To Forgive or Not: A timely question in an age of terror

Abstract

The question raised in The Sunflower, by force of the faiths of the victim and the wrongdoer (Simon and Karl respectively), implicates a need for exploration of the different apprehensions of the concept of forgiveness in Christianity and Judaism, and warrants, at once, its secular interpretation and understanding. I begin with a multidisciplinary discussion of the literature, and then turn my attention to the theology of forgiveness. Theorists, particularly Hannah Arendt (1958, 32) and Bishop Butler (1970, 72)), insist that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for forgiveness, and that these conditions are partly moral, metaphysical, and existential. One obvious condition requires that a culpable wrong be committed for forgiveness to be relevant, and that both victim and offender be moral agents (the concept of forgiveness would be senseless in a world comprised of stones, fish, and vegetables). Thus once a harmful act has been committed, forgiveness acts as a mechanism that interrupts the damages inflicted, and mitigates the stimuli to react or seek revenge. But once a great harm has been done, the mere act of forgiveness may lack the capacity to make whole or redeem the victim from what Arendt described as “the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done”(Arendt 1958, 40). Arendt acknowledges this limiting power of forgiveness, but insists that forgiveness, in spite of its limitations, remains the solution for the “inevitable damages resulting from action, which, rather than undoing actions, interrupts their consequences;” without forgiveness we would remain the victim of our own behavior “confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.” (Arendt 1958, 241). In this sensibility of forgiveness, it terminates that which could go on pointlessly and endlessly without interference.