Peace-building and forgiveness: the first of two Agenda for Reconciliation conference focussed on peace-building initiatives...

In the past ten years, the subject of forgiveness has climbed into newspaper headlines, political speeches and scholarly literature around the world. The further we move away from the 20th century, the more we feel the burden of the violence that afflicted us all in some part of it. Between 1900 and 2000 deaths by warfare totalled some 175 million, an average of 200 every hour.

In my religious tradition, we are taught to pray: `Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.' The 21st century needs that prayer as few other centuries in human history. We who have lived in the 20th century are well acquainted with temptations to murder our neighbours. Collectively speaking we have often yielded to that temptation.

What will deliver us from these evils? Forgiveness is just one ingredient in a bundle of answers. But not every version of forgiveness will do. Here I want to offer you a brief list of questions about the difference between genuine and false forgiveness: a `catechism on forgiveness', if you like.

Is forgiveness a synonym for forgetting?

Au contraire: `forgive and forget' is an inhumane motto. `Remember and forgive' is much better. How insulting it is to tell the widow of a murdered Muslim man in Srebrenica to forget that crime and her loss! If there is no other dignity we can accord the dead, we can remember them, and remember that some of their deaths were grossly unjust. Whatever else the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did, it gave victims of injustice the chance to inscribe their sufferings on a public record. Forgiveness has to begin with memory.

Does justice have anything to do with forgiveness?

It has a lot to do with it. The South African TRC came under considerable criticism for seeming to overlook justice for victims and for perpetrators. Defenders of the TRC point out that exposing the truth about crime is the first step in punishing the criminal and in justifying the victim. Historical truth is not the whole of justice, but it is the indispensable beginning.

Is justice actually compatible with forgiveness?

Yes, but not with every version of justice. One version is simply incompatible: the justice of revenge. Punishment there may have to be for unjust acts; but acts of revenge merely imitate acts of injustice. Revenge is a greedy demon: it hungers for more and more punishment of offenders and creates a new, reversed set of perpetrators and victims. It repeats the crime it presumes to punish. That is the fundamental injustice of capital punishment. Whatever else forgiveness is, it is forbearance from revenge.

Does forgiveness belong simply to the realm of personal relations and not the realm of socio-political relations?

The answer is `no'. Berel Lang puts the matter succinctly: `It is possible ... to imagine a world without forgiveness or any of its allied concepts. But such a world would ... be either more than human (that is, one in which no wrongs are committed or suffered) or less than human--one where resentment and vengeance would not only have their day, but would also continue to have it, day after day.'

In all our countries the demons of vengeance are either awake or sleeping. They are the evil spirits that continue to haunt our present with our past.

Can the past really be changed?

One might think of the past as a visitor who is always knocking on every present door. Open that door, and the past will make a demand: `What are you going to do about us?' One answer readily springs to mind, `We will forget about you!' And we slam the door on the past, only to hear the knock again: `What are you going to do about us?' Second answer: `We will not forget you, we will just smooth over the real evils of the past. We'll clothe you with an attractive cloak for concealment. We'll write comfortable history books that never name the evil-doers or their collaborators. Why should we subject our children to all those terrible facts which their ancestors suffered?'

At that answer the past puts its foot in the door and says; `The only way to make peace with us is to remember us with such honesty that we become a permanent powerful warning to your children not to repeat the mistakes of this past.'

We change the past when we commit ourselves to preserving the good in the past and refusing to repeat its evil.

Is talk about forgiveness really a matter of religion?

Yes and no. True enough, religion, especially Christianity, speaks much of forgiveness, but churches have often confined it to the secrecy of the confessional and to the realm of personal sin only. No wonder that secular people have often assumed that forgiveness has little to do with secular, collective human relationships.

But many cultures show awareness of what happens to ordinary human society when something like forgiveness is absent. I think, for example, of an ancient Korean village tradition which calls for neighbours to offer each other rice cakes every 15 January. As the author Kyu-Tae Lee describes it, `The more grudges [various neighbours] have, the larger a piece of rice cake they make ... In this way the new year gets underway, they remove the uncomfortable relationships of the last year and get off to a fresh start.' A fresh start: that is what forgiveness is all about.

Suppose two people or two groups haven't even agreed that there is something to forgive?

Say to me, `I forgive you for doing that to me', and I may reply with some hostility, `What do you mean, "you forgive me", I did not do what you said I did, and even if I did, it wasn't in the least bit wrong!'

Participants in a forgiveness-transaction need to enter into extended discussion with each other. There is such a thing as forgiveness too soon, just as there is such a thing as forgiveness too late. Too soon is when the nature of the evil, and the evilness of the evil, have yet to be agreed upon.

Hence the need, in collective relations in particular, to allocate time for stories to be told, for different experiences to be shared, for historians to be invited to do their necessary work of interrogating the past and letting it interrogate the present. A notable work of this sort was achieved by German and Polish historians in the 1960s and 1970s as they sought to write accounts of the Nazi occupation of Poland which did justice to the experiences of both sides.

If we look at all sides of a tragic conflict, won't we find that there is guilt on all sides? Why not just call the balance even?

Every evil deed deserves acknowledgement. That is ethically fundamental. One might say, `I cut off your arm, and you cut off my foot. So we are even.' But that's the logic of revenge. It leaves neither side--nor the relationship between them--healed.

Uncovering all sides of an evil event may be burdensome and embarrassing. But it is a burden and an embarrassment which must be endured, if persons and societies are to undergo healing.

It seems that, in human experience, everyone is at one time or another a victim or a perpetrator. What does that fact have to do with forgiveness?

The philosopher Jeffrie Murphy referred to a boy who, after learning that the class bully was a victim of child abuse, said, `That takes all the fun out of hating her.'

Hate feeds on stereotypes, on demeaning, unidimensional images of another. Empathy for the humanity of the wrongdoer is only one element in forgiveness, but it is indispensable.

In his monumental study of the Nazi doctors in Auschwitz, Robert J Lifton demonstrates that one requirement for the culture of killing in Auschwitz was the Nazi definition of the inmates as subhuman. Define another as less than human and you have begun to prepare yourself for killing. What then, Lifton asks, about the Nazi doctors themselves? Were they subhuman? With great inner difficulty, he asks himself the question: must we not try to understand the Dr Mengeles of this world as being only too human?

But ethical judgement does not dissolve in a warm embrace of empathetic understanding. Empathy and sympathy are different, both in their Greek and English meanings.

Rather, understanding lessens the moral distance between the best of us and the worst of us. Empathy for evil-doers surfaces in ourselves the disturbing thought, `Am I really so different from this perpetrator that I could never do what he did?' Once you have asked that question, the possibility of healing a relationship begins to seem a little more possible.

Is forgiveness the same as reconciliation?

I prefer to define forgiveness as a start towards reconciliation, as an agreement between the parties to put their feet on the same road to the future, to begin to treat each other as neighbours again, but all under that caution that some evils take a long time to recover from. The effects of some evil deeds last and last and last down to one's death. It may take time to forgive and more time to reconcile.

Is forgiveness possible without repentance?

Yes, but one has to ask whether it is desirable, and my answer to this is mostly `no'. Forgiving someone who claims not to need forgiving seems to insult the idea of forgiveness and the integrity of the forgiver. True enough, better to give up resentment than to let it gnaw away at you inwardly for year after year. Hatred, like revenge, is bad for body and soul. It is also bad for the body politic.

But full-blooded forgiveness seeks reconciliation. Forgiveness without healed relationships is like a hand extended without a handshake. It lacks completion. It leaves in the forgiver a continued yearning, a void that only repentance can fill.

Is forgiveness the ethic of the soft-hearted, the hope of the naive?

If you have ever had to face deep, radical evil in your life or in the death of those you love, you are not likely to confuse forgiveness with a refusal to face hard fact. Forgiveness has to be hard as nails. It has to mobilize intelligence, feeling, self-assertion and other-affirmation over against the horrors of acknowledged evil. It is a complex, demanding discipline. It will test your mettle, and your ability to wrestle with evil until you defeat its power to continue harming you. It will ask you to lift heavy stones for reconstructing a home in which both you and your enemies may discover ways to live together again.

In summary: Forgiveness is an act that joins moral-historical truth, forbearance from revenge, empathy for wrongdoers, and a commitment to repair a fractured human relationship. Such a combination requires a turn from the past that neither ignores past evil nor excuses it, that neither overlooks injustice nor reduces justice to revenge, that insists on the humanity of enemies even in their commission of inhumane deeds, and that values the justice that serves reconciliation above the justice that destroys it.

So defined, forgiveness links realism to hope. What greater gift do we who were born in the 20th century have to bequeath to our descendants of the 21st?