agency

The capacity to change history rather than remain trapped in a cyclical world, which Jiang ties to Christ's redemptive action. Raised here as the question of whether movement toward God depends on our own orientation and attention rather than divine monitoring. The human likeness to God that one student offers as the reason people are given meaningful freedom. The distinctly human capacity Jiang keeps interrogating: the freedom to choose, stray, and therefore make goodness meaningful. The capacity for responsible action that is lost once the person narrates the sin as someone else's doing.

The freedom or liberty people need in order to love, create, learn, and grow.

Jiang says Dante would not make pride the ultimate ground of the sins; he would make ego the basis, understood as how one perceives oneself and one's agency in the universe.

For Jiang, the real purpose of Dante's cosmology is to secure maximum free will by preventing the soul from interpreting its condition as unavoidable divine determination.

Bromwich argues that the Macbeth marriage evolves from Lady Macbeth goading him into murder to Macbeth later managing her, which reveals both their compatibility and their shared inability to separate agency from deed.

He generalizes Macbeth's self-deception into a broader account of ambition: ambition feels like an outside force that takes a person over and strips away the inward capacity to care about right and wrong.

Bromwich argues that Macbeth's way of isolating the deed in one place and one time is not unique to him but expresses a fantasy common to hard ambition more generally.

He reads Macbeth's address to the dagger as a confession that he was already going toward the murder, so the hallucination aids rather than causes the deed.

The student argues that minor acts like spitting in food may exercise agency, but real reclamation of free will would require fully breaking free rather than symbolic sabotage.

Jiang explains the return of time and space in Purgatory by linking them to motion, free will, and agency: the soul is no longer trapped but can actively participate in its own restoration.