"Car ils ne savent pas ce qu'ils font" : au coeur du pardon et de sa dynamique spirituelle

This thesis is a multidisciplinary approach to the concept of interpersonal forgiveness. Its purpose is to unearth the scope and dynamics of forgiveness, as it seeks to answer the question, Why forgive? Up until recently, there has been a dearth of literature on the subject of forgiveness. Then over the past 20 years, an escalation of psychotherapeutic research on forgiveness started to emerge as psychologists awakened to its healing benefits. Over the same time period, a number of philosophers and theologians also began publishing on the subject.  Two hypotheses benchmark the research. The first one concerns the meaning of the second half of the biblical quote, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” found in Luke 23:34. This hypothesis claims that the “motive of ignorance” is universal in scope, and purports that the offender is ignorantly unaware of his wrongdoing. Forgiveness of an offense can thus be interpreted as the forgiveness of ignorance. The second hypothesis claims that interpersonal forgiveness can be understood as a spiritual dynamic, but with the loosening of its religious ties. We believe the forgiveness–spirituality relationship to be a significant one, and that a deeper understanding of it will bring us closer to the fundamental nature and gift of forgiveness, thereby facilitating its realization. However, to determine the value of this hypothesis, we must consider both the process of forgiveness, and the contemporary definition of spirituality. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part depicts authors who discuss forgiveness through the lens of the four academic disciplines concerned with forgiveness: philosophy, theology, psychology, and spirituality. Issues that are covered include what is forgivable and what is not, and conditional versus unconditional forgiveness. Correlates of forgiveness, such as forgetting, anger, repentance, guilt, as well as results of psychotherapeutic empirical studies, are examined. A reflection on the concept of spirituality and how it relates to forgiveness concludes this first part. In the second part, we examine the hypothesis concerning the meaning and scope of the biblical quote “for they know not what they do,” and look at what the exegetic expertise has to say about its authenticity and meaning. This is followed by a historical interpretation of free will in major philosophical thinking in order to grasp its true sense, and its impact on the concept of personal responsibility. This philosophical questioning of free will brings us back to the Socratic thesis, “No one commits wrongdoing voluntarily.” Finally, the mimetic theory of René Girard contends that persecutors are fundamentally unaware and ignorant of what they are doing, and the theologian Lytta Basset argues that the illusion of knowing what is good and what is evil contributes to the ignorance that ignores itself. The third part of the thesis integrates the reflections and insights of the first two parts, as it brings forgiveness from the unforgivable endpoint to the healing endpoint. This is conceptualized in a schematic matrix of vertical and horizontal interactions. We discover that if the phrase “for they know not what they do” offers a reason-able answer to the question Why forgive? there is as well a second way that leads to forgiveness—love. Love is the key to forgiveness based on the evangelical message, while empathy is the primary means in the psychotherapeutic approach. Comparing “psychotherapeutic forgiveness” with “evangelical forgiveness” leads us to conclude that there are, in effect, two principal ways to access the gift of forgiveness—reason and love.

Keyphrases: Ignorance, Forgiveness, Spirituality, Ignorance, Unawareness, Mimesis, Evil, Wrongdoing, Free will, Love, Luke 23-34