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TO THE EDITORS:
Yotam Benziman concludes (“Forgiveness and Remembrance of Things Past,” AZURE 35, Winter 2009) that an unrepented offense cannot be forgiven, but that there is a means by which men can (and do) achieve unilateral forgiveness. First, it is important to establish that forgiveness is voluntary. Unilateral forgiveness, which occurs when the offender is unrepentant, is even more so. No one can enjoin upon another such a superhuman duty. Forgiving an unrepented offense is an act of will, not a result of spontaneous warmth.
One aspect of committing an offense against someone is that the wronged person’s point of view is set aside. He did not wish to be injured, insulted, or cast out, but to the offender, these wishes did not matter. The wronged person’s will, her very concept of self, was violated. People who experience a break-in of their homes, for example, frequently report a greater experience of fear than the event itself warrants. The burglar is not likely to return, and yet their fear persists. This is because a house is constructed, and willed, to be a shelter that permits the resident to choose who may (and may not) enter. When this will has been set aside, and entrance forced, the resident’s sense of safety and of self is set at naught. It is the same with any offense, great or small. A portion of the injury is a sense of loss: I have been defined as someone whose wishes do not matter. I have been defined as a shareholder whose hopes did not matter, as a child whose safety did not matter, as a friend whose feelings did not matter, as a lover whose exclusivity did not matter. In the moment of the offense, I was made smaller than I am. I was made nothing.
Repentance, then, consists of the offender’s construction of a narrative in which the offended’s viewpoint did matter. In cases of accidental offense, nothing else is needed; the accidental offender says, with surprise, that he did not intend to set the victim’s rights, viewpoint, or self at naught. “It was an accident” does not remove the harm done, of course, but it does restore the self that was robbed. The pain caused by the injury cannot be changed through this admission, but the dimunition of the wronged person’s self can.
In cases of deliberate offense, the offender must offer a narrative that re-tells the offense from the victim’s point of view. Benziman’s scenario of the married couple who work through forgiveness after adultery illustrates this well. The couple will re-tell the story from every vantage point, and the victim will insist, again and again, on relating his point of view, which the offender must accept and validate. The harm has been done, but the victim’s rights to his point of view can be restored. Forgiveness tracks closely with this restoration, and the closer the offender’s narrative draws to the victim’s, the greater and freer the forgiveness.
In this light, Desmond Tutu’s narrative of forgiveness can be better comprehended. Faced with unrepentant offenders, he constructs a narrative in which he and his people are not what the offenders considered them to be. The offense itself consisted of calling them lesser human beings. The economic and personal wrongs they suffered cannot be undone, but Tutu reaches for a theory in which they are not lesser creatures, but are part of a higher whole. When he insists on a commonality of mankind, he likely does not intend to share in the guilt so much as to construct a narrative in which he and his people have equal, or perhaps greater, value than those who wronged them. From the divine height of ubantu consciousness, he can then extend forgiveness like a scepter to the lesser beings, the offenders. He wishes to be filled with “the compassion of God, looking on and weeping.”
And this is how unilateral forgiveness is achieved. The victim conceives of himself as being on a higher plane and thus restores to himself what was taken away. If the offender will not offer a narrative that restores the victim’s rights, the victim can offer a narrative that reduces the offender’s rights. The offender has not asked for forgiveness and, indeed, may not desire it. But the victim forces it on him, and creates a story in which they are equals, all part of ubantu—the kingdom of God, or the timeline of history—or some other sufficiently grand, higher plane. “There, but for the grace of God, go I” is an assertion of being that the offender has set aside, and of equality that the offender did not permit. The offense is still borne by the victim, and its scars are woven into a story, but it is one the offender did not wish to have told. Unilateral forgiveness thus becomes a benign revenge.
Ruth Johnston
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
YOTAM BENZIMAN RESPONDS:
Ruth Johnston’s letter raises some important points regarding the restitution of a wronged person’s rights or self-esteem. On some occasions these can be closely connected either to revenge or to forgiveness. But revenge and forgiveness are at odds. Johnston’s suggestion that forgiveness can be a kind of revenge, or that it can be “forced on the offender,” therefore includes what seems to be a contradiction in terms. I also disagree with her interpretation of Desmond Tutu’s notion of forgiveness. Far from seeing the offenders as “lesser beings,” Tutu insists that we are all equal qua human beings and that “what dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me.”
