Fragmentation and Memory: Meditations onyChristian Doctrine

3. From Trauma to Revelation

3 F R O M T R AU M A T O REVELATION Forgiveness 379. What is the sacrament of Penance? Penance is the sacrament by which sins committed after Baptism are forgiven through the absolution of the priest. . . . 384. What must we do to receive the sacrament of Penance worthily? To receive the sacrament of Penance worthily, we must: first, examine our conscience; second, be sorry for our sins; third, have the firm purpose of not sinning again; fourth, confess our sins to the priest; fifth, be willing to perform the penance the priest gives us. But if the wicked do penance for all his sins which he hath committed and keep all my commandments and do judgment and justice, living he shall live, and shall not die. (Ezekiel 18:21) —A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Revised Edition of the Baltimore Catechism, Part 3, Lesson 29 A Promise Created with Time The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression We begin again, or not at all. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep If we begin with the question of sin, whether original or derivative, an obvious consequent question is that of forgiveness. Forgiveness is an elusive notion; as the opening catechismic questions indicate, it 55 F R O M T R AU M A T O R E V E L AT I O N appears sacramentally as reconciliation (formerly designated penance, itself an interesting terminological shift), and it is understood to obtain between persons as well as between human and divine—though all of its modes are often, following Alexander Pope, given the latter designation.1 If we follow Deleuze’s Leibniz, then it would seem that God’s forgiveness must be our own: that is, in forgiving God we must find ourselves forgiven (the resonance of this claim with Christian Neoplatonism is perhaps obvious: ‘‘God and I, we are one in this work’’2 ). I want to argue that we find in forgiveness, given or received, a call of eternal memory and the eternity of the opened future. Divine forgiveness is the to-come already given (precisely in its unspecificity), making human forgiveness possible. What becomes particularly strange and intriguing in this opening , then, at least for the purposes of this text, is the question of when. When is forgiveness offered, and what does its giving do to time? Given this particular fascination, I would like to focus on a startling and rich textual moment, one that occurs in the catechism shortly after this definition of penance or reconciliation has been given: God, we read, is bound by a promise to sacramental forgiving. ‘‘Certainly,’’ the Catechism declares, ‘‘God could forgive our sins if we confessed them to Himself in secret, but He has not promised to do so; whereas He has promised to pardon them if we confess them to His priests.’’3 In this wording we find, however inadvertently, the temporal peculiarity of forgiveness; it is linked not to the orderly and successive time of the punishment (following upon transgression, preceding freedom from debt), but to that of the promise, which complicatedly enfolds past and future—which, by its past, allows the future of time. This fold is characteristic of the promise, which, as Nancy points out, does not bring about what it promises (to make a promise does not performatively effect the promised result), and yet is instrumental in causing, or in allowing, what is promised to come about.4 Viewing forgiveness as promise emphasizes its relation to the future; the idea of God’s promise, a promise that would have to be made (have to have been made, have to be coming up for the making) not some time ago but from eternity, must alter it further. In his essay ‘‘Fore/ giveness on the Way: Nesting in the Womb of Response,’’ Elliot Wolfson unfolds (among other complexities) the temporal implications of kabbalistic readings of forgiveness and atonement via an analysis of the meanings of Yom Kippur. While we obviously can’t conflate Kabbala and catechism, there are nonetheless useful conceptual parallels between the sacramental promise and the linking of forgiveness to ‘‘the symbol of 56 F O R G I V E N E S S the covenant.’’5 Like the sacrament, the covenant has in this context a ‘‘legalistic background’’ but goes beyond...