Questioning God

Four: Forgiveness and Incarnation

92 four Forgiveness and Incarnation John Milbank ∞. Forgiveness as Negative or Positive If we are to be saved, in the Christian West, then we must partake of the waters of forgiveness which flow down the slopes of Mount Purgatory. However , right from the top, these waters divide: down the near slope pour the waters of Lethe, or of forgetting; down the farther side rush the waters of Eunoe, or of positive remembrance. According to Dante, this stream ‘‘nonadopra / se quinci a quindi pria non ē / gustato [it works not if first it be not tasted on this side and on that].’’1 Forgiveness, therefore—the forgiveness that we in the West have been given to remember—is poised vertiginously between obliteration and a recollection that amounts to a restoration. It is either, or both, a negative gesture and a positive deed. The most ancient, pre-Christian cognates for something at least akin to ‘‘forgiveness’’ suggest mostly the former: Greek aphesis is a letting go, or dismissal; Latin ignoscere is an overlooking or not-knowing, and in the Old Testament the God of mercy is said to hide human faults behind his back. If there was any question, for the Romans, of a deed here, or of an active donation, then the gesture of forgiving was not itself seen as a gift, but what Forgiveness and Incarnation 93 was offered (dare) was either impunity (venia) or, once again, oblivion as to the past.2 Only in a later era at once Christian and feudal do the vernacular tongues suggest that forgiveness is a positive offering. Both the Latinate and Germanic languages now deploy words designating a hyperbolic giving: pardonner, perdonare , perdonar, vergeben, forgive.3 In both cases the main force of the prefix seems to be one of emphasis—here giving is extreme because one-sided and unprompted, a gift to the undeserving. At the same time, it is not clear that negativity is not also connoted. In English the prefix ‘‘for-’’ may be an intensi fier (as in forread, forfrighted), but it may also be a negator (as in foredeem, forhale).4 Perhaps forgiveness, since it gives up, or forswears a legitimate ground of complaint, suggests a kind of negative giving which benignly removes —the giving of a gift which fortunately destroys. This is exactly how, in Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard understood forgiveness: namely, as the counterpart of creation, which miraculously brings being out of nothing; and of hope, which turns an absence into a presence.5 By contrast, for Kierkegaard, forgiveness with equal miraculousness decreates, and causes what is not merely to be as if it were not, but literally not to be. It is precisely this absurdity of forgiveness which leads the Danish philosopher to insist that it is a reality only of divine grace and only to be known as real by human faith. Indeed, since, for Kierkegaard, the gift of creation appears to bring about existence, while the negating anti-gift of forgiving grace removes it, he seems to invoke here a metaontological register of ‘‘donology.’’ However, one may already pose the question as to whether, in this respect, and with regard to his exclusive understanding of forgiveness as negation, Kierkegaard is not the heir to specifically late-medieval, early modern, and Reformation developments. For whatever the linguistic evidence, there is no doubt that for the earlier Christian era, negativity was doubly qualified by something positive. By our human efforts alone, we could, indeed, for this period, like the pagan Virgil, arrive at the waters of Lethe, but to arrive at the waters of positive remembrance we required already prevenient grace, personi fied in Dante by the figure of Matilda who presides as a new Proserpine (that earlier female figura of a necessary half-and-half ) over the earthly paradise.6 Thus, for the high Middle Ages, the forgiveness and repentance which is specifically the grant of grace was mediated only through the sacrament of penance, which is the first instance of a new, positive dimension to forgiveness. In penitence, repentance is more than an attitude, it is also a public sign, a gesture, an offering which somehow ‘‘makes up’’ for a past error. But this positivity might indeed appear to be a mere prelude to the negating anti-gift of pardon as mediated by the priest, a prelude required by the legalism of medieval Christian thought. Such legalism may seem to be exemplified in Thomas Aquinas’s...