Forgiveness

The meaning of life

Image: Agnus dei, a painting in Madrid’s Prado Museum, by Francisco de Zurbarán.¹

Where to start? If you’ve ever tried to root out clover on your lawn, you’ll know what a knotty, never-ending process it is. You must locate the mother root, and dig that out in its entirety. And, to find it, you must follow the tendrils from the offshoots back towards the centre of the plant. What looks like an evenly planted field of trefoils is in fact a system of radial plant growths. And, just like the states of our world, these plants are in a turf war.

It’s a phrase often reserved for the kinds of conflicts that occur between rival gangs in deprived inner cities. They mark out their territory with colour coding, red and blue, or perhaps with tags, they patrol, on the look-out for rival gangs’ members, and they do this, not simply in order to be able to proclaim a certain ’hood as theirs but in order to exploit it for its resources and its potential: protection rackets, prostitution and drugs. Prostitution and drugs might be obvious as to what they mean, protection less so. Payment of money is demanded less in order to protect premises from attack and more as an incentive to avoid the payee from being the party who attacks them. A guarantee of freedom from attack is not given. Protection is somewhere between insurance as conceived in the mind of the insured, insurance as conceived in the mind of the insurer, the idea of a police force appointed by the state, and the simple fact that the state acts as the imposer of danger if the subject fails to obtemper his or her statutory obligations. On that score, nation states, like gangs, are in a turf war.

Getting to the heart of a matter can be equated to getting to its root, but they’re not necessarily the same thing. The heart of the attack by the United States on Iran last week lies in the fear held by the United States that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb. The root of the matter, on the other hand, lies in the fact that Iran says it is not developing a bomb and the United States says it doesn’t believe them. If my government were to suspect that I was building a nuclear bomb in my living room, they would send the police to search my premises and, if they found a bomb, I would go to prison; and if they didn’t they might apologise for the intrusion. But it is unlikely that, without a word of warning, they would fire a howitzer at my house and attempt to obliterate it. And, from that observation we can extrapolate this: that we cannot look to the ordinary, everyday explanations of how and why people act to explain the manner in which states act. We, and the states that govern us, are different.

To get to the root of the matter, if not its heart, let us then look to a source of inspiration that lies close at hand: the Holy Bible and, for Christians, the Old Testament thereof. In the beginning was the word. Well, before we go any further, for those who don’t know, I’m a believer. How I got to being a believer is another story; and what I believe in is another story yet, which I shall be touching upon in what follows. But, as far as the first sentence of the Holy Bible is concerned, I believe this: there is more to it than meets the eye; or, put more prosaically, it’s utter bollocks.

If the creation of the world, as we now know it to have occurred, lies somewhere millions of years ago, then at that moment, and for the ensuing several million years, words were not even a possibility. If there was anything in the beginning, it wasn’t a word. So, what word means is open to discussion.

Much of what is contained in the Old Testament is of questionable veracity. The people who populate it probably existed but, like Robin of Loxley and William Tell, a certain amount of legend must have arisen around these factual personages before the accounts contained in the Good Book were committed to parchment. Macklemore, the singer, in his song—rapped song—with Ryan Lewis and Mary Lambert, Same Love, describes the Bible as a book written three thousand years ago. Being a song—even a rapped song—one must allow Mr Haggerty a certain artist’s licence. For if this is the 2,025th year of our Lord, our Lord’s exploits can hardly have been written about a thousand years before he lived. Maybe he didn’t mean the whole Bible, but just the book of Leviticus, which forms the authoritative basis for prejudice against homosexuals, just as St Paul forms the basis for prejudice against prostitutes and St Mark forms the basis for prejudice against the rich, and against women who make profligate use of spikenard instead of selling it to benefit the poor. The Bible is a source for many propositions, but it is the fact of its being cited as authority for prejudice that most often takes the listener aback.

Judas Iscariot is the only disciple of Jesus not to be canonised: after all, he betrayed Jesus, so why would he be canonised? Canonisation is a process at least one of whose purposes is to give believers an example to follow, and the church is loth to hold Judas up as an example to follow. Yet, St Peter, as predicted by Jesus, denied Him three times before the cock crowed. But he was canonised. I don’t personally need Judas Iscariot to be canonised to hold him in my heart as an example to follow, because I do that anyway, and because of one thing that Judas did above all others. He showed remorse.

Remorse is an essential step in the process of healing wrong. It is completed by the stage known as forgiveness, and forgiveness is a strange concept, because it is at one and the same time a sentiment of love asked for by the sinner and conferred by the representative of God on Earth, usually a priest or a rabbi, or by God directly, if you’re protestant, and also a sentiment of love expressed independently of the request of the sinner by the sinner’s victim. When Mrs Yocheved Lifschitz, a peace activist in Israel who was taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October 2023, was released, she forgave them. Just like that. I doubt Hamas asked her to, but she did anyway, as the victim of their sin. Of relations of forgiveness between the peoples of the Earth and other conceptions of the deity, I have little or no knowledge, but that they exist can be taken as a certainty. I can be this certain because of one simple realisation. It is the means by which, as Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, we rise above nature: forgiveness is the meaning of life.

That is a bold statement for a Saturday lunchtime. To claim to know the meaning of life, as if a host of archangels had visited me in a dream last night and revealed this epiphany to me in my slumbers. I will, you’ll be heartened to know, make no attempt to deny that, for what I do not know I cannot deny. But nor can I deny what I feel to be true and truth does not stem from third-party authority, not ever. Rather, it stems from the ability of the holder of the truth to reason its veracity. Take it from me is nought but a quicksand on which to build the foundations of truth. Go and google it, even more so. I doubt whether you would very easily find a proposition to which your AI friend would respond in words akin to “That is utter claptrap.” I don’t think your endeavours would be so long in trying to find a real friend who’d say pretty much the same thing, however. Whether I say this or not, you will only hold it to be true if you can reason the same truth yourself. Maybe I can help. So what makes the forgiveness of sin the meaning of life?

According to Thomas Hobbes, a life that is spent in the conduct of war is nasty, brutish and short. It’s one man’s view (from his 1651 work Leviathan), but it’s a view expressed in terms that have ensured its citation for 375 years. Is it true, or is it a quicksand? Dentists tell us that the resilience of our teeth has not augmented along with our increased life expectancy. From that, they can guess that mankind was initially intended to live for about 40 years. A man who died in battle in aeons gone by might well have been regarded as old and wizened by the time he was 40 years of age. When Henry V of England won his country’s most astounding victory of any war, ever, at Agincourt, the king was not yet 30 years of age. He died seven years later.

But whether a life spent in the conduct of war is necessarily nasty, brutish and short depends on what you mean with the conduct of war. In short, whether you give, or take, the orders.

The Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War saw the greatest loss of life ever, in the history of the world, from a single military operation. Counting civilians and military losses, of the 3.2 million population of the city pre-war, over 1.5 million died. It’s a shocking thing to have to say this, but the Siege of Gaza, of more recent date, whose death toll is unconfirmed but likely to be in the region of 70,000, and the combined attacks by atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed a total of 200 to 250,000, pale in comparison, if not quite to insignificance, but pale nevertheless in comparison to the enormity that was Leningrad. It is worth noting that the siege was deemed post-war to have been within the bounds of legality.

So severe was the shortage of food that the people resorted to cannibalism, reports of which only seriously emerged more than 60 years later, so shocking were they. Dimitri Shostakovich’s seventh symphony has drawn criticism from musicologists for its platitudes, its melodramatic bursts of sentiment, and its length. The work is dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad and I’m given to wonder what kind of symphony dedicated to that event these critics would themselves have written. For two of Shostakovich’s four movements were written in the city, under constant bombardment, before he was eventually able to escape over the winter Road of Life, across the frozen Lake Ladoga. It’s not a symphony about the Siege of Leningrad, it’s a symphony written in the Siege of Leningrad. A siege that, for a good many Soviet citizens and soldiers, rendered their lives very nasty, very brutish and very short.

If you subscribe to the view, and this is different to what Hobbes himself said, that a life that is nasty, brutish and short is the life that we have been destined by fate to live, then you subscribe to a view that embraces war, conflict, aggravation, fighting, as a natural component of that life. And, whether or not its natural place in our lives is right or not, it is not the meaning of that life, for wanton destruction is not the meaning of anything. Destruction is a part of life, but not that which is wanton.

Now, here philosophy and palaeontology (and its related disciplines) need to accommodate each other, for the latter give us evidence of widespread destruction, through meteorites or floods or fire and brimstone, at various stages in the existence of our planet. But, whilst uncontrolled, that destruction lacks the quality of being wanton, because wantonness is a feature of acts that are committed by Mankind, not by nature. From the very first beginnings of Mankind on Earth, we know that he shared a quality along with the beasts of the planet: he killed other species for his supper. We do so today, as well, whether sheep, goats, cattle, chickens, we kill for our food. And so do carnivorous animals. The injunction contained in the Ten Commandments not to kill therefore requires to be reconsidered. Either the Bible proscribes the consumption of meat, or the injunction not to kill needs further qualification.

One of the central tenets of Christianity lies in a name that John the Baptist gave to Jesus upon first meeting him. He exclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.” (Gospel of St John, chapter 1, verse 29). Theologians tell us that the epithet of a lamb draws on the practice of sacrificing animals, especially young animals, who are thereby free from all sin. Whether even old animals are capable of sin within our human concept of the word is questionable, but John’s greeting tells even non-believers this: that he greeted Jesus as one free from sin who would end up removing the sin from mankind. Whether that’s in fact true doesn’t alter the fact it was said. And it was said because killing a sacrificial lamb was not a sin, unless the lamb were to take the form of a man. Thou shalt not kill must therefore be understood to mean other people and, perhaps even, beyond what is necessary. That last word then raises the source of many a problem in our world: what is necessary?

Just as the word forgiveness bears meanings that hail from two quite different directions—whether from the culprit who asks for it or the victim who offers it unasked—the word vengeance likewise portends two different ideas according to where they stem from. The avenger takes up the cause of a victim and, inspired by the perceived injustice wrought upon that victim, seeks to right the wrong by which he was been slain. Both forgiveness and vengeance know no time limits. Just as a wrong can be forgiven centuries after it was committed, vengeance can lie unwrought for a like period of time. Long-festering injuries can give rise to demands for apology, an act that is often resisted for reasons of legal liability (and, even if consented to, rings empty because of the need to have asked for the apology; Vladim Shishimarin, a Russian soldier convicted of war crimes in Ukraine, movingly offered a spontaneous apology to the family of the victim of his acts before being sentenced). Likewise, many major damages claims get settled out of court on an ad hoc basis but without admission of liability. Our modern legal systems have rendered transactional the spontaneous trigger that, but for that intervention, would lead us inexorably to the meaning of life: remorse.

The law, and particularly the law of insurance, is the single biggest block to our expression of remorse. And, contrarily, legal systems are precisely declared to be Mankind’s effort to state in secular terms the balancing of the rights and obligations that are supposed to be innately installed among the people of the Earth: natural law, they would have it. With its separate systems to regulate the relations between the State and its people (criminal law), among the people themselves (civil law), between the people and the administration of their State (administrative law), and between the State, its people and the corporations that natural persons set up as artificial persons (commercial law). All different, but natural laws. And, whilst all of these separate regimes rely on a single precept that is in fact drawn from God, none of them quite expresses that precept in the way religion does: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

The law is a riot of rights and obligations. For a right to exist, it must be enforceable against one on whom is incumbent an equal and opposite obligation. He who owes a sum of money owes it to someone who has an entitlement to claim that sum of money. The one has an obligation; the other, a right. The law is somewhat vaguer on the rights and obligations that involve third parties, however, and there are oodles of them: rights possessed by parties who owe no obligation, or deny the existence thereof, to those who suffer at the consequences of their exercise.

For example, leaving aside the theological arguments advanced for the Jewish occupation of the country known as Israel, it is commonly recognised that the problems surrounding the State of Israel stem from an undertaking by one nation (Great Britain) to accord another nation (Israel) the right to occupy the land of a third nation (Palestine), in circumstances under which there was little or no consultation with that third nation, which, at the time of the declaration, was under the authority of yet a fourth nation (the Turkish Empire). The theological claim by the Jews neatly evades this mish-mash of legal authority, of anyone to declare anything in favour of anyone else, by citing God’s designation of the Jews as His chosen people as the sine qua non authority to occupy Israel, an argument that meets with cynicism outside the world of Jewry, but which is, ultimately, far easier to reconcile than the Balfour Declaration has ever been. If the Holocaust was the ultimate moral argument in favour of the establishment of Israel as a State, Germany must have breathed an eternal sigh of relief at the land concession granted in the Bible, for that also absolved it of any duty to grant a concession of land from its own territory, which may explain the vehemence with which the country has supported the State of Israel ever since (viz. in the location in which it is de facto located).

By circumventing the concept of forgiveness in its entirety (for example, English law does not accept the concept of a gift, and will seek to derive fiscal or property transfer ramifications for any exchange of property that is effected without consideration), law, the means by which Mankind regulates the society in which it lives, is precisely the negation of the meaning of the life for which that society lives. Whereas God’s injunction is forgiveness, the injunction of Man’s law has the effect of deeming settlement of inequality out of generosity as transactional, for the sole purpose of implying that it entitles the State to a resultant fiscal charge. The State deems inequality to exist in situations from which it can profit from their settlement. God offers settlement free of charge—literally— for the asking. Tax and rain may be the two great inevitabilities of life, but only one of them is a construct of Man.

Tax is a form of vengeance: it is predicated on an obligation founding in the ability to pay, and a right possessed by the taxing authority to ingather the amounts due for the purpose of reallocating them to the benefit of the deserving or the benefit of all (whether deserving or not). Insofar, government avenges the needs of the deserving by attacking the ability to pay of the affluent. This it does on the basis of a statute worded in order to justify the vengeance: the righting of wrongs contained in tax statutes. If income and resources were consistently distributed in a manner thought just by all and sundry, there would be no tax system. No one would appoint battalions of tax collectors to sit and not collect taxes. Instead, they would just abolish the tax rules. Since fiscality is a means to set things right, to put people in the position that the state believes they ought to be in, neither tax nor vengeance can then be construed as the meaning of life: the meaning of life cannot be to restore things to the ordinary course of life. Much more, it has to be the purpose for which life is even restored.

To recap: we have a situation in which killing is allowed by God where it is necessary, providing always that it is never necessary to kill another human being.

Vengeance, while being an act to restore something that is unjust to a state of justice, cannot therefore comprise killing. Perhaps monetary compensation, but not death. The notion of vengeance then becomes a construct of law, which takes it outside the realm of forgiveness and renders it a settlement ultimately inspired by fiscal considerations, or even an excuse for theft, generally.

Animals do not have the capacity to process feelings of forgiveness. When roebucks do battle for the favours of a female, they may engage in social behaviour that can be likened to how human boys woo their girlfriends, and the methods may differ (slightly), but, unlike the roebuck, the boyfriend may subsequently harbour feelings of recrimination. Our ability to hold a grudge is unparalleled in the animal world. Many who acquiesce in defeat for want of any other option would secretly much prefer to wreak vengeance. But neither acquiescence nor vengeance is a guarantor of survival. He who acquiesces may be perceived as showing a weakness that his attacker, or another attacker, may wish to take advantage of. And he who seeks vengeance may simply provoke sentiments of injustice on the part of the avenger’s victim, thus creating a vicious circle.

The circular system of injustice, vengeance, acquiescence and counter-attack relies heavily on qualities we attribute to power. Strength nowadays can be muscular, or expressed in terms of military hardware. Surprisingly, there is one nation state in the entire world that has a military presence approximating to zero, and whose power, or strength, is predicated on something quite different from its army.

The Vatican City, or Holy See, the truncated form of which is a product of a treaty from 1922 with the then Italian fascist regime, nevertheless exudes great influence the world over, and it does so out of a diplomatic and theologically reasoned application of the power of love. Whereas many fighting nations proclaim with apparent confidence that God is with us, this is something that is not proclaimed by the Holy See. Instead the Pope declares, we are with God. The love that the Pope preaches is underpinned by the very reason why the Lamb of God was sent to take away our sins. With a simple confession of remorse, every person’s sin can be removed for the asking. Forgiven. By God, and by its victim, if victim there is. The readiness that the world demonstrates to drop bombs instead of forgiving is stark evidence that forgiveness is by far the more powerful of the two, if only because it is so very difficult to summon.

You don’t need to be of a given religious persuasion, or of any, to see and reason this. If you dismiss it, and place instead your faith in the power of bombs to regulate the world, then yours is a system that has consistently failed in its mission for thousands of years. And mine is one that succeeded consummately for over 250,000 years before yours took over, with the discovery that gunpowder has different uses than just fireworks.

The only state in which an individual can be at one with themselves and their world is harmony. And harmony is not achievable through application of force in favour of purported interests. The application of force in favour of purported interests only ever produces disharmony, even if it may for a while produce satisfaction on the part of the party exercising the force. Forgiveness is the expression of harmony, and harmony is what allows all to thrive, until Mother Nature deems an exit. That is why forgiveness is the meaning of life: it cultivates and nurtures life. It gives life the best possible conditions for endurance and enjoyment. It removes the nastiness, the brutality and the shortness from life. It abolishes selfishness. It gives meaning. Meaning to life.

Harmony manifests itself outwardly to all in one’s environs. But it starts in the individual. If our environs lack harmony, it is not in our environs that we must seek the reason why. It is in ourselves, and therein lies another story and a fundamental difference of world view: the power of resistance.

The tendency of some philosophies is to manifest resistance in order to protect that which belongs to the community. It contrives a unity that seeks to resist outward influences as foreign, unwanted, threatening. There can be merit to this attitude, especially if what threatens the community does in fact threaten to subsume it, or even annihilate it. But other philosophies seek to build resistance by challenging the individual themselves: in short they do not seek to contrive unity to challenge the identified extraneous influence, but the individual is exhorted to seek the elements within themselves that work to create conflict; and by overcoming that inner conflict, harmony ensues across society as night follows day. Such, at least, is the theory, and no theory is perfect. But understanding how one approach differs from the other is key to understanding the whole. A part of today’s whole is understanding the mutual fear and anger expressed between Islamic and putatively Christian countries, and the Jewish one.

The task that lies before the world is to turn that fear and anger into respect and harmony. And the key lies in the meaning of life.

The phenomenal gift that has been bestowed upon us as a race is to reason and decide for ourselves. It has given us the ingenuity and the inventiveness to do great things, to conquer frontiers and to tame the wilder aspects of our environment. But the greatest challenge to our powers of reasoning does not lie in invention or conquest or discovery, unless it be the conquest and discovery of ourselves as individuals. The challenge is to question the blithe manner in which we label things as counter-intuitive. The capitalist seeks innovation. That’s what those I know tell me. Well, I have a gage to throw before them, one that demands intuition and innovation: how to inventively remove the pursuit of their own vested interests from the world they share with us, to conquer new ways of thinking, and thereby to discover, to the wonder of all, that all our interests are thereby much better served.

1. By Unknown author - http://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/online-gallery/on-line-gallery/obra/agnus-dei-the-lamb-of-god/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160338.