The epidemic of forgiveness.

Last year Earl Justus was executed in Virginia for the rape and murder of a young woman who was nine-months pregnant. He was also convicted of homicide on two other counts. In a radio interview on the eve of his execution, Justus reported that over the years he had repeatedly petitioned the families of his victims for forgiveness. Without commenting on their response, he went on to say that, in time, he had learned to forgive himself for what he had done. I am not an advocate of the gallows, so do not misunderstand my cross-examining the next-to-last words of a condemned man--but: Whence comes this notion that we can forgive ourselves our own trespasses?

Perhaps there was nothing extraordinary about Justus's belief that he could forgive himself. I hear people absolving themselves all the time. Just last week a friend confided to me that he had finally forgiven himself for the hell he had put his first wife through. Shortly thereafter, I tuned in on a talk show to hear an alcoholic father sigh that he had forgiven himself for the damage he had inflicted upon his children.

People are not only forgiving themselves, they are encouraging others to do the same. Take a good friend of mine, whose not-so-nurturing father is dying from a rare and aggressive form of cancer. After a recent, and probably final, visit my friend reported that he told his father to forgive himself. "Why that particular message?" I gently pressed. Not entirely without grounds, my friend explained that he thought his father's extreme guilt had thwarted his ability to value the good things in his life and that the end might be less spiritually devastating if his father could only believe that his life was not the abject moral failure he took it to be. This is forgiveness as a form of therapy. Guilt is the disease. Absolution the cure.

Katherine Power, the sixties' revolutionary who turned herself in after twenty-three years on the lam for participating in a bank robbery in which a police officer and father of six was killed, said during her trial: "I spent many years in therapy, learning to understand, to tolerate, and forgive both others and myself" While I won't meddle in the conscience of Katherine Power, it does seem fair to ask: Can we forgive ourselves our own trespasses? Or, is forgiving oneself an empty Cesture, rather like blessing oneself or apologizing to oneself?

As Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton argue in their book, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge University Press, 1988), the concept of forgiveness is traditionally bound up with the idea of a restored relationship. Thus, when a friend recently forgave me for being so absorbed in a project that I neglected to notice that he had been twisting on one of life's racks, he was saying that he was willing to resume our relationship. There is, it is true, more to forgiveness than a renewed relationship. There are many cases of people continuing relationships for no other reason than their psychological inability to break them off. Just the same, were my friend to announce that he had forgiven me but didn't want anything more to do with me, I would have good cause for believing that he really hadn't forgiven me at all. Not to play the philosophical pedant, but it could be argued that the restoration of relations is a necessary but not sufficient condition for forgiveness. Thus, who am I, the transgressor, to unilaterally decide that the person against whom I have transgressed shall no longer allow my transgression to stand as a barrier to our relationship? It would be ludicrous for me to tell my friend, "I know that I wasn't there when you needed me, but I am sorry and have forgiven myself and so I shall no longer allow my act of numbness to come between us.

Another notion of forgiveness, articulated by Bishop Butler, is that forgiveness is the letting go of one's justified feelings of resentment. To be sure, there are circumstances in which letting go of a sense of resentment betrays a lack of self-respect, or at least a sense that here is a person with whom I cannot afford to be angry; so, there is more to forgiveness than releasing resentment. Nevertheless, were my friend to claim that he forgave me but still resented my insensitivity, I would have good reason to conclude that he really hadn't forgiven me. But to the extent that forgiveness can be described as the release of resentment under appropriate circumstances, how could I possibility forgive myself for hurting someone else? I have no grounds, psychological or otherwise, for feeling resentment. It is clear that I cannot forgive myself for hurting my friend, if by that I mean that at the time of my self-absolution I forswear all feelings of resentment toward the person whom I have left in the lurch. It would also be completely benighted of me to think that I could forgive myself in the sense that I could command someone whom I have hurt to smother the justified resentment which was the outcome of the injury I inflicted.

Dryden observed that forgiveness belongs to the injured. It is up to the person who has been sinned against to say that he will cover over or wash away the harm that he has suffered. Except in cases of an individual being closely identified with the victim, and then only in an attenuated sense, third-party forgiveness is no forgiveness at all. It would be ridiculous for me to forgive your mugger or for you to forgive me for letting down my friend. Thus, it would be ridiculous for me to forgive Pol Pot for his killing fields.

The genius of this and related territory, Dostoevsky, raised the problem of divine forgiveness as a form of third-party forgiveness. God, he argued in the character of Ivan Karamazov, cannot forgive the demon who tortures a child because it wasn't God, but the child, who was tortured. In the Christian tradition we have coped with this theological problem in a number of different ways. One of them has been to argue that every sin is ultimately a sin against God; another has been that because we are God's creation, God is no more a third party to our sins against one another than parents are a third party to the harms that their children suffer. The mystery of divine forgiveness aside, the reason a bystander cannot reasonably forgive a mugging is because it wasn't the bystander who got his nose broken and wallet stolen. Neither did the thug get his nose broken and wallet stolen. The mugger has no more authority to forgive himself than the bystander has to forgive the mugger.

Forgiving oneself is like third-party forgiveness except for one feature, the person who forgives himself usually does so on the basis that, unlike the bystander, he has experienced pain--the pain of guilt. And now, after a time, which is for some long and others short, the self-absolver concludes that the amount of guilt that he has suffered is sufficient to pay for the suffering that he has caused. But, once again, who am I to decide that the pangs of conscience that I have suffered are sufficient penance for, say, having left my friend out on a limb? Indeed, if I could really assume the roles of both judge and defendant and so set my own penalties, there would not be any need to plead for forgiveness. I could decide the whole matter myself without ever coming under the examination of another; I could sentence myself to so much guilt, serve my sentence of knit brows, and then go on my morally self-assured way.

The idea that we can forgive ourselves our own trespasses violates all traditional conceptions of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a relational act and as such cannot be carried out alone. Here it might be instructive to imagine, and for some it will not take much imagination, someone having put a wrecking ball through your life. As the years roll on, you try to forgive the rabid individual who left you with a cicatrix running from your spine to your soul. However, every time you conjure up this person's face, nothing but fear and hate comes to you. Try as you have, you cannot forgive him. And then one day you hear that this very person has learned to do what you couldn't do, namely, forgive himself What would you feel? Maybe I am hard of heart, but I would feel as though my tormentor were simply kidding himself. I would feel as though he was compounding one transgression with another. Not surprisingly, the notion that we can forgive ourselves seems more viable to the person who has slung the stone, and now has the furies breathing down his neck, than it does to the person who is trying to peel his life off the floor.

Within contemporary Western thought there is a strong suspicion about the moral effects of guilt. In the view of some psychologists, a little bit of guilt is healthy but a little more than that is useless self-flagellation--and even counterproductive. Indeed, even such unmeliorist figures as Soren Kierkegaard have observed that guilt of a certain pitch and with a certain edge often spurs the despairing attempt to blow the brains out of guilt by sinking oneself deeper and deeper in sin. In a different venue, Freud recognized the same phenomenon and believed that a capacity to tolerate guilt without acting it out in scenarios of self-destruction was a necessary attribute of candidates for psychoanalytic therapy. While I can't presume to speak for all self-forgivers, my own moral-psychological struggles instruct me that the intuition behind gestures of self-absolution often fall along the lines of, "it won't do any good to continue torturing myself about, say, having unintentionally but nevertheless irresponsibly hurt a student, and so regardless of what the student says, I forgive myself."

But it is one thing for me to resolve to accept what I have done and stop torturing myself, and another for me to imagine that I can wipe my slate clean. Likewise, though I have twice heard the heretical invocation to self-forgiveness come from the pulpit, it is one thing for me to pray for and have trust in God's forgiveness and quite another for me to imagine that I can forgive myself. On this point, I have the strong sense that the idea of self-forgiveness is a symptom of the secularization process. People for whom the idea of a personal God has become an offense often wish to retain some of the ethico-religious ideas associated with faith, such as forgiveness. So, fantastically enough, they take this power upon themselves.

As I have previously written, many of us are always singing songs about taking responsibility for our lives and deeds (Commonweal, February 12, 1993). It is not always clear to me what these tales come to, but one thing is certain, taking responsibility for myself must involve acknowledging both intellectually and affectively the injuries that I have visited upon others. This civilizing yet humble posture of acknowledgment is no picnic and there are many ways of twisting free of the need to assume it. Not the least of these is the fantasy that we can forgive ourselves.

In his Religion within the Limits of Reason, Kant argued that were it not for faith in the mystical possibility of forgiveness, the serious individual would take one look into the looking glass of his past actions, glean the corrupt soul that gave rise to them, and fall into terminal moral despair. The need for forgiveness may seem selfish to those with utilitarian moral instincts, but it is nothing to feel guilty about.

Still, if it is forgiveness that we seek, then we need to seek it from the person or people whom we have hurt. But what of the individual who has done something for which it is virtually impossible to be forgiven? Take for example the young soldier who, filled with rage, torches a village. Should he carry that act to his grave? While I was never placed in the crucible of a battlefield, I am not a personal stranger to this problem. From the sheer vantage point of moral psychology, it would be far better for me to live as a penitent remembering that I am not a distant cousin to the individual who committed some heinous deed, than for me to pretend that I could, of my own accord, unhitch myself from my past. Although I do not have the notation to capture even idealized movements of the spirit, I can see that while they may appear the same, the humble acknowledgment of my sins is one movement, moral masochism another. Again, I am not suggesting that we should burn ourselves at the stake for our transgressions; such acts of moral self-immolation can easily become and lead to further causes for guilt. I am, however, insisting that not everything is permitted by the understandable desire to get on with our lives.

GORDON D. MARINO is visiting scholar at the Virginia Center for the Humanities and Public Policy, in Charlottesville, Virginia.