Why unconditional forgiveness is needed

Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2008

Why Unconditional Forgiveness IS Needed

by William Meninger

I have been invited to respond to Professor Griswold's article on forgiveness. It is a fine article but I think his feelings against unconditional forgiveness need some modification. He holds that the victim should not (cannot?) forgive until the offender does something to earn it. Unilateral or unconditional forgiveness breaks a moral relationship, a need to move forward together or not at all. Unconditional forgiveness is tantamount to excuse or condemnation. There is a need to move forward, but not necessarily together.

Forgiveness, that is, reciprocal forgiveness, is necessary or every victim would just become a source of vengefulness, resentment, moral hatred, and clouded judgment. Peaceful characters would be transformed into connoisseurs of violence. Thus forgiveness should be of intense concern to us in ordinary life, both individually and collectively. It is an indispensable response to inevitable vengefulness, violence, and injustice.

The victim's anger at the offender, says Professor Griswold, should be forsworn only when the offender takes certain steps that render continued anger inappropriate. This includes an acknowledgement of responsibility for the wrong; a commitment to become the sort of person who does not do such things; an expression of regret to the victim; and some sort of accounting of how that wrongdoing does not express the totality of the perpetrator's character. In the face of these steps, the victim would be unethical to refuse forgiveness. The victim must reframe his view of the offender, which would also mean reframing his view of himself. He must see the injury as something that happened to him and not intrinsic to his very being. Then he explicitly offers forgiveness to the offender.

It is only in this way, Professor Griswold claims, that forgiveness does not collapse into either excuse or condonation for the evil done. To excuse would be not to hold the perpetrator responsible, to condone would be to enable continued wrongdoing. He then takes issue with what he calls "unconditional forgiveness" because it demands nothing from the offender. It is, as he calls it, a "gift" which is given to the offender. This is a strange notion, which I do not recognize as coming, as he claims, from Christian sources. In Christian sources the gift (referred to as a grace, which means a free gift from God) is given to the victim, not to the perpetrator. When the victim tries to open his mind and heart to the love he is called to have for all men, including his enemies, this is referred to as a grace.

Unconditional or unilateral forgiveness is necessary for the same reasons that Professor Griswold gives for reciprocal forgiveness. Without it, how can the victim avoid becoming the source of vengefulness, resentment, moral hatred, and clouded judgment if the perpetrator of his wounds is unknown, absent, or dead? Perfect forgiveness does demand reciprocity, but often we have to be satisfied with imperfect forgiveness because nothing else is possible. Imperfect forgiveness, as I understand it, is based on the premise that what is worth doing is worth doing poorly. If union with the perpetrator cannot be accomplished (because of the absence, death, or refusal), then on the part of the victim there must at least be a reaching out—that is, an imperfect forgiveness.

Most forgiveness issues must begin with imperfect forgiveness. We have to forgive on three levels. The first is intellectual, the second is emotional, and the third is the instinctive or gut level. It is only when grace takes us to the gut level that forgiveness is complete and we finally see the offender, not as the perpetrator of our wounds but as another human being with our own gifts and failings. This is true whether or not the perpetrator reciprocates. An overriding principle in this approach to forgiveness is that forgiveness is essentially something we do for ourselves. It is not done, primarily, for the sake of the perpetrator. A dramatic example of this is the Rabbi who came to Brooklyn from a concentration camp where his wife and parents were killed. "I could not bring Hitler over here with me, but the only way I could leave him behind was to forgive him."

As for Professor Griswold's concern with unconditional forgiveness condoning or excusing harmful activity, I cannot answer him philosophically but only practically. Is there anyone who would say that the Amish community condoned or excused the murder of their children when they forgave him?

Father William Meninger is a Trappist monk at St. Benedicts Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. In 1974 he originated the workshop on Contemplative Meditation (later known as Centering Prayer). www.contemplativeprayer.net.

RELATED ARTICLE: Unconditional Forgiveness? Reply to Father Meninger

I am grateful to Father Meninger for his thoughtful, acute, and instructive reply to my article on forgiveness. We are in agreement about our central difference: I argue that model (paradigmatic or accomplished) forgiveness is not unconditional or unilateral, and he argues that it is precisely that. Let us see if we can take the debate about this fundamental issue a bit further.

Meninger asks, "Without it [unconditional or unilateral forgiveness], how can the victim avoid becoming the source of vengefulness, resentment, moral hatred, and clouded judgment if the perpetrator of his wounds is unknown, absent, or dead." My answer is twofold. First, I allow that if certain "threshold" conditions are met, the victim is afforded what I call "imperfect" forgiveness. By that phrase I mean that all of the conditions we would wish to see fulfilled—for example, that the offender be able and willing to offer an apology, and so forth—have not been fulfilled. I do not see that Meninger either denies this or has grounds for denying it (if they could be fulfilled, would we wish for them not to be?). Consequently, he is committed to the view that were it possible for the relevant conditions to be met, we would want them to be met; that is, he's committed to my view. He writes: "Imperfect forgiveness, as I understand it, is based on the premise that what is worth doing is worth doing poorly." As that statement of my view might mislead, allow me to put it this way: if something is above the threshold of what's worth doing, even though it can't be done perfectly, it's better to do what one can than nothing at all. And that may still be a lot, though by definition it won't be everything one would have hoped for.

Second, if one falls below the threshold of what counts as forgiveness, or if one is somewhere in the spectrum of imperfect cases and finds the results less than fully satisfactory, the answer to Meninger's question is that one must take other steps—therapy, for example, or perhaps prayer or meditation—that, while not constituting forgiveness, may nonetheless be effective in helping to lift the burden of resentment. Advocates of unilateral forgiveness seem to want forgiveness to be the magic wand that resolves the serious problems Meninger mentions. My view is that human life does not offer any such wand; sometimes forgiveness isn't possible, or is possible only in an incomplete or imperfect way. Suffering cannot always be redeemed through forgiveness. But there are other resources available to help the victim overcome the toxic effects of moral hatred and clouded judgment.

Father Meninger mentions "grace," meaning no doubt God's grace, and stipulates that it is required for forgiveness ("It is good for us to be aware of God's role in every step of the forgiveness process.... We could not begin without God's grace ..." [The Process of Forgiveness (New York: Continuum, 1996)]). This too is a deep conceptual difference between our outlooks. His is predicated upon the truth of a certain theological view, and indeed upon the individual believing that it is true (one could not accept God's grace while disbelieving in God). Mine requires no such commitments; I suspend judgment about the theological issues and work out a conception of forgiveness. His outlook has to exclude all convictions that differ in a fundamental way from his own (whether because the conception of the divine differs, or because the view is secular); mine has no parallel logical feature.

Meninger and I have a second, less important difference: it concerns the connection between Christianity and the notion that unconditional forgiveness is a "gift" bestowed upon the offender. I am instructed and fascinated by Meninger's assertion that, "This is a strange notion which I do not recognize as coming, as he [Griswold] claims, from Christian sources." I certainly am no theologian. Allow me, however, to call as my witness Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, in his book No Future Without Forgiveness (Doubleday 1999) remarks, in the context of his famous discussion of forgiveness that, "The victim may be ready to forgive and make the gift of her forgiveness ness available, but it is up to the wrongdoer to appropriate the gift--to open the window and draw the curtains aside. He does this by acknowledging the wrong he has done, so letting the light and fresh air of forgiveness enter his being." In the next paragraph, Tutu cites Jesus in support of this view. So far as I can tell, Tutu is speaking from within a Christian outlook about forgiveness as a gift bestowed by the victim upon the offender. I would be very surprised if this is the only such passage in Christian literature.

One reason is that this conception of the gift of forgiveness flows naturally from the idea that forgiveness is unconditional and unilateral, and that it is not self-forgiveness that is at stake, but rather forgiveness of the other. In all such cases, the notion is inherently relational or other-directed. Furthermore, consider Meninger's own talk in his book The Process of Forgiveness about "God's gift of grace." God's gift to us is certainly relational (God is not giving grace and forgiveness to himself). In forgiving our fellows, are we not taking as our model God's unconditional love—that love of which the "gift of grace" is an expression? Meninger seems to answer affirmatively since he wants us to imitate, in our relations to others, God's love of us. He writes in The Process of Forgiveness "The Father loves all his children without conditions, and we are told to love one another in the same way. Indeed if we are to love one another for the love of God, it must also be that very love of God which we have for each other. This is an unconditional love." But then, the metaphor of the gift is an appealing way to characterize our unconditional forgiveness of others. Presumably this is one reason why Tutu uses it. My point was that on reflection, the metaphor itself pushes against the idea of forgiveness as unconditional, and for good reason: perfected forgiveness isn't unconditional. Where this leaves the concept of "God's gift of grace" I would not venture to say.

Meninger concludes his stimulating reply with a compelling rhetorical question. The answer to his question is affirmative.

by Charles L. Griswold