Before Forgiveness. The Origins of a Moral Idea by David Konstan (review)

In his most recent book, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea, David Konstan, emeritus professor of the Classics Department of Brown University argues that the modern notion of forgiveness involving “the idea of a moral transformation in the adult, along the lines of Christian conversion narratives, is foreign to classical biography and to the classical conception of the person in general” (168). His claim, which may come as a surprising to some, includes both the Christian and non-Christian classical sources.

Konstan brings to bear on this study a lifetime of scholarship on emotion in classical philosophy and literature including previous works The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle (2001) and Pity Transformed (2001). His examination of Greek and Roman sources is an exemplary example of philological scholarship. After establishing in Chapter 1 what the modern notion of forgiveness is, he shows in the next two chapters that the idea of personal conversion, understood as interpersonal forgiveness, is quite foreign to Greek and Roman cultures. In Chapter 2 he examines the Greek and Roman notions of guilt and innocence. In Chapter 3 he turns to Greek and Roman narratives of reconciliation. The range of sources examined is impressive and the evidence is convincing. What Konstan discovers is that forgiveness in classical literature is not so much a matter of confession of guilt as it is about protecting social rank, accounting for involuntary errors and slights, and appeasing anger. So while the classical world had its own moral horizon it did not include the fully developed modern notion of forgiveness.

Turning to the Hebrew and Christian sources, one might expect to discover the seeds of the modern idea of forgiveness. Certainly, the Hebrew and Christian notions of forgiveness differ significantly from the Greek and Roman ones. However, for both the Hebrew and the Christian the locus of forgiveness is not interpersonal (in the sense of between humans) but between human beings and God. In the Lord’s Prayer the supplicant asks: “forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The meaning here is that sin is first and foremost an offence against God and the shift or conversion (metanoia) that occurs is primarily in the relationship between each person and God. The supplicant’s request for forgiveness is atoned by an act of God. Thus, while the conversion of each person affects other persons in the community – “as we forgive those who trespass against us” - the act of forgiveness itself is not interpersonal in the modern sense of the word. This ethos remains central in the Christian tradition right through ancient and medieval cultures.

How then did we come to the modern notion of interpersonal forgiveness? This is the subject of a most interesting last chapter. Konstan notes the emergence of an appeal to interpersonal forgiveness in comic form in Molière’s short, three-act farce Les Fourberies de Scapin from 1671, indicating that an ethos of remorse and forgiveness was available to Molière as material for comedy. Konstan, however, leaves to scholars of the Renaissance and early modern culture the task of ferreting out the precise origins of this ethos and turns instead to the philosophical sources of the modern notion of forgiveness. These he finds primarily in Kant’s moral philosophy. While Kant secularizes the supernatural context of Christian moral theology, he retains ‘God’ and ‘grace’ as kinds of moral archetypes for our rational nature and for those instances of moral transformation in human relations, respectively. Thus, “Kant’s insistence on the moral autonomy of human beings, combined with his belief in the practical incompleteness of virtue, may be seen as paving the way for an understanding of conversion or moral transformation as the precondition for earning forgiveness and for the capacity to forgive in interpersonal relations” (157). We may recognize in the very public displays of remorse on the Oprah Winfrey show with their implicit plea for...