, and Enos again widens the scope of his concern. “And after I, Enos, had heard these words, my faith began to be unshaken in the Lord; and I prayed unto him with many long strugglings for my brethren, the Lamanites” (Enos 1:11). And God again responds: “The Lord said unto me: I will grant unto thee according to thy desires, because of thy faith” (Enos 1:12).However, it is not until verse 13 that Enos gives us a look at the specific form of “his many long strugglings” for his brethren. Anchored in faith, Enos must now go to work as an agent. But what does this work—on the ground, as an agent among a mass of other agents—look like? What form does this work take?It takes, I think, the form of reason.To his faith, Enos must add works. To his adequate knowledge by way of intuition, he must add adequate knowledge by way of reason.Under the umbrella of faith in God, Enos's struggle with necessity takes the form of painstakingly working step-by-step back through the causal chain, identifying all the links, until the necessity of those connections comes clearly into view and those relationships are understood.Here, this local work of producing adequate knowledge by way of reason takes the very specific form of a complex hypothetical statement that tries to map out the causal relationships at stake in his love for the Lamanites. It takes the form of those tangled, complex, local necessities that Enos unravels in verse 13: And now behold, this was the desire which I desired of him—that if it should so be, that my people, the Nephites, should fall into transgression, and by any means be destroyed, and the Lamanites should not be destroyed, that the Lord God would preserve a record of my people, the Nephites; even if it so be by the power of his holy arm, that it might be brought forth at some future day unto the Lamanites, that, perhaps, they might be brought unto salvation— (Enos 1:13)Or, if we abstract from the content of Enos's desire to focus just on its form, then Enos's reported struggle with necessity on behalf of the Lamanites would look something like this: If this and this, and also this happen, then God promises to do this, even if it also requires this, so that this might happen, and, perhaps, also this.Here, Enos has the look of a man who has been struggling with a vast network of necessities beyond his control, a man struggling to reconcile himself with what he cannot change and still, “perhaps,” leverage some of those implacable necessities to save some part of what he had hoped to save.The key, for Enos, is to engage with these local hypotheticals only under the sign of global (and categorical) necessities. His works must be a function of his faith in Christ. His work must unfold as an attempt to reconcile himself, in love, with all the voices and lives and causes he cannot control, working on behalf of their welfare without attempting to dictate the results of that work.But Enos must be careful here. Because if his works stop being a function of his faith in Christ, then he will end up back where he started. Whenever we attempt to dictate results, then we end up ignoring necessities, and, once again, we end up rootless, aimless, passive, and powerless. We end up guilty all over again. We end up positioned as effects, cut loose from their causes.Enos's conversion, originally catalyzed by the indwelling voice of his father, is almost complete.Operating now as an agent of the Lord, Enos is struggling—with all manner of complicated local necessities—on behalf of the Lamanites. But, despite the difficulty of this work, Enos won't let go. “I cried unto [God] continually, for he had said unto me: Whatsoever thing ye shall ask in faith, believing that ye shall receive in the name of Christ, ye shall receive it” (Enos 1:15). If Enos asks in faith, as an agent of Christ, for what is necessary, he is guaranteed to receive it.The remarkable thing about this promise is its scope: it applies, God says, to “whatsoever thing” Enos asks in faith. Even more striking, however, is what Enos then decides to pray for.Enos doesn't pray for “whatsoever” thing. Rather, with laser-like precision, Enos zeroes in on just one thing: “And I had faith, and I did cry unto God that he would preserve the records” (Enos 1:16). In response, God covenants with Enos to do just that: to “bring [the records] forth unto the Lamanites in his own due time” (Enos 1:16).Enos is relieved. Having received this covenant, he finds the peace he has been looking for. He tells us: “And I, Enos, knew it would be according to the covenant which he had made; wherefore my soul did rest” (Enos 1:17).This, it seems, is the happy ending we have been waiting for: wherefore Enos's soul did rest. But, from God's perspective, the story is not over yet. Enos—though he doesn't seem to realize it—has not quite reached his destination. He hasn't quite come full circle.To close the loop, God will have to proactively intervene.For the first time, in verse 18, the voice of the Lord does not come into Enos's mind in response to a wrestle or struggle or pleading. For the first time in the narrative, God speaks without first being addressed. Rather, in verse 18, the voice causes itself to come into Enos's head.God needs Enos to know one more thing.God needs Enos to know one last thing about what Enos had, in faith, desired of God: “And the Lord said unto me: Thy fathers have also required of me this thing; and it shall be done unto them according to their faith; for their faith was like unto thine” (Enos 1:18). Here, God reveals to Enos that his desire is the same as his father's desire. “Thy fathers also required of me this thing,” God says. “Their faith was like unto thine.”Enos's story begins when he can't stop hearing his father's words in his head (cf. Enos 1:1). And Enos's story ends when God reveals to Enos that Enos's own words—for a long time now, all through his many long strugglings, sunk deep in his heart, without his ever realizing it—are his father's words (cf. Enos 1:18).This was the desire that Enos now desired: his father's desire (cf. Enos 1:13).Enos, rather than suffering those words, had become their agent. What Enos had at first only heard, he had finally learned to say.Enos, as caused, had—in Christ—become a cause.