On Forgiveness by Richard Holloway.

[midnight_birth]

Title: On Forgiveness.
Author: Richard Holloway.
Genre: Non-fiction, philosophy, psychology, how-to.
Country: Scotland, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: The book draws on the great philosophers and writers such a Frederick Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Nelson Mandela, and serves as a pertinent and fascinating discourse on how forgiveness works, where it came from, and how the need to embrace it is greater than ever if we are to free ourselves from the binds of the past.

My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:


♥ While fully understanding these responses and the anger that energised them, I was intrigued that they had felt it necessary to tell me about them. The implication seemed to be that my book had sought to impose an obligation on people to forgive in all circumstances, whereas that was the opposite of what I had intended. It was because I was very aware of the damaging effect pressure to forgive could have on people who found it impossible that I had been careful to describe my book as descriptive but in the indicative mood. I was trying to say: look, human beings do terrible things to each other and the tragic thing about it all is the way the remembrance of past hurt can rob us of our future and become the narrative of our lives, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner whose only release comes from rehearsing the tragedy that had consumed him. One can recognise the pain in these trapped lives without condemnation or disapproval, or even praying that an easier way could open for them. Nietzsche, brilliant psychologist that he was, was well aware of his phenomenon, and in a passage I quoted reminded us how people differentiated in their ability to prevent incidents from the past becoming the gravediggers of the present.

I had noticed this difference myself in a lifetime of pastoral encounters with people. Some seemed to have an infinite capacity for forgiveness, others hardly any. Some were able to recover quickly from great wrongs done to them; others were devastated by a single slight. Nietzsche said we had to know something of the "plastic energy" of a person if we would account for the way they respond to life's blows. That's why to know all would be to forgive all, including the inability to forgive. And it was why I had spent some time in my book trying to uncover the way we are all determined by factors that were not in our control; suggesting that we only get leverage on our weaknesses when we begin to acknowledge and accept their existence.

So I was well aware of the danger of trying to force people to feel they had to forgive when it was impossible or even morally destructive for them to do so.

♥ I had taken the epigram for my book from Jacques Derrida: There is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable, and this had struck me as a stunning example of that paradox.

♥ I dedicated the book to Desmond Tutu, and when it came out he wrote to thank me and told me he found the ending "quite devastating" and that it had left him "shattered".

Maybe that's because the book ends with a warning that societies which are unable to forgive the past are destined always to repeat it.

~~from Introduction.

♥ I do not want to retrace ground I have already covered in a previous book, Godless Morality, except to repeat the point that to identify God with social arrangements that come from a previous stage of human development makes any kind of cultural evolution impossible. Traditional religions claim that God has provided a highly detailed and permanent pattern for human relationships, and the fact that it happens to be based on the cultural norms of ancient patriarchal societies is just too bad; ours is not to reason why. Universal obedience to this claim would have put a permanent brake on cultural development, had religion been the only player in the game.

♥ If justice is one of the fundamental principles of true religion, then forgiveness, as I shall argue, is its essential counterpart, its necessary antithesis. If pour passion for justice can sometimes trap us in war and bitterness, then it is forgiveness that can sometimes help to rescue us. And, as with justice, we can value forgiveness for its own sake, even if we are no longer comfortable with the theological packaging it comes in. Indeed, we might argue that practising justice and forgiveness for their own sake, and not out of religious duty, is their highest expression and the truest form of religion.

♥ And a few pages later [Jacques Derrida] writes:

In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin with the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable.

♥ I shall be more interested in discovering what forgiveness is and how it actually operates in the human sphere than in trying to promote or justify it. It makes no sense to command people to forgive, and there are clearly situations where every instinct of justice commands us not to forgive. Nevertheless, when true forgiveness happens it is one of the most astonishing and liberating of the human experiences. The tragedy of the many ways we trespass upon each other is that we can damage people so deeply that we rob them of the future by stopping the movement of their lives at the moment of the injury, which continues to send out shock-waves of pain that swamp their whole existence. I have called the next chapter, "Reclaiming the Future", because forgiveness, when it happens, is able to remove that dead weight form our past and give us back our lives. The real beauty and power of forgiveness is that it can deliver the future to us.

♥ The moral challenge to humankind that emerged during this period us known, in scholars' short-hand, as the birth of ethical monotheism and the very idea can come as a shock to some people. Was monotheism unethical before this? Let's just call it premoral, before the knowledge of good and evil. When invincible power is ruling, you don't challenge it, you humour and placate it. You flatter rulers, earthly or heavenly, you burn incense to them, pour out grain offerings and sacrifice fat beasts: that's what religion and politics were all about - until that extraordinary jump in human evolution that began to associate God, the supreme power in the universe, with the disgust felt by the prophets at the injustice that disfigured the earth. Humanity discovered the righteousness of God, God's anger at oppression, God's pity for the poor. No matter how you interpret the origin of these claims, they represent an extraordinary human discovery: whether the insight came from God through the prophets to humanity or from humanity itself through prophets who thought it came from God, the fact is, it came. We invented or discovered conscience. The emergence of conscience and the birth of moral struggle seem to be the result of humanity's sundering from its animal past. We know that instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inwards. They do not cease with the emergence of conscience, but as society becomes more ordered and complex it is now rarely possible to gratify these instincts without losing the benefits and approval of the group, so they find new, subterranean satisfactions. The emergence of conscience would not be so painful if it had also brought moral power, if awareness of the greater good of the community brought the capacity always to choose the good, but that does not seem ti be our experience. With the birth of conscience comes its twin, human discontent, and Freud is its most penetrating interpreter. It is probably a mistake to reckon that, at some point in history, humans got together with one another and entered into a social compact called civilisation that offered individuals the protection of the group at the price of the sacrifice of their personal autonomy. That, however, is how it seems to have worked out in practice and it does breed a kind of unease and discontent, particularly in powerful characters who feel constrained by the pressure of others to conform to the social norm.

♥ This is the cause of the greatest pain our humanity carries, the fact and remembrance of our own failures, those acts that can never be undone or reversed, which now turn the past intro a great weight of regret that we bear everywhere with us and cannot lay down. Just as a stopped clock can bear permanent witness to the exact time of a particular atrocity, so the memory of a particular event in our past can have the power to close off the future and stop our life. And it is not just the memory of our own misdeeds that halts us in life: being a victim of someone else's evil act can be even more immobilising. One of the ways the human animal has learnt to deal with the pain of the past is by burying it behind a fog of denial. It is as though we know instinctively that if we look too closely at the thing that was done to us it will completely paralyse us, so we hide it from ourselves like a mad relative in the back room of the basement. But its presence down there leaches into our lives anyway, affecting our relationships and our general conduct in ways we ourselves probably never fully comprehend.

It is this failed attempt to deny the power of the past upon our lives that, paradoxically, may offer the clue to our healing. Another clue can be found in the way certain strong natures seem to break the normal human pattern and are able to disregard those who have offended them and move on. Nietzsche, because he was a profound psychologist who was fascinated by strong characters, is better on this subject than almost anyone I have ever read. He knew better than anyone how the past can rob us of the future and how our lives can be stunted by remembrance and sorrow. But he was also a celebrant of those he described as possessing strong, full natures who were incapable of taking their enemies or even their own misdeeds seriously for very long, because they had a powerful innate ability to recuperate and forget. In an early essay on the use and abuse of history he writes:

In order to determine the extent and thereby the boundary point at which past things must be forgotten if they are not to become the grave diggers of the present, one has to know the exact extent of the plastic energy of a person, of a people, of a culture; that is, the power to grow uniquely from within, to transform and incorporate the past and the unknown, to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, and to duplicate shattered structures from within... There are people so lacking this energy that they bleed to death, as if from a tiny scratch, after a single incident, a single pain, and often in particular a single minor injustice.

The other philosopher who thought deeply about this was Hannah Arendt. She meditated on how the past has the power to deny us the future, by imprisoning us in our own irreversible actions.

And this is the simple fact that, though we don't know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility ever to undo what we have done. Action processes are not only unpredictable, they are also irreversible; there is no author or maker who can undo, destroy, what he has done if he does not like it or when the consequences are disastrous. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility to the faculty of forgiving, and the remedy for unpredictability is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two remedies belong together: forgiving relates the past and serves to undo its deeds, while binding oneself through promises serves to set up in the ocean of future uncertainty islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would ever be possible in the relationships between men. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences for ever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to achieve that amount of identity and continuity which together produce the 'person' about whom a story can be told; each of us would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of his own lonely heart, caught in its ever changing moods, contradictions, and equivocalities. In this respect, forgiving and making promises are like control mechanisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes.

♥ Our day-to-day problems with one another do not usually reach that horrifying dimension, though they are bad enough and can destroy our happiness. It gets most of the publicity, but the fact remains that real evil done by one person to another is rarer than the good deeds that attract no publicity. That is why Hannah Arendt is more concerned with what she calls "trespasses", those everyday breaks in the harmony of life or tears in the web of human relationships, than with monstrous evils. If we are not to be immobilised by these everyday offenses, then we have to learn to forgive each other in order for life to go on. The way she advises us to do this is to focus not on the act or the trespass, but on the person who committed it, because forgiveness is always of individuals, never of actions. We cannot ever forgive a murder or a theft, but we might learn to forgive a murderer or a thief. According to Arendt, "By being aimed at someone and not something, forgiveness becomes an act of love." We have not yet reached the level of Derrida's impossible forgiveness of the unforgivable, but the need to forgive each other our trespasses if we are to reclaim the future is difficult enough to manage. The fundamental insight here is that we can and must retain an attitude of disgust towards the offending act, if we are to justify the legitimate claims of human justice; nevertheless, we must find a way of preventing these irreversible offences from locking us permanently into the past; and the remedy for this dilemma is forgiveness of the person, not of what the person has done.

♥ Two poems capture, for me, the tragic symbiosis of nature and our part in it. The first, about hunters, is by Rebecca West:

We are all bowmen in this place.
The patter of the birds against the sky
Our arrows overprint, and then they die.

But it is also common to our race
That when the birds fall down we weep.
Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

♥ The pain of consciousness is that we have projected our own emotions on to the indifferent processes of nature and embroidered it with our own sense of loss and tragedy. We are compulsive anthropomorphisers who read our own pain and sorrow into the lives of other species. Nevertheless, there can be a mysterious comfort in accepting the nature of a universe in which the worm is crushed by the grieving plough and in which hunters weep over the beauty of the birds they slaughter. There's an astonishingly moving meditation right at thee end of Camus' The Outsider, when the condemned man Meursault lies on the bunk in his prison cell:

I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvellous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide... gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

♥ Fatalism is not quite the right word here, though Nietzsche told us to love fate, to have what he called amor fati, to say yes to the unavoidable necessity of things. The normal sense of the word fatalism is too passive for the experience I am trying to uncover. The mood I am after is more celebratory than resigned. It actively says yes to the tragic reality of life, including the facts of pain and loss. Two instinctive responses lie behind this affirmation: that there is, first of all, a wise, sometimes rueful, awareness that the universe is bigger than us and will get us all in the end; and, secondly, that to completely understand any human act, including what we would describe as a wicked act, we would have to know all the facts of the universe. To know all would be to forgive all, to know all would be to accept the necessity of the worm-crushing plough and the need for hunters to feed their young, not to mention all the other ways in which we exploit one another. We have to begin our search for understanding and wisdom by accepting that in the great chain of being all effects have causes that are themselves the effects of causes that were affected by causes, going back all the way to that mysterious uncaused cause we call the Big Bang. This is not quite the same thing as saying that everything is so absolutely mechanistically determined that there is no point in judging people for the way they act. Though it is true that we all tend to judge too quickly, it seems to be intrinsic to our nature to discriminate between types of conduct, some of which we blame, some of which we praise. What we are less good at recognising is that the scope of human freedom is surprisingly slight and fragile. An understanding of this may lie behind Hannah Arendt's distinction between the need to forgive the person who has wounded us while continuing to condemn what the person has done. This is a difficult balance to sustain, but it seems to be important to hold these two apparently opposing values in some kind of equilibrium: the need to reclaim the future for humanity by forgiving its offenders, by refusing to let their past actions simply stop time, as it were, and freeze it at a particular moment of passion or madness or carelessness or forgetfulness or confusion; while, at the same time, retaining the moral ability to identify the actions themselves as bad, as things that should never have been done.

..Actions are the result of character and our characters seem to be stamped upon us from the beginning, like a kind of predestined fate, for good or evil. It is theoretically possible to reform or remould the character into a different pattern, but major developmental changes rarely seem to occur in the human psyche. The most we can usually hope for is the strength to develop avoidance strategies that may help us to manage our compulsions in less destructive ways. Nevertheless, extraordinary transformations do sometimes occur.

♥ The same point was made by many commentators after September 11, 2001: terrorists are bred by circumstances, they do not come fully formed from the womb of hell; they are made by history not Satan. So are we all, which is why we must all learn the art of forgiving, and the hardest place to start is in the struggle with our own guilt.

We are all different from each other, of course, but most of us seem to be quite good at forgiving or understanding human weakness in people we love, at sticking with our friends through the painful consequences of their mistakes. It is much more difficult to apply the same generosity to ourselves. I have often quoted Hopkins to people who were held in the vice of self-loathing:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

..Knowledge of our failings is important if we are to live the examined life, but complete honesty will involve finding the balance between our good points and our bad. In any case, the real motive for self-examination is not so that we can beat ourselves up for being miserable sinners, but so that we can grow in self-knowledge and manage our relationships a bit more wisely. We should be honest about what we have done badly, but we should also acknowledge what we have done well in our journey through life. Most lives are achievements that have had their share of sorrow and endurance. The point I am making here is that we have to bring to the examined life a kind of objectivity that enables us to look at ourselves with compassionate impartiality.

♥ ..to forgive others can be almost impossible. This can lead to an excruciating double bind, in which our inability to forgive adds guilt to the pain that is already in our souls, because now we have to acknowledge that we continue to hold grudges, can't let things go and walk away, but endlessly proceed from wrong to wrong like a rat caught in a cage. This is Eliot's "rending pain of re-enactment" with a vengeance. Listening to people caught in this predicament makes one painfully aware of how apt the trapped-animal analogy is. At the root of the rod "obsession" is the Latin for being under siege and that is what this state of mind feels like. Compulsive obsessive disorders are wrackingly repetitive, as the mind drives the body through endless rituals and routines without surcease. The inability to forgive and let go can feel like that. The offence, the assault upon the body or soul of the victim, is endlessly reprised. The details of the insult or brutality of infidelity are exhaustively rehearsed to anyone who will listen, and the mind and heart are permanently under siege as memory plays the injury over and over, just the way TV endlessly repeats news clips of catastrophes, like those shots of the hijacked planes plunging into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. If these public tragedies can play endlessly in our minds, think of the undying effect on people of hurt that violated their trust in others. It is the destruction of trust that is the damning thing here, except that it is the victim who suffers damnation, as the abuse is relived or the memory of the broken promise runs round the mind in a loop that nothing seems to stop.

We must apply exactly the same strategy to the guilt of the victim who cannot forgive as we did to the guilt of the offender who seeks forgiveness: unconditional positive regard, deep understanding and an honest acknowledgement that this is the way things are and that they have been made that way by factors that are not in the person's control. We only add to the trauma if we try to urge or hurry people into a forgiveness they are humanly incapable of offering.

♥ This is why the severe conditionality that we sometimes hear in the words of Jesus about forgiveness begins to jar with us, such as these verses from Matthew, chapter 6: "[14] For if you forgive others their trespasses your heavenly Father will also forgive you; [15] but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." We could perhaps take some of the harshness out of that text by observing that it is an observable truth that the inability or refusal to forgive can be a sentence of psychic imprisonment that locks the person for ever into the remembrance of the original trespass. Just as forgiveness gives the offender the capacity to move away from the moment of trespass and regain the future; so the victim's inability to forgive makes it impossible for her to move on into the future. I cannot read the conditionality in these words of Jesus as anything other than tragically descriptive: we cannot order people to forgive, but we can recognise that their inability to forgive may have the tragic effect of binding them to the past and condemning them to a life-sentence of bitterness. Sometimes there is a strength and grandeur in the refusal to forgive. Something of this comes through the words of the woman who spoke to the Truth Commission and it is certainly what we find in the great Nazi hunter Simon Wisenthal, who dedicated his whole life to the unforgiving search for those who were responsible for the murder of millions of his people. The refusal to forgive can be the righteous thing to do, the thing that justice commands. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the inability or refusal to forgive, though it may be morally appropriate, always extends the reign of the original sin into the future, so that it can end up dominating a whole life or the life of a whole people.

♥ In our own era, the most emblematic example of humanity's capacity for trapping itself in chronic and intractable conflict is provided by the violence that has surrounded the State of Israel since its inception half a century ago. It had been the tragic fate of the Jewish people to be scattered throughout the earth for centuries, persecuted and despised wherever they settled. And it was in Christian Europe in the twentieth century that the monstrous decision was taken to try to rid them from the earth. The longing to return to Palestine, in order to escape from their long and bitter exile, gave birth to Zionism and the violent emergence of the State of Israel. The tragedy was that the return of one lost people to their ancient homeland created a new exiled community, the Palestinians. Every day we witness the terrible wounds these crucified communities inflict on each other, with neither side able to feel the other's pain. Neither community seems capable of forgiving the past in order to discover a new and better future. It appears that they would rather go on dying separately than try to learn to live alongside each other.

♥ The traditional way to read the parable of the prodigal son is to interpret it as an example of conditional forgiveness at work, through the process of repentance, leading to confession, followed by re-instatement. The focus is usually on the moment of self-realisation when the wayward son "came to himself" and decided to go to his father and confess the sin he had committed. This moment of repentance, which means a radical change of mind, is the act that triggers forgiveness. Behind it is the theory that you cannot receive or make active use of forgiveness until you acknowledge that you need it. A moment spent reflecting on the psychological phenomenon known as "denial" seems to be relevant here. As long as we go on denying that we have a problem with something that is actually disabling us we are not in a position to deal with it. The purpose of coming to ourselves and admitting our true condition is so that we can start dealing with the difficulty and stop running away from it. Repentance followed by confession is the sequence that opens us to the changing power of forgiveness. I, as the victim, may already have forgiven you and moved on, but unless you can admit to the trespass the value of my forgiveness will lie there like an uncashed cheque.

..In this reading of the parable, the central act is the running of the father to greet the returning sinner. His son had broken the strict patriarchal code of the community of which he had been a part. His request for his inheritance was an insult to his father and should have led to his banishment for rebellion. Instead, the broken-hearted father gives him what should legally have come to him only after his own death. Having abandoned the code that had been carefully designed to contain the anarchic and selfish human spirit, the son sinks even lower and finds himself living with pigs, animals of profound allegoric impurity in that culture. According to this reading of the parable, his coming to his senses was no act of repentance, but a characteristically opportunistic move that was designed to save his own skin. In deciding to try his luck at home, however, he will place himself in great danger, because he must run the gantlet of the village elders, guardians of the moral code, before he can get to his father and make his bid for rescue. According to the code which he had already abandoned, he is no longer a part of the community he walked out of so contemptuously. If the elders see him enter the village, they will break an earthenware vessel over his head as a sign that he has shattered his covenant with the community and may henceforth be offered no succour, no food, no water, no shelter: he is already dead to them and they to him. The pining father sees him before anyone else and runs to meet him. This was in itself an extraordinary breach of the patriarchal code, which specified that the greater your dignity the more slowly you moved. Portentous deportment in our superiors is designed to awe intimidate us, which is why pomposity is a common disguise of the inwardly fearful. The secure and fearless spirit has no need of protective camouflage and lives with an unselfconscious openness that responds spontaneously to the needs and overtures of others. The strong love of the waiting father has no interest in its own dignity or status. He rushes out to meet and embrace his disgraced child. It is this abandonment of code and conditionality that is the scandalous heart of the story. The son is clearly forgiven by the father before he can get a word out, and when he does produce his prepared speech there is a significant omission: "Then the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son," full stop. There is no opportunistic plea for a job on the farm. This reading of the parable suggests that the father's outpouring of love caused a true change in the son, so that we might say that the forgiveness that was unconditionally given actually caused the repentance that followed it, an exact reversal of the order that is followed in the usual system of conditional forgiveness. The parable ends inconclusively, because it closes with an act of petulant defiance of the father by the elder brother. Here, again, the father ignores the traditional code by going out to him to explain the nature of his heart's rejoicing at the return of his brother. Since the parable stops at this point, we do not know whether the older son also responded to the unconditional love of the father with a radical change of heart.

This is a story which, in George Steiner's words, "casts fathomless light" on the human condition. It takes us completely away from the world that measures injuries and orders a carefully managed precision in our response to them. It simply tears up that script and substitutes an uncalculating mercy that makes no sense according to the conventional way of measuring these things, but which pours such sudden light upon our normal human motives that they are irradiated with the possibility of pure grace.

♥ ..the word spoken in anger that we wish we could immediately take back, but which continues to reverberate destructively in the lives of those we love. It is almost certain that we have also offended in ways we were unaware of at the time, but they go on damaging the hearts and minds of people whom we have long since forgotten. That is one reason why, in one of the acts of sacramental confession used in church, penitents confess sins that they "cannot now remember", knowing that the effect of what they have ignorantly said or done may still be eating away at someone's soul. One of the things that most depressed me when I went out visiting parishioners as a priest was the frequency with which I encountered people who would rehearse in minute detail incidents from decades ago that had scarred their souls. Though often surprisingly trivial, the continuing impact of these events was powerful. Frequently the offences were committed by professional carers, such as clergy, who had thoughtlessly dropped an inappropriate remark into their conversation or engaged in inappropriate behaviour at some painful moment in the person's life, and the experience had gone into them like a knife, creating a wound that had never healed.

♥ The offence of the ungrateful slave was his refusal to connect his own situation to that of a fellow victim's. This seems to fit one aspect of Jesus' doctrine of conditional forgiveness - only if we forgive others can we ourselves be forgiven - but a deeper reading may be possible. Is there some kind of universal awareness emerging here that by any calculus of revenge we should all deserve punishment for something, because we are all enmeshed in the web of collective guilt that history has spun round humanity? In real life, some are never punished, because they are never found out or because they are too powerful to be challenged; some are punished not for offences they did commit, but for those they did not commit; and some seem to be punished for no reason at all. The human situation, it is being suggested here, is so complex that it is impossible to apply a rational system of moral accountancy to it with any accuracy, so we should not even bother to try. Instead of laboriously working out the exact and proportionate revenge that is someone's due, we should refuse to get involved in the punishment process at all. Interestingly, the revenge system, though it appears to be the normal practice in most societies, does not seem to have been followed in every human community. The Blackfoot Indians of North America did not use such a system within their community, though they did impose the sanction of banishment on members who refused to comply with the group ethic. There was a sophisticated recognition among them that persistent offenders against the harmony of the community had, in effect, separated themselves from the life of the group, so banishment was an explicit recognition of the real situation, without resorting to any method of retributive punishment. What may be implicitly understood by communities that reject retributive punishment is the fact that once we stray into the bed of revenge it wraps itself round us for ever, trapping us in the compulsions of vengeance and victimhood. The refusal to punish switches our attention from the actions themselves onto the agents who committed them, including the factors that influenced their conduct and which we should take account of when planning our response. There is an opposing moral tradition that dismisses this as a colossal mistake, because it holds that it is only acts we can accurately judge, never persons. The history of individuals is so complex that exactly judging their culpability is impossible; it is easier to decide whether their actions are objectively wrong and should be punished, because the law itself has to be vindicated for the sake of the community. This is a strictly logical position, but few of us would be prepared to say that moral acts can be completely separated from their human context, including the agent's level of awareness and intention.

♥ That is why moralising at victims of crime and war is pointless and insulting. What is not pointless, however, is the kind of indicative approach that may help people to gain an understanding of the causes and possible consequences of their responses. Thinking before acting may enable them to take a step or two back from immediate retaliation and its ramifying repercussions into the future. It may be sexist to say so, but I wonder if women might not turn out to be an important part of international conflict resolution here. The revenge instinct seems to be hard-wired into the male of the human species. I know women can be fierce in the protection of their young, and there does seem to be something of an equal opportunities policy working in the area of violent crime at the moment, but the statistics of crime as well as the history of war demonstrate that both are fuelled to a great extent by blind testosterone. That is why managing male anger will always have to be a major factor in diminishing violence at both the personal and collective level. Given the pressures and insecurities of male pride, refusing a fight can take enormous physical as well as moral courage. No one could accuse Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King of being physical cowards, yet they all espoused non-resistance as the best way of breaking the cycle of violence that plays on a permanent loop through human history. I am suggesting that, where the moral confidence exists to try it, the application of forgiveness to human conflict may break the chain or repetitive offending, though it is easier to follow this path in personal than in collective relationships.

♥ It is one of the few things that are able to break the circuity of evil within the heart of the evil-doer; it is the kind of forgiveness that Derrida must have been thinking about when he wrote:

Yet despite all the confusions which reduce forgiveness to amnesty or to amnesia, to acquittal or prescription, to the work of mourning or some political therapy of reconciliation, in short to some historical ecology, it must never be forgotten, nevertheless, that all of that refers to a certain idea of pure and unconditional forgiveness, without which this discourse would not have the least meaning... pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning, must have no "meaning", no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible.

It is a madness of the impossible, but when it occurs it can create a profound qualitative change in people and events. It is important to remember that it is not calculated to do this; it is not calculated to do anything; it is its own meaning, to use Derrida's language. Like pure poetry, which, according to W.H. Auden, makes nothing happen, radical forgiveness is its own meaning. In theological language, it is a miracle of pure unmerited grace, given out of uncalculating love. When it happens, if it ever happens, it casts not only light but silence all around, in which, one by one, the eager voices stop their clamour for revenge and fade away, the way the men who called for the stoning of the woman caught in adultery crept off the scene when Jesus invited the one without sin to cast the first stone. When we see this kind of imperturbable grace in action it leaves us in a state beyond explanation that is close to worship. Only this is absolute forgiveness, because only this forgives the unforgivable. There are some deeds that are so monstrous they will drive us mad if we do not forgive them, because no proportional reparation is possible, no justify accounting, nothing that makes any sense. We cannot press a button to rewind history, to reverse the events of September 11, to get the planes back on the tarmac in Boston, to start that day again and let it follow its accustomed path. Those horrifying events are irreversible. The dead cannot return, the deed cannot be undone. Nor can the holocaust of the Jews nor the slave trade in Africans nor the genocide of the native American communities nor the ancient miseries of the poor in all places at all times. None of it can be undone, nor can it be appropriately avenged or made sense of. Only unconditional, impossible forgiveness can switch off the engine of madness and revenge and untie us, with infinite gentleness, to move on into the future. Until we can do that, we are exiled in the horror of the past, locked in the unspeakable nightmare. Sadly, unconditional forgiveness is beyond most of us, even though we believe it might be the very thing that could release us. It comes, when it comes at all, the way great genius suddenly visits us in extraordinary people.

One of the dismaying things about history is that there never seem to be many of these moral geniuses around. It is notoriously difficult to apply the politics of even unconditional forgiveness to conflicts between groups or nations; it is almost impossible to apply unconditional forgiveness in these situations. The group mind is prone to the excitements of revenge and closed to the painstaking processes of forgiveness. Nevertheless, in situations of gross and enduring conflict between groups, the emergence of charismatic figures who bear in their own bodies the suffering of their people, yet are able to transcend the pain and lead them beyond it into the peace of forgiveness, is one of the most extraordinary spectacles that history affords. Such people become representative or archetypal figures who outgrow their own particular humanity and become universal figures. They are few enough at any time, but there seems to be a particular dearth of them today. Where is the great figure who can transcend the ancient conflicts in Northern Island or Israel/Palestine? There are good people at work in those places, of course, but no one has emerged as a fully representative redemptive figure who is able to transcend the divisions and unite the opposite forces in the insane possibility of forgiveness.

♥ I once stood outside the cell [Nelson Mandela] had occupied on Robben Island and saw the thin mat on the cold floor on which he had slept for 18 years and was choked by the enormity of his graciousness. Those are the conditions that normally produce enraged avengers, whose actions we deplore, yet whose embittered logic we can understand. The enormity of forgiveness flowing from such conditions is impossible to understand. It is the insanity of grace. We hear it in the voice of the crucified forgiving those who are hammering in the nails. We hear it in the voice of the mother embracing in tears her daughter's killer and releasing in him the ability to own his own guilt for the first time. We hear it in the voice of Hosea drawing his adulterous wife back to him with the cords of love and tenderness. We call this kind of absolutely gratuitous conduct "grace" or "gift", because it comes upon us, when it comes at all, without condition. It is done for its own sake, out of the pure joy and love of doing it. Believers say it has its source in God, who pours our life without calculation from a pure excess of being. For those who do not believe in God or can find meaning in this kind of language, the mystery remains that this prodigal universe sometimes redeems its own pain through extraordinary souls who, from somewhere beyond all possibility, forgives thew unforgivable.

♥ Nevertheless, the history of human vengeance is not one that contains much re-assurance for us. It suggests that, so complex are the conflicts that enmesh us and so unsubtle are the ways we respond to them, that violence goes on begetting further violence. If forgiveness, conditional or unconditional, is too difficult to apply in the heat of conflict between peoples and nations, then we might try to remember the healing power of mercy towards a vanquished enemy. In this famous speech on Conciliation with America in 1775 Edmund Burke said that "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom." Magnanimity or political mercy is not as radical as forgiveness, but it is related to it and is easier to apply. Magnanimity is generosity in our dealings with those who oppose us, particularly those against whom we have successfully waged war. Like its sister forgiveness, it can break the long chain of revenge. While it is almost as rare as forgiveness, it is often found in great leaders, including great warriors. Where it is present after a great conflict it can check the infection of future violence. Its absence after an overwhelming victory can allow the seeds of hatred to grow towards a terrible harvest. In January 1919, W.B. Yeats wrote one of his most prophetic powers, "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

♥ The most tragic example of the failure of a great nation to practise magnanimity or political forgiveness towards its defeated enemy, and thereby release the rough beast of history, is found in William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill. He quotes Churchill's own words the day the Great War ended:

It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I stood at the window of my room looking up Northumberland Avenue to Trafalgar Square, waiting for Big Ben to tell that the War was over.

Manchester says that, when Big Ben struck, Churchill could hear the baying of the crowds, but felt no jubilation. Since 1914 Britain had suffered 908,371 dead, 2,090,212 wounded, and 191,652 missing. Victory had been "brought so dead as to be indistinguishable from defeat." Churchill's wife proposed that they go to Downing Street and congratulate Lloyd George, the Prime Minister. Those already present when Churchill arrived were discussing the advantage of calling a general election. Churchill interrupted to point out that the "fallen foe" was close to starvation. He proposed rushing "a dozen great ships crammed with provisions" to Hamburg, but his proposal was coldly rejected. Manchester tells us that, while Churchill's suggestion was being rebuffed by his unforgiving colleagues, a twice-decorated German non-commissioned despatch runner, who had been temporarily blinded during a heavy gas attack on the night of October 13, sat in a Pomeranian military hospital and learnt of Germany's plight from a sobbing pastor. Six years later the soldier set down a description of his reaction to the event:

I knew that all was lost. Only fools, liars and criminals could hope for mercy from the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed... The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous events in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery? In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me... I resolved to go into politics.

The soldier's name was Adolf Hitler.