A number of years ago I took part in a convention of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, in York, England, where I read a paper on an essay by DLS written during the Second World War, "Forgiveness". I actually had no title for my paper, or any intention of giving it a title, until I was asked just moments before "curtain" what my paper was called. They wanted to project the title on the screen behind me. I frantically shook my imagination into action and came up with the title as you see it below. The "friend" referred to is Charles Williams, whom I quote several times--and indeed afford him the final word--and the reference to Sayers being "at her weakest" should explain itself in the paper itself... or else I have miserably failed to convey my idea.
ON FORGIVENESS:
SAYERS AT HER WEAKEST (WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A FRIEND)
by Ken Sears
There’s a reason why Dorothy Sayers never indulged in a mental
experiment to show how all human creativity reflects its first source in the
gods of Hinduism. She didn’t believe it. She was certainly imaginative enough
to have done it, and well, had she wanted to. But she was too honest to. Not to
mention too busy to waste her time, and ours, on anti-reality.
Mary McDermott Shideler, in her introduction to Charles Williams’s
Arthurian poetry, writes, “All man’s concerns are rooted in the question of
what is real” [emphasis mine]. C.S. Lewis says that what makes you a man instead of a rabbit is
that you want to know what is real, not just what you might get by with. In Mind of the Maker Sayers writes, “We
must not… try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that
the Fall was a good thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative
act.”
Her categorical “must not” was rooted in a reality in which Sayers
believed, passionately. Only passion could have generated all her plays
illuminating the truth of Christ.
Now, Sayers denied the sort of thing I’m saying. “Nothing
would induce me,” she wrote, “to set down my ‘religious beliefs and
convictions.’ Setting down what I
understand to be the Church’s beliefs and convictions is a different matter.”
And in another place she insists that she writes only “the opinions of the
official Church, which you will find plainly stated in the Nicene Creed,
whether or not you and I agree with it.”
Sayers clearly preferred this stance; dare I say it’s the role she
liked best in matters religious. She played the role unevenly, however. Mind of the Maker explores – and asserts
– things not quite “plainly stated in
the Nicene Creed”, and her essay “Forgiveness” speaks to a far more compelling
crisis than a failure to accurately register Church teaching “whether or not
you and I agree with it”. Her “nothing would induce me” seems, laudably, to
stop short at her passion for creating and the horror of world war.
Even in Creed or Chaos? she
writes, “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of
feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a
rational explanation of the universe.”
“Fatal”. “Vitally necessary.” “Insist.” “Explanation of the
universe.” This isn’t the vocabulary of someone who’s playing it coy with her
personal convictions. Moreover, no
principled person could insist that
the story of a crucified man who rose from the dead was “a rational explanation of the universe” unless she happened to
believe it was the rational
explanation of the universe. Let alone suggest that getting it wrong was in
some way “fatal.” Even if she only meant “fatal” to the Church as an institution,
why should she care?
Also from Creed or Chaos?: “The brutal fact is, that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.”
Again, why should she care?
She cares because she believes.
And in “Forgiveness” she publicly, transparently, cares and believes that
people engulfed in a real cataclysm really need to know the forgiveness rooted
in the real structure of the universe.
Sayers’s friend Charles Williams wrote his own book on forgiveness
during the war and he says, “If there is one thing which obviously is either a
part of the universe or not – and on knowing whether it is or not our life
depends – it is the forgiveness of sins.”
Sayers’s friend Williams will accompany us on our way to a weak
conclusion. Weak, why? We’ll come to that, but let the wartime words of British
Catholic Caryll Houselander serve as adumbration. She declares that, longing
for the “redeeming of the world, the healing of the wound, the making new… no
one… need be appalled by the vast size of the world’s tragedy, or by their own
obscurity, littleness or limitations, because
He hath put down the mighty from their seats
And hath exalted the humble.”
“Forgiveness.” I counted seven parts in this essay (fortunately not
seventy times seven). The first part discusses what forgiveness isn’t, and
Sayers quickly dispenses with the most obvious: forgiveness isn’t
non-forgiveness. If you hope never to see so-and-so’s face again, though of
course you forgive him – you haven’t.
The next is even worse, what Sayers calls hypocritical,
self-interested forgiveness. “Well of course
I forgive Ted for being such a louse.
He does sign my paycheck, after all….” (Not
forgiveness!)
Then Sayers goes after “priggish” forgiveness, the superior kind
that’s gratified at vindication and absent compassion for the repentant. It’s
humiliating to take “forgiveness” from someone to whom your grief isn’t also a
grief but a triumph. Sayers warns that that
kind of forgiveness may provoke the offender back to his crimes.
Then comes conditional forgiveness, which says: relationship with me
is possible only if you feel good and
dreadful for what you did, and it
never happens again. Which leaves two
perplexing questions gaping wide like a great gulf fixed: how dreadful is
dreadful enough, and, how long is
“never”? More to the point, how do you determine it’s “never” happened again
until “never” has come and gone? Isn’t that pretty much the same as saying “I
will never forgive you”?
Sayers writes, “We are forced to remember that no man is so free
from trespass himself that he can afford to insist on condition.”
Which implies that… God can.
So, does He?
Via words from William Blake, Sayers seems to say “no”, that God forgives because He simply forgives
(just like He tells us to).
Blake: “Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall
be payed? …That debt is not forgiven! …Jehovah’s salvation is without money and
without price, in the continual forgiveness of sins, in the perpetual mutual
sacrifice in great eternity… [T]his is the covenant of Jehovah, ‘If you forgive
one another, so shall Jehovah forgive you; That He Himself may dwell among
you.’”
Interesting that Sayers quotes Blake on forgiveness because so does
Charles Williams, though Williams cautions that Blake was a heretic. Williams
also admits he wishes Blake had sometimes explained what he meant! I agree,
particularly on the phrase “perpetual mutual sacrifice”.
In any case, just as Sayers appears to be making it
as-simple-as-that, she turns around and says, “The whole teaching of the New
Testament about forgiveness is haunted by paradox and enigma and cannot be
summed up in any phrase about simple kindliness.” And she illustrates with Jesus’s healing of
the paralytic:
“Whether is easier: to say Thy sins be
forgiven thee or to say Arise and walk? But
that ye may know that the Son of Man hath
power on earth to forgive sins (then
saith He to the sick of the palsy) Arise,
take up thy bed and go.” The irony is so
profound that we are not certain which way
to take it. “Do you think forgiveness
is something glib and simple? To be sure –
it is as simple as this. Does it seem to
you formidably difficult? To be sure, so is
this – but you see it can be done.”
Far from simple
kindliness, the Son of Man’s competency to forgive correlated to His power to
heal the paralyzed man.
From what forgiveness is not, Sayers moves to what forgiveness
does not. First, it does not wipe out
consequences. “It is scarcely necessary”, she writes, “to point out that when a
debt is cancelled, this does not mean that the money is miraculously restored
from nowhere. It means only that the obligation… is voluntarily discharged by
the lender.”
I made the same point once to a shop
lady in Jerusalem, saying that if I were to maliciously destroy her
merchandise, but she chose to forgive me, it wouldn’t end there. There’s still the cost of the merchandise.
By forgiving me, she’d have chosen to absorb the loss herself.
I made that point, too, also in
Jerusalem, to a university professor. In a lecture he had made the
not-so-subtle hint to us Christians in the audience that God’s telling Abraham
to spare Isaac showed God wouldn’t
allow an innocent person to be sacrificed for others (get it?). I went up to
him after the lecture and said, “That’s why
the Incarnation is intrinsic to the Atonement.” He stared at me blankly and
said, “Why?” “Because”, I said, “only the one who’s been sinned against can
absorb the full brunt of the offense – that’s what it means to forgive. If God asked someone else to do it – you’re
right, it would be unfair.” The professor grew very still and said, “I never
thought of it that way before.” I couldn’t help but think, “You are a teacher
of the Jews and you don’t know these things?” God is the shop owner who eats
the loss, the Lord who is also Lamb.
But Sayers provocatively nuances
this principle with the following: “[I]f you are forgiving and I am repentant,
then we share the consequences and gain a friendship.”
Bravo. If forgiveness
eventuates in reconciliation, sharing of consequences is inevitable, for the
consequences have reshaped the terrain which the reconciled must walk together.
The word “terrain” helps perhaps to follow Sayers’s exegesis of the
Parable of the Unmerciful Servant: “that”, she writes, “forgiveness is not
merely a mutual act, but a social act.” She speaks of injuries being “forgiven
all round”, lest presumably unforgiving Law dominate the terrain. Now Sayers
still hasn’t mentioned the war outright, but no one could fail to note how the
present emergency nuanced her biblical exegesis.
Which is a good thing; if
Scripture can’t speak to the exigency of the moment, what good is it?
Unfortunately, there were those who wondered what good Sayers’s
essay was in the current crisis! For those inhabiting the historical context of
“murdered citizens, ruined homes, broken churches, fire, sword, famine,
pestilence, tortures [and] concentration camps” the question may well have been,
“How dare you talk of forgiving all round?”
It’s not what the newspaper editor wanted to hear, so he rejected
the essay. Sayers explains in her foreword: “[T]he Editor of a respectable
newspaper wanted (and got)… Christian sanction for undying hatred of the
enemy.”
The second thing Sayers says forgiveness does not, is remit
punishment, at least not “primarily”. This is difficult, because her analogy of
the lender swallowing the debt and her talk of “forgiving all round” seem to argue precisely the opposite!
But she notes how this works in child-rearing, where you surely forgive, and
love, your naughty child – but you punish him, too, because he needs to learn a
lesson. I’m just not sure how to extrapolate grounding your 13-year-old for a
week to hanging the convicts of Nuremburg. One might say, you can’t, because the first is all about a
personal, nurturing relationship while the second is about social justice. But,
didn’t Sayers say forgiveness was a social
act?
All I can say is, I heartily agree with Dorothy Sayers when she
says, “Forgiveness is a difficult matter”!
And it doesn’t get easier when Sayers turns to what forgiveness is. I want to focus on two assertions
that make for a slight logical muddle in this essay. First: “Forgiveness is the
re-establishment of a right relationship” – in short, reconciliation. To be
very precise, it’s not. It may lead to it but they are two different things, which is why we have two words for them.
That may sound picayune, but slighting that distinction is what
immediately leads the engine of Sayers’s logic ever so subtly to stall. That’s
in the next assertion. If you listen carefully you’ll recognize that she must have felt something was “off” but
she fixed it, as a writer, stylistically more than theologically. She says,
“[I]t is impossible to enjoy a right relationship with an offender who, when
pardoned, continues [in short, willfully to be your enemy].” But of course, if
forgiveness is reconciliation, you
can’t logically adduce that forgiveness obtains where reconciliation is absent.
No, not even by replacing “forgiven” with “pardoned”! It’s only here,
significantly, that Sayers suddenly gets writer’s scruples about overusing the
word “forgive”. After this foggy patch it’s all “forgive” again.
Now that second assertion by Sayers was quite right – you can forgive,
from your heart, your recalcitrant enemy –
precisely because her first assertion was not quite right; forgiveness isn’t essentially reconciliation, though
it hopes for it.
And of course Sayers knew that,
one benignly imprecise formulation notwithstanding. She says, “[W]hile God does not, and man dare not, demand repentance as
a condition for bestowing pardon [forgiveness],
repentance remains an essential condition for receiving it [reconciliation].” So my only criticism
is that that first, “not quite right” assertion together with the needless
introduction of the word “pardon” could lead
one to the notion that God magnanimously bestows some judicial sort of
pardon-without-condition, but another, heartfelt, “relational”, dare I say
cathartic sort of “forgiveness” materializes only upon repentance. I would dispute that. The forgiven may know the catharsis only upon repentance,
but the forgiver has already substantiated it in forgiving.
One day I came to a new understanding of this that changed my life.
I could talk about this for two hours, except that I must not talk about it for two hours! In brief, it dawned on me
that, far from minimizing an offense, or concluding that you somehow deserved it – what I call the Gospel of Extreme
Niceness – real forgiveness meant calling a crime a crime. That’s why Charles
Williams called his book The Forgiveness
of Sins, not The Forgiveness of
Unintended Inconveniences. It’s a naming that liberates, that means your
pain is perfectly justified. Forgiveness
means judgment.
For that reason Charles Williams writes, “Love, we have been told,
is slow to anger; it is, as a result, slow to forgive, for it will not be in a
hurry to assume there is anything to forgive.”
Next, forgiveness means
suffering. There’s the paradox: you suffer
for the crime you’ve judged, drinking its pain to the dregs, never hoping the
offender can undo it. He can’t, anyway: who can turn back time? So you let the
vain hope die in you. Forgiveness is a kind of death, a small Golgotha.
Sayers’s words in Creed or
Chaos?, though not on forgiveness per se, fit perfectly here all the same.
She writes of “the vigorous grappling with evil that transforms it into good, …
the dark night of the soul that precedes crucifixion and issues in
resurrection.” C.S. Lewis said that “in
reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact
Christ.”
Enacting Christ. A small Golgotha. Crucifixion that issues in
resurrection. Forgiveness means
resurrection. Having embraced the pain to
death, you’re free. That’s the
great and tragically secret secret of
forgiveness: that before anything else, it’s for the forgiver’s sake first.
“Forgive us our debts, O God, so that
You might be free of them!” And so He
did.
And so must we. Charles Williams writes of Christ’s atonement: “He
as Man would forgive thus, because men also should not merely be forgiven but
also, in every corner of their natures, forgive.” Our union with the risen
Christ makes us not only Forgiven Man, but Forgiving Man and in like fashion:
“Forgive one another just as God has
forgiven you in Christ.”
Finally, forgiveness means an
open door. It invites reconciliation. But
(!), authentic forgiveness will not be held hostage to repentance. There’s
an audacity, if not ruthlessness, to forgiveness: “I will forgive, whether you like it or not!” While we were his enemies Christ died for us….
Now I must add a word about humility, because all this “I will
forgive you no matter what you feel about
it” can sound rather like the priggish forgiveness Sayers criticizes.
It’s not.
To the soul that really passes through that small Golgotha, there’s
no place left for arrogance, but only a redemptive compassion. Charles Williams
depicts this so well in “Percivale at
Carbonek”:
In the red saffron sun hovered the Grail;
Galahad stood in the arch of Carbonek;
The people of Pelles ran to meet him.
His eyes were sad; he sighed for Lancelot’s
pardon.
Joy remembered joylessness; joy kneeled
Under the arch where Lancelot ran in
frenzy.
The astonished angels of the spirit heard
him moan:
Pardon, lord, pardon and bless me, father.
Galahad the
sinned-against, to angels’ astonishment, begs forgiveness of Lancelot the
guilty, the miserable, the joyless. “Joy remembered joylessness.” Perhaps this
approaches what Blake meant by “perpetual mutual sacrifice”….
Sayers addresses the mutuality of
forgiveness, which can’t have won her any points with the newspaper editor. She
writes, “It is very difficult to forgive those whom we’ve injured”, and, “no
man living is wholly innocent, or wholly guilty.” So, if every act of
forgiveness is a small Golgotha, it is also an imperfect, remotely approximated
one – and that on an individual level.
How much harder, then, for Sayers to recommend this unsatisfying act to a
whole, deeply aggrieved nation? Her answer to this difficulty is:
“[F]orgiveness is the establishment of a free relationship.” Free. You can’t nickel-and-dime forgiveness; who owes whom more…. Just as you
can’t be slightly dead, you either die to the offense or you don’t. Charles Williams says,
“Forgiveness is… a thing to be done… easily or with difficulty, but there is
only one alternative to its being done, and that is its not being done. … The
Christian has no doubt of his duty, though he may have every difficulty in
fulfilling it. … The phrase ‘things that cannot be forgiven’ is therefore to
him intellectually meaningless.”
“But are there not crimes,” Sayers
seems to argue back, “which are unforgivable, or which we, at any rate, find we
cannot bring ourselves to forgive? At the present moment, that is a question
which we are bound to ask ourselves.” And here, about five-eighths through the
essay, Sayers explicitly addresses the war for the first time.
“It is here especially”, she says, “that we must make a great effort
to clear our minds of clutter.” The “clutter” being, as Williams put it, “the
massacres, the tortures, the slavery, which have appeared in Europe of late.”
How callous it seems to call it clutter. But just as a young mother in London
couldn’t allow fear of the next bombing to paralyze her from giving the baby
its next meal or bath – the bath must overcome the bombs – so forgiveness must
overcome manifold evil. The bath doesn’t excuse the bombs, nor does forgiveness
minimize atrocity. It defeats it.
Looking forward to
the enemy’s hoped-for defeat, Sayers asks, “When the war comes to an end, is
there going to be anything in our minds, or in the minds of the enemy, that
will prevent the re-establishment of a right relationship?” She’s still
wrestling with the question of the unforgivable. And she will conclude it
exists. But first, she points out one “monstrous, shattering paradox”, that is,
that the worst sin of all, the
“deliberate murder of God”, is forgiven…
“for they know not what they do.” If the worst
sin is forgivable, how can anything be
unforgivable?
As we’ve seen already in this essay, it’s never quite that simple.
The ones, Sayers contends, who knew not what they were doing, were the
Roman soldiers who really thought, at first, they were executing a criminal,
but whose hearts were not “impenetrable to light”.
It was the others, “who had seen the healing power of God blaze in
their eyes like the sun; they looked it full in the face and said that it was
the devil.” That’s what she calls the
“ultimate corruption”. Ultimately corrupt, unforgivable men engineering the
murder of the Innocent…. Now that part
might have been more to the newspaper editor’s liking, had not Sayers immediately followed with, “I do
not know that we are in any position to judge our neighbor. But let us suppose
that we ourselves are free from this corruption (are we?) and, that we are
ready to greet repentance with open arms….”
What if it’s not there? Worse, what if we meet a fundamental absence
of conscience and all possibility of its recovery? Here lies the unforgivable.
Not in what someone’s done but in what he’s become. It’s not the scale of the
sin but its direction. You can forgive the Holocaust before you can forgive
Mein Kampf because, one way or the other, your soul can somehow survive Auschwitz. But Hitler cannot survive Hitler. And
his self-destruction is not for you to
forgive.
But what of the others, the millions of minds the monster infected,
those Sayers calls “the innocents”? Where do you begin with them? Sayers’s
suggestion:
For whether is easier: To say, Thy sins be
forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk?
But that ye may know that the Son of Man
hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then
saith He to the warped mind, the frozen
brain, the starved heart, the stunted and
paralyzed soul) Arise, take up thy bed and
go to thy home.
If you think you
can’t forgive them, the throngs who
hailed the monster while millions perished – alright, set that aside for now.
Think of healing them instead. And
perhaps in the healing, you will find that you are forgiving, that you have forgiven.
And with that we arrive at Sayers’s
disturbing conclusion. Disturbing, because the usually mightily convinced and
awfully persuasive Sayers concludes ominously inconclusively. Ominously,
because the weakness of her conclusion reflects her anxiety for the future:
We, as a nation, are not very ready to harbor
resentment, and sometimes this means
we
forget without forgiving – that is, without ever really understanding either
our
enemy
or ourselves. This time, we feel, forgetfulness will not be possible. If that
is
so,
and we make up our minds that no right relationship will ever be possible
either,
I do
not quite see to what end we can look forward.
It’s as if she uncharacteristically
runs out of steam. Perhaps hope. This is an ending in weakness. Sayers could be
categorical, the master of her medium, on how her plays were to be done, or a
mystery crafted, or Church teaching not diluted.
But here the medium is out of her hands. It is the private space of men’s
hearts, and it is the future. With unaccustomed wistfulness she seems to say,
“I know we need to find it in our collective heart to forgive, or worse
horrors may await us. But I fear we just… won’t… manage it…. And, that whatever
I say won’t, finally, make any difference….”
Charles Williams writes, “It is
easier to write a book repeating that God is love than to think it privately.
Unfortunately, to be of any use, it has to be thought very privately and
thought very hard.” Not surprising, then, that Williams’s work on forgiveness
ends with what Williams called “a lame conclusion”.
Crystal Downing writes how Sayers
“relished role-playing”. Does the fragility of this essay come from Sayers’s
having no role – at least not a comfortable one – in which to speak these
lines? Real forgiveness – giving it, begging it, advising it – admits of no
role-playing.
Nor of academic distance. Sayers
doesn’t exposit forgiveness as an article of Church doctrine but urges it on her wounded and aggrieved
nation, commends it as of the order
of reality – Reality in which the Creator concretely consummated forgiveness in
His own sacrificed Person. She believes it.
Paradoxically, when Sayers’s belief is most interiorly constitutive,
her adducing of it is most couched in weakness. For the Christian this is no
surprise. The supremely convinced apostle Paul tells his flock, “I came to you
with weakness and fear and in much trembling.” And his Lord tells him, “My
strength is made perfect in weakness.” There is a helplessness and an
imperative in commending forgiveness. Williams writes, “Can any writer lay down
such rules, for himself and for others? No, and yet, without those rules, without
that appalling diagram of integrity, there can be no understanding of the
nature of the interchange of love, the truth that the fact of forgiveness is
absolute. Immanuel… by his life as forgiveness…showed it as an absolute.”
Sayers, with Williams, wrestled with the appalling weakness of the
Unimposable Absolute. As did the Lord of lords when He summoned men, “Come,
follow Me”, and they said “No”. The frustration is only compounded in
commending an intensely personal and
Christian imperative to a very mixed and traumatized nation.
