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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
In his wonderful book, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, Michael Ignatieff observes that the process of healing the wounds of the past is the most mysterious process of all. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, South Africa are names that remind us that the past continues to torment us because it is not the past. ‘These places are not living in a serial order of time but in a simultaneous one, in which the past and the present are continuous, an agglutinated mass of fantasies, distortions, myths, and lies.’
page 33 note 2 New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1997.
page 33 note 3 Ignatieff, p. 186.
page 33 note 4 Ignatieff, p. 186. Ignatieff's reference to Joyce is to the famous reply of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses that ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’
page 34 note 5 Ignatieff, p. 188. At the very time I was writing this paper Augusto Pinochet was arrested in Britain. Duke is fortunate to have Ariel Dorfman on our faculty. Dorfman is a novelist and playwright who had been an aide in Allende's government and subsequently had to flee for his life when Pinochet took over. Dorfman is obviously a very sophisticated intellectual, which makes his response to Pinochet's arrest all the more interesting. He said, ‘To see the man that betrayed [Allende] and devastated my life and took the lives of so many people I love, to see that man confronted with his crimes, unable to leave his hospital room, is for me, to restore a cosmological balance to the universe.’ Dorfman's comment appears in an article by Wagner, Jason, ‘Humbling of a Dictator,’ The Chronicle (Duke University student newspaper) 94/45 (2 November 1998): 1 and 13Google Scholar. Vengeance is not a disposition to be found only among the uneducated. In a subsequent article Dorfman notes that the trial of Pinochet will not be easy for Chileans because such a trial means they must confront those whom Pinochet tortured and murdered. As Dorfman puts it, ‘Do we want a nation that does not care about those thousands and is willing to forget them in order to have an uneasy and erratic peace? Or are we strong enough to begin the difficult task of finally, at long last, living in a world without Pinochet? ‘Chile's Strange Relationship with Pinochet,’ Duke University Dialogue 13/24 (11 December 1998): 7. For an extraordinary theological account of Chile under Pinochet, see Cavanaugh, William, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998)Google Scholar.
page 36 note 6 Ignatieff, p. 190. My friend Michael Quirk rightly reminds me that, contrary to the liberal assumption that justice and vengeance are opposites, justice is a ‘purification’ of the moral impetus behind vengeance. Vengeance schooled by justice no longer takes delight in the harm it must do.
page 36 note 7 Will, George, ‘Race Advisory Report Immune to Time's Passage,’ The Herald Sun, Durham, North Carolina (Sunday, 27 September 1998), A17Google Scholar.
page 37 note 8 George Will, ‘Scalia Missed Point But Made Right Argument on Separation of Religion,’ Durham Morning Herald (Sunday, 22 April 1990), Section F. I discuss Will's column in After Christendom? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), pp. 30–1. A second edition of After Christendom? has been published in 1999 with a new introduction.
page 38 note 9 ‘Peace In Northern Ireland?’ PeaceWatch 4, 5 (August, 1998), pp. 4–5Google Scholar.
page 38 note 10 O'Toole, Finnan comments on the same process in his The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar. He notes that Leopold Bloom's observation in Ulysses that a nation is the same people living in the same place or in different places no longer holds. The reason is that the Irish face the disappearance of that Ireland under the pressures of economics, geography and the collapse of the religious monolith. ‘We live in different places, but are we the “same people”? Only if we can understand sameness in a way that incorporates difference, that brooks contradictions, and that is comfortable with the idea that the only fixed Irish identity and the only useful Irish tradition is the Irish tradition of not having a fixed identity’ (p. xv). He continues ‘the paradox of the Republic of Ireland in the aftermath of the British Empire—its national independence is underwritten by transnational corporations and by a supra-national European Union. Its sovereignty is a power that can be exercised mostly by giving it up’ (pp. xvi–xvii). In short, O'Toole is recommending that Ireland should learn to enjoy globalization because, like it or not, Ireland is already lost in that process.
page 39 note 11 I am aware that this seems an exaggerated claim, but I think there is a correlation between history as science, which turns out to be a form of forgetting, and capitalism. For an exploration of these issues, see my Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 206–214Google Scholar, and my ‘The Christian Difference: or Surviving Postmodernism,’ Cultural Values 3, 2 (April 1999), pp. 164–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 39 note 12 Some may discern the influence of Alasdair MacIntyre shaping the argument of this section. I should certainly like to think MacIntyre has taught me how to think about these matters. This may seem odd since MacIntyre is anything but a pacifist: For my attempt to explore the difference between MacIntyre's perspective on these issues and my defense of nonviolence see Chapter 10, ‘The Nonviolent Terrorist: In Defense of Christian Fanaticism,’ in my book, Sanctify Them in The Truth: Holiness Exemplified, ibid., pp. 177–90.
Michael Quirk warns me against romanticizing Irish poverty, noting that while their poverty prevented them from acquiring the rapaciousness and affluent unconcern that plagues Americans, it is nonetheless the case that the Irish way of dealing with poverty was emigration. Emigration was, he suggests in a letter, devastating to Ireland because it fomented a strain of passive-aggressive resentment at home and a kind of forgetfulness, disguised as romanticism among the ‘wild geese’ about the mother country. Quirk acknowledges that Irish poverty tempered any illusions they may have had about being a ‘universal’ or ‘savior’ culture, but on the other hand it put a crimp in their natural good cheer that encouraged a kind of self-loathing that authors as diverse as Joyce and McCourt describe and exemplify.
page 40 note 13 Volf, Miroslav, Exclusion and Embrace; a theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 135Google Scholar.
page 40 note 14 Volf, p. 135.
page 41 note 15 Volf, p. 136. Volf is responding to Jones, Gregory argument in his Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) that it is a mistake to forget. As Jones puts it, ‘the judgment of grace enables us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to remember well. When God promises to ‘blot out (Israel's) transgressions” and “not remember (Israel's) sins” (Isa. 43:25; see also Jer. 31:34), God is not simply letting bygones be bygones. Rather, God is testifying to God's own gracious faithfulness. Moreover, such forgiveness provides a way to narrate the history of Israel's sinfulness with the context of God's covenant of grace. To be sure, such a narration makes it possible, and even necessary, to forget the sin. But the past itself, the history, is and needs to be remembered so that a new and renewed future becomes possible’ (p. 147).Google Scholar
page 41 note 16 Volf, p. 138.
page 42 note 17 Gregory Jones, ‘Healing the Wounds of Memory,’ Unpublished Lecture, p. 9. Jones continues in this lecture to explore the profound set of reflections of the relation between memory and forgiveness he began in Embodying Forgiveness.
page 42 note 18 Jenson, Robert, Systematic Theology, vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 217–218Google Scholar. I left out a paragraph in Jenson's text that is not essential to my argument, but extremely important. Jenson notes that ‘There is something Barth did not say that must be said, and with emphasis. Simply that source and goal are real in God would not make his eternity a “duration,” a temporal infinity. He is temporally infinite because “source” and “goal” are present and asymmetrical in him, because he is primarily future to himself and only thereupon past and present for himself. It is in that he is Spirit that the true God avoids—so to speak—the timelessness of mere form or mere consciousness. Therefore such paired denials and affirmations as the following must always be to hand: God is not eternal in that he adamantly remains as he began, but in that he always creatively opens to what he will be; not in that he hangs on, but in that he gives and receives; not in that he perfectly persists, but in that he perfectly anticipates.’
page 43 note 19 Jones, Embodying Forgiveness, p. 173.
page 43 note 20 Duquoc, Christian, ‘The Forgiveness of God,’ Concilium, 184 (1986), pp. 40–41Google Scholar. Earlier in the article Duquoc had observed that ‘terror results from the combination of violence and the idea’ which means no account of violence is adequate that fails to understand that, in the words of Robespierre, ‘Terror is the emanation of virtue.’ Thus the wish for a utopia, of a world without corruption, unleashes a world of limitless violence. It is against this background that the politics of God's forgiveness can be seen just to the extent God's forgiveness breaks the link, as Duquoc puts it, between ‘violence and the idea,’ p. 39.
page 43 note 21 Ibid., p. 42.
page 44 note 22 Ibid., p. 173.
page 44 note 23 Jones, , Embodying Forgiveness, p. 179Google Scholar.
page 45 note 24 ‘French Bishops' Declaration of Repentance,’ Origins 27, 18 (16 October 1997): 303. For an informative article that surveys the objections against the current Pope's penchant for such confessions, see Avery Dulles, ‘Should the Church Repent?’ First Things 88 (December, 1998), 36–41.
page 45 note 25 A fascinating comparison, I suspect, remains to be made between the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and President Clinton's recent Advisory Committee on Race in America. The latter floundered in the therapeutic culture of blame and counter-blame, victim and victimizer. Part of the difficulty is the American sense that we are not part of histories that constitute our moral identities. Therefore most whites in America simply do not believe that we have any history for which we should feel ashamed.
page 46 note 26 Christian Duqouc ends his article with these words, ‘Forgiveness is, of course, gratuitous, God does not ask for compensation, but it opens up a new era. Forgiveness would be abstract if this era remained purely interior. This is the sense in which the forgiveness of God, revealed by the person who was victim of a crime, does not stop meaning that God is working in solidarity with the victims of history towards a world renewed, and this not simply by means of reversing the situation but by creating new relationships. The forgiveness of God is the proclamation of the kingdom: it comes about by conversion and not by substituting power for power. The God of Jesus does not impose himself; he is the one who, by dint of a patience that is often insulted, reveals a face quite other than the one our games of violence and our idolatry of power invite,’ pp. 43–4.
page 47 note 27 Ash, Timothy Garton, ‘True Confessions,’ The New York Review of Books (17 July 1997), pp. 33–38Google Scholar.
page 47 note 28 Ash, p. 37.
page 48 note 29 Ash, p. 37. Ash is quite right about the importance of unbuntu for Tutu. See, for example, Battle's, Michael fine study, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
page 48 note 30 Paul Ricoeur has explored these issues in a marvelous essay, ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,’ Philosophical and Social Criticism 21/5–6, pp. 3–13. Ricoeur argues that what prevents cultures from allowing themselves to be recounted differently is the influence perceived over the collective memory by what may be called ‘founding events.’ Memory of such events tends to freeze history in a manner that makes that history incommunicable. Ricoeur does not try to suggest why this process occurs, but surely one of the reasons is the assumption that we need to keep faith with the dead. The challenge before Europe according to Ricoeur is to acquire the ‘ability to recount the founding events of our national history in different ways’ through an exchange of cultural memories. Such an exchange is only possible through forgiveness, by which we re-narrate our specific narrative identities. As Ricoeur puts it, forgiveness enables a ‘mutual revision in which we are able to see the most valuable yield of the exchange of memories. Forgiveness is also a specific form of that mutual revision, the most precious result of which is the liberation of promises of the past which have not been kept’ (9). Ricoeur argues that forgiveness in the full sense exceeds political categories just to the extent it belongs to the order of charity. That may be true for ‘politics’ but it cannot be true of that politics we call church.
page 48 note 31 I have a hunch that Italy would be a fascinating study for how forgiveness works for the building of a culture. Stories matter, and stories that are the stories that shape a people matter even more. That Manzoni's, Alessandro, The Betrothed (London: Penguin Books, 1972Google Scholar) is the novel taught to every Italian school child has to make a difference even in a society that was surely once one of the most violent societies in the world.