Concepts versus Territories

What counts as forgiveness? Suppose that a person says that she forgives you but she clearly feels great hostility to you. Is she misusing the word? Suppose that a word in some text from another civilization is translated as “forgiveness” although the text describes the execution of “forgiven” people. Is this a mistranslation? One way to approach such questions would be to make a theory of forgiveness, laying out the conditions that have to be met for one person to forgive another. Then, if a person or a text uses a word in a way that violates these conditions, we would take it that forgiveness is not really the topic.

That is the procedure suggested by standard analytical philosophy. It is well suited for debunking, and there is always a lot of bunk around. But, for all its attractiveness, I think it is not the best approach here, for two reasons.

In the streets of Athens today, in the crowds climbing the hill of the Akropolis to the Parthenon or riding the bus or subway, the polite remark to be made, equivalent to the American “excuse me,” or the English “sorry,” is sungnōmē, translatable as “pardon [me],” or, more formally, “forgive me.” The banal, automatic utterance, ever more necessary as the city draws more and more Greeks from their villages into the city, has undergone centuries of mutation and transmission from the language of antiquity. Does it really mean “forgive me,” today, in the sense in which Charles Griswold uses the term in his important work on the topic? And can we find his virtue of forgiveness in the works attributed to Homer, in the earliest Greek poetry?

I am concerned in this chapter with the intertwined issues of empathy and forgiveness. As a heuristic device, I want to argue that forgiveness does not occur in Homer’s Iliad, not even in the encounter between Achilles and Priam in book 24; my most challenging assertion is that the archaic Greek world did not know empathy or forgiveness. I take into account the important work on pity by David Konstan, as well as Griswold’s recent book on forgiveness.

Survivors of the Nazi atrocities, of the sufferings of apartheid in South Africa, and of the Rwandan genocide are often asked if they should, and indeed if they can, forgive those who persecuted and assaulted them. Forgiveness can, of course, be a mundane and common occurrence, but the most visible and dramatic cases of it are of this type. They involve survivors or relatives of survivors; the perpetrators are conceived of collectively or, on occasion, as individuals; the injuries and suffering are extreme; the victims may or may not have been compensated, and the perpetrator typically was punished or is undergoing punishment; culpability is not in question; and the offender most likely has not expressed remorse or regret or asked for forgiveness. The most publicized cases have these features. Numerous discussions of these types of cases are available.

I want to set aside the question of collective forgiveness – that is, of whether we can make sense of a notion of forgiveness for collective entities such as states or nations or peoples – and focus on the interpersonal case. In these modern situations, and in much of the literature on forgiveness of the past few decades, the emphasis has been on the individual victim. Commentators ask when forgiveness is justified; whether it is morally obligatory or supererogatory; if it is an emotion or attitude or something akin to both; whether the disposition to forgive is a virtue; and whether the highest form of forgiveness – what Calhoun calls “aspirational forgiveness” – is not best expressed by unconditional forgiveness, when it is granted by the victim without the offender asking for it, showing regret, or possibly even knowing about it. The way these questions have been discussed in recent literature certainly indicates an individualist and, in some cases, a voluntaristic tendency. Moreover, the locus of interest in recent discussion is by and large on the victim of harm and injury. The focus is on the decision of that victim to forgive, the self-respect exemplified by the choice, and that of the sinner acknowledged in the choice.

From the modern perspective, forgiveness is in its core form an interpersonal act in which a person consciously gives up resentment or settled anger toward another after a sincere expression of contrition. The closest Greek equivalent to forgiveness is sungnōmē, which, however, has a broader range of meaning including recognition, understanding, forbearance, pardon, and excuse. The fundamentally cognitive aspect of the Greek concept is evident in Aristotle’s definition of sungnōmē as “understanding [gnōmē] that judges correctly what is fair,” meaning “correct judgment of what is truly fair” (EN 1143a23–24). The emphasis on intellectual judgment based on truth in this definition shows clearly that the Greek concept of sungnōmē has a different centering point from the modern one of forgiveness, which emphasizes the interaction of two persons with accompanying emotional change. The circles representing the behavioral range corresponding to Greek sungnōmē and modern forgiveness do, however, have a space of intersection, which is clearly identifiable in the uses of sungnōmē in the late classical period. An important way of analyzing this intersection is to look at the stories told in Greek literature, and my particular interest concerns the relationship of forgiveness to the identity and formation of dramatic genres. The word sungnōmē appears but seldom in Attic tragedy, and acts of forgiveness are rare and peripheral because tragedy was about moral choices made in the face of the irreparable harm that human beings do one another. New Comedy, however, as we know it from Menander, was created from a reworking, or even a reversal, of tragic form in which the potential harm that characters might do to one another was blocked or repaired by a combination of chance and the capacity to forgive. In analyzing Greek drama, particularly Menandrian comedy, I am concerned to show how cognitive assessment of what is forgivable is affected by bonds of affection, moral character, and learned social roles.

An analysis of forgiveness in the most philosophically minded and representative patristic authors, especially Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine, and also John Chrysostom, suggests that they understood forgiveness, whether it comes from God or from human beings, as deeply related to the core notion of divine grace but not as unconditional. In addition, a crucial role in their reflection on forgiveness was played by their soteriological and eschatological doctrines.

Clement

Clement was the disciple of the Christian Stoic Pantaenus in Alexandria, and his thought can be considered a precursor of the doctrine of apokatastasis, which was then developed by Origen, who may have been a disciple of his, and who, in any case, was well acquainted with his works. Clement attaches a great importance to forgiveness, including interpersonal forgiveness, even to the point of presenting it as an essential feature of the “gnostic” – that is, the perfect Christian, in Stromateis 7.13.81: such a person “never remembers those who have sinned against him but forgives [aphiēsi] them. This is why this person righteously prays, too, saying: ‘Forgive [aphes] us, since we forgive [aphiemen] in turn.’ For this, too, is one of the things that God wishes: to crave nothing, to hate no one. For all humans are the work of one will [henos thelēmatos].” According to Clement, a “gnostic” will forgive because he or she will hate no one, because God wanted all human beings to exist, and because they all come from one single will. The idea of the unity of all humanity in Clement is essential, as it is in Origen and, with particular emphasis, in Gregory of Nyssa; indeed, it is one of the main bases for their universalism in soteriology. Moreover, the notion of creation as an act of will is typical of the Alexandrian school in the time of Clement: both Pantaenus and Ammonius Saccas – who was the teacher of Origen and of Plotinus as well – saw creation as the fruit of God’s will, which made itself substance. Pantaenus in fragment 2 Routh says that the logoi in God’s mind are called by scripture “God’s wills,” because the Godhead created everything by its will (thelēmati) and knows all beings “as its own wills” (hōs idia thelēmata), and Ammonius (ap. Hierocles of Alexandria ap. Phot. Bibliotheca cod. 251.461b–462b) claimed that God’s will (boulēma) was enough for the constitution of the beings and that the divinity created each thing by its will (thelōn) and knows the beings “as its own wills” (hōs idia thelēmata).

The purpose of this volume is to seek out and explore what Adam Morton calls “forgiveness territory.” It is not that difficult to demarcate the general landscape. For us, forgiveness is located in a cluster of concepts consisting of pardon, mercy, clemency, indulgence, pity, sympathy, humaneness, and doubtless others; these concepts are associated with apology, repentance, remorse, and atonement; they result in remission of punishment or reconciliation or reinstatement; and they occur in the context of the transgression of some kind of code, religious, legal, or moral. It is self-evident that the transgression that gives rise to the opportunity for forgiveness also provides the possibility of the opposite reaction – of resentment and anger and the desire to take revenge for the perceived offense. But did this general landscape exist in the Roman world?

My aim in this essay is to explore “forgiveness territory” in its Roman version, particularly as manifested in the writings of the Stoic philosopher and imperial tutor Seneca (c. 4 b.c.e.–65 c.e.). To discover what, if anything, “forgiveness” meant to Seneca it is crucial to understand as fully as possible the, philosophical, social, political, and literary contexts that shaped his ideas. It is not adequate to zoom in on a word such as ignoscere, that is often translated as “to forgive,” and expect to find easy answers. That much is demonstrated immediately by considering one of the earliest occurrences of this verb in Latin literature, in the play Mercator (The Merchant) by the comic dramatist Plautus, writing in the late third and early second century b.c.e. At line 320 a character says humanum amarest, humanum autem ignoscere est (to love is human, to forgive is human too). Taken out of context, this could sound like Christian doctrine avant la lettre. But when we realize that the speaker is an elderly man who has fallen madly in love with a teenage girl who has been purchased by his son for sex, and that the speaker is responding to withering criticism of his ridiculous behavior by another old man, and that in the genre of comedy falling in love is the exclusive prerogative of adolescents, while lecherous old men never ever succeed in their cunning plans to sleep with young women, the picture looks rather different. Now that we know the context, we will do better to translate the superannuated would-be lover’s specious pleading as “to fall in love is human [referring to his own behavior], to make allowances is human too [referring to how he wants his elderly friend to behave toward him, as if he were an adolescent whose behavior might be excused].” Clearly, context is everything.

Maimonides and Aquinas employ extensive resources from Aristotle in their moral thought. Like Aristotle, they present perfectionist accounts of human nature and consider the virtues to be fundamental to moral life. They too regard intellectual activity as central to human perfection. And yet there are fundamental differences between Aristotle, on the one hand, and Maimonides and Aquinas on the other, and additional important differences between Maimonides and Aquinas. The differences made by Jewish and Christian theistic commitments show that neither Maimonides nor Aquinas should be described as “basically Aristotelian, with some religiously based modifications.” The present discussion brings into relief some differences between their views and Aristotle’s, with the aim of explicating their understandings of the nature, significance, and role of forgiveness. Topically, the discussion could, of course, be extended to include the Islamic tradition as well, but here our attention is confined to the Jewish and Christian traditions, examined through the thought of a key figure in each.

I

Some issues of moral psychology crucially important for Jewish and Christian thinkers did not arise for Aristotle or did not arise with the same significance. They include gratitude, repentance, and forgiveness. Each is related to God’s graciousness, that is, God’s offer of help to human beings by means of revelation and, in the Christian tradition, the offer of salvation through Christ. In Aristotle’s conception of an excellent and happy life there really is not a correlate to a wise, just, and merciful God whose providence governs the created order. In that respect the first cause in the Jewish and Christian faith traditions is radically different from Aristotle’s. Aristotle writes:

However, the religious view relevant here is that a just and merciful God not only created the world but also offers help to human beings. Revelation offers guidance without which we would go astray and fail of perfection. It is part of God’s providential governance to offer help graciously to human beings in a manner, and for an end, differing from what is found in Aristotle’s conception of how the gods might influence human happiness. In the Christian tradition this need for divine assistance is heightened by the fact that human nature is fallen, wounded in a way such that it cannot heal itself. Also, in the religious view there is a place for imitatio Dei (imitation of God) in the conception of perfection in a manner not found in Aristotle’s view, and it is relevant to understanding forgiveness.

Preface

Charles L. Griswold

Talk about forgiveness has reached astonishing proportions in the contemporary world. Forgiveness is said to do it all: it is the cure for wrongs both personal and political, the road to eternal salvation, and the secret to mental and physical health. Related notions such as apology, pardon, excuse, mercy, pity, sympathy, empathy, and reconciliation have also gained wide currency. One can hardly open the newspaper without reading about an apology being offered by, or demanded from, some organization, state, or prominent individual. We want apology and remorse from convicted criminals so as to decide how harshly to punish them; we praise South Africa’s famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the path to forgiveness and civic unity; countless self-help and religious tracts urge us to forgive our enemies unilaterally and instruct us how to do so, promising that we shall thereby rid ourselves of toxic resentment. Forgiveness and related notions are now so thoroughly woven into the fabric of culture that it is hard to imagine a moral world without them.

In late republican Rome the question of reconciliation was not only of theoretical import: the city was preoccupied, for decades, by political infighting of the most deadly kind. While there was a wide variety of competing notions concerning what an ideally peaceful Rome should be like, there was, de facto, no feasible prospect for the resolution of the civil war. In the larger mix of difficult, potentially violent altercations, religious arguments and actions had a particular edge. Since the 80s b.c.e., leaders such as Sulla and Pompey exploited religious symbols in order to advance or emphasize their particular powers. Most poignantly, Pompey’s claim to his “greatness,” which obviously sought to mimic that of Alexander the Great, referenced an ideal of divinely sanctioned leadership that challenged the limits of Rome’s traditional structure of government. Of course, no Roman leader would have gone so far as Alexander to claim direct divine parentage and demand religious honors equal to a god for himself, but similar, if less direct, references to divine power became part of the many contested ideals of leadership. The years under Julius Caesar and his adoptive son, Augustus, saw especially intense discussions about the religious status and actions of Roman leaders – exactly at the same time when the resolution of the long civil infighting brought notions of reconciliation into the focus of attention. In this chapter, I examine a few key moments in the process from which the notion of imperial clementia (clemency) emerged – a process that, I argue, included both religious and political concerns.

My main argument engages a nexus of religious, political, and philosophical notions that, I believe, interacted in shaping what we can call, with Adam Morton, the “forgiveness territory” in this period. With reference to other critical concepts of this era, such a multiply influenced process has already been recognized; we know, for example, that the emerging idea of the leader capable of resolving civil conflict was understood, at least in part, through religious language and associations. The salus (well-being) of the state was increasingly seen in connection to that of the commander who could ensure it, and the Salus of that leader was now the subject of prayers. My point is that the idea of imperial clementia also emerged, at least in part, through a religious understanding and that the success of clementia in particular also had to do with its unique characteristics among the specific religious connotations of reconciliation, forgiveness, and clemency in the late republic and early empire.