Satisfaction, then forgiveness

In his book Responsibility and Atonement, Richard Swinburne argues that whenever a person is morally guilty she is always guilty towards someone.Footnote ³ That is, when an agent does something that is morally wrong, this wrong is never done in a vacuum, but rather there is always some person that is the victim of this wrong act. For example, if Jack breaks his promise to Mary, Jack has failed in his obligation to keep his word to her. Likewise, if Mary loses her temper and speaks unkindly to Jack, she has failed in her obligation to treat Jack with respect. Any time a person fails in one of her moral obligations, she has failed to act towards another person as she ought, and in doing so she acquires moral debt.Footnote ⁴ Even when a crime appears to be victimless, Swinburne suggests that insofar as we are all beneficiaries of God, we owe God the ultimate obligation: our entire lives, perfect and unblemished.Footnote ⁵ So even if we suppose that a wrong action does not directly harm another person, the wrongdoer has still failed in her obligations towards God. Hence no matter the sin that a person commits, a failure in one's moral obligations always involves a victim and it always incurs a moral debt.

This point bears important consequences for Swinburne's theory of forgiveness. Since all wrongdoing involves a violation of one's moral obligations, when a person does something wrong her offence is never merely a past action. Rather, all wrongdoing incurs a debt towards the person(s) wronged, and that debt remains until it is paid. Forgiveness, according to Swinburne, is the act whereby a victim releases a wrongdoer from the moral debt that she has incurred. If we take a financial debt as an example, when a banker forgives the debtor what she owes, then that debtor is now no longer a debtor. Forgiveness thus occurs when the victim of a morally wrong act releases the wrongdoer from the moral debt that she bears towards him, and when the victim treats the wrongdoer as one who had not committed a morally wrong act (i.e. as one who is no longer a debtor).

While forgiveness on this account may appear to eliminate the debt that a wrongdoer bears, this supposition is not entirely correct. Instead, forgiveness is the final stage in the process of removing guilt for Swinburne. In his words, ‘For perfect removal of guilt, the wrongdoer must make atonement for his wrong act, and the victim must forgive him.’Footnote ⁶ Not only is satisfaction necessary for the payment of one's moral debt and the removal of one's moral guilt, but the order of events is important on Swinburne's schema, for satisfaction must precede forgiveness.Footnote ⁷

There are of course some cases when paying the debt incurred from a morally wrong act is easier than others. The example that Swinburne gives is one person stealing another's watch. If the thief is truly repentant, he can eliminate the consequences of his action by returning the stolen watch, which removes the harm caused by the act of stealing, and thus repays the debt that was incurred by this wrong action.Footnote ⁸ However, not all cases are as simple as this one. Suppose Simon was driving while intoxicated and hit his friend Dylan, leaving Dylan paralysed.Footnote ⁹ In this case Simon has incurred a debt, yet the payment of that debt cannot be complete since the harm caused by his act will remain despite Simon's attempts to rectify the damages. Nonetheless, although the consequences cannot be fully undone in this case, Swinburne suggests that guilt can be removed as long as the guilty person does everything in his power to remove the effects of his crime. Thus removing the consequences of a wrong action does not necessarily require success, but rather the wrongdoer's best effort. Once the wrongdoer has completed the act(s) of satisfaction, the only thing that remains on Swinburne's schema for the removal of guilt is forgiveness.Footnote ¹⁰ When the victim grants forgiveness, the wrongdoer has completed the process of removing his guilt.

Suppose a wrongdoer does not seek to make satisfaction for his offence though – could a victim, on this account, still forgive him? For Swinburne, the answer is complicated.Footnote ¹¹ The victim can of course forgive the wrongdoer in the sense that she can treat the wrongdoer as one who no longer owes her a moral debt – she can choose to stop being angry towards the wrongdoer, she can decide to hold a grudge no longer, etc. But Swinburne suggests that if no act of satisfaction is made then she should withhold forgiveness, for when a victim forgives a wrong done to her without the wrongdoer making satisfaction, he argues that she has trivialized the wrong act, the importance of morally good acts, and, perhaps most importantly, human relationships, ‘for it supposes that good human relations can exist when we do not take each other seriously’ as moral agents.Footnote ¹² Thus while the victim could conceivably choose to forgive a wrong act committed against her even if no attempt at satisfaction is made, on Swinburne's view she should withhold forgiveness in such cases. We might be inclined to reply that, insofar as Swinburne argues that forgiveness involves a victim disowning the wrong act and treating the wrongdoer as if he had not wronged her, the victim can forgive without satisfaction being made. However, while he acknowledges that there is some limited sense in which the victim can forgive a wrongdoer without satisfaction, this sort of forgiveness does not remove guilt or reconcile the sinner and the victim. Moreover, it is actually a bad action on the part of the victim since it requires her to trivialize sin. Thus in Swinburne's words, ‘A victim's disowning of a hurtful act is only to be called forgiveness when it is in response to at least some minimal attempt at atonement . . .’Footnote ¹³ So for Swinburne, satisfaction should precede forgiveness in order for forgiveness to release a person from the moral debt incurred by sin.

If we accept this conception of satisfaction and forgiveness, it would follow for a theory of the atonement that Christ's work serves to repay our moral debt to God that we incurred by sin, and thereby pave the way for God to forgive us. Without Christ's works of satisfaction, God could not forgive us without trivializing human sin. In the following section I will argue that this approach to forgiveness, and its subsequent implication for a theory of the atonement, is mistaken.Footnote ¹⁴

Forgiveness as a manifestation of love

While there are many features of Swinburne's account of forgiveness that are helpful in theorizing about the atonement, I suggest that it gets the order of forgiveness and satisfaction wrong. To begin to see why, we should note that if satisfaction must precede forgiveness it appears to eliminate the need for forgiveness. For example, suppose Jack owes Mary $1,000 and has been making payments to her over the course of a year. If Jack makes the final payment and Mary tells him that his debt is forgiven, his confusion would be justified. After all, Mary did not forgive Jack – he paid her back in full. If satisfaction involves paying back a moral debt, then it would appear that once satisfaction is made it eliminates the need for forgiveness. Swinburne could of course reply to this objection by noting that satisfaction does not need to repay the victim in full, but rather the wrongdoer simply needs to make his best effort towards making amends in order for satisfaction to be complete. Yet this is not entirely satisfying, for since one of the primary problems of sin on this view is that it incurs a moral debt, and since satisfaction and forgiveness are intended to work towards eliminating that debt, then we still have a form of ‘book balancing’ on such a view. Indeed, while a work of satisfaction will not be able to repay a moral debt fully, it will be offering some form of partial payment for a wrongdoer's debt. However, this would mean that when the victim forgives one who has wronged her, she has not forgiven the whole offence, but only the portion that remains unpaid by the wrongdoer's works of satisfaction. To put it in somewhat crude terms, it appears to make the victim into something like a debt collector: knowing that she cannot receive full payment for what is owed to her, she is willing to take a small amount towards the debt and cancel the rest, even though the rest is still justly owed. This is not how we intuitively think of forgiveness though, for it appears to turn it into some sort of trading game between the victim and her wrongdoer.Footnote ¹⁵

Swinburne may have resources to avoid the above worry, but even if we concede that this point is not damaging to his view, difficulties nevertheless remain. As we recall, forgiveness on Swinburne's view is when a victim releases a wrongdoer from a debt and treats that wrongdoer as if he had never harmed her. This forgiveness, however, is only morally appropriate once the wrongdoer has first made some attempt at satisfaction. Yet as Swinburne notes, there are some acts that the wrongdoer cannot fully repay. Return to the example where the intoxicated Simon hits Dylan with his car. On Swinburne's view, before Dylan can morally forgive Simon, it is necessary that Simon make some sort of satisfaction, which involves making an effort to repay the debt he owes to Dylan. Yet even if Simon does everything in his power to make amends, the fact remains that he has committed this grave act, and no matter how badly he feels or what he tries to do to fix his crime, his efforts will never be able to fully repay Dylan, nor will they undo the consequences of his wrong act. While Swinburne's account does not require Simon to fully repay Dylan, it is nevertheless the case that whatever he does to make amends will not necessitate Dylan's forgiveness. To put this another way, Dylan's forgiveness is never owed to Simon regardless of what satisfaction Simon makes. Swinburne would agree that the victim never owes a wrongdoer forgiveness, but if we think of moral wrongdoing as incurring a debt, then if that wrongdoer is truly repentant and has done everything in his power to repay the victim for his actions, our intuition is that the victim should forgive the wrongdoer.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus on this account it would seem that acts of satisfaction put an obligation on the victim to forgive the wrongdoer (even when forgiveness is difficult for the victim).Footnote ¹⁷

While I will argue later that there is indeed an obligation on the part of the victim to forgive a wrongdoer, this duty is not in response to any satisfaction that the wrongdoer makes. This is because forgiveness, whatever else it is, is not an act of justice. For example, a common account of justice is that it involves giving someone what is due to him based on the circumstances.Footnote ¹⁸ No matter what Simon does to repay Dylan though, he can never pay him enough to fix the wrong of paralysing him, and thus Dylan never owes Simon forgiveness (i.e. Dylan is never obligated to release Simon from the moral debt he owes, nor to treat Simon as one who does not owe a moral debt, especially since Simon does, at least seemingly, owe a debt). Indeed, since many wrongs harm a victim in a way that cannot be fully repaid, whenever a wrongdoer asks his victim for forgiveness the victim is never under an obligation of justice to grant this forgiveness. Dylan could thus justly refuse to forgive Simon.

Since forgiveness is not a matter of justice it should be clear that forgiveness is never due to a wrongdoer. Instead, it is love, not justice, that motivates forgiveness. As Eleonore Stump has noted, for Thomas Aquinas there are two main characteristics/desires of love: (1) the desire for the good of the beloved, and (2) the desire for union with the beloved.Footnote ¹⁹ If a person truly loves another, then she will have these two desires and act so as to bring about the actualization of these desires. Contrariwise, if either (or both) of these desires are missing, then that person does not have love.Footnote ²⁰ In fact, the best way to think of forgiveness is as a manifestation of love characterized by maintaining or reinstating the desires of love towards one who has wronged you.Footnote ²¹

If we characterize forgiveness in this way, then a victim can forgive a wrongdoer independently of an act of satisfaction. As Stump explains, ‘A person can forgive unilaterally, as she can love unrequitedly.’Footnote ²² Her comparison with unrequited love is helpful here, for it serves to illustrate that forgiveness can be given independently of any action on the part of the wrongdoer. In the same way that a man can love a woman, meaning that he desires her good as well as union with her, and yet find that love unreturned, a victim can forgive the person who has wronged her and yet have the desires of love unfulfilled. This is to say that, even if a wrongdoer is unrepentant, the victim can still desire the wrongdoer's good and union with him (thus forgiving him) even if he does not make satisfaction.Footnote ²³ To illustrate this point, suppose that after Simon wrongs Dylan, Dylan refuses to forgive him. While this would be an understandable reaction considering the circumstances, such a refusal would not be motivated by the desire for union with Simon or the desire for Simon's good. Indeed, a refusal to forgive will likely involve precisely the opposite desires! If Dylan becomes willing to forgive Simon though, it would involve love insofar as it would require Dylan to desire some degree of union with Simon (even if only the limited union that follows from no longer desiring to be distant from him) as well as some desire for Simon's good (even if this is only the general desire that one might have for all of humanity, e.g. that nothing bad should befall him, that he is generally happy, etc.). In other words, when Dylan forgives Simon he reinstates the desires of love.

While we may be inclined to grant that forgiveness necessarily involves love, it may nevertheless still be true that forgiveness is a matter of justice. For instance, I have been arguing from a Thomistic position, but Aquinas himself seems to provide an argument that suggests that forgiveness is, in fact, owed to the wrongdoer. As Aquinas puts it, we ought to love God as a matter of precept,Footnote ²⁴ and it is not possible to love God and yet fail to love our neighbour: ‘God is the principle object of charity, while our neighbor is loved out of charity for God's sake.’Footnote ²⁵ Because the primary object of the virtue of charity is God, it follows that we have an obligation to love our neighbour; in other words, love is due to our neighbour, which means that the actions of charity (such as forgiving one who has wronged us) are also a matter of justice. This conclusion appears even more certain on this framework when we recall that Jesus commands us to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’Footnote ²⁶ – indeed, even commanding us to love our enemiesFootnote ²⁷ – which Aquinas views as a divine edict.Footnote ²⁸ To fail to love our neighbour would thus be to fail to obey God, which would be a violation of justice. As Aquinas puts it, ‘All wills, by a kind of necessity of justice, are bound to obey the divine command.’Footnote ²⁹ Insofar as forgiveness is a matter of love and love is a matter of justice, forgiveness could be construed as a matter of justice after all.

While this line of thought is enticing, we must be careful here. Aquinas is correct to point out a duty to love our neighbour, yet an obligation on the part of a victim to love/forgive does not correspond to a right on the part of the wrongdoer to that victim's forgiveness.Footnote ³⁰ To provide an example for this claim, on Aquinas’ view a rich man has an obligation to care for those in need, but it does not follow that a poor man has a right to that particular rich man's property. To illustrate this, suppose a rich man, Bernard, has a poor friend, George, who needs $100 to pay for a textbook that he cannot afford (and suppose that George has a genuine need for this book, and that possessing this book will help to bring about his well-being). If Bernard is really George's friend, and if he can afford to help, then he will buy that book for him; indeed, if Bernard has the virtue of charity, then he has an obligation to help George if he is able (after all, acts of charity for Aquinas are matters of precept). In this scenario George does not have a right to Bernard's $100 – in fact it is doubtful that he has a right to that particular textbook. But if Bernard wants to act as his friend (i.e. exercise the virtue of charity) then he has an obligation to help him in any way that he reasonably can. Here we have a case where obligations and rights are not correlative, and thus while some rights might correspond to certain duties, it should be clear that there are cases when one person's duty does not entail another's right.

Likewise, Aquinas is correct to suggest that there is an obligation to love, and therefore to forgive, but this does not entail a wrongdoer's right to his victim's forgiveness. So although it would be wrong for the victim to withhold forgiveness, the wrongdoer has not been treated unjustly if the victim refuses to forgive him. Since forgiveness is morally obligatory from the perspective of the victim but is not a right to which the wrongdoer is entitled (regardless of what he does to make satisfaction), we can maintain that forgiveness is not a matter of justice, but rather a matter of love. Hence even though there is an obligation on the part of the victim to forgive, this is no impediment to claiming that forgiveness can and should precede satisfaction.Footnote ³¹

There are additional objections that might be raised to the position I have been defending – objections that can be taken both from Aquinas’ texts and from Scripture. Aquinas suggests that in order for God's forgiveness to be complete in the sacrament of penance, the sinner must repent.Footnote ³² Moreover, God's forgiveness is productive of good in the wrongdoer, and since many sinners are seemingly not made good by the unilateral forgiveness I have promoted here, it would seem to follow that God's forgiveness is not unilateral after all, but instead is conditional upon (at least) the repentance of the wrongdoer. If this is right, then Aquinas does not support the view I have defended, but rather one closer to that of Swinburne.

Likewise, there are many passages in Scripture that appear to indicate that forgiveness is conditional upon our prayer and/or action. For example, in Matthew 6 when Jesus is teaching the apostles how to pray, he says that we ought to ask God to ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’.Footnote ³³ Similarly, in the same chapter, Jesus says, ‘But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.’Footnote ³⁴ Furthermore, in Matthew 18 Jesus tells the story of a servant who is forgiven a great debt only to refuse to forgive a much smaller debt incurred by a fellow servant. The master then revokes his forgiveness from the first servant and sends him to debtor's prison.Footnote ³⁵ The term that is often used to refer to the consequences of sin (i.e. that which must be forgiven) in passages such as these is some variation of the word ‘ὀϕειλή’ (opheilē), which is most literally translated as ‘a debt’, or ‘that which is owed’.Footnote ³⁶ Swinburne's account of moral wrongdoing suggests that a moral debt is one of the chief consequences of sin, and these passages in Scripture seem to confirm his claim. If this is correct, then it is likely that one of the primary purposes of forgiveness is to eliminate this moral debt. More importantly, both Aquinas’ position on penance and these Scripture passages can also be taken to support Swinburne's claim that some kind of satisfaction must come before forgiveness, for it would appear that forgiveness is conditional upon the actions of the sinner (e.g. doing penance, forgiving others, etc.).

While I take these to be potentially serious objections to the position I have defended, I do not think that they require us to endorse a view like Swinburne's. To begin to see why this is the case, consider the use of the term ‘debt’ in these Scripture passages. The term ‘debt’ is often used in Scripture to refer to the consequences of sin (and therefore seemingly the thing that forgiveness addresses), but note that such a term can be used in three different ways: univocally, equivocally, or analogically. My suggestion is that this term is used analogically in these passages, and thus Scripture does not support Swinburne's understanding of moral debt or the subsequent process whereby that debt is removed. This becomes clear when we notice the difference between monetary debt and moral debt: a monetary debt is the sort of thing that could be repaid, whereas a moral debt is not. For example, if Jack borrows $100 from Mary, he can reasonably be expected to pay her back. Yet imagine that Jack's income is relatively low, and that he borrows a sum of money from Mary that far exceeds his ability to repay her. In fact, not only does Jack not have the money to repay Mary, but even if he works for the rest of his life he will never earn enough to repay his debt. It seems clear that Mary might forgive a debt like this, and thus forgiveness can occur in the way that Swinburne suggests (as long as Jack performs some act of satisfaction prior to Mary's forgiveness). Yet notice that this example is not identical to moral debt, for moral debt is not the sort of thing that could be repaid. For instance, suppose that Jack steals one of Mary's family heirlooms, and in the process of trying to sell it he accidentally destroys it. Now suppose that Jack becomes penitent and wishes to receive Mary's forgiveness. Mary could still forgive Jack in the Swinburnian sense, but the debt that Jack has incurred in this example is of a different sort from that incurred when he borrowed a large sum of money. Given that the heirloom had great intrinsic and sentimental value to Mary, even if Jack could pay Mary for the cost of replacing the heirloom, he cannot repay her for the lost sentimental value, nor can he pay her for the breach of trust that occurred as a result of his theft. The debt incurred in each case is different, for in the case of monetary debt Jack at least could repay Mary (even if he never in fact does), but in the case of the stolen heirloom Jack cannot repay Mary. This suggests that the use of the term ‘debt’ in Scripture is not being used univocally. However, these passages seem to make it clear that the wrongdoer owes the victim some kind of reparation, and it is thus unlikely that this term is being used equivocally. Hence it would seem that ‘debt’ is being used analogically in these passages.

Furthermore, one of the major consequences of a moral debt that the foregoing highlights is not merely the material damage done to a victim,Footnote ³⁷ but also the psychological damage done to the victim (and to the wrongdoer), as well as the damage done to any relationship that existed (or might have existed) between victim and wrongdoer.Footnote ³⁸ These are, to my mind, much graver consequences than the material consequences of moral wrongdoing, and whatever reparations are made they will never be able to repay the victim for this sort of damage. Moreover, it will still remain the case that even if such damage could be repaid in full, no reparations can necessitate the victim's forgiveness. Because of this, nothing in the foregoing gives us reason to think that the victim's forgiveness must wait for the wrongdoer's act(s) of satisfaction. Indeed, forgiving a wrongdoer in the absence of reparations need not trivialize the wrong done to oneself, or the moral agency of the wrongdoer, for there is nothing logically inconsistent in both desiring the good of the wrongdoer and union with the wrongdoer while simultaneously recognizing that his moral violation was both seriously wrong and damaging. There is much more to say concerning the damage done to relationships as a result of moral wrongdoing, but the incommensurability of monetary and moral debt provides a way to see that the removal of these different forms of debt is likewise incommensurable. Thus Scripture does not give us a reason to endorse Swinburne's view.

While this may help to alleviate the Scriptural objection, what can we say about the objection from Aquinas? As noted, Aquinas seems to indicate that a condition of receiving God's forgiveness is penance, but if penance is needed to bring about God's forgiveness then this seems to lend force to Swinburne's claim that satisfaction must precede forgiveness, and therefore forgiveness is not unilateral after all. Yet I would argue that Aquinas would not endorse Swinburne's view despite his position on penance. To see why this is the case, we can apply a distinction to our theory of forgiveness that is often made in theories of grace. Since many within orthodox Christianity believe that receiving God's grace produces good in the recipient and thereby restores her to a right relation with God, some have argued that God does not offer grace to everyone. After all, if God offered grace to everyone and that grace resulted in right relation with God, then everyone would be reconciled with God. Yet this seems to entail a form of universalism,Footnote ³⁹ which is often rejected within orthodox Christianity. However, if God only offers grace to some, then it would appear that by failing to offer it to all he has condemned some unjustly to Hell. Indeed, since many orthodox Christians believe that one can only be saved with the assistance of God's grace, if God withholds that grace from some people then those people do not have the opportunity to be in right relation with God, and are therefore held morally responsible for something that was not within their control. A common solution to this dilemma, as Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange explains, is that God offers sufficient grace to all, but that such grace is only efficacious for some.Footnote ⁴⁰ The idea is that God offers grace unilaterally, but that in order for that grace to be made effective for any individual she must cooperate with or accept the grace that is offered, and only when this cooperation/acceptance obtains does such grace restore right relationship between the sinner and God.Footnote ⁴¹

We can employ a similar distinction to address the worry raised from Aquinas' notion of penance by noting two types of forgiveness: ‘sufficient forgiveness' and ‘efficacious forgiveness'. Sufficient forgiveness is when God maintains or reinstates the desires of love towards someone who has wronged him. Since God is perfectly loving, and since forgiveness is a manifestation of love, God gives this forgiveness to all unconditionally (i.e. he never stops having the desires of love for all humans). However, while this forgiveness is given to all, it is not effective for all since not all people appropriate that forgiveness. Indeed, as Aquinas indicates, for God's forgiveness to be efficacious, some action is required on the part of the sinner, such as penance. Penance on this model would thus be equivalent to cooperating with or accepting God's sufficient forgiveness (thereby making it efficacious).Footnote ⁴² Thus we could say that ‘efficacious forgiveness’ is forgiveness that is appropriated by the sinner and thereby produces good in the sinner, ultimately leading her to seek restoration of relationship with God.Footnote ⁴³

If this is an apt distinction, and if the account of forgiveness presented above is correct, then the passages found in Aquinas and in Scripture that indicate that forgiveness is conditional are referring to efficacious forgiveness, not sufficient forgiveness. Thus we could maintain that God's forgiveness is a manifestation of love, and is unilateral, without denying that the appropriation of this forgiveness is nevertheless conditional. So despite the ‘debt’ terminology found in Scripture, as well as the apparently conditional forgiveness found in Aquinas’ position on penance, it should be clear that there are resources available to maintain the view I have defended.

As we recall, Swinburne argues that a wrong action is always done to someone; that is, someone is always the victim of a wrong act. This is correct: all sin has a victim – either human or divine – and thus no morally wrong action is committed in a vacuum. However, while morally wrong actions may incur a moral debt, focusing on this feature leads us astray in our understanding of forgiveness and atonement. If I owe a debt, I can either repay that debt or be released from that debt by my ‘creditor’, but even if that repayment and subsequent release from debt fully repays the material damage done by moral wrongdoing, it does not necessarily restore the damaged relationship that results when one person wrongs another. Furthermore, since we have seen that acts of satisfaction cannot necessitate the victim's forgiveness, satisfaction cannot be required for a victim to forgive. Yet if morally wrong actions always have a victim, and if the claim that a victim can (and should) forgive the wrongdoer prior to satisfaction is also correct, then the damage to a relationship – not merely the moral debt incurred – needs to be addressed as well. Whether it be a relationship with another human being or with God, moral wrongdoing causes a breach in the intimacy that was, or could have been, shared between persons, and this breach must be repaired to remove the consequences of such wrongdoing. So while more than forgiveness is needed to rectify a damaged relationship, there is nothing that prevents a victim from forgiving a wrongdoer's moral debt independently of satisfaction being made. Indeed, if the account presented here is correct, then forgiveness not only can precede satisfaction, but, given the obligations of love, it should.