Allow me to indulge in a public confession: of all the tenets of Catholicism, the one I struggle with the most is forgiveness. We are called to forgiveness – and through confession we seek it ourselves – but it challenges me. I recognise that such tension suggests importance: forgiveness is a radical act and request. Yet I am unable to reconcile it with what often feels like the messy reality of life.
For those reasons, I was drawn to a new book, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, by Matthew Ichihashi Potts (Yale University Press). Potts is a theologian with a compelling backstory. A Navy veteran and an Episcopal clergyman who has ministered in other Protestant churches, he was intellectually formed in a Catholic space – the University of Notre Dame – before earning his doctorate at Harvard. He has written of Cormac McCarthy’s sacramental sense. Clearly, Potts is interested in how Catholicism shapes essential writers of contemporary fiction.
Potts brings a fresh vision to forgiveness. Early in the book, he anchors his approach – and introduces the stakes. He wonders “what a Christian forgiveness that rooted itself in grief would look like”, and how centring grief might affect “our moral theology”. True forgiveness, he argues, “will and must challenge the assumptions and test the boundaries of our moral instincts themselves”.
For Potts, this strain is healthy, at least in terms of our lives as faithful Christians. The strain that forgiveness causes us is not evidence of the “unreality or impossibility” of forgiveness, but instead “the hidden limitations of our moral reasoning”. Potts’s willingness to acknowledge the difficulty of his project early in the book is heartening and humble.
Rather than avoid “the incoherences and contradictions of scriptural forgiveness”, Potts argues that we should contemplate them. He offers a reformulation: we might “think of sin not as debt to God but as distance from God”. Then, “If sin is distance, then God’s love will be signalled by the chasm Christ crosses to meet us rather than the torture he bears to win us. If sin is distance, then God’s love reaches rather than redeems.”
In Potts’s view, part of our struggle with forgiveness comes from our unwillingness to recognise its complexity. “Forgiveness,” he writes, “is not reconciliation.” It would be obtuse to assume that because we ask for – and receive – forgiveness, that a friendship or relationship is mended. The past remains, and Potts does well to outline how sin and pain mark us.
His goal in the book “is to show that the intuitive associations among sin, punishment, and forgiveness that so thoroughly undergird our morals also largely pervade Christian doctrine, all the while obscuring other moral and theological possibilities.” To do this, Potts turns to literature. His reasoning: “contemporary literature wrestles with forgiveness most admirably, in a way that mimics scripture’s similar complexities”. Literature “allows forgiveness to be a problem… it doesn’t aim to clean up the mess forgiveness leaves”.
His choices of texts are sound: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, LaRose by Louise Erdrich and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Each is a compelling, complex work by a talented writer – and the latter two are some of the most notable contemporary American Catholic writers of fiction. Yet Erdrich and Morrison’s Catholicism is largely absent from Potts’s analysis.
In his introduction, Potts warns: “this is not a work of literary history or of literary criticism in the usual sense.” This is a reasonable disclaimer from a theologian venturing into literary waters. Potts is a deft, creative reader of literature, but his omission of the Catholicism of Erdrich and Morrison feels like a lost opportunity.
LaRose is nominally treated as a Catholic work, with no engagement with how the religion and culture defined (and complicated) Erdrich’s life. My main concern is with the section on Morrison. The late Nobel Prize winner is one of the great American Catholic writers, yet neither her Catholicism nor the deeply Catholic nature of Beloved is engaged with here. The paradoxes of Morrison’s Catholic identity are the types of tensions that Potts thinks a discussion of forgiveness might reveal.
Despite such an omission, Potts offers a new way to imagine Morrison’s classic novel. Beloved, he believes, is a novel about the limits of forgiveness. In the book, Sethe, a formerly enslaved person, is haunted by the nightmarish conditions of her captivity, and commits a hellish act: she kills her daughter so that her child would never experience such a life. When a mysterious woman named Beloved appears years later, Sethe realises the woman is an apparition of sorts – the bodily form of her dead daughter’s spirit.
The result is a horrific, hypnotising story. As Potts notes, “Sethe seeks desperately for her act to be justified and wants that justification to warrant forgiveness, but at the same time she also intuits that any justification will misapprehend the terrible stakes of her rough choice. It will obscure the sinful, racist frame that consigned her to it.” Potts encapsulates Sethe’s moral conundrum as “the impossible temptation of justification; it makes her believe that the past can be restored, and even if the facts of it cannot be changed, at least they can be made right instead of wrong.”
That is an illuminating frame for a novel. Forgiveness offers much for Catholics to ponder.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.