Law of Forgiveness
“For if ye forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their transgressions, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions” (The Gospel According to St. Matthew 6:14-15).
The Sermon on the Mount changed my life. Nothing compares.
While Pentecost restored what was broken at Babel, the Sermon on the Mount anticipates this ecclesial movement: God ascending the mountain and communing with His people. He sits embodying His yoke: good and His burden: light (cf. Matt. 11:30).
I remember reading it during the pandemic; despite being raised (nominally) Christian, this was the first time I had really sat and soberly contemplated the words. My first reaction after reading Matthew, chapter seven, was thinking, ‘Does everyone know about this? I need to tell everybody about what’s going on here.’
It was after this that I sold all my occult books and bought a rosary. It was then that I did away with the things of an infant (Cf. I Cor. 13:11).
Christ changed me ontologically. It’s this experience that has anchored my faith: God is real, He cares for us, and “all things work together for good, to those who are called according to purpose” (Rom. 8:28). I’m sharing all this because the last post closed, turning toward forgiveness. And forgiveness is the bridge, the very mountain, where the heavens meets earth.
The Sermon on the Mount not only presents forgiveness as a spiritual necessity, but in totality Christ’s words are the very bricks with which we build our lives, with Christ as the foundation.
My concentrated area of study is intellectual history, tracing the philosophical shifts that made forgiveness, among other virtues that rely on relation, increasingly unintelligible within modern paradigms. To be is to be in relation; our personhood, hypostasis, is a being in relation.
Yet, the idea that we are autonomous creatures is a myth following the upheaval of the French Revolution’s and the primacy of reason it enthroned. This inversion replaced the primacy of communion—the mode in which man has lived in relation to God, to others, and creation—with the individual self.
Man’s reality is communion, it’s only been in the past few hundred years of intensified psychologizing of self, emerging in the wake of Darwinism, Freudianism, and materialistic rationalism that we’ve inverted the meaning of being as an interior existence, reality becomes individualized and ‘to be’ is to be aware of oneself (incorporating Cartesian philosophy) instead of communal participation.
Modernity has flipped the timeless participatory nature of existence into a self-driven narrative, building on one’s preferences and emotions, radically orienting the self away from objectivity to self-referential emotivism. Thus, to be is a performance of identity; a woven tapestry of my story that can be changed at any moment to reflect a better “more authentic” one, serving performativity and reducing visibility of our faults, or even re-writing them as strengths.
What we see in our society now, more apparent with each day, is the choice to turn away from communion toward self-enclosure. Communities and communal institutions, those standards of a bygone era that drew persons into relation, are now being sidestepped for self-sufficiency.
Social media simulates communion yet activates dispersion; its platforms monetize and reward atomization, pulling in would-be influencers to get in on the action of performative unity while buying and selling outrage.
The latest AI models are the next step forward in this societal fragmentation, mimicking dialogue yet simply reflecting our essence back to us through a black mirror. The black mirrors in our pockets and the AI relationships stemming from them are conditioning us to reject the reality of personhood and increase suspicion of relationships with other, real persons. When we talk with robots, we’re not learning compassion.
Vulnerability requires an other, and an other is what we lack. Even in our modern relationships, there is a vital element missing between dating partners and husbands and wives: vulnerability. We might be surrounded by a sea of others, but black mirrors and blue light drown them out, just as they do us.
The Machine is re-casting reality in its image: neat, predictable, straight lines. We’re not forced into a life of fiction, as St. Theophan encourages us in the ascetical life, “Resign yourself to life-long friction. Do not forget this or underrate its importance, for unless you act in this way patience cannot be firmly established” (The Art of Prayer 229). However, if we do not understand that we do not own this life, that this world is not our home, and that every moment here is meant for repentance and self-sacrifice, then we immediately shun and avoid any friction that rubs against us.
There is no room in our modern society for the Cross anymore, save for that as a fashion accessory. Our mistaken individualism and self-sufficiency are a product of the last few hundred years of anthropocentric psychologizing, yet it’s not simply a matter of assumed materialism and scientific rationalism that has led to this as a logical endpoint. We’re here because there has been a concerted effort behind the scenes to fragment creation and embolden us as individuals.
While it is latent Satanism at its core, Satanizing of God’s image simply means we are better consumers. It is much easier to sell things no one needs to a self-enclosed individual than it is to a person in relation with God and others. There is a void that needs filling; performative identity, a consequence of existing self-referentially, is the basis on which many ideologies, technologies, and branded clothing can find their way adorning the individual. This transactional form of identity construction leads to further fragmentation and, insidiously, judgement of others.
We do not live in a society that supports dying to self; no longer does anyone champion taking up our ‘personal’ cross and following God; no, we are led by the algorithm further and further into narcissism and judgement of others. Social media stirs the passions, leads us hither and tither, amplifies our hostility toward anyone who doesn’t share our exact beliefs, not realizing that even they have been shaped by the algorithm.
More and more do we become an image of the Machine hidden behind our egotism and sensuality. We are guilty of such behavior, but we must not allow ourselves to become complicit under the deluge of individuality and consumption.
Modernity, through the atomizing lens of the Machine, divides, conquers, and sells. Yet, in an age of outrage, performative identity, and spiritual consumerism, true existence lies in the ability to forgive.
Everyone has become quick-tempered and hypercritical of others; political purity tests, sectarianism, and anarchic ethics threaten to drive us further into isolation and self-imposed captivity. Forgiveness doesn’t make modernity not what it is, but forgiveness participates in the restoration of mankind. It’s not a modern action to forgive.
It’s an eternal operation.
Forgiveness is divine.
Not only that, but forgiveness is fundamental to manifesting relationality. Deepening communion, that is, the actualization of knowing someone more fully, is grounded in forgiveness. Relation cannot exist without love, compassion, and forgiveness: these three are Christlike qualities, for God is love (cf. I Jn. 4:8).
Further, forgiveness is an intentional relinquishing of self; it is self-surrender, as or Lord says, “Verily, verily, I say to you, unless the grain of the wheat ‘that’ falleth into the earth should die, it abideth alone; but if it should die, it beareth much fruit” (Jn. 12:24).
Forgiveness mirrors the Incarnate Christ: who came so His people might know Him, and He was glorified through His Resurrection by willingly going to the Cross. And His wounds from the Cross remain with Him, and the ‘breaking of the bread’, the Eucharist: the zenith of communal participation in and through Christ. So, forgiveness follows this pattern of self-surrender in forgiveness (forgiveness is challenging because of pride) but then the relationship, through this ‘death’, is restored in a greater glory than before. Relationships have a different texture, reflecting our Resurrected Lord, and are stronger through this operation.
The ontological participation in the world’s creation with God underscores this because God wants us to ‘become partakers of His divine nature’ (cf. II Pet. 1:4). God is God, and what is not God is not God, yet forgiveness allows the possibility for what is not yet Godlike to be transformed by His grace. When we hold on to resentments and grudges, we are suffocating life and acting as God, asserting our wants over creation. Forgiveness is our abdication of God’s throne.
Modernity has reduced forgiveness to a moral directive, a therapeutic exercise, self-soothing and egoic, when in truth it is the relational network that sustains reality. Social and network media mimic connectivity while separating us from God and each other. The world is becoming chaotic and hyperreal because of this separation intensified by our unwillingness to forgive and our consent to judge.
The Machine won’t allow surrender. The technological panopticon cannot monetize the grain of wheat that falleth into the earth. It does not reward the death to self and deepening of the communal fabric through forgiveness, compassion, and the sacraments.
The Machine consumes. It mines our data and whips us into a frenzy so that we’re angry and more susceptible to advertisements.
Thus, forgiveness is the way out of the digital matrix. While the world calls us to give more of ourselves to digitization, God calls us to give more of ourselves to Him and others. Life is all about movement; we either move further into self-enclosure or toward communion.
One of the hardest steps is facing our own sin-condition, because forgiveness sets us free just as much as it sets others free, if not more; we enter the transfigured life by letting go of resentments, forgiving others freely. This is where we encounter ourselves, truly, not through a black mirror, reflecting fragments of our distorted psyche, but in the light of God’s glory.
To forgive is to be undone and confront who we are, right now, in this moment. We no longer see what we want others to see, nor perform for an algorithm, but sincerely take steps to confront our sin-condition, to recognize we are not God, that we need Him, and that we have separated ourselves from Him.
It’s a chaotic world out there, rich with brambles, thorns, and glittery worldly concerns. Much of modernity validates the ego and grows it while the Sower’s seeds lie by the wayside. Dopamine drips into our veins, processed sugar clogs our arteries, culture war discourse plagues the airwaves, and political recuperation subsumes revolutionary thought into the Machine, sterilizing and commodifying change, vilifying and castigating the commodities of others.
Forgiveness cannot be commodified. The love of God cannot be recuperated. Performativity can only simulate compassion; all form with no substance. Incarnate love is what the Machine cannot sell us; in a world that ranks convenience over friction, the most radical act is to love.
Elder Zosima, explaining to a woman of little faith how she can be convinced of the reality God, says: “By an experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul… I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving of even one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science” (B.K. 56,58).
The love that modernity offers inflates the ego and motivates us to put on a show for others, but actual love requires an actual death. To face ourselves images the Lord’s ascent up the mountain by the descent into our hearts. There, we come face-to-face with our sin-condition and there we can choose to set out on the narrow way that leads to life.
Elder Zosima goes on, saying, “There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all” (B.K. 320).
We must not judge a single soul; we return the vitriol of this age with love and forgiveness, acknowledging that it is us who are captured by the Machine and ego and self-idolatry. We are all infected by modernity’s worldliness, carnality, and the desire to judge. We all need each other’s prayers, even the most wicked and deplorable, because of our shared humanity.
Each of us needs to forgive one another to actualize our personhood and be transformed by God’s grace. If we cannot forgive, then we will remain under the delusion of individuality and self-sufficiency, not realizing we are being controlled by the very people we refuse to forgive. And so, to forgive is to participate in the Sermon on the Mount, with Christ seated, giving Himself to His people and by His people, His grace descending into the world, to be offered back to Him unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Witness, NM 