Hugh Nibley on free agency and our individual responsibility — in his very blunt direct way:

This law of free agency and total individual responsibility has one great drawback: it requires that every member seeking to be properly led so live as if he or she was the Pres. – for each one is just as eligible (and therefore responsible) for receiving revelations as he is.

How much more easy, economical, and simple is the Roman Catholic system of identifying infallibility automatically with utterances given from a certain office. Above all, we do not need to ponder things in our own minds, to ask God for personal revelation, and to live so uprightly as to be able to receive it – that is a rough road. How much pleasanter to say simply: “Whatsoever pleases the Brethren is all right with me!”

But “this,” says B.Y., “is not pleasing in the sight of the Lord,” it is begging off from our solemn obligations in the name of loyalty, making a merit of evading the duties imposed on us by that free agency which as Elder Smoot told the Senators, God himself cannot take away.

The irony of “corpse-like obedience” (a Jesuit expression, quamut cadaver, meaning automatic and unquestioning compliance with whatever authority command), is that the people who profess to it do not follow it at all: the actual rule they follow is that described by Samuel the Lamanite: if they LIKE what the Prophet says they willingly accept it, if not they declare him a false or fallen prophet. Sen. Smoot gives an example of this which deserves serious thought:

Sen Dubois: If the President of the Church received a revelation from God and submitted it to the conference, and they sustained it, and you, for instance, did not see fit to obey it, how would that affect you as regards your relation to the church?

Sen Smoot: I hardly think it would affect me. I remember now an instance in our church of a revelation being received for the establishment of the United Order. I know that Brigham Young went from one end of the state to the other and preached the new order, and instructed the people to organize and follow out that revelation. He went from St. George to the north, and I know that it was never adhered to or followed out by the people, and is virtually a dead letter today.” (pp 249-250)

  • Unpublished notes of Hugh Nibley, thanks go to T.C.
    Image: Hugh Nibley’s typewriter

Originally posted in 2014.