On Forgiveness. Richard Holloway
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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. This is why Caputo goes on to say that the idea of religion without religion
amounts to the recommendation that we return to the medieval sense of vera religio, where ‘religion’ meant a virtue, not a body with institutional headquarters in Nashville or the Vatican, so ‘true religion’ meant the ‘virtue’ of being genuinely or truly religious, of genuinely or truly loving God, not The One True Religion, Ours-versus-yours. God is more important than religion, as the ocean is more important than the raft, the latter bearing all the marks of being constituted by human beings. Religion, which is a human practice, is always deconstructible in the light of the love of God, which is not deconstructible.2
This way of applying some of the fundamental ideals of religion to the needs of the human community could help to lead us out of old conflicts into a new future. The fascinating thing about this radical hope in the possibilities of the future is the way some of its central protagonists, such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and John Caputo, have developed a theory of human development that is continuous with the best of the religious vision. Though they do not accept the absolutist claims that religions have made for themselves, they affirm and admire the essence of the religious impulse, because it has promoted some of the best ideals of humanity. This is why Derrida uses the paradoxical formula, ‘religion without religion’. Most people of common sense have long since intuited their way to a similar position, though they would express it in simpler language. Instinctively, they are repelled by the arrogant claims that certain religions make about possessing unique and exclusive versions of the truth without which the rest of us cannot be saved. They admire the way religions at their best produce people who are benefactors of humanity, servants of the poor, supporters and champions of the weak. While they may no longer practise religion seriously themselves, they like the way it continues to challenge human folly and cruelty. I am going to use the term reconstructionist to describe this revisionist approach to religion, and I want to apply it to the important theme of forgiveness in what follows in this book. And since I believe that the real meaning of religion is in deed not word, is a how not a what, I can be united in action with my more traditional sisters and brothers, even though our attitudes to the claims of theology may be very different.
A good example of how the reconstructionist approach to religion can confront our moral indifference is provided by the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty describes himself as an atheist, but he continues to place what I would call religious challenges before the human community. In his generous essay Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes, he describes how the utopian prophecies of both the New Testament and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto have been repeatedly falsified by history, yet continue to represent the unconquerable human hope for justice and peace on earth. He points out that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a shift in the direction of human hope from eternity to our time on earth, from the longing for divine intervention to practical planning for the happiness of future generations. Rorty wishes we had documents that lacked the defects of the New Testament and the Manifesto, but he writes:
It would be best, in short, if we could get along without prophecy and claims to knowledge of the forces which determine history – if generous hope could sustain itself without such reassurances. Some day perhaps we shall have a new text to give our children – one which abstains from prediction yet still expresses the same yearning for fraternity as does the New Testament, and is as filled with sharp-eyed description of our most recent forms of inhumanity to each other as the Manifesto. But in the meantime we should be grateful for two texts which have helped make us better – have helped us overcome, to some degree, our brutish selfishness and our cultivated sadism.3
I shall make more use of the work of Jacques Derrida in this book than that of Richard Rorty, but I believe that both are talking about a process of Christianising the world without any necessary reference to the Church as such. In his short but powerful essay On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida, in writing about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, discusses the relatively new concept of a ‘crime against humanity’:
… if, as I believe, the concept of a crime against humanity is the main charge of this self-accusation, of this repenting and this asking forgiveness; if, on the other hand, only a sacredness of the human can, in the last resort, justify this concept; if this sacredness finds its meaning in the Abrahamic memory of the religions of the Book, and in a Jewish but above all Christian interpretation of the ‘neighbour’ or the ‘fellow man’; if, from this, the crime against humanity is a crime against what is most sacred in the living, and thus already against the divine in man, in God-made-man or man-made-God-by-God, then the ‘globalisation’ of forgiveness resembles an immense scene of confession in progress, thus a virtually Christian convulsion-conversion-confession, a process of Christianisation which has no more need for the Christian church.4
And a few pages later he 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.5
I have used those extraordinary words as an epigraph to this book and I shall try to demonstrate that, in our day, perhaps for the first time since Jesus, forgiveness can be explored in all its profound but redemptive impossibility as a fundamental theme in human history. Though I shall refer to some Christian texts, particularly to the great parable of the Prodigal Son, I shall offer a reading that, while not denying the theological authority of the narratives, is mainly interested in their human meaning and application, in what Derrida calls ‘religion without religion’ or a process of Christianisation that has no more need of the Christian Church. The thing that attracts me to this approach is that it runs counter to what has always been the worst aspect of religion, which is its tendency to divide people from one another in both time and eternity. The method I shall use could unite us all, because it takes the great religious themes of hope and forgiveness and tries to make them work for the whole human community. 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 from our past and give us back our lives. The real beauty and power of forgiveness is that it can deliver the future to us.
Chapter 1
1. John D. Caputo, On Religion, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, pp.138–139.
2. Ibid., pp.112–113.
3. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, London, 1999, pp.201 and 209.