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Abstract
This article traces the development of Pamela Sue Anderson’s thought about the nature of forgiveness through six papers that she wrote, published between 2001 and 2017. Throughout the period she was in conversation with Paul S. Fiddes on the theme, some of which appears explicitly in her published work, and the article aims to re-create and renew the conversation. Successively in her papers, Anderson presents forgiveness as a struggle with justice (alternatively, the place for the struggle of love with justice), associates it with promise and yearning in making a new future, regards it as “unselfing,” affirms that it exceeds distributive justice, portrays it as an object of hope, finds difficulties in locating it in the practice of Restorative Justice, and finally relates it to vulnerability. Throughout she urges that forgiveness must not undermine the self-worth and the righteous anger of the abused, especially women, so that time and space must be given for a process of cognitive and emotional transformation to happen. While an increasing mutual convergence develops between her view of a “process” and Fiddes’s more theological view of a “journey of forgiveness” (involving divine empathy with humanity), the conversation remains unfinished.
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: 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.
26 Ibid. 106–10, 142–46.
27 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 234.
28 Anderson, Re-visioning Gender 105.
29 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 234.
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.
32 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 237–38. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 266–68.
33 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 238.
34 Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos” 7.
35 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 242.
36 See John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 3–28.
37 Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 157–63.
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.
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.
48 Ibid. 253.
49 Ibid. 248.
50 Ibid. 251–52.
51 Ibid 257. Cf. Fiddes, Creative Suffering of God 71–76.
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.
53 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 260.
54 Ibid. 261.
55 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory” 236.
56 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 260.
57 Ibid. 264.
58 Ibid. 260.
59 Ibid. 264.
60 Ibid. 265.
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.
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.”
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.
68 Anderson, “Unselfing in Love” 260.
69 The address was given at Mansfield College, Oxford, in a series whose theme was Getting it Right: Moral Issues of Today.
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.
71 Ibid. 108, 112.
72 Ibid. 109.
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.
74 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 109.
75 Ibid. 112; my emphasis. See bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (London: Women’s P, 1999) 119.
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.
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.
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.
89 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 110.
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.
91 Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness” 109.
92 Ibid. 110.
93 Ibid. 111.
94 Ibid. 113.
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.
96 Fiddes, Participating in God 210.
97 Acts 17.28.
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 “Anger and Forgiveness” at the time (2014) in Oxford.
102 Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart” 117.
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).
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).
124 Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 153.
125 Ibid. 147–48.
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.