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What would it mean to see forgiveness as a “work of love”?

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Although unconditional forgiveness is in many cases admirable, there is nothing inappropriate — much less cheapening — about holding out hope for such repentance. Indeed, such hope may itself be a work of love. (GCapture / iStock / Getty Images)

We live in fractious times. Resentment, anger, and injustice seem to abound in social life — a situation that seems to be exacerbated by the apparent desire, in some quarters, to be hyper-vigilant in seeking out new ways to take offence, new “wrongs” to unearth. Legitimate senses of injustice, and the anger and resentment which greet them, can easily morph into the polarisation that results from a self-righteous sense that we (that is, those on “the right side of history”) must triumph over them (those who are not).

What room is there, in this environment, for forgiveness? Various commentators have noticed and lamented its absence from the scene, in judgements of both contemporary and historical figures. For the last five years or so, I have been working on a philosophical study of forgiveness rooted, in part, in biblical treatments of these themes. One theme that emerged from this study is the ways that self-righteous judgementalism can be a major block to the capacity to forgive.

Why forgive?

Consider, for example, the story of the “sinful woman” in Luke 7:36-50. Jesus is eating at the home of a Pharisee, referred to as Simon. On hearing he is there, a woman with a local reputation as a “sinner” (tradition has it that she was a prostitute) enters, wetting Jesus’s feet with her tears, drying them with her hair, and anointing his feet with an expensive perfume. Simon says to himself that if Jesus was a prophet, he would know “who is touching him and what kind of woman she is” — namely, a sinner.

Jesus’s response is to direct at Simon a parable, asking if two people — one owing five hundred denarii, the other fifty — both had their debts forgiven, who would be more grateful? The bigger debtor, reasons Simon. Jesus concurs, but then contrasts Simon’s behaviour — failing to offer him water for his feet, a kiss of hospitality, or oil for his head — with the woman’s lavish demonstrations of love. He adds that her many sins have been forgiven, as her lavish love has demonstrated. Jesus invites Simon to see that by standing in self-righteous judgement over the woman, he has failed to see that he too is a sinner in need of forgiveness — that he is, moreover, one whose response to God’s grace has been so much less deep than that of the sinful woman.

Yet, at one level, judgmentalism stems from a reasonable place. Many philosophers have treated forgiveness as being about renouncing — or at least controlling — various “negative emotions”, such as anger, resentment or the desire for revenge, with warranted resentment often given pride of place. And such resentment, some have argued, speaks for justice. So if forgiveness involves overcoming warranted resentment, and such resentment speaks for justice, why forgive?

A common answer — very prevalent in pop psychology — is to be able to “let go” and “move on” from the harm and hurt, to attain “closure”. Ongoing resentment, it is sometimes argued, causes psychological harm, and so to overcome such resentment by forgiving does tremendous good to the person forgiving. But will that do? If I forgive solely for my own sake, something important is missing. The forgiveness is improperly directed; it lacks the element of gift towards the person forgiven that seems built into the very term. And if you think this link — between giving and forgiving — is a mere quirk of the English language, then think again: this is a feature shared by plenty of other languages. The French term verb “to forgive” — pardonner — shares the same feature (donner; to give); as does one of the two key terms for forgiveness in, for instance, each of German (Vergebung), Danish (Tilgivelse), and New Testament Greek (charizomai).

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In writing my book, I became intrigued by how much discussion of forgiveness in much modern philosophy has insisted on proceeding without any reference to the religious framework that gives much of this debate its impetus. Can we really understand terms such as “turning the other cheek” without reference to their biblical origins? The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the religious traditions they have inspired are sometimes masked dancing partners of the burgeoning secular literature on forgiveness. Some of these concerns led me to a guiding question: what difference might be made to our understanding of interpersonal forgiveness if — to borrow a phrase from the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard — we were to approach it as a “work of love”?

Doing so enables us to navigate what has been one of the major disagreements about the conditions under which forgiveness is legitimate and admirable. For some, forgiveness at its best must be conditional: only if a wrongdoer has satisfied a variety of conditions should forgiveness be offered. What makes it on to this list can vary, but it typically includes some sort of acknowledgment of responsibility for and repudiation of their wrongful deed; showing understanding of the harm or moral injury done; sincerely expressing regret; and a commitment to not inflicting such harms again. In short, what both religious and secular writers have called repentance. For others, forgiveness is at its most admirable when it is offered unconditionally: without any pre-conditions being set. (The former is sometimes presented as the Jewish, the latter as the Christian, view of forgiveness; but paying attention to the biblical material shows this distinction to be over-simplified.) Some writers on forgiveness, including Jacques Derrida, have insisted that even to hope for apology, repentance, and so on, is to sully the gift of pure forgiveness, turning it into a merely “economic” transaction.

I hold, on the contrary, that although unconditional forgiveness is in many cases admirable, there is nothing inappropriate — much less cheapening — about holding out hope for such repentance. Indeed, as we shall see, such hope may itself be a work of love.

Love’s forgiveness

Understanding forgiveness as rooted in what we might call “love’s vision” can begin to capture truly exemplary instances of forgiveness — instances that go beyond the everyday. What, then, are the key features of “love’s forgiveness”?

My thinking on these matters has been influenced by Works of Love, a particularly rich text by Søren Kierkegaard. My starting point here is a characteristically paradoxical idea in Kierkegaard, that love “sees with closed eyes”. What he seems to mean by this, inter alia, is that the “look of love” does not focus all its attention on faults and transgressions. Some have worried that this amounts to a wilful blindness to fault, akin to Nietzsche’s quip that “love is the state in which people are most prone to see things in the way that they are not.” But while this indeed signals a risk, it is not a fatal objection; generosity of vision need not imply wilful blindness. Love’s generous vision may simply amount to an openness to seeing the good in someone, in stark contrast to the attitude of self-righteous judgementalism. Love may have its own epistemic standards. As philosopher Troy Jollimore has put it:

love suggests a certain kind of epistemic practice, one centred on close attention, empathy, and generosity of vision, one that tends to conflict with other sorts of epistemic practice, particularly those that take neutrality and detachment as their presiding virtues.

Instead of assuming that the loved one must prove themselves to us, we might actively seek out the best in them. Sometimes only a loving kind of attention provides an awareness that reveals deeper insights than any available to neutral detachment. Loving attention actively seeks out a value which a more detached attitude is likely to miss.

To treat forgiveness as a work of agapic or neighbourly love has the advantage of deprioritising conditional forgiveness, but is able to resist one of the most common objections to unconditional forgiveness — namely, the idea that such forgiveness violates justice. Surely, goes this argument, to forgive unconditionally is to let the wrongdoer off scot-free? It is to fail to take seriously the degree of the wrongdoing, and thus to fail at the level of justice.

One possible answer to this objection is the one taken by the twentieth century Swedish Lutheran bishop Anders Nygren, in his classic study Agape and Eros. For Nygren, faced with this tension between agapic love and justice, we should recognise that the New Testament insists that the former trumps the latter: “‘motivated’ justice”, as he puts it, “must give place … to ‘unmotivated’ love.”

I’m unconvinced by this move. Helpful here is a distinction made by Nicholas Wolterstorff in his book Justice in Love. Wolterstorff contrasts the kind of Nygrenesque gratuitous benevolence, uninterested in the claims of justice (“benevolence-agapism”) with a form of agapic love that can incorporate justice (“care-agapism”). He notes how central justice is to some of the biblical texts on love of neighbour. For instance, in Leviticus 19, reproving one’s neighbour — while nonetheless refraining from holding a grudge against them — is given as an example of what it means to love them. This signals a kind of love that may be distinguished from mere “niceness” or kindness: a variety of “tough love” which may make perfectionist demands on the beloved, aiding or prodding them to do the right thing; challenging them. Such love is not justice-indifferent benevolence, but a kind of genuine care which aims to combine seeking to secure their just treatment with seeking to enhance their flourishing; what is genuinely in their interests — which may not be what they desire. Forgiving out of such love can be a manifestation of such care-agapism.

Sister Helen Prejean

Transformative forgiveness

An example of this can be found in Sister Helen Prejean’s moving memoir, Dead Man Walking. Prejean, a Catholic nun who worked as a spiritual advisor to a series of Death Row inmates in Louisiana prisons, found herself faced with the problem of how to face her feelings of moral revulsion at what those she was tasked to counsel had done: egregious acts of rape and murder. Prejean experiences a warranted moral anger, and her ability to overcome this requires her to shift her attitude towards those she encounters. I believe that it makes sense to describe this change of attitude as a kind of third-party forgiveness: a case where there is a significant connection between the person forgiving and the wrongdoer, yet where the person forgiving is not their victim. The relationship into which Prejean is called to enter with the inmates she counsels requires her to be able to manifest a forgiving attitude towards them. She never succumbs to the temptation manifested by others — including the prison chaplain — to reduce the inmates to moral monsters. She never loses sight of their common humanity. Yet neither does she let them off the moral hook.

Of particular importance is her relation to one such inmate, Elmo Patrick Sonnier. Prejean is able to see in Sonnier that to which others have been blind: his capacity to see the evils that he has done, and genuinely to repent of them. It is not that she notices (whereas others don’t) that Sonnier has repented. It is rather that she sees the potential for this — and her attitude of agapic love towards him (a love that is manifested, I would argue, in her forgiveness of him) serves as the catalyst to bring this potential to actuality. To borrow a phrase of Kierkegaard’s, her love “loves forth love”.

As Prejean’s friendship with Sonnier grows, so — as a human being — does he. In the final days before his execution, he expresses genuine gratitude to her for being the first person to show him what love really means (“It’s a shame a man has to come to prison to find love”). This gratitude is also extended to the lawyer who has attempted to get his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and to the chef who prepares his final meal. Crucially, although he had earlier been inclined to use his final words to show defiance, in the end he uses them to ask forgiveness from the father of one of his victims.

In the movie based on the memoir, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, the character played by Penn is an amalgam of two distinct murderers, Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Willie. In the memoir, Prejean’s loving attitude has markedly less success in the case of Willie, demonstrating that there can be no guarantees. Love takes a risk, in hope.

I want to suggest that such hope can itself be a work of love. Kierkegaard suggests as much in a passage of Works of Love, where he reflects upon Christ’s attitude to Peter after the latter’s betrayal of him. Describing Christ’s love for Peter as “boundless”, Kierkegaard points out:

He did not say, “Peter must first change and become another person before I can love him again”. No, he said exactly the opposite, “Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if anything, will help him to become another person”. Therefore he did not break off the friendship in order perhaps to renew it if Peter would have become another person: no, he preserved the friendship … and in that way helped Peter to become another person.

In a similar way, Prejean’s pre-emptive forgiveness of Sonnier seems to act as the catalyst for his moral growth. Such love is a manifestation of care-agapism insofar as it preserves both justice for Sonnier (not rejecting him as a moral monster) with justice for his victims and wider society (although Prejean campaigns against the death penalty for inmates, she never denies that Sonnier deserves judicial punishment).

Prejean’s attitude towards Sonnier is, moreover, an instance of what Adrienne Martin has called “normative hope”, which is capable of “scaffolding” normative change in the person for whom one hopes. Such hope can galvanise the energy and fortify the resolve of those who hope. Philip Pettit has written of hope as being pragmatically rational even when what is hoped for is unlikely, given that it is a way to handle the “hurly burly of belief. It frees you from the bleakness of beliefs that wax and wane unpredictably in level of confidence … To have hope is to have something we might describe as cognitive resolve.” This is what keeps the hoper going — but it also communicates an important message of the person hoped for; that we are holding them to account. Hope communicates a call, to which we hope they will respond.

One way of achieving what Prejean achieves in her view of Sonnier is to recognise what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn does in The Gulag Archipelago, his memoir of internment and hard labour under Stalin — conditions in which many froze, were starved or beaten to death. Recognising how close he was to having joined the security service which became the KGB, Solzhenitsyn reflects:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

This is not to condone, excuse or justify wrongdoing, but rather to recognise the hopeless oversimplification involved in dividing the world into two categories of people, the good and the evil. It is a simplification that should give pause to anyone tempted to interpret the world as us (the good guys) against them (the bad guys). For the hope I’ve tried to describe here will likely requires another virtue: humility, understood as a mean between the vice of servility and vices of pride such as arrogance, vanity, and self-righteousness.

John Lippitt is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame Australia. His research focuses on the moral psychology of virtues and vices, and the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. His most recent book is Love’s Forgiveness: Kierkegaard, Resentment, Humility, and Hope. You can hear Professor Lippitt discuss the logic and ethics of forgiveness with Meredith Lake on Soul Search.

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