The following is a short reflection on the 2010 film Of Gods and Men, which is the true story of a group of French Trappist monks who served a poor Algerian community. Coming under threat from radical Islamic militants, they had to confront the question of whether they should leave and embrace safety or stay in obedience to their calling and face violence and death. I include footnotes for readers who may wonder what I mean by certain terms.
Forgiveness and Ontology1
‘Every evil is in a good thing’ said Thomas Aquinas. This is why we must love our enemies...because they are not evil per se but have become twisted and their original goodness distorted. This is why the monks, especially their leader Christian, seek to love those who will eventually take and kill them, even before the deed is done. At one point Christian prays over the corpse of a man who has been responsible for the murder and destruction of many innocent and defenceless people. He reacts with disgust when he hears how the man’s body was desecrated and humiliated before the citizens of a particular place. Even a man given to such evil and destruction still bears the trace of his origin in God, even a man such as that is capable of being redeemed.
If one thinks of evil as substantive2 it is easier to neglect the command to love our enemies, for our enemies could be wholly evil, no longer good in even the most basic sense but entirely subsumed by evil and ontologically corrupted. They must be utterly destroyed because they are a blight on God’s creation.
It is the mark of a saint, and the witness of the monk Christian, to hold out for - and to seek some good in - the men who will destroy his community and kill him, not to give himself over to hatred and to fear. Hoping to see them in heaven, two happy thieves in paradise, friends of the last minute.
We must not give ourselves over to hatred whatever happens, but to seek the redemption of our enemies, those who persecute us, try to control us and take away our agency through deceit. Pray for them, believe for them. For love hopes all things.
The word ‘ontology’ refers to existence or being. When I speak about ontology and forgiveness, therefore, I am talking about the relationship between the things that exist and our the practice of forgiveness. This will become clearer (hopefully) throughout the piece.
That is, if one thinks of evil as a thing truly existing in itself. The point here is congruent with the tradition of Christian reflection that says that there is no such thing as evil in itself. Rather, evil is a “privation” of good, that is an absence of good, as blindness is the absence of sight. This tradition reaches back at least to St Augustine who, for example, in Confessions describes his personal journey in trying to reconcile the existence of God with that of evil. He eventually solves this paradox by realising that evil is not something that exists in itself, personified in, say, an evil being who is the equal and opposite of God (as he had at one time believed when he was a Manichee). Rather, evil is a twisting of something that was originally good and, by virtue of that thing’s being a created aspect of the work of God (who does not create evil things) it can never be wholly evil. Even the fact of existing is, in some sense, a good because existence is given to us by God. The logic of my post here is that, if someone or something has been twisted, then that thing or person can be untwisted.
The reader may wonder where this idea is expounded in Scripture. Although the language of privation is not used in Scripture, it seems to me a straightforward implication of verses such as 1 Timothy 4:4, “For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it received with thanksgiving” and the doctrine of creation more generally.