Forgiveness, Empathy and Vulnerability

Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20 FORGIVENESS, EMPATHY AND VULNERABILITY an unfinished conversation with pamela sue anderson Paul S. Fiddes To cite this article: Paul S. Fiddes (2020) FORGIVENESS, EMPATHY AND VULNERABILITY, Angelaki, 25:1-2, 109-125, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2020.1717790 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1717790 Published online: 26 Feb 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 19 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20 ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 25 numbers 1–2 feb–apr 2020 W hen, in May 2001, Pamela Sue Anderson came to Regent’s Park College, Oxford for interview as a candidate for a Fellowship in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, she chose to give her “sample lecture” on the theme of forgiveness. I later discovered that she had recently written a chapter on “A Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” for a book titled Forgiveness and Truth, which was to be published later in that same year.1 I had myself written on the Christian approach to forgiveness in a book on the idea of Atonement in 1998,2 and had recently published a development of my argument in a book on experience of God as Trinity.3 As a theologian, as well as Principal of the college, I was naturally interested to discover what Pamela had to say about the subject from the distinct perspective of a feminist philosopher of religion. From that time onwards, indeed for the sixteen years remaining of her too-short life, Pamela and I held a sustained conversation about the nature and practice of forgiveness. Our talking together, in the Senior Common Room and over meals, marked our friendship, and seeped into print, both explicitly and implicitly. Perhaps the climax of the conversation came in the participation of both of us in a symposium on the place of forgiveness in the practice of Restorative Justice (RJ), organized by another Fellow of Regent’s Park College (Myra B. Blyth) as part of her research project, held in June 2014. Both our contributions, suitably revised, were published in the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion in 2016, and there we took the occasion to enter into more public debate. Then, in the last year of Pamela’s life, the theme of forgiveness took a slightly new form in the context of her paul s. fiddes FORGIVENESS, EMPATHY AND VULNERABILITY an unfinished conversation with pamela sue anderson developing ideas on the place of vulnerability in love. In this paper I briefly want to re-trace the stages of her thought on forgiveness, through a series of six articles or book chapters that she wrote, beginning with the piece from 2001 and ending with her final unpublished work. At the same time, I intend to hold a dialogue between her ideas on forgiveness and my own, thus re-creating our conversation and finding new insights within it that were not apparent at the time. It is an exercise in that kind of memory which – as she emphasized – can “enact every situation anew” and “forge new links with the future.”4 My only regret and deep sadness is that she is not here to share in ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/20/01–20109-17 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1717790 109 forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability the conversation, and with her quicksilver critique to point up the “ethics of memory” and so prevent any manipulation of my memories of her to my own advantage. I am grateful for the continuation of our warm and close friendship that this exercise offers, as well as the opportunity to honour her pioneering thought from which I have learned so much. Inevitably, however, the conversation remains unfinished. 1 forgiveness as a struggle The first emphasis that Pamela Sue Anderson5 wanted to make is that forgiveness is a struggle that cannot be short-circuited. Here, I begin with the book chapter that she had written just as she came to Regent’s Park College in 2001, titled “A Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness.” Her point of departure is a critique of what she regards as a traditional Christian notion of forgiveness, and while it is not the only approach it is admittedly widespread. Her “hermeneutic of suspicion” involves a two-fold objection: first, forgiveness of wrongdoing is expected, even required, from people, especially women and marginalized others; and second, it is assumed that forgiveness is always possible since it comes as a divine gift. Thus, she protested, forgiveness is used to reinforce the lack of self-respect suffered by oppressed persons, while the sense of self-respect is a rational good.6 In contrast to this Christian account (as she sees it), she insists that forgiveness is always a struggle. The experience of enslaved persons in African-American history suggests that if a wronged person is no longer to feel resentment then there needs to be a painful emotional transformation. She writes that it is difficult to create “stories recounting forgiveness that do not involve the lack or loss of rational selfrespect,” and so “there is a struggle to create new narratives of forgiveness and promise.”7 The conflict is between forgiveness and justice, since justice entails the development of selfrespect, and this in turn requires a righteous resentment against certain forms of wrongdoing such as sexual abuse. Anderson sees the dilemma thus: “how can the soul and its emotions be transformed to achieve forgiveness without a loss of self-worth in the face of massive wrong-doing?”8 Anderson’s insistence on forgiveness as a difficult process of emotional transformation in the victim seemed to me at the time to have affinities with the idea I had been developing, that forgiveness is a costly journey. Forgiveness can never be demanded of a victim, but the one who wants to forgive, I had written, needs to embark on a voyage of experience with two stages to it. First, there is a journey of discovery as the forgiver has to expose the truth of what has been done to her, rather than forget about it, and second there is a journey of endurance as the forgiver absorbs the hostility and anxiety of the offender.9 The aim of this twofold journey of empathy is to create a response in the offender, who needs to face up to the truth of his actions and to be won to the forgiveness which is being offered. The one who has offended is more likely to come to self-realization and reconciliation if he or she experiences the one forgiving as an accepting rather than a judgemental person. From a Christian perspective, the victim who aims to forgive participates in the journey of forgiveness which God has taken universally through the life and death of Christ. The forgiver takes an initiative which relies upon the initiative taken by God in making the deepest journey of empathy into human lives. As I talked this over with Anderson during the years to come, the question which always arose was whether my idea of forgiveness as a journey of empathy with the offender allowed sufficiently for expression of the righteous resentment which the victim rightly felt. Did it sufficiently reflect the struggle between forgiveness and justice? Yet in this early piece on the theme, Anderson felt that oppressed persons do want to let go of the resentment they feel, however righteous it is, because of the toll it takes on them. Forgiveness, she believed, was characterized by “overcoming certain potentially destructive emotions like resentment.”10 Expanding her second critique of a Christian approach, Anderson asks in this paper why some enslaved persons were able to exemplify 110 fiddes the virtue of forgiveness, and comments that “Personally I do not see how a mere reference to […] Christian forgiveness or grace, could be a sufficient explanation.”11 The struggle could not, and cannot, be short-circuited by an easy divine gift, and so she makes the challenge that it is necessary to develop what she calls a “secular” understanding of forgiveness in which self-worth is retained within a difficult process. There is, she writes, “something about emotional transformation that […] [a Christian] perspective on forgiveness” cannot achieve.12 In response, I would (and did) say that when Christians receive the gift of entering into the journey of God’s own forgiveness,13 this is indeed sharing in a struggle of feelings and responses and is no superficial view of grace. Forgiveness, Anderson urges, involves a process of emotional and rational transformation of the person in order to achieve release from resentment without loss of self-respect. Here, she appeals to a number of witnesses who were important to her thought during the course of her writing. First, there is the narrative account developed by bell hooks, expressing her struggle with the stereotypes which restricted the possibilities for black women’s identities in African-American contexts; hooks, noted Anderson, came to an inner transformation in a “gradual release from these stereotypes” which became part of “a redemptive process of ‘a writing life.’”14 This painful process of “refiguring the past” and creating “an imaginary domain” in which persons can relocate themselves in relation to a past of pain and oppression, means that “forgetting is not the same as forgiveness.”15 This is an insight that is also central to my own model of a journey of forgiveness,16 and it raises the place of memory in a feminist ethics of forgiveness which Anderson was to explore more thoroughly in her next piece on the theme. Another witness for Anderson to the need for transformation through emotional and rational struggle is Gillian Rose, who points to the “intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries” that is involved in the process of mourning; in the paradigmatic 111 Greek stories of Phocion and Antigone, this is a mourning which makes experiences of past injustice “visible and speakable,” so that “mourning draws on transcendent but representable justice.”17 Anderson suggests that there is a similar process going on in forgiveness, where “release from resentment” occurs as the person grieving over a transgression against her “recognizes justice […] in representations (and new acts) of justice.”18 Yet a further witness here is Paul Ricoeur, whom Anderson makes a conversation-partner throughout her work. Anderson proposes that “re-enacting” narratives of the past anew in relation to justice here and now can reshape the identity of a culture or individual when there is a deliberate “struggle” with the difference of others from oneself. She sees Ricoeur as explaining this “shaping of narrative identity” in terms of “the ‘entanglement’ of an individual’s story with the story of others.”19 A feminist ethics of forgiveness, she concludes, will take responsibility for the life stories of the other, “through the exchange of narratives in imagination and empathy.”20 Again, this seems close to my understanding of forgiveness as a journey of empathy into the life of another, but we must not miss that the empathy Anderson had in mind was between victims and others who are oppressed, not between victim and oppressor. She might say, if she were here: why should empathy include the transgressor? And I would reply – that it depends on whether one wants to achieve reconciliation with the other as well as freedom from one’s own resentment. 2 forgiveness as making a new future Anderson’s next paper that reflected on forgiveness, titled “An Ethics of Memory: Promising, Forgiving, Yearning” (2005), took its point of departure from the question of how a person’s identity might be retained in face of the challenge of the postmodern view of the “death” of the self. It was in fact written for the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology. Drawing on the thought of Ricoeur and forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability Hannah Arendt, she proposed that our identity through time consists in the making and keeping of promises. It is through this that we are the same person. Forgiveness thus becomes necessary as a way of dealing with the broken promises of others, opening up a shared future. The paper repeats the presentation of forgiveness from the 2001 piece as a difficult process of emotional and rational transformation, but there is no direct statement of a struggle between forgiveness and justice. Elaborating the theme of memory from the earlier book chapter, the struggle is now portrayed as being between the past and the future, and it takes the form of a yearning to create just memories which will move beyond the past to forge new links with the future. She writes: “The struggle leads to personal and social transformation only insofar as the response to the injustice of broken promises involves forgiving others and yearning for the transformation of life’s narratives.”21 The process or struggle is defined here as a “yearning,” including the “mourning” which appeared in the earlier piece.22 Anderson proposes that we make “narrative sense of life” through three acts which involve memory in one way or another: there is the making and keeping of promises, the forgiveness of broken promises and yearning (for love and justice) which holds together promise-keeping and forgiveness.23 Again she writes, “The ultimate aim of my project is to apply an ethics of memory to the feminist problematic of philosophy of religion,” explaining that “What needs to be retrieved are the shattered promises, the ability to forgive and the yearning which leads to transforming melancholia into love and justice.”24 In fact, the triumvirate of forgiveness, promising and yearning was not to play a substantial part in Anderson’s future working out of her “project,” though it merits a page or so in her later Re-visioning Gender.25 In that study she is interested in the “moral force of love” in constructing a feminist epistemology and ethics, in which “yearning” for love plays a substantial part, and promise-keeping is replaced by the “commitment” of love, without the same reflection on forgiveness.26 If she were here now I would want to ask her why forgiveness was apparently downplayed in what she intended as a major book on the gendering of philosophy of religion: it seems that it no longer had the significance in the making of human identity that she had given it earlier. In this book chapter, forgiveness is still closely bound to the elements of promising and yearning, in making a story of the self with an openness to the future grounded in memory. Promise-making and promisekeeping achieve self-constancy in their continuing through the changes of time. This, Anderson stresses, is not just an individual act but a communal act of commitment, a mutual promise as the basis for shared convictions, rules, norms, customs and beliefs.27 Forgiving is linked with this phenomenon in freeing us from a past of broken promises. Admittedly, the forgiveness here relates to broken promises, not explicitly to the abuse, violence or oppression that is in view in the first paper. However, Anderson probably thinks that the principles of forgiveness are the same in all instances, since this piece develops the “ethics of memory” she had proposed in the paper of 2001. After all, the breaking of a communal promise, or a social contract, often does involve oppression of particular groups, and she suggests in Re-visioning Gender that the breaking of personal promises can be emotional abuse and involve a threat to self-respect.28 In the 2005 book chapter, the yearning for justice and lost love is also inseparable from forgiveness, since it is in “forgetting or forgiving” that the yearning which is bound up with promising finds the freedom to be “unbound” from promises that have failed to deliver.29 Anderson’s associating of “forgetting” and “forgiving” in this context need not mean, of course, that she has neglected the difference between them that she registered previously. The significance of forgiveness to both promising and yearning seems here to derive from Anderson’s debt to Arendt, who proposes in The Human Condition that we gain our narrative identity as agents who promise and forgive. Promise-keeping and forgiveness respectively “bind” and “unbind” us in time. 112 fiddes Promising offers a remedy for the unpredictability of behaviour, and forgiveness offers the remedy for “the predicament of irreversibility,” i.e., being unable to undo what one has done.30 Anderson also gains from Arendt the perception that the disclosure of “who” we are takes place when a new beginning – natality – is established through an action such as promising or forgiving which “falls into an already existing web of relationships.”31 Thus, a single life story affects the life stories of all. Anderson goes on to find similar themes in Ricoeur who, like Arendt, considers promise-keeping to be an example of “the highest expression of selfhood.”32 Anderson notes his obligation to Arendt’s idea of “natality,” and points out that for Ricoeur such “births,” together with memory, establish coherence between past, present and future in the narrative of the self, and that acts of promising always take place “within a web of relationships.”33 In this piece Anderson does not consider Ricoeur’s own handling of forgiveness, as she will do in a later one. She does reflect on Ricoeur’s understanding of involvement in the “web of relationships,” and here draws attention to Ricoeur’s caveat that this does not mean we can actually relive the life of others: she quotes him to the effect that “It is a matter of exchanging memories at the narrative level where they are present for comprehension.”34 This process is portrayed in somewhat cognitive terms as “an ability to think from the standpoint of others,” and the influence of Ricoeur here may account for Anderson’s tendency to establish boundaries to empathy in forgiveness, and her suspicion of my own model of forgiveness as a journey of identity into the life of another. Nevertheless, she repeats from the 2001 paper that an ethics of memory takes responsibility for the life stories of the other, “through the exchange of narratives in imagination and empathy.”35 Anderson’s ethical concern for the opening up of the future in a changed life narrative has parallels with the aims of RJ, a process which brings together offender and victim in a conversation either inside or outside the criminal justice system, in which the victim can confront 113 the perpetrator with the effects of his or her offence.36 In this meeting, a key aim is to find a way forward together into the future on which all the stakeholders are agreed, and which will involve some kind of change in all who are involved. Later, as we shall see, Anderson did comment on RJ, but this was not part of her thinking in 2005. In my own conversation with her, I raised the question of the place of a loving God within any process in which restoration and the making of a new future is in view. Oddly, contributing as she was in 2005 to a volume on postmodern theology, she does not say anything about God. But I wanted to urge that in shaping the future God is also open to change as a participant in the healing of broken relations. God, as a divine forgiver, must be vulnerable, open to suffering and mutable. This is the corollary of a process of forgiveness which is a journey of identification with the other, and which in God’s own story is a voyage into all human lives, reaching the most intense pitch in the life and death of Jesus Christ.37 There can, of course, be no alteration in God’s character of goodness and faithfulness, or we would no longer be talking about “God” at all, and neither is the change any movement from reluctance to forgive into being forgiving. Instead, we can conceive of God’s taking new experience into the divine life through the death of Christ for the sake of creation, enabling God through empathy to win offenders into reconciliation and achieve transformation. 3 forgiveness as exceeding justice In a paper by Anderson of the following year, titled “Unselfing in Love: A Contradiction in Terms?” (2006),38 my own stress on the passibility of God does appear in her dialogue with me. However, this is not where she begins. The point of departure is the idea of “unselfing,” a term that Anderson takes and converts from Iris Murdoch’s notion of unselfing.39 Forgiveness then becomes relevant in several ways. First, an unhealthy kind of unselfing would be the “loss of self” in the sense of “self-emptying,” loss of self-worth and self-dignity. She forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability maintains that, whatever ambiguities there might be in the idea of “unselfing,” the very idea “presupposes a self capable of loving relationships: that is, a self who can decreate in order to find herself in loving another.”40 What Anderson had learnt from Kant’s ethics of autonomy remained with her throughout her life as a defence of a woman’s power of self-determination. Picking up the theme of her first paper, the demand that someone should forgive seemed to her to foster this kind of destructive unselfing. It ignored the necessary struggle between forgiveness and justice.41 But forgiveness appears again in Anderson’s view of a healthy kind of unselfing, which is marked by a de-centring of the self in giving “attention” to the other. She writes: “I see the essence of love simply in an arresting attention to […] [a person’s] particular existence.”42 Here, she is indebted to Murdoch, and through her to Simone Weil, for the idea of unselfing as turning from mere absorption in the self to attend to another, citing Murdoch’s acknowledgement that she has borrowed the word “attention” from Weil “to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”43 Such attention requires a self “capable of intimate relations,” and the result in turn of attending to the other is the creation of enriched relations.44 In this context she approves bell hooks’s notion of awareness of the reality of ourselves,45 and thinks that a proper self-love might be best expressed as “oneself inasmuch as another.”46 The essence of love remains “in the quality of the self’s attending to another, including oneself as another.”47 Now, while the main theme of this paper is “love” in the widest sense as unselfing, Anderson focuses the discussion on one particular loving act of attention to the other, namely forgiveness: “forgiveness becomes the crucial example of an ethical act done in order to sustain loving relationships.” It is crucial, she will go on to explain, because “today the act done for the sake of love alone which raises serious questions about love’s capability is forgiveness.”48 We shall come in due course to these “serious questions.” Again following Murdoch, Anderson suggests that a further aspect of healthy “unselfing” is the loss of illusions cultivated by the self.49 “Unselfing” means seeking to rid oneself of self-deceptions concerning the reality of selflove and other-love. One of these illusions, she suggests, is that love is merely benevolence, an altruistic “doing good” to others which neglects the reality of the desires of the self. While benevolence to others is a proper human disposition to be encouraged, it can become distorted into “acts of charity” which mask the unjust discrepancy between the situations of rich and poor in society. It can cease to be a specific act of goodwill towards another, and become “a nonspecific act of charity in giving to the personally unknown, less well-off as a duty.”50 In line with Kant, Anderson finds “a duty to love” to be an absurdity, since love is a “feeling,” so that if love is regarded as mere benevolence it undermines itself. At this point, Anderson’s discussion takes a theological turn, detecting a sanctioning of this human distortion of benevolence in the religious image of an omnibenevolent God. This is also the point where Anderson appeals to my own insistence on the mutability and passibility of God. A healthy theology of unselfing, she argued, will challenge the view of a God whose love is reducible to benevolence to all; in traditional terms, this is the image of a God of pure agape or selfgiving love, with no aspect of eros or desire. Appealing to my own theology, she suggests that proper human unselfing will be prompted by the view of a God who “unselfs” by ridding God’s self of the illusion of invulnerability and impassibility that is pervasive in classical theology: What emerges in Fiddes’ case is the relational capacity of love. He argues that since human beings are the objects or subjects of the searching love of God, relationship […] with them must satisfy the desire of God and complete divine joy. Fiddes moves a great distance from both the classical view of divine love as the ideal of invulnerable gift and the human ideal of disinterested self-giving.51 114 fiddes Thus (with some theological originality) she proposes that the image of a God who rids God’s self of the illusion of disinterested benevolence will challenge our own distortions of benevolence, and awaken us to our proper desires. For God and human beings, unselfing and maintaining the self are to be held in tension: here she approves my claim that “we become more truly ourselves when we give ourselves away […] self-giving love is in the end a self-realization.”52 Anderson does not here – as I do – explicitly relate this vulnerability of God to the process of forgiving, even in the form of a religious image that might motivate human forgiveness. There is an implicit connection in so far as Anderson has already taken forgiveness as the paradigm example of “the relational capacity of love,” but it is in another example of ridding oneself of illusions that she brings a discussion of forgiveness to the fore. According to Anderson, another illusion to be discarded in “unselfing” is that love is a kind of distributive justice, in which love is to be given to everyone impartially. Love cannot be required on the grounds of justice, she writes, to be distributed equally, to intimates and strangers alike. Woman especially cannot distribute love equally, since this destroys a sense of self, and “historically women and marginalized men have not been allowed to create a sense of self in the first place.”53 Making love a form of distributive justice fails to create a proper self-love which is essential for making relationships. It is here that the act of forgiveness, as a paradigm of loving relations, raises the “serious questions” to which Anderson referred earlier. It is clear that “forgiveness […] must be done out of love, not duty or distributive justice”:54 For forgiveness to remain different from forgetting or reparation, it would have to be incompatible with the rules of distributive justice which seek reparation in the form of punishment for crimes or injustices committed. In other words, one forgives precisely because the injustice cannot be repaired. Forgiveness is the key example of the tension between love and distributive justice: in the 115 case of an offence committed, justice requires reparation, and yet no injustice can be fully “repaired” and so calls for forgiveness. “One forgives the unforgivable for the sake of love,” she asserts, “not distributive justice.” The implication is that forgiveness exceeds justice, as she had written earlier in her 2005 book chapter: “the cemetery of past promises can be transformed by a love that goes beyond morality in forgiveness.”55 Yet, at the same time, Anderson insists that if a victim of injustice denies her own self in forgiving the one who has hurt her, she has little sense of the reality of love.56 We are back with the struggle between love and justice in the act of forgiveness that occupied Anderson in the first paper above. The development in this piece is to illuminate that struggle by placing it in the tension (even the apparent “contradiction”) between “selfing” and “unselfing” in love, but Anderson does not attempt to supply any easy resolution. Putting forgiveness in the larger context of “unselfing in love” does, however, make it a practice of the “wise lover” who attempts to “confront the egoistic enemy of the good life without neutralizing or denuding the self.”57 The two “egoistic enemies” Anderson has identified in this paper, or “the fat relentless ego[s] in modern ethical theory,”58 have been an overconfidence in benevolence and distributive justice, but it has been easier to name them than to resolve the tension of which they are symptoms. Rather as she had earlier discerned the need for a slow process of emotional and rational transformation in the process of forgiveness, here she admits that “one may not be able to single out accurately any examples of the wise lover”59 and that the “perfection of love […] remains humanly impossible.” In the face of a tension that “verges on contradictions” one can only hold a “vision of sheer delight in an arresting attention to the reality of oneself, other selves, and our world.”60 Anderson’s phrases about “forgiving the unforgivable” and perfected love as “impossible” have overtones of the treatment of forgiveness by Jacques Derrida, and in her first paper above Anderson does refer to Derrida in a footnote, recording that he rejects any notion of forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability forgiveness as a duty.61 He formulates the act of forgiveness in terms of its sheer unconditionality.62 For Derrida the whole point of forgiveness is that it rises above all mechanisms of reciprocation and the market-place. Forgiveness is not about calculation, or balancing the accounts: There is in forgiveness a force, a desire, an impetus, a movement […] that demands that forgiveness be granted even to someone who does not ask for it, who does not repent or confess or improve or redeem himself.63 Forgiveness, he stresses, is always of the unforgivable.64 For Derrida, unconditional forgiveness is “impossible,” but there can be no other kind, or we buy into a mere economy of exchange. I myself also stress that forgiveness itself is unconditional; it does not require repentance or remorse in the offender, since that would undermine the dynamic nature of forgiveness as initiating a response in those who are reluctant to accept pardon. Above all, the forgiveness of God expressed in the death of Christ is unconditional.65 However, in Derrida’s view, forgiveness to be pure must be offered without any hope, expectation or intention that the offender will in due time face up to his or her crime, be repentant, seek reconciliation, offer reparation and be transformed. Even holding hope for the offender is, in Derrida’s view, entering an economy of exchange. In my approach, while forgiveness is unconditional, the completing of forgiveness in reconciliation between those who are alienated (whether between people or between human persons and God) is conditional upon an appropriate response.66 It does not deny unconditional forgiveness to hope for this response, though it can never be demanded. Derrida’s view seems to arise from associating forgiveness radically with forgetting,67 rather than with an empathy that relies on memory. Despite an apparent echo of Derrida’s language, in this piece Anderson appears to reject unconditional forgiveness, remarking that “the moral theologian’s insistence on unconditional, spontaneous and selfless love becomes self-contradictory.”68 Certainly, to the end of our conversations, Anderson was unhappy about the idea. It seemed to her to undermine justice and self-worth, and especially to put the woman back in the position of victim. I urged that forgiveness was not the end of the process of healing broken relations. I suggested that reconciliation between victim and oppressor must be conditional on the repentance of the offender and his making of reparation; forgiveness, as unconditional, has the power to create such an ethical response. I wonder whether in this paper, with her urging of the “forgiving of the unforgivable” there is just the seed of a possible agreement. She would have to say. 4 forgiveness as a hope Some five years later, in a short paper titled “A Feminist on Forgiveness” (2011), Anderson returned to the conflict between forgiveness and justice, as flagged up in the first and third papers considered here. Indeed, this is the point of departure for her piece, which is the transcript of an oral presentation.69 She says, “Love might say, forgive! But justice may not!”70 She asks, “Can forgiveness be unjust?”71 and maintains that “The feminist argues that in the case of an abused woman with a weak sense of self-respect, the danger of forgiveness is to condone injustice.”72 In short, she is sketching out the situation indicated by the subtitle of the piece: “When (Where?) Love and Justice Come Apart.” In the light of this struggle between love and justice it is appropriate that the talk, published in a book designed to honour Paul Ricoeur, takes as its repeated motif Ricoeur’s phrase about “difficult forgiveness.” Indeed, Anderson judges that “one half-century of philosophical reflections on evil were simply a prelude” to Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness in the epilogue to his Memory, History, Forgetting, titled “Difficult Forgiveness.”73 As previously, she proposes that the dilemma of forgiveness can be resolved only through a process of transformation in which the struggle is fully recognized and worked through. She refers to a “long process” with forgiveness “a long way down 116 fiddes the line,”74 and cites bell hooks as writing that “confronting myself with compassion, I learn to practice the art of forgiveness.”75 She also gives at least qualified approval to the particular Christian view that the pronouncement “I forgive you” is “not an act at all, but is a description of a process; that is, forgiveness involves a process of changing one’s emotion.” As in her first paper above, she certainly rejects an alternative Christian view that “forgiveness is both necessary and possible as a miraculous gift from God,” deriving from a forensic understanding of atonement in Christ as paying an offender’s debt.76 In exploring the difficult “process” of forgiveness, she finds it to be characterized by both memory and hope. For the aspect of memory she is indebted to Ricoeur’s discussion of “recognition” as “a small miracle of memory,” when someone suddenly exclaims “That is her! That is him!”77 Forgiveness, suggests Anderson, is characterized by the same recognition of the truth of what has actually happened in a past act of offence, so that forgiveness depends on “seeing and remembering.”78 It is in memory that the wrong done is recognized, but through memory also that the necessary encounter with someone can happen. Anderson affirms that “in the place where the person is recognized, the spirit of forgiveness becomes manifest.”79 Such a “spirit of forgiveness” only becomes possible through a “fundamental premise” that, as she gladly acknowledges, both she and Ricoeur have gleaned from Immanuel Kant: that innocence is more original than guilt, and goodness more original than evil.80 Here, Anderson (in a footnote)81 makes what she calls a “detour” to describe “how it is I have arrived as a moral philosopher – and a philosopher of religion – to my view of forgiveness.” She explains that she is following Ricoeur in his own debt to Kant on the nature of good and evil: that while evil is radical as a propensity of human action, innocence is more original than evil or guilt.82 Thus there is what Ricoeur calls a “spirit of forgiveness” inscribed in human willing, within the very capability of humans to act both to do right and wrong, and 117 “a capability not only to do wrong but for that wrong doing to be undone.” It is this Kantian–Ricoeurian insight that gives Anderson the hope that, despite the struggle between love and justice that cannot be easily resolved, forgiveness is still possible. Ricoeur, she continues, draws the conclusion that the act of forgiving is “an unbinding of evil from the guilty agent” so that the act of evil can be distinguished from the agent who is “potentially restored to his or her original innocence.” While Anderson appears to approve this account, we are bound to notice that it leads Ricoeur to equate forgiving with forgetting, as the fault is separated from the agent and sent into oblivion, while the agent is remembered only as an innocent person. Ricoeur believes that this kind of forgetting of faults in the past, or what Ricoeur calls an “unbinding of debt from fault,”83 can promote the healing of relations; it can, he thinks, prevent an obsessive repetition or commemoration of the past, unblock a situation of conflict in memory, remove melancholia and so make forgiveness possible.84 Unfortunately, it can also undermine the very process of “transformation” of the person that Anderson herself is commending, in which person and act are bound up in one reality that has to be faced openly by both forgiver and offender. The Kantian insight into original innocence need not inevitably lead to the conclusion that agent and act can be separated, and if forgiveness is to be unconditional (as Derrida perceives),85 they cannot be. The offence done does not derive from a kind of parcel of evil that can be detached from an agent but from destructive attitudes that have to be changed in the person through a painful voyage of experience. In this piece Anderson does in fact link my own conception of a journey of forgiveness to her concern for a process of rational and emotional transformation. In a long footnote attached to a comment about forgiveness as a “complex process” she writes: Roughly, a Christian moral theologian would probably introduce an account of the stages of atonement – or, as Paul Fiddes describes, forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability the journeys of forgiveness. Elsewhere I have given attention to the intriguing work done by Fiddes on forgiveness – he has an interesting take on […] the process of repairing broken relationships in the journey of forgiveness: of discovery and endurance.86 Anderson is correct here that I relate the journey of forgiveness to atonement – in the sense that God in the death of Christ takes the furthest voyage into human desolation and isolation in order to awaken human persons to their situation, and to create response to God’s forgiving love.87 However, I do not, as she implies, follow the sequence of the particular stages of atonement she goes on to outline – recognition of wrong, repentance, forgiveness and penance. The whole point of the empathetic journey taken by the Creator into creation is that unconditional forgiveness has the power to prompt repentance and reparation, and that this issues in reconciliation.88 I venture to suggest that this kind of pattern, in which human beings participate through their own acts of forgiveness, may offer an answer to another problem that Anderson raises. Alongside the struggle between justice and love in forgiveness, Anderson sets what she finds to be a rational or logical conundrum. On the one hand, forgiveness would be “unjustified” if the wrongdoer has not made reparation. On the other, the act of forgiveness is “pointless” if the wrongdoer has already made adequate reparation.89 While she offers the slow process of transformation, taking the issue of justice seriously, as the only way through the struggle, she does not appear to have any solution to the conundrum. It ceases to be so acute, however, if we distinguish between unconditional forgiveness and conditional reconciliation as I have done earlier: forgiveness prompts reparation rather than following it, and lack of reparation would make unjustified not forgiveness but reconciliation. The second major characteristic of the process of forgiveness which Anderson discusses in this piece (the first being memory) is that of hope – grounded, as we have seen, in a conviction that innocence and goodness have priority over evil. Here, Anderson expands an idea that she first mentioned in her 2001 paper on forgiveness, prompted by the writing of Drucilla Cornell, that we should conceive a new imaginative space of freedom, an “imaginary domain” in which exploited peoples can recover and relocate themselves in relation to a past of pain and oppression.90 Beyond Cornell’s exposition, she asserts that forgiveness can create that space through love, and, as before, she sees bell hooks as “working to conceive a space […] where forgiveness breaks down the divisions between our private and public lives in order to open up both to love and justice.”91 But here she goes a step further in seeing the hope for this space as meeting a set of questions about forgiveness which she herself poses, such as: how can forgiveness be justified when victims are no longer alive? When injustice is still taking place against a people, a race, a sex? When the victim cannot forgive?92 When the victim is not conscious, or gone away, or estranged?93 Her answer is that at times when forgiveness is impossible, there remains “hope for the place where love and justice will be able to create a new future.”94 I myself raise almost exactly the same questions about forgiveness, and also offer hope for a “future space” of reconciliation where forgiveness can be practised.95 However, my account is deliberately theological in a way that hers is not. The image of a journey of empathy directed towards the creation of response to the offer of forgiveness seems especially problematic when someone refuses to be reconciled, or is not present to be reconciled because they have died, or the situation is such as to make it unsafe for someone who has been abused to make any contact with the abuser at all. In such cases, I urge, the one who wants to forgive can still set out in imagination on a path of empathy towards the other, so becoming the kind of person who is freed from the chains of the past. A Christian hope is based not only in a Kantian positive view of human nature but also in an eschatology where all will experience the judgement of having to face the truth about themselves, and have the opportunity to be reconciled with Love.96 118 fiddes Belief in a God who is engaged in the same kind of journey as human beings means that our own journey becomes part of the journey of a God in whom all persons “live and move and have their being.”97 Our hopeful imagination thus has persuasive power in creating reconciliation in the world as our created love is added to the uncreated love of God which is a constant pressure towards human flourishing. We cannot know what this will achieve, either in the one with whom we desire to be reconciled or in others who need to be reconciled and of whom we are quite unaware. 5 forgiveness and restorative justice A paper published by Anderson in 2016, and originally written for a colloquium on Restorative Justice in 2014, has a similar title to the previous one, being “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart.”98 The departure point here is the practice of RJ, and the highly contested question, among practitioners of RJ, as to whether forgiveness should play any part in the process. Along the lines of previous pieces, this essay continues to assert a conflict between forgiveness and justice – or between love and justice in the act of forgiveness – and to underline the “difficult” nature of forgiveness. The article develops the argument, however, by making explicit that the process of forgiveness may, and will in the case of women suffering abuse and “intimate violence,” call for a withholding of forgiveness at least for a period, not least during the practice of RJ.99 Time will be needed to cultivate emotions of righteous anger. This “withholding” may well be implied in the “process of transformation” set out in earlier papers, but is not so stated there.100 In dialogue here with Martha Nussbaum, she maintains that anger, in the form of resentment and contempt, is a cognitive emotion which plays a positive role in withholding forgiveness from the offender, so creating both distance (with space for ethical accountability) and time for the injuries to be 119 recognized. Withholding also allows for the suitability of the positive affective emotion of love, motivating forgiveness, to be assessed.101 Forgiveness is to be withheld in the name of self-respect. Resentment and contempt need to be acknowledged if a victim is to be able to know what and how to forgive, or to express any just emotion. Forgiveness, she stresses, is a vice when it maintains injustice. In this circumstance love can be a negative cognitive emotion, setting up “unethical love relations.”102 Women can be “too forgiving or too loving to be ethical or just,” and “unquestioning trust in a personal religion of love is a deeply-embedded obstacle to justice in the lives of oppressed subjects under patriarchy.”103 Anderson’s hesitations about the practice of RJ is that it might not allow for this exercise of the proper cognitive emotions of anger, and this failure would be exacerbated if acts of forgiveness were included within the process. These would make RJ prone to misunderstanding the cognitive role of human emotions, in the form of both love and anger, which motivate our interactions. Thus RJ might exploit the forgiving nature of those women (and men) who are vulnerable to being treated unjustly precisely because of being too loving.104 Taking up an earlier theme, Anderson stresses that unconditional forgiveness is not an ethical requirement in every situation for every person, since it is necessary to take time to address cognitive emotions.105 In my own approach to the place of forgiveness within RJ, I agree strongly with Anderson106 that the survivor of intimate violence has no duty to forgive. Rather, in line with my model of a “journey of forgiveness,” I suggest that the exercise of forgiveness can be encouraged in the process of RJ, with the effect of creating a response in the offender, without either requiring or expecting it.107 Using the language of John Braithwaite, forgiveness can be regarded as one of the “standards” that can be “maximized” as appropriate in the process of RJ.108 Braithwaite himself prefers to regard forgiveness as an “emergent value,” developing out of the process, but in his discussion with me he admits that the issue might be really about forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability the definition of “maximizing.”109 By contrast, Anderson remains apprehensive about introducing forgiveness into practices of RJ at all. In RJ, she affirms, we can learn how to recognize when cognitive emotions such as contempt have a salient role in alerting us to injustice. We must begin the process of restoring trust in oneself in the face of self-denigration before we can hope to restore justice. Forgiveness, she admits, is often the decisive step needed to generate the possibility of repairing ethical accountability, but it is not an easy step to take, and it will probably need to be withheld initially. Anderson is also apprehensive about certain practices of “caring” relationships. Like RJ, these can run the danger of ignoring ethical vulnerability and accountability in the name of “caring about” the other’s reparation more than one’s own.110 She notes that twentiethcentury feminist debates have sometimes distinguished between an “ethics of justice” supposedly typical of men, and an “ethics of care,” supposedly typical of women.111 She judges that the debate has been right to suspect that these two types of ethics have been assigned to the public and private spheres respectively, with the result that an ethics of justice in the public sphere has failed to achieve the restoration of personal relations, while an ethics of care has promoted loving and forgiving relations only in private life.112 Anderson affirms that it has been a good thing to unearth an ethics of care in the decision making of women, but she agrees with more recent feminist philosophers in disputing any sharp gender distinction between care and justice, writing that “we have many new understandings of gender, transgender and other sexual relations.”113 Stereotypes which divide ethics into men (justice) and women (care) have to be challenged. She also warns against slipping into a sharp distinction between public and private life, since the separation of two spheres of life is highly problematic for forgiveness. Women who suffer intimate violence – within family life – have been taught to forgive immediately and unconditionally. There is decisive risk of injustice in regarding forgiveness as unproblematic within the private sphere of life, and she finds this to be typical of the traditional Christian (premodern) community. The article shows that at this advanced stage of our conversation on forgiveness there is convergence between Anderson and myself in so far as Anderson increasingly associates my understanding of the “journey” of forgiveness with the “process” of transformation she envisages herself. Here, she deliberately links her own account of “taking time to address cognitive emotions” with what she calls my own “dynamic process of forgiveness,” and thinks that both can be related to a proper process of RJ.114 In fact she makes a point of preferring what she identifies as my “late modern Christian theology of forgiveness as a dynamic process” to Braithwaite’s suspicion that modernity (and the autonomy it cultivates) is a hindrance to RJ, opposing his desire to return to what she regards as dangerous “ancient traditions” of relationships.115 Her difference from me is about the stage in the “journey of forgiveness” where forgiveness becomes appropriate, at least in the case of women suffering intimate violence. For my part, in the paper I contribute to the colloquium, I try to place her advocacy of withholding forgiveness within my own image of forgiveness as a journey of empathy. I have learned to take seriously her insistence that withholding may be necessary, especially in extreme cases of harm such as abuse, to preserve the integrity, well-being and freedom of the victim as well as to make clear to the abuser the terrible depths of the harm inflicted. So I suggest that persons who cannot forgive at a particular moment, and yet who do not have a fixed unforgiving attitude, might begin the journey of forgiveness and so escape being trapped in resentment by imagining conditions in which they might take a first unconditional movement of forgiveness. They might envisage a situation in which they themselves were in a better position to take this move, or in which the offender were in a different frame of mind or attitude. The very willingness to imagine that forgiveness might be possible, though it is impossible at present, is – I suggest – taking one’s place in the 120 fiddes empathetic journey of God which can in proper time enable further steps to be taken.116 A similar step in imagination is commended by the philosopher Charles Griswold, who suggests that when forgiveness seems inappropriate we can nevertheless construct in our minds an “imaginative and credible narrative” about an offender, finding reasons to think that conditions for forgiveness such as remorse might have been or might be fulfilled in a different situation than obtains at present.117 The advantage I see in the theological context I propose is that the “imaginative narrative” participates in the story of a God who is actually moving in the world to create love and justice ahead of us. 6 forgiveness and vulnerability: in conclusion The final paper I am considering118 appeared posthumously in a publication of the Enhancing Life Project at the University of Chicago (2017). Some of the same themes are repeated from the 2016 article – in fact about seven pages119 are close transcriptions of it – especially the need to withhold forgiveness120 and to cultivate cognitive emotions of righteous anger in order to achieve just relations. However, this piece triangulates forgiveness with an ethics of care and an ethics of vulnerability, where the latter two themes made only a slight appearance in the former article. The need to demolish barriers between private and public spheres is taken further, in the light of a situation where offences against women are often relegated to the private or family realm, creating a demand on women to forgive their intimate abusers. Anderson insists on a “politics of care,” or care in the public space, characterized by the development of reciprocal accountability,121 a note already sounded in the fourth of the papers I have gathered together.122 But the most significant expansion from her previous article on forgiveness is her treatment of vulnerability, prompted (it seems) by a dialogue with the notion of universal human “precarious life and corporal vulnerability” in the work of Judith Butler.123 121 The “ethical vulnerability” which Anderson had briefly mentioned in the former paper is “clarified” as existing on two levels. First, there is a “phenomenological level” of experiencing vulnerability, prior to taking any ethical action. This is “a primary capacity for being wounded, or a potential wounding,” and includes “a range of positive to negative vulnerable experiences,” from loving affection in sexual intimacy to injurious violence that occurs in intimate relations.124 Anderson also describes this phenomenology as presenting “specific, lived experiences of intimacy, as an openness to love and affection, while admitting affection could generate negative effects of fear, shame or rage.”125 In her previous article she had urged the need for time to come to terms with cognitive emotions arising from these experiences of vulnerability before forgiveness becomes possible.126 Second, there is an “ethical level” of vulnerability, where “wounding” or the potential for being “wounded” is not something to be eliminated or thought of as a mere liability but adopted as a basis for relational accountability which has within it an openness to change, “of calling one another to account for immoral, non-moral or ethical wounds.” Ethical vulnerability opens up an opportunity to restore justice or to repair the horrendous pain of wounds, and such “ethical repair” will need to work with the just emotions of resentment and contempt.127 As she makes clear in a coda of deliberate engagement with Butler, Anderson’s desire is to shift the experience of vulnerability away from issues of violence, where it often belongs. The human response to vulnerability usually takes the form of a social mythology where violence is either to be avoided or imposed on others. But rather, we should allow vulnerability to lead us into an “openness to loving affection”128 and accountability in relations. This project was to take initial form in her proposal for a new “social imaginary” of vulnerability in two final, unpublished papers which are now published in this journal.129 But forgiveness does not feature explicitly in her outline of this imaginary, any more than it takes centre stage in the paper of 2017. forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability Through six papers we have traced Pamela Sue Anderson’s understanding of the impasse, and yet the possibility, of forgiveness. A constant feature has been her urging, in face of the struggle between forgiveness and justice, or between love and justice in forgiveness, to give time and space for a process of cognitive and emotional transformation to happen in which forgiveness can gradually emerge. Though in increasing convergence with my own view of the process of forgiveness, she has remained suspicious of accounts of the “journey” that make forgiveness too much of an initiating action, out of concern that this imposes demands upon women who are abused and oppressed. Her account seems to belong, in terms of this final paper, to what she calls a “phenomenological level” of vulnerability. If Pamela were here, I would ask her what place she finds for forgiveness in the active, “ethical level” of vulnerability within her social imaginary. And I would like to know whether, as a philosopher of religion, she sees a place for a vulnerable God within a new narrative by which we can live. The conversation must now remain openended, but then the best conversations always are. disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes 1 Pamela Sue Anderson, “A Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” in Forgiveness and Truth, eds. Alistair McFadyen and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: Clark, 2001) 145–56. 2 Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: Darton, 1989) 171–89. 3 Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, 2000) 191–223. 4 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 154. 5 Following my personal introduction about “Pamela” I will henceforth refer to her in a more academic way. 6 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 145, 147. 7 Ibid. 148–49. 8 Ibid. 152. 9 Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation 173–75; Fiddes, Participating in God 192–97. 10 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 151, cf. 152. 11 Ibid. 152. 12 Ibid. 155. 13 For an account of this shared journey, see Fiddes, Participating in God 206–10. 14 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 149, citing bell hooks, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (New York: Holt, 1997) v. 15 Ibid. 151, 150. 16 Paul S. Fiddes, “Memory, Forgetting and the Problem of Forgiveness. Reflecting on Volf, Derrida and Ricoeur” in Forgiving and Forgetting, eds. Hartmut Von Sass and Johannes Zachhuber (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015) 130–33. 17 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 152–53, citing Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 35–36, 104. 18 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 153. 19 Ibid. 155, citing Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1996) 6–7. 20 Anderson, “Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 155. 21 “An Ethics of Memory: Promising, Forgiving, Yearning” in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 243. 22 Ibid. 239–40. Women’s “yearning” was already a prominent theme in Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: 122 fiddes Blackwell, 1998): see, for example, 171–75, 213– 15, 225–26. 23 Ibid. 233. 24 Ibid. 234, 235. She notes (239) that Julia Kristeva affirms forgiveness as a “solution to the inertia of melancholia”: see Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) 189–90. 25 Pamela Sue Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (London: Ashgate, 2012) 104–05. 42 Ibid. 246. 43 Ibid. 255, citing Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good 34. 44 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 258. 45 Ibid. 255, citing bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990) 111. 46 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 257, referring to Ricoeur’s phrase “oneself inasmuch as being other” in Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 3. 47 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 255. 26 Ibid. 106–10, 142–46. 48 Ibid. 253. 27 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 234. 49 Ibid. 248. 28 Anderson, Re-visioning Gender 105. 50 Ibid. 251–52. 29 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 234. 51 Ibid 257. Cf. Fiddes, Creative Suffering of God 71–76. 30 Ibid. 237, citing Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998) 236–37. 31 Ibid. 236, citing Arendt, ibid. 183. 52 Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine (Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1999) 160–61, cited by Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 255–56, 255 n. 32 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 237–38. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 266–68. 54 Ibid. 261. 33 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 238. 55 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 236. 34 Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos” 7. 56 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 260. 35 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 242. 57 Ibid. 264. 36 See John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 3–28. 58 Ibid. 260. 37 Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 157–63. 60 Ibid. 265. 38 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Unselfing in Love: A Contradiction in Terms?” in Faith in the Enlightenment? The Critique of the Enlightenment Revisited, eds. Lieven Boeve, Joeri Schrijvers, Wessel Stoker, and Hendrik M. Vroom (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006) 257–61. 39 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970) 84; cf. “the long task of unselfing” in Iris Murdoch’s novel Henry and Cato (London: Chatto, 1976) 143. Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 247–49. 40 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 249. 41 Ibid. 253, 260–61. 123 53 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 260. 59 Ibid. 264. 61 Anderson, “A Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 152 n. 62 Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible” in Questioning God, eds. J.D. Caputo, M. Dooley, and M.J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 25–30. 63 Ibid. 28, cf. 8. 64 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Columbia UP, 2001) 32. 65 Fiddes, Participating in God 217–19; for an insistence on conditionality in forgiveness, see Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 83–85, 148–52, 160–62. forgiveness, empathy, vulnerability 66 Fiddes, “Memory, Forgetting and the Problem of Forgiveness” 126–27, 132–33. Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) 61– 69, similarly identifies an unconditional “compassion-forgiveness” and a conditional “absolution-forgiveness.” 83 The narrator always owes an “unpaid debt” to the past, the need to render past events their due by rendering them truthfully: Ricoeur, Memory, History and Forgetting 363–64; see also Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1984) 25–27. 67 Compare Miroslav Volf, who argues for eschatological forgetting: Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006) 203. For a criticism of Volf, see S. Hauerwas, “Why Time Cannot and Should Not Heal the Wounds of History But Time Has Been and Can Be Redeemed,” Scottish Journal of Theology 53 (2000): 42–43. 84 Ricoeur, Memory, History and Forgetting 502–03. 85 Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 34–39. 86 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 116. 87 Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation 178–79. 88 For more detail, see Fiddes, Participating in God 216–19. 68 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 260. 89 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 110. 69 The address was given at Mansfield College, Oxford, in a series whose theme was Getting it Right: Moral Issues of Today. 90 Ibid. 109; cf. Anderson, “A Feminist Ethics of Forgiveness” 151. See Drucilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex and Equality (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998) 8– 17, 182–86. 70 Pamela Sue Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness. When (Where?) Love and Justice Come Apart” in Paul Ricoeur: Honoring and Continuing the Work, ed. Farhang Erfani (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011) 107. 91 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 109. 92 Ibid. 110. 71 Ibid. 108, 112. 93 Ibid. 111. 72 Ibid. 109. 94 Ibid. 113. 73 Ibid. 114 n., referring to Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Katherine Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004) 457–506. 95 Fiddes, “Restorative Justice and the Theological Dynamic of Forgiveness,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 5.1 (2016): 64–65; Fiddes, Participating in God 209–10. 74 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 109. 96 Fiddes, Participating in God 210. 75 Ibid. 112; my emphasis. See bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (London: Women’s P, 1999) 119. 97 Acts 17.28. 76 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 115– 16 n. 77 Ibid. 108; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting 495. 78 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 107. 79 Ibid. 112. 80 Ibid. 108. 81 Ibid. 114–15 n. 82 See also Pamela Sue Anderson and Jordan Bell, Kant and Theology (London: Clark, 2010) 62–65. 98 Pamela Sue Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart: A Feminist Perspective on Restorative Justice and Intimate Violence,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 5.1 (2016): 113–34. 99 Ibid. 116–18. 100 See Anderson’s acknowledgement, in ibid. 118 n., of the similar idea in Joram Graf Haber, “Feminism and Forgiveness” in Norms and Values: Essays on the Work of Virginia Held, eds. Joran Graf Haber and Mark S. Halfon (Lanham, MD: Rowman, 1998) 146–47. 101 Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart” 114–16. She references (114 n.) Martha Nussbaum’s John Locke Lectures on 124 fiddes “Anger and Forgiveness” at the time (2014) in Oxford. 124 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 153. 102 Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart” 117. 125 Ibid. 147–48. 103 Ibid 123. 104 Ibid 134. 105 Ibid. 123. 106 Ibid. 116. 107 Fiddes, “Restorative Justice” 56. 108 Braithwaite, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation 14–16. 109 John Braithwaite, “Redeeming the ‘F’ Word in Restorative Justice,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 5.1 (2016) 84–86. 110 Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart” 130. 111 Ibid. 118, referencing Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982). 126 Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart” 115. 127 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 154, cf. 147–48. 128 Ibid. 150. 129 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary,” eds. Sabina Lovibond and A.W. Moore, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Spec. issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.1–2 (2020): 8–22; Anderson, “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion,” ed. Paul S. Fiddes, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Spec. issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.1–2 (2020): 46–53. 112 Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart” 128. 113 Ibid. 129. 114 Ibid. 116 n., 131 n. 115 Ibid. 121. 116 Fiddes, “Restorative Justice” 64. 117 Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 124. 118 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?” in Exploring Vulnerability, eds. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck, 2017) 147–62. 119 Ibid. 154–61. 120 Ibid. 158. 121 Ibid. 148–51. 122 See Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 106. 123 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 161, citing (for example) Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). Paul S. Fiddes Regent’s Park College Oxford Pusey Street Oxford OX1 2LB UK E-mail: paul.fi[email protected]