Alma’s doctrine of desire

Being judged for what we want along with what we do

In his final recorded sermon, a private exhortation to his wayward son Corianton, Alma the Younger teaches that “it is requisite with the justice of God that men should be judged according to their works; and if their works were good in this life, and the desires of their hearts were good, that they should also, at the last day, be restored unto that which is good.” He starts with a straight-forward connection between judgement and works before doubling back to add another element: “the desires of their hearts.” Alma wants his son to know it is not enough to do good—something this former missionary has probably done in the past—but that he must want to do good too.

Lest we think that this addition of desire is incidental, Alma doubles down. Two verses later, he is not mentioning works at all. Desire is everything: “The one raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness, or good according to his desires of good; and the other to evil according to his desires of evil…If he hath repented of his sins, and desired righteousness until the end of his days, even so he shall be rewarded unto righteousness.”

Alma’s emphasis on being judged by our desires runs headlong into modern assumptions of the psyche. Since at least Freud, desire has been understood as an inscrutable, unruly force that defies definition and transformation. Desires can be repressed or expressed, disciplined or indulged, but they resist our pitiful attempts to change them. As Emily Dickinson wrote, and Selena Gomez crooned, “The heart wants what it wants.” How can we be judged for that?

Could Alma himself even bear that judgment? Alma is teaching Corianton this law of restoration to correct Corianton’s assumption that “it is injustice that the sinner should be consigned to a state of misery,” instructing him that it is impossible for a sinner to be “restored from wickedness to happiness.” But let’s rewind Alma’s life some 25 years. Then, he was traveling in secret, seeking “to destroy the church of God.” But instead of being restored “to evil according to his desire of evil,” Alma receives a thunderous intervention at the hand of an angel. In an instant, a man hell-bent on the church’s destruction has the scales before his eyes shattered, and he is forced to confront the perilous edge on which his soul stands, an edge that Jesus rescues him from as he cries for mercy. About as dramatic an act of repentance as you can imagine—but one not precipitated, it appears, by Alma’s desires, but by those of his father. How can God’s forceful intrusion into Alma’s life be squared with his teaching to Corianton “that [if] you are merciful unto your brethren; deal justly, judge righteously, and do good continually…then shall ye receive your reward”?

The idea that a soul can be rescued in a single moment conflicts with some of Alma’s later teachings. The same man who was converted from a Christian antagonist to apologist after a three-day coma also taught one of the most eloquent analogies in scripture on how faith must be nurtured over a long period of time before you can ever expect to taste its fruits. Alma seems to have experienced in an instant what he claims will take us a long period of patience and endurance.

The Desire to Believe

At the heart of these two versions of repentance—Alma’s life and Alma’s teaching—is the role of desire. Ironically, Alma heard very little of the angel’s message, for he was shook to his core after one line: “If thou wilt of thyself be destroyed, seek no more to destroy the church of God”—or, as it was probably meant, “Even if you are willing to destroy yourself, stop seeking to destroy the church of God.” The angel dismisses Alma’s personal desires as irrelevant; what matters are his actions, the ones that are undermining the Christian faith. But it is Alma’s desire to endure, and his fear of self-destruction, that sends him into existential despair: “And the angel spake more things unto me, which were heard by my brethren, but I did not hear them; for when I heard the words[,]…I was struck with such great fear and amazement lest perhaps I should be destroyed, that I fell to the earth and I did hear no more.”

Alma’s instinct for self-preservation spurs his self-examination; he realizes that by attacking other people’s faith, he was threatening his own soul: “I saw that I had rebelled against my God, and that I had not kept his holy commandments…Yea, and I had murdered many of his children, or rather led them away unto destruction.” That Alma sees his religious attacks as a form of “murder” shows that in his mind, spiritual survival has become equivalent to physical survival, that concern for his own well-being has expanded to include others around him.

Rather than opposed to his teaching, Alma’s experience is a condensed form of faith’s development that he preached in his mission to the Zoramites. In Alma 32, Alma acknowledges the paradoxical origins of faith: it starts with belief, yes, but what starts belief? Alma says its desire: “even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.” By posting desire as the jumpstart to belief, Alma is suggesting that desire comes more naturally, that it is easier to nurture, and that belief—the leap into a reality beyond the self—comes as an outgrowth of personal desire.

Of course, that just puts the question back a step: if desire leads to belief, what leads to desire? This seeming endless regress of desire to desire to desire to believe is why thinkers like John Calvin gave up on free will and attributed all spiritual yearnings to an inscrutable God (a god who might, for instance, transform your desires with angelic intervention). But Alma asserts that our desires are, at least to some degree, under the purview of our agency, that we can choose and be held accountable for our desires. How might that work?

Mimetic Desire

One answer comes from the theory of “mimetic desire” articulated by twentieth-century philosopher Rene Girard. Girard argued that our desires do not come hardwired into us but are developed through the process of “mimesis,” in which we observe others—“mediators”—and mimic their behavior and preferences. Think, for example, of how children play with toys. One boy is content with his truck until he sees another playing happily with a car. Now the truck is dull, and the car is everything. Or consider Madison Avenue advertising: instead of selling us on Pepsi, they sell us on the cool, attractive people who drink Pepsi, and—surprise, surprise—we find ourselves thirsty. The heart wants what other hearts want.

In light of soda ads, mimetic theory can appear depressingly fatalistic, like we’re envious lemmings who cannot help but follow attractive mediators right off whatever cliff they lead us to.

Yet Girard’s model also presents the potential for transformation. Girard says that our desires often go beyond the material desire to metaphysical desire, from wanting something to wanting to be someone. We don’t just want the Pepsi; we want to be the celebrities who hawk the product. Metaphysical desire can be a double-edged sword. We might become consumed with frustration and dissatisfaction if we become fixated on a metaphysical rival whom we must always surpass: a colleague whom we need to be promoted over, a college roommate whom we need to outshine. But if we direct our mimetic desire towards noble mediators, we can be inspired to emulate their better qualities. We cannot escape mimesis altogether, so we instead must choose our “rivals” carefully, and decide how we will respond to them—ideally, not in self-defeating competition but in aspirational striving.

Alma encounters several potential rivals throughout his life: Amlici, who desires Alma’s political power; the king of Ammonihah, who mocks Alma’s claim to divine power; Korihor, who challenges Alma’s religious authority; and the leader of the Zoramites, who sees his political authority threatened by Alma’s success with lower class converts. And yet Alma does not seem to reciprocate their rivalries; his metaphysical desire is directed elsewhere.

Desiring God’s Will

“O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people!” Alma 29 is one of the most puzzling chapters in the Book of Mormon. A first-person meditation with no context or attribution, it serves as a hinge between the first and second halves of Alma, a book that reels from catastrophic battles to radical conversions. But at its center is the plaintive cry of a man hungry for spiritual power even while he fears his own desires: “I would declare unto every soul, as with the voice of thunder, repentance and the plan of redemption…that there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the earth. But behold, I am a man, and do sin in my wish; for I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me.”

Alma feels himself pulled towards mimetic rivalry with the angel who rescued his own soul, wishing that he could speak with the same power that changed his own life. But he checks his desires from spiraling out of control: “I ought not to harrow up in my desires the firm decree of a just God…why should I desire more than to perform the work to which I have been called?” The first line is difficult to parse, but Alma appears to be warning himself against losing sight of God’s justice. Instead of saving souls in the manner he thinks best, he should defer to God’s judgment. By doing so, Alma is also able to celebrate, rather than envy, the missionary successes of the sons of Mosiah (who, it’s worth noting, converted far more persons in their missions than Alma ever did).

Alma’s wrestle against spiritual rivalry in Alma 29 illustrates how we are “judged” of our desires. Judgment after this life is not so much an evaluation of whether we have measured up as it is, to use Alma’s word, a “restoration” back to who we were and wanted to be. Our desires communicate who we have chosen as our mediators, and the nature of our rivalry with them, and those choices define our identity. As Alma consoles himself, in Alma 29, for not measuring up to the angel that saved him, he reminds himself that his shortcomings are the product of the desires of his listeners, that God “granteth unto men according to their desire, whether it be unto death or unto life.” This doctrine prompts him to reflect on his own desires—if his listeners will be judged for not desiring repentance, “why should I desire more than to perform the work to which I have been called?” He realizes that he is implicated alongside his audience for not trusting in God’s wisdom and timeline. So instead, he “glories,” or embraces, the sphere God has placed him in: “that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance.” Once he has finally aligned his desires with God’s can he finally trust that he will be, as he taught Corianton, “raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness.” “This,” he says, is the perfect unity of desire and justice. This, he says, “is my joy.”