Forgiving 4/5

Some people forgive themselves everything and condemn everyone else. Some condemn everything about themselves and find extenuating circumstances for others. Some do not forgive themselves for anything and forgive nothing. And others forgive everything and (almost) everyone. To love and forgive is to be both demanding and indulgent. Once again, this is a mater of balance. An Islamic prophetic tradition says: ‘Find seventy excuses for you brother, and if you cannot find any, imagine that there is one excuse you do not know.’ This suggestion echoes the Christian maxim ‘Love they neighbour as thyself,’ and ‘Thou shalt not judge.’ It is about loving and suspending one’s judgement. This does not mean accepting everything that others do (in which case there would be no love), but it does mean taking the view that their mistakes or sins do not tell us the whole truth about them. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare suggests that we ‘Condemn the fault and not the actor of it’ if we wish to ensure that we do not punish the wrong person. All the monotheisms recommend that we make that distinction: human beings can judge acts, but only God is in a position to judge human beings. When human beings turn into judges, they invent not the hereafter on earth and but hell, for then hell really does become ‘other people’, to paraphrase Sartre.

What, basically, does the expression ‘No one’s perfect’ mean, if not that we all  – and not least you and I – make mistakes, get things wrong, and that we sometimes lack courage, generosity, love and/or understanding. We have to begin by learning to forgive ourselves, and that, as it happens, means two very different things. We must, on the one hand, be aware that we are at fault and, on the other, hope that our faults will be forgiven or transcended. Some people seem to find it easy to forgive themselves and to ignore their own failings, and we know that they are not really aware of the nature of the harm they can do. They offend, insult, ignore, despise and humiliate others without any real awareness of what they are doing. They may be blinded by prejudice, by their emotions, their wounds, their vengeance or their certainties, but they have no perception of the process of their own dehumanization. Their reasons mean that they are, by definition, in the right. Learning to put a critical distance between us and ourselves, our intentions and our behaviour, is the elementary basis of spirituality and psychology: a human mind cannot develop unless it acquires the ability to take a critical moral view of its own actions. What we said earlier about tolerance, respect, freedom and love partakes in the basic teachings that allow us to resist the thoughtlessness, dehumanization and bestiality of human beings. By acquiring that awareness, the human mind acquires a sense of forgiveness.         This awareness must not become another trap. All spiritualities and religions teach us to be both demanding and indulgent towards ourselves. The reason why sages and prophets were human beings is that they had to convey to us the message of their humanity, which was sometimes strong and sometimes fragile, sometimes determined and sometimes vulnerable, sometimes alert and sometimes weary. Their mistakes and failings are signs, reminders and calls against being smug, arrogant or pretentious as we go on our way. At the same time, they are expressions of the need to be watched, forgiven and loved. Our faults make us human, and we must accept them, not as fatalities but as initiations that raise us up. Forgiving others teaches us our need for humility. Begging forgiveness, and being forgiven or unforgiven, is the essence of our humanity. Alone before God and/or our conscience, we must have the humility to ask for forgiveness, and to forgive. To forgive is to love. To love is to forgive. We must love what lies, or might lie, beyond what exists or what has been done.

We must also learn ‘to put ourselves in the place of the other’ and practise the empathy we discussed earlier. We must try to understand others’ motivations and actions, as that will give us a better understanding of the meaning and import of their gestures and actions. That is not always easy. It is never easy. Let me tell you a story. Thierry was fifteen when, in a fit of anger, he violently struck his mother one day. She had to be rushed to hospital: the blow had been so violent that it had smashed her upper lip into her upper teeth. Thierry’s sister called his teacher for help, because he and Thierry enjoyed a relationship based upon a deep trust and complicity. When he got to the hospital, the teacher was beside himself with rage. He was ready to scold, or even to hit Thierry himself because he found his behaviour as unacceptable as it was shameful: there was no excuse for hitting his mother. Thierry’s sister took him to one side: ‘That’s how our father behaves. He used to hit our mother, and us: violence has always been the way we communicate in our family. Thierry shouldn’t have done it, and I hate him for doing that to Mum, but . . .’ She did not finish her sentence, and then added, with a tense, hurt expression on her face: ‘You understand?’ The teacher said nothing: he understood, and he calmed down. It was not a matter of condoning violence, but of understanding where it came from. Thierry’s sister had helped him to revise his initial moral judgement and to take into account the complexities of the boy’s life. He was now able to revise his moral judgement, to realize that things were more complex than he had thought and to forgive Thierry without condoning what he had done. All spiritualities, from Hinduism to Confucianism, and from Buddhism to Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach us the same lesson: forgiveness does not mean passive acceptance but an active human commitment to reforming and transforming ourselves. God indeed forgives mistakes, and men can sometimes forget them in a positive sense. For the moral consciousness, forgiving mistakes and forgetting about them is not a way of denying that mistakes have been committed, but a way of asserting that our conscience has the ability to overcome them, or that it is trying to do so.

Thierry was a victim, and he became a bully. Did he become a bully because he had been a victim? Psychological and psychoanalytic studies support that view. Or did he become a bully simply because he was human and because inhumanity lies dormant in all of us? Spiritualities, religions and philosophies support that view, and postulate that it is a truth that is borne out by the history of humanity. We have to distrust both feelings of pity and abuses of authority, and forgiveness can become either a feeling of charitable condescension towards the victim or an instrument of authority in the hands of a former victim and/or future bully. Who forgives whom? Who forgives what? Forgiving, like loving, is not feeling pity. It is very easy to feel pity, and the ability to forgive forces us to question the intentions of those who do so: pity can be the dark side of authoritarianism or psychological manipulation as well as the brightest side of love and of an active, constructive empathy. The difference between the two kinds of forgiveness is, of course, love: we forgive out of love, forgive with love, and go on loving.