Forgiveness is an enormously complex moral transaction. It defies understanding, yet it shapes our personal lives and defines world affairs.
Three months after Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, Father Michael Lapsley, a chaplain exiled by the apartheid government because of his ANC membership, lost an eye and both hands to a letter bomb. His journey, from a victim “as helpless as a baby, to survivor, to victor” has led him to believe that he is able to be a better priest with no hands than with two hands.
Lapsley’s story is one of more than 100 in Forgiveness: An Exploration by activist, MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) recipient and journalist Marina Cantacuzino. The book tells of situations, ranging from dastardly deeds to dreadful accidents or petty arguments and conveys how forgiveness can emanate from a gamut of circumstances, including immediate and irrational, process-orientated and logical, nonlinear and having unsatisfying outcomes — or never, at least as we understand it.
That’s Cantacuzino’s central point: forgiveness is inordinately complex. Her journalistic investigations led her to establish a charity organisation, The Forgiveness Project, in 2004, with the late archbishop Desmond Tutu as a founding patron. “I wanted to act, to help, not to proselytise,” she tells me.
Religious roots
The concept of forgiveness has evolved over thousands of years. Ancient philosophies and civilisations did not consider it in the ambit or paradigm we ponder it today. Forgiveness is not integral within Buddhism and, while Confucianism emphasises the implications of anger and resentment for self-respect, forgiveness is framed around forswearing these and is not idealised for its own sake.
Simplifying ancient Greco-Roman ideas, the focus was on justice, particularly the restoration of the wronged person’s dignity. The school of Stoicism philosophy supported this by emphasising justice as one of four virtues, the others being courage, temperance and wisdom.
Forgiveness started being shaped more patently with the rise of formal theistic religions, though the concept is expressed and weighed differently within each. Judaism’s holiest day is Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, when Jews are expected to confess, convey regret, apologise and repent. The aggrieved person is obliged to forgive, and the act of forgiving is viewed as pious.
Mercy is a central theme in Islam’s holy book, the Koran, with about 4.5% of the text comprising verses specifically about forgiveness. Allah has many different names, but three are derivatives of “The Pardoner” or “The Forgiver”.
Hinduism connects forgiveness to the principles of karma and moksha. Seeking forgiveness, by diminishing negative karma, influences reincarnation; the act of forgiving is a form of spiritual growth that can contribute to spiritual liberation (moksha) from the cycle of birth and rebirth.
Forgiveness is at the heart of Christian faith, being an intimate part of Christ’s death on the cross, when he uttered, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Asking forgiveness from God requires Christians to forgive, too: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” invokes the Lord’s prayer.
Forgive me for the liberty of a suggestion to anyone facing a family schism or relationship crisis. It’s extraordinarily moving to read the biblical parable of the prodigal son with an image of Rembrandt’s painting of the same name at hand. One of the last paintings completed before he died, it is one of the great religious-themed works of the 17th century, bringing to life the idea that sincere repentance invokes mercy and tender forgiveness.
Ironically, it is displayed in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia. Might the world one day forgive Russia and welcome the nation back into the international fold after its perpetration of acts that may qualify as genocide, including the abduction of perhaps tens of thousands of children?
From this Christian platform, supplemented by enlightenment philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, springs much of the modern world’s thinking about the ethics of forgiveness — and its conundrums.
Lapsley’s life since 1990 is an illustration of the enormous complexities swirling around forgiveness. “I haven’t forgiven anyone, because I have no one to forgive,” he says in Forgiveness: An Exploration. “No one was charged with this crime, and so for me forgiveness is still an abstract concept. But if I knew that the people who sent my bomb were now in prison, then I’d happily unlock the gates — although I’d like to know that they weren’t going to make any more bombs.
“I believe in restorative justice and I believe in reparation. So my attitude to the perpetrator is this: I’ll forgive them, but since I’ll never get my hands back, and will therefore always need someone to help me, they should pay that person’s wages. Not as a condition of forgiveness, but as part of reparation and restitution.”
Amazing grace?
In her book Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Chicago University ethicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum maintains that forgiveness is tacitly assumed to include an element of retribution. She points out that the Old Testament is full of righteous anger and vengeance, like the proverb: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head, and God will reward you.”
Interpretations and attitudes have since shifted, but this suppressed anger still suffuses our emotions when we forgive, and the forgiver’s covert moral superiority holds sway, Nussbaum writes. Reading Lapsley’s words, we see her point; knowing his story, it’s impossible to begrudge him this sentiment.
Still, an improved envisagement of forgiveness would strip out these undercurrents, Nussbaum says, and define a purer form of forgiveness as “unconditional love and generosity”. This may not be as abstract as it seems. With the backdrop of Jim Crow’s brutality as a continuation of centuries of slavery and oppression in the US, Martin Luther King Jr preached the same thing in 1957: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” His sermon was titled “Loving Your Enemies”.
The ephemeral nature of forgiveness, its undefinable essence, rests in the question as to whether Nussbaum, or even King, would dare to suggest that Lapsley veers from Christianity’s template.
Forgiveness is unfair
The process of forgiveness often places an unbearably unfair burden on the victim. We see this in the Steenkamps, parents of Reeva, whose killer, Oscar Pistorius, has just been granted parole after serving half his sentence. Over the years media reports have described the Steenkamps’ on-off state of forgiveness towards the murderer.
A few months ago, just before Reeva’s father, Barry, died, they indicated that they had forgiven Pistorius, but rejected his first parole appeal because he had not been fully truthful nor genuinely remorseful. Mother June said she had decided not to oppose his second parole hearing because “I would not be able to survive if I had to cling to my anger”.
The process of forgiving is often harrowing, Cantacuzino notes, and requires work over and above coping with what may be terrible anguish. Rejecting any form of apology — even when it is heartfelt and intended towards reconciliation — is easier. But if we align with Nussbaum’s unconditional love version of forgiveness, thinking, when a transgressor apologises, the words “I accept (or do not accept) your apology” are irrelevant, because we must do so.
However, apology is a paradoxical act, the writer Elizabeth Breunig points out. In essence, an apology says that we own our action but qualify it by adding, “I’m not that kind of person anymore.” So the apology acknowledges culpability but simultaneously disowns it. Pure contrition should not seek to hold on to this subtle fragment of power.
So, forgiveness is fraught with loopholes. If love is blind, forgiveness may often require a blind faith in humanity.
Indeed, many stories underscore that some people have a boundless capacity for forgiveness. Reading about Eva Kor evokes multiple feelings. A child survivor of the Holocaust, having undergone with her twin the infamous Dr Josef Mengele’s nauseating experiments, and losing both parents, she not only forgave the perpetrators but in her later years campaigned vociferously for Jews to give across-the-board forgiveness to all Nazis, and for the Holocaust, saying it was the only path to reclaim personal power for individual victims, and healing for all Jews.
She drew significant criticism, especially when doubling down in slating rabbinical teachings on forgiveness, embracing former Nazis, and confirming her belief that “absolutely not”, no act is unforgivable.
She died in 2015, but many Jews around the world continue to revile Kor for her outspoken views. The broader learning is that forgiveness is an elusive, shape-shifting concept, and even in the context of an horrendous shared experience there is unlikely to be either a common reaction or a shared inclination to forgive. Kor could forgive, and wanted to, but she had no moral authority to demand the same response from others.
Amazingly, recent neuroscience research shows that when we allow Schadenfreude to rise up, the area of our brain that we use to feel empathy shuts down.
As a Holocaust survivor, Kor viewed forgiveness as her “ultimate revenge”. Studies in psychology confirm that part of the impetus to forgive — our deigning to do so — might be to revel in Schadenfreude. This is forgiveness as a form of retribution: the suffering of the other because we have been made to suffer. Indeed, Schadenfreude includes justice as one of its interrelated forms. Amazingly, recent neuroscience research shows that when we allow Schadenfreude to rise up, the area of our brain that we use to feel empathy shuts down.
This ebb and flow of our neural processes play out even for deep thinkers on the issue of forgiveness. Another Holocaust survivor, the writer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, addressing the German Reichstag in 2000, urged Germany to ask forgiveness of the Jewish people. But interviewed six years later he rejected the idea of a mass Jewish forgiveness of the Nazis, saying, “I am asked occasionally, do you forgive? I am not God. I don’t believe in collective guilt.”
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt invested much of her life’s work in this issue. The arc of logic in her book, The Human Condition, is intricate, making it possible to extract quotes to support a position that may not have been her meaning. For instance, the view that withholding forgiveness is not only understandable but also makes sense can be underpinned by the extract, “men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and … they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable”.
Arendt’s reference was the Holocaust; by saying that in terms of moral, natural law there can be no proportionate punishment for a collective, heinous, mass crime, it “transcends the realm of human affairs”. As such, the human inconceivability of seeking punishment befitting the industrial-scale crime means that it is also inconceivable to forgive such a crime.
However, individual actions — specific crimes during the course of the crime against humanity — can be individually understood and commensurate punishment determined. University of Cape Town professor of jurisprudence Jaco Barnard-Naudé argues that not only did Arendt say these can be forgiven, but that forgiving these individual perpetrators’ acts amounts to a tacit waiving of the right to take proportionate revenge. Forgiveness is thus symbolic, Barnard-Naudé points out, and Arendt understood this as the best realistic outcome. This symbolism is vital, she concluded, because to “remove the Damocles sword over every new generation … the only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness”.
Reconciliation without truth
Though there are parallels, then, there is a chasm between forgiveness as a personal or interpersonal moral transaction and its role in the political realm. The renewed conflagration in Israel and Palestine is a reminder that the cycle of hatred and revenge will never be broken until there is a reckoning — and this will need to include forgiveness. SA’s postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chaired by Tutu between 1995 and 2002 was necessary and well-intentioned, with innovations such as the transparency of public hearings and amnesty for perpetrators in exchange for full testimony. Yet in hindsight the TRC was flawed: so many victims were no longer alive, and neither were many perpetrators — or they chose not to appear. And for many people the idea of justice did not materialise at all.
Like SA’s TRC, Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC), which had been intended to heal the wounds of the country’s 1994 genocide, has been praised, but also heavily criticised — likewise, Chile’s 1990 TRC, conducted after the brutal Pinochet regime. In the former Yugoslavia, the attempted TRC barely got off the ground and was effectively abolished with the country’s break-up. No report was ever compiled.
What more could any of these commissions have done? They are substitutes, in the political and social realm, for what were atrocities or extreme, personal violations. Echoing Arendt, in this form of moral transaction “forgiveness therefore becomes more symbolic than actual”, says Cantacuzino. The biggest obstacle, she continues, is when “injustices have not been acknowledged, let alone rectified”.
In our hectic world, with challenging personal lives stressed further by 21st century conflict and volatility, how may we reorient our thinking about forgiveness, and find the right words to describe the complex mix and muddle of emotions that make up this ephemeral idea — anger and sadness, confusion, relief, empathy?
Replacing the word with Nussbaum’s “unconditional love” seems too far a stretch, especially for people who are not simultaneously guided by religious beliefs. One leading academic on the subject of forgiveness, Stanford University’s Fred Luskin, is “so overwhelmed with the convoluted, unsatisfactory definitions ... that he [now] opts for the single word of ‘freedom’”. Cantacuzino refines this, adding one other ingredient, which she admits is radical because it “stretches our humanity”: the tiniest hint of compassion or empathy for the person who has hurt us.
Perhaps any study of forgiveness is fruitless if it insists on an outcome. Rather, discovering the dimensions of forgiveness is an exercise in self-reflection, a hybrid exploration — regardless of agnosticism or atheism — of spiritual or religious teachings. We should hope (or pray) fervently that we never suffer a dreadful experience that may require us to dig deep within our souls to forgive; equally, that we can try to behave such that we do not have reason to ask for forgiveness.
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